The people*23 convicted of and executed for witchcraft in late-seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts were not burned at the stake, as one persistently sees asserted, but hanged. The accused Giles Corey, who refused to plead to charges one way or the other, was, grotesquely, tortured to death as stones were piled on him. His defiant last words were, we’re told, “More weight.”
