AN AMERICAN HORROR STORY

you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink,” Sarah Good reportedly spat as she awaited execution. A crowd watched as she and four other suspected witches ascended the gallows on a quiet spot just outside the small New England settlement of Salem on 19 July 1692. Good faced execution that day for supernatural crimes she had supposedly perpetrated on her neighbours, part of a rash of bewitching and terrifying events that had plagued the town for months. Accusers reported how she had muttered curses, flown on a pole, and transfigured into a wolf to stalk young girls. Good’s threats that day did not save her, however. She was not the first to hang for witchcraft that year in Salem, and she would not be the last. Over the course of 1692, 19 people in Salem were executed for witchcraft, five died in prison,