At least 34 people were accused or convicted of witchcraft during the trials in Connecticut, which lasted from 1647 to 1697. By their end, 11 people — two men and nine women — had been hanged for suspicions of witchcraft. Those who were not killed were often ousted from their hometowns or fled from them in fear.
Allegations of witchcraft could result from things like contracting an illness, having a crop failure or experiencing a marital dispute. Women were the most often accused, and a single witness could be enough to accuse someone.
“Let’s get to the root cause of why they were targeted. It was because of misogyny. It was because of community panic,” said Beth Caruso, who co-founded the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project and has written books about the state’s witch trials.
One of the people convicted was Alse Young, who historians believe was the first documented New Englander to be killed for witchcraft. Details of her life and death are scant. Historians believe that she was accused of witchcraft during an epidemic that killed many children, including those of a family who lived nearby. When her only child, a daughter, survived, others claimed that her use of witchcraft had kept the child alive.
Ms. Young, a Windsor, Conn., resident, was hanged in 1647. The town council in Windsor exonerated her 370 years later, in 2017.
But the Exoneration Project members and allies want to go a step further. While Ms. Young’s name is engraved on a brick in Windsor’s town center with the date of her hanging, it was paid for by a group of individuals. A resolution in the Statehouse, supporters say, could clear the way for Connecticut to help fund a memorial more significant than that.
During the early 2000s, a group of historians pushed for legislation that would recognize the people accused in the trials. However, there was little political will among Connecticut’s state legislators to engage with the effort; most considered an apology to the so-called witches too frivolous.
