Martha Carrier was tried for witchcraft on August 2, 1692, convicted on spectral evidence, neighbors’ grudge testimony, and confessions tortured out of her own children, and hanged at Proctor’s Ledge on August 19. The trial of Martha Carrier during the Salem witch trials is one of the best documented of the nineteen executions, partly because Cotton Mather singled her out in his published defense of the court, and partly because she refused, from her first examination to the gallows, to confess to anything.
How a Smallpox Outbreak Made Her a Target
The suspicions that ended in her execution started with a disease. A smallpox outbreak swept Andover, Massachusetts in the fall of 1690, and every one of the ten people who died of it in the town was a blood relative of Martha’s, including her father Andrew Allen, two brothers, two nephews, and several in-laws. The selectmen issued formal warnings in October and November 1690 ordering the family to stay away from public gatherings.
Martha and several of her children caught the disease and survived. To neighbors already inclined to read misfortune as supernatural, her survival looked like a clue rather than a mercy. When the witchcraft panic radiating out of Salem Village reached Andover in the spring of 1692, those older suspicions attached themselves to a woman who had a reputation for a sharp tongue and no interest in apologizing to anyone.
Arrest and Examination
Joseph Houlton and John Walcott of Salem Village filed a formal complaint, and a warrant for Martha’s arrest was issued on May 28, 1692. The charges alleged acts of witchcraft against several Salem Village residents, including Mary Walcott and Abigail Williams, who claimed her spectral form had pinched and choked them during violent fits. She was jailed in Salem to await the special court Governor William Phips had established to handle the cases.
Her examination before the magistrates took place on May 31, 1692.1Phillips Library Digital Collections. Examination of Martha Carrier Most accused people wept, begged, or tried to reason with the judges. Martha told the magistrates they were liars. When the afflicted girls fell into convulsions at the sight of her, she dismissed the display. She denied every charge and offered no deference to the court.
Evidence Used Against Her
The case rested on three kinds of evidence: confessions tortured out of her own children, spectral testimony from the afflicted girls, and grudge testimony from Andover neighbors.
Her Children’s Coerced Confessions
Some of the most damaging statements came from inside Martha’s household. Her sons Richard and Andrew were subjected to a form of physical torture in which their necks were tied to their heels, a method used to force confessions. Under that pressure, both boys told interrogators their mother had made them serve the devil.
Her daughter Sarah was seven when she was questioned. Sarah told the court she had been a witch since the age of six. Asked who made her a witch, she answered, “My mother. She made me set my hand to a book.” She described touching the book with her fingers and said “the book was red, the paper of it was white.”2Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. SWP No. 026 Sarah Carrier The court treated this as a description of the Devil’s Book, the registry witches were said to sign, and accepted the statement as evidence of a hereditary pattern of witchcraft in the Carrier family.
Spectral Evidence
Spectral evidence meant that if an accuser claimed to see the ghostly form of the defendant tormenting them, the court accepted that vision as proof the defendant was a witch. The theory was that the devil could not use a person’s image without that person’s consent. It was already controversial in 1692. Increase Mather would argue later that year that “to take away the life of anyone merely because a specter or devil in a bewitched or possessed person does accuse them will bring the guilt of innocent blood on the land.” That objection came too late for Martha.
Neighbors’ Grudge Testimony
Beyond the spectral claims, Andover neighbors testified about misfortunes they blamed on Martha. Benjamin Abbot told the court that after a land dispute with her, he developed a painful swelling in his foot and a sore in his side so severe that “several gallons of corruption ran out of it” when a doctor lanced it. He also said his cattle died under mysterious circumstances after she threatened him.3The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature. Wonders of the Invisible World – The Trial of Martha Carrier at the Court of Oyer and Terminer, Salem, August 2, 1692 Timothy Swan alleged that physical torments coincided with her presence. In each account the structure was the same: something bad happened, the witness had recently quarreled with Martha, therefore she caused it by witchcraft.
The Trial and Cotton Mather’s Role
The Court of Oyer and Terminer, the special tribunal Governor Phips created in May 1692, tried Martha on August 2, 1692.4National Endowment for the Humanities. The Salem Witch Trials According to the Historical Records Cotton Mather attended and later published his account of the proceedings in Wonders of the Invisible World, a book intended to justify the trials to a skeptical public. He called her “this rampant hag” and wrote that confessing witches, including her own children, agreed the devil had promised her she would be queen of hell. He described how the afflicted girls fell into convulsions whenever Martha looked toward them and treated those performances as confirmation of her guilt.
Martha never stopped telling the judges they were being deceived. She was the only member of her immediate family who refused to confess. The jury returned a guilty verdict. The sentence was death by hanging, the penalty prescribed by the English Witchcraft Act of 1604, which made witchcraft a capital felony.5The National Archives. An Act against Witchcraft
Execution
Martha Carrier was hanged on August 19, 1692 alongside four others: Reverend George Burroughs, George Jacobs Sr., John Proctor, and John Willard.6Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. Martha Carrier Executed, August 19, 1692 The executions took place at Proctor’s Ledge, near the base of Gallows Hill. She reportedly proclaimed her innocence to the crowd at the site. Her body, like those of the others, was placed in a shallow burial near the ledge, since the convicted were denied proper burial and families had to retrieve remains under cover of darkness.
Reversal in 1711
Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer on October 29, 1692 after Increase Mather and others argued spectral evidence could not be trusted. The Superior Court of Judicature that replaced it largely rejected spectral testimony, and most remaining defendants were acquitted or had charges dropped. By then nineteen people had been hanged, one man had been pressed to death, and several others had died in jail.
On October 17, 1711, the Province of Massachusetts Bay passed “An Act to reverse the attainders of George Burroughs and others for Witchcraft.” Martha Carrier was named in the act, which declared her conviction, judgment, and attainder “reversed made and declared to be null and void to all intents, constructions and purposes whatsoever, as if no such convictions, judgments or attainders had ever been had or given.”74score.org. Act to Reverse the Attainders of George Burroughs and Others for Witchcraft The act also authorized financial restitution to the families, and Thomas Carrier, Martha’s husband, petitioned for compensation for his executed wife and for the expenses incurred during their children’s imprisonment.
Her case shows the full range of tactics the Salem court accepted as proof: neighborhood grudges repackaged as supernatural harm, a seven-year-old’s interrogation treated as capital testimony, sons tortured into accusing their own mother, and visions and fits admitted as evidence. In a proceeding structured to reward confession, Martha Carrier refused to give one.