page_title: Giles Corey
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Giles Corey / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: "Father Father" (Giles Corey, Salem witch trials)
context_page_description: Giles Corey was an English-born American farmer who was accused of witchcraft along with his wife Martha Corey during the Salem witch trials. After being arrested, Corey refused to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. He was subjected to pressing in an effort to force him to plead—the only example of such a sanction in American history—and died after three days of this torture.
  Corey is believed to have died in the field adjacent to the prison that had held him, in what later became the Howard Street Cemetery in Salem, which opened in 1801. His exact grave location in the cemetery is unmarked and unknown. There is a memorial plaque to him in the nearby Charter Street Cemetery.
context_section_description: According to a local legend, the apparition of Giles Corey appears and walks his graveyard each time a disaster is about to strike the city. Notably, he was said to have appeared the night before the Great Salem Fire of 1914. The position of Sheriff of Essex County was also said to have suffered from the "curse of Giles Corey", as the holders of that office, since George Corwin, had either died or resigned as a result of heart or blood ailments (Corwin died of a heart attack in 1696). The curse was said to have been broken when the sheriff's office was moved from Salem to Middleton in 1991.
caption: "Father Father", illustration accompanying Giles Cory, Yeoman, a play by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume LXXXVI, 1893.
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