The colony created the Court of Oyer and Terminer especially for the witchcraft trials. The law did not then use the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” – if you made it to trial, the law presumed guilt. If the colony imprisoned you, you had to pay for your stay. Courts relied on three kinds of evidence: 1) confession, 2) testimony of two eyewitnesses to acts of witchcraft, or 3) spectral evidence (when the afflicted girls were having their fits, they would interact with an unseen assailant – the apparition of the witch tormenting them). According to Wendel Craker, no court ever convicted an accused of witchcraft on the basis of spectral evidence alone, but other forms of evidence were needed to corroborate the charge of witchcraft. Courts allowed “causal relationship” evidence, for example, to prove that the accused possessed or controlled an afflicted girl. Prior conflicts, bad acts by the accused, possession of materials used in spells, greater than average strength, and witch’s marks also counted as evidence of witchcraft. If the accused was female, a jury of women examined her body for “witch’s marks” which supposedly showed that a familiar had bitten or fed on the accused. Other evidence included the “touching test” (afficted girls tortured by fits became calm after touching the accused). Courts could not base convictions on confessions obtained through torture unless the accused reaffirmed the confession afterward, but if the accused recanted the confession, authorities usually tortured the accused further to obtain the confession again. If you recited the Lord’s Prayer, you were not a witch. The colony did not burn witches, it hanged them.