Salem, 1692. The image everyone carries is women tied to stakes and flames going up.

Not one person was burned at Salem.

Nineteen people were hanged. One man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death under stones over two days — he refused to enter a plea, which under the law of the time prevented a trial and therefore prevented the seizure of his estate by the crown. He chose two days of that over leaving his sons with nothing. His reported last words were a request for more weight.

Twenty executions. At least five more died in jail waiting.

No fire.

The burning imagery is European. On the continent, witchcraft was frequently prosecuted as heresy, and heresy carried burning. In England and its colonies, witchcraft was a felony, and felonies carried hanging. Salem was operating under English law, in an English colonial court, with English procedure.

The continental picture traveled culturally, merged with the American story, and produced a hybrid that is now the default mental image.

This matters more than trivia usually does, because of what Salem is used for.

Salem gets invoked constantly — as shorthand for mass hysteria, moral panic, false accusation, and mob justice. It is one of the most-reached-for historical analogies in American public argument.

And the actual event is a better analogy than the imagined one.

The imagined version is a mob and a fire, which is to say it is chaos. The real version is a functioning legal system: magistrates, sworn testimony, formal charges, indictments, juries, verdicts. The horror was procedural. Educated men in an established court accepted spectral evidence — testimony that the accused’s apparition had tormented the witness — as sufficient to hang a person.

That is a far more useful and far more uncomfortable thing to think about than a mob with torches. Institutions did this. Carefully. With paperwork.

The repudiation is also part of it and rarely gets taught. Within five years, one of the trial judges, Samuel Sewall, stood in his church while his apology was read aloud. Several jurors signed a statement of regret. The colony eventually made restitution to families.

They figured out they had been wrong, and said so, in public, having killed twenty people.

The metaphor works best when it is accurate.

You’re Doing It Wrong: Dump the Myths, Misconceptions, and Bad Advice You Believe is here: https://amzn.to/4cX2M4U

I also cover the Salem Witch Trails in my Time Patrol books as one of the team’s missions in Hallows Eve: https://amzn.to/3mvq4Sg