To the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts, there was no greater crime than witchcraft—and no greater witch than Sarah Good (1655–1692). One of the first women accused during the Salem witch trials, Good was convicted of bewitching several young girls and executed in the summer of 1692. At her trial, Good’s own husband and five-year-old daughter were forced to testify against her.
Of course, Good was no witch—and neither were the other nineteen women and men killed during the hysteria that swept through Salem that summer. Instead, she was a poor, unpopular woman who had few friends to defend her. Along with the rest of the victims of the Salem witch hunt, she has endured as a powerful symbol of the danger of religious zealotry, intolerance, and mob justice.
Good was the wife of William Good, a colonist who had gone to prison for debt. The couple had one daughter, Dorothy. Like many of the other victims, she was of low social status. Good was unpopular in Salem, and she had the reputation of being rude, unkempt, and dependent on charity.
The trials began in February 1692, when three young girls began accusing neighbors of bewitching them. Good and two other women were the first to be accused. When she went on trial in March, more townspeople chimed in with accusations. One claimed to have seen Good flying on a broomstick. Another accused her of exercising magic powers over cats and birds. Her daughter was also imprisoned—at age five—and eventually forced to give evidence against her mother.
Defiant to the end, Good was said to have proclaimed her innocence as she was being taken to the gallows. Good was thirty-seven when she was executed.
The witch trials originally had the support of the colony’s top civil and religious leaders, but they were shut down later that year. Two decades later, the victims were exonerated and their families were invited to apply for compensation. The letter to the court that Good’s widower wrote, in shaky handwriting, was a poignant coda to Good’s trial and execution: “I leave it unto the Honourable Court to Judge what damage I have sustained by such a destruction of my poor family.”
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- All the victims of the Salem witch trials were formally declared innocent by Massachusetts in 2001.
- One of the judges who condemned Good and other prisoners was John Hathorne (1641–1717)—the great-great-grandfather of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864).
- Arthur Miller (1915–2005) used the trials as the basis for his play The Crucible (1953). Written at the height of the McCarthy hearings, the play was intended to draw a comparison between the witch hunt and the atmosphere of paranoia in 1950s America. Good is a minor character in the play.
