Howard Street Cemetery

In 1692 a wave of witchcraft accusations swept Salem Village and the surrounding towns of Essex County. Between 150 and 200 people were jailed; nineteen – fourteen women and five men – were hanged, at least five more died in prison, and one man was put to death by torture. That man was Giles Corey, an English-born farmer of about eighty, accused along with his wife, Martha.

Corey refused to enter a plea. Under English law a court could not try a defendant who would not plead, and the penalty for standing mute was peine forte et dure: the prisoner was laid down and heavy stones were placed on him until he either pleaded or died. Corey endured two days of it and died on 19 September 1692. Because he was never tried or convicted, his property passed to his heirs rather than being seized. Martha Corey was hanged three days later, on 22 September. He is believed to have died in an open field beside the Salem jail, part of which later became the Howard Street Cemetery; his exact burial place is unknown.

The legend that grew up around him holds that his ghost appears among the graves before calamity strikes Salem, and that in his last moments he cursed the sheriff and the town. Tellers point to the Great Salem Fire of 25 June 1914, which began with explosions at a leather factory and destroyed 1,376 buildings across 253 acres, leaving some 20,000 people homeless – Corey, it is said, had been seen shortly before. Popular accounts also link the curse to the misfortunes of later Essex County sheriffs, though there is no documentary evidence for any of it.

Massachusetts spent centuries acknowledging what happened in 1692. In 1697 Judge Samuel Sewall publicly apologised; in 1711 the General Court reversed the convictions of many of the condemned; and the last names were cleared only in 2001 and 2022. Today the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, near the Charter Street burying ground, includes a stone bench inscribed with Giles Corey’s name. In a city that now markets itself as “Witch City,” the quiet Howard Street Cemetery is a place to remember a real man who chose to die rather than give the court what it wanted.

The legend describes the figure of an old man seen walking among the gravestones, said to appear as a warning before disasters in Salem. Visitors on ghost tours describe cold spots and a sense of heaviness or pressure in the cemetery.

Howard Street Cemetery, a small burying ground beside the site of the old Salem jail, near Bridge Street. Sightings are said to precede disasters; ghost tours visit after dark, but the cemetery itself should be visited in daylight.

Giles Corey appears in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953), whose line “more weight” made his final words famous, and in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s verse drama Giles Corey of the Salem Farms (1868). His ghost is a fixture of Salem’s Haunted Happenings season and its many ghost tours.