Listen in Your Favorite App
Listen and subscribe wherever you enjoy podcasts:
Show Notes
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast. Here is a special surprise episode featuring Professor Emerson Baker and his book, “The Devil of Great Island.” Discover the wild world of supernatural attacks and witchcraft accusations on an island where everyone’s a suspect. Get ready for a captivating discussion with Professor Baker as he unravels the clues and weaves the threads together. From the historical intrigue to serious discussions on witchcraft accusations, this episode wraps up with a call to exonerate all accused witches and end modern witch-hunts. Don’t miss this festive episode, and consider gifting a copy of the book from our bookshop—link in the show notes.
Enjoy this special holiday bonus as Dr. Emerson W. Baker, Salem State University history professor, returns as our esteemed guest!
Links
Buy the book The Devil of Great Island by Emerson Baker
Support Us! Buy Book Titles Mentioned in this Episode from our Book Shop
Sign the MA Witch Hunt Justice Project Petition
Support Us! Sign up as a Super Listener
Support Us! Buy Witch Trial Merch!
Support Us! Buy Podcast Merch!
Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback
Transcript
Josh Hutchinson: Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I'm Sarah Jack, and we have a present for you.
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to a special Christmas edition of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. We're talking to Professor Emerson Baker about his book, The Devil of Great Island.
Sarah Jack: This is a wild case of supernatural attack and witchcraft accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: Grab a big cup of cocoa and settle in with a warm blanket. Join us for an interesting talk.
Sarah Jack: Lithobolia is not something you add to your eggnog.
Sarah Jack:
Josh Hutchinson: Lithiobolia is actually a stone throwing demon.
Sarah Jack: That sounds like a poltergeist.
Josh Hutchinson: It's basically the same thing, just [00:01:00] at one point in history, people believed that this stone throwing was caused by demonic activity, And now we attribute it to ghosts, just a change in our superstitious perspectives.
Sarah Jack: But what or who was really behind the attacks?
Josh Hutchinson: On an island where everyone is a suspect, we have to sort through all the clues.
Sarah Jack: Professor Baker is our lead detective.
Josh Hutchinson: He reviews the suspects and the evidence.
Sarah Jack: And expertly weaves all the threads together.
Josh Hutchinson: While this episode includes a fun story, it also features serious discussion of the mechanics behind witchcraft accusations.
Sarah Jack: And we close with a note on how to end the ceaseless stream of witch hunts that continue to flow unchecked today.
Josh Hutchinson: You're gonna get a lot out of this show, and you're gonna really love this wonderful story, [00:02:00] and then you'll love reading The Devil of Great Island.
Sarah Jack: Use that gift card you just got to buy a copy from our bookshop. The link is in the show notes.
Josh Hutchinson: And why not buy one for a friend while you're at it?
Sarah Jack: It's a special holiday gift to welcome back Dr. Emerson W. Baker, professor of history at Salem State University and author of an unofficial trilogy. He was coauthor to The New England Knight: Sir William Phipps, author of A Storm of Witchcraft: the Salem Trials and the American Experience, and The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England.
Emerson Baker: Ah, I'm looking forward to it. Always a pleasure.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We're really looking forward to getting into this book. The Devil of Great Island hasn't been covered a lot on other podcasts. So a lot of our listeners will be hearing of this for the first time.
Emerson Baker: It's somewhat obscure. It's written, it was one of my earlier books. And but I think it's, I think it's a great, an [00:03:00] amazing story even. I don't, I'm not sure if, I'm not sure how good the book is, but I think the story is pretty amazing.
Sarah Jack: Both are fantastic. It was a really fun research for me to do, and we've really enjoyed talking about it before getting to talk to you about it. I'm really excited for this conversation.
Emerson Baker: I realized in hindsight that I'd written a trilogy, the first book being the biography of William Phipps with John Reid, and that kind of, there's a chapter in there on the Salem Witch Trials, it's my first kind of attempt at it, and it's the chapter that I took lead authorship on, and it nearly took over the whole book, or it could have, right? And it'sour first take on the frontier interpretation of the Salem Witch Trials. But the important book on that was it gave me that imperial context and that broader picture of Massachusetts in the late 17th century.
Emerson Baker: And then I stumbled across this bizarre case of stone throwing demons and thought it made a really cool micro history. And I think the thing is, when people study the Salem Witch Trials. A bad place to start, because Salem is so atypical, so off the [00:04:00] scale, so different in so many ways, that I thought it'd be before studying Salem, even though I was teaching at Salem at the time, I wanted to know what witch trials were like and what witchcraft accusations were like before 1692.
Emerson Baker: As I used to say is, I'm doing something no Salem historian has done before. I'm writing a book about witchcraft that really doesn't have much to do with Salem. It's in that sense it was, it's different, but it, but ultimately, as I say, is that it in many ways it has everything to do with Salem, 'cause it shows you what witchcraft was like in 1692. But I guess the other thing I would say is that it really is, I didn't write it as a witchcraft book. I really wrote it to talk about what I call the other New England, to talk about Northern New England in the 17th century, which is now famous as that sort of those incidents that led to the outbreak of the fighting in 1689, and then influenced the Salem Witch Trials.
Emerson Baker: But to me, it's a very different type of place, and it's a place where I live. Even though I teach at Salem State, I live in [00:05:00] Maine. And It's a place that is a very unpuritan place in the 17th century, but it's a place you don't hear about.
Emerson Baker: It's really about what I call the other New England, right? The Devil of Great Island. It's about, so if you imagine a story that is set in a debauched Quaker tavern in New Hampshire that's supernaturally assaulted by flying stones throughout the summer of 1682, and the logical response is to accuse your aged Anglican widowed neighbor of being a witch.
Emerson Baker: And I'm saying where in the history of books do you hear about anything like this when you talk about early New England, right? And also too if you think about the difference between, say, the Salem Witch Trials. Where's the ground zero for the Salem Witch Trials? Parris parsonage in Salem Village, the most holy, devout place in the community, the minister's home, and his children are afflicted. And how are they afflicted? Screaming, writhing on the floor. And this has become our sort of typical witch trials for us, because everyone knows Salem, right?
Emerson Baker: But contrast that to, again, a [00:06:00] debauched Quaker tavern that is supernaturally assaulted with flying stones, but it's every bit as much as witchcraft as the Salem trials, and in fact, probably more typical of what a witch could do and what sort of harms people feared from witches in the 17th century than the spectral affliction that happened in Salem, which is, as you folks know, was outside of Salem is really not that common in the 17th century in New England, right? So I, in essence, I guess I wrote the book a bit to broaden the picture of really New England history and to talk about that place that actually did have cases of witchcraft and things like that, but didn't get all the attention of Massachusetts and Connecticut, right?
Josh Hutchinson: Indeed, cases in Portsmouth and in Hampton.
Emerson Baker: And those cases are, Hampton and Portsmouth are all very interesting because really... In 1656, we know at the same time that we have the first accusations of, actually of Jane Walford and Eunice Cole down in Hampton. And they actually only lived a few miles apart [00:07:00] there were several other people who cried out upon that point. So actually in 1656 there's really a bit of a a witch panic going on in New Hampshire, but it, again, it fizzles out and so it doesn't get the attention of some of thelater outbreaks, even though John Demos does talk quite a bit about Eunice Cole, which is a really fascinating case, because she's accused of witchcraft like three times between like the 1650s and the 1680s.
Josh Hutchinson: On the subject of the stone throwing, can you tell us what happened on Great Island on the night of June 11th, 1682?
Emerson Baker: George Walton is getting ready to head home and finds that he and his house are being, his tavern on Great Island, which is now the town of Newcastle, New Hampshire, but at the time was part of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, it's supernaturally assaulted with flying stones for hours on end, almost on cue. And they, the members of the house, they retreat in the inner recesses of the house, because there's stones coming through the windows. And then they, the [00:08:00] stones almost seem to be going, leaving from the house out the windows, and things are disappearing. And it really, until the middle of the night, two or three hours, the house is under assault.
Emerson Baker: They claim they can say, no visible agents present. No one can really tell what's going on, where the stones are coming from, and it's stopped by the next morning, but then the next night it starts again, and it just pretty much every night that summer, literally almost like clockwork at eight o'clock at night, the house and its inhabitants are assaulted with what they come to believe is the work of a stone throwing demon, because no one can see anyone doing this, so it clearly must be an act of a demon, and to me, that's really important because, again judging on what happens in Salem, we tend to think of teenage girls writhing on the floor, screaming in pain from invisible specters, but no, witches had the powers to do, as we know, to all kinds of things, right? To cause ships to be sunk at sea, to destroy crops, to lightning strikes, to [00:09:00] making animals and livestock sick, to doing what we would today call really more of a haunted house, right? Or a poltergeist, again depending on if you believe in any of these sorts of things. These were all powers that witches got from Satan people believed in the 17th century.
Emerson Baker: This assault continues for literally four months, and the family has to cope with it on a regular basis. And, of course, eventually it'll lead to charges of witchcraft, as these things always tend to do.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it goes from a demon to witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: Who were the people at the center of the incident?
Emerson Baker: Yeah, George and Alice Walton are the tavern keepers, and they are fascinating folk. George is one of the original antinomian followers of Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright, and in 1638, when they are all basically thrown out of Massachusetts, George follows Wheelwright north and is one of the first settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire. They go over the line to New Hampshire to establish a new settlement. [00:10:00] And hangs around in that neck of the woods between Exeter and Dover, New Hampshire. And at some point meets Alice. We think she's a local girl, might even be a daughter of the Hilton family, who were like the first settlers of New Hampshire. Can't prove that. But the interesting thing is, by the late 1650s, early 1660s George and Alice are amongst the leaders, apparently, they're at one point they're called like by some sort of the most devout people in the area, leaders of a growing group of Quakers in the Piscataqua region, both on the New Hampshire side and on the Maine side.
Emerson Baker: And in this sense, again, this is something you don't really hear about. If you hear about Quakers in New England, it's usually like maybe down in Rhode Island or something, but there were quite a few. In New Hampshire and Maine, and George and Alice are very successful tavern keepers and also Quakers, but that very quickly runs them afoul of the law, because Quakers are not your, let's put it this way, Massachusetts does not like Quakers, and in fact, as early as the late 1650s, Massachusetts makes it [00:11:00] illegal for people, for Quakers to proselytize, and as you probably know, between 1659 and, and 1661, Massachusetts actually executes four Quakers, essentially for entering the colony and daring to proselytize. And if you go to the state house, right by Boston Common, there's a statue to Mary Dyer, who was one of those four Quakers who was executed, and it basically is a statue today for religious freedom, right? Because really she was a religious martyr to her cause. That's the way Massachusetts treated Quakers. They were sort of persona non grata. And when New Hampshire had been taken over by Massachusetts, that meant that Massachusetts had a real problem with Quakers. But after the 1660s, it almost becomes a bit of a, don't ask, don't tell policy, so your neighbors might be Quakers, but as long as they showed up at the meeting house for the Sabbath worship fairly regularly, as long as they paid their tithes to the church and didn't cause any problems, there was a degree of religious toleration that was allowed. And this is particularly true in, New Hampshire and Maine, [00:12:00] where Massachusetts takes over both colonies, New Hampshire in the 1640s, Maine in the 1650s, and specifically, with the implicit understanding that they're not gonna try to enforce pure Puritan orthodoxy in those colonies.
Emerson Baker: George and Alice are not entirely unusual in the region. They are a bit unusual in the fact that they are running this tavern, and taverns were considered very dangerous spots by Puritans. And to have a sort of a Quaker tavern that's visited by all kinds of strange people I'm happy to talk about. So it's not just a couple of Quakers who are the odd characters in the story, but all this odd mix of people who inhabit and visit the tavern.
Josh Hutchinson: What was that odd mix like?
Emerson Baker: One of my favorites, of course, is Mary Agawam. It's a Native American woman who is apparently a servant. We can't tell if she was probably not enslaved, probably a paid servant, we think. But she has the misfortune of committing fornication with some itinerant sailor on the Sabbath in the tavern and gives birth to a son, William, who then [00:13:00] becomes a servant in the tavern, as well. So there you have living proof of how these Quakers defiled and their tavern defiled the Sabbath.
Emerson Baker: You have other folks like their Irish serving man, Dermot O'Shaw or O'Shea. And so you have all of these really interesting characters. You have the next door neighbor, again, the woman they accuse of witchcraft eventually, Hannah Jones, who's a good Anglican, and then you have another neighbor, Walter Barefoot, who had actually been the man, the hero down in Hampton when several Quakers from Dover, New Hampshire, had been tried. They tried to whip them out of the colony, and it's what's called the Horse and Cart Act, where they would literally tie Quakers to the tail of a wagon, of a cart, and literally beat them outta the colony. They would whip them at every town, and then they'd have to walk. And you had these poor Quaker women in, I think it's February or early March, who stripped to the waist and are whipped starting in Dover. And by the time they get down to Hampton, [00:14:00] Barefoot, who's the local doctor at the time down in Hampton, stop puts a stop to it, 'cause they said they're gonna kill the women. Again, these are not like your standard Puritan colony.
Emerson Baker: And then even the the other one of the other neighbors who I really love to, to talk about is John the Greek Amazine who is otherwise known as John the Italian Amazine. So he's apparently some sailor from the Mediterranean, probably ethnically Greek, but from one of the Greek enclaves in Southern Italy or Sicily, who, as sailors tend to do, arrived in Portsmouth and clearly fell in love, local girl fell in love, and he married and settled down. And there are still Amazines, over 300 years later in Newcastle on Great Island. And around here people just tend to think it's just, it's an unusual Yankee name, right? Because they've been here forever.
Emerson Baker: So you have this very international cast of characters. You have some Puritans around, you have some Quakers, you members of the Church of England, and you even have, in 1682, when this incident took place, it turns out right across the river, [00:15:00] literally, not more than a stone's throw across the Piscataqua, in Kittery Point, New Hampshire, you have a group forming a Baptist church.
Emerson Baker: And at the time, again, it's laughable to us that the Puritans were afraid of Quakers and Baptists, right? Today, they don't seem to be that offensive. As a matter of fact, Quakers seem to be, they represent that ideal. They believe in egalitarianism. They believe everyone's equal, that no one's better than anybody else and that everybody should be able, including women, should be able to speak their mind in worship services. But this terrifies the Puritans, of course, who are very hierarchical and very patriarchal, right?
Emerson Baker: But the Baptists are equally terrifying to the Puritans, because they don't believe in infant baptism. They believe that people should wait until they're adults to be baptized, when they can actually make a conscious choice. And, of course, Puritans are terrified about this because what happens if a baby dies before it's baptized? It'll end up going to hell. In fact, actually that's going on right in the midst of all of this as well, too. And the amazing part of this is that eventually even Maine decides that those Baptists are really too radical for the good people of [00:16:00] Maine, and the leader of that group, William Scriven, the minister, and members of his family and some friends, actually moved to South Carolina, and Scriven and this group are considered the founders of the Southern Baptist Movement.
Emerson Baker: The Southern Baptist Movement is being founded right in the middle, literally like a mile away from the lithobolia attack on the Walton Tavern in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1682. So this just gives you the idea of just how an unusual mix of characters these are, and that's just on Great Island, as you folks know from the story, there are other players that get involved in this too, including Scottish prisoners of war and all kinds of other folk that don't really fit the pattern of what we expect to see in early New England.
Sarah Jack: We've talked about a lot of the ethnic and religious diversity going on, and you touched a little bit on the political situation. Can you tell us more about the politics that were going on?
Emerson Baker: To me, this is an interesting story, because it really, in many ways, it does show the kind of tensions that do lead to witchcraft accusations [00:17:00] in Salem, in Great Island, and elsewhere, where you have a combination of factors. In this case, we have that original dispute, it ends up the Waltons, who do they accuse of being a witch? It's their elderly neighbor, Hannah Jones. Isn't it interesting that the two families have been involved in a property dispute over an acre of land on Great Island for over 20 years, right? So you have this kind of local kind of conflict that we see in other places. Indeed, like we really see in the Salem Witch Trials, right, where we have individual cases of neighbors accusing neighbors of different things, property disputes, things like this.
Emerson Baker: But on top of that, in Salem and in Great Island, we have serious colony wide political instability and political disputes. New Hampshire and Maine are very different than Massachusetts. These were not joint stock companies like the Massachusetts Bay Company. These colonies were started, really, as proprietary efforts. The Council for New England deeds Maine to Sir Ferdinando Gorges. They're in the process in the mid 1630s of deeding [00:18:00] New Hampshire to his friend Captain John Mason, when Mason dies. But by this point, the Mason family has put a lot of money into New Hampshire, and there seems to be they, there, there's a tacit claim that they have to the colony that they pursue really for over the next a hundred years. And it reaches a head in the late 1670s and 1680s in New Hampshire because in 1679, New Hampshire manages to convince the Crown to remove Massachusetts as its governing body and restore itself to be an original independent colony and under a sort of localized government run by the local merchants and folks in the seacoast of New Hampshire.
Emerson Baker: However, the Mason family sees this as an opportunity. In this case, we're talking about like the grandson of Captain John Mason, who is now trying to assert his claim to the colony. And he sends over an agent, Richard Chamberlain, to come represent the family and essentially stir up trouble and see if he can make an effective claim to the colony. [00:19:00] So what this really means is a time of political instability in the colony, where you have this change from Massachusetts to local government, but then this threat of New Hampshire being taken away by the Mason family. And isn't it interesting, of course, where does Richard Chamberlain, the agent of the Mason family, live? He's a tenant at the Walton Tavern on Great Island, and who is one of his leading accomplices in these efforts? None other than George Walton. And what they're really trying to do here, in theory, one of the things the Masons want to do is to resume ownership of all of the colony.
Emerson Baker: It would really vacate the title to every piece of land owned by every resident of New Hampshire. Now, that's the terrifying news to people, right? The somewhat better news is don't worry, we don't really want to take, really want to throw you off the land, but if the Mason family gets their claim established, we're just going to force you to pay property tax to us every year and [00:20:00] acknowledge us as owning this land.
Emerson Baker: And in fact, George Walton had gone so far as to purchase title to some neighboring parcels of land in Seacoast, New Hampshire from Chamberlain on behalf of the land that was already occupied, that if the people didn't pay their taxes, then good old George Walton would take it over.
Emerson Baker: So you can see this kind of, this real sort of political instability bubbling over in the colony, where people are upset over local property disputes on Great Island, this very small island of 100, 200 acres. And this whole political turmoil going over in the controversy. It turns out there's also a really major local conflict that will sound, I think, really familiar to people because just at the same time that Salem Village, present day Danvers, is trying to become independent from Salem Town, people on Great Island are desperately trying to [00:21:00] become an independent town, to escape from being part of the town of Portsmouth. Great Island they'd actually tried building a bridge to it, and today, actually, there are several bridges from the mainland, one from Rye, one from Portsmouth onto Great Island, now, and now it's town of Newcastle. At the time, though, they built one bridge, and the ice took it out after a year or so.
Emerson Baker: But at the time, people complained, 'hey it's taking us hours in bad weather in the winter to sail, and it's dangerous to get to the mainland to attend worship services.' Doesn't this sound familiar compared to people in Salem Village? Could we please petition the government to make us a separate town so we can hire our own minister, form our own congregation, build our own meeting house, right?
And as it happens, just a couple of weeks before the assault, that June assault on George Walton's tavern, there's been a very contentious meeting in Portsmouth where the Portsmouth town government, the selectmen, have voted against allowing Great Island to separate. [00:22:00] One of the factors that is in favor, that was a deciding factor to them was it was clear that there were people on Great Island who were not in favor of leaving Portsmouth.
Emerson Baker: Now there's no names mentioned, but it does seem pretty clear that let's just say Quakers like George and Alice Walton, who are the largest property holders on Great Island, who would've paid the highest tax to support a minister and to build a meeting house, probably also very much enjoyed having an excuse for not having to go to Puritan worship every week, where they could say, 'Oh, the weather was just too bad. We couldn't make it.' Gosh, right? It seems pretty clear that the Waltons and their family were against this move to separate the town. And in fact, eventually, and the whole issue is defeated, and it won't be until literally about ten years after the death of George Walton in 1695, that finally Newcastle will be established as a town separating itself off.
Emerson Baker: So you have petty local disputes between neighbors, you have disputes over a town trying to [00:23:00] establish its freedom, and then you also have a whole question over who's going to own and run the colony, and are we going to have to pay taxes to the Mason family or not? Tremendous amounts of political instability, and it's really clear that one of the major factors, even though witchcraft is a religious crime, it's clearly related to various levels of political instability and hardship by people. And you see this consistently in Great Island.
Emerson Baker: In addition to these layers of religious controversy between the Quakers and the Anglicans and the Puritans, because by the 1680s, there's a Puritan minister in Portsmouth and then the Baptists and other groups hanging around. And then someone like John the Greek Amazeen who probably would have been raised Greek Orthodox originally, right? It's a wild free for all of politics and factionalism going on in right here on this little island at the mouth of the Piscataqua River.
Josh Hutchinson: And a lot of activities seem to be centered, all of those things come together at the Walton Tavern. They're Quakers, they're supporting the Mason [00:24:00] patent claim, they're on the wrong side of other Great Islanders on the separation, the new parish dispute. It Sounds like a lot of people had reason to be mad at the guy.
Emerson Baker: Yeah, I think, it's to some degrees, I won't give away the ending. But it's Murder on the Orient Express, it wasn't a question of who did it, it was like, everybody did it, right? And one of my chapter titles is called, 'The Neighbors from Hell.' This is not like that other famous Walton family, John Boy and Ma and Pa and Walton's Mountain. These folks, they read this rowdy, debauched tavern, and there's one case where, actually the leader of the York County militia and his son in law come over to Newcastle, to Great Island to do some business, and they end up in the tavern drinking late at night, and they just get so drunkeverybody starts frolicking out on the grounds by the fort. They're playing leapfrog, and soon they look out and they think there's a fog rolling in, and they think it's the Dutch fleet coming to invade New Hampshire, and they raise the alarm, and people are on their knees praying to God that the Dutch are going to come and kill us all, and of course it [00:25:00] turns out to be a complete false alarm.
Emerson Baker: You have these kinds of things going on at the tavern. You have all kinds of odd incidents going on there. For example, there's an open well behind the tavern, and a cow drowns in it, and then one of the Waltons' grandchildren drowns in it. These sort of stories ripped from the headlines, and it really is, again, it's like having the neighbor's smell. You just knew if there was a problem that was going to take place on Great Island, it was going to take place at the tavern, because this is the busy waterfront of the Piscataqua, and you got sailors coming to there from all over the Atlantic world, causing all kinds of problems.
Emerson Baker: And no, taverns were considered a necessary evil by Puritan society, right? Travelers need a place to stay, a place where they can sleep, where they can get a decent meal. But they also look somewhat askance at taverns as places where people get into trouble with gambling and drinking and perhaps women of low morality and things like this, so it's this very dubious place, absolutely. To some degrees, I picture it like the Target logo, the bullseye. It's almost like there was this Target logo, I think, on the side [00:26:00] of the tavern and to me, the amazing thing about this is, there are two accounts that survive, and one is actually written by published by Increase Mather in Remarkable Providences, part of a number of really interesting stories that he tells, that he gets from the local minister, Joshua Moody in a series of letters.
Emerson Baker: But the other account, the longer account, is actually written by Richard Chamberlain, this guy living in the tavern, who actually have rocks almost hit him in the head,and somehow he seemed to be convinced that, I don't know what invisible agents of Satan, this is all. This is like a London trained lawyer, who's saying, 'gee, I can't imagine why anybody would shoot rocks at us, but clearly the devil has some kind of bone to pick with us. Not like we're really having all the neighbors upset over all this turmoil that, that I and George Walton might be causing on the town.'
Josh Hutchinson: It's interesting you described it as a Murder on the Orient Express. I described it as a Scooby Doo episode written by Agatha Christie.
Emerson Baker: Thank you. I'll take that as a compliment. It's funny because the actually, the ultimate compliment I got was from a friend [00:27:00] of mine when the book first came out. I gave him a copy, and he called me about two weeks later, and he said, 'hey, Tad, I'm really enjoying this, but this is a novel, right?' I'm like, 'oh, bless you.' No. No. All the facts in here are, putting this in quote marks, folks, true. These were recorded incidents. And to me the real story here, to some degrees, there are many fun stories here, but one is like, why did Chamberlain and George Walton, why did they at least pretend to believe that this was a stone throwing demon, that this was a satanically inspired attack rather than acknowledge the fact that literally everybody who went by this tavern was probably chucking rocks at it, and if anybody saw them do it, they were like going yeah, throw one for me, because they hate these people so much that they're doing that. But Chamberlain, in his account, never lets on. He says, ' some people say it was just the neighborhood boys, but we know better. It really was the work of Satan.' [00:28:00] Okay. And George Walton too, right? He seems to be very cynical about this and notes, isn't it interesting, he notes that when he goes upriver to his other farm up in the Great Bay, which is about five, six miles upriver, the attacks seem to continue there too, right?
Emerson Baker: And of course, they even try counter magic on it. This is clearly an attack, so they try to boil up this amazing scene where they really try to makewhat we call a witch's bottle, where they're taking urine and pins and boiling it up over the hearth. But unfortunately, the Devil of Great Island knows what's going on and starts lobbing rocks down the chimney, and it literally breaks up the cook pot, spattering urine all over the hearth, this boiling urine. And I think this was designed to ward off evil, but I think it would have warded off pretty much anybody entering the tavern for a few weeks, right? They were not able to, you're supposed to take this concoction and then pour it into a bottle and seal it and bury it under your hearth, and it'll prevent witches from coming down your [00:29:00] chimney. But they're taking all the proper steps and treating this like witchcraft, but you also think that isn't it interesting that ultimately, who do they blame for this, right? They blame next door neighbor who's been involved in this property dispute for decades, and If you think about it, an accusation of witchcraft is the ultimate nuclear bomb threat, right? In the 17th century. It is really in some ways, maybe the 17th century legal equipment of playing the race card. Let's accuse the opposition in this case of being a witch, and that will bring the court onto our side. So it's really there's a lot going on in this place. And I think if the story was just that in its own right, to me it would be interesting enough. But I guess the other thing that is to me is really fascinating about this is it really shows how witchcraft spreads.
Emerson Baker: Here's the thing. I've always been interested in the cases of witchcraft that take place in the Connecticut River Valley over several decades, really, from the late 1640s through into the 1660s. Up and down the river valley and you wonder [00:30:00] how that's how that information spread and how one case influenced the other. And we know this, we see this in Salem where we see the spread and even where we can say clearly what's going on in Salem pretty much seems to, we can't prove it, but it seems like that's influencing this outbreak of witchcraft in Connecticut even in 1692.
Emerson Baker: But here's the thing, it's really hard to tell how these cases spread, because witchcraft is normally, in this case, most of these cases are just witchcraft. But in this case, we have a stone throwing demon, so isn't it interesting, and in fact, Increase Mather, when he writes his book, he says, he describes the attack on the Walton Tavern, and then he says the same year there were these two other cases of a stone throwing demon. Isn't that interesting?
Emerson Baker: He's basically saying, what a coincidence. Maybe it's not a coincidence, Increase. When you realize that in fact, within a month or so of the attack on the Walton Tavern, if you go about a dozen miles upriver to Berwick, Maine, to one of the last houses in English Settlement before the wild frontier, [00:31:00] we actually have another stone throwing demon attack. And it takes place in an even stranger house than the home of George and Alice Walton. Because it takes place in the home of Antonio Fortado, who is a Portuguese sailor. And he's married to Mary Start, who's the daughter of a of a York fisherman. And they live in this house on the edge of the frontier. And all of a sudden, Mary walks out of the house one morning and she's got this huge bruise over her eye. And and bite marks and scratch marks on her arms and they say, 'Mary, what happened to you?' And she says, ' Oh, it was the devil of Great Island. It was the stone throwing demon that did this to me. That rock just hit me right here, son of a gun.'
Emerson Baker: I won't go into the full details of the story, but essentially what becomes really clear really fast is this is a classic case of domestic abuse, where her the husband is beating her and, like many people who are victims of domestic abuse, the [00:32:00] last thing you want to do is admit to that, so instead you make up this excuse of it being the stone throwing demon from downriver. And if you even read the account, it's really interesting that the way, eventually the stone throwing demon, or the witch responsible for the demon, manifests itself to her, to Mary. And how did, how is she described? She described as wearing this a safeguard, and she describes her garments. Now, a safeguard is like an overcoat that you wear over your skirt to protect it when you're riding, but it's basically a prop used in Elizabethan stage and in and Shakespearean stage. If someone comes, exit or enter stage, wearing a safeguard, it basically means that you come from a journey. Today, it would be like if you walk in carrying a suitcase. So what's Mary saying by this? 'Oh, it was that devil downriver. It wasn't anybody here. It couldn't possibly be my abusing husband who did this to me. This is the stone throwing demon downriver, right?'
Emerson Baker: And isn't it interesting, when they go across the river to seek the safety of another house, [00:33:00] the attacks stop. When they go back home, just the two of them, the attacks start again. In this case, it's a copycat incident that's clearly being used to cover something else, something very, very unfortunate going on in that household at the time, that now, unfortunately, the husband has free reign to continue to abuse the wife, unfortunately, right?
Emerson Baker: And then you find out later on that summer, there's another case in Hartford, Connecticut as well. In this case, you can see how these cases spread. And what it really tells you is how, and to me, that would be interesting enough if it wasn't the fact that, of course, the most famous case of a poltergeist or lithobolia attack in this time period is just a couple of years earlier in Newbury, Massachusetts, today where the people live in Newburyport, in the Morse House, where Elizabeth Morse is ultimately accused of basically bewitching her own household and her own family, including stone throwing demon and other poltergeist like activity. And eventually she's [00:34:00] convicted of witchcraft and put under house arrest for much of the rest of her life. It's a very odd case in its own right.
Emerson Baker: But isn't it interesting that one of her sons, that the son and nephew, live in Portsmouth? One of whom had actually bought property from George Walton and was a neighbor and didn't get along too well with the Waltons. In fact, the Morses and other folks knew exactly how to deal with people that they didn't like, and it takes this odd form of what we had forgotten was classic witchcraft in the 17th century. There you have not only this, you can actually track the course of the stone throwing demon and see how this is such bizarre news that it spreads like wildfire throughout New England.
Emerson Baker: And today, people think of Hartford, Connecticut, as being like this kind of interior place, but it's a major port in the 17th century. It doesn't take long for ships to get there from Boston or from Portsmouth, and news spreads, and the ministers in all these towns are writing letters to each other, so it's all part of this network of information, and to me was a different way to think about how news of things like [00:35:00] witchcraft spread.
Josh Hutchinson: It's great the way you tie all of that together. And that Connecticut case in 1692 really seems to me to be a clear they heard about what was going on at Salem and embodied that.
Sarah Jack: We do know, of course, that there were actually some of the people who fled Salem in 1692 actually did seek refuge elsewhere. We actually, at least a couple of them, the Bradstreet's probably came and lived with their sister in New Hampshire but then others, like the Englishes and John Alden folks probably, clearly ended up in New York City. And again, too, not that far, shall we say, as the stone flies from Hartford and that clearly this news is coming is spreading throughout the region really rapidly. And I just wanted a little, just a little information on lithobolia prior to New England. It didn't just show up there. Is that right?
Emerson Baker: Yeah, I know what's really fascinating about this is if you start [00:36:00] looking at it, actually, the whole term lithobolia is Greek for stone thrower, stone throwing demon, and you have stone throwing attacks like this going back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and throughout medieval history and that essentially this is a really typical kind of witchcraft. Again, Salem is so atypical. We're conditioned to thinking that's the only thing witchcraft can be, right? Instead of thinking of witchcraft being things like, again, we'd call like a haunted house. And so there are numerous cases of this going back into early medieval times as well, too, of houses being assaulted by demons and people try to protect them against rocks being thrown.
Emerson Baker: And yes, ultimately, if you look at the Salem Witch Trials, there are a number of cases, one incident in Reading, where it appears that there's rocks being thrown at the house, and there appears to be some sort of demon climbing on the roof, and in Gloucester as well, in the summer of 1692, when the Babson garrison there, it seems to be attacked by stones, and then they claim to see French soldiers, but it's a phantom attack, of course, and it's just war [00:37:00] paranoia. There's nothing taking place at all there. But again, how does it manifest itself, as stones and rocks being thrown and other things being thrown at the house? So this is classic.
Emerson Baker: But also, to me, the really interesting thing, too, is that also was the way people would, and we know in 17th century England and New England sometimes, would express their displeasure at their neighbors by throwing stones at them, and particularly at folks like Quakers, that this was not an unheard of treatment that again had absolutely nothing to do with anybody thinking anything supernatural was going on here. But just that as a sort of form of protest against one's neighbors, shall we say. It's got a long history of stone throwing. One point I was tempted to think about write a history of stone throwing, because I'm sure you could trace as well into the 18th and 19th ,century as well.
Josh Hutchinson: And Hannah Jones, she's a typical suspect for witchcraft. For one thing, it seems to run in her family.
Emerson Baker: Her mother, Jane Walford, is accused several times of witchcraft [00:38:00] ,and there's actually some line in where someone talks about, that basically every one of her generation, basically all your family are witches in other words, right? And this is again, very typical that we see in Salem and elsewhere is this idea that witchcraft travels from one generation of the family to the next. And frankly, folks, if I can make a broader point here of the efforts that you're taking out to further efforts to exonerate the remaining non Salem victims of witchcraft in Massachusetts, people will say so what, these people have been dead for 300 years. You can see here that sort of the transgenerational trauma that took place in these families, where once your family is labeled as being witches or in some way out of the norm, you're ripe for scapegoating for from anybody.
Emerson Baker: And I think in many cases, we have people, descendants today, 9, 10, 11 generations removed from these folks who really feel that they has that sort of stigma next to their name, their own sort of scarlet letter based on these incidents so long ago, and I think that's one [00:39:00] reason why it's really important to try to make amends for these transgressions in the past today, is because of this fact that people believed such nonsense that your mother was a witch, so clearly you are too, and that'll mean your children will be and and so on, right?
Emerson Baker: Can we at least acknowledge maybe that there were some wrongs done here and that, no, they weren't witches. There were no witches. Yes, we talk about them. We call them that, because frankly every time I can't put everything in air quotes or quotes when I'm writing, but we all know there were no witches in the 17th century that were in league with Satan to cause harm to people, right?
Emerson Baker: So can we acknowledge that maybe the government made a transgression there and whether they recognized it at the time or not? I think we could do it now so these families have what they consider to be that sort of stain removed from their name, right?
Josh Hutchinson: Exactly.
Sarah Jack: I really found it fascinating in your book where you pointed out the one early writer who was like,we're going to find the science to prove there's witches. We don't have it, but there are them. So they're real.
Emerson Baker: This is the thing. You [00:40:00] actually do have people of the Royal Academy, including folks like Robert Boyle, who's considered to be the inventor of physics, really, right? In the 1680s and 1690s, he and other Englishmen are really trying to prove the witchcraft exists. As a matter of fact, this is why Increase Mather is writing his Remarkable Providences in the 1680s. And he's writing to all the ministers, sort of thing, if you have any witchcraft or any odd supernatural occurrences, send that to me, because if we can compile all of these and then look into the phenomenon and regularize it and determine it, essentially what they're trying to do is prove the existence of the supernatural, to prove the existence of witches.
Emerson Baker: And that sounds like a crazy thing for people to be trying to do, right? But if you can prove the existence, here we are at the kind of the dawn of the age of reason, right? The fact that you have someone like Robert Boyle tried to prove the existence of witches, at the same time working with Newton to prove the laws of physics and gravity. But if we can prove the witches are real then we know that Satan is real, and if Satan's real, who does Satan get his power from? From God, [00:41:00] so then God's real, right? And so if we don't believe in witches, that's a slippery slope, because eventually someone's going to might say, 'wait a second, what does that say about Satan and what does that say about God?'
Emerson Baker: So there was this very real effort going on in the late 17th century to ultimately try to prove the witchcraft was real, and you can even see this, folks, you see this even in things like the witch's bottle or the witch's cake in Salem. There was an odd science to it, right? And if you read Thomas Brattle in his letter, he tries to get at some of this, but people have never been able to understand the witch's cake, that the question is whether it was John or whether it was John and Tituba baked in under the direction of Mary Sibley at the Parris parsonage, right?
Emerson Baker: But the idea is, again, it's like a proto-scientific principle, and that is, when witches curse you, there's this invisible force, almost like electricity, and of course they didn't understand electricity, either, but today we might think of something like this invisible force that goes from the witch and enters the victim with that curse, and but when that [00:42:00] person urinates, part of that witch's essence and the curse leaves the victim, so can we take that essence of the witch and put it in a cake, bake it up, and then feed it to the dog. And when that essence is being chewed on by the dog, it's causing the witch harm, and the witch will show up and will come in screaming and yelling and saying, 'who's hitting me? Who's hurting me?' And a witch will be revealed like this.
Emerson Baker: Now, again, to us, this sounds like almost something out of Monty Python, but there is this odd kind of early scientific effort there, and it's the exact same thing, actually, with the evil eye, is the same kind of thing, this idea of this invisible force going there and these efforts in some ways, people like the witch trials judges in 1692, in some ways are trying to be scientific with things like the touch test and the evil eye and witch cakes and things like that, and I guess the sad reality is that I fear that those kind of efforts at science are proto science, really only convince them perhaps of the efficacy [00:43:00] of these tests to prove people were witches.
Josh Hutchinson: You talk in The Devil of Great Island about what generally you need, the climate that you need to precipitate witchcraft accusations and stone throwing demon incidents. We have a lot of those ingredients in our world today,and we still see witch hunting today in many places in the world. That stew, what really sets it off, I think, is fear really gets you to start acting irrationally and make some of these decisions that lead you down this road. So when fear becomes prevalent in our community, what should we do so that we don't go down the road of witch hunting?
Emerson Baker: That's a great question. And I think about this a lot, like you can't watch the news nowadays [00:44:00] without somehow coming up with these parallels to things that took place three or four hundred years ago, right? And to me, what it is fear. It's fear of the unknown, of the outsider, of people who are different than you, right?
Emerson Baker: Here's the thing, fear is a natural reaction touncertainty of things that aren't happening the way you expect them to, of misfortune. And, unfortunately, the world is full of misfortune today as it was three or four hundred years ago. And even though we think we're maybe more scientific in how we express that, all too often, it seems to me, what we're doing is trying to find someone else to to blame for these problems, right? And basically what ends up as scapegoating. And so I really think to me the ultimate answer really is to find ways to build community as a society.
Emerson Baker: And I think, I hate to say this, but I really think all of us, or at least God knows most of us, I'm probably as guilty as everyone else today is, it makes that situation worse because we tend to be in our own bubbles. I [00:45:00] think, no matter where you are socially, geographically, politically, religiously, whatever, we tend to feel most comfortable with those people who share similar views, and we avoid those tough conversations. Sometimes, even like at Thanksgiving, let's not talk about religion or politics, right? Because, and at the same time, too, so instead, what ends up happening is you have these really tough conversations in forums like Facebook and social media, where you can't understand the subtleties of what people are saying, and it just makes things worse. Can we try to break down some of those barriers and try to understand people and get to know people who aren't just like us, who maybe are a little bit different, that can we escape our comfort zones a little bit to hear other views, to realize, before we demonize people, to realize that we all have a lot more in common than we have different, [00:46:00] right?
Emerson Baker: The tough part about, is these days is in these very charged lives that we lead where there's all these opinions floating out there in various forms of the media that seems to be an unreg ulated sort of space. How do we come together and have common cause? And I think that's the really difficult question that there are no easy answers to.Obviously, in some degrees, people say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. But on the other hand, the devil you know, you at least know what to expect, right? And what they're from.
Emerson Baker: But the ultimate fear really is that devil you don't know. And if we can try to get to know better, maybe they aren't devils after all. But if I had the answers to how to do that, folks, I would, but I will say it's really intriguing, isn't it, that I fear that as long as we have bigotry and racism and hatreds that we are going to have some form of scapegoating and some form of witchcraft. And we don't necessarily have to call it witchcraft, per se, but [00:47:00] I think we see things like this happening in our society all, all too often, right? And I wish I had the answer.
Sarah Jack: When I hear what you're saying there, I just keep thinking, too, how one of the things that may hold me back or anyone back is what's this going to cost me? What's the risk here? And we need to start seeing maybe it's not as risky as we think. Maybe actually there's a payout, which is that common cause that you spoke of.
Emerson Baker: Yeah, and I do like to mention the fact that I think one of the reasons I love Salem so much is because I think a lot of people come to Salem because they realize, in fact, they've told me like, we realized that they may have rushed a judgment on people 300 years ago and that didn't work out so well, but I think, in many ways, the community tries to be very open and accepting of difference, of diversity, and you have this great organization, Voices Against Injustice, that is really, presents it well, like an annual award in social justice in honor of the victims of the Salem. But again, organizations like that, I think, [00:48:00] that are trying to build community and break down the bonds and have civil discourse about things, right?
Emerson Baker: But I should say, too, I'm a firm believer in the National Endowment of the Humanities and the State Humanities Offices. I'm former chair of the Maine council. And again, too they take some of these hot, sometimes they take some of these hot button topics and put together reading and discussion groups to bring people to different views to come together and think and talk about these kinds of things, right?
Emerson Baker: Maybe there's some solutions, but I think people have to be willing a little bit to put the, as you say, Sarah, to put yourself out there and maybe expose you to that kind of like that risk of that unknown and folks who you might not necessarily be comfortable normally, but hopefully that's what we need to do, right, is to try to become just better informed global citizens, right?
Emerson Baker: And now a merry minute with Mary.
Mary-Louise Bingham: Elizabeth Morse.
Mary-Louise Bingham: On March 2nd, 1679/1680 old style, the Court of Assistants recorded that Elizabeth Morse was indicted for the capital crime of [00:49:00] witchcraft, a crime of which she was wrongfully found guilty and sentenced to be hanged.
Mary-Louise Bingham: At a later Court of Assistants, dated June of 1681, Elizabeth's punishment was postponed until the following October, during which time Elizabeth lived in fear that her execution would become a reality. Luckily, that did not happen. Elizabeth was released from prison under a major certain condition, that she not travel from her farm unless she was accompanied by her minister. One can only imagine the fear and anxiety that Elizabeth experienced every single day of her life, wondering if that day would be the day that her sentence would be carried out, all the while being at the mercy of the minister if she needed to run necessary errands for herself and her family.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah has End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News, a non profit [00:50:00] 501c3.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts and our projects and podcasts are wishing you a joyous holiday season filled with warmth and merriment. As the year draws to a close, we want to express our deepest gratitude to each and every one of our podcast listeners. Thank you for tuning in, sharing your time with us, and becoming a vital part of our community. Your support and enthusiasm make our podcast journey truly special. May your holidays be filled with laughter, love, and the magic of the season. Here's to a wonderful new year ahead. Thank you for being a part of our podcast family.
Sarah Jack: When we see you in 2024, you will find all of our same great guests and episodes under our new title, Witch Hunt. Please visit our new web link, aboutwitchhunts.com/, starting January 1st, 2024. To offer your financial gift in support of our advocacy and education, go to endwitchhunts.org.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're [00:51:00] welcome
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to this special holiday episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer. We're so glad you decided to spend your time with us.
Sarah Jack: We'll be back in three days with our weekly episode.
Josh Hutchinson: Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit the podcast website, thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, acquaintances, and neighbors about Thou Shalt Not Suffer.
Sarah Jack: Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Thank you.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great holiday and a beautiful rest of the year.
Leave a Reply