5 Books That Take You Inside the Salem Witch Trials

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stacy Schiff calls the Salem witch trials America’s “first true-crime story.” In The Witches: Salem, she brings a novelist’s touch to the mania—building vivid scenes and complex characters, and letting events unfold without forcing the narrative into an overarching theory. Drawing deeply on Rosenthal’s groundbreaking research, Schiff paints a gripping picture of a community unraveling: daughters denouncing mothers, husbands turning on wives, and siblings implicating one another in a climate so charged that, as she writes, it “became less dangerous to accuse than to object." Peter Drummey, chief historian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, calls The Witches “a comprehensive and wonderfully readable recent account of the Salem witchcraft hysteria.”

“Covers it all—from the origins to the aftermath to present-day Salem,” says Dan Lipcan, director of the Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library, of A Storm of Witchcraft. “And it is very readable.” Drawing on three centuries of records, unpublished manuscripts and physical artifacts, Emerson Baker, professor of history at Salem State University, argues that a volatile mix of forces—political upheaval, a lethal frontier war and a decline in religious fervor—combined to create a “perfect storm.” The result: 20 people executed and 113 imprisoned in horrific conditions. Baker also reveals how the Massachusetts Bay government’s ban on publishing trial accounts amounted to “one of the first cover-ups in American history,” marking a turning point with lasting repercussions. Rachel Christ-Doane, director of education at the Salem Witch Museum, praises Baker’s work as “thoroughly researched” and commends its “unique and original perspective” on the infamous events.

In another of Drummey’s picks, Mary Beth Norton, professor emerita of American history at Cornell University and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, takes the story far beyond the political, economic and religious discord of Salem Village. In the Devil’s Snare argues that the witchcraft hysteria was deeply connected to the brutal Second Indian War (also called King William’s War) and the havoc it wreaked on New England’s northeastern frontier. Norton traces how traumatized refugees and war orphans emerged as key accusers. And she describes how local leaders, haunted by earlier failures to defend those borderlands, channeled their guilt into a fervent campaign against the supposed agents of Satan at home. 

As director of the University of Virginia’s Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive, a vast online trove of original records and interactive maps, Benjamin Ray “knew the records upside down and backwards,” says historian Hall, an expert on the Puritans. In his concise, highly readable Satan & Salem, “Ray lays out what went wrong in the courtroom: Judges ignored basic rules of civil law and accepted dubious testimony from a “chorus of young women whose accounts of being afflicted were, we [now] know, contrived,” says Hall. Ray also uses mapping to reveal a surprising pattern—not the long-assumed east-west geographic divide in Salem Village, but one rooted in religion. That split, Ray argues, played a key role in sparking and spreading the accusations.

Tituba, an enslaved woman whose vivid and haunting confession ranks among the longest recorded during the Salem trials, likely did more than anyone else to escalate the witchcraft mania. Yet she remains one of its deepest mysteries. Maryse Condé’s novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem—originally published in French and winner of the French Grand Prix Award for Women's Literature in 1986—imagines the life behind that mystery, even weaving in a cameo by The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne. “It’s my favorite related work of fiction,” says Lipcan. “It captures the mystery and darkness of the time, and I found Condé's writing to be visceral and visual.”