There was no version of this test you could pass.
The touch test played out in front of a packed meetinghouse. An accuser — usually one of the young women at the center of the outbreak — fell into convulsions on cue: thrashing, screaming that the defendant's specter was attacking her. The court's response rested on a specific piece of folk logic: a witch's power, once spent on a victim, was believed to flow back into her the instant she made physical contact, ending the fit. So the remedy was to bring the accused forward, have her touch the afflicted girl directly, and watch what happened.
The same belief ran through the whole outbreak, not just the courtroom. It's what drove the earlier ‘witch cake’ incident, where a neighbor baked a cake from the afflicted girls' urine and fed it to a dog, on the theory that harming a piece of the victim would reveal the witch through sympathetic pain — touch, blood, and bodily residue were all treated as channels a witch's power could travel back through.
The clearest surviving account of the test comes from Andover, where villagers gathered in the meetinghouse and put roughly a dozen accused women through it in a single afternoon, one after another. Several later gave a joint account of the ordeal: “we were blindfolded, and our hands were laid upon the afflicted persons... they being in their fits and falling into their fits at our coming into their presence, as they said. Some led us and laid our hands upon them, and then they said they were well and that we were guilty of afflicting them.” Every woman whose touch was said to calm a convulsing girl that afternoon was arrested on the spot.
Refusing the test at all was no safer. It was read as the move of a witch too cunning, or too frightened of exposure, to risk the contact. There was no third option — no way to stand in that meetinghouse and have the outcome read as innocence.
A similar shape shows up in a much more familiar piece of modern courtroom folklore: the polygraph. Like the touch test, it converts an involuntary physical reaction into supposed proof of guilt or innocence — and like the touch test, the underlying science has never held up. The U.S. Supreme Court excluded polygraph evidence from federal trials in 1998, finding it fails basic standards of scientific reliability, a conclusion the American Psychological Association shares. The test is still used anyway, mostly in pre-employment screening and plea negotiations, playing roughly the same role the touch test played in 1692: a piece of theater everyone treats as more conclusive than it is.
A test with only one correct outcome isn't a test. It's theater with paperwork.