The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft.

Benge is the ‘Poison Oracle’ used by the Azande of Central Africa, mainly in Southern Sudan, in which a decision is determined by whether or not a fowl survives being administered a poison. If someone was ill, they would go to an oracle who would feed poison to a chicken.

Nineteen men and women were executed by hanging, one was killed by torture, and others died in prison. In October 1692, the governor dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer, and in December 1692, the General Court passed An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits.

5) was a law passed by the Parliament of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1735 which made it a crime for a person to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practising witchcraft….Witchcraft Act 1735.

Among the largest and most notable of these trials were the Trier witch trials (1581–1593), the Fulda witch trials (1603–1606), the Würzburg witch trial (1626–1631) and the Bamberg witch trials (1626–1631).

While prevalent world-wide, hot-spots of current witch-hunting are India, Papua New Guinea, Amazonia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. While an unknown problem in vast parts of the Western population, body-counts of modern witch-hunts by far exceed those of early-modern witch-hunting.

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Dornoch

The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft—the Devil’s magic—and 20 were executed. Eventually, the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted.

Lancaster Castle

But around the world, innocent people are still attacked and killed for witchcraft. Modern-day witch hunts happen in Africa, the Pacific, Latin America and even in the U.S. and Europe, writes Mitch Horowitz for the New York Times.

The definition of a witch hunt is a situation where accusations are made freely, especially against someone or something that is not popular with the majority. An example of a witch hunt is when many women were burned at the stake in Cambridge Massachusetts.

Beginning in 1517, the Reformation split the church into two factions: Catholic and Protestant. Suddenly, these two churches had to compete with each other for followers, and they did so by using the attention-grabbing witch trials as perverse advertisements for their brand.