Howard Street Cemetery

Howard Street Cemetery opened in 1801, more than a century after Salem’s witchcraft crisis. Its connection to that earlier violence comes from a local tradition: Giles Corey, an elderly farmer who refused to enter a plea in 1692, was pressed to death in a field believed to have been near this ground. The cemetery is often described as the site, but the precise place of his death—and his grave—has never been established.

Corey’s refusal had a grave legal consequence. Because he would not plead, the court could not proceed with a trial in the usual way. Authorities subjected him to peine forte et dure, a form of coercion in which weights were added to a board laid over the accused. He died on September 19, 1692. The story that his last words were “more weight” belongs to later tradition; it is not a verified transcript of his death.