Rebecca Nurse was seventy-one years old, had raised twelve children, and held a reputation for piety no one in Salem dared question. When in March 1692 she was accused of witchcraft by the "afflicted girls", forty neighbours signed a petition in her defence — a rare act of courage that year.
The jury acquitted her. But the accusers' screams in the courtroom pushed the judges to request a reconsideration, and the verdict was overturned. On 19 July 1692 Rebecca was hanged on Gallows Hill alongside Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe and Sarah Wildes. To her church's excommunication she answered, it is said, with a silence full of dignity.
The conscience of Salem
Within a few years Salem grew ashamed of itself: jurors and accusers recanted, her church revoked the excommunication, and in 1711 the colony compensated her family. Today a monument remembers her as a symbol of innocence overwhelmed by hysteria — the most human face of a witch-hunt that never found a single witch.