You were not wrong to think you'd survive. That was the trap.
“I compile the record. Where the archive is certain, it says so. Where historians disagree, or the simulation reconstructs a possibility, that boundary belongs in the file too.”— Orphea, Archive Administrator
Between February 1692 and May 1693, roughly 200 people were accused of witchcraft across the Salem crisis. Nineteen were hanged, Giles Corey died under pressing after refusing to plead, and others died in jail. The records below separate documented mechanisms from disputed interpretations and the simulation's own reconstructions.
If a witness said your specter attacked her, proving your body was somewhere else did not answer the accusation.
The questioning came before trial, but the answers did not stay there.
The test treated a claimed physical reaction as evidence about an invisible crime.
Magistrates signaled that confession, repentance, and naming someone else could change what happened next.
Criticizing witnesses the magistrates already believed offered no safe route out of the system.
The records contain animal-shaped agents of the Devil. That did not make every suspicious pet a standard legal accusation.
Community support was real evidence of character. It was not a guarantee of acquittal.
Ergot poisoning can cause convulsions and hallucinations. That does not mean it caused Salem.
Real estate was not automatically forfeited, but goods were seized, jail costs accumulated, and economic damage could begin before a verdict.
A jury cleared Lydia Dustin in January 1693. She died in her cell that March, still unable to pay the costs attached to her confinement.
Giles Corey refused to enter a plea and died under peine forte et dure; the exact motive behind his refusal remains debated.
A pregnancy finding could postpone an execution; it did not erase the conviction.