More than fifty people confessed. They named names, described sabbaths, and implicated neighbors. Their confessions were almost certainly false — and the court knew it, or should have. Yet the confessions worked. Not one person who confessed was executed. Nineteen people refused.
The court, paradoxically, treated confession as proof of repentance rather than proof of guilt. A confessing witch was a soul returning to God. An unconfessing witch was a soul still in the devil's grip — and therefore still dangerous, still deserving of death. This created a perverse incentive. The more fervently you maintained your innocence, the more guilty you appeared.
I am as innocent as the child unborn.
For the devout, confession was not a simple transaction. It was a covenant act. Puritans understood confession as a sacred obligation — a public declaration of truth before God and community. To confess falsely was to take the Lord's name in vain in the most literal sense: to invoke divine witness to a falsehood. It was to slander innocent neighbors by implicating them. For men and women who had organized their entire lives around the idea that New England was a holy experiment, a false confession was a form of spiritual suicide.
Giles Corey occupies a singular place in the history of the trials. He was not hanged. He was pressed to death over the course of two days on September 18 and 19, because he refused to enter a plea at all. By refusing to plead, he prevented the court from trying him, which meant his estate could not be seized and would pass to his heirs. He was 80 years old. According to witnesses, when the sheriff demanded he speak, Corey said only: 'More weight.'
Mary Easty, sister of Rebecca Nurse, was arrested, released when the accusers briefly recanted, then re-arrested when the accusations resumed. She knew she would hang. In a final petition written from prison, she did not beg for her own life. She asked the court to spare future innocents. 'I petition not for my own life,' she wrote, 'for I know I must die.' She was hanged on September 22.
