The Salem witch trials, which took place in 1692 in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, are a dark chapter in American history. During this time, mass hysteria and religious fervor led to the wrongful accusation and execution of 20 innocent people on charges of witchcraft. Today, the Salem witch trials serve as a somber reminder of the dangers of intolerance and the importance of preserving individual rights and freedoms. As a way to remember and honor the victims, a memorial was created in Salem. The Salem witch trials memorial stands as a powerful reminder of the tragedy that unfolded centuries ago. The memorial consists of a series of stone benches with quotes carved into them, each representing a different victim of the trials.

Salem witch trials memorial quotes

176 Hobart Street
Danvers, MA 01923

The Salem Village Witchcraft Tercentennial Committee of the Town of Danvers

On May 9, 1992, the Salem Village Witchcraft Victims' Memorial of Danvers was dedicated before an audience of over 3,000 people. It was the first such Memorial to honor all of the 1692 witchcraft victims, and is located across the street from the site of the original Salem Village Meeting House where many of the witch examinations took place. The Memorial serves as a reminder that each generation must confront intolerance and "witch hunts" with integrity, clear vision and courage.

This memorial project was undertaken by the Salem Village Witchcraft Tercentennial Committee of the Town of Danvers which commemorated the 300th anniversary of the witch prosecutions during 1989-1993. The Memorial itself was designed by Committee members Richard B. Trask; Robert D. Farley, CSI; and Marjorie C. Wetzel. Finance Chairman Ralph E. Aridff, Jr. raised money for the project through donations of numerous town, civic, patriotic, business and ethnic organizations and by individuals. The property was donated and is now maintained by the Town of Danvers, and the Memorial is open to the public daily from dawn to dusk.

Memorial Design and Symbolism

The design of the Memorial is highly symbolic in nature. On a light colored Barre granite sarcophagus measuring 4' x 8' x 4' rests an oversized representation of a slant-top bible box. In colonial times such boxes were used as storage containers for precious volumes and papers. The positioning of the block with the bible box on top is reminiscent of a colonial pulpit and its juxtaposition and correct alignment with what would have been the original Meeting House pulpit across the street is purposeful. Yet the bible box, a domestic item of furniture, better represents individual home-inspired devotion, rather than communal, ecclesiastical worship, denoting the significance of personal beliefs and morals.

The box is composed of Canadian Pink granite, and on its front is carved several different and local style rosettes, typical design features found in both Puritan furniture and gravestones. The five rosettes banded together by a serpentine vine are Puritan symbols for eternity. Resting on top of the bible box, and composed of the same brown-reddish granite as the box itself, is an open book with an inscription in 17th century typeface reading, "THE BOOK OF LIFE." In biblical language this phrase represented the record of those who should inherit eternal life. During the witch trials numerous persons testified that the accused had signed the "Devil's book" thus becoming witches and doing the work of the devil. Those who were executed for witchcraft refused to confess to being witches, for they wanted to be inscribed in "The Book of Life." At the time almost all in the Puritan community believed the accused to be guilty, while today the historical record, a modern-day "book of life" of sorts, has rectified the former deadly falsehoods of 1692.

The weight of truth, symbolized in the granite box and book, is also represented smashing through the falsehood of history, depicted by a pair of large scale reproduction metal shackles divided in two by the book and resting broken upon the block of granite. Curtis M. White, a talented blacksmith, staff member of the Saugus Ironworks National Park and at the time the resident overseer of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, hand-forged the chains. Carved on the face of the block granite is the inscription "In memory of those innocents who died during the Salem Village witchcraft hysteria of 1692."

To the rear of this granite piece stands a three-panel 12 feet long by 8 feet high granite memorial wall containing in 17th century spelling form the names of the 24 men and women and one child who died as a result of the witch hysteria. Also included are the towns of origin of these people which include besides Salem Village, Salem Farmes (Peabody), Salem, Andover, Billerica, Amesbury, Reading, Topsfield, Marblehead and Rowley. Above the center panel on a granite ellipse is carved the Tercentennial Committees logo featuring a man grasping an open book. The man's hair style, robe and neck bands are reminiscent and symbolic of a 17th century cleric with an open bible or a magistrate with an open law book trying to come to understand and interpret the witch hysteria which had overtaken much of Massachusetts. The logo was designed for use of the Tercentennial Committee and donated by Jim Barina, founder of 'Spellbound,' a Salem, Massachusetts, advertising agency.

On each side of the Memorial wall stands at a 45 degree angle to it a wall inscribed to include in their own words brave statements made by eight of the accused witches during their harrowing examination just across the street from the memorial location.

In Memory of Those Innocents Who Died During the Salem Village Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692

Note: The spelling of 17th century names varied widely even within families. Though there were several choices for spellings of many last names, the ones represented here are those for which the best contemporary evidence exists.

Brave Words of Some of the Accused Witches All of Whom Were Executed

"I am an innocent person. I never had to do with witchcraft since I was born. I am a Gosple woman." Martha Cory (March 21, 1692. From the Rev. Parris account of the examination at Salem Village Meeting House.)

The lord above knows my Innocencye . as att the great day win be known to men and Angells. I Petition to your honours not for my own life for I know I must die, and my appointed time is sett but the Lord he knowes it is that if it be possible no more Innocent blood may be shed . " Mary Esty (September 1692. Written while in prison awaiting execution.)

"If it was the last moment I was to live, God knows I am innocent . " Elizabeth How (May 31, 1692. From the Rev. Parris account of the examination at Salem Village.)

"Well! burn me, or hang me, I will stand in the truth of Christ . " George Jacobs, Sr. (May 10,1692. From the Rev. Parris account of the examination at Salem.)

"Amen. Amen. A false tongue will never make a guilty person." Susannah Martin (May 2, 1692. From the Rev. Parris account of the examination at Salem Village Meeting House.)

"I can say before my Eternal father I am innocent, & God will clear my innocency." Rebecca Nurse (March 24, 1692. From the Rev. Parris account of the examination at Salem Village Meeting House.)

"The Magistrates, Ministers, Jewries, and all the People in general, being so much inraged and incensed against us by the Delusion of the Devil, which we can term no other, by reason we know in our own Consciences, we are all Innocent Persons." John Procter, Sr. (July 23, 1692. Written while in Salem Prison.)

". I fear not but the Lord in his due time will make me as white as snow." John Willard (May 18, 1692. From the Rev. Parris account of the examination at Salem Village.)

The Salem Witch Trials Memorial ― Remembering Those Lost in 1692

In 1692, led by the hysterical accusations of a handful of bored Puritan teenage girls, over one hundred and fifty innocent men and women were accused and imprisoned under the charge of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. Of those, twenty-nine went to trial and all were found guilty. It was a true kangaroo court: The girls came to court to accuse their ‘tormentors’ and would often throw hysterical fits, claiming to see the spectral evidence of the devil, sent by the accused to attack them. If a verdict of not guilty was handed down, the testimony from the girls would simply continue until the jury could comfortably settle on a guilty verdict. From June to September of 1692, twenty innocents were publically executed under the pronouncement that they were witches, and at least another five perished due to the deplorable conditions of imprisonment in the witches’ dungeon.

All the victims except Giles Corey were hung at Gallows Hill; he was pressed to death. The law of the time demanded that your lands would be forfeit as soon as a plea of guilty or not guilty was entered for the charge of witchcraft. Knowing he would likely die, and in order to ensure that his lands were passed down to his family, Corey refused to enter any plea. The magistrates attempted to force a plea from him by strapping him under a wide plank or door and adding hundreds of pound of rocks to crush him into an admission. The story is told that Giles Corey remained silent for three days, slowly being crushed to death. His final words were simply ‘more weight’. After he died, his lands passed on to his children.

Was witchcraft really involved? Were these men and women tried for practicing the old Celtic traditions of the Goddess? No, the accused were all devout Christians, but the prevalent fear of the time that Satan actively walked the earth among them fueled the panic. Laurie Cabot, the official Witch of Salem puts it best when she describes the hysteria as “what can happen to a Christian community that succumbs to an irrational fear of the devil and projects this evil image onto members of the community”.

When the hysteria died down following the final deaths in September of 1692 and the close of the regional trials in 1693, calls for justice came from the community and petitions were filed to reverse the convictions of those who were convicted but not yet executed. Those who were still imprisoned were released and the community returned to normal. Years later, Ann Putnum, one of the girls involved in the hysteria, gave a public apology, stating that she had been deluded by Satan into denouncing innocent victims.

In 1992, on the three-hundredth anniversary of the trials, the City of Salem opened the Salem Witch Trials Memorial Park as a tribute the twenty victims killed in 1692. It is located adjacent to the historic Old Burying Point on Charter Street, where Jonathan Corwin and John Hawthorne, judges in the Salem Witch Trials, are buried. The park consists of a large area of open green space, surrounded on three sides by a granite wall. Six locust trees grace the center area, chosen intentionally as they are the last to flower in the spring and the first to lose their leaves in the fall, representing the stark injustice of the trials. Twenty cantilevered stone benches, one for each victim, encircle the park.

Witch Trials Quotes

“This mundus tenebrosus, this shaddowy world of Mankind, is sunk into Night; there is not a Field without its Spirits, nor a City without its Daemons, and the Lunaticks speak Prophesies while the Wise men fall into the Pitte. We are all in the Dark, one with another. And, as the Inke stains the Paper on which it is spilt and slowly spreads to Blot out the Characters, so the Contagion of darkness and malefaction grows apace until all becomes unrecognizable. Thus it was with the Witches who were tryed by Swimming not long before, since once the Prosecution had commenced no Stop could be put to the raving Women who came forward: the number of Afflicted and Accused began to encrease and, upon Examination, more confess'd themselves guilty of Crimes than were suspected of. And so it went, till the Evil revealed was so great that it threatened to bring all into Confusion.

And yet in the way of that Philosophie much cryed up in London and elsewhere, there are those like Sir Chris. who speak only of what is Rational and what is Demonstrated, of Propriety and Plainness. Religion Not Mysterious is their Motto, but if they would wish the Godhead to be Reasonable why was it that when Adam heard that Voice in the Garden he was afraid unto Death? The Mysteries must become easy and familiar, it is said, and it has now reached such a Pitch that there are those who wish to bring their mathematicall Calculations into Morality, viz. the Quantity of Publick Good produced by any Agent is a compound Ratio of his Benevolence and Abilities, and such like Excrement. They build Edifices which they call Systems by laying their Foundacions in the Air and, when they think they are come to sollid Ground, the Building disappears and the Architects tumble down from the Clowds. Men that are fixed upon matter, experiment, secondary causes and the like have forgot there is such a thing in the World which they cannot see nor touch nor measure: it is the Praecipice into which they will surely fall.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

“When the hysteria of a witch-hunt is granted supremacy over the logic, values and spirit of the law, justice can only become a warped, alien concept in that society.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The most powerful men of the kingdom have dragged a duchess down and sent her out to be a marvel to the common people of London. They are so deeply afraid of her that they took the risk to dishonor their own. They are so anxious to save themselves that they thought they should throw her aside.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Lady of the Rivers

“The local political and religious officials
were more than ready to take action and
began rounding up suspects at once. Anyone
who was accused of witchcraft by at least three witnesses was arrested. Those who confessed were burned at the stake; those who refused to confess were tortured until they said what their accusers wanted to hear and then were burned. Clerk of the court Johannes Fründ, the author of the most detailed record of the Valais witch trials, noted with amazement that some of the accused kept insisting on their innocence until they died under torture; like most of the officials involved in the trials, he assumed that every person accused of witchcraft must be guilty.”
― John Michael Greer

“We proved there is no match in this world for fear and superstition. No match for the power of a word.”
― Jakob Crane, Lies in the Dust: A Tale of Remorse from the Salem Witch Trials

“Two days after Christmas I stood in the shower thinking about the Salem witch trials.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, At the Edge of the Universe

“the Jews should stay away from this trial -- for their own sake. For -- mark this well -- the charge "a war for the Jews" is still being made, and in the post-war years it will be made again and again. The too-large percentage of Jewish men and women here will be cited as proof of this charge. Sometimes it seems that the Jews will never learn about these things. They seem intent on bringing new difficulties down on their own heads. I do not like to write about this matter. but I am disturbed about it. They are pushing and crowding and competing with each other, and with everyone else. They will try the case I guess.

“Similarly unsubstantiated upon close examination is the claim that there is somehow a parallel between current concern over child sexual abuse and witch hunts of previous historical eras. The only similarity is the presence of children making accusations against protesting adults; and even here the parallel is limited, since most child sexual abuse victims do not eagerly disclose their plights. The witch-hunt analogy does not work for several reasons. In the past people became hysterial about witches because ignorance and lack of education led them to believe in a nonexistent evil, whereas current concern about child sexual abuse results from increased education and sophisticated research, and a growing body of medical and psychological proofs that validate the existance of a very real evil. Witch hunts flourished because the authoritative force of society, the Church, encouraged them and supported accusers. In our society, however, validation of child sexual abuse victims has occurred despite the failure of our authoritative force, the legal system, to encourage the abusers. Witches were tortured, hanged, and burned. Child abusers are rarely reported to authorities, and those who are seldom see the inside of a jail or even a psychiatrist's office. National statistics on child sexual abuse indicate, for example, that judges only see 15.4 percent of sexual abuse cases.(39)”
― Billie Wright Dziech, On Trial: America's Courts and Their Treatment of Sexually Abused Children

“Noah presses upon my back to bend me double in preparation for the order. He tosses aside my clogs in order to bind left thumb to right toe, then right thumb to left toe in the form of the holy cross. It has always seemed to me a forgiving God would not condone such abuse of the crucifix.”
― Janet Graber, The White Witch

“During the Burning Times, standing out and speaking up meant risking literal persecution: imprisonment, torture, sexual assault, and murder. The scars of this trauma run deep in our collective unconscious; they remind us that in the not-so-distant past, being marked as different ran the risk of physical harm and death. Even today, being too much or not enough for modern society can mean being ostracized, judged, and shamed. In this way, the witch wound is your psyche’s way of trying to keep you safe. Your consciousness holds this warning because your ancestors’ bodies carried it over the span of generations, passing it down to you.”
― Celeste Larsen, Heal the Witch Wound: Reclaim Your Magic and Step Into Your Power

“My wife," he said eventually, slowly, as if it pained him to speak the words. "She nearly died in childbed, delivering our son. A wise woman in our village saved both their lives. Beatrice, she was called. I said nothing, when they accused her. She was hanged."
He took a velvet pouch from his breeches and pressed it into my hands, before melting away into the throng.
I looked inside the pouch and saw gold coins. I understood, then, that I had this man---or the woman who saved his family---to thank for my life.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“My imps need no doors, sir. They go where I tell them. Through any crack, be it as narrow as a nun's or wide as your wife's.”
― A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches

“One does not need to look too deeply into the transcripts of witch trials before uncovering tortured women speaking of cavorting with everyday animals. (There does seem to be a size limit; one can converse with a devil in the form of a dog, but not a moose and surely not an elephant.)”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Curious Case of the Talking Mongoose

The memorial consists of a series of stone benches with quotes carved into them, each representing a different victim of the trials. These quotes illuminate the thoughts and feelings of the accused, revealing the immense fear and confusion they experienced during this dark time. One such quote, from the accused Martha Corey, reads, "I am wronged.

It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits." This quote captures the disbelief and frustration felt by many of the accused, who were unable to comprehend the accusations being leveled against them. Another quote, from the accused John Proctor, conveys a sense of defiance and resilience in the face of injustice. Proctor famously said, "Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!" This quote showcases Proctor's refusal to sacrifice his integrity and his determination to preserve his good name, even in the face of death. These and other quotes in the memorial serve as a powerful reminder of the human toll of the Salem witch trials. They bring to light the turmoil and anguish experienced by the victims during this terrifying chapter in American history. They also serve as a reminder of the dangers of unchecked hysteria and intolerance, urging future generations to protect individual rights and liberties. Visiting the Salem witch trials memorial allows visitors to reflect on the lessons learned from this tragic event. It serves as a solemn reminder to remain vigilant in the face of injustice and to actively work towards a more tolerant and inclusive society. The memorial stands as a powerful testament to the enduring impact of the Salem witch trials and the importance of remembering and honoring the victims..

Reviews for "In Memory of the Accused: Quotes that Speak to the Salem Witch Trials Memorial"

1. Sarah - 2 stars - I was disappointed with the memorial quotes at the Salem witch trials memorial. I found them to be generic and lacking in depth. It felt like the quotes were chosen without much thought or consideration for their significance to the trials. I was hoping for more thought-provoking and powerful words that would truly capture the gravity of the events that took place in Salem.

2. Michael - 2 stars - The memorial quotes at the Salem witch trials memorial were underwhelming to say the least. They did not do justice to the tragic history that unfolded in Salem during that time. The quotes lacked emotion and failed to convey the fear, hysteria, and injustice experienced by those who were accused and persecuted. I expected more impactful and evocative quotations that would honor the victims and educate visitors about the horrifying events of the witch trials.

3. Emily - 1 star - I was deeply disappointed with the memorial quotes displayed at the Salem witch trials memorial. They seemed irrelevant and disconnected from the historical context. The messages fell flat and did not convey the horror and injustice that occurred during that period. I was hoping for quotes that would capture the pain, suffering, and complexity of the trials, but instead, they felt shallow and uninspiring. It was a missed opportunity to educate visitors about this dark chapter in history.

4. John - 2 stars - I found the quotes at the Salem witch trials memorial to be uninspiring and forgettable. They failed to make a lasting impact and did little to evoke the emotions associated with the tragic events that unfolded in Salem. I expected the quotes to be thought-provoking and powerful, but they fell short of my expectations. More effort should have been put into selecting quotes that would truly honor and commemorate the victims of the trials.

5. Jessica - 1 star - The memorial quotes at the Salem witch trials memorial were disappointing. They lacked substance and failed to effectively communicate the tragedy that occurred during the witch trials. The quotes felt generic and did not capture the unique historical context of the trials. I was expecting to be moved and enlightened by the quotes, but instead, I left feeling underwhelmed and unsatisfied. The memorial could have been much more impactful with better chosen quotes that carried more weight and significance.

The Weight of History: Quotes that Elucidate the Significance of the Salem Witch Trials Memorial