The iconic image of witches burned at the stake in America.
Documented
Hanged, pressed, died in jail
Nineteen of the condemned were hanged. Giles Corey, 81, was pressed to death under stones over two days for refusing to enter a plea, his last words reportedly "more weight." Several died in jail. Burning was the European practice, not the English colonial one; English law burned only for treason, including petty treason like a wife killing a husband.
Assessment: Fully documented in trial records.
Stories
Why we remember fire
The burning image is more cinematic and imports the European witch-craze into the American story, making Salem feel like the climax of something older and darker than it was.
Assessment: Memory edits for drama, always.
Interesting claims
The ergot in the rye
In 1976 a researcher proposed the afflicted girls were poisoned by ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus in damp rye grain: the visions, the convulsions, the sensations of being pinched and bitten all match ergotism. The theory has been attacked and defended for fifty years.
Assessment: Genuinely interesting and genuinely unresolved. The symptoms match imperfectly, the geography fits badly, and the theory cannot explain why accusations snowballed after the fits stopped. Filed as the strongest natural explanation ever offered, and still not enough.
Sources and further reading
Court of Oyer and Terminer records, Essex County, 1692 (Boyer & Nissenbaum eds., The Salem Witchcraft Papers, 1977)
Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World, 1700
No burning sentence exists in the record; the executions were hangings at Gallows Hill
Worth asking
If we cannot correctly remember how we executed people, what else has collective memory sanitized or distorted?