The Pit and the Pendulum The Pit and the Pendulum "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual "The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843". The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story describes his experience of being tortured. The story is especially effective at inspiring fear in the reader because of its heavy focus on the senses, such as sound, emphasizing its reality, unlike many of Poe's stories which are
Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition low, of 6% on average. The raw numbers of trials usually include cases of witchcraft or false accusations that were quickly identified as neighbour fabrications and dismissed by the system. For example, the Spanish Inquisition trialed 3687 people for witchcraft from 1560 to 1700, of which only 101 were found guilty. Other estimates of trial-conviction ratio for witchcraft are even lower. A common mistake in inquisitorial Historiography has been to report the number of trials as number of convictions, or even of executions. Another common mistake has been to assume that the elevated number of trials indicated an active prosecution