Three centuries and 30 years ago this month, a young woman from Massachusetts stood before a magistrate and told him that she was in league with the Devil and had attended meetings, with like-minded neighbours, where they agreed “to afflict folk” and “to pull downe the kingdom of Christ”.
Elizabeth Johnson Jr, who was 22, was among those who were convicted but never executed during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The trials were later declared unlawful and in 1711 the colony passed a bill restoring the good names of the survivors, but for reasons that remain unclear, Johnson was left out and remained, in the eyes of the law, a possible conspirator with Satan.
Now, thanks to a campaign by a class of pupils
