Where was the first witch trial in America?

Connecticut. Alse Young of Windsor was executed for witchcraft in 1647 — forty-five years before Salem, and the first known witchcraft execution in the American colonies. Connecticut went on to execute around a dozen people before Salem's trials began.

What were the Hartford witch trials?

A witch panic in Hartford, Connecticut in 1662 and 1663, thirty years before Salem, which followed a very similar pattern of accusation, spreading suspicion and execution. It is the closest precedent for what happened in Salem and it is barely known outside Connecticut.

Eunice Cole of Hampton, New Hampshire — the only person ever convicted of witchcraft in New Hampshire. She was imprisoned repeatedly across decades, was destitute and widowed, and died around 1680. Hampton symbolically restored her reputation in 1938, more than 250 years later.

Why is Salem the famous one?

Scale and speed. Salem executed nineteen people by hanging plus one by pressing in a matter of months in 1692, which was a collapse rather than a routine. It also generated an enormous documentary record, and later Salem built an industry on it. The earlier cases were slower, more scattered, and left fewer people to tell them.

The Witch Trials Beyond Salem: Connecticut and NH

Q: Have the accused been exonerated?

Gradually and unevenly. Massachusetts cleared names in stages across centuries. Hampton, New Hampshire acted on Eunice Cole in 1938. Connecticut's legislature passed a resolution absolving those convicted there in 2023 — three hundred and seventy-six years after Alse Young was hanged.

The first witchcraft execution in the American colonies happened in Connecticut in 1647 — forty-five years before Salem. New England had been doing this for a lifetime already.

Ask anyone where the American witch trials happened and you will get one answer. Salem, 1692.

Salem was not the beginning. By 1692, New England had been hanging people for witchcraft for forty-five years.

Salem was the end of it — the point where the practice collapsed under its own weight and stopped. Everything before it is barely told, and some of it is worse.

Connecticut went first

Alse Young of Windsor, Connecticut, was executed for witchcraft in 1647. She is the first known person put to death for witchcraft anywhere in the American colonies, and almost nobody outside Connecticut has heard her name.

Connecticut kept going. Over the following decades the colony executed roughly a dozen people — a rate that, measured against its small population and long timeframe, is not a mild prelude to Salem. It is the same phenomenon, running steadily rather than in a burst.

The Hartford panic, thirty years early

In 1662 and 1663, Hartford had a proper panic — an accusation, then spreading suspicion, then more accusations, then executions, including Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith.

The structure is the one everybody recognises from Salem: an initial affliction, a naming, then the accusations widening outward as suspicion becomes the currency of a frightened community.

It happened thirty years before Salem, in a colony next door, and it is essentially absent from popular memory. If Salem is treated as an inexplicable eruption of madness, Hartford is the inconvenient evidence that it was nothing of the kind. There was a working template.

Massachusetts before Salem

Boston executed Margaret Jones in 1648 and Ann Hibbins in 1656 — Hibbins a wealthy widow, which cut against the usual pattern and demonstrates how far the accusation could reach.

So Massachusetts, too, had been doing this for four decades before 1692. Salem did not invent anything. It only did it faster.

New Hampshire and Goody Cole

New Hampshire's contribution is a single name, and it is a grim one.

Eunice Cole of Hampton — "Goody Cole" — is the only person ever convicted of witchcraft in New Hampshire. She was accused, tried, imprisoned, released, accused again, and imprisoned again, across decades. She was old, poor, widowed and disliked, which in seventeenth-century New England was very nearly a sufficient condition.

She was never executed. She was ground down instead, over a working lifetime, and died around 1680 in destitution.

In 1938, more than two hundred and fifty years later, the town of Hampton voted symbolically to restore her reputation.

Why Salem got the monopoly

Three reasons, none of them that Salem was uniquely terrible.

Scale and speed. Nineteen hanged, one pressed to death, more dead in jail — in a matter of months. That is a system failing, not a system working, and failures leave marks.

Documentation. The Salem trials generated an enormous written record that survived, in a way the scattered earlier cases did not.

Later investment. Salem built an economy on it. Hartford did not. Windsor did not. Hampton did not. Attention follows the people willing to sell tickets, and our Salem ghost tour comparison covers six operators doing exactly that today.

That is the whole mechanism. Not that Salem was worse — that Salem is told.

The reckonings, unevenly

Massachusetts cleared names in stages, some of them absurdly recent.

Hampton acted on Eunice Cole in 1938.

Connecticut's legislature passed a resolution in 2023 absolving those convicted there — three hundred and seventy-six years after Alse Young was hanged in Windsor, and largely because descendants and local historians pushed for it.

The gap between the crime and the acknowledgement is measured in centuries, and in the Connecticut case it took until the twenty-first.

Where to actually go

Windsor and Hartford, Connecticut have almost no ghost-tour infrastructure attached to any of this, which is precisely why it stays untold. If you want the sites, you are doing it on your own with a map.

Hampton, New Hampshire is on the Seacoast, a short drive from Portsmouth.

Salem remains the place to see it interpreted, and the tours vary enormously in how carefully they do it. If a guide tells you anyone was burned, they are working from a film — nobody in New England was ever burned for witchcraft, a myth so durable it has attached itself to a residential road in Billerica.

And Danvers — which was Salem Village, where the 1692 accusations actually began — is where the asylum was later built on the hill named for the judge who never recanted.

The Witch Trials Beyond Salem: Connecticut Started It, and Salem Ended It