Hocus Pocus (1993): The Shocking True Story Disney Never Told You

Disney turned a very real mass-hysteria tragedy into a cozy Halloween comfort watch. That is not me knocking Hocus Pocus - I press play every October - but it is wild when you line up the movie with what actually happened in and around Salem in 1692. Here is how the Sandersons echo a real trio of sisters, why a property line might have helped get people killed, and the odd way Sarah Jessica Parker connects to the story.

Quick refresher: Hocus Pocus (1993)

In the movie, the Sanderson Sisters are executed in the 1600s for witchcraft. Their cottage becomes a museum. Centuries later, a new Salem kid named Max - a virgin, as the script will not stop reminding you - lights the black flame candle and resurrects them for one Halloween night. Their plan: snatch the souls of Salem's kids and stay young forever. The film flat-out treats the sisters as actual witches and makes them fun, quippy villains. Historically, none of that was ever proven about the real people who got swept up in the scare.

The real-world echoes: three sisters, one feud, and a powder keg

The Sandersons are often linked, at least in spirit, to a real set of siblings: the Towne sisters of Topsfield, Massachusetts - Rebecca Nurse, Mary Eastey, and Sarah Cloyce. They lived next to the powerful Putnam family on the border of Topsfield and what was then Salem Village. The two clans spent years arguing over where one farm ended and the other began. It is not sexy, but boundary fights were the kind of petty, simmering grievance that powered a lot of what came next.

Before the accusations, the Townes were considered devout, respectable, the kind of neighbors who sit up front at church. That made them threatening to rivals once the witchcraft rumors started - because if the 'good' people can be witches, anyone can. Inside baseball, but important: community politics mattered as much as superstition.

1692, when panic did the driving

By early 1692, talk of witchcraft had already put people in jail. Then came the widely cited 'afflicted girls' in Salem Village - a group of young accusers who convulsed in public and claimed certain people's 'specters' attacked them. That is how the Towne sisters got dragged in, helped along by the Putnams pressing charges.

• Rebecca Nurse - 71 years old, frail, almost deaf, widely loved. In March, the afflicted girls cried out that her specter tormented them, even staging an episode in the meetinghouse. Dozens signed a petition vouching for Rebecca's character. Judges hesitated, then flipped after a girl screamed that Rebecca's ghost pinched her in open court. Rebecca was hanged on July 19, 1692.
• Mary Eastey - Deeply involved in church life, admired like her sister. Arrested, briefly released when the court wavered, then re-arrested after the accusers doubled down. Before her death she submitted a plea to stop the panic, not to save herself but to halt the killing.

  "End the shedding of innocent blood."

  Mary was hanged on September 22, 1692.
• Sarah Cloyce - Her 'crime' was walking out of church in protest after a sermon targeted Rebecca. Defending a supposed witch made Sarah a target. She was accused and jailed, but the madness burned out before her case finished, and she eventually went free.

The body count, for real

In the Puritan panic of 1692 alone, more than 200 people were accused. Nineteen were hanged. One man was pressed to death under stones. At least ten more died in jail from starvation or infection after beatings. It was not campy, and it was not cute.

What the movie changes (because it has to)

A family comedy cannot be two hours of property disputes and show trials. So Hocus Pocus flips the lens: the sisters are actual witches, there are spells and jokes and a talking cat, and Salem's history becomes a spooky backdrop. We buy it because the town really did prosecute people for witchcraft - but the real Towne sisters were churchgoing locals, not cackling villains.

Hocus Pocus 2 pushes the Sanderson origin story even further into fantasy, painting them as perennial outcasts from day one. Historically, the Towne sisters were respected before the accusations started. The contrast is the point: the movies are fairy tales draped over a very dark episode.

The Sarah Jessica Parker connection

Sarah Jessica Parker has a documented family tie to the era: she is descended from Esther Elwell, a woman accused of witchcraft in the Salem trials who survived because the special court dissolved before any execution could happen. Spooky trivia, but real.

If you want a tonal match, try The Witch

Robert Eggers' The Witch gets closer to the paranoia and religious pressure-cooker of 1692 - at least until the finale leans into the supernatural. Different story, same dread. I still rewatch it every October, which probably says something about me I am choosing not to unpack.

So where does that leave us?

The closest real-life counterparts to the Sandersons are the Towne sisters, who went from pillars of their community to victims of a panic supercharged by old grudges and bad evidence. The movies turn all that into folklore we can enjoy with popcorn. The history is messier - and it started with neighbors fighting over a line in the dirt and whose plants were creeping over it. Happy Halloween, and sorry for the buzzkill. I will still be queuing up Hocus Pocus tonight.