9 Women Vanished From a Locked Salem Jail Cell – The Night Before Their Hanging (1692)

On the morning of June 29th, 1692, the iron-barred cell in the Salem jail that had held nine accused women was discovered empty. The heavy oak door remained bolted from the outside. The single window was too narrow for any grown woman to pass through, and the jailer, a man named Corwin, swore before God and the magistrates that he had not slept a single moment that night.

The nine women were meant to hang at dawn. By the time Reverend Nicholas Noise arrived to offer one last prayer over them, the cell contained nothing but nine wooden spoons arranged in a perfect row on the stone floor. Alongside them lay a small pile of what the constable would later describe—in a letter that disappeared from the court record within two weeks—as hair, freshly cut, damp, and still warm to the touch of a trembling hand.

What happened inside that cell between midnight and 5:00 in the morning has never been officially acknowledged by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The names of those nine women were erased from the execution roster so completely that most historians today believe they were never charged at all. But in the basement of the Essex County archive, inside a sealed box labeled only with a date and the word “incident,” there are documents that tell a different story.

It is a story of land, of money, of three men in a cellar at midnight, and of a bargain made by nine desperate women that would bind their descendants into silence for more than 300 years. To understand what happened in that cell, we have to go back to the spring of that same year and to a village already beginning to consume itself from within.

Salem Village in 1692 was not the Salem that modern visitors picture. It was not a town of picturesque wooden houses and cobbled streets; it was a poor, wind-scoured farming parish of perhaps 550 souls, set apart from the wealthier port of Salem Town, with which it had been at legal and religious war for nearly two decades. The village wanted independence, but the town refused to grant it.

The village wanted its own meeting house, its own minister, and its own tax authority, but the town ruled that Salem Village was a subordinate parish and would remain so. Out of that long, grinding resentment came two factions. On one side stood the Putnam family and their allies, farmers of the western uplands, whose fortunes had been slowly declining for a generation as the Atlantic trade made the eastern merchants rich.

On the other side stood the Porter family and their allies, tied by marriage and business to Salem Town, the shipping trade, and the new economy rising out of Boston and Marblehead. For nearly 20 years, these two factions had fought over every pew assignment, every tax levy, every ministerial hire, and every foot of disputed boundary. By the winter of 1691, the hatred between them had become the defining fact of village life.

Children learned to cross the common ground by a particular path because the other path led past the house of a family whose name their father had told them never to speak. Women learned not to sit beside certain other women at meeting because a generation of grievance sat between them on the bench. Men learned to carry a club when they walked the roads after dark, not from fear of wolves or bears, though those still prowled the edges of the village, but from fear of their neighbors.

It was in that winter, in the parsonage of Reverend Samuel Parris, that two young girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, began to exhibit what the village physician, William Griggs, could only describe as the hand of the evil one. They convulsed upon the kitchen floor and spoke in voices not their own—deep voices, scraping voices, voices that seemed to come from behind their teeth rather than from inside their throats.

They complained of being pinched, pricked, and bitten by unseen hands. Marks appeared on their arms and legs, small red welts that no one had seen administered. When pressed to name their tormentors, they named three women, all of them outsiders, all of them without male protectors in the village: a slave woman from Barbados named Tituba, held as property in the parsonage itself; a beggar woman named Sarah Good, with a reputation for foul speech and for pipe-smoking on her neighbors’ doorsteps; and a half-recluse named Sarah Osborne, who had married a man much younger than herself and had been the subject of village rumor for a decade.

Within weeks, the circle of accusers had grown beyond those two girls to a company of seven, then twelve, then more. Within months, it had consumed all of Essex County. Respectable farm wives stood in the meeting house and fell to the floor, crying that the specter of a neighbor was tormenting them from across the room. Children of 11 and 12 testified under oath to things they could not possibly have witnessed.

The magistrates, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, who had been dispatched from Salem Town to investigate, made a fateful decision in the first week of March. They decided that the girls were telling the truth and that the spectral evidence they offered—visions of the accused tormenting them in forms invisible to anyone else—would be accepted in the preliminary examinations.

This was a decision without legal precedent in English common law, and it was a decision that would, within six months, put 150 people in chains. It was a decision that, as certain men among the Putnam family quickly realized, could be steered. By the time the special Court of Oyer and Terminer was convened in June of 1692 under the authority of the new royal governor, Sir William Phips, more than 150 people had been accused, and the jails of Salem, Ipswich, Boston, and Cambridge were overflowing.

The Salem jail itself was not a building designed for the purpose. It was a converted house on Prison Lane, a two-story structure of rough-cut timber and fieldstone with a cellar that had been crudely reinforced with iron bars and a single oak door. The air in that cellar was said to be so foul in the summer months that the jailer’s wife refused to bring the prisoners their meals, sending instead a serving girl of 14 who covered her face with a vinegar-soaked rag each time she descended the steep wooden steps.

The walls of the cellar ran with moisture even in dry weather. The floor was packed earth for the first three feet and then stone, and the seam between the two was a breeding ground for rats which no amount of poison or terrier work could fully control. Prisoners complained of being bitten in their sleep, and several of the older women developed sores that would not heal.

The smell, according to a letter written that June by a visiting minister from Ipswich, was like nothing he had ever encountered in his life: a compound of human waste, rotting straw, standing water, and something else—something sweeter and more private, which he could not identify and which, he wrote, he prayed never to encounter again. The women held there in June of 1692 were chained by the ankle, not to each other, but to iron rings driven directly into the stone walls.

This was not standard procedure. It was done at the specific written order of Magistrate John Hathorne, who believed and wrote openly in his letters to Cotton Mather in Boston that witches could travel in spectral form through solid walls if left unchained and could afflict the godly even from within their place of confinement. Hathorne further ordered that the prisoners be searched upon their entry into the cellar for what were called “witch marks,” meaning any unusual spot or protuberance on the body which might be used to nurse a familiar spirit.

The searches were conducted by a party of respectable village matrons, and the reports, which are preserved in the Essex County Court files, make for some of the most disturbing reading to survive from that season. Women in their 50s and 60s were stripped naked and examined in every fold and crease of their bodies by women they had known for 30 years—women who had stood at their weddings and helped them bury their children. The searches took on average two hours.

The women who had been searched were returned to the cellar without their undergarments, which were retained as evidence. They sat on the stone floor in their torn shifts; some of them weeping, some of them praying, and some of them staring at the low ceiling in a silence that their fellow prisoners found more frightening than any tears. The nine women in the cell on the night of June 28th were not, for the most part, the women whose names we remember today from the Salem trials.

They were not Bridget Bishop, who had already been hanged on June 10th, the first of the condemned to die on Gallows Hill. They were not Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susanna Martin, or Sarah Wilds, who would hang together in a mass execution on the morning of July 19th, their bodies left to swing from the oaks on Gallows Hill for most of the day before being cut down and thrown into the shallow crevice in the rock that has ever since been known as the “witch’s hole.”

The nine women in that cell on the night of June 28th were, according to the surviving jail ledger: Mary Osgood of Andover, aged 55, the wife of Captain John Osgood, a man of considerable standing in the militia; Hannah Carrier of Andover, aged 38, whose mother, Martha Carrier, would hang on August 19th; Abigail Faulkner, the daughter of a minister, aged 33, pregnant by several months and visibly so; Martha Emerson of Haverhill, aged 29; Sarah Cloyce of Salem Village, aged 51, sister of Rebecca Nurse, whose composure in court had been remarked upon and feared in equal measure; Mary Toothaker of Billerica, aged 40; Rebecca Eames of Boxford, aged 48; Deliverance Hobbes, whose age is given in the ledger as about 40 but who was in fact closer to 35, a woman who had initially confessed to witchcraft and then recanted, making her the most hated of the accused among those who had not confessed; and a ninth name that has been deliberately scratched from the ledger so thoroughly that the parchment beneath is worn through, as if someone had taken a knife to it in a state of great agitation and worked at it for some length of time, leaving only a pale oval where a name had once been written in a clear secretary hand.

What these nine women had in common was not, as one might first expect, their poverty or their marginal status. On the contrary, every one of them, with the possible exception of the ninth name, was the wife or daughter of a landholder of significant standing in the northern part of Essex County. And every one of them came from a family that held contested title to property along the disputed boundary between Salem Village and the town of Andover, a boundary which had been the subject of three separate surveys since the 1660s.

None of them were fully agreed to by both parties, and every one of them had, in the weeks immediately before their arrest, either refused to sell their land to a Putnam agent or had filed a petition of protest with the Essex County Court against the most recent survey. This pattern does not appear to have been noticed at the time; it would not be noticed for another century and a half. And when it was at last noticed, the man who noticed it would not live long enough to see his observation published.

The event that would come to be called, in those few private letters that survived, “the incident,” took place on the night of June 28th, 1692. It was a Tuesday. It had rained heavily in the afternoon, a summer storm rolling in off the Atlantic, and the roads leading into Salem Village were deep in mud by the time the sun began to set.

The sun set that evening at around 8:27, and by 9:00, the last lamps had gone out in the village windows and the last of the dogs had been called in from the yards. The air was heavy with the smell of wet grass and of the ocean three miles to the east. The frogs in the marshes along the river were loud enough that a man walking the post road could hear them from a quarter-mile away.

The jailer that summer was George Corwin, a cousin of the magistrate, who had been appointed to the position that spring after the previous jailer, a man named Bridge, had died suddenly of what was officially recorded as a fever, but which had been, according to the gossip of the village, a rather more complicated death. Corwin was 36 years old, a man of modest intelligence and considerable ambition, married without children.

On that particular night, he was accompanied by two constables: Joseph Herrick, a man of 45 with a wife and seven children and a reputation for piety, and John Putnam the younger, aged 24, a nephew of Thomas Putnam. The three men had been drinking cider from a large stoneware jug, which had been delivered to the jail that afternoon by a serving boy from the tavern at the sign of the King’s Head in Salem Town.

The jug was later found on its side in the jailer’s room, with most of its contents soaked into the floorboards, the wood beneath stained dark in a pattern roughly shaped like a hand. Neither the serving boy nor the tavern keeper could later remember who had ordered the jug of cider, how it had come to be delivered, or who had paid for it.

The records of the King’s Head for that month, which ought to have shown the transaction, had been lost in what the tavern keeper described as a “small fire” in his ledger room—a fire that had destroyed only the month of June and had not spread further, and which the tavern keeper himself had not witnessed, having been, he said, out of town at the time.

At approximately 11:00 in the evening, according to Joseph Herrick’s later deposition, the cider began to have an effect unlike any cider the men had drunk before. It was not the effect of drunkenness. Corwin reported a heaviness in the limbs, a humming in the ears, and a strong desire to lie down upon the earthen floor. His hands, he said, felt as if they were wrapped in wet wool.

His tongue felt too large for his mouth. When he tried to speak to Herrick, his words came out slow and thick, as if he were speaking from under deep water, and Herrick had to lean close to make sense of them. Putnam the younger became ill and vomited twice into the back garden behind the jail, then sat down on the doorstep and wept for reasons he was afterwards unable to explain.

He would say later that he had been thinking of his mother, who had died when he was nine, and that he had, for the space of perhaps an hour, been unable to remember her face, and that this had filled him with a grief so sharp he could not bear to remain inside the building. Herrick, by his own account, remained conscious longer than the other two, though he too felt the heaviness and the humming.

He sat upright in his wooden chair against the wall of the jailer’s room, clutching a Bible that had belonged to his father, and he began to recite under his breath the 23rd Psalm, which he had memorized as a boy of seven. He recited it perhaps 20 times, and it was he who heard, at some point between midnight and 1:00 in the morning, what he described as a sound of women weeping—a quiet, continuous weeping that did not rise and fall as natural weeping does, but maintained a single low note like a string being drawn across a viol.

The sound came, he said, from directly beneath him, from the cellar. And then, more disturbing than the weeping, a sound of women laughing—not loud laughter, not hysterical laughter, but a quiet, companionable laughter, as if at a small joke shared among friends who had known each other a long time. It was the kind of laughter that would follow a remark made in an ordinary kitchen on an ordinary afternoon, and then, no sound at all.

The silence, Herrick said, was worse than either the weeping or the laughter had been. He did not, he swore later, go down into the cellar. He did not hear the oak door open. He did not hear the bolt slide back. He did not hear footsteps on the cellar stairs. And this, as he would come to confess on his deathbed, was the first lie of his later life.

When the three men came fully to themselves at approximately 4:30 in the morning, with the first grain of light beginning to show in the eastern sky over the roofs of the village and the first birds beginning to call in the elms around the jail, Corwin rose stiffly from the floor. He took the keys from the peg in the jailer’s room and went down the narrow stairs to the cellar to rouse the prisoners for the walk to Gallows Hill.

The walk was perhaps a mile from the jail to the place of execution, up a gentle rise of rocky ground, past two farms and a small orchard, and along a stretch of pasture that had been trampled by the feet of previous condemned and of their spectators. Corwin had made the walk eight times already that summer. He knew every stone in the road. He expected to make it a ninth time with nine prisoners within the hour.

He unlocked the heavy oak door of the cell. He found the cell as I have described it. The ankle chains were not broken; they were unlocked and laid neatly on the stone floor beside the rings in the wall. The keys to those ankle chains hung as they always did on a peg in the jailer’s room, two floors above, behind a door that had been bolted from the inside.

The nine wooden spoons lay in a perfect row in the center of the floor, evenly spaced, their handles all pointing toward the door. The small pile of hair lay beside them, and there was nothing else. No bodies, no torn clothing, no marks on the walls, no mud on the floor to suggest that the women had been dragged out through any passage. The single high window, too narrow for even a small child to pass through, was still shuttered and barred.

Corwin sat down on the stone floor of the cell and did not speak for nearly an hour. When he at last rose, he went upstairs, told Herrick and Putnam what he had found, and then the three of them stood in the jailer’s room in silence for a long time before any of them dared to speak. It was Herrick who spoke first. And what he said, according to Corwin’s later private statement, was this: “We must agree now on what we saw before anyone else is told.”

In the decades that followed, Salem Village tore itself apart over what had happened in 1692, and the nine women of the incident were absorbed into the larger horror of those months, so completely that their names were rarely spoken aloud, except among the families themselves, and then not often even then. The parish records show that by 1697, five of the nine families had relocated: three to Connecticut, one to the province of New York, and one to a settlement in what is now southern Maine.

The sixth family, the Osgoods, remained in Andover but ceased attending any organized church until the 1730s, and when they did at last return to church attendance, it was to a church of a different denomination in a different town under a minister who had no knowledge of the family’s history. The seventh family, the Cloyces, continued to petition the general court for the restoration of their property rights until 1699, at which point Peter Cloyce, the husband of Sarah, died suddenly of what his physician described in a phrase that would recur several times in this story as a “softening of the brain.”

After his death, no further petitions were filed by the Cloyce family. The eighth and ninth families cannot be traced at all, which is in itself remarkable because the Essex County records of that period are otherwise quite thorough and because the families in question had been in Massachusetts since the 1630s and had left considerable documentary traces before the summer of 1692 and none afterwards.

It is as if they had been erased—not forgotten, but actively erased. Their names removed from the tax rolls, from the church rolls, from the militia lists, from the deed records, leaving behind only the negative space of a family that ought to have been where no family now was. What did survive, however, is a series of letters written between the Reverend Increase Mather in Boston and a merchant in Salem Town by the name of Philip English.

English had himself been accused of witchcraft in April of 1692, had escaped from the Boston jail with his wife Mary through the intervention of friends and the payment of certain sums to certain jailers, and had fled to New York, from which he wrote in October of that year asking Mather a single, carefully worded question. He asked whether Mather had any knowledge of a transaction of land that had taken place in the final week of June 1692 involving nine parcels of disputed property along the border of Salem Village and Andover, and whether the signatures on the deeds of sale bore any resemblance to the marks used by the accused in their examinations before the magistrates.

Mather’s reply to this letter, if he wrote one, has not survived. English’s original letter, however, is preserved in the papers of his descendants in New York, and it is specific in a way that Mather would not have missed. English did not ask Mather whether the accused had sold their land; he asked whether their marks on the deeds matched their marks on the accusations. This is a strange question to ask unless one already suspected something about the condition of the women at the moment the deeds were signed.

It suggests that English, sheltering in New York with his wife and with a small fortune of his own, had received intelligence from someone in Essex County whose name he could not commit to paper. It suggests that the mechanism of the incident, though not yet called by that name, was already suspected by a small number of people within six months of the night of June 28th. And it suggests that those people were, like English himself, either already fled from the colony or had good reason to wish they were.

Three months after English’s letter was written, in January of 1693, nine parcels of land along that exact boundary were indeed transferred to new ownership. The new owners were in every case men connected by marriage or business to Thomas Putnam, one of the most active accusers in the Salem proceedings—a man who, in the space of 18 months, had made formal accusations against more than 40 of his neighbors and whose handwriting appears on more of the complaint documents than any other individual.

The original owners on the deeds—the nine women of the incident—had signed with crosses rather than with their own names, which is notable because several of them, including Mary Osgood and Abigail Faulkner, were demonstrably literate and had signed other documents in their own hand earlier that same year. Mary Osgood, for instance, had signed her name in a clear and careful hand on a parish subscription list for the relief of the poor in March of 1692, three months before her arrest.

The Mary Osgood of the January 1693 deed signed only with a cross, and the crosses on the deeds, when compared by a suspicious clerk in the Essex deeds office some 20 years later, matched in precise detail the crosses the same women had made on the accusation documents that had sent them to the cellar in the first place—not approximately, precisely, down to the angle of intersection and the slight hook at the end of the lower stroke.

The clerk who made this observation, a man by the name of Ebenezer Bodic, died of a fall down the stairs of his own home within a week of making the report. His notes on the matter, which had been drafted but not yet submitted, were never officially entered into the record. His widow, questioned afterward by a neighbor who had been a friend of her husband, said only that in the days before his death, he had been unable to sleep and had walked the rooms of the house from midnight until dawn, murmuring about crosses and signatures, and a cellar he had never himself seen.

The widow did not remarry. She moved some months after the funeral to her sister’s home in the town of Newbury, and she took with her, according to neighbors who helped her pack, only the clothes on her back and a small wooden box which she would not allow anyone else to touch.

The investigation into what had truly happened on the night of June 28th began in a quiet and unofficial way in the year 1710 when the General Court of Massachusetts passed an act reversing the attainders of many of those convicted in the Salem proceedings and granting financial restitution to their families. The families of the nine women of the incident did not apply. This too was remarked upon at the time by a clerk named Samuel Sewall, who had himself served as one of the magistrates on the original Court of Oyer and Terminer and who, in the year 1700, had stood in silence in the Old South Meeting House in Boston while his pastor read aloud his public repentance for his role in the trials.

Sewall wrote in his personal diary that he had made inquiries and had been unable to locate a single living relative of any of the nine. This was, on its face, impossible. The Osgood family alone had at least 14 documented descendants living in Essex County in 1710. The Cloyces had direct relations in Salem Village itself. The Faulkner line had branched into three separate households by the second decade of the new century.

But when Sewall, acting on his own conscience and without official authority, traveled to Andover in the autumn of 1711 and presented himself at the Osgood homestead, he was received by a man who claimed the name of Osgood, but who refused to discuss the matter of Mary Osgood, his own mother, and who asked Sewall to leave the property before the sun set below the hill west of the house. In his diary, Sewall wrote that the man’s eyes had a quality he had seen only once before, in the eyes of a man who had survived the Deerfield massacre of 1704 and who had watched his own three children killed before him.

It was the look, Sewall wrote, of someone who had made a bargain he could not unmake, who was forced to live each day under its weight, and who knew that if he ever once broke the terms of that bargain, something he loved would be taken from him. Sewall made further inquiries over the following two years. He was a careful man, a man whose public repentance for his role in the trials had been sincere and costly, and he did not rest easily at the thought that there was some further wrong within the Salem matter which he had never been told and which he himself might have unknowingly facilitated in his capacity as a magistrate.

He found through a contact in the Connecticut General Assembly at Hartford that the families who had relocated to Connecticut had done so under new surnames, which was not itself uncommon among refugees from the trials, but that they had purchased their new lands in cash in amounts that would have been impossible for them to have saved from the farms they had left behind in Essex County. The Osgoods had held a farm worth, perhaps, £60 at the time of Mary Osgood’s arrest. The family that arrived in East Hartford in the autumn of 1692, claiming a different name, paid £215 in silver for a property there.

The Faulkners had held even less. The family that arrived in Middletown paid nearly £400. The Cloyce descendants, who relocated to a town on the Thames River in eastern Connecticut, arrived with sufficient capital to begin a small iron foundry, a venture that required upfront investment far beyond what any Massachusetts farming family of their rank could reasonably have possessed.

He found through a correspondent in New York that the one family that had gone south had also taken a new name and that the head of that household, a man who had been a carder in Andover—and whose trade could not possibly have supported his family at the level the New York record suggested—had arrived in Manhattan with enough money to open a small import business. By 1715, this had become a large import business and was, by that point, entangled through credit and shared ventures with several of the leading merchant houses of the city, including certain houses connected with the Putnam interests in Boston and with men whose names Sewall did not commit to paper, but whose initials, written in the margins of his notebook in a careful hand, correspond to two members of the royal governor’s council sitting in 1711.

He found at last that, a year or two later, an old and frightened woman in Salem Village who had once worked as a serving girl in the Putnam household and who was now in her final illness and had sent for a minister to ease her conscience, said that on the morning of June 29th, 1692, a covered cart had left the Putnam farm at approximately 5:30, heading west on the post road. The cart had been driven by Thomas Putnam himself.

It had been accompanied by two riders whom the woman could not see clearly in the dawn light and whose faces she had been warned later that same morning not to attempt to remember. It had been loaded, she said, with nine bundles of what looked in the gray dawn light like folded laundry, but the bundles, she said, had breathed. She had watched from the kitchen window as the cart passed by on the far side of the rail fence, and she had seen the canvas rising and falling in nine separate rhythms, not quite in time with one another.

She had turned away, set to kneading bread, and had not spoken of it to anyone, not even to her husband, for 39 years. She had held it inside her, she told Sewall, for so long that when at last she spoke the words aloud, she could not be sure whether she was remembering the thing itself or remembering the many times she had remembered it, but the bundles had breathed—of that she was certain.

Sewall noted in his diary at the end of his account of this interview that the old woman had died two nights after speaking with him, in her own bed, of what the attending physician called a “stoppage of the heart.” The minister who had heard her final confession, the man who had brought her to Sewall, died three weeks later of a fall from his horse on a stretch of road he had ridden every week for 20 years.

Sewall never published his findings. He could not, because the implications were too dangerous for the fragile peace that had been restored to Essex County after the trials, and because the men who would have been implicated—though several were by now dead—had powerful descendants who still sat in the General Court, in the pulpit, in the magistracy, and in the counting houses of Boston.

He confined his investigation to a bound notebook of good calf leather, which he placed, at some point in the 1720s, inside a locked drawer in his personal library in Boston. He told his son, the second Samuel Sewall, that the contents of the drawer were not to be read by any living person and that if the house should ever pass out of the family, the drawer was to be emptied and its contents burned unopened.

The second Samuel Sewall kept this promise; the third did as well. The notebook would not be opened again until 1843, when a great-great-grandson of the original, a young divinity student at Harvard named Jonathan Sewall Rogers, broke the lock in search of a particular sermon he had been told was kept there—a sermon by the original Samuel Sewall on the text of the 90th Psalm which the family believed to be preserved among his private papers.

What Jonathan Sewall Rogers found instead was the notebook, and inside the notebook, tucked between two pages that dealt with the old man’s inquiries into the incident, was a single folded sheet of parchment that did not appear to be in Sewall’s hand. The parchment was an affidavit signed by the constable Joseph Herrick in the year 1717, which is to say, the year of his death.

Herrick had dictated it, the affidavit stated, to a reverend in Wenham named Joseph Gerrish, because he had been unable to die without confessing what he had seen on the night of June 28th, 1692. He had come to the Reverend on a Tuesday morning in February of 1717—a man of 70 years by then, his body thin and shaking with what he called a sickness of his bones—and he had asked to dictate a confession on condition that it not be read to anyone until after his death.

The Reverend Gerrish, recognizing that the man was not long for this world, had agreed. Herrick wrote—or rather, the Reverend Gerrish wrote for him—that he had not, in fact, remained in the jailer’s room that night. He had gone down the cellar stairs at some point after midnight, drawn by the sound of the weeping and then by the sound of the laughter, and he had done so against the specific instructions of George Corwin and against what remained of his own judgment.

He had moved in his stocking feet, he said, without his boots so as to make no sound on the wooden steps. He had carried no light. He had held his father’s Bible in his right hand as a talisman and a shield. The oak door of the cell had been unbolted when he reached the bottom of the stairs. It stood slightly ajar, and a faint light—a light the color of a candle, but steadier than any candle he had ever seen—came from inside.

The chains on the ankles of the nine women had been unlocked and neatly coiled on the stone floor. Standing inside the cell had been three men he recognized. One was Thomas Putnam; he stood near the door with a small lantern in his hand, the kind used in barns and outbuildings, and he was looking at the nine women with what Herrick described as the expression of a man counting his sheep before a sale. He nodded once to someone out of Herrick’s line of sight.

One was the village constable’s superior, a man he declined to name in the affidavit but described only as a figure of high office in Essex County—a man whose voice Herrick recognized from having heard it pronounce sentence in the courthouse not many days before. The man was standing slightly behind Putnam with his hands clasped in front of him, and he wore, Herrick said, the coat he had worn on the bench. He had not taken the trouble to change his clothing for this particular work.

Herrick’s refusal to name this man is the most heavily commented-upon feature of the affidavit in the two transcriptions that survive and has been the subject of several scholarly conjectures, none of them yet proven. The list of men who held high office in Essex County in June of 1692 and who could have been present at that hour is not long. It is, perhaps, six names. Five of those names are still honored today in the naming of streets, of schools, of charitable foundations.

The sixth has been largely forgotten and is the name that most of the researchers who have considered the question have privately settled upon, though none has yet been willing to publish the conclusion. And one was a man Herrick had never seen before in his life—a man in a dark travel cloak, a man whose face Herrick could not now, even on his deathbed, even under the weight of his coming judgment, quite bring himself to describe, except to say that the man was carrying a leather satchel about the size of a small traveling bag, and that the leather satchel was moving.

It moved, Herrick said, in a slow and regular rhythm, as if something inside it were breathing. But the rhythm was not quite the rhythm of breath. It had pauses in it where no lung would pause; it had quickenings in it where no lung would quicken. The man in the cloak, Herrick said, held the satchel at his side as if he had been carrying it for a very long time and had grown used to its movement.

The women in the cell, Herrick wrote, were sitting in a row on the stone floor, not speaking, not weeping, not moving. Their wrists had been bound one to the next with lengths of what looked like ordinary rope, but which, Herrick said, made no sound when the man in the cloak gestured for them to rise. Their feet were bare, their eyes were open, and each one of them, Herrick wrote, was looking directly at him—not one, all of them at the same moment, as if they had all nine of them known, before he had known it himself, that he was there at the foot of the stairs.

He had, he said, fled back up the stairs without a sound, his heart beating so loud in his ears that he was certain it would betray him. He had lain on the floor of the jailer’s room beside the snoring Corwin and the weeping Putnam the younger and had pretended to be asleep. He had heard, some immeasurable time later, the sound of the oak door of the cell closing, the sound of the bolt sliding into place from the outside, the sound of footsteps on the cellar stairs, the sound of the outside door of the jail opening, the sound of a cart creaking on the muddy track beyond the building, and then, nothing.

He had not slept again that night. He had lain on the floor with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling, waiting for dawn. He had made himself a promise that he would never speak of what he had seen. He had kept that promise for 25 years. And it had cost him, he said, his health, his peace, and the affection of his wife, who had known from the first week of July 1692 that something had happened in the jail which her husband could not tell her, and who had withdrawn from him by small degrees over 25 years into a silence of her own.

The affidavit Rogers found in 1843 did not remain in his possession long. Within six months of his discovery, he had written to three scholars of New England history, enclosing a careful transcription of Herrick’s words. Within a year of sending those letters, all four men—Rogers and his three correspondents—were dead.

Rogers himself drowned in the Charles River on a November evening in 1844 in what was officially ruled a suicide. Though there were no witnesses, the body, when recovered, bore bruises on the wrists and on the back of the neck which the coroner attributed to the current of the river. One of the scholars, George Brastoff, died of a fever he contracted on a voyage to investigate parish records in Andover—a voyage he had undertaken specifically as a result of Rogers’s letter.

Another, a clergyman named Peter Thatcher, was found at the foot of his own church bell tower in Boston on a Sunday morning, the church having been closed since the previous evening and the door to the bell tower staircase still locked from the inside. The third, a lawyer named Ephraim Peabody, died of what his attending physician recorded using the exact phrase that had been used for Peter Cloyce in 1699 and for Ebenezer Bodic some years later: a softening of the brain.

He had become, in the final weeks of his life, unable to speak. His wife reported that he would sit by the fire in the evenings and stare into it and sometimes begin to weep, and that when she asked him what was wrong, he would lift his hand and show her on the underside of his wrist where a small mark had appeared some months before—a mark that resembled nothing so much as the impression of a cross, and that she had at first taken for a bruise, but which had not faded with the weeks, had not faded with the months, and which seemed on some evenings to be darker than on others and never in any pattern she could discern.

The original notebook of Samuel Sewall was returned to the Sewall family papers and was deposited in 1879 with the Massachusetts Historical Society, where it remains today and where any scholar may request to examine it. But the affidavit of Joseph Herrick, which had been the most damning document in the notebook, was not deposited with the notebook. Its current location is unknown.

The two surviving transcriptions were made by Rogers himself before he sent his letters. They are held now in private collections and have been viewed by a handful of researchers, each of whom has, for reasons that are not always documented, chosen not to publish their findings. What does survive in the Essex County Archive is the sealed box that I mentioned at the beginning of this story.

The sealed box is labeled with the date June 29th, 1692, and the single word “incident.” The box was opened once in 1922 by a young archivist named Edith Pierce, who was attempting to catalog the county’s 17th-century holdings in a project funded by a grant from a private foundation in Boston. Pierce’s catalog entry for the box, which is the only surviving description of its contents to have been made by a qualified professional, is as follows:

“Nine parchment sheets, each bearing a single cross in the lower right corner, otherwise blank.” The crosses, Pierce noted, were identical in form and resembled the marks made by the accused on the Salem complaint documents preserved elsewhere in the archive.

“One iron ankle ring, the lock mechanism partially melted as if by great heat.” The iron itself showed the peculiar crystalline structure that forms when metal is heated to just below its melting point and then cooled rapidly—a phenomenon Pierce noted she could not account for, since the cellar of the Salem jail had contained no source of heat sufficient to produce such an effect, the building having been entirely unheated in June and, in any event, not equipped for metalworking.

“One small pile of human hair, dark, shoulder-length, braided into nine small plaits, and bound at the top of each plait with what appeared to be a thin strip of the same hair, intricately plaited back upon itself.” The hair, Pierce noted, showed no sign of decay that might be expected after more than two centuries, and was noted by the county physician who examined it at her request to have the appearance of hair cut from a living head rather than from a corpse—a distinction the physician explained to her in a private letter that was not easy to articulate in precise scientific terms, but which he said any practiced embalmer would immediately recognize.

“One small leather pouch containing nine wooden spoons, each carved from the same piece of wood, each marked on the handle with a letter of the alphabet.” The letters, Pierce noted, did not spell a word in English. They did, however, spell a word—or rather, a series of letters—that a colleague of hers in the Harvard Divinity School, a scholar of medieval liturgy, identified in a letter dated September of 1922 as an acronym in Latin of a phrase used in a particular ritual of the medieval Roman church for the anointing of the dying.

The phrase, translated into English, was: “Let them go in peace.” Three weeks after that letter was received, Edith Pierce resigned her position at the Essex County Archive, packed her personal belongings into two trunks, and returned to her family home in rural Vermont, where she lived for another 41 years. According to her nephew, who inherited her papers after her death in 1963, she never again spoke of her work in Massachusetts and would leave the room if the word “Salem” was mentioned in her hearing.

The nephew, who was interviewed once in 1984 for a local historical society newsletter, said only that his aunt had kept until the day of her death a small wooden box on the mantel above her fireplace and that he had been told as a child that he was never to open it. He said that when he had inherited the contents of her house, he had, out of respect for her wishes, placed the box unopened into her coffin before burial.

In the spring of 2007, a family in East Hartford, Connecticut, was clearing out the attic of a house that had been in their family for nine generations. The house had been purchased, according to the town records of East Hartford, in the autumn of 1693 by a couple who had arrived from Massachusetts with no prior history and considerable silver.

The couple had given their names as Thomas and Mary Barker and had told the neighbors when asked that they had been married in Boston and had decided to start fresh in Connecticut after a loss in the family which they preferred not to discuss. They had paid £215 in silver for the house and the 50 acres of land that came with it.

They had lived quietly for the rest of their lives. They had had four children. They had been known in the community as gentle, reserved, devout in a modest way, never quite at ease in the meeting house, but never absent from it, generous to their neighbors in small matters, private in large ones. And they had, according to the will of Mary Barker, drawn up in 1729 and preserved in the Hartford probate records, left their eldest daughter a cedar chest.

The chest was not to be opened in her lifetime, nor in the lifetime of any person who had known the testator, but was to be preserved within the family for as long as the family should endure, as a remembrance of a time of great trouble from which she had been delivered by the mercy of God and by the charity of a friend whose name she could not write.

The cedar chest had been passed down through nine generations. It had been opened at various points over the centuries to have additional items added to it. By 2007, it contained, in addition to the original contents, a Civil War pension certificate, a bundle of love letters from the 1920s, a christening gown from the 1950s, and a folded wedding dress from the 1980s.

Beneath all of these, at the very bottom of the chest, wrapped in what appeared to be a linen shift of extreme age, was a small, bound volume approximately the size of a modern paperback. The cover was made of what appeared to be aged brown leather, but which, on closer inspection by a conservator at the Beinecke Library at Yale University to whom the family brought the volume for authentication, was determined to be something other than leather.

The conservator’s private report, which was shared with the family but not published, concluded only that the material was organic in origin, was not the skin of any commonly available animal, and showed structural characteristics consistent with human dermis that had been tanned using the methods known to have been in use in New England in the late 17th century.

The pages of the volume were filled with a small and careful handwriting in a form of English that a linguist at Yale dated to the last decade of the 17th century, consistent with the education and likely age of a literate woman born in the 1630s. The volume was a diary. It had been kept, according to the opening page, by a woman whose name was written there in full in her own hand. Her name was Mary Osgood.

The diary began on the 1st of July 1692, which is to say two days after the night she had disappeared from the Salem jail and three days after the night on which she had been scheduled to hang. The diary was not long. It covered a period of approximately 11 months, ending in May of 1693. It described in careful and sometimes beautiful prose the life of a woman beginning again in a new place with a new name and with a husband she had married by arrangement some six weeks after her arrival in Connecticut.

He was a widower named Thomas Barker, whose first wife had died in childbed and who had been told only that his new wife was a respectable woman from Massachusetts who had suffered a terrible loss. She lived with a community that asked her no questions because the man in the dark travel cloak had, she wrote, sent word ahead, and the community had been given to understand that certain newcomers would arrive that autumn whose pasts were not to be inquired after.

The diary described her daily work, the long Connecticut winter of 1692, and the slow return of something like peace. She wrote of learning to love her new husband, a gentleman who never once asked her about the name she no longer used, and who accepted—with a sort of quiet patience that was more moving to her than any declaration of love could have been—the fact that his wife sometimes woke in the night weeping and could not tell him why.

She wrote of cooking, of spinning, of the small church at the end of the lane, of the neighbor woman who brought her a basket of apples in the first week of September, and who asked her no questions beyond whether she preferred to bake them or to eat them fresh. She described the other eight women who had settled in towns and villages within a day’s ride of one another across the Connecticut River Valley and whom she saw in various small gatherings over the course of that year.

They met in one another’s kitchens under the pretext of visiting and spoke of ordinary things, and never, never spoke of the cellar, or of the oak door, or of the sound of the cart on the track, or of the nine chains that had been unlocked without a key. Once, Mary wrote in February of 1693, she and “Sarahs”—whom she does not identify further, but who can only be Sarah Cloyce—had sat together by a fire in a farmhouse near Wethersfield and had wept for a full hour without speaking, and then had dried their tears and had spoken only of the quality of that year’s butter.

They had not looked at each other while they wept. They had not embraced. They had sat on either side of the hearth and had stared into the fire and had allowed themselves for that one hour to grieve for what they could not name. And then they had stopped at the same moment, as if by prior agreement, and had gone on with the visit.

The diary described once, and only once, in an entry dated the 10th of November 1692, the man in the dark travel cloak and the terms he had offered them in the cell. He had come to them, Mary wrote, on the night of the 28th, through the unlocked cell door, accompanied by Thomas Putnam and by a man she called in her diary only “the high gentleman,” whom she too declined to name and whose identity she said she had been warned never to discover, because to know it would be to be unable to forget it.

And forgetting, she wrote, was the first duty she had been asked to perform. The man in the cloak had explained the terms of their release with great gentleness. He had spoken in a voice that Mary described as the voice of a very old man, though he had not seemed old in his movements, and he had addressed each of them by the name they had been given in baptism, and not the name by which they had been accused.

He had given each of them the choice, individually and in turn, to stay in the cell and hang at dawn or to go with him and never speak under any circumstance, for as long as they lived, what had happened in that cell, or of who they had once been, or of the village they had left behind, or of their husbands, or of their children, or of any person who had once known them by their true name.

He had told them that their silence was required not for the protection of the men who had arranged their release, though that was one consequence of it. Their silence was required, he said, because the true purpose of the Salem proceedings was not the hanging of witches. The hanging of witches was the public face of the enterprise, the face that would be remembered, the face that would be written into the histories, the pamphlets, and the sermons of repentance.

The true purpose of the Salem proceedings was the transfer of approximately 4,000 acres of disputed farmland from families who had held it for two or three generations to families who would put it to a different use—a use he did not fully specify, but which required, he said, that the land be understood in the public mind as spoiled, as cursed, as ground upon which no prudent man would wish to build.

The hangings, he said, served this purpose by attaching to the accused families a permanent stigma. No one would contest the title to land whose previous owner had been hanged for witchcraft. No descendant would come forward to claim an inheritance tainted by that shame, and the land would be quietly and permanently available.

The disappearances, he said, served a different purpose. They made it possible, he said, to remove from the contested ground certain families whose members were too well-connected, too respected, too sympathetically regarded by their neighbors to be hanged without endangering the wider enterprise. For those families, hanging would have produced martyrs, and martyrs would have produced inquiries, and inquiries would have produced truth.

What was wanted instead for those families was a erasure—not death, but absence, not a body on the gallows, but a cell that was, one morning, simply empty. The hangings, he said, were a theatrical necessity; the disappearances, he said, were a practical mercy. The disappearances would continue for as long as was required, the land would continue to change hands for as long as was required, and the true history of what was happening in New England in those years would not be written down because the men who would write it were the men who were arranging it.

Furthermore, the women who had been its hidden victims would themselves be, by his arrangement, alive, grateful, and silent. Each of them, he said, would receive a new name, a new husband, a new home in a town chosen for its distance from any road a traveler from Essex County might take, a sum of money sufficient to establish her new household, and the guarantee of her life and the lives of her children to come.

In exchange, she would give him her silence and the silence of every descendant she should ever have for as long as her blood continued. If she spoke, he said, if at any point in her life she spoke of the cell or of the cloak or of the bargain, the bargain would be broken and a price would be collected. He did not specify what the price would be. He did not need to. Each of the women had in that moment a clear and precise understanding of what could be taken from her.

It is the particular cruelty of such arrangements, Mary Osgood wrote, that they do not require the threat to be spoken. The threat is made by the mind of the person who bears it and it is shaped in each case exactly to the fear that person carries most deeply. And there is no negotiating with a threat one has oneself assembled. Mary Osgood closed the diary entry of the 10th of November with a single sentence—the only sentence in the entire volume in which she permitted herself to sound afraid.

“I do not know,” she wrote, “what became of the ninth woman among us. She did not come with us to Connecticut. She did not come with us at all. And when I asked the man in the cloak where she had gone, he did not answer me, but I saw his mouth move.”

The remainder of the diary from the 11th of November 1692 until the final entry in May of 1693 contains no further reference to the cloak, to the cell, to the nine women, or to the ninth. It contains only the small chronicle of a woman trying with some success to make a life out of a silence.

The final entry reads in its entirety: “I have planted the garden today. Thomas has built a new gate. The apple trees are in flower. I believe I am with child. May God forgive us all.”

The Osgood diary is currently in the private collection of the family that found it. They have declined, since the initial authentication in 2007, to make it available to scholars, citing the wishes of an elderly family member who was at the time of the find in her 90s and who has since passed away. The family has declined since her passing to revisit the decision.

A partial transcription made by the Yale conservator during the brief period in which the volume was in his care for authentication exists in limited academic circulation and has been the subject of two doctoral dissertations, both of which were quietly withdrawn before publication—one by a student at Boston University and one by a student at a seminary in Philadelphia.

The names of the two doctoral students are a matter of record for anyone who wishes to search the dissertation registries for the years in question. Both are still living, and both have moved into fields of study unrelated to their original subjects. Neither will return calls on the subject of Salem, or of the Osgood diary, or of what the man in the cloak may have meant when he said that the land would be put to a different use.

The Essex County Archive still holds the sealed box, and the box is still labeled “incident.” The contents of the box, according to a phone call I made in the course of preparing this story to the present-day archivist, are still exactly as Edith Pierce described them in 1922, down to the nine parchment sheets, the iron ankle ring with its partially melted lock, and the nine small plaits of hair, which, according to a recent, privately funded examination, still show no sign of decay.

More than 330 years after they were cut, the nine parcels of land along the Salem Village and Andover border changed hands many times over the following three centuries. They are today, in whole or in part, the sites of a regional shopping mall, a private school, two cemeteries—of which one is closed to new interments—a stretch of state highway, and a small industrial park which has had, over the years, three separate owners, each of whom has sold the property within five years of acquiring it.

None of these places is regarded in local tradition as haunted. None of them has ever been the subject of any unusual report. No ghost story attaches to any of the nine parcels. No historical marker indicates what happened on any of them. The land, as the man in the cloak is said to have promised, has done what was required of it and has been forgotten. And that forgetting is perhaps the most thorough thing about the entire affair.

What this story shows us, perhaps, is that the most terrifying thing about Salem was not what we were told. It was not the hysteria of the accusers or the cruelty of the judges or the fear of a frightened colonial village huddled against the dark forest at its edge. The most terrifying thing about Salem was that beneath all of that, beneath the visible horror, there was a second horror—quieter, more patient, more interested in property than in souls.

And that this second horror has never been prosecuted, never been named, never been fully acknowledged, and never, so far as we can tell, gone away. Every generation since the Osgoods boarded that cart in the dawn of June 29th, 1692, has produced its own men in dark travel cloaks, its own quiet transfers of land, its own families who learned, as Mary Osgood’s descendants learned, that there are certain questions which are not to be asked, and certain names which are not to be spoken, and certain cedar chests which are not to be opened—not in your lifetime, nor in the lifetime of any person who might remember.

And perhaps somewhere there is a ninth woman still, or the memory of one in a satchel that still moves. What do you think of this story? Do you believe everything was revealed? Do you think the ninth woman ever truly left that cellar? Leave your comment below.