Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

Giles Corey

Again, in this court, Corey refused to plead.

Death by pressing

According to the law at the time, a person who refused to plead could not be tried. To avoid people cheating justice, the legal remedy for refusing to plead was "peine forte et dure". In this process, prisoners were stripped naked, and heavy boards were laid on their bodies. Then rocks or boulders were laid on the plank of wood. This was the process of being pressed:

... remanded to the prison from whence he came and put into a low dark chamber, and there be laid on his back on the bare floor, naked, unless when decency forbids; that there be placed upon his body as great a weight as he could bear, and more, that he hath no sustenance, save only on the first day, three morsels of the worst bread, and the second day three draughts of standing water, that should be alternately his daily diet till he died, or, till he answered.

As a result of his refusal to plead, on 17 September, Corey was subjected to the procedure by Sheriff George Corwin, but he was steadfast in that refusal, nor did he cry out in pain as the rocks were placed on the boards. After two days, Corey was asked three times to enter a plea, but each time he replied, "More weight," and the sheriff complied. Occasionally, Corwin would even stand on the stones himself. Robert Calef, who was a witness along with other townsfolk, later said, "In the pressing, Giles Corey's tongue was pressed out of his mouth; the Sheriff, with his cane, forced it in again." There are several accounts of Corey's last words. The most commonly told one is that he repeated his request for "more weight", as this was how it was dramatized in The Crucible, but it may also have been "More rocks." Another telling notes it as, "Damn you. I curse you and Salem!"

Samuel Sewell's diary states, under date of Monday, September 19, 1692:

About noon at Salem, Giles Cory was pressed to death for standing mute; much pains was used with him two days, one after another, by the court and Captain Gardner of Nantucket who had been of his acquaintance, but all in vain.

It is unusual for people to refuse to plead, and extremely rare to find reports of people who have been able to endure this painful form of death in silence. Since Corey refused to plead, he died in full possession of his estate, which would otherwise have been forfeited to the government. It passed on to his two sons-in-law, in accordance to his will.

The pressing of Giles Corey is unique in New England. It is similar to the case in England of Margaret Clitherow, who was arrested on 10 March 1586 for the crime of harboring priests, hearing Mass, and secretly being of the Catholic faith.

Aftermath

Corey's wife Martha was hanged three days later on September 22, 1692. She had a son from a previous marriage named Thomas; he showed up as a petitioner for loss and damages resulting from his mother being executed illegally during the witch trials. He was awarded £50 on 29 June 1723.

The gruesome and public nature of Corey's death may have caused residents of Salem to rethink their support for the witch trials. Corey was absolved of the crime in 1712, although Martha was not.

Despite Corey's efforts to protect his estate by refusing to plead, George Corwin still attempted to extort money from Corey's heirs after the witch trials. In 1710, Corey's daughter Elizabeth and her husband John Moulton filed a lawsuit seeking damages from Corwin. Her statement to the court read, "After our father's death the sheriff threatened to seize our father's estate and for fear that if we complied with him and paid him eleven pound six shillings in money."

Legacy

According to a local legend, the apparition of Giles Corey appears and walks his graveyard each time a disaster is about to strike the city. Notably, he was said to have appeared the night before the Great Salem Fire of 1914. The position of Sheriff of Essex County was also said to have suffered from the "curse of Giles Corey", as the holders of that office, since George Corwin, had either died or resigned as a result of heart or blood ailments (Corwin died of a heart attack in 1696). The curse was said to have been broken when the sheriff's office was moved from Salem to Middleton in 1991.

Literature

Giles Corey is the subject of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow play entitled Giles Corey of the Salem Farms and an 1893 play, Giles Corey, Yeoman, by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman.

Corey is a character in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible (1953), in which he is portrayed as a hot-tempered but honorable man, giving evidence critical to the witch trials. His wife Martha was one of the 19 people hanged during the hysteria on Proctor's Ledge. In The Crucible, Giles feels guilty about the accusation of his wife because he had told a minister that Martha had been reading strange books, which was discouraged in that society. Corey also appears in Robert Ward's operatic treatment of the play, in which his role is assigned to a tenor. A movie of the same name was released in 1996, featuring Peter Vaughan as Corey.

Actor Kevin Tighe portrayed Giles Corey in the pilot episode of the WGN television series Salem, in which he is pressed to death in a more-or-less historically accurate manner.