John Wilkins (Salem witch trials)

John was the second son of another prominent Salem accuser, Bray Wilkins and his wife Hannah (or Anna), either of the Gengell or Way family. When John was about 17 years old, his father Bray leased 700 acres of land from the Royal Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony around nine miles northwest of modern Salem, Massachusetts which later became the town of Salem Village, known today as Danvers, Massachusetts. Eventually he married a woman by the name of Lydia and had three children, Lydia died while giving birth to the third.

In 1689, the Wilkins family permanently settled in Salem Village in order to establish a church there. Around a year later, John's niece Margaret Wilkins married a constable named John Willard. John's father, Bray, had been taken to court and received a debilitating judgement to his opponent's favor 20 years earlier in 1666, and as a result the family harbored a deep hatred for Willard.

When the trials began in Salem Village in 1692, Willard, being the constable, handled arresting the accused. However, he sometimes found himself ordered to arrest townsfolk that he respected for witchcraft, a task he eventually refused to carry out. Because of this, the paranoid townsfolk accused Willard himself of being a partitioner of the dark arts, and a warrant for his arrest was swiftly issued. Willard quickly fled to nearby Nashaway, but after a second warrant for his arrest was issued, he was discovered and sent back to Salem to stand trial. Ann Putnam, who would accuse 62 people by the trials' end, claimed to have seen two apparitions of John Willard, during the latter of which she claimed John Willard had told her he was responsible for the death of Lydia, the wife of John Wilkins. The accusation spurred John himself to testify against Willard. Willard was hanged on August 19.

John eventually remarried and had 8 more children. He later died at the age of 81.

• Norton, Mary Beth, In the Devil's Snare (New York: Adolf Knopf 2002) p. 157-158.