Portland, Maine’s ties to the Salem Witch Trials

We discuss how Maine, then part of Massachusetts, was a war-torn frontier during the years surrounding the Salem Witch Trials and show that refugee movements, fear, and trauma from frontier conflict contributed to the Salem panic. The hosts focus on Salem figures connected to Falmouth (now Portland), including minister George Burroughs, afflicted witness Mercy Lewis, and confessor Abigail Hobbs, emphasizing how their experiences in Maine intersected with events and testimony in 1692. It ends by noting that magistrates Hathorne and Corwin also had a connection to the fall of Falmouth.

Links

⁠Bernard Rosenthal, ed., Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt

The Thing About Witch Hunts / About Salem YouTube channel

⁠Salem Witch Trials Daily Hub

Salem Witch Trials Daily Course Week 7: Families, Geography, and the Machinery of Accusation, February 9-15, 2026

⁠The Thing About Salem

⁠The Thing About Witch Hunts

⁠Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience

⁠Marilynne K. Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege

⁠Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

Ben Wickey, More Weight: A Salem Story

Peabody Essex Museum Salem Witch Trials Collection

The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689–1694 - Colonial Society of Massachusetts

Richard Hite, In the Shadow of Salem: The Andover Witch Hunt of 1692