How Fear, Faith, and Factionalism Devoured a Puritan Community In the winter of 1692, in the small farming settlement of Salem Village (today’s Danvers, Massachusetts), two girls began having fits. By the following spring the colony’s jails were overcrowded, a special court was hanging people on the strength of dreams and visions, and a respected grandmother had been condemned after a jury’s not-guilty verdict was overturned. By the time the hysteria burned itself out in 1693