The First Salem Witch Trial Arrest Warrants
On this day · 29 February 1692
On a leap day in 1692, three women were named as witches, lighting a fuse that would end nineteen lives.
On February 29, 1692, magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts issued the first arrest warrants of what became the deadliest witch hunt in American history. Three women were named: Sarah Good, a destitute beggar; Sarah Osborne, an ailing widow; and Tituba, a woman enslaved in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris.
The accusations grew out of strange fits suffered by young girls in the village, including Parris’s daughter and niece. The surviving warrant, signed by magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, ordered the constable to “apprehe’d & bring before us the said Sarah Good” the following morning at Nathaniel Ingersoll’s tavern.
The document is dated, in the calendar of the day, “Salem, febr 29th 1691/2.”
The examinations that followed turned suspicion into mass panic. By the time the trials ended, twenty people had been executed and several more had died in jail. These three warrants mark the legal beginning of the Salem witch trials — a cautionary episode still invoked whenever fear overwhelms due process.
Sources & references
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