Volunteer-Led, Descendant-Driven Nonprofit Reaches 200 Episodes, a One-Year Anniversary This May, a New Daily Feed, and 1,000 YouTube Subscribers
End Witch Hunts is a Colorado-based, volunteer-led, community-driven social justice nonprofit. Through projects including posthumous exoneration, memorialization, podcasts, and public education events, the organization advances awareness of witch trial history and modern witchcraft accusations worldwide. Today the organization is celebrating three landmark moments across its history-centric podcast network: the 200th episode of The Thing About Witch Hunts on June 24th, the one-year anniversary of The Thing About the Salem Witch Trials on May 31st, the debut of Salem Witch Trials Daily as a standalone daily podcast this March, and crossing 1,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Together, the three shows form the most comprehensive independent podcast network devoted to the history, human cost, and cultural legacy of witchcraft accusations.
Hosted by Salem Witch Trials descendants Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack, The Thing About Witch Hunts has spent nearly four years building a remarkable archive of expert interviews, original research presentations, and co-host storytelling that spans centuries of persecution and connects historical witch trials, the demonologies and religious frameworks that made accusations possible, and popular belief across centuries, to modern-day accusations still devastating communities across the globe. With more than 160 guests since 2022, the show has drawn historians, human rights advocates, descendants, survivors, authors, artists, educators, activists, and more into conversation about why the same narratives of fear, accusation, scapegoating, and violence recur across radically different times and cultures. Across every episode the show confronts the stigma that has always made witchcraft accusations so devastatingly effective.
The Thing About the Salem Witch Trials zooms in on the most recognized witch trial in American history, the 1692 and 1693 Salem proceedings, examining them not as a moment of mass panic, but as deliberate legal machinery that destroyed real lives, drawing directly on the historic record to ground every episode in what the documents actually say. The show’s one-year anniversary this May marks a growing catalog of episodes that range from primary source deep dives to frank conversations about Salem’s ongoing fascination in film, fiction, and culture.
Salem Witch Trials Daily launches as a structured chronological course through the full Salem crisis of 1692 and 1693, offering listeners a day-by-day window into one of American history’s most documented tragedies, anchored in primary sources and the historic record of 1692 and 1693. The feed accompanies a free online course at aboutsalem.com, with a weekly blog and printable worksheets designed for both adult learners and young students.
What makes this network singular is not only its scope, but its origin. End Witch Hunts is entirely volunteer-led. Its co-founders are documented descendants of Salem witch trial victims, including Rebecca Nurse and Mary Easty, who were condemned and executed in 1692. Advocacy for these women is not abstract. It is personal, genealogical, and generational. Co-host Josh Hutchinson brings his own ancestral reckoning to the work — his ancestor signed the first arrest warrant of 1692, the document that initiated charges against Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne. That shared lineage has become a gathering point, drawing descendant communities, researchers, and advocates from across the world into a collective effort to remember, exonerate, and protect.
That advocacy has already produced concrete results. End Witch Hunts founders lauded the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, which secured the 2023 passage of Connecticut House Joint Resolution 34, absolving 34 colonial witch trial victims. The organization continues to pursue posthumous exonerations, push for memorialization, and testify before state legislatures, including testimony before the Massachusetts General Court in 2025 in support of legislation to exonerate eight additional Boston witch trial victims.
But the work is not only solemn. Witchcraft, magic, Halloween, and horror are woven into the programming with full sincerity, because the love of the witch in imagination and art is inseparable from the fear of the witch in law and history. The podcasts make space for both. Listeners encounter the Salem trials alongside discussions of witches on stage and screen from The Crucible to Wicked, witchcraft in contemporary film, the aesthetics of the Halloween witch, and the explosion of witch-centered storytelling across books, games, and social media. Witchcraft and magic are perennial forces in entertainment and popular conversation. End Witch Hunts positions that cultural appetite as a doorway, not a distraction.
The shows reach listeners in more than 100 countries, ranked in the top 15% of video podcasts on Spotify in 2025, and crossed 1,000 subscribers on YouTube this year.
“We are making space for the world to learn, discover, and talk about witch trial history, and about what it means that these accusations never stopped,” said Sarah Jack, Executive Director of End Witch Hunts. “The witch is everywhere in our imagination. The witch hunt never left the real world. Both of those things matter, and both belong in the same conversation.”
“Descendants of the accused found each other through this work. That keeps happening, across countries and continents. We are proof that these histories still belong to living people and that these experiences still belong to the living.”
Explore the Salem Witch Trials Daily course at aboutsalem.com, and become part of a growing global community at youtube.com/@aboutwitchhunts. Whether history brought you here or pop culture did, you belong in this conversation. This is a community built around a history we can still touch. Find us at endwitchhunts.org.