On October 12, 1692, Royal Governor William Phips of the Province of Massachusetts Bay wrote a pivotal letter to the Earl of Nottingham, defending his decision to halt the increasingly controversial Salem witch trials. By this point, the accusations had struck close to home: his own wife, Mary Phips, had been named as a suspected witch, though she was never formally arrested or charged. Phips’s intervention came shortly after the final executions on September 22, when eight convicted individuals were hanged.
In October, Phips ordered that spectral evidence—testimony based on alleged visions, dreams, or apparitions of an accused person’s spirit—could no longer suffice to convict suspects in future witchcraft trials. Later that month, on October 29, he formally dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer, the special tribunal that had overseen the trials. By removing the court and restricting its most controversial form of evidence, Phips brought the executions to an end and began restoring judicial restraint to the colony.
Phips subsequently reviewed the cases of those still imprisoned, releasing many accused people—especially those against whom spectral evidence was the principal proof. A new court, the Superior Court of Judicature, convened in January 1693 and largely declined to accept spectral evidence; most remaining defendants were acquitted, and Phips later pardoned the rest. His actions marked the effective end of the Salem witch trials and the return of institutional order to Massachusetts Bay.
