ABSTRACT
The Salem witch trials came near the end of a tragic era. The number of witch trials had begun to decline precipitously throughout the West, until by the mid-eighteenth century they practically disappeared. The decline in the number of witch trials was as rapid in New England. Writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, one clergyman observed that few towns in New England had failed to experience at least one suspicion of witchcraft, and that some inhabitants 'were well-versed in that occupation'. Charles Upham, in his nineteenth-century study of the Salem witch trials, was among the first to raise such a specter. Perhaps the best-known use of the Salem metaphor has been in the history of the anticommunist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s. John Demos found that whereas descriptions of seventeenth-century witches portrayed a powerful, formidable, and dangerous adversary, by the nineteenth century she had become a 'hag-witch', characteristically old and decrepit.
