In January 1692, a group of girls in Salem Village begin having violent fits, convulsions and outbursts the village doctor can only explain as witchcraft. The film traces how those symptoms spread to other girls and how their accusations against neighboring women snowball into a full legal crisis, fed by spectral evidence, in which accusers claimed to see the accused's ghostly shape tormenting them, and by the political and religious tensions already straining Puritan Massachusetts. Roughly 200 people end up formally accused, many jailed or driven to flee the colony, and by the time the trials run their course twenty people, most of them women, have been executed. The documentary walks through the escalation month by month, from the first strange behavior to the special court convened to try the cases, and weighs the competing explanations historians have offered since, from mass psychological delusion to the ordinary machinery of scapegoating under fear. It closes on the trials as a case study in how quickly due process can collapse under panic.