About This Book

The First Complete Account of the Largest Supernatural Crisis in American History

By July 1692, the witch hunt surrounding the town of Salem and Salem Village had been raging for four months. The Massachusetts Bay colony’s new governor, William Phips, had established a special court to try the suspected witches and the trials were well under way. No new arrests had taken place for nearly six weeks and residents had every reason to believe the crisis soon would be over. However, a middle-aged woman in nearby Andover lay gravely ill. Her husband suspected witchcraft as the cause and invited some of the afflicted girls from Salem Village to the town, thinking they could determine whether his suspicions were valid. Not surprisingly, they confirmed his supposition. The first person these girls accused in Andover—a frail and elderly widow bereaved by a series of family tragedies over the pre­vious three years—not only confessed, but stated that there were more than three hundred witches in the region, five times more than the number of suspects already in jail. This touched off a new wave of accusations, confessions, and formal charges. Before the witchcraft crisis ended, forty-five residents of Andover found themselves jailed on suspicion of witchcraft—more than the combined total of suspects from Salem Village and the town of Salem. Of these, three were hanged and one died while awaiting execution.

Based on extensive primary source research, In the Shadow of Salem: The Andover Witch Hunt of 1692, by historian and archivist Richard Hite, tells for the first time the fascinating story of this long overlooked phase of the largest witch hunt in American history. Untangling a net of rivalries and ties between families and neighbors, the author explains the actions of the accusers, the reactions of the accused, and their ultimate fates. In the process, he shows how the Andover arrests prompted a large segment of the town’s population to openly oppose the entire witch hunt and how their actions played a crucial role in finally bringing the 1692 witchcraft crisis to a close.

Richard Hite is State Records Coordinator at the Rhode Island State Archives and Public Records Administration. He has a B.A. in history and political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.A. in Archival Management from North Carolina State University, and an M.A. in history from Kent State University.

Praise for In the Shadow of Salem:

“Hite is to be commended for challenging Boyer’s and Nissenbaum’s treatment of early modern witchcraft persecutions in Salem in terms of factionalist strife. Also useful is his summary of the witchcraft persecutions in Andover. . . . [In the Shadow of Salem] paves the way into an important field of research, emphasizing the value of comparative analysis and structural awareness in understanding these complex phenomena. It ought to inspire further research and serve as an introductory volume to the early modern witchcraft persecutions in Andover.”—Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies