In 1699 in the town of Salem Massachusetts, over two hundred women, men and children were accused of being witches and imprisoned in the county jail from offenses such as supposedly creating voodoo-like cloth poppets, entering men’s bedrooms at night or dancing with demons in the fields behind the church. Nineteen innocent people were publicly executed; eighteen by hanging, one being crushed to death under heavy stones. The hysteria was prompted by twelve raving girls and women, all said to be cursed by “The Dark Hand.” Through the pressure and influenced placed upon them by the family patriarchs, the horrid Sheriff Corwin and the magistrates of the court, the girls and women accused several dozen people, some who were outcasts from society, others who were rich and held sway in the town, and some that were just hated by their neighbors. The accusations went as far as to point of the five-year-old daughter of an alleged witch, the consequences of which drove the child insane.

The horror began in the winter of 1699, in the house of the reverend minister Samuel Parris. His sickly daughter Betty and his defiant niece Abigail Williams and their friends were playing magic games with Parris’s slave, an Indian woman named Tituba. During one fortune telling game Abigail saw an image that drove her into hysterics, immediately caused screaming delusions in the other girls. The local doctor diagnosed their afflictions of being the result of a witch’s curse. Parris pressured his daughter and niece to give up the name of their attacker, and they cried out that Tituba had done it. Parris dragged the slave before the local court, and Tituba declared that she was a witch and named three other women who were in her coven. More and more people came forward describing nocturnal attacks, strange injuries or damage to their property, how they had seen giant black dogs and the accused dancing through the field in the moonlight with a man in black.

The hunting was at such a fevered pitch that several dozen ministers and witch hunters were dispatched to investigate the trials, not least among them Cotton Mather, the son of a famous author on hunting witches. Accompanying him to Salem was the young Fiona Rain, a demon hunter from Ireland hired by the frantic king and queen of England. Fiona’s family stretched back to the times of the Roman colonization, when their first ancestor had been granted the ability to hunt demons by the fair folk, and Fiona was hired to go to Salem to investigate the cases of demons and ghosts attacking people. As she searches for evidence and begins to track down The Big Black Dog demon and The Black Man, Fiona is shocked to feel herself pulled to the dark Reverend Parris, now serving as an investigator and prosecutor of the alleged witches. She’s frightened of him and the way he looks at her, and even though she does her best to avoid him, he’s always there, watching…

The rest of the Nurse family was