The test treated a claimed physical reaction as evidence about an invisible crime.
The touch test appeared during the 1692 crisis as a way to identify supposed witches. An afflicted person would be in a fit, and an accused person would be made to touch them. If the fit was said to stop after contact, officials could interpret that recovery as evidence that the accused had been the one afflicting the victim.
The underlying belief was a form of sympathetic magic: the harmful force was thought to return to the witch through physical contact. What survives most clearly in the records is the incriminating reading of a successful “cure.” The evidence does not establish a universal rule that every refusal, failed touch, or non-response was automatically treated as guilt in every use of the practice.
On September 7, accused and afflicted people in Andover were brought to a meetinghouse for a touch test. Later accounts by accused women described being blindfolded and having their hands laid on afflicted people; when the afflicted were then said to recover, the accused were identified as witches. The episode became one of the clearest surviving examples of the procedure in action.
The structure was deeply biased: a fit that stopped could be counted against the accused, while a fit that continued did not create a reliable scientific exoneration. But that is different from claiming that every historical touch test had a formally defined “guilty no matter what” result. The record supports the asymmetry; it does not support turning that asymmetry into a universal procedural rule.
The polygraph offers a useful modern comparison only if the limits are kept clear. In United States v. Scheffer (1998), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a military rule excluding polygraph evidence and emphasized that there was no scientific consensus about polygraph reliability. The decision did not create a blanket ban on polygraph evidence in every federal civilian trial; federal courts can apply ordinary evidence rules and reach different admissibility decisions.
A body reacted. The court decided what the reaction meant.