Discussed in this essay:

The Witches: Salem, 1692, by Stacy Schiff. Little, Brown. 512 pages. $32.

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, by Richard Beck. PublicAffairs. 352 pages. $26.99.

One night in May 1692, Ann Foster and Martha Carrier hopped on a pole in Andover, Massachusetts, and flew twelve miles to a meadow in Salem Village. They picnicked on the grass and drank from a nearby brook before attending a meeting of about two dozen witches — a small fraction of the total number in New England at the time. The details of…