WITCH WAY TO SALEM?

It’s never too late for justice: the story of Elizabeth Johnson, North Andover witch with North Andover teacher Carrie LaPierre and author Richard Hite.

In this illustration, a young woman accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, tries to defend herself in front of Puritan ministers. MPI/Getty Images

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Elizabeth Johnson Jr., a woman convicted of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials in the 1690s, was finally exonerated in August 2022 after years of petitioning by North Andover teacher Carrie LaPierre and her eighth-grade civics students.

Johnson was accused of witchcraft in 1692 along with more than 200 other women and men in Salem. Of those convicted, 19 were hanged and four others died in prison – Johnson was set to be executed, too, but was later spared.

And yet, during Johnson’s lifetime and over the centuries that followed, her name was never actually cleared. It wasn’t until Carrie LaPierre, an eighth-grade civics teacher at North Andover Middle School, came across her story and involved her students in her case that Massachusetts legislators took notice. Carrie LaPierre will be sharing the story of this initiative at the NAHS program on October 29th.

While many other convicted witches were exonerated, many of them posthumously, the late Johnson – or “EJJ,” as LaPierre and her students called her – had “somehow been overlooked while all other convicted witches had been exonerated over the years.

Details of Johnson’s life are slim, but her family was a major target of the Salem witch trials, driven by hysteria, Puritanical rule and feuding between families. She was one of 28 family members accused of witchcraft in 1692, according to the Boston Globe.

Look out for “The Last Witch”- a documentary 330 years in the making that describes the efforts of Carrie LaPierre and North Andover Middle School Students to exonerate Elizabeth Johnson.

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