6 John Eliot, “Records of the First Church of Roxbury …,” NEHGR 33 (1879), 373-74.
7 In the past twenty years, historians have discovered many more cases of witchcraft than had been previously known. In 1968, Frederick Drake’s count of witchcraft cases in the American colonies from 1647 to 1692 yielded the following result: Connecticut, 42; Massachusetts Bay, 20; New Haven, 6; Maryland, 3; Virginia, 3; New Hampshire, 2; Plymouth, 1; Puritan settlements on Long Island, 1; these 58 accusations ended in 20 executions. Of that total, the Puritan colonies accounted for 90% of accusations and 85% of executions. The executions outside of New England occurred on ships at sea, bound to or sailing from America. Every execution for witchcraft in the colonies themselves from 1647 to 1662 was carried out by the Puritans. From 1663 to 1692, Drake found another 37 accusations and 2 executions, which were also heavily centered in New England. In the great Salem outbreak, there were an additional 141 indictments or formal complaints which further swelled New England’s total. See Frederick C. Drake, “Witchcraft in the American Colonies, 1647-1692.” AQ 20 (1968), 694-726.
Subsequent research by other scholars has uncovered many more cases in the Puritan colonies. John Demos, in a project confined to New England, found 93 complaints filed or indictments for witchcraft from 1620 to 1700, not counting the Salem cases. With the addition of Salem, Demos’s count rose to 234 New England indictments or complaints filed, of which 36 ended in execution. An inquiry by Lyle Koehler identified 315 accusations in New England, and yet another other study by Carol Karlsen has identified 344 accusations of witchcraft and 35 executions in New England from 1620 to 1725.
Proceedings for witchcraft were “uncommon in other parts of British America” (John Demos, Entertaining Satan (New York, 1982), 12, 401-9). But they were not unknown. For witchcraft in other colonies see Lawrence J. Spagnola, “The Witchcraft Cases of Maryland and Virginia, 1626-1712,” (undergraduate thesis, Harvard, 1977); Richard Beale Davis, “The Devil in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,” VMHB 65 (1957), 131-49; F. N. Parke, “Witchcraft in Maryland,” MDHM 31 (1936), 271-98; “Witchcraft in New York,” NYHSC (1869), 273-76; Tom P. Cross, “Witchcraft in North Carolina,” SP 16 (1919), 217-87; Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth Century New England (Urbana, 1980), 474-91; Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (New York, 1987), 47.