Giles Corey - Legacy

Legacy

Gile Corey is the subject of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow play entitled Giles Corey of the Salem Farms and an 1893 play Giles Corey, Yeoman by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman.

He is a character in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, in which he is portrayed as a hot-tempered but honorable man, giving evidence critical to the witch trials. His wife Martha (executed on September 22, 1692) was one of the nineteen people hanged during the hysteria. In The Crucible, Giles felt guilty about the accusation of his wife because he had told a minister that Martha had been reading strange books, which was discouraged in that society. Corey also appears in Robert Ward's operatic treatment of the story, in which his role is assigned to a tenor.

According to a local legend of Salem, Massachusetts, the ghost of Giles Cory appears in Salem and walks his graveyard each time a disaster is about to strike the town. Notably, he was said to have appeared the night before the Great Salem Fire of 1914.