Common errors about the Witch Hunts

http://departments.kings.edu/womens_history/witch/werror.html#magic

Torture - link to practical.

#7. People condemned during the Witch Hunts were burned at the stake.
FACT: While indeed governments did burn many witches at the stake, most were executed by other means.
COMMENTARY: The favorite neo-pagan term for the period of the Witch Hunts is "the Burning Times." The most common form of execution, though, was hanging. Admittedly, burning was important in many of these cases also, since to further protect against any malevolence from the dead witch, authorities often burned the remains afterward. Other popular forms of execution for witches included beheading, drowning, and breaking on the wheel.  Witches were rarely buried alive, boiled alive, impaled, sawed in two, flayed, drawn and quartered, or disemboweled, as other contemporary criminals were.  Other punishments inflicted on convicted witches included mutilating (cutting off of a hand or ear for example), branding, whipping, dunking, locking in the the stocks, jailing, fining, banishing, or selling into slavery.
A notoriously common myth is that the alleged witches at Salem in colonial Massachusetts were burned. All of the convicted during the Salem Witch Hunt in 1692 died by hanging.  Others died by natural causes before conviction or execution, and Giles Corey was pressed to death. In fact, no witches were executed by burning in the English colonies of North America. English law did not permit it.