Were people burned at the stake in Salem?

Nobody was burned at the stake in the Salem witch trials, despite the image being nearly universal. During the 1692 hysteria in colonial Massachusetts, nineteen people convicted of witchcraft were executed by hanging, not fire. A twentieth victim, an elderly man named Giles Corey, was pressed to death, slowly crushed under heavy stones over days, because he refused to enter a plea, a brutal but distinct method. Several more accused died in prison awaiting trial. The burning image is imported from Europe, where witch trials did often end in burning, and it got grafted onto Salem in the popular imagination, but the English legal tradition that colonial Massachusetts followed used hanging for witchcraft, so that is what happened.

The trials themselves were a genuine tragedy of mass panic: fueled by fear, personal grudges, religious extremism, and the courts' acceptance of spectral evidence, testimony that an accuser had seen the defendant's ghostly apparition, an unfalsifiable standard that made defense nearly impossible. The frenzy collapsed within a year once accusations reached prominent people and the governor barred spectral evidence, and Massachusetts later formally apologized and compensated some victims families. Salem endures as a byword for the dangers of mass hysteria, scapegoating, and abandoning due process to fear, which is precisely why Arthur Miller used it as an allegory for McCarthyism in The Crucible. But the specific detail everyone repeats, burned at the stake, is wrong: they were hanged, and remembering that accurately is part of honoring what actually happened.