Before Salem: The Witch Trial Connecticut Erased

Episode 1 — Before Salem the witch trial Connecticut erased — The witch trials America forgot

The witch trials America forgot The witch trials that came before salem — Forty-five years before Salem became the name everyone remembers, colonial America had already hanged its first accused witch. It happened on a quiet stretch of the Connecticut River — and almost nobody today remembers her name.

▪️Time: 0:00 The year is 1647. The town is Windsor, Connecticut — a small farming settlement behind wooden palisade walls, built to keep out one kind of danger. It couldn’t keep out another. That year, influenza swept through the town, and death arrived faster than anyone could explain it.

▪️Time: 0:37 In a world without germ theory, unexplained illness needed a cause. And the colony had recently given that fear a legal outlet — in 1642, witchcraft had been made a capital crime.

▪️Time: 0:51 Her name was Alse Young. Married to a local landowner, living near families whose children had just died in the outbreak while her own child survived, she became the target the panic needed. On May 26, 1647, she was hanged — the first person executed for witchcraft in what would become the United States.

▪️Time: 01:14 She would not be the last. Once one execution proved the system worked, it kept working. A servant named Mary Johnson confessed under interrogation and was executed in 1650. A man and his wife were hanged together for allegedly dancing with the devil. Over sixteen years, Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield would send eleven people to the gallows.

▪️Time: 01:37 The panic reached its peak in the early 1660s, with a wave of executions in Hartford itself — until a shift changed everything. The colony’s governor tightened the rules of evidence, requiring real eyewitnesses instead of confessions pulled from torment. The killings stopped almost as quickly as they’d started.

▪️Time: 01:58 Here’s the twist: by the numbers, Connecticut’s witch panic was arguably more deadly than Salem’s ever was. But history remembers Salem — the plays, the museums, the tourism. Connecticut’s story simply went quiet. For over three hundred years, almost no one spoke of it at all.

▪️Time: 02:18 That silence didn’t break until descendants started asking questions. In 2017, the town of Windsor formally cleared the names of its victims. In 2023, the Connecticut legislature did the same for the entire state — three hundred and seventy-six years after the first hanging.

▪️Time: 02:37 A quiet New England town, known today for suburbs and small-town charm, once carried one of colonial America’s deadliest witch hunts — and kept it a secret for three centuries. Which makes you wonder: what else is still hiding in the towns we drive through every day? ______________________________________________________________________________________

🔌 SOURCES ▪️ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v… ▪️ https://sites.google.com/view/livingi… ______________________________________________________________________________________

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