During the summer of 1692, nineteen women and men from a small Massachusetts village were carted out to a hill near town to be hanged as witches, while hundreds more stood accused. What brought the paranoid fear of supernatural evil into the hearts of Salem’s citizens and why did they suddenly begin to accuse each other of consorting with the devil? And why, by the end of the same year, did the accusers confessed they had been “sadly deluded and mistaken” in their judgment?