Over a third of the people formally accused of witchcraft in the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692-93 confessed falsely — but why? The conventional explanation is that no one who confessed was executed, so when people realized that the Court was sparing confessors, they chose to do so as a legal strategy to save themselves. But this falls apart on closer scrutiny — one of the confessors actually was executed. The timeline of who confessed and when further discounts this as a “strategy.” This presentation will show how the false confessions in Salem fit with present-day sociological research on coercive interrogation techniques used in criminal investigations.

Margo Burns is the 10th-generation great-granddaughter of Rebecca Nurse, who was hanged in Salem in 1692 on the charge of witchcraft. She is the project manager and an associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press. This work is the definitive collection of transcriptions of the legal records of the episode.