Howard Street Cemetery

A historic cemetery dating to 1801, final resting place of many Salem residents. The cemetery sits near the former location of the Salem jail where accused witches were held during the trials.

"More weight."

Those were the last words of Giles Corey, an 81-year-old farmer who became the only person in American history to be pressed to death by order of a court. The site of his execution—now Howard Street Cemetery—is considered the most haunted ground in Salem. And the curse he uttered with his dying breath is said to have claimed victims for three centuries.

In April 1692, during the Salem witch hysteria, five afflicted girls accused Corey and his wife Martha of witchcraft. Corey, a prosperous English farmer, had accumulated considerable wealth over his lifetime—and under Salem law, convicted witches forfeited their property to the colony. Rather than risk a biased trial that would strip his sons-in-law of their inheritance, Corey refused to enter a plea.

The punishment for this defiance was peine forte et dure—"strong and harsh punishment"—a medieval torture method never before used in Massachusetts. On September 19, 1692, Corey was stripped, laid on the ground, and a wooden board was placed across his chest. Heavy stones were piled on the board, one by one, crushing him slowly over three days.

Sheriff George Corwin supervised the execution personally. When Corey's tongue was pressed out of his mouth, Corwin forced it back in with his cane. Periodically, Corey was asked to enter a plea and end his suffering. Each time, he refused. "More weight," he demanded. The sheriff obliged.

Before he died, Corey is said to have fixed his eyes on Sheriff Corwin and uttered a final curse: "Damn you! I curse you and Salem!"

Three days later, his wife Martha was hanged on Gallows Hill.

The curse took its first victim four years later. Sheriff George Corwin died suddenly of a heart attack in 1696 at the age of 30. Since then, every Sheriff of Essex County has either died in office or resigned due to heart or blood ailments. The pattern continued for nearly 300 years until 1991, when the sheriff's office was moved from Salem to Middleton—finally breaking, some believe, the three-century hex.

Former Sheriff Robert Cahill experienced the curse firsthand. In 1978, the night before suffering a heart attack that forced him into early retirement, Cahill claims he saw Giles Corey's ghost in Howard Street Cemetery—an old man in colonial clothing, staring at him with unmistakable malice.

Corey's apparition appears whenever disaster threatens Salem. He was reportedly seen the night before the Great Salem Fire of June 25, 1914—a conflagration that killed three people, injured sixty others, and destroyed 1,376 buildings. The fire started near Gallows Hill, where his wife had been hanged 222 years earlier. Witnesses describe an old man wandering the cemetery in the hours before dawn, then vanishing as flames erupted across the city.

Howard Street Cemetery was established in 1801, though the land holds far older dead. Approximately 1,100 tombstones mark the graves of Revolutionary War soldiers, early settlers, and other witch trial victims. Colonel Samuel Colton, who fought at Fort Ticonderoga, rests here. So does George Crowninshield Jr., America's first yachtsman, and Prince Farmer, a wealthy African-American abolitionist.

But it is Corey who dominates this ground. He lies in an unmarked grave—the courts never gave him the dignity of a proper burial—but his presence is unmistakable. Visitors report seeing his spirit wandering among the headstones at night, particularly when tragedy looms. Shadow figures move between graves. Disembodied voices speak from empty air. Strange mists form without explanation. Orbs of light appear in photographs where none were visible to the eye.

The cemetery officially closes at dusk, and trespassing is illegal—a rule many believe exists not for the protection of the grounds, but for the protection of visitors. Some places hold onto their dead more tightly than others.

Giles Corey spent three days dying rather than submit to a court he knew was corrupt. He protected his family's inheritance with his body and his silence. And with his final breath, he ensured that Salem would never forget what it did to him. The curse remains. The ghost remains. And anyone who doubts it can visit Howard Street Cemetery and see for themselves—if they dare stay until dark.