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Secrets of the Basque Witch Hunt with Jan Machielsen Download

Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast that explores the history and impact of witch hunts around the world. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today we're uncovering the history of one of Europe's most notorious witch hunts, the Basque Witch Trials.
Josh Hutchinson: We're joined by historian Jan Machielsen, author of the newly released book, The Basque Witch Hunt: A Secret History. Jan's research offers a fresh perspective on this dark chapter of history.
Sarah Jack: From sex obsessed judges to child witnesses, and from bizarre descriptions of witches' sabbaths to lingering societal fears, the episode uncovers the complex factors that fueled the Basque Witch Hunt.
Josh Hutchinson: Jan also draws some intriguing parallels between historical witch hunts and modern day conspiracy theories, reminding us that these events are not just relics of the past.
Sarah Jack: So get ready for a fascinating journey into the heart of the Basque country and the witch hunts that shaped its history.
Josh Hutchinson: Let's begin our conversation with Jan [00:01:00] Machielsen.
Sarah Jack: Welcome to Witch Hunt and congratulations on your new book, The Basque Witch Hunt: A Secret History. Can you tell our listeners about your background and expertise? And have you had any author events?
Jan Machielsen: Oh, so my name is Jan Machielsen. I'm a reader, which is sort of associate professor here in the UK. I'm a reader at Cardiff University. This is my, depending on how you count, my second or my third book. I've written widely about witchcraft in different guises. I have written a biography of a man called Martin Delrio, who some of your readers, listeners, might know. He is one of the very famous demonologists, but this is a very different book.
Jan Machielsen: This is a book about a witch hunt rather than a demonologist, although there is a demonologist involved in it, too. But I didn't really want to start a Jan Machielsen series of biographies of demonologists. So I was very keen on focusing it on the witch hunt rather than on the [00:02:00] demonologist in question, Pierre de Lancre.
Jan Machielsen: And yeah, the book came out, as we're speaking, the book came out last week. So at the moment I have one event here in Cardiff, next week on the 15th of October, but it's sold out. And when I say sold, it's actually a free event. So it's not that difficult. And then there is an event in London that people might want to get tickets for still, and that's on Thursday, from memory, the 23rd of October. And that's at Treadwell's. It's a bookshop in London, in Bloomsbury.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you. And your book is more than a simple retelling of the story of the Basque Witch Hunt. It offers a lot more. What more can listeners expect to learn about when they pick up your book?
Jan Machielsen: Well, the story of the Basque witch hunt is really famous. It is one of Europe's most [00:03:00] notorious witch hunts. And actually the parallel here is maybe particularly with Salem in the United States. There is, just as Salem is like part of the origin story of the United States, the Basque Witch Hunt is very much part of the origin story of the Basque country as a territory, and the traditional story of the witch hunt that has been retold over the centuries is that this is a witch hunt there's been inflicted on the Basque country by evil outside judges.
Jan Machielsen: The Basque country is,as you may know, divided between France and Spain. On the French side, you have a judge called Pierre de Lancre who wrote a famous book about his experiences in the Basque Country, and he's maybe for that reason always held up as almost an archetypal villain.
Jan Machielsen: And then on the Spanish side you have the Inquisition who got involved. So it's quite easy to see why this is a witch hunt that's often been told as a story of outside [00:04:00] judges like going into a territory and then searching for evil. And that's a story that's like particular resonances in the Basque Country, because the Basque Country is quite an unusual space.
Jan Machielsen: Basque, the language, is Europe's only language isolate, which means that it has no connections whatsoever to any other European language. So the Basque have their very own distinct culture, and part of what seems to have happened also is that that culture ends up being demonized in some ways.
Jan Machielsen: And of course, this attack, or this witch hunt, is then seen as an attack not just on Basque people, Basque women in particular, of course, but also seen as an attack on Basque culture, as well. And what I sort of tried to do in this book is actually turn the story a bit on its head and show that actually a lot of the impulse for this witch hunt was actually homegrown starting in the Basque country and actually that Basques have a very [00:05:00] long-established history of witch hunting that goes back at least a century, a century and a half, possibly longer, and that this is just the most extreme version of a long-existing trend.
Jan Machielsen: That's such a familiar,the secret history part. Really am so happy to see that emphasized. We have seen when we're looking at Salem, there's the history behind what is popularly known. Is there anything else that you want to speak to about the secret history? The other part of the story, I think, in terms of the secret history is the question about the sources that we historians have and how we can use those sources to try and tell a story. Part of the reason why, particularly on the French side of this witch hunt, why this witch hunt was always seen as like Pierre de Lancre being this sole person responsible [00:06:00] for this witch hunt is because he wrote a book about it, and it was like widely believed that no other source survived. And this I think has a sort of like real methodological issue for us as historians, because it raises the question as to how can we see this witch hunt from the eyes of someone else than Pierre de Lancre? And maybe we'll get into this, but Pierre de Lancre is, he's not a nice person. And when I say that this book tries to show that the witch hunts emerged out of the Basque Country itself, it's in no way an attempt to excuse Pierre de Lancre. He was one of the most unpleasant people that I've ever had to work on. And I've worked on other demonologists. So I think that's saying a lot.
Jan Machielsen: What it does mean is trying to escape his perspective. And that's another component, I think, of writing this as a sort of secret history. And in there, I have found other documents that people weren't aware of. Some of them were really difficult documents to work [00:07:00] with. A lot of documents that I found were financial records where I literally just said, payment to this judge, payment to this interpreter, payment to this jailor, and then trying to reconstruct things from there.
Jan Machielsen: But there were also other witnesses out there who've left fragmentary accounts of what happened. And I think when you put all of those things together, you get a different story that shows that Pierre de Lancre is still a significant actor in this story, but he was called in toprosecute this witch hunt, and he was also related by marriage to a member of the local Basque nobility, so he was not actually an outsider, he was actually part of internal factionalism inside the Basque country.
Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about the scale and scope, magnitude of this witch hunt? How many victims are we talking about, and what do we need to know [00:08:00] about the victims?
Jan Machielsen: Well, this is a really great question, and it's also a question that doesn't have a very cut and dry answer. Pierre de Lancre, for the French side, Pierre de Lancre is not at all interested in telling usthose types of detail. He doesn't offer like a chronological account, being like, well, today I arrived in Bayonne, the capital of the Basque country, and now I'm going to go and hunt some witches and tomorrow I will execute four. No, all he, all Pierre de Lancre says is that he and his colleague, because there was another judge working alongside him, that they prosecuted between 60 and 80 witches.
Jan Machielsen: That number then gets a bit complex, because he talks about sorcière, so that's the female French for witch, and we know that one set of targets is also priests, who are by definition male, so there might be some men that one could add to that mix. But on the other hand, [00:09:00] we know that some of the people he prosecuted, he ended up banishing rather than executing. So you could take some people away from the equation. And then there is the final thing that is really important to my wider story, is that this witchcraft commission that was sent from Bordeaux In 1609 to deal with this witchcraft problem, and which operated for about four months, that's only one part of the story, like in my book, it's like the middle part.
Jan Machielsen: And what I try to show is that you're actually, there's already witch hunting happening before they call in these outside judges. And actually, after they leave, there's evidence of vigilante justice and people lynching suspected witches. My own estimate is that there is probably about a hundred victims, but that's based not on any clear mathematics. It's really just when you take together the bits and pieces of evidence that we have.
Jan Machielsen: I think that's still a significant number. [00:10:00] It's more than Salem, but it's also,it can also point to some German witch hunts where about a thousand people died. By that count, it's a noticeable number, but it's not exceptionally big by comparative European standards.
Sarah Jack: And was there a lot of confessing that happened with the accused?
Jan Machielsen: So with the testimony that we have,we have quite a few accusations by children that are an important part of this witch hunt.These children were in all likelihood not charged. I think there's one case whereone of these children said the wrong thing and then ended up being executed as a witch. Basically what happened is that they claimed to be taken to the Sabbath by witches, which made them valuable witnesses to use against witches, [00:11:00] and then one of them accidentally said, "Oh yes, but sometimes I went on my own." And that meant that she clearly was not actually taken against her will. And then rather tragically, when she was then on the scaffolds and realized, "Oh my God, I'm being killed too," she said, "No, no, no, I made it all up." And at that point, it was too late. So that makes it actually rather difficult to say how many of the actual accused witches confessed.
Jan Machielsen: Pierre de Lancre really valued the testimony of this particular girl, because he says, witches really rarely confess. But of course,she never thought of herself as a witch. She thought of herself as a witness. So most of the testimony that we have, particularly from Pierre de Lancre's account, comes from children and teenagers who act as accusers rather than the confessions of witches.
Jan Machielsen: But there are definitely some of them in the book. There is one particular moving example of, Pierre de Lancre does not name her, he describes her as a 40-year-old witch from Biarritz, Biarritz is a small town, and it's a seaside resort now on the Basque [00:12:00] coast. But back then it was a small seaside village and there was this, Pierre de Lancre describes this 40-year-old witch like crying and hitting her head against his desk, being so upset about what was happening. So there is some testimony there,but the bulk of the material that we have comes from accused, as well, than from witches.
Josh Hutchinson: And how were those who were convicted, how were they executed?
Jan Machielsen: So Pierre de Lancre doesn't bother to tell or describe the method of execution. I think we can take it for granted that they would be burned. It is possible, I would hope so, hopefully, likely, that they might have been strangled before their bodies were burned. That was common practice in French legal procedure at the time, for reasons that it makes it, makes the whole execution a bit more orderly and a bit more seemly. Sorry, that sounds really grim to say it in that way. [00:13:00] We have one example that he gives where a witch is executed by burning, but at that moment, a toad escapes from her body, and toads are also in the Basque country particularly associated with witchcraft, and he says that at that stage, the public gets so outraged that they start throwing stones at the dying person. And from that, I think it's, it is clear that there is death by burning.
Jan Machielsen: But that's about as close to him bothering to describe anything. As a source, he's really not interested in telling us anything in terms of chronology or detail. What he wants to convey is what he's discovered, which is the world of the Sabbath. And the book is really basically a extended description of the Witches' Sabbath, which he cobbled together from quotations from the witnesses that he had interviewed.
Sarah Jack: What was a Sabbat? And how did his [00:14:00] differ from other European Sabbats?
Jan Machielsen: Partly because of Pierre de Lancre, the Witches' Sabbath has always been associated with the Basque. In his, the second edition of his famous book, he even commissioned a Paris engraver to include an engraving of what the Witches' Sabbath looks like, which is quite an interesting thing to think about, because the Witches' Sabbath takes place at night, only witches are meant to be there, or witches and these witnesses then taken against their will, but in theory only witches are meant to be there and the devil, and it should not be accessible to normal, biased Christian eyes.
Jan Machielsen: And it's only really accessible to the judges, through the testimony of those who went there, and, and yet here, Pierre de Lancre even includes in engraving depicting what it is meant to have looked like. And Pierre de Lancre is really obsessed by the Sabbath, like when he finds out locations where the [00:15:00] Sabbath is meant to have been held, he goes there just to see if he can find any evidence. He claims at one point that he found from a marking that he can found where the pot of the witch's Sabbath, where the poisons and potions were cooked, that he couldn't find the pot where the Sabbath was held.So the Sabbath is really, really associated with the Basque Country, and that's also because the testimony that Pierre de Lancre then gathers up about the Sabbath is much more sensational than any other Sabbath testimony gathered from anywhere else.
Jan Machielsen: Stories about the Witches' Sabbath are often quite commonplace, but one story that you might know and that your listeners might know is that witches were meant to consume the bodies of dead babies at the Sabbath. But what the Basques do is that apparently they go into cemeteries and dig up the bodies of dead witches and that the devil gives them special [00:16:00] dentures, so that at the Sabbath they can eat the bodies of dead witches. So there's a lot of really bizarre graphic detail that's really highly unusual, and there's nothing really similar to it in what survives of sort of European Sabbath narratives.
Josh Hutchinson: That engraving is rather incredible of everything with all the different panels depicting everybody's different involvement. The children guarding the toads is probably my favorite piece of that.
Jan Machielsen: Yeah. Yeah. So I had a whole chapter in the book where, so basically I take every little fragment, every little vignette, and use it to decode the surviving testimony, then, and then by comparing the French material that Pierre de Lancre gathered up, we have the material that the Spanish inquisitors gathered up, you can actually see how much of this material comes from the Basque country. That's not to say that any of these stories were real, it's just is that [00:17:00] a lot of this is folkloric beliefs inside the Basque country.
Jan Machielsen: And that, to me, really explains why someone like Pierre de Lancre ended up writing this book, because he didn't arrive in the Basque Country with preconceived ideas that are that specific, like he presumably had read his Malleus Maleficarum before traveling to the Basque Country. Certainly, he knows books like the Malleus and Martin Delrio's book,the person I wrote on before I worked on Pierre de Lancre. He certainly knows those books, but then he arrives in the Basque Country, and then he has all these witnesses tell him these extraordinary stories that, you know, that as he himself said were never reported in any of the literature that he'd read.
Jan Machielsen: And that's part of his motivation to write his book is basically to show his readers look at what I found here, which is a very different, I think, reason for writing and what most authors or most historians have said about Pierre de Lancre, that he [00:18:00] wrote this book as a way of justifying his witch hunt. So that's not what he is interested in. It's more like this is amazing material, and everyone needs to know about this.
Josh Hutchinson: You wrote about a debate that was going on about whether the Sabbath was a real physical event or whether it was more an illusion or imaginary. Can you explain that?
Jan Machielsen: This is particularly the case in Spain, inside the Spanish Inquisition. And that the Spanish inquisitors really argued amongst themselves whether or not the Sabbath that they were exploring, whether or not that was a real thing or whether or not it was entirely imaginary, and when I say imaginary, I mean that what they were wondering whether or not had happened or whether or not the devil made them think it happened,and that if the devil made them think it happened, so for instance, they were sleeping, and in their sleep, the devil made them think that they traveled to the Sabbath, whether or not these people were then [00:19:00] still legally responsible. Are you still a witch if you dream that you went to the Sabbath, rather than if you actually flew to the Sabbath from on a goat, and these are the types of like really vexing legal questions that the Inquisition, in particular, got really obsessed by. And on the Spanish side, it really seems that those types of debates ultimately frustratedany further action against the witches.
Jan Machielsen: Pierre de Lancre seems not to be interested in this at all. For him, the Sabbathwas a real thing, andwitches deserve to die for going to the Sabbath, but the Spanish Inquisition is a very bureaucraticinstitution. It's also very legally minded. They were also saying, "we cannot prosecute these refugees from France, these people accused of witchcraft who fled into Spain, because they haven't committed any witchcraft here in Spain," which is quite a fun sort of thing to think [00:20:00] about, if you think about it, becauseif you made a pact with the devil, why does it matter that you made a pact with the devil in France as opposed to Spain? But that is the sort of like legal consideration that they really thought about in the Inquisition.
Sarah Jack: And is there anything we need to understand about the French legal framework with witch trials?
Jan Machielsen: That's a really good question, because it gets to the reason why Pierre de Lancre was sent in. The thing about the French legal system is that it's highly bureaucratic in a different way and that they have lots of appeals processes. And that if you are accused of witchcraft or of any other crime, then there would be a trial in Bayonne, but that trial could then be appealed to Bordeaux.
Jan Machielsen: In Bordeaux, you'd have maybe 15 judges looking over your case, and all of those judges needed paying. [00:21:00] And one of the things that's so interesting about the surviving material, the few surviving archival materials, is that a lot of them are invoices and a lot of them are like account books, listing the costs and it really brings out the high cost of French justice.
Jan Machielsen: So one of the reasons then why the Basque communities on the French side really wanted this outside commission was because it would make witch hunting a lot cheaper, because it meant that you didn't have to transport your witches from the Basque Country to Bordeaux, which was about a five days travel at the time,and you wouldn't have to house them and feed them there. You wouldn't have to pay all of those judges, you only needed to pay the two judges on your witchcraft commission. There were actually some strong financial motives for creating a witchcraft commission, because it meant that they could act, the judges could act in the Basque country, and they could act without any possibility of [00:22:00] appeal.So the main thing to notice about the French side is it's just like the high cost of justice in France.
Josh Hutchinson: The commission you mentioned before, they worked for four months. How were they able to work so much more quickly than regular justice?
Jan Machielsen: There are a few factors there, I think. The main thing is that, that there was no possibility of appeal. And this is something that the Bordeaux Parlement, which is the court that Pierre de Lancre himself was part of, that's the appeals court in Bordeaux, the Bordeaux Parlement really resisted registering the King Henry IV's edict setting up this witchcraft commission, because I think they were like, we want to get paid? And it can be maybe that, yeah, it can be that crude. So the fact that there was no longer any forms of appeal meant that they could act more quickly. The fact that they literally traveled from community to community. And I don't know [00:23:00] how accurate or complete my reconstruction has been, but like looking at these invoices and comparing it with dates that Pierre de Lancre casually mentioned, I've been able to create a map as to where they were at any given point in time, I think. And then you can get a sense as to they travel to a village, they would prosecute the witches there, and then they would execute them there, and then they would move on to the next village. And that obviously went a lot quicker than having to send all of those witches and the witnesses accusing them, sending all of them to Bordeaux. And therefore, it's quite plausible to me that they actually did end up executing 50, 60, maybe morepeople in that four months period.
Sarah Jack: You had mentioned that there was a history of witchcraft accusations in the Basque Country.
Jan Machielsen: How is that a perfect expression of the conflicts there?
Jan Machielsen: So a [00:24:00] big part of my argument about this witch hunt is that it's really significant that it took place in a border region. France and Spain in the early 17th century were the two major European powers, and they were almost always at war with one another. Spain at the time had a vast empire, and of course, from an American context, you will know about the Spanish Empire in the Americas. But in Europe, the kings of Spain were also the dukes of Milan, so northern Italy. They also were in charge of what was then called the Spanish Netherlands, which is now Belgium. There were a number of territories to the east of France that owed their allegiance to Spain. So as you can see that Spain almost encircled France at that time. So Spain and France did not reallyget along, and the Basque Country in particular, the [00:25:00] town of, city of Bayonne really is like the entry point between France and Spain, because France and Spain are separated by the Pyrenees.
Jan Machielsen: So this tiny territory of the Pays de Labourd is part of the Basque country that is in France. It's like the first French line of defense against Spain, which makes it really importantfor the French monarchy that people in the Pays de Labourd are all happy and harmonious and working together, just in case the Spanish invade.
Jan Machielsen: But what then also happens is that because of that, and because Paris is so far away, it also means that actually, it's very difficult for the kings of France to assert their authority in a territory like the Pays de Labourd, because they need to keep everyone happy. It's far away. How do youassert your authority?
Jan Machielsen: So there's actually, as a result, constant conflict between the communities and towns of the [00:26:00] Pays de Labourd, where they all argue about scarce resources and also between the nobles and the towns, where it's really clear that the towns are, by French standards, they have a lot of rights, they're incredibly independent, and the nobles are like, they look at what nobles in other parts of France are getting away with, and they're like, we want that too.
Jan Machielsen: So there's actually a lot of conflicts, and it's quite difficult to see how that conflict links to the witch hunt, except that it's clear that it did, in the sense that you can see how people from one faction accuse other people from the opposite faction of witchcraft. So again, there is maybe a parallel there with some of the stuff that's been written about Salem.
Jan Machielsen: But I think it's really important to say that we should never see witchcraft accusations as just a tool of, a cynical tool of accusing the other. I think it's also very natural to believe the worst of an enemy and that if you [00:27:00] are engaged in a long-running dispute that you would be willing to believe that your enemy would make a pact with the devil.
Jan Machielsen: But these conflicts are really gradually tearing this territory apart, and actually then sending a group of commissioners in from the outside, seems like the best way of solving this problem. But then, of course,one of the commissioners is Pierre de Lancre, and he is a rather sex-crazed maniac, who is fascinated by the devil. So he's rather the wrong person to sort out the many different conflicts that exist in this territory.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. On the subject you got into at the end, his sex obsession.
Josh Hutchinson: What's the deal with that? Why was he so utterly obsessed with the sex lives of especially the beautiful women and the teenagers?
Jan Machielsen: It's really rather striking [00:28:00] isn't it? When you read his descriptions, he constantly like talks about how bewitching the Basque women are. And he also really represents the Basque country as a feminine space. And to some extent, he's actually justified by doing that because the main economic foundation of the Basque Country is fishing and whaling. And so the menfolk are all off. Actually, some of them go as far away as like the Canadian Maritimes to go hunt for whales.So in Pierre de Lancre's imagination, that means that the women and old men and priests are just all that's left in the Basque country. And, as a result, the devil finds it very easy to infiltrate this space and seduce the women. So yeah, so the Basque Country and its women folk are clearly like an obsession of his. And he describes the Basque women and their dress, that included two contemporary engravings of Basque [00:29:00] women and how they dressed, and it's quite unusual. So if people buy the book, they can look at some images there. So it's clearly taken by how they looked.
Jan Machielsen: I think there is also maybean important factor here that he doesn't speak Basque. He uses interpreters, so he cannot actually get to what these people are saying except, through an interpreter, but he can scrutinize the bodies ofthe witnesses and witches, and they give him some sort of like direct access to this demonic story that the testimony in some sense doesn't.
Jan Machielsen: So I think there are a number of factors there that sort of come together. But yeah, as I write in the book, we know he has an illegitimate son, so it's he's already married to his wife. So there is definitely evidence that he is a bit of a sex pest. Let's put it that way, the very least.
Sarah Jack: [00:30:00] These demonology books and their authors, other men were reading these, other people, other authorities involved in convicting witches were reading these. And so I just think that impact must have really trickled through the communities, the world, the ages.
Jan Machielsen: Yeah,it's interesting cause there is actually a relatively, contemporary German translation of Pierre de Lancre's book, and it has the sort of the, I think quite revealing,title of The Wonderful Secrets of Witches, and that sort of I think really like testifies to what Pierre de Lancre is revealing here is like this exotic,often quite sexually explicit, like he also talks a great length about the size and shape of the devil's penis,like this really like a strange, remarkable worldthat he's uncovered.
Jan Machielsen: But it's also like fair to say that the Tableau, which, so that's the main text that Pierre de Lancre writes, it goes only through two editions. So it's not the Malleus [00:31:00] Maleficarum, where it's not Martin Delrio's Disquisitiones, like it's, as far as early modern demonological texts goes, it's actually not really quite a bestseller. So it's quite, and I don't quite, can't quite explain why it wasn't more successful at the time.
Jan Machielsen: But at the same time, Pierre de Lancre keeps on writing about witches. So after his Tableau, he writes two more books about witches, the last, apparently for his own personal entertainment, and that's literally what the contract with the publisher says, and it's only, it was only printed in 40 copies, and therefore only three or four copies still survive to this day, but if you put all the pages of those books together, you get to about 1700 pages about witches and demons and other sort of related supernatural things. And that does make him, I would argue, I haven't found anyone [00:32:00] else, maybe in response to this interview, someone will come up with a counter example. But I think he may very well be the person who has filled the most pages on demonology in the entire early modern period, because 1700 pages is a lot.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, when books of that time were generally pretty short, that, these were some real opuses.
Jan Machielsen: Yeah, very much Yeah.

Jan Machielsen: The only other thing I would bring up is that I also want to spend some time about the way this witch hunt ends, because I think often people think that witch hunting ends once the witch hunter packs up his bag and leaves. And that's like the traditional story that has been told about the witch hunt in the Basque Country. It's like Pierre de Lancre and his colleague, their four months are over, they return to Bordeaux, and then that's [00:33:00] that, basically. Butthe evidence that survived shows that there is substantial panic about witches persisting in the Basque Countryacross the 1610s, almost like a full decade after the judges leave, there's still people being panicked about witches, people going to, visiting missionaries and confess that they were witches.There's lots of stuff still happening. So my book doesn't end in 1609, my book ends in 1619, and it ends there because it's at that moment where I think that the witch hunt really ends, because one thing that happens with the border is that there is another group of refugees, but this time fleeing from Spain into France rather than witches fleeing from France into Spain. And these refugees are religious refugees. They are new Christians, so these are people whose ancestors have been forced to [00:34:00] convert from Judaism and Islam, but were suspected by the Inquisition of having reverted to the faith of their ancestors. And they flee across the border and obviously the Basque country, because it's just across the border, is a place where a lot of them settle. And it seems like a lot of these fears about witches are displaced. They're moved from witches to these new, these refugees.
Jan Machielsen: And in 1619, one of these refugees, a Portuguese woman called Caterina Fernandez, ends up being lynched by a mob in the small town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and the way that event is described, to me, sounds very similar to the fears that surround witches a decade earlier.We can have a really, I think, interesting discussion as well, as to like, how do witch hunts end? Because I don't think they end simply because a judge leaves. Because they cause so much [00:35:00] panic in the territory and that lingered. And I think those fears were transferred onto another group of victims who were then ultimately cast out and expelled from the Basque country.
Sarah Jack: I'm really glad that you wanted to speak about that. It's, your book really is going to expand people's understanding of humans and witchcraft fears put on innocent people. But I think the ending thing, they haven't ended in our world, and they don't just have that final chapter. So we do need to get there, but it, when you. Thank you for sharing that, because it's an example of how communities have that panic. And it doesn't just, it's not just over because the judge left, as you said, and how that fear can be transferred.
Jan Machielsen: Yeah, as [00:36:00] I write in my epilogue, I didn't want to write a full conclusion, but I wrote a short epilogue. But as I write there, I think witchcraft is still with us, right? I think previous historians even just five or ten years ago, people would, those historians would all be writing about witchcraft as a thing that's like in the past. And yet, I think these days, I think we're so much more aware about how there are different ways in which people think about witches, like how witchcraft was fuelled by fears about the other that transcends like just the category of witch and how conspiracy theories are not something that is just, just belong to the past. They are very much present in the present as well. And we should never see these stories as I think the witch hunt has often been portrayed as a story of like reason triumphing over superstition. Because that's not how these witch hunts ended.
Jan Machielsen: There is, at least the Basque Witch Hunt did not [00:37:00] end because people woke up and looked around and thought to themselves like, what are we doing? It's like it seems to have ended in a form of transference of fears of one group of outsiders to another group of outsiders. And it seems to have ended because of an act of like popular violence rather than like an act of radical enlightenment of whatever shape. And I think that's probably true for the witch huntwrit large in the early modern period. I don't think witchcraft beliefs were ever defeated by rational argument.
Josh Hutchinson: Right, that whole enlightenment ended the witch trials narrative has prevailed for a long time, and I'm finding myself growing out of that, that realizing that witch trials just went underground and became these extrajudicial actions, and that has continued around the [00:38:00] world.
Jan Machielsen: Yes, a colleague of mine here in the UK, Bill Pooley, who's at the University of Bristol, I don't know if you've had a chance to interview him yet, but he works on witchcraft beliefs in 19th century France, and there you can see how it's, it's no longer than like the witches who appear in front of a judge. It is people who have killed witches who appear in front of judges. And then in many instances, actually, it's like they are let go or they're released, or there's a jury who refuses to convict.The story of like how the witch hunt ends is a story that is continuing in the present day, I think, and it's not a story that has a very neat and uplifting ending either.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Certainly not yet.
Jan Machielsen: Yeah. I think that we're all working towards that ending though in one way or another. I think that's one of the really important ways that your podcast contributes to those [00:39:00] discussions.
Sarah Jack: Thank you. I. It is uplifting to see that from academics and from people who are literally advocating and rescuing folks, there's space for this conversation now, and there's lots of conversation to have. Looking at the history gives us an opportunity to ask important questions about humanity, ones that are, questions that are relevant today that were relevant then too so thanks for. Your book is so enjoyable to read. it really brought questions to mind of other witch hunt histories that I read and study on. So I just, it's a really great tool, but it tells a story that people need to hear about the Basque Country and its people as well. Thank you.
Jan Machielsen: Well, thank you so much again for having me. It's been a real pleasure to speak to the two of you and it's also been an honor to [00:40:00] be invited onto this podcast, because I know you've interviewed quite a number of very famous people already. So it's, it's honor, it's an honor to join that particular list as well.
Jan Machielsen: So
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you. And, when is your book available and how can people get their hands on it?
Jan Machielsen: It's on sale now. I haven't checked the price in dollars, but I think in, at least in pounds and euros, it's quite reasonably priced. I'm hoping that it would reach a wider audience and that people who are interested in finding out more about the Basque Witch Hunts and try and, as the two of you did, try and place that into a wider history,that they'll be interested in in buying it. Yeah, I'm not sure it will hit every bookstore in, in the world, but it's certainly accessible on all the major online retailers at a, I think, a quite affordable price.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Jan. Now Mary Bingham returns with an all new Minute with Mary.
Mary Bingham: Here is a brief [00:41:00] regarding three women over a span of 82 years, all accused of witchcraft, who boldly defended themselves, standing in the truth and though they knew that death was their outcome.
Mary Bingham: María de Echachute, from Navarre, northern Spain, repeatedly denied that she was a witch, though making a false confession would have most likely resulted in a pardon for her. Maria paid with her life in 1610.
Mary Bingham: Ann Hibbins, a well-educated woman who was tried twice and boldly declared her innocence. Ann was hanged at Boston Neck in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1656.
Mary Bingham: Mary Esty, a pillar in her Topsfield, Massachusetts community, was arrested, released, and then yet arrested again in 1692. She never wavered while being badgered by the magistrates, even authoring two petitions, [00:42:00] one advising the magistrates how to proceed with the trials after her death.
Mary Bingham: The strength of character of these three women is inspiring beyond anything that I could ever imagine. Thank you.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: And now Sarah has this week's edition of End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: On our End Witch Hunts news segment today, we're highlighting a crucial human rights issue affecting persons with albinism. The Africa Albinism Network is campaigning to have sunscreen added to the World Health Organization's essential medicines list. This campaign is driven by compelling evidence from the 2023 report by Maluka Ann Middy Drummond, the UN independent expert on the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism.
Sarah Jack: Her findings underscore a critical truth. For people with albinism, sunscreen isn't merely a cosmetic luxury, it's a vital, life-saving medical [00:43:00] necessity that can significantly extend and enhance their quality of life. We strongly support the rights and protection of persons with albinism. Ending their persecution and ensuring their safety is fundamental to upholding human dignity and rights. Making sunscreen more accessible by including it on the world Health Organization's essential Medicines List would significantly improve affordability and access for those who need it most. Do you want to learn about this issue or get directly involved in supporting persons with albinism? Here's an excellent opportunity. On Thursday, October 24th, at 2 p. m. GMT time, there's an important webinar you should know about. Sunscreen as Essential Medicine, a Climate Justice Webinar. It's being hosted by CBM Global Disability Inclusion, the Africa Albinism Network, the Fund for Global Human Rights, and Climate Action Network Europe. This virtual event will dive into the crucial campaign to add sunscreen to WHO's essential medicines [00:44:00] list for persons with albinism, framing it as both a human rights and climate justice issue. You can learn how you can actively support this vital campaign. It's a chance to engage in a critical conversation on human rights and climate justice, particularly for one of the most vulnerable populations affected by climate change.
Sarah Jack: We've included the registration link in our show notes. Remember, your participation can make a real difference in this important cause. Recently, Josh and I had the privilege of meeting and engaging with Muluka-Anne Miti-Drummond at the Witchcraft and Human Rights Conference in Lancaster. During our interactions, we gained valuable insightsinto the critical importance of ensuring the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism. Muluka-Anne's expertise and passion for this cause left a lasting impression on us. Following the conference, she shared a powerful statement that directly relates to our End Witch Hunts mission.
Sarah Jack: She said, quote, "This week, I was at Lancaster University attending a conference on the UN resolution on the elimination of [00:45:00] harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks. Around the world, people continue to lose their lives and livelihoods due to witchcraft accusations, or in the case of persons with albinism, for example, witchcraft-related practices. Ultimately, whether you believe in witchcraft or not, it cannot be denied that people are dying because of it.And we cannot continue to relegate the topic to the aisles of history and fiction while the rights of so many are violated," end quote.
Sarah Jack: Our conversation with Muluka-Anne reinforced our understanding that protecting the rights of persons with albinism is not just a matter of policy but a fundamental aspect of human dignity. It's clear that addressing harmful practices and ensuring full human rights for persons with albinism are interconnected and crucial goals.
Sarah Jack: How will you use your unique skills, authority, agency, and platform to advocate for persons with albinism? Your collaboration is needed now.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah. [00:46:00]
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: Join us every week.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

October 15, 2024

Witch Hunt Podcast Goes to England to Speak about Ending Witch Hunts

Join Sarah and Josh as they talk about their recent experiences at two dynamic UK conferences focused on witchcraft and human rights. In this fun and reflective episode, our hosts share the insights gained from the York CREMS Magic and Witchcraft Conference 2024 and the Lancaster “Witchcraft and Human Rights: Past, Present, Future” conference, which centered on the implementation of United Nations Resolution 47/8. Learn about the presentations Sarah and Josh delivered for their nonprofit, End Witch Hunts, including talks on the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, the End Spiritual and Ritual Abuse (SARA) data collection project, and the World Without Witch Hunts Project. Our hosts share about the fascinating research and presentations of the other experts in the field, which offered experienced perspectives on both historical and contemporary issues surrounding witchcraft accusations. Get up to speed on the current status of implementing Resolution 47/8, which addresses human rights violations related to witchcraft accusations and ritual attacks. This episode showcases how these conferences bring together a diverse group of historians, human rights advocates, legal experts, and social scientists in a collaborative effort to combat ongoing witchcraft-related human rights abuses. Whether you’re a history enthusiast, a human rights advocate, or simply curious about this often-overlooked global issue, this first hand report promises to broaden your understanding of the intersection between history, human rights, and modern efforts to end witch hunts worldwide.

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Links

⁠Buy America Bewitched Book by Owen Davies⁠

⁠Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch Hunts: A Global History⁠

⁠United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 47/8. Elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks ⁠

⁠Papua New Guinea Sorcery and Witchcraft Accusation-Related Violence National Action Plan⁠

⁠Pan African Parliament Guidelines for Addressing Accusations of Witchcraft and Ritual Attacks⁠

⁠Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: Study on the situation of the violations and abuses of human rights rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as well as stigmatization⁠

⁠Donate to Our UK Conference Trip to speak and learn about ending witch hunts⁠

⁠Advocacy for Alleged Witches, Nigeria⁠

⁠The International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices⁠

⁠Zoom Event World Day Against Witch Hunts 10th August, 2024.⁠

⁠International Alliance to End Witch Hunts⁠

⁠IK Ero On Next Steps For Ending Witch Hunts TINAAWAHP⁠

⁠Sanguma: Everybody’s Business⁠

⁠Justice for Witches, Pardon Campaign⁠

⁠Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project⁠

⁠Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project⁠

⁠Maryland Witches Exoneration Project⁠

⁠Witch Hunt Website

Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast where for the last two years, we've been talking to you about witch trial history and contemporary witch hunts, known as harmful practices. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. In fact, this week is our second anniversary as a podcast. And
Sarah Jack: this is the episode where we're going to talk about the conferences we were able to attend in England in September.
Josh Hutchinson: That's right. We've come a long way since our first episode about Connecticut witch trial history. Now we've become advocates in this sphere working with others to raise awareness and bring an end to harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft, where basically people accuse someone of bewitching them or their family or their possessions and then attack them.
Josh Hutchinson: On this trip, we were able to meet for the first time, at least [00:01:00] 11 of our incredible guests who we have featured on previous episodes. We got to talk to them in person and it was amazing.
Josh Hutchinson: It really was. There's something very different about meeting somebody in person versus just talking to them over Zoom and emails.
Sarah Jack: For those of you who podcast or guest, there is an affinity in the podcasting community. You feel like friends when you meet someone who has podcasting experience, or it's their hobby or their profession. And meeting our guests was much like that.
Josh Hutchinson: Was amazing. It was so great to meet people from all around the world, many different nations on most of the continents. And just being in one place with all these brilliant minds, these great thinkers was quite a treat.
Sarah Jack: Let's tell our listeners about how we met our [00:02:00] guests.
Josh Hutchinson: Let's do that. We started with a conference at the University of York, the Magic and Witchcraft Conference sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. And it was quite brilliant. The theme was healing and health from antiquity to 1850. Right from the start of our getting into York, we had such a great experience in that city.
Sarah Jack: We came in on a train. We hopped into a taxi and our accommodations were contemporary, but when you walk out the door and you hit the cobblestone, it was like walking back in time on our way to the university.
Josh Hutchinson: We got to pass through the fabulous road called the Shambles, which has the Shambles Market.
Josh Hutchinson: Used to be the road where they laid out all the meats, [00:03:00] the butchers laid out all their finest cuts of meat, and today it's still a busy shopping and tourist hub and an active outdoor market.
Josh Hutchinson: Well, we passed through the shambles, which is a medieval street. So the buildings are authentic going back centuries. It's quite different coming from the United States, especially the Western United States, where our oldest buildings that we have we are from,the mid 20th century in most of our towns, to go to a place that has 2000 years of history that York has since Roman times. It was quite remarkable. One of the big attractions there is York Minster, which is a very large cathedral and very impressive looking Gothic structure with all of those pointy [00:04:00] things and the gargoyles and the whole bit.
Sarah Jack:
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. And we also were able to pass through the old city gates in the ancient city wall that again, dates back, the original walls go back to Roman times, but were improved upon many times over the centuries. So what's there today is mostly Norman, I believe, and post Norman, but it's still very ancient, hundreds of years old. Some of the positions there, the actual structures, were first in place in Roman times back in the early first millennium.
Sarah Jack: Passing all of these very special landmarks brought us to the University of York where our conference was.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We went to lovely King's Manor, just got to see this amazing, it has [00:05:00] this beautiful ornate crest above the door that, we'll have to put up a picture here so you can see what I'm talking about.
Josh Hutchinson: But yeah, it's quite,it makes it seem like you're going into the King's Manor. It does feel that way.
Sarah Jack: And you'll see the excitement on our face in this selfie that we took.
Sarah Jack: It was a very lovely experience there.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. It was so fun walking up this very short staircase to a second floor and walking into a classroom, knowing that our friends were going to be in there prepping for their own presentations. It was great. We stood around and greeted each other and drank some coffee and the conference started.
Josh Hutchinson: We got to meet in person, Debora Moretti, Tabitha Stanmore, Javier Garcia Oliva, and Helen Hall. You'll recognize those four as previous [00:06:00] guests that have been on this podcast. And we were in a room with all of them and got to listen to their talks and they got to listen to us and it was just a remarkable experience.
Josh Hutchinson: And we also met future guests.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, it was a great conference. There was an online audience as well as in person attendees, and it was a great day, it flew by so quickly.
Josh Hutchinson: It was so fun learning about healing and healers, different magical practices and beliefs about healing over time, especially,we learned, literally, like it says, from antiquity to 1850, covered the whole time period in between, and was amazing. And then we got to talk.
Sarah Jack: In our presentation at this first conference, we talked about the [00:07:00] beginnings of End Witch Hunts, the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, and our podcast.
Josh Hutchinson: We also got to talk about our other projects going on in Massachusetts and Connecticut and the wonderful project happening in the state of Maryland.
Josh Hutchinson: So we got to talk about what's going on in America as far as remembering past victims from historical trials.
Sarah Jack: And we got to speak about our involvement, and especially Mary Bingham's involvement, in the BOLD project, Building Opportunities for Lives and Dignities, which is running in the Jharkhand state in India, which is bringing a holistic solution to ending harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and also supporting the survivors of [00:08:00] these accusations.
Sarah Jack: And we're looking forward to future episodes where we talk about that project much more.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes.
Josh Hutchinson: One of the things that I enjoyed about this conference, listening to the academic research, and then when we had our opportunity to present, having things come to mind that I'd heard that day in somebody's paper that matches what's happening right now in communities in different countries. It just really was like this. When we're in an episode and we hearin our conversation, oh, this really matches something we learned in a previous episode. But then when you like go to a conference and the subject matter is just enveloping everything that's still happening. And you just see the continuous, there's it wasn't hard to point [00:09:00] out, well, let me tell you, these things are still happening. It was unfortunately, so easy because it, there were all these examples and, just, we're listening to it. So we were just really able to discuss how, what they are researching and how important it is to understanding even the modern framework of some hunts that are still happening. Yeah. Learning about traditional healers of the past and cunning folk, those sorts of professions that occurred in the medieval period, the early modern period, and learning that, you're realizing that those professions are still around today and still involved in witchcraft accusations as they had been previously, both occasionally being accused, but [00:10:00] not so often themselves, but being used in counter magic and for the detection of witches.
Sarah Jack: When we started this podcast two years ago, there were conversations happening on university campuses, in historical society meetings, at local libraries, and in books and blogs. But over the last two years, this podcast has really made a space for the conversations and it just, I really felt that. The podcast has helped to bring together this network of academics and advocates who talk in this space and being at a conference, which was another forum where networking is able to happen was very,well, it's insightful getting chunks [00:11:00] of everybody's mind.
Sarah Jack: In our talk, in addition to talking about healing and medicinal associations with witchcraft accusations in the contemporary world, we also talked about methods to potentially eliminate those harmful practices from happening in the first place.
Josh Hutchinson: And so what we talked about was the need for a holistic approach with a focus on the conditions that allow witch hunts to occur so that you can cut them off at the source, instead of treating the symptoms of the problem, treat the root cause, pull it out by those roots, and toss it.
Sarah Jack: And that includes addressing economic conditions and creating social safety nets for communities. Often, accusations [00:12:00] are happening to families that are experiencing life-changing misfortune that is unexplainable, and so when you address the infrastructure.
Josh Hutchinson: Addressing those underlying economic conditions that lead to the great poverty, which is a big factor in witch hunting. It's one of the sort of prerequisites. You need some bad things basically to be happening in somebody's life in order for them to kind of resort to making a witchcraft accusation and you need them to have no recourse. When people don't have any recourse, there's no insurance system for crop failures, there's no safety net to catch them if the bottom falls out from them economically, it's very easy for that person to want to blame something [00:13:00] or at least seek a cause. Why did this misfortune happen to me? What can I do about it?
Josh Hutchinson: Where when you have these safety nets and insurance mechanisms, then people are compensated when misfortune happens, and they're not down to that last straw. So these things need to be a big part of it. And just addressing worldwide economic conditions is of course a concern anyways.
Sarah Jack: The things you just heard Josh touching on, those probably sound familiar to you if you've been listening to historical witch trial stories, but also we're finding the same influences now.
Josh Hutchinson: If you listen to anything we've done about Salem or Connecticut or England, Ireland, the same underlying conditions were [00:14:00] part of the problem. Economic conditions, as we know from contemporary life, are one of the key stressors in anybody's life. Andso economic conditions, the fear of losing everything, the actually having that happen to you to where you lose everything and have no support.
Josh Hutchinson: Another area that needs to be addressed is climate change. That is actually intensifying both droughts and storms that can kill livestock and crops, and in turn, the people who rely upon those livestock and crops. And that needs to be addressed, and the economics, and you've got to tackle the refugee crisis as well.
Josh Hutchinson: I read recently, there's some millions of people in [00:15:00] transit right now in refugee status, and you do havea lot of people crammed into these refugee camps and you don't know each other, bad things are happening to people, and it just creates another climate for witchcraft accusations.
Sarah Jack: Another area of importance is to raise awareness about the consequences of witchcraft accusations and about laws that may be on the books. In several nations, there are laws against making witchcraft accusations, but those laws aren't widely enforced or known about. And one of the very important things is that change needs to come from communities locally and through community members raising awareness with each [00:16:00] other, having these difficult conversations that need to be had about witchcraft beliefs, and are there other explanations for what happens when bad things happen?
Sarah Jack: And for the communities where there is legislation in place to protect victims, educating them on what their course of action can be or what their rights would be for seeking justice and protection.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, so it's very important that advocates work with the local community and with local politicians and religious leaders andthe police force and everyone.
Sarah Jack: Number of accusations arise because of insufficient healthcare treatment and insufficient understanding of healthcare. So this is something that [00:17:00] we talked about at this health and healing conference was the need to provide healthcare in underserved areas. So people don't rely on unlicensed diviners who will then identify witches. And well, traditional healers provide a very valuable service in the communities that they serve. They're often the only people with any sort of a medical background. But they need to be trained on certain fundamental disease diagnoses to understand basic conditions and know when to refer somebody to another doctor. Instead of at the end, you get to the point of, well, it's not this, it's not this, it's not this. So maybe [00:18:00] it's witchcraft. Instead of that, you want to get to, it's not this, it's not this, it's not this. Here's another doctor that you can go to, or that we can call into our community. Maybe they come around periodically. But there just, there needs to be that health care. There needs to be that option for the second opinion. And people need to know about basic conditions and not be afraid of them.
Sarah Jack: That also would have helped during the Salem Witch Trials.
Josh Hutchinson: Would have definitely helped Dr. Griggs or whichever physician it actually was who diagnosed Betty Parris and Abigail Williams as under an evil hand.
Sarah Jack: There's always connections. There's always connections.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, so many of these communities, while we're on this,remote communities, especially rural communities. And we see this here in America. We see this everywhere. [00:19:00] Rural communities, just the distances between where people are and where healthcare is, are often put people at an extreme disadvantage.
Josh Hutchinson: And you can't timely get to see a doctor with the knowledge of the condition that you have. So there just needs to be better access to these remote communities. There needs to be more facilities nearby, ambulance services. police services need improvement in a lot of remote areas, because again, the local constabulary might be understaffed, or it might be a great distance that people can't travel to report an attack.
Josh Hutchinson: And then after the attacks or accusations happen, there needs to be support. There needs to be healing, therapy, counseling, everything that a [00:20:00] person who survives such an ordeal and is so traumatized by it, both physically and emotionally, everything that they need to be supported later in their lives, instead of just sending them off to witch camp, supposedly, so called witch camps or other refuge centers,allow these individuals to reestablish some kind of life in their new community. Understandably, in many situations, they can't go back to their old community, at least not very quickly, because the danger is still there that they're going to be reaccused and reattacked. But all the things that we take for granted in life, these individuals are being denied because of their being run out of their towns. They're being forced onto the road. They're [00:21:00] being forced to be jobless, homeless.So they need support so they can get back to sustaining themselves and finding value in themselves.
Sarah Jack: That was all conference number one, and we were getting ready to go to a two day conference in Lancaster that was all about the current state of this effort.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, the Lancaster conference began a week after the York conference and was hosted by Lancaster University and the International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices, and it was an honor to be invited to be a part of it.
Sarah Jack: That those first moments walking up to the building, there's a gathering [00:22:00] of attendees. Some of us recognize each other or are familiar with some of the work. There was so much excitement to be standing there together and know we're going to walk in and tackle the situation together.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, this conference, the theme was about implementing UN Human Rights Council Resolution 47/8, which was passed in 2021. And finding ways to come together and compare notes and exchange ideas on how to eliminate these harmful practices that we've been talking about.
Sarah Jack: This was the type of conference where you had to, you wanted to get to every speaker. You wanted to find out what is this research or what is this experience or what is this [00:23:00] program that is getting rolled out? It was a robust gathering of information and people.
Josh Hutchinson: It was so robust. There were presentations occurring in two rooms simultaneously. So it was impossible to be able to take in everything individually, but Sarah and I being two of us were able to split up and each of us attend every event and every presentation that happened. And there were just so many great talks. It's impossible to cover them all in this episode, but we met people from Australia, Papua New Guinea, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Nigeria, India, so many places around the world.
Sarah Jack: England, of
Josh Hutchinson: course. [00:24:00] England was well represented.
Josh Hutchinson: During the conference, we were able to meet with our colleague and friend, Dr. Leo Igwe, who've you've heard on this podcast a couple of times talking about his experiences working against witch-hunting in Africa. And he received the
Josh Hutchinson: inaugural award from the International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices. He was recognized, quote, "for his indefatigable work in advocating on behalf of alleged witches at both the global and the regional level, and in so doing, advancing the implementation of the Human Rights Council resolution on the elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks." End quote. Definitely a well-deserved award.
Sarah Jack: Yes, he was so humbled by [00:25:00] it.
Sarah Jack: So the honor was a complete surprise, and he just wants to save lives, and he gets up every day to do that. The conversations he has with colleagues or community leaders or accusers or victims, it's all to save lives and to get others to spring to action, as well. And that's why he got the award, because that is what he does.
Josh Hutchinson: Nonstop, indefatigably, as the award says, he's dedicated to this cause and just saving lives and also helping people once they've been affected by these accusations. He works with a lot of the survivors, helping them get restarted. What Leo does requires a certain amount of courage, as well. [00:26:00] He's putting himself in some vulnerable positions when he's interfacing with an angry mob, for example, or even the police who don't understand what his organization, Advocacy for Alleged Witches, is really about and think, Oh, these are witches meeting and we need to break this up.
Josh Hutchinson: So Leo's very brave. He's very dedicated, committed, very passionate about what he does and everybody loves him.
Sarah Jack: So we attended great talks in the morning, and then it was our turn to come up and give a presentation on spiritual and ritual abuse of how it affects children in the United States of America.
Sarah Jack: That's our newest project. This is a data collection project, so right now, [00:27:00] the project is collecting specific cases of spiritual and ritual abuse that have occurred in the United States.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, we talked about the project, we talked about our objectives and the challenges that we face and went over our methodology, which right now where the project is, we're searching the internet for these cases. And then once we identify a case of spiritual and ritual abuse, particularly one that's related to an accusation of witchcraft or spirit possession, we look into those more deeply, find out the jurisdiction handling the case and see what other records we can dig up on it.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. Everything that we are collecting is tied to criminal [00:28:00] charges or a criminal death, something that is heading to court.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, our main goal with the project is to use this data to raise awareness that there is a problem out there, that these aren't one off, isolated cases, there are beliefs that are behind, behind these cases that link them together. So we're looking just to collect the data and we talked about a few of the cases at the conference.
Sarah Jack: We talk about what spiritual abuse is on our World Day Against Witch Hunt episode.
Josh Hutchinson: We do, and we talk about it in our episode with Jordan Alexander. So go back and yeah, watch that one if you haven't already. That's a great episode.
Sarah Jack: And you've also [00:29:00] heard several minutes with Mary that have told stories of some of these victims.
Josh Hutchinson: This talk at Lancaster focused on children, but our research that we're doing is not limited to any age group or any other group of people, either as perpetrators or as the victims. We're not narrowing this down yet, we're just trying to collect as much data as possible so that we can present it to the media, to government agencies, to say, hey, let's get something going to try and fix this.
Josh Hutchinson: And then after lunch, we had another talk, we talked about mostly the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, but exoneration in general, as an opportunity to raise awareness of the ongoing problem with harmful practices [00:30:00] related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. And then what was really impactful to me when we're at a conference like this, gathered with advocates in the regions that are seeing witch hunting happening, we don't have to describe or explain in any way the significance of exonerating the historically accused witches. They tell us how significant it is.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes. It was wonderful to be there with Leo Igwe in the room when we were giving this presentation, and we were able to tell the story of how he came to Connecticut and spoke at the state capitol to legislators andthe next week ourexoneration legislation passed the Senate 33 to one, [00:31:00] a week after Leo gave that important talk and spoke with Dr. Senator Saud Anwar and Representative Jane Garibay about how meaningful this is in other parts of the world.
Sarah Jack: But the parts of the resolution that are historical, the naming of every known accused witch in Connecticut is in the legislation and an apology from the state.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, those are both the first of their kind, the first bill to name those who were indicted but not convicted, and the first of its kind in America to apologize for a witch trial. So it's very historic. We also got to talk about plans for a Connecticut memorial. And, uh, Day of Remembrance and [00:32:00] exonerations in other states.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. What's so great about this project is it's not just Josh and I and Mary, it's many of us. Our very first episode of this podcast, our guests were Beth Caruso and Tony Griego. They are longtime advocates for the Connecticut Witch Trials. We did join up with them, but it took many volunteers, local and nationally and internationally, as we mentioned, Leo getting to talk at the Capitol, but this remembrance, these remembrance efforts, there's still a large group of people coming together to work on this. So it's a great project and you are welcome to join us.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, please do. Absolutely.Dozens and dozens of people were involved in the Connecticut effort and are involved in ongoing remembrance efforts. It was also [00:33:00] during this panel that we were a part of, this series of three presentations. we were able to meet,previous guest Alice Markham-Cantor, who presented about her ancestor, Martha Carrier, who was convicted in the Salem witch trials. And we also met Charlotte Meredith of the Justice for Witches campaign in the UK.
Sarah Jack: The four of us really enjoyed speaking about pardons and exoneration and the experiences that we have in our ancestry.
Josh Hutchinson: And also that first day of the conference, there was a keynote by Muluka-Anne Miti-Drummond, who is the current independent expert on the rights of persons with albinism for the United Nations, and she gave a wonderful talk about how to go forward, how to implement the resolution 47/8.
Josh Hutchinson: And you may be [00:34:00] wondering why the independent expert on the rights of persons with albinism was speaking at a witchcraft and human rights conference. And it's because many people around the world believe that persons with albinism have special magical properties in their bodies and collect body parts from persons with albinism for use in magical potions to bring luck or better health or prosperity, whatever the case may be, they're used in these magical concoctions.
Sarah Jack: Which means children with albinism and others are targets.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, their body parts are typically harvested while they're alive to increase the potency.
Josh Hutchinson: These are attacks that people are surviving, but not always. So the parts are taken while they're alive, and [00:35:00] many don't survive.
Josh Hutchinson: At the conference, there was talk about how many children with albinism are sent to boarding schools specifically for persons with albinism, so that they're safer than if they have to walk to a local school, where their predictable route to that school makes them especially vulnerable to an ambush style attack, and people taking them.
Sarah Jack: And I, I learned at the conference that it's believed at times that persons with albinism don't have a regular death, that they just disappear. And because of that belief, when some are taken and disappear, and have disappeared, there isn't an investigation looking for that person because it's accepted that they just vanished.
Josh Hutchinson: And persons with albinism are also believed to [00:36:00] variously bring you bad luck or good luck, depending on the nature of your interaction with them and where exactly you are with the person. Local belief is exactly shaking a hand with a person with albinism might be considered good luck in one place while walking by them in another place.
Josh Hutchinson: You might feel like you have to spit on yourself or on the ground, to purge yourself of whatever taint there is. It's very terrible.
Sarah Jack: And this is in any culture, in any family. There are persons with albinism in every place needing our protection and understanding.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes. All around the world, every continent, there are persons living with albinism and
Josh Hutchinson: every person deserves dignity and the right to enjoy a [00:37:00] life with the fullest possible health and wellbeing that there can be.
Josh Hutchinson: I
Sarah Jack: Really enjoyed getting to speak with Muluka and seeing her and listening to all the conversations that she was having with the various advocates about all the different complex needs and the crises that are being faced in different communities. She was very tuned in and engaging.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, definitely learned a lot from her and the, there was a lively question and answer session at the end of that. Andjust continued to learn more. Everybody was so eager to talk about how do we implement this resolution.
Sarah Jack: That night we had a very special event that we got to [00:38:00] attend.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we went to an art gallery.
Sarah Jack: And Josh had award-winning photos that were a part of a international photo exhibit.
Josh Hutchinson: Yay. That's right. Three of my photos were privileged to be part of this terrific exhibit.
Sarah Jack: Witch Hunts in the 21st century: a Human Rights Catastrophe is traveling the world. It'll be in Lancaster, England for a few more weeks, and then it's traveling to different countries around the world. So people can interact with it and learn about the crisis that's going on right now.
Sarah Jack: If your university has an art gallery that would like to participate in a social justice photo exhibit, please reach out.
Josh Hutchinson: What were your [00:39:00] photos?
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, yes. The first photo was of the Alice Young memorial brick in Windsor, Connecticut. It's a brick dedicated to the first New England, first American colonies, hanging victim of a witch trial. And That is Alice Young. It's a picture of her brick with some roses we had laid during a memorial that we held on May 26th, 2023, the day after the legislation passed the Senate and the 376th anniversary of Alice Young's execution. So that, that was the first one. Then there's a picture of Samuel Parris's sermon book. You may remember him as the [00:40:00] minister of the Salem Village Church involved in the Salem Witch Trials. And the picture is open, the sermon book is open to his sermon he gave on "Christ Knows How Many Devils There are in His Church," which, was the sermon that Sarah Cloyce allegedly stormed out of because he was basically talking about her sister, Rebecca Nurse, which is Sarah's ancestor.
Sarah Jack: Did you go to Salem to get a look at that notebook?
Josh Hutchinson: No, actually it's in Connecticut at the former Connecticut Historical Society, now the Connecticut Museum of Culture and Historyso yeah, there's that picture. And the third picture is of Leo Igwe, paying tribute by laying flowers at the Procter's Ledge Memorial in Salem, which is at the site where [00:41:00] the hangings were believed to have taken place for those convicted under the Salem Witch Trials. And seeing Leo at that photo, looking at it, was very meta experience. It was. Just interesting, I got a picture of him looking at a picture of himself.
Sarah Jack: The other photos that are part of this exhibit are very moving. You are looking at the faces of communities where they have seen persecution against women and children and sometimes men for witchcraft accusations. It's very touching.
Josh Hutchinson: It is. You'll learn a lot about what's going on in the crisis by looking and reading the captions in the booklet that accompanies the exhibit. And then after the art exhibit, we had a lovely [00:42:00] dinner with the other attendees, it was great just sitting at a table. I would have been really thrilled to have been at any of the tables in that room. The only downside is you can only talk to so many people at a dinner. But we had just such wonderful conversation.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, there were attendees from Papua New Guinea at our table, from England. So it was a wonderful conversation.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. It was great chatting. And then at the end of the dinner, Kirsty Brimelow, K.C. gave a talk about the Lancashire Witch Trials. Yeah. And it was a great talk. I really enjoy when this type of gathering is happening. There's just this constant recognition of past matching present. And that even came through in her talk about [00:43:00] the victims of the Pendle witch trials and how that history even sometimes overshadows the court today.
Josh Hutchinson: And I want to say about the barrister here, she, I'm skipping ahead to day two for a minute. I hope you'll forgive me, listener. But she gave another talk about, talking about the history of a resolution against female genital mutilation and how that was implemented and what we can learn from the implementation of that resolution for, to apply to the resolution to eliminate these harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks.
Josh Hutchinson: And dessert was yummy.
Sarah Jack: I think I had cheesecake. I'm not really remembering.
Josh Hutchinson: I just remember it was really good.
Sarah Jack: There was coffee [00:44:00] served and I made sure everybody got a second cup who wanted a second cup.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes. And there was salmon, which I remember because I ate salmon like four days that week.
Sarah Jack: We really enjoyed getting to try food in England and there were yummy roasted vegetables so often.
Sarah Jack: And this dinner had them also. It was great.
Josh Hutchinson: It really was. Kudos to the chef and team that pulled that off.
Josh Hutchinson: Day two, we rode a double decker bus most of the way to the university.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it was impossible to get a ride share in the morning and wasn't sure about how to go about getting a taxi in the city. So we ended up just riding the bus out to the university and taking a little walk across the campus, which was [00:45:00] the other thing that.
Josh Hutchinson: I enjoyed eating the food. I enjoyed talking to the people and just being out. But I really enjoyed the weather while we were there. And again, this might be, we are going to do an episode specifically about our tourism that we did, but I want to say England, sunny, mild temperatures,in the sixties to seventies Fahrenheit, while we were there for highs, it was very comfortable. You could just walk around. No jacket usually. and,
Sarah Jack: no umbrella
Josh Hutchinson: be fine. Yeah. And we only had to use umbrellas one day that we were there and one morning and it rain ended in the afternoon. Yeah. It was just a lovely time in England.
Sarah Jack: Day two, we did not have a presentation, so we got to just settle in our conference seats and really soak in the presentations and [00:46:00] talking.
Sarah Jack: Speaking of settling in and having conversations, I was privileged enough to get to chat frequently with Nigel Thompson during this conference. The first day, I enjoyed talking to him about podcasting. The second day, we were talking more about what we learned the first day, at the art gallery. He and his team were there recording the conference and interviewing guests.
Josh Hutchinson: Nigel, very pleasant gentleman to talk to. so
Sarah Jack: There's just something that happens when podcasters find each other. There's just, an acknowledgment of craft that you have with each other, and you can talkall day about it.
Josh Hutchinson:
Josh Hutchinson: At day two, we had more great conversations with the attendees. It was amazing that many of them [00:47:00] know the podcast and knew of us before we met them.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, it was such a warm welcome and getting to plan upcoming episodes in person with experts that you're chatting with right there is so great. It's really beats sending an email.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Andit was so great, day two, we were free, as Sarah said, just to appreciate all the other talks that were going on and we learned so much.One great thing about it is we're going to be interviewing a number of these individuals who spoke at the conference. And so you'll get to hear what they talked about as well.
Sarah Jack: Our friend, Dr. Debora Moretti came into town to hear her boss, keynote. They're working on a project together. [00:48:00] And the keynote that Professor Davies gave was so great about linking historic witchcraft persecution to modern witchcraft persecution.
Sarah Jack: It was so great meeting him.
Sarah Jack: Owen Davies keynote was going to be one of my highlights. And it was, I was really excited that I was going to get to hear him speak in person. Having him as a guest on our podcast was a really big deal to me last year.
Sarah Jack: I hadn't even heard him speak, but I spied him sitting in a seat on that first day. And I was like, I thought, what if this is my only opportunity to say hi? It was the beginning of the day. So I'm like, I have to go over and say hi to Dr. Davies. But a little bit later I go in to get a fresh cup of coffee and my colleague is deep in conversation with Dr. Davies.
Josh Hutchinson: That's right. Yeah, Professor Davies is very [00:49:00] interested in what goes on in America. He wrote a book, which is behind Sarah, America Bewitched, which talks about witchcraft persecutions in the United States after the Salem witch trials. And he talks about how more people were killed because of witchcraft accusations after the Salem witch trials than during.
Josh Hutchinson: And so it just. Lovely catching up with him, chatting with him. It's been at least a year since we talked to him about his book on The Art of the Grimoire. And so great to catch up and we got to talk to him more during the conference as well.
Josh Hutchinson: And his keynote, one of the points that stuck out to me, I think it was basically his main point was that if you look at 19th and [00:50:00] 20th century persecutions, extrajudicial, action against people accused of witchcraft are all around the world in Europe, England, the United States, all over. If you look at those 19th and 20th century events, that's where you can really see the closest similarities to what's happening in the modern world. He talked about the close links between those types of events.
Sarah Jack: And it happens to be one of the spaces of time that we haven't had the opportunity to share a lot of stories.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we're really looking forward to talking about that. It's, there's not really a name for that period of witchcraft accusation. I know Sarah did ask Professor Davies, when he was on the show, last year about what do we call that [00:51:00] time period? But that's the time period that I'm most keen on getting into because we haven't really peeled that layer back of what was happening 18th, 19th and 20th century with those post Salem witchcraft accusations in the Western world.
Sarah Jack: Not only has there been. academic literature published on it, but there is newspaper archives, there's articles. It's in the papers.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. If you go to newspapers.com and just type in things like witch killing, witch killed, witch murdered, you'll find a surprising, yeah, witchcraft accusation,you find a surprising amount of things from even your own area. No matter where you are in the world, these things have been going on.
Sarah Jack: [00:52:00] Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson: So yeah, that was a really good keynote.
Josh Hutchinson: And after all the talks were done, a roundtable was formed. We got to sit down,almost all the attendees just sat around tables together and the keynote speakers and some other members of the international network spoke out about what needs to be done to implement the resolution and we got to hear from Professor Davies again, we got to hear from Muluka-Anne Miti-Drummond again.
Sarah Jack: Leo,
Josh Hutchinson: Leo Igwe, Philip Gibbs spoke,friend Samantha Spence spoke, Miranda Forsyth spoke, Charlotte Baker spoke, want to give a shout out to the crew that put on the conference, which was Charlotte Baker, Miranda Forsyth, Samantha Spence, Alice [00:53:00] Markham-Cantor, Leethen Bartholomew.
Josh Hutchinson: it
Josh Hutchinson: took many hands to make that thing run the way that it did.
Josh Hutchinson: And we learned so many things during those two days. We've already talked about the commonalities between historical witch hunts and contemporary harmful practices.They're extensive. They are extensive.
Josh Hutchinson: And what I'd like to point out and, talking again about Professor Davies' book, America Bewitched, really witchcraft accusations didn't end when the European witch trials ended. They continued on but went underground and extralegal.
Sarah Jack: That's why today, every day people are experiencing violence from witch hunts.
Josh Hutchinson: People often look back at historic witch hunts and say, well, [00:54:00] that ended 300, 400 years ago and, depending where you are exactly. And they say, well, let's just not do that again. But we see everyday occurrences of witch-hunting of various forms, and especially the literal, brutal, harmful practices are still going on.
Sarah Jack: And we're going to tackle this by everyone working together.
Josh Hutchinson: That was another point that was raised by Muluka-Anne Miti-Drummond and many of the other speakers at the conference. Implementation of a resolution of this nature, given the scope of this problem, it's really going to take everybody from every background working together. So researchers, academics, advocates, activists, the media, you need [00:55:00] faith-based communities to get involved. You need non faith based NGOs to get involved. You need people who are in the countries that are most effective and part of those nations and cultures, and you also need people in other locations supporting them.So it really is going to take all hands on deck and there are plenty of ways that you can get involved that I think we'll talk about shortly.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, one thing that came through the keynotes, but, and also many of the other sessions is the need for more and more data to be collected around the world about the scope and scale of the problem and more data to [00:56:00] both quantify the issue, but also qualify what is the actually happening around the world, on the ground when these things take place.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. And it's really about collecting it because there is information, this tragedy can be substantiated with records and the numbers of those are experiencing gender based violence. There's lots of places that there is data, but it needs to be organized.
Josh Hutchinson: There's no government agencies going around our country or any countrygathering data on harmful practices related to witchcraft accusations or ritual attacks. There's no central repository where you can go and say, oh, here's all the data. Butpeople at the conference did talk about the [00:57:00] need to make, to have a centralized database, also where all this data can reside and different researchers can access it and study the situation. But we need this data to be able to make the case to the nations of the world that they should take steps to do what's said in Resolution 47/8 for them to do, which we'll actually cover shortly.
Sarah Jack: I wanted to say something about so what is a UN resolution, but say, you don't really have to worry about that part. You need to pay attention to the values that it is representing, which are things that are important, not to everybody though, but that are important to those that care about safeguarding children and other vulnerable people.
Sarah Jack: And some of those values are equality, [00:58:00] non discrimination, human dignity, child safety, eldercare, women's rights,
Sarah Jack: freedom of thought,conscience, and religion. And to quote the resolution, everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person, and that no one shall be subjected to torture, or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
Josh Hutchinson: That's right. That's a value that we should all share. It's enshrined in constitutions around the world, those rights to life, liberty, and security of person, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, right there in the U S constitution and other constitutions, and also in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed 76 Years ago now.
Sarah Jack: We're now going to read to you [00:59:00] a portion of Resolution 47/8. The entire resolution contains two pages of whereas clauses, basically where it's stating, laying the groundwork, stating all the different international covenants and treaties that have been adopted that apply to this situation that say that you need to follow these rules. So we're going to read the recommendations that the Human Rights Council has for its member, for UN member states, the things that states should be doing to eliminate harmful practices. Here we go.
Josh Hutchinson: The Human Rights Council urges states to condemn harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks that result in human rights violations.
Sarah Jack: Also urges states to take all measures necessary to ensure the [01:00:00] elimination of harmful practices amounting to human rights violations related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, and to ensure accountability and the effective protection of all persons, particularly persons in vulnerable situations.
Josh Hutchinson: Calls upon states to ensure that no one within their jurisdiction is deprived of the right to life, liberty, or security of person because of religion or belief, and that no one is subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, or punishment, or arbitrary arrest or detention on that account, and to bring justice to all perpetrators of violations and abuses of these rights in compliance with applicable and international law.
Sarah Jack: Invite states in collaboration with relevant regional and international organizations to promote bilateral, regional, and international initiatives to support the protection of all persons vulnerable to harmful practices [01:01:00] amounting to human rights violations related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, while noting that, in providing protection, attention to local context is critical.
Josh Hutchinson: Also invites states to draw attention to this issue in the context of the Universal Periodic Review.
Sarah Jack: Emphasizes that states should carefully distinguish between harmful practices amounting to human rights violations related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks and the lawful and legitimate exercise of different kinds of religion or beliefs in order to preserve the right to freely manifest a religion or a belief individually or in a community with others, including for persons belonging to religious minorities.
Josh Hutchinson: Encourages human rights mechanisms, including relevant special procedures of the human rights council and treaty bodies to compile and share information on harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, and their impact on the enjoyment of [01:02:00] human rights.
Sarah Jack: Request the United Nations High Commissionerfor Human Rights to organize an expert consultation with states and other relevant stakeholders, including the United Nations Secretariat and relevant bodies, representatives of sub regional and regional organizations, international human rights mechanisms, national human rights institutions, and nongovernmental organizations, the results of which will help the Office of the High Commissioner to prepare a study on the situation of the violations and abuses of human rights rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as well as stigmatization, and to inform further action by existing mechanisms at the United Nations, and to submit a report thereon to the Human Rights Council at its 52nd session.
Josh Hutchinson: And that resolution was adopted by the Human Rights Council on July 12th, 2021. And since then, there's been some more activity in implementing it. One thing that has been a [01:03:00] major development is the Pan African Parliament developed guidelines for its member nations to develop their own national action plans to ensure coordinated response to harmful practices occurring in accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks.
Josh Hutchinson: So how is the report distinct from the resolution?
Josh Hutchinson: The report it goes in more detail about the nature of the crisis. The resolution doesn't really establish the nature of the crisis in terms of magnitude or how it impacts specific communities, which the report breaks down the impacts to various, to children, to women and girls, to elders. It breaks down all those things, what actual human rights violations are being committed, as [01:04:00] well. It gives some specific recommendations that are for the implementation by the member states and other stakeholders.
Josh Hutchinson: So we're going to read a section from this report. It was given in 2023. We had mentioned it in the resolution, one of the steps is for this report to be created, and it was done in February 2023. We'll read the recommendations section.
Josh Hutchinson: Recalling recommendations made by human rights treaty bodies, the Universal Periodic Review, and special procedure mandate holders, the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights recommends that states undertake the following actions.

Sarah Jack: Develop and implement comprehensive frameworks at national and local levels focusing on the prevention of human rights violations and abuses rooted in harmful [01:05:00] practices related to accusations of and associations with witchcraft and ritual attacks, as well as stigmatization.With a view to ensuring the effectiveness and sustainability of such efforts, further research should be conducted on the design and implementation of policy and legal measures, including lessons learned from responses to hate crimes, prevention efforts, protective measures, and responsive services.
Josh Hutchinson: Address and promptly investigate human rights violations and abuses rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, prosecute and adequately punish the perpetrators of such attacks, and in that regard, enhance the capacities of relevant stakeholders, including police officers, prosecutors, and judges.
Sarah Jack: Collect and publish information
Sarah Jack: including updated disaggregated data, exploring the behavioral barriers that prevent law enforcement officers from fulfilling their obligations to promptly investigate harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft [01:06:00] and ritual attacks and identify strategic entry points for pilot interventions.
Josh Hutchinson: Review and update relevant asylum policy guidance, including country guidance notes to include all countries that have increased vulnerability to harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft, as well as associations with witchcraft and ritual attacks that potentially threaten the life and safety of persons in vulnerable situations, pushing them to flee their countries and seek asylum.
Sarah Jack: Ensure that national authorities,as well as all human rights mechanisms, effectively address both human rights violations and abuses rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and to association with witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: Conduct further research on prevention and responses, including an assessment of the risks related to a variety of settings, including conflict, intercommunal hostility, political and economic instability, elections, natural disasters, environmental [01:07:00] degradation, and public health crises.
Sarah Jack: Ensure that authorities identify, document, disseminate promising practices of combating human rights violations and abuses rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks.
Josh Hutchinson: And organize systematic awareness raising campaigns targeting both men and women, as well as community and village chiefs and religious leaders, particularly in rural areas, with a view to tackling the root causes of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as well as stigmatization.
Josh Hutchinson: Many more details on the implementation ideas that people have on how to put together national action plans is available in additional episodes. And, we'll go back to this in many upcoming episodes to give more detail on what still needs to be done. But what I talked about when I [01:08:00] was talking about the our York presentation on Ending Witch Hunts, the holistic approach, is basically what's needed to go forward. You need an all-in strategy encompassing all aspects of life and society.
Sarah Jack: We have many guests that you are going to hear soon presented at this conference.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, many coming up and many that you've heard in the past or can go back and check out. So check our show notes for links to past episodes with these great guests who spoke at the conferences and subscribe to our newsletter for information on our upcoming guests.
Sarah Jack: We thank everyone who supported this trip and who have shared information and who used their voice, [01:09:00] platform, and community to advocate.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, thank, everybody that we met at the conferences as well as, like Sarah said, everyone who generously contributed to our travel expenses. We really appreciate you allowing us to do this. We think it's very important for the movement this conference.
Mary Bingham: End Witch Hunts has recorded 99 cases related to spiritual and ritual abuse in the United States. Contributing factors known in some of these cases from the court documents of those who committed the crimes are extreme religious views, government conspiracy theories, Superstition, mental illness, and drugs. Most of these factors were present in the sad case of 13 month old Amora Bain Carson, whose life ended on December 2nd, 2008, at the hands of Blaine Milam and her mother, Jessica Carson. [01:10:00] Court documents tell us that Blaine had a 4th grade education and a history with drugs. Jessica became withdrawn and possibly suffered from psychotic depression after she began to date Blaine and was under his watchful eye 24/7. The pair used a Ouija board to contact their deceased fathers and believed a spirit was released and entered Amora. Blaine later performed the exorcism while Jessica waited in the next room. Blaine was found guilty in 2010 and sentenced to death. However, Blaine filed an appeal stating he can't be executed due to an intellectual disability.
Mary Bingham: Though these factors should be noted in our research, it is most important for us to remember the innocent lives that were lost. Rest in peace, Amora Bain Carson, and all of those who will be remembered in future segments of Minute with Mary. Thank you. [01:11:00]
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for joining us for this episode.
Sarah Jack: Have a great day and a beautiful tomorrow.
Josh Hutchinson: Yay. She said it.

October 8, 2024

Grace Sherwood: The Witch of Pungo with Scott O. Moore

Fresh from the release of his book⁠ The Witch of Pungo: Grace Sherwood in Virginia⁠, historian Scott O. Moore joins us to uncover the true story behind colonial Virginia’s only witch trial. In 1706, Grace Sherwood faced an unusual trial by water—but what really happened, and why does it still captivate us today? Moore examines both the legend and reality of Grace Sherwood, showing how local tensions transformed neighborhood conflict into a witch trial.

Learn how this singular case differed from the infamous Salem trials, and why Virginia Beach continues to grapple with Sherwood’s legacy three centuries later.

From ducking stools to modern-day memorials, this episode challenges what we think we know about witch trials in America, revealing how historical memory shapes—and sometimes distorts—our understanding of the past and present.

Listen in Your Favorite App

Listen and subscribe wherever you enjoy podcasts:

Links

⁠Purchase the book The Witch of Pungo: Grace Sherwood in Virginia⁠

⁠Eastern history professor publishes book on legendary Virginia ‘witch’⁠

⁠Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project⁠

⁠Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project⁠

⁠Maryland Witches Exoneration Project

⁠Purchase the book The Witch of Pungo: Grace Sherwood In Virginia⁠

⁠Author’s Corner with Scott O. Moore⁠ ⁠

Witch Hunt Website

Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast where for the last two years, we've explored the history of witch trials and their impact on society. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack. The first full episode of this podcast premiered October 6th, 2022, with a look at the history of the Connecticut Witch Trials.
Josh Hutchinson: Since that premiere, we have done more than a hundred episodes on the history of witch trials around the world and how witch hunting has continued in the 21st century.
Sarah Jack: From our beginnings in New England, today we are venturing to the Southern U. S. to uncover a fascinating chapter in colonial American history.
Josh Hutchinson: We're digging into the story of Grace Sherwood, known as the Witch of Pungo, who faced accusations of witchcraft in early 18th century Virginia.
Sarah Jack: Taking place 13 years after the end of the Salem witch trials, this is a tale that challenges much of what we think we know about witch trials in America, from the legal proceedings [00:01:00] to the long-lasting cultural impact.
Josh Hutchinson: To help us unravel this intriguing story, we're joined by historian Scott O'Moore, who has extensively researched Grace Sherwood's case and its significance in Virginia's history, and written this book, The Witch of Pungo, available now from your local booksellers.
Sarah Jack: Or bookshop.org/endwitchhunts.
Josh Hutchinson: Scott's insights will take us on a journey from colonial courtrooms to modern day memorials, showing how one woman's story has shaped a community's identity for centuries.
Josh Hutchinson: We'll explore the economic and social factors behind witchcraft accusations, the practice of ducking people accused of witchcraft, and how historical memory can sometimes diverge from historical fact.
Sarah Jack: Here's our conversation with Scott O. Moore.
Sarah Jack: Welcome to Witch Hunt, Scott Moore. It's great to have you today. Can you tell us about your work and interests?
Scott O. Moore: Sure. [00:02:00] I'll start with the big picture, and then I'll narrow down to what brought me here today. If you were to look at the broader scope of my work as a historian, I am more interested in what you could call historical memory more than history itself. In other words, how do communities remember their past? How does that remembrance of their past shape the way they think about themselves, they think about other people, the way they think about the world around them?
Scott O. Moore: And, having grown up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where the story takes place, I was obviously very exposed to all of the legacy of Grace Sherwood, the so-called Witch of Pungo, and you can't be a historian thinking about other people's history and not have it bleed into your own life. And as I looked around, I was thinking it would be a really interesting project to explore the impact of this singular witch trial and this singular accused witch on Virginia [00:03:00] history. In order to tell that story, I also then had to of course explore the actual history. And so if you were to look at the book, what it essentially does is break the story into three pieces. The first part is the actual history of what we can prove happened, but then also I look at the way legends and stories have been told about this trial and this accused witch, Grace Sherwood, and then I also look at the very long-term cultural impact, the way that, that culturally, this has influenced the way the city of Virginia Beach thinks about itself, thinks about its past and tells its story.
Josh Hutchinson: And so it's been a really rewarding experience to get to, to unpack that story. It's also been, a sort of bedeviling story, because, as I'm sure we'll get into, there is so much missing from the actual history, and also untangling history and legend can be challenging at times, but I think it's still an important story to tell, and it's been an interesting story, and it's been an interesting experience for me.It's a really [00:04:00] interesting book, very entertaining and informative, and it's great for us to get to explore the southern half of the country. We haven't been really south of New England yet on this podcast. So what should we know about colonial Virginia to set the stage?
Scott O. Moore: I think the most important, there are two things that I think are important to unpack, and as I move into the first one, I think, again, dealing with the historical memory, if you were to look at starting in the 1800s, the 19th century, as we began to really write the history of witch trials in North America, and by that I mean English-speaking North America, there was this perception thatwitch trials and witch belief was, and I'm going to use a paraphrase, a direct quote from a source of the time, was a uniquely Puritan dysfunction. There's this sense of this only really happened because the Puritans were in New England and everybody else was quote unquote, "more rational;" they were [00:05:00] lessconsumed by these beliefs. And this really wasn't true. The truth is that it's just all the records were kept in New England, while other places were sparser, and so we have less documentary evidence about witch trials in other places, but that doesn't mean that they didn't happen.
Scott O. Moore: But I do think, and what this basically gets to is that everybody that was part of the English-speaking North American world shared approximately the same beliefs in witches and witchcraft and magic. The main difference, and this gets to the second part, is that once you leave New England, the colonial governments were more hesitant to actually prosecute witchcraft as a crime.All of the New England colonies immediately passed witchcraft statutes when they were founded, and so they had their own laws that were separate and distinct from the rest of the English-speaking world,and in all of those cases, using magic regardless of how, when, and what purpose was technically a capital offense in [00:06:00] New England And this was not the same in Virginia, for example, where they were bound by the English witchcraft statutes, which treated it as a secular crime, not a religious crime. So if you were to look at, for example, everywhere else in Europe, what witches supposedly did with magic was secondary to the fact that by the standards of the time, they were considered heretics, they were devil worshipers.
Scott O. Moore: And so in the rest of Europe, witchcraft was prosecuted as a heresy, first and foremost, which is why it was a capital offense.In the case of England, it was always a secular crime, and so it was prosecuted depending on what witches supposedly did with their magic. And this creates a really bizarre world, and I know for your listeners this will seem strange, where you could actually be convicted of misdemeanor witchcraft or felony witchcraft, depending on what you did with it. If you were a fortune teller, or if you made love potions, or if you cursed someone's crops, that was less punished, or punished by a lesser sentence in England than, let's say, being accused of causing a [00:07:00] miscarriage or killing someone.
Scott O. Moore: The other thing that I think is unique to Virginia, and not unique to Virginia, but what separates it from New England, is because the governors were less likely to prosecute witchcraft,you essentially had witch accusations moreoccurring with slander suits, basically someone being called a witch by their neighbor, and then them taking that neighbor to court to reclaim their good name, to try to restore their standing in the community. So we have literally dozens of people who were called witches by their neighbors, but only a handful of people were formally prosecuted by the actual government of Virginia for witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: Thank you so much. That's so helpful to set the stage for learning about Grace. Before we jump into who she actually was, would you want to tell us about her in popular lore or who the Witch of Pungo is known to be?
Scott O. Moore: Sure, and so I think [00:08:00] the, and this will set that stage for both, I think, the historical and legendary Grace Sherwood, is that we, the only records we have from colonial Virginia at the time she was tried in the early 1700s are court records, and those court records, which I know we're probably going to dig into, are very sparse on details. We know what happened in the trial, but we don't know a lot of, for example, we have no idea what she looked like. We have no idea how she talked, we have no idea what she may have said at any of her trials.
Scott O. Moore: And the challenge, though, is because she was prosecuted, or part of the evidence used against her was that she failed a trial by water. So she was put in water, or "ducked," using the colloquial language and because she floated that kept the trial moving along. Well that was a weird event, tying up a woman and putting her in water to see if she would float to see if she was a witch. And so there's a region of Virginia Beach called Witch Duck Point, and it has been called some variation of that witch duck point, the Witch's [00:09:00] Duck or Witch Duck, really since at least the 1700s and what that did was generate a whole host of legends and stories, some of which are very fantastical, that really have nothing to do with a woman named Grace Sherwood. And once we found out the witch was Grace Sherwood, then they added her name to these legends.
Scott O. Moore: So there are very fantastical stories. For example, she sailed on eggshells to bring back rosemary to Virginia, that she was able to cause storms when she was ducked as a way of ducking the crowd that was watching her. But you also began to see, starting in the 19th century, once knowledge of her case was, uncovered, people essentially filling in an equally legendary story, which is trying to figure out, okay, who was this woman actually? And in this regard, who Grace Sherwood was has really changed in popular consciousness with the times. Starting in the 19th century, she was this meek, demure woman who was victimized by powerful men around her. And that very much fit the vogue of how writers at the time thought about [00:10:00] witch trials, but also thought about the idea of the damsel in distress.
Scott O. Moore: By the time you get to the 1950s, local legend tellers began to make her a little more spirited. So there's a very famous woman named Louisa Venable Kyle, who wrote a children's book called The Witch of Pungo, and it contains a little story about Grace Sherwood. And according to Louisa Venable Kyle, who literally told this story off and on for probably 30 or 40 years,Grace Sherwood was this iconoclastic, unconventional woman who was just out of time, in the sense of she, she belonged more in the modern era than in time she was. And so she offended her neighbors by challenging social norms. And by the 1970s, she, rumor was that she would wear pants, because she found them more comfortable and, essentially better to work in the fields. But this scandalized her neighbors because they were more form-fitting, and longstanding legend also argued that she was breathtakingly beautiful and so there was this assumption that she was this seductress going aroundthe southeastern part of then Princess Anne [00:11:00] County.
Scott O. Moore: This sort of image has stuck, but more recently, I'd say in the last 20 years or so, there also began to be this image of her as a midwife or healer, and so she was a woman who was good with herbs, the person who tried to take care of her community and was in tune with nature. And this is why she ran afoul of those in her community And this is a very modern phenomenon, yet it's also the one almost all of your readers are going to encounter if they immediately Google Grace Sherwood. Everything that pops up is going to say she was persecuted as a midwife or healer. And yet this image is actually less than 25 years old. And there really is no evidence of any of those perceptions. And in fact, I think it's interesting if you look, by the time you get to around 2000, if you were to go to public consciousness or popular consciousness of what made women vulnerable to be accused of witchcraft, by 2000, you did have this image of essentially new age women who were ahead of their time. And in this sense, the stories of Grace Sherwood almost went [00:12:00] national. They essentially began adopting broader characteristics that were ascribed to generically witches in general. But that's the legendary Grace Sherwood. And then I'm sure you'll have questions about the woman we actually can figure out, based on records.
Josh Hutchinson: First I want to say that having a witch be beautiful strikes me as a little unusual that it's not the stereotype that is in my head.
Sarah Jack: Oh yeah, it's really, I think, one of the more unique pieces of the puzzle, because if you look at all of the legends I just went through, a lot of them have antecedents in other witch tales from other places. You even have witch is sailing and eggshells in other traditions. And the fact that she was beautiful is I think an interesting, very local spin. And it's also, I think interestingly, one of the oldest pieces of legend about her. I mean, we have records going back to the early 20th century, late 19th century, that describe her as [00:13:00] shockingly beautiful, but in one of the early sources again said that it disturbed the serenity of her community, how beautiful she was. And that has sort of stuck, but you're right, it runs very much against the grain of what we normally assume witches to be. And who was the actual Grace Sherwood?
Scott O. Moore: Right, so from what we can tell, and again, we're basing our knowledge on very scant surviving evidence, and I want to apologize for the fact you're going to hear a lot of from what we can tell, or you could assume, and I know even just telling the story, when I give talks and speak with people, I know one of the things that often people are frustrated by is they want more meat. They want more truth. And the problem is there's not a lot that we can find. But we do know based on court records, land deeds, and things like that, that Grace Sherwood was the daughter of a relatively successful mid-tier planter. Her father owned 195 acres of land, [00:14:00] which was by no means extravagant, but it made him comfortable. It made him respectable. More importantly, he was also a carpenter, which was a very rare skill in Virginia by the middle of the 1600s. There really wasn't a strong manufacturing sector in Virginia early on. And by all accounts, based on where he shows up in people's wills, the way that he interacted with the community, he was very well respected. I mean no slander to Grace Sherwood's husband, James, but if you judge their marriage purely on socioeconomic conditions, her husband, James Sherwood, was a less prosperous person than her father. He couldn't read, he didn't have a trade, he didn't own land, and what that meant is when they got married and her father died literally a year later, the only thing they had to root them in the community is what her father provided her.
Scott O. Moore: And what we can tell is that their economic condition began to deteriorate. We know, for example, James Sherwood, Grace's husband, was sued several [00:15:00] times for not paying back debts. They were forced to sell off land to some neighbors. These things aren't exceptional, but what is unique is that he is never lending money to anyone, and he is never buying land.
Scott O. Moore: In other words, we only ever see him interacting with the court in a vulnerable economic position, and we do know if you were to compare the broad history of witch trials in both Europe and North America, we do know that people who experience declining economic fortunes are more likely to be targeted as witches by their community, and there's lots of reasons, if y'all want to get into that, we can do that.
Scott O. Moore: Around the time her husband starts planning she also ends up in court with her husband suing to defend her reputation. In 1698, she is involved in 3 lawsuits related to slander. The 1st, we don't know exactly what the slander was; it just says she's suing a neighbor, Richard Capps, for an act of defamation. 2 other cases that occur later that year are explicitly related to witchcraft. She and her husband sue 2 [00:16:00] sets of neighbors, John and Jane Gisburne and Anthony and Elizabeth Barnes, both of whom had apparently told neighbors that she was a witch. These are really the only allegations where we have specific sort of tantalizing details about what people thought Grace Sherwood could do with magic. For example, they sued John and Jane Gisburne, because they were contesting an allegation that Grace Sherwood had cursed and bewitched their cotton and their pigs so basically they were telling neighbors that she had killed some cotton crops and that she had killed some of their pigs. The Elizabeth Barnes allegation is always a little more exciting, because she was apparently telling people that Grace Sherwood came to her at night, rode her like a horse, and then turned into a cat and disappeared out the door.
Scott O. Moore: Your listeners are listening regularly, they'll know these are actually really generic allegations of witchcraft. They are very much out of the stock of what Europeans believed that witches would do to people they were [00:17:00] tormenting. So there's nothing exceptional in and of those allegations.It's notable that Grace Sherwood, even though they brought nine witnesses to allege they had heard the slander, the Sherwoods lost both cases, and the jury found for, for the defendants, which tells me, first off, slander usually had to be very egregious for a jury to actually award somebody damages. Most of the time, it was an action people took just to show they wanted to reclaim their good name. But I think it's notable that the jury discounted nine witnesses, and what that tells me is either they didn't think the slander damaged her reputation that much, because her reputation was already so bad, or that really there was nothing to gain for her for them doing this. I'm not sure if there was, if it was widespread thought that she was a witch, there seems to be evidence. If you look, the only people that ever accused her lived literally [00:18:00] right next to her. And she lived in a very remote part of Princess Anne County, Virginia. And so I'm not sure how much those allegations filtered outside of that region. But, she was suing people that had a lot of respect. She literally sued two sitting constables. Richard Capps, the first person she sued, and then John Gisburne were both constables, who would have had a lot of friendship and support with their courts.Things calm down for Grace Sherwood. Unfortunately, her husband dies in 1701. She also loses the title to her land, most likely for not paying taxes, in 1704. So those economic vulnerabilities keep perpetuating. And in 1705, she's back in court suing another neighbor, Elizabeth Hill, for assault. So she's basically arguing Elizabeth Hill attacked her, and in this case, she actually won, and the odds are, because there was no other evidence besides the testimonies, Grace Sherwood was probably still visibly injured from that assault, and so there was no denying the fact it happened.
Scott O. Moore: But you can tell that she doesn't have a great [00:19:00] reputation, because even though the jury finds for her, they literally award her the equivalent of $66.00 in damages. Which is a far cry. I think she asked for something like $7,000 or $7,500, and I'm adjusting for inflation, obviously. But also the jury foreman never signed the verdict, which meant it was never official, so she never received those damages, and we do have evidence the court asked them to come back and asked him to come back to sign it, and he, there's no evidence he did. And you might think, oh, that could just be an oversight. This is a time where maybe people didn't know what they were supposed to do. Well, this guy, Mark, Mark Powell, had been on countless juries before. He had also been a foreman before. More importantly, there is literally an assault case the exact same day by heard by the exact same jury that finds for the plaintiff and that verdict is signed and the damages are awarded. So, it was a very specific decision to not award Grace Sherwood the damages they gave her. And what that tells me is they wanted to signal a degree of contempt [00:20:00] in Grace Sherwood. They could not deny the validity of her claims, but they didn't want her to actually sort of get the win. Regardless, things get more dire for her because Elizabeth Hill and her husband Luke immediately then accuse her of witchcraft. And this means now there has to be a formal procedure, and at the same time, this is the first witch trial that's had a formal witch accusation of witchcraft in Princess Anne County in several years. There weren't that many to begin with. There's only evidence of 1 other formal witch trial, and that ended with an immediate acquittal. So there's no evidence of 1 where the judges actually had to keep the ball rolling to figure out what to do.
Scott O. Moore: I'm not going to get into the weeds of the trial, because I'm sure you'll have questions, but basically it drags on until finally, in a last ditch effort to resolve the matter, as I mentioned, the judges essentially ask that she be ducked, that they, that, and this is to be evidence of guilt. It's [00:21:00] not actually going to decide her guilt, but it's evidence that could be used in the trial itself. And frustratingly, because the court records from the, from the colonial General Court, which was heard by the governor, those records were destroyed in the Civil War, so we have no idea what the outcome of the final trial would have been if the case was referred to him, but we do know after her ducking, nothing else happened at the county, and so we don't frustratingly know what actually happened at the end of her trial. We just know she was ducked. We do know, however, she lived. We do know she's back on her farm by 1708, where she continued to eke out a living. She did get her land back officially in 1715 by paying back taxes, but she was in court several times for not paying debts, so this tells us she continued to barely make ends meet,though she did live to 1740, to about the age of 80, and by all accounts, from what I can uncover, she actually outlived everybody that accused her, and so she was last woman standing. But [00:22:00] like I said, the sort of final decades were not exactly prosperous, but at least she avoided future legal entanglements.
Josh Hutchinson: So much of her case seems very typical, the neighborly disputes, the crop failure and the livestock getting harmed. We see that a lot, but the witch ducking is unusual in the colonies. We've only seen that a couple of times in New England. Can you explain what the purpose of that test was and how it worked?
Scott O. Moore: Yeah, it's, if you were, if you want to be official, historians like to call it a trial by water ora water test. And it's based on the medieval belief that water repels evil and pure water, especially running water of a river, would be repelled by evil, and therefore, if you put someone unclean in it, they would float unnaturally. This was part of a wide series of medieval tests that were used when you had a trial, but you didn't have evidence of who might be guilty. [00:23:00] And let's say you have murder or theft, something like that.
Scott O. Moore: And we could spend literally an entire podcast talking about the very bizarre trials that Europeans used to determine guilt. For example, you would have a thief hold a red hot iron to see if their hand burned. And if it didn't burn, then that meant they were innocent. If it did burn, that meant they were guilty. All of this was based on the idea that God would not allow an innocent person to be unjustly convicted. And so there would be divine intervention in these tests.
Scott O. Moore: Almost all of them had fallen out of popular use, except for trial by water, which became almost exclusively associated with witchcraft. The idea that witches, being the devil's servants, would be unnaturally repelled by water. That said, even though, thanks to Monty Python and a lot of other sort of popular consciousness, we see this as almost the go to test to determine the guilt of a witch. As you rightly point out, it was relatively infrequently used. In fact, we have more evidence of it being used by vigilante mobs [00:24:00] to determine if somebody was a witch because they're frustrated the courts aren't doing enough. And and many of the cases you mentioned in New England are actually, there's several in Connecticut, where I live, where mobs basically attacked the supposed local witch, tied her up and put her in the water.
Scott O. Moore: And if you look even at the time, you could go back to the 15 and 16 hundreds to see very rigorous fighting over the validity of this test. Plenty of people who very much believed in witchcraft were also saying we don't think this can actually work,and you have lots of skeptics that point out all the various ways somebody might sink or float, depending how they're put in the water, how their body weight is distributed. Because nobody is technically supposed to die, most of the time, somebody was holding on to the rope, and so the idea was if it looks like they're about to drown, you have to pull them quickly out of the water. if you have, two people holding a piece of rope, and they're really nervous already, and all of a sudden somebody's acting weird, what's to stop them from, let's say, pulling it too hard and making that [00:25:00] person look like they're floating simply by how the rope's held? So plenty of people pointed out these issues.
Scott O. Moore: There's another thing that taints the test, and that is during the English Civil War in the 1640s, a man named Matthew Hopkins, who was a Puritan zealot, proclaimed himself to be Witchfinder General, and he argued that he had a divine calling to eradicate all of the witches from England, to help end the unrest of the Civil War. And over the course of about two years, he was responsible for the worst witch hunt in English history. He was responsible for the death of around 300 women,in a very short span of time. And his preferred method of determining the guilt of the accused witches was ducking.
Scott O. Moore: And because the Puritans lost the Civil War, and also because of the fact that you had this association, it was a very dubious test. And in fact, I think the reality that Virginia or that the Princess Anne County Court resorted to this test is a really clear sign that they had no idea [00:26:00] what to do to make this go away. And I think it was a last ditch effort to try to resolve the matter. Even in the court records, they say this was to finally decide if she was guilty or innocent and to sort of determine once and for all what should be done. And I think it's, part of the reason I'm suspicious that she was ever formally tried in Williamsburg, which we'll talk more about that in a second. Part of the reason I'm suspicious of that is because the only evidence Princess Anne County could really give is that we think she floated when we put her in the water. And keep in mind, this is over a decade after the Salem Witch Trials, where you have now, at this point, libraries of books being written about the injustices that happened because of dubious evidence. And so, you know, would Virginia's government, knowing full well of what's been going on in New England at this time, be willing to formally prosecute a woman based on something so dubious and so questionable? I'm suspicious. But I think [00:27:00] it's a sign of desperation.
Scott O. Moore: If you'll indulge about 30 more seconds, I do also think there's another reason she might have been ducked. And that is as rare, she is the only known case where a woman was ducked to test for witchcraft in Virginia. But women were ducked constantly in Virginia as troublesome women. Because of the colonial, the way colonial laws were determined, a husband had to represent his wife in court. So a woman had no right to, to petition the court on her own behalf. So that meant if you were a husband and your wife was sued, you were on the hook for whatever she was fined. There were so many slander suits and other cases involving women that were gossips or scolds or, I'm using the language they would use at the time, that Virginia finally passed a law that said, okay, husbands, if you don't want to pay the penalty, you can have your wife publicly ducked instead as a form of almost public humiliation. And if she is publicly [00:28:00] humiliated and then also promises to never be bad again, that will be sufficient to wipe out whatever the result of the trial would be.
Scott O. Moore: And so in my mind, and knowing that association and knowing that the court would frequently use that as a tool of punishingwomen that were seen as problematic in the community, I can't help but think in their mind, this is a two for one thing. They're able to signal they're taking the witchcraft accusation seriously, while also signaling to both Grace Sherwood and the community around her that they think she's a problem and she needs to essentially get it. And there's no way also the witnesses of the ducking would not have had that association. And so I think there's 2 things going on.
Josh Hutchinson: She's humiliated in public and frightened, of course, by being ducked in the water. And that kind of serves just to say, don't do this again.
Scott O. Moore: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think also, for the folks that thought she was a witch. [00:29:00] That vindicated their suspicion,seeing the fact that she floated, and for the rest of the community that just really didn't want to see her in court again, this signaled, we're signaling to her, get in line, and I'm sure she got the message herself, because she doesn't show up in court for anything besides very mundane matters related to economics.
Scott O. Moore: There are no more disputes with neighbors. And so that doesn't, obviously, we can't say she got along with her neighbors, but nothing rose to the point where people felt the need to bring her to court or she felt the need to bring them to court. And it would obviously, even if it didn't result in a formal conviction for witchcraft, it would have been a very obvious signal of the community to, of trying to essentially, as I said, put her back in line, which is what that punishment was meant for in most other cases.
Sarah Jack: And did they happen to do that in Connecticut as well?
Scott O. Moore: I would have to check. I'm sure there, the idea of the ducking stool was really common. [00:30:00] yeah. And but it, and it was, it, and so I'm guessing there probably would've been some possibility, but I don't wanna get over my skis 'cause I haven't dug into it.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, I'm curious. I descend from Winifred Benham, who Robert Calef reports as being ducked during her last witch trial. So I was curious.She, they had, her and her husband were not community favorites also.
Scott O. Moore: Yeah, it's just, I'm sure that association probably filtered out of Virginia, but I do know Virginia actually took the step of literally passing a law where it was a formal punishment, that was almost exclusively reserved for what they called "brabbling women," women who just talked and gossiped and just didn't stay in their appropriate lanes. And, and there are plenty of court cases where we have women repeatedly submerged, because many counties actually had a formal ducking stool, as I mentioned, which was this little device that literally, put underwater and could be held until they cranked it out again. And [00:31:00] so a woman would be essentially held underwater while she was tied to this chair, and then that would happen several times. And we know based on other counties that women were essentially required to promise to never do bad things again as part of the ducking. When they would pull her out, they'd say, are you ready to be good? And if she seemed hesitant, they would put her back in. And it was a form of almost public, obviously a public humiliation and a form of public torture of women that we're seeing as challenging.
Sarah Jack: I find this so informing because now I'm, and I wasn't aware of this until this conversation, but I know that some of the trials that Governor Winthrop Jr. was on, he, I think it was Katherine Harrison, he told her to straighten up. And I always thought, why are they doing that? But evidently, women, really told to straighten up like physically too, it sounds like. I didn't understand that element of it.
Scott O. Moore: Absolutely. And we [00:32:00] know also in, and again, you can see this with Grace Sherwood's case, but I think looking at other cases of witchcraft help to make her case makes so much more sense. We knowthat sort of one of the things, especially in North America, that made women vulnerable to being accused of being a witch is essentially a rapidly declining reputation.
Scott O. Moore: In other words, it starts out with, oh, she argues too much with her neighbors. Oh, she doesn't do things the right way. Or she's challenging the way things are supposed to operate. Or she's a gossip. She's a scold. We think she has questionable sexual morality. And these things essentially compound until finally when people have something unusual happen, they're like, we need our witch, and so obviously it's her, because who else is going to be a witch? It's going to be the woman who's not doing things the right way. And so it's really hard to not see a lot of the punishments that were donewhen supposed witches were investigated or punished when they weren't executed, but if they were punished in other ways, to also not look at [00:33:00] that in conjunction with the colonial governments punished women who challenged social norms, which was, all of those things were legislative. In other words, the idea that a woman had to be faithful to her husband, a woman could not gossip or talk ill of her neighbors. All of those things were statutory so that you could be prosecuted for essentially those things.
Josh Hutchinson: And I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier. You talked about how a decline in a person's economic status contributes to witch hunting, and we've certainly seen that in cases like in Salem with Sarah Good, who came from a good family, but inherited basically nothing and was reduced to begging for assistance. So how did economic decline, how did that play into Grace Sherwood's trial and other cases like hers?
Scott O. Moore: So, I think there's really two things that are going on, and I want to [00:34:00] acknowledge I'm very much sitting on the shoulders of much better historians than me who have dug deeper into the witch trials in other places.
Scott O. Moore: This is the context that I use to help me make sense of looking at Grace Sherwood's circumstances. Two things are going on, especially in the Puritan case, somebody who experienced rapid decline in economic fortune, that could be seen as a sign of God's displeasure. Obviously, God is withdrawing favor from that individual. And I say, especially in the Puritan case, but also in general, in the broader Christian world during this period in Europe, that could be seen as a sign of something amiss.I think the more robust answer is and this is going to involve sort of two things. We're going to have to try to do the dangerous work of peering into psychology, but, for example, we know that in a small community for especially, let's say, a New England colony or Virginia at this time, which is a very small population, if somebody is [00:35:00] poorer, they're going to occasionally need assistance. They're going to need to borrow money, or they're going to need help. For example, they may need to, let's say, beg for food or beg for other assistance, and we know that when people beg their neighbors for things, that breeds resentment and frustration,and so often what would happen is people would ask for things and they would be denied, and we know that often these denials would then be followed by allegations that the beggar was a witch.
Scott O. Moore: And there are two things that can often go on. Some historians have argued it's basically displaced guilt. In other words, I know from a, let's say, a charitable Christian perspective, I should help my needy neighbor. But I didn't, and so I feel bad about that, and so how can I make myself feel less guilty for not doing the godly thing? Well, obviously, she was a witch, and so I was righteous in not giving it to her.
Sarah Jack: Also, you tended to see, and this is again, almost a guilt by [00:36:00] association, circumstances where somebody denies a neighbor assistance, and then something bad happens to them afterward. And so again, in your mind, wait, is God punishing me for not being charitable? Well, that, I don't like that. And so what if I'm being attacked by the witch because I didn't help her? And you tend to basically blame the misfortune on being bewitched as opposed to, let's say, divinelack of favor. My favorite example of this phenomenon, because it almost lines up too well, there was a woman in the 1600s named Elizabeth Goodman, who was in New Haven in Connecticut. And we have two cases. We know that she was a beggar who tended to beg aggressively in the sense that she would be very insistent for assistance and neighbors thought she did so in quote, "a sullen and ungrateful manner." And we know on one case she asked a neighbor for buttermilk because she needed buttermilk. The neighbor said, I can't, I need to give it to my pigs. And she apparently [00:37:00] looked at him and said, it won't do your pigs any good. And then the pigs started dying one after another, soon after. In another case, she asked the neighbor for beer and was told that he didn't have enough to give. And then all of a sudden his beer started going sour, even though he kept brewing fresh batches. And so take that sort of association, almost ironic misfortune followed after you deny assistance, and then, well, that's obviously your witches. Thank you so much. What do we know, what do we need to know, or what can we know about her trial after the dunking?
Scott O. Moore: And so as I mentioned, so if you look, there's a whole series of events that lead up to Grace Sherwood's dunking. Most of it, to be honest, is back and forth with trying to get evidence. The only evidence the court was able to find was that she had suspicious marks on her body, which were seen as devil's marks or witch's marks, sort of sign that she was in league with the devil, but they didn't have much else. And we know, [00:38:00] for example, Luke Hill, who was the one who brought the case against Grace Sherwood, was frustrated by what he saw as the court dragging at the county level. So he actually took the very bold action for a guy who's essentially very lower middle class and wrote the governor of Virginia personally and said, I want you to intervene and prosecute Grace Sherwood, and he referred that to the attorney general. The attorney general reviewed everything and basically said the charge is too general. I need something specific.
Scott O. Moore: Because remember in Virginia, you had to be accused of specifically doing something with witchcraft. And so all that the charge said is that she bewitched Elizabeth Hill. Well, we, what specifically did she do? He argued that had to be there. He also said, we need more evidence. I can't prosecute based on this evidence.
Scott O. Moore: And so essentially what he's saying is, so Virginia had a two-tier court system. The county court tried all misdemeanors, and the General Court in Williamsburg tried all felonies. And so also what he's basically saying [00:39:00] is, if this is a misdemeanor, I don't have the authority to try it. I can only try this if this is a felony. And so give me evidence, give me a charge, and we'll see what happens.
Scott O. Moore: And so now the county court has to do something, and they have trouble getting more evidence, so they arrive at ducking. We do know that, according to the records, after she's ducked, the argument was she floated contrary to nature, and so they argued this was not enough to secure immediate release, so they remanded her to the county jail to await future trial. And that's the exact phrase, "to await future trial." This was not a conviction. And I keep harping on this, for any of your listeners that don't know why I'm harping on this, because one of the things that constantly pops up in collective memory of her trial is that she is the only convicted witch in Virginia's history. We have no evidence that she was actually convicted. We only know that she was ducked. The county court did not convict her. There was never a jury that heard the case. The judges never rendered a verdict. They essentially just said, we [00:40:00] need to hold her in remand until future trial happens.
Scott O. Moore: The fact that there is no trial that takes place in Princess Anne County signals they didn't have that trial there. And so what is likely the case is they wanted the General Court heard by the governor to be the final say as to what happens, that they didn't want that hot potato in the decision made, so they wanted them to make the final call. As I said, those records were burned, so we have no idea what would have happened.
Scott O. Moore: But there are several, and I, the phrase I use is, there are several dogs that aren't barking. Even if we don't have their records, there are other ways the General Court's actions show up in other places, and I'm going to give you some of them. The governor of Virginia was one of the most well connected men at the time in the English-speaking world. He was personally appointed by the king. I say governor, he was actually lieutenant governor. But what that means is he was very well connected with England. He [00:41:00] was very well connected to other merchants and other governors in North America. So was his governor's council. So were the merchants that came in and out of Williamsburg. Even though nobody would have looked through their records to find evidence of Grace Sherwood, we, other historians have looked through all sorts of stuff that those men have written to tell the story of England's colonial empire. And I have a hard time believing something so weird wouldn't have shown up in a letter somewhere, where the, even if it's just an offhanded. So we had a witch trial today. Or there was this strange case where a woman was ducked in Princess Anne County. There's nothing. It's complete silence.
Scott O. Moore: The other thing is if we think back, the attorney general said, I need a specific charge and I need evidence. While they hadn't clarified the charge at all, and the only new evidence was very dubious. And so would he have found that robust enough to pull ahead for a trial when he was skeptical before. Added to this, because of the way those [00:42:00] trials took place, when a county court sent someone to be prosecuted, they had to provide six jurors, so they had to provide half of the jury, and they also had to provide all of the witnesses. And so that meant people had to pay to travel to Williamsburg, which would have been a week's, if not month's journey, if you think about how long the trial may have taken. And so it was very expensive. And the way Virginia law worked is, whomever lost the trial, so if you were prosecuted in the general court and lost, you had to pay for you to go and everybody else who went.
Scott O. Moore: So it was an enormous financial hit, too. If you couldn't pay, then the county and the colony, colonial government, divvied up the cost. There is no mention in the Princess Anne County records of having to settle accounts for this trial, and even if it had been heard in Williamsburg, they still would have had to pay for their end, or had to have, secure jurors, or they would have had to order somebody to pay.
Scott O. Moore: There is nothing related to that, and we know from other counties and other countycourt records, [00:43:00] you see all the time where you have these mentions of so and so has returned from Williamsburg, or we have to send this money for because so and so had to travel to Williamsburg, and all of that's missing.
Scott O. Moore: My personal suspicion is that it was referred to the general court. And they basically, either the attorney general dismissed it outright and refused to prosecute, or he brought it to the grand jury, who found it unconvincing for an indictment. And then, basically, she was remanded in jail until that was resolved within a few months.
Scott O. Moore: And as I said, we know for certain she was back on her farm by 1708, and there is never any mention of her being punished. And if you want to think of the range of how people were punished for witchcraft, technically if it was a felony, that was death. Technically according to English law, if it was a misdemeanor, you were imprisoned for a year, or, you could face corporal punishment.
Josh Hutchinson: The only known person we know of certain, with certainty, that was convicted by a court in Virginia for witchcraft was a man named William Harding, who was [00:44:00] convicted by a county court in Northumberland, and he was whipped and banished, so it was an immediate punishment, and those were clearly stated in the county court records, and we have no mention of her ever having any punishment. There's never a mention in any of the subsequent court cases related to debts that she had been previously convicted. And it seems like the men who were charged with investigating the case didn't want to proceed with punishment because maybe they were skeptical of the evidence, which seems a shift in attitudes, certainly in the 14 years since Salem. So this seems to be occurring at a turning point inhow these cases were dealt with.
Scott O. Moore: Yeah, I would say absolutely. I think that's two things are going on. So first off, I know from digging through the county court records, merchants from Salem traded in [00:45:00] Princess Anne County. And so even if normal people living on remote farms didn't know what happened, the justices probably did. And also, as I know from all the work y'all have done, literally within years of the Salem Witch Trials, so not decades, years, months, people were writing about it and essentially critiquing it. And so that had to be on the minds of the county justices and especially the colonial General Court, this idea of how, are we going to prosecute somebody based on such tangential evidence? And the county court really just wanted this whole thing to go away. They, first off, they dragged their feet. Most of the time, these things are resolved within 1 or 2 court days. These things, you don't have multi-month trials really, during this period once they're ready to get the ball rolling.
Scott O. Moore: And also we know, you can tell they want it to go away. Because they make the very controversial decision early on, so within the first hearing or two, to basically say to Luke Hill, the accuser, alright, you want us to dig into this? [00:46:00] Fine, we'll keep digging. But you're paying for everything. So we're not waiting for who loses to pay. You're on the hook for all of the costs related to this trial. And he was not a rich man. He was the same class as Grace Sherwood.
Scott O. Moore: And you can, this was obviously the county court basically saying, fix this yourself and leave us out of it. And yet he looks to them and says, fine, I will be happy to keep paying, get the ball rolling. And, and so they're forced to have to keep moving on.When it comes to, I think, though,the comparison, and I don't think I mentioned this when I talked about the difference between, let's say, New England and the rest of the colonies, if you were to look, again, I'm relying on other historians, the biggest determination of when a court is willing to actually prosecute suspected witches, when they're really going to go for it, is the belief in what we would call diabolism,the being convinced the devil is active in your community and is using human agents like witches to try to destroy the godliness of your community.
Scott O. Moore: We know that [00:47:00] in order for witch trials to take place, formal witch trials, where you're going to prosecute and punish women for being witches, that you have to have that belief. And you certainly had it with the Puritans, where, they were very convinced God was attacking their city on a hill.
Sarah Jack: And if you look at other jurisdictions in Europe, it waxes and wanes. And so when you have this fervor, that's when you get these periods of intense witch hunting. For some reason, I have no explanation, the only thing I can say is that it's not that they are more rational and more intelligent, but for some reason, English jurisdictions, and this filters into all of the non New England colonies of England, were never worried about diabolism. There was never this conviction that the devil is active in the community and you have to ferret out the witches. Instead, they're worried about witchcraft the same way normal people are, which is, oh, what if we have a witch who's cursing my crops, and we have to punish her because she's cursing crops? There's not this belief in satanic [00:48:00] conspiracies that's driving their fervor, and I have no idea why, but that is a sort of X factor that's very much missing from those governors. I'm curious if she has any memorials and if she's had any exoneration or anything like that.
Scott O. Moore: Yes, in fact, she has, so there's lots of, I'll call them informal memorials. As I mentioned, we've, Virginia Beach has been telling stories about her literally for centuries. There is that children's book I mentioned, The Witch of Pungo. Pungo, by the way, for anybody who's what is this Pungo place? It's the name given to the small little village that she lived near. She actually lived about a 20 minute drive from it today. But, but it's, today, it's this little tiny rural spot of Virginia Beach, which is this large sprawling city. But if you go to the southern tip of the city, past the ocean front, it's this rural area. And sothe, there has been for decades, until Covid, an event called the Pungo Strawberry Festival. [00:49:00] And one of the dignitaries of that was an honorary witch of Pungo, where people got together and awarded the title to somebody who was a particularly good public servant. And so people who worked with the community well, did charity work, were the honorary witch of Pungo, with lots of jokes of, only in Pungo is it an honor to be called a witch. But more formally, there is a highway marker near Witch Duck Point in Virginia Beach that was put up in 2002that is essentially the standard historical marker you would have near other significant sites.
Scott O. Moore: In the early 2000s, there was a woman named Belinda Nash, who was a, the city's sort of authority on Grace Sherwood, who, by all accounts, felt this very passionately deep connection to Grace Sherwood and her story, and she very much took it upon herself, even though she had no relation. She actually came to the area from Canada. She took it upon herself to exonerate and honor Grace Sherwood. And so it's thanks to her efforts that in [00:50:00] 2006, Governor Tim Kaine did formally quote unquote, restore the good name of Grace Sherwood.It was not a formal pardon because, again, we have no evidence she was actually convicted. And I'm sure there is somebody in the governor's, at the time's, legal department that's like, we cannot issue a formal pardon. We don't have an actual conviction. Also, Virginia doesn't normally pardon posthumously, especially somebody from the colonial era.
Scott O. Moore: And instead, what Tim Kaine did is write a personal letter to Belinda Nash that restored the good name of Grace Sherwood, acknowledged the injustice of her ducking, but that was not the nuances of that were totally lost and everybody said, Virginia just pardoned their witch. And so there was a lot of fanfare, because by this point, Belinda was having annual reenactments of Grace Sherwood's ducking as part of her work with the Historic House. The next year, she built a statue to Grace Sherwood that very much reflected the way Belinda Nash imagined her as this midwife and healer. All of these events [00:51:00] were attended by a lot of local leaders and dignitaries. The mayor of Virginia Beach read the governor's exoneration. City council members were at the statue's unveiling. And Belinda Nash was also responsible or the driving force for getting the church that ascribes itself as the parish church of the whole area for the colonial period to put up a marker that honors Grace Sherwood.
Scott O. Moore: So there are several that were all put up thanks to the efforts of Belinda Nash before she died in 2016. And also, for any of your listeners who are interested, they're all within a walking distance from each other. If you were to drive to where the statue is, the marker is literally like a hundred feet away and the stone that's in the church's front lawn is like a diagonal walk across the street. So all these things are within a walking distance.
Josh Hutchinson: It sounds like she's a very important figure in the local history and to Virginia as [00:52:00] a whole as being what you said is Virginia's witch.
Scott O. Moore: Absolutely. And a lot of this is because she was the first set of records of witchcraft in Virginia that were uncovered back in 1833. My suspicion is, and it's more than a suspicion, it's because of the name Witch Duck, and to give you a brief sort of analysis of why, if you think about it, nobody has access to records in the 1600s, nobody can go to the county court and read through things for the 1700s, and you don't have newspapers at the time. You don't have books written about it. But what you do have are stories. And you have a name called Witch Duck. And we know from the folklore fieldwork that all it takes is a weird name, a weird place, or something that looks strange, and people will tell stories about it. And so you had this name of Witch Duck, and you had these legends about Witch Duck.
Scott O. Moore: And in 1833, the county clerk of Princess Anne County was hand transcribing all of the earliest colonial records, to make sure they were saved, and he was responsible for [00:53:00] specifically writing out the five pages related to her ducking and sending it to the Virginia Historical Society where it got published, and from that point forward, she was literally Virginia's witch. For the next hundred years, she showed up in literary magazines and things like that. And we know also that from folklorists that have done fieldwork, a student named Betty Oliver was there in the 1960s, and she made the argument that folks around Witch Duck have what she called an ironic pride in Grace Sherwood.
Scott O. Moore: There was also a historic house in the Pungo area that was an old farmhouse, very dilapidated by the 1990s, but everybody said it was Grace Sherwood's house. It was not Grace Sherwood's house, but local legend had that that was her house. And by this point, it was literally collapsing. It also didn't have plumbing or electricity. So it, and you couldn't add them because of where it was located. And so the Fish and Wildlife Service bought the property it was on and they were like, we have this dilapidated farmhouse. And the survey report literally says, I'm loathe [00:54:00] to advocate tearing this house down until we find out if it's Grace Sherwood's. And he goes, because we don't want to offend the quote unquote affection that the area has for her. And she is a very active part. She has, her story has literally been a detail in the book, sculpted, reenacted, quilted, drawn, sketched, performed on the ocean front for tourists. And she's this sort of signal point of what it means to be Virginia Beach. As the area grew and expanded, it became a local legend and a local tradition that old timers could latch onto to, to give them bearing and connection to their community as it changed and newcomers could add to basically help them feel acclimated to their area. And what I would argue is that, ironically, that's perversely more important than the actual history of the woman who lived, because all of this was done without really a strong grasp of who that woman actually was. And so that cultural impact though, [00:55:00] few could have ever assumed that she would have had the cultural resonance that she's had. She certainly couldn't have.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Scott.
Josh Hutchinson: And now Sarah has this week's edition of End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: Here's End Witch Hunts News. The association of women with witchcraft has historically served and continues to function as a mechanism for obscuring truthand designating scapegoats, a normalized practice that extends far beyond the early modern period into our contemporary society around the globe.
Sarah Jack: Witchcraft accusations serve multiple purposes of shifting blame. Not only is it used as an explanation for unexplained misfortune and perceived evil, but also as a socially acceptable veil for crimes perpetrated against women, crimes that warrant thorough investigation. A case in point from the United States is a popular true crime case that's currently getting highlighted by podcasts and documentaries. Occurring merely [00:56:00] five decades ago, in the 1970s, it illustrates the ongoing nature of this issue. The unexplained death of a missing female teenager, while not officially classified as homicide by officials, was emphatically attributed to Satanic sacrifice by officials. It is being reported that there, in fact, was no evidence linked to the occult. This unacceptable narrative has significantly contributed to the case remaining unsolved. At the time of the death, men in multiple positions of power made satanic accusation claims to the public, using the media to spin the web of deception. The intent of this deception is unknown, and her cause of death has remained unknown.
Sarah Jack: The use of witchcraft accusations as a means to adjudicate any victim's right to justice, humanity, and dignity will persist as an accepted societal construct until collective action is taken to eliminate this practice.
Sarah Jack: We call upon you and all [00:57:00] members of society, institutions of justice, and governing bodies to recognize the ongoing harm caused by witch hunt mentality, properly investigate crimes against women without resorting to supernatural assumptions or excuses, implement policies and practices that protect women from baseless accusations, and ensure their access to justice. We stand firm in our commitment to ending witch hunts in all their forms and establishing a society where every individual's humanity and right to justice are respected and protected. We thank you for joining us today and look forward to next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Sarah Jack: And thank you for joining us for this episode of Witch Hunt. Join us every week.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

October 1, 2024

Salem Witch-Hunt 101 Part 4: Rising Tide

In this gripping episode of Salem Witch Hunt 101, we delve into the pivotal period of March 8-24, 1692, when the Salem witch trials reached a fever pitch. We explore the dramatic escalation of accusations and arrests that rocked Salem Village, including the unexpected cases of respected community members Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse, as well as the shocking arrest of 4-year-old Dorothy Good. The episode begins with the election of new selectmen and constables in Salem, setting the stage for the tumultuous events to come. We then chronicle the return of former Salem Village minister Deodat Lawson and his influential sermon that further inflamed tensions. Listeners will hear detailed accounts of the examinations of Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse, providing chilling insight into the judicial proceedings of the time. Throughout the episode, we discuss the growing role of spectral evidence in the trials and how it shaped the accusations and outcomes. Key moments include Martha Cory’s passionate declaration of innocence, Rebecca Nurse’s heartbreaking plea, and the community’s reaction to the arrest of young Dorothy Good. The episode concludes with an update on End Witch Hunts’ recent activities and a preview of upcoming content. This episode offers a comprehensive look at a crucial turning point in the Salem witch trials, demonstrating how quickly suspicion and fear can escalate into a full-blown crisis. Whether you’re a history buff, a legal scholar, or simply curious about this dark chapter in American history, this episode provides valuable insights and compelling storytelling.

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Follow these helpful links to learn more

Emerson W. Baker, ⁠A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience ⁠

Mary Beth Norton, ⁠In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692⁠

Bernard Rosenthal, editor, ⁠Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt⁠

Marilynne K. Roach, ⁠The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-By-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege⁠

Marilynne K. Roach, ⁠Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials⁠

Stacy Schiff, ⁠The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem⁠

⁠Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project⁠

⁠Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project⁠

⁠Maryland Witches Exoneration Project ⁠

⁠Witch Hunt Website⁠

⁠Salem Witch-Hunt Education Project⁠

⁠The Salem Witch-Hunt Saga: Beginnings⁠

⁠The Ultimate Introduction to the Salem Witch Trials: Salem Witch-Hunt 101 Part 1⁠

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast bringing you a detailed, turn-by-turn account of the Salem Witch Hunt. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack. We're back with the fourth installment of our Salem Witch Hunt 101 series, covering the pivotal events of from March 8th through March 24th, 1692.
Josh Hutchinson: In today's episode, we'll explore the dramatic escalation of accusations and arrests that rocked Salem Village during this crucial period.
Sarah Jack: We'll examine the unexpected cases of Martha Cory, Dorothy Good, and Rebecca Nurse, three unusual witchcraft suspects.
Josh Hutchinson: We'll also discuss the return of former Salem Village minister to Salem Village and analyze his influential sermon and eyewitness account of the unfolding events.
Sarah Jack: As we walk you through these events, you'll gain insight into how quickly suspicions spread and how the legal machinery of the witch trials began to gather momentum.
Josh Hutchinson: We'll break down the examinations, the testimonies, and the growing atmosphere of fear and [00:01:00] paranoia that gripped the community.
Sarah Jack: So join us as we continue our in depth exploration of one of history's most infamous witch hunts, piecing together the complex tapestry of events that led to the Salem Witch Trials. Let's dive in and uncover the stories behind the accusations, the hidden tensions within the community, and the fateful decisions that set the stage for the tragedy to come.
Josh Hutchinson: Previously in our Salem Witch Hunt 101 series, we've introduced the witch hunt and discussed events up to March 7th, 1692.
Sarah Jack: In the first episode in the series, we presented a broad overview of the Salem Witch Hunt, addressing many of the key events
Josh Hutchinson: and people involved, as well as the reasons behind the crisis. In part two, we focused on the events of February, 1692 as residents of Salem Village began to consider that there was witchcraft in their midst.
Sarah Jack: In the third episode, we covered February 29th through March 7th, 1692,from the arrest of Tituba , Sarah Good, and Sarah Osburn,through their [00:02:00] interrogations and jailings.
Josh Hutchinson: Today, in part four, we follow the cases against church member Martha Cory, baby girl Dorothy Good, and pious grandmother Rebecca Nurse.
Sarah Jack: These cases are captivating, so let's join the action on March 8th, 1692.
Josh Hutchinson: On March 8th, at Salem's town meeting, new selectmen and constables were elected.
Sarah Jack: The new selectmen included future witchcraft suspect Philip English and John Higginson Jr., the son of Salem's senior minister. Along with Salem Village's Israel Porter and Daniel Andrew.
Josh Hutchinson: The newly elected constables included John Putnam Jr. and Jonathan Putnam of Salem Village, two cousins of Sergeant Thomas Putnam.
Sarah Jack: The next day, in Boston, jailer John Arnold bought chains for Sarah Osborn and Sarah Good for 14 shillings.
Josh Hutchinson: Chains were believed to have the power to stop a witch's specter from roaming. And the cost of the chains was added to each accused individual's jail bill, which they would have to pay to [00:03:00] be released if they were acquitted or the charges were dropped.
Sarah Jack: The two Sarahs would be locked in these chains until their deaths months later.
Josh Hutchinson: On March 11th, John Hale and other local ministers attended a fast at the Salem Village Parsonage.
Sarah Jack: Robert Calef later wrote that the afflicted persons were, for the most part, silent, but after any one prayer was ended, they would act and speak strangely and ridiculously, yet were such as had been well educated and of good behavior, the one, a girl of eleven or twelve years old, would sometimes seem to be in a convulsive fit, her limbs being twisted several ways and very stiff, but presently her fit would be over.
Josh Hutchinson: On an unknown date in March, perhaps shortly after this fast, Samuel Parris sent his daughter Betty to stay with his kinsman, Stephen Sewell, the brother of future Salem Witch Trials Judge Samuel Sewell.
Sarah Jack: While staying in Salem Town, separated from the other afflicted persons, Betty's condition appears to improve, and after March, she never [00:04:00] takes part in any further courtroom proceedings or is named as an afflicted person in any arrest warrant or testimony.
Josh Hutchinson: On March 12th, Ann Putnam Jr. was purportedly attacked by Martha Cory's specter.
Sarah Jack: Martha was the wife of Giles Cory. Her maiden name is unknown, but her first husband was Henry Rich, and the two had a son named Thomas. While married to Henry, Martha had a second son, Ben, with another man.
Josh Hutchinson: Martha was accepted as a full member of the Salem Village Church on April 27th, 1690.
Sarah Jack: Which was coincidentally the same day that a certain Mary Sibley was accepted into the church.
Josh Hutchinson: Ezekiel Cheever and Edward Putnam asked Ann Jr. what clothes Martha Cory's specter wore. She told them she was blind and could not see what the supposed witch had on.
Sarah Jack: Cheever and Putnam went to Martha Cory's house, where Martha told them she knew people were talking about her and denied being a witch. She then asked if Ann Jr. had described her clothes.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:05:00] The two men took this question to have come from diabolical knowledge. How else could Martha know what they had asked Ann?
Sarah Jack: Elsewhere in Salem, Martha Cory's specter supposedly attacked Mary Warren at the home of Elizabeth and John Procter.
Josh Hutchinson: On May 12th, Mary Warren would testify that when she was first afflicted by Martha Cory, she reached out for Martha's specter but instead pulled John Procter into her lap.
Sarah Jack: When this happened, John Procter said, "it is nobody, but it is my shadow that you see."
Josh Hutchinson: Mary again reached for the spectral Cory, but instead pulled the shadow figure back into her lap.
Sarah Jack: John Procter said, "I see there is no heed to any of your talkings, for you are all possessed with the devil, for it is nothing but my shape."
Josh Hutchinson: Mary also said she had seen Martha Cory at the Procter house in person, and Martha told Mary that "she would be condemned for a witch as well as she herself. And she said that the children would cry out and bring out all."
Sarah Jack: [00:06:00] On Sunday, March 13th, during worship service in Salem village, Bethshua Pope, an aunt of Benjamin Franklin was allegedly afflicted by specters and was temporarily unable to see.
Josh Hutchinson: Later, Ann Putnam Jr. was visited by an unknown specter at home. She thought she sort of knew the person from seeing her at worship services, and she could just about picture where this woman sat in the meeting house, but she didn't know her name until either her mother or her maid, Mercy Lewis, suggested it was Rebecca Nurse.
Sarah Jack: Like Martha Cory, Rebecca Towne Nurse was a church member. However, she kept her membership in the Salem Town church and never joined the village, though she usually worshipped there. She was noted for her devotion.
Josh Hutchinson: On March 14th, Martha Cory and Elizabeth Procter's shapes supposedly attacked Abigail Williams, niece of village minister Samuel Parris.
Sarah Jack: In the visible world, Thomas Putnam invited Martha Cory to visit Ann Jr. in person. When Martha entered the Putnam house, Ann Jr. had a [00:07:00] fit, contorted into strange positions, and collapsed.
Josh Hutchinson: Ann Jr. cried out against Martha for causing her affliction, but then "her tongue thrust forward, her teeth clamped down, and she was unable to speak."
Sarah Jack: When she regained control of her mouth, Ann Jr. told Martha she saw a yellow bird sucking between her forefinger and her middle finger.
Josh Hutchinson: Ann Jr. claimed Martha was the specter that had covered Bethshua Pope's eyes during the meeting the day before.
Sarah Jack: Ann Jr. 's hands then got stuck in her own eyes and could not be removed for some time.
Josh Hutchinson: Then Ann Jr. had a twisted vision of the invisible world, where she saw a man being roasted in her parents' hearth, with Martha Cory turning the spit.
Sarah Jack: Mercy Lewis, the Putnam's maid, grabbed a stick and struck where Ann said the specter was. The vision went away for a moment.
Josh Hutchinson: Mercy had been orphaned in King William's War and had previously witnessed the killings of most of her extended family as a very young girl during King Philip's War.
Sarah Jack: Her family lived on the [00:08:00] frontier in the vulnerable settlement of Falmouth located in Maine on Casco Bay, where the city of Portland now stands.
Josh Hutchinson: Following each of these wars, Mercy relocated to Essex County, Massachusetts. After her parents were killed, she spent some time in Beverly before taking a position as maid for Thomas and Ann Putnam in Salem Village.
Sarah Jack: Mercy's sister Priscilla had married a Putnam neighbor, Henry Kinney, Jr.
Sarah Jack: When Ann's vision came back, Mercy struck at the specter again. Ann cried out, "do not if you love yourself! "And Mercy shrieked, as Ann said Martha's specter clubbed her with an iron rod. Mercy claimed to see shadowy female figures in the room and said they were trying to get her to write in the devil's book.
Josh Hutchinson: As the real Martha Cory left the Putnam house, Mercy Lewis succumbed to fits so violent it took three men to restrain her.
Sarah Jack: Around 11 o'clock that night, while Mercy sat in a chair before the hearth, the chair creeped forward toward the fire.[00:09:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Two men had to grab the chair to prevent Mercy, who couldn't get up, from being burned.
Sarah Jack: But they couldn't stop the chair until Edward Putnam jumped in front and lifted Mercy's feet.
Josh Hutchinson: Elsewhere in Salem, Giles Cory's ox and cat were strangely afflicted but later recovered.
Sarah Jack: On March 15th, Martha Cory's shape allegedly afflicted Elizabeth Hubbard.
Josh Hutchinson: And Rebecca Nurse allegedly attacked Abigail Williams spectrally.
Sarah Jack: Ipswich's Mary Fuller and Marjorie Thorne were afflicted, allegedly by Rachel Clinton, who turned up at the James Fuller Jr. house at this moment.
Josh Hutchinson: Rachel was a child-free divorcee who had been rumored to be a witch for years.
Sarah Jack: At the Fuller house, she told them she was there to hear their lies about her.
Josh Hutchinson: Suddenly, Joseph Fuller ran in, exclaiming that his sister Betty was dead. Rachel Clinton ran out, and James Fuller Sr. was unable to see her when he tried to follow.
Sarah Jack: As it turned out, Betty Fuller had passed out and would recover [00:10:00] after three to four hours of unconsciousness.
Josh Hutchinson: When she came around, Betty said she'd seen something so frightening that it had made her turn on the spot and run, but she wasn't quick enough and whatever she saw knocked her down.
Sarah Jack: On March 18th, Ann Putnam Sr. reportedly wrestled with Rebecca Nurse's specter for two hours.
Josh Hutchinson: The next day, Ann Putnam Sr. was allegedly assailed by the specters of Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse because she refused to join their ranks.
Sarah Jack: Henry Kinney and Edward Putnam filed a witchcraft complaint against Martha Cory and magistrates issued a warrant for her arrest. It is unclear which Henry Kinney was involved, father or son.
Josh Hutchinson: The complaint alleged that Martha had afflicted Ann Putnam Sr., Ann Putnam Jr., Abigail Williams, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Mercy Lewis, sister-in-law of Henry Kinney Jr.
Sarah Jack: The warrant issued by John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin instructed Marshal George Herrick to arrest Martha and take her to Ingersoll's Tavern in Salem Village on Monday, March 21st.
Josh Hutchinson: Also on March 19th, [00:11:00] former Salem Village minister Deodat Lawson returned to the village. Tituba had claimed that his wife and his child were killed by maleficium.
Sarah Jack: After Deodat Lawson checked into a room at Ingersoll's, Mary Walcott, the daughter of near neighbor Captain Jonathan Walcott, called upon him and claimed to be bitten on the wrist.
Josh Hutchinson: In the candlelight, Lawson observed a set of teeth marks.
Sarah Jack: In the beginning of the evening, Lawson visited the parsonage nearby Ingersolls.
Josh Hutchinson: Abigail Williams ran back and forth across the room with her arms held high and flapping like a bird. She said, "whish, whish, whish," as she virtually flew about the home.
Sarah Jack: She stopped suddenly and declared that she saw the specter of Rebecca Nurse before her. Nobody else could see the specter, which proffered the devil's book.
Josh Hutchinson: Abigail said, "I won't, I won't, I won't take it. I do not know what book it is. I'm sure it's none of God's book. It is the devil's book for ought I know."
Sarah Jack: Across town, when Giles Cory went to prayer before bed, he was hindered by some [00:12:00] unseen force. As his wife approached, his lips loosened and he was able to say his prayers.
Josh Hutchinson: On March 20th, Deodat Lawson stood in for Samuel Parris to lead Sunday services, which were interrupted by the afflicted persons.
Sarah Jack: As Lawson prepared to read the text introducing his sermon, Abigail Williams said, "now stand up and name your text." Lawson read the text, and Abigail asserted, "it is a long text."
Josh Hutchinson: Lawson began his sermon. Soon, Bethshua Pope said, "now there is enough of that."
Sarah Jack: Abigail Williams claimed Martha Cory's specter left her body and sat on a beam with her yellow bird. The bird alighted on Lawson's hat, which hung on a peg, but Abigail was silenced by neighbors.
Josh Hutchinson: In the afternoon, when Lawson referred to his doctrine, Abigail said, "I know no doctrine you had. If you did name one, I have forgot it."
Sarah Jack: On March 21st, Joseph Herrick arrested Martha Cory. During the arrest, Herrick spotted a strange ointment in Martha's [00:13:00] house.
Josh Hutchinson: Herrick asked Martha about it, and she told him she got the recipe from future witch judge Major Bartholomew Gedney of Salem.
Sarah Jack: Constable Herrick took Martha to Ingersoll's Tavern, where magistrates were preparing for her interrogation.
Josh Hutchinson: Reverend Nicholas Noyes opened the hearing with prayer, and the very biased Samuel Parris was appointed to record the interrogation.
Sarah Jack: Hathorne began questioning Martha.
Josh Hutchinson: You are now in the hands of authority. Tell me now why you have hurt these persons.
Sarah Jack: I do not.
Josh Hutchinson: Who doth?
Sarah Jack: Pray give me leave to go to prayer.
Josh Hutchinson: We do not sin for you to go to prayer, but tell me why you hurt these.
Sarah Jack: I am an innocent person. I never had to do with witchcraft since I was born. I am a gospel woman.
Josh Hutchinson: Do not you see these complain of you?
Sarah Jack: The Lord open the eyes of the magistrates and ministers. The Lord show his power to discover the guilty.
Josh Hutchinson: Tell us who hurts these children.
Sarah Jack: I do not know. [00:14:00]
Josh Hutchinson: If you be guilty of this fact, do you think you can hide it?
Sarah Jack: The Lord knows.
Josh Hutchinson: Well, tell us what you know of this matter.
Sarah Jack: Why, I am a gospel woman, and do you think I can have to do with witchcraft too?
Josh Hutchinson: How could you tell then that the child was bid to observe what clothes you wore when some came to speak with you?
Sarah Jack: Cheevers interrupted her and bid her not begin with a lie. And so Edward Putnam declared the matter.
Josh Hutchinson: Who told you that?
Sarah Jack: He said, the child said.
Josh Hutchinson: Ezekiel Cheever said, "you speak falsely."
Sarah Jack: Then Edward Putnam read again.
Josh Hutchinson: And Hathorne asked, "why did you ask if the children told what clothes you wore?"
Sarah Jack: My husband told me the others told.
Josh Hutchinson: Who told you about the clothes? Why did you ask that question?
Sarah Jack: Because I heard the children told what clothes the other wore.
Josh Hutchinson: Goodman Cory, did you tell her?
Sarah Jack: The old man denied that he told her so.
Josh Hutchinson: Did you not say your husband told you so?
Sarah Jack: She sighed. [00:15:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Who hurts these children? Now look upon them.
Sarah Jack: I cannot help it.
Josh Hutchinson: Did you not say you would tell the truth why you asked that question? How came you to the knowledge?
Sarah Jack: I did but ask.
Josh Hutchinson: You dare thus to lie in all this assembly? You are now before authority. I expect the truth. You promised it. Speak now and tell who told you what clothes.
Sarah Jack: Nobody.
Josh Hutchinson: How came you to know that the children would be examined on what clothes you wore?
Sarah Jack: Because I thought the child was wiser than anybody if she knew.
Josh Hutchinson: Give an answer. You said your husband told you.
Sarah Jack: He told me the children said I afflicted them.
Josh Hutchinson: How do you know what they came for? Answer me this truly. Will you say how you came to know what they came for?
Sarah Jack: I had heard speech that the children said I troubled them and I thought that they might come to examine.
Josh Hutchinson: But how did you know it?
Sarah Jack: I thought they did.
Josh Hutchinson: Did not you say you would tell the truth? Who told you what they came for?
Sarah Jack: Nobody.
Josh Hutchinson: How did [00:16:00] you know?
Sarah Jack: I did think so.
Josh Hutchinson: But you said you knew so.
Sarah Jack: A child says, there is a man whispering in her ear.
Josh Hutchinson: What did he say to you?
Sarah Jack: We must not believe all that these distracted children say.
Josh Hutchinson: Cannot you tell what that man whispered?
Sarah Jack: I saw nobody.
Josh Hutchinson: But did not you hear?
Sarah Jack: No.
Josh Hutchinson: If you expect mercy of God, you must look for it in God's way by confession. Do you think to find mercy by aggravating your sins?
Sarah Jack: A true thing.
Josh Hutchinson: Look for it then in God's way.
Sarah Jack: So I do.
Josh Hutchinson: Give glory to God and confess then.
Sarah Jack: But I cannot confess.
Josh Hutchinson: Do not you see how these afflicted do charge you?
Sarah Jack: We must not believe distracted persons.
Josh Hutchinson: Who do you improve to hurt them?
Sarah Jack: I improved none.
Josh Hutchinson: Did not you say our eyes were blinded, you would open them?
Sarah Jack: Yes, to accuse the innocent.
Josh Hutchinson: Why cannot the girl stand before you?
Sarah Jack: I do not know.
Josh Hutchinson: What did you mean by that? [00:17:00]
Sarah Jack: I saw them fall down.
Josh Hutchinson: It seems to be an insulting speech as if they could not stand before you.
Sarah Jack: They cannot stand before others.
Josh Hutchinson: You said they cannot stand before you. Tell me what was that turning upon the spit by you?
Sarah Jack: You believe the children that are distracted. I saw no spit.
Josh Hutchinson: Here are more than two that accuse you for witchcraft. What do you say?
Sarah Jack: I am innocent.
Sarah Jack: Then Mr. Hathorne read further of Crossley's evidence.
Josh Hutchinson: What did you mean by that the devil could not stand before you?
Sarah Jack: She denied it.
Josh Hutchinson: Three or four sober witnesses confirmed it.
Sarah Jack: What could I do? Many rise up against me.
Josh Hutchinson: Why confess?
Sarah Jack: So I would, if I were guilty.
Josh Hutchinson: Here are sober persons? What do you say to them? You are a gospel woman. Will you lie?
Josh Hutchinson: Abigail cried out, "next Sabbath is sacrament day, but she shall not come there."
Sarah Jack: I do not care.
Josh Hutchinson: You charge these children with distraction. It [00:18:00] is a note of distraction when persons vary in a minute, but these fix upon you. This is not the matter of distraction.
Sarah Jack: When all are against me, what can I help it?
Josh Hutchinson: Now tell me the truth, will you? Why did you say the magistrates' and ministers' eyes are blinded and you would open them?
Sarah Jack: She laughed and denied it.
Josh Hutchinson: Now tell us how we shall know who doth hurt these if you do not.
Sarah Jack: Can an innocent person be guilty?
Josh Hutchinson: Do you deny these words?
Sarah Jack: Yes.
Josh Hutchinson: Tell us who hurts these. We came to be a terror to evildoers. You say you would open our eyes, we are blind.
Sarah Jack: If you say I am a witch.
Josh Hutchinson: You said you would show us.
Sarah Jack: She denied it.
Josh Hutchinson: Why do you not now show us?
Sarah Jack: I cannot tell. I do not know.
Josh Hutchinson: What did you strike the maid at Mr. Thomas Putnam's with?
Sarah Jack: I never struck her in my life.
Josh Hutchinson: Who are two that see you strike her with an iron rod?
Sarah Jack: I had no hand in it.
Josh Hutchinson: Who had? Do you believe [00:19:00] these children are bewitched?
Sarah Jack: They may, for aught I know. I have no hand in it.
Josh Hutchinson: You say you are no witch. Maybe you mean you never covenanted with the devil. Did you never deal with any familiar?
Sarah Jack: No, never.
Josh Hutchinson: What bird was that the children spoke of?
Sarah Jack: Then witnesses spoke.
Josh Hutchinson: What bird was it?
Sarah Jack: I know no bird.
Josh Hutchinson: It may be you have engaged. You will not confess, but God knows.
Sarah Jack: So he doth.
Josh Hutchinson: Do you believe you shall go unpunished?
Sarah Jack: I have nothing to do with witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: Why was you not willing your husband should come to the former session here?
Sarah Jack: But he came for all.
Josh Hutchinson: Did not you take the saddle off?
Sarah Jack: I did not know what it was for.
Josh Hutchinson: Did you not know what it was for?
Sarah Jack: I did not know that it would be to any benefit.
Josh Hutchinson: Did you not say you would open our eyes? Why do you not?
Sarah Jack: I never thought of a witch.
Josh Hutchinson: Is it a laughing matter to see these afflicted persons?
Sarah Jack: She denied it.
Josh Hutchinson: Several prove it. [00:20:00]
Sarah Jack: Ye are all against me, and I cannot help it.
Josh Hutchinson: Do not you believe there are witches in the country?
Sarah Jack: I do not know that there is any.
Josh Hutchinson: Do not you know that Tituba confessed it?
Sarah Jack: I did not hear her speak.
Josh Hutchinson: I find you will own nothing without several witnesses, and yet you will deny for all.
Sarah Jack: It was noted when she bit her lip, several of the afflicted were bitten. When she was urged upon it, that she bit her lip, saith she, "what harm is there in it?"
Josh Hutchinson: What do you say to all these things that are apparent?
Sarah Jack: If you will all go hang me, how can I help it?
Josh Hutchinson: Were you to serve the devil ten years? Tell how many?
Sarah Jack: She laughed.
Josh Hutchinson: The children cried there was a yellow bird with her.
Sarah Jack: When Mr. Hathorne asked her about it, she laughed. When her hands were at liberty, the afflicted persons were pinched.
Josh Hutchinson: Why do not you tell how the devil comes in your shape and hurts these? You said you would.
Sarah Jack: How can I know how?
Josh Hutchinson: Why did you say you would show us?
Sarah Jack: [00:21:00] She laughed again.
Josh Hutchinson: What book is that you would have these children write in?
Sarah Jack: What book? Where should I have a book? I showed them none, nor have none, nor brought none.
Sarah Jack: The afflicted cried out there was a man whispering in her ears.
Josh Hutchinson: What book did you carry to Mary Walcott?
Sarah Jack: I carried none. If the devil appears in my shape.
Sarah Jack: Then Needham said that Parker some time ago thought this woman was a witch.
Josh Hutchinson: Who is your god?
Sarah Jack: The god that made me.
Josh Hutchinson: Who
Sarah Jack: is that God?
Sarah Jack: The God that made me.
Josh Hutchinson: What is his name?
Sarah Jack: Jehovah.
Josh Hutchinson: Do you know any other name?
Sarah Jack: God Almighty.
Josh Hutchinson: Doth he tell you that you pray to that he is God Almighty?
Sarah Jack: Who do I worship but the God that made me?
Josh Hutchinson: How many gods are there?
Sarah Jack: One.
Josh Hutchinson: How many persons?
Sarah Jack: Three.
Josh Hutchinson: Cannot you say so, there is one god in three blessed persons?
Sarah Jack: Then she was troubled.
Josh Hutchinson: Do not you see these children and women [00:22:00] are rational and sober as their neighbors when your hands are fastened?
Sarah Jack: Immediately they were seized with fits, and the standers by said she was squeezing her fingers, her hands being eased by them that held them on purpose for trial. Quickly after, the marshal said, she hath bit her lip, and immediately the afflicted were in an uproar.
Sarah Jack: Why do you hurt these, or who doth? She denied any hand in it.
Josh Hutchinson: Why did you say, if you were a witch, you should have no pardon?
Sarah Jack: Because I am a woman.
Josh Hutchinson: After Martha's initial interrogation, Ezekiel Cheever, Edward Putnam, Elizabeth Hubbard, Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, and Nathaniel Ingersoll were deposed against her.
Sarah Jack: Ezekiel Cheever and Edward Putnam described the events of March 12th, when they had confronted Martha Cory at her home.
Josh Hutchinson: Edward Putnam testified about Martha's March 14th visit to the Thomas Putnam family.
Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Hubbard said Martha had afflicted her many times since March 15th. She said, "I believe in my heart that Martha Cory [00:23:00] is a dreadful witch and that she hath very often afflicted and tormented me."
Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Parris, Nathaniel Ingersoll, and Thomas Putnam described how the afflicted were tormented during Martha's examination.
Sarah Jack: After the examination, Marshal Herrick and the magistrates dined and fed their horses at Ingersoll's, racking up a bill of four shillings and sixpence. Then they took Martha Cory to Salem, where Marshal Herrick secured her in jail.
Josh Hutchinson: On March 22nd, Rebecca Nurse's Shape allegedly assaulted Ann Putnam Sr. while wearing nothing but her shift and nightcap.
Sarah Jack: The Nurse specter offered Ann a little red book, but Ann refused to sign and quoted scripture at the specter.
Josh Hutchinson: The specter threatened to tear Ann's soul from her body, but yielded after another two hour battle and left .
Sarah Jack: Around this time in March, Peter Cloyce, Daniel Andrew, and Elizabeth and Israel Porter, visited Rebecca Nurse, who had been in bed for around a week.
Josh Hutchinson: After Rebecca expressed concern for the afflicted, whom she regretted not [00:24:00] visiting but couldn't, the visitors informed her that she too was being accused.
Sarah Jack: Once Rebecca recovered from the shock, she said, "well, as to this thing, I am as innocent as the child unborn. But surely, what sin hath God found out in me unrepentant of, that he should lay such an affliction upon me in my old age?"
Josh Hutchinson: On March 23rd, Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse's specters reportedly afflicted Ann Putnam Sr. again.
Sarah Jack: Deodat Lawson visited and found Ann in bed, where she was getting over a fit.
Josh Hutchinson: Lawson prayed over Ann.
Sarah Jack: At some point in the prayer, Ann seemed to fall asleep. Thomas Putnam took her in his arms and found her to be stiff as a board.
Josh Hutchinson: He tried to sit her up on his lap, and she eventually had another fit. Her arms and legs jerked about as she argued with the specter of Rebecca Nurse again.
Sarah Jack: That day, Jonathan and Edward Putnam filed complaints against young Dorothy Good and aged Rebecca Nurse.
Josh Hutchinson: The magistrates issued [00:25:00] arrest warrants for Dorothy and Rebecca.
Sarah Jack: Rebecca's warrant stated that she was wanted for allegedly bewitching Ann Carr Putnam and her daughter, Ann Putnam Jr.
Josh Hutchinson: Dorothy's warrant did not specifically list any victims or even what form of witchcraft she'd been accused of, but it was likely given to Marshal George Herrick at the same time as Rebecca's warrant.
Sarah Jack: To the northeast, Captain John Alden traveled to St. John, Canada to ransom captives, including his own son. His attempt failed, and his son and others were moved to Quebec.
Josh Hutchinson: On March 24th, constables arrested Dorothy Good and Rebecca Nurse. They took the girl and the older woman to Ingersoll's Tavern in Salem Village.
Sarah Jack: There, magistrates John Hathorn and Jonathan Corwin interrogated Rebecca Nurse and Dorothy Good.
Josh Hutchinson: Reverend John Hale of Beverly gave the invocation and Samuel Parris again recorded the proceedings through his biased lens.
Sarah Jack: Hathorne began with a question to an afflicted person.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you [00:26:00] say? Have you seen this woman hurt you?
Sarah Jack: Yes, she beat me this morning.
Josh Hutchinson: Abigail, have you been hurt by this woman?
Sarah Jack: Yes,
Sarah Jack: Ann Putnam,in a grievous fit, cried out that she hurt her.
Josh Hutchinson: Goody Nurse, here are two, Ann Putnam, the child, and Abigail Williams, complain of your hurting them. What do you say to it?
Sarah Jack: I can say, before my eternal father, I am innocent, and God will clear my innocency.
Josh Hutchinson: Here is never a one in the assembly but desires it. But if you be guilty, pray God discover you.
Sarah Jack: Then Henry Kenny rose up to speak.
Josh Hutchinson: Goodman Kenny, what do you say?
Sarah Jack: Then he entered his complaint and further said that since this Nurse came into the house, he was seized twice with an amazed condition.
Josh Hutchinson: Here are not only these, but here is the wife of Mr. Thomas Putnam, who accuseth you by credible information, and that both of tempting her to iniquity and of greatly hurting her.
Sarah Jack: I am innocent and clear, and have not been able to get out of doors [00:27:00] these eight or nine days.
Josh Hutchinson: Mr. Putnam, give in what you have to say.
Sarah Jack: Then Mr. Edward Putnam gave in his relation.
Josh Hutchinson: Is this true, Goody Nurse?
Sarah Jack: I never afflicted no child, never in my life.
Josh Hutchinson: You see these accuse you. Is it true?
Sarah Jack: No.
Josh Hutchinson: Are you an innocent person relating to this witchcraft?
Sarah Jack: Here, Thomas Putnam's wife cried out, "did you not bring the black man with you? Did you not bid me tempt God and die? How oft have you eat and drunk your own damnation?"
Josh Hutchinson: What do you say to them?
Sarah Jack: Oh Lord, help me. And she spread out her hands, and the afflicted were grievously vexed.
Josh Hutchinson: Do not see what a solemn condition these are in? When your hands are loose, the persons are afflicted.
Sarah Jack: Then Mary Walcott, who often heretofore said she had seen her, but never could say or did say that she either bit or pinched her or hurt her, and also Elizabeth Hubbard under the like circumstances both openly accused her of hurting them. [00:28:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Here are these two grown persons now accuse you. What say you? Do not you see these afflicted persons and hear them accuse you?
Sarah Jack: The Lord knows I have not hurt them. I am an innocent person.
Josh Hutchinson: It is very awful to all to see these agonies,and you an old professor thus charged with contracting with the devil by the effects of it, and yet to see you stand with dry eyes when there are so many wet.
Sarah Jack: You do not know my heart.
Josh Hutchinson: You would do well if you are guilty to confess and give glory to God.
Sarah Jack: I am as clear as the child unborn.
Josh Hutchinson: What uncertainty there may be in apparitions I know not. Yet this with me strikes hard upon you, that you are at this very present charged with familiar spirits.
Josh Hutchinson: This is your bodily person they speak to. They say now they see these familiar spirits come to your bodily person. Now what do you say to that?
Sarah Jack: I have none, sir.
Josh Hutchinson: If you have, confess and give glory to God. I pray God clear you if you be innocent, and if you are guilty, discover you, [00:29:00] and therefore give me an upright answer. Have you any familiarity with these spirits?
Sarah Jack: No, I have none but with God alone.
Josh Hutchinson: How came you sick? For there is an odd discourse of that in the mouths of many.
Sarah Jack: I am sick at my stomach.
Josh Hutchinson: Have you no wounds?
Sarah Jack: I have none but old age.
Josh Hutchinson: You do know whether you are guilty and have familiarity with the devil, and now when you are here present to see such a thing as these testify a black man whispering in your ear and birds about you. What do you say to it?
Sarah Jack: It is all false. I am clear.
Josh Hutchinson: Possibly you may apprehend you are no witch, but have you not been led aside by temptations that way?
Sarah Jack: I have not.
Josh Hutchinson: What a sad thing it is that a church member here, and now another of Salem, should be thus accused and charged.
Sarah Jack: Mrs. Pope fell into a grievous fit and cried out, "a sad thing, sure enough!"
Sarah Jack: And then many more fell into lamentable fits.
Josh Hutchinson: Tell us, have [00:30:00] not you had visible appearances more than what is common in nature?
Sarah Jack: I have none, nor ever had, in my life.
Josh Hutchinson: Do you think these suffered voluntary or involuntary?
Sarah Jack: I cannot tell.
Josh Hutchinson: That is strange. Everyone can judge.
Sarah Jack: I must be silent.
Josh Hutchinson: They accuse you of hurting them, and if you think it is not unwillingly but by design, you must look upon them as murderers.
Sarah Jack: I cannot tell what to think of it.
Sarah Jack: Afterwards, when this was somewhat insisted on, she said, "I do not think so." She did not understand aright what was said.
Josh Hutchinson: Well, then give an answer now. Do you think these suffer against their wills or not?
Sarah Jack: I do not think these suffer against their wills.
Josh Hutchinson: Why did you never visit these afflicted persons?
Sarah Jack: Because I was afraid I should have fits too.
Sarah Jack: Upon the motion of her body, fits followed upon the complainants abundantly and very frequently. [00:31:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Is it not an unaccountable case that when you are examined, these persons are afflicted?
Sarah Jack: I have got nobody to look to but God.,
Sarah Jack: Again upon stirring her hands, the afflicted persons were seized with violent fits of torture.
Josh Hutchinson: Do you believe these afflicted persons are bewitched?
Sarah Jack: I do think they are.
Josh Hutchinson: When this witchcraft came upon the stage, there was no suspicion of Tituba. She professed much love to that child Betty Parris, but it was her apparition did the mischief. Why should not you also be guilty, for your apparition doth hurt also?
Sarah Jack: Would you have me belie myself?
Josh Hutchinson: She held her neck on one side, and accordingly so were the afflicted taken.
Sarah Jack: Then authority requiring it, Samuel Parris read what he had in characters
Sarah Jack: taken from Mr. Thomas Putnam's wife in her fits.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you think of this?
Sarah Jack: I cannot help it. The devil may appear in my shape.
Josh Hutchinson: When the hearing was over, the magistrates [00:32:00] committed Rebecca Nurse to the jail in Salem.
Sarah Jack: Next, the magistrates questioned little Dorothy Good, daughter of a witchcraft suspect, Sarah Good. Deodat Lawson wrote an account.
Josh Hutchinson: "The magistrates and ministers also did inform me that they apprehended a child of Sarah Good and examined it, being between four and five years of age. And as to matter of fact, they did unanimously affirm that when this child did but cast its eye upon the afflicted persons, they were tormented, and they held her head and yet so many as her eye could fix upon were afflicted, which they did several times make careful observation of. The afflicted complained they had often been bitten by this child and produced the marks of a small set of teeth. Accordingly, this was also committed to Salem prison. The child looked hale and well as other children. I saw it at Lieutenant Ingersoll's."
Sarah Jack: Giles Cory made a statement against his wife Martha.
Josh Hutchinson: He recounted the time when he was stopped from praying and the incidents which [00:33:00] befell his ox and cat.
Sarah Jack: He also described a time when Martha knelt at the hearth, as if in prayer, but he did not hear her pray.
Josh Hutchinson: Ann Putnam Jr. and Mary Walcott were deposed against Dorothy Good.
Sarah Jack: Ann said that she was tortured by the apparition of Dorothy Good many times from March 3rd through the child's examination on March 24th.
Josh Hutchinson: Mary Walcott claimed that she was afflicted by Dorothy's apparition from March 21st through 24th.
Sarah Jack: Ann Putnam Sr. was deposed against Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse.
Josh Hutchinson: She gave a day by day account of her torments at the hands of the specters of Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse for March 18th through 24th.
Sarah Jack: Daniel Andrew, Peter Cloyce, Israel Porter, and Elizabeth Porter made a statement for Rebecca Nurse on the 24th.
Sarah Jack: Later on the 24th, Deodat Lawson delivered the Thursday lecture, which he soon published as Christ's Fidelity the Only Shield Against Satan's Malignity.
Josh Hutchinson: In published form, the book was endorsed by [00:34:00] ministers Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, Charles Morton, James Allen, Samuel Willard, and John Bailey.
Sarah Jack: The key verse Lawson used was Zechariah 3:2. "And the Lord said unto Satan, ' The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan, even the Lord that hath chosen Jerusalem, rebuke thee. Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?
Josh Hutchinson: Lawson stated that his doctrine was "that the Lord Jesus Christ is the only prevalent intercessor with God the Father for the relief of those that are in covenant with him and are made partakers of his special mercy, when they are under the most threatening and amazing distresses that by the rage and malice of Satan they can be exposed unto."
Sarah Jack: Then he put forth six propositions and expounded upon six uses for this verse.
Josh Hutchinson: 1. Satan is the adversary and enemy. He is the original, the fountain of malice, the instigator of all contrariety, malignity, and enmity.
Sarah Jack: 2. [00:35:00] Satan makes it his business to improve all opportunities and advantages, to exercise his malice upon the children of men.
Sarah Jack: He is an indefatigable as well as an implacable enemy.
Josh Hutchinson: Three, the covenant people of God and those that would devote themselves entirely to his service are the special objects of Satan's rage and fury.
Sarah Jack: Four, that in all Satan's malicious designs and operations, he is absolutely bounded and limited by the power and pleasure of the great and everlasting God, the Lord Jehovah.
Josh Hutchinson: Five, that whensoever God hath declared a person or people to be in covenant with him as the objects of his special mercy and favor, he will assuredly and shortly suppress the malice of Satan, however violently engaged against them.
Sarah Jack: 6. The great God doth manage all his designs of mercy to his people under the gospel dispensation in and through the mediator. The very tenure of the gospel covenant is such, and the terms thereof are so methodized as to introduce a [00:36:00] necessity of depending on a mediator. The whole transaction of the gospel covenant betwixt the Great God and fallen Man Is by the Mediator, hence it is on better terms than the Covenant of Works, Hebrews 8:6. Under the new covenant, all addresses to God are by the Mediator, Hebrews 4: 15 and 16, and all communications of grace from God are by the Mediator, John 1:16.
Josh Hutchinson: After stating these six prepositions, Lawson then listed his six uses for the chosen verse.
Sarah Jack: One, let it be for solemn warning and awakening to all of us that are before the Lord at this time and to all other of this whole people who shall come to the knowledge of these direful operations of Satan which the Holy God hath permitted in the midst of us.
Josh Hutchinson: 2. Let it be for deep humiliation to the people of this place, which is in special under the influence of this fearful judgment of God. The Lord doth at this day manage a great controversy with you, to the [00:37:00] astonishment of yourselves and others. You are, therefore, to be deeply humbled, and fit in the dust considering.
Sarah Jack: Three, it is matter of terror, amazement, and astonishment to all such wretched souls, if there be any here in the congregation, and God of His infinite mercy grant that none of you may ever be found such, as have given up their names and souls to the devil, who by covenant, explicit or implicit, have bound themselves to be his slaves and dredges, consenting to be instruments, in whose shapes he may torment and afflict their fellow creatures, even of their own kind, to the amazing and astonishing of the standers by.
Josh Hutchinson: 4. Let it be for caution to all of us that are before the Lord, as ever we would prevail with God, to prevent the spreading of this sore affliction, and to rebuke Satan for us. Let us take heed of siding with, or giving place unto, the Devil.
Sarah Jack: 5. Let it be for exhortation and direction to this whole assembly, and to all [00:38:00] others that shall come to the knowledge of these amazing dispensations, here then give me leave to press those special duties which all persons are concerned to put in practice at such a time as this."
Josh Hutchinson: Six. The sixth and last use is in two words of comfort, to bear up the fainting souls of those that are personally under, or relatively concerned in, these direful operations of the grand enemy of mankind.
Sarah Jack: Lawson wrapped up his sermon with a conclusion.
Josh Hutchinson: He said, "to conclude, the Lord is known by the judgments which he executes in the midst of us. The dispensations of his providence appear to be unsearchable, and his doing pass finding out. He seems to have allowed Satan to afflict many of our people, and that thereupon he has come down in great wrath, threatening the destruction of the bodies,and if the infinite mercy of God prevent not, of the souls of many in this place, yet may we say in the midst of the terrible things which He doth in righteousness. He alone is the [00:39:00] God of our salvation, who represents himself as the savior of all that are in a low and distressed condition, because he is good and his mercy endures forever.
Sarah Jack: Let us then return and repent, rent our hearts and not our garments. Who can tell if the Lord will return in mercy unto us, and by his Spirit lift up a standard against the grand enemy who threatens to come in like a flood among us and overthrow all that is holy and just and good? It is no small comfort to consider that Job's exerciseof patience had its beginning from the Devil, but we have seen the end to be from the Lord, James 5:11, that we also may find by experience the same blessed issue of our present distresses by Satan's malice.
Sarah Jack: Let us repent of every sin that hath been committed, and labor to practice every duty which hath been neglected. And when we are humbled and proved for our good in the latter end, then we shall assuredly and speedily find that the kingly power of our Lord and Savior shall [00:40:00] be magnified in delivering his poor sheep and lambs out of the jaws and paws of the roaring lion.
Josh Hutchinson: Then will Jesus, the blessed anti-type of Joshua, the redeemer and chooser, quell, suppress, and utterly vanquish this adversary of ours with irresistible power and authority, according to our text. And the Lord said unto Satan, The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan, even the Lord that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee. Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?"
Sarah Jack: Once Rebecca Nurse and Dorothy Good were jailed, there were a total of six people behind bars for allegedly participating in the Salem Witch Conspiracy.
Josh Hutchinson: Also imprisoned were Martha Cory, Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.
Sarah Jack: In the next episode in our Salem Witch Hunt 101 series, we will cover the remainder of March and the beginning of April, getting into accusations against Rachel Clinton, Sarah Cloyce, and Elizabeth Procter.
Josh Hutchinson: And now Sarah has End Witch Hunts [00:41:00] News.
Sarah Jack: As we wrap up this episode, we're excited to share some recent developments. End Witch Hunts just completed its first international trip, attending and presenting at two academic conferences outside the United States. This journey was more than just a professional milestone; it was a testament to the global community we've built through this podcast. We had the incredible opportunity to meet 10 of our past podcast guests in person for the first time, plus a rare encounter with Leo Igwe, Director of Advocacy for Alleged Witches. The experience of connecting face to face with these experts, along with several of our dedicated listeners, reinforced the impact of our work.
Sarah Jack: This podcast is unique in delivering firsthand experiences and research from organizations and individuals working directly in communities affected by witch hunts.Our guests bring context and perspective from around the world, offering insights you won't find anywhere else. Our time in England, filled with enriching conversations, has inspired [00:42:00] a wealth of important updates and fascinating content that we can't wait to share with you this fall.
Sarah Jack: We'll be bringing you snippets from our conference presentations on our projects, World Without Witch Hunts, End SARA, and the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project. If you'd like to support our work and help cover the costs of attending these conferences, please consider making a donation. You'll find the link in our show notes.
Sarah Jack: To those who have already contributed, we extend our heartfelt thanks. Your support is crucial in our ongoing efforts to end harmful practicesand witch accusations. Thank you for being part of this critical mission. We'll be back next week with more insights and stories from the front lines of ending witch hunts. Until then, stay informed and stay engaged.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for joining us for this episode.
Sarah Jack: Be sure to join us again next week.
Josh Hutchinson: And if you haven't already done so, check out our extensive back catalog of episodes.
Sarah Jack: We have now done 28 episodes on the Salem Witch Trials. A link to these episodes is [00:43:00] included in the show notes.
Josh Hutchinson: And we will continue to bring you the best witch trial content.
Sarah Jack: Subscribe to our newsletter and always know what's coming up. The link is in the show notes.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you. Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

September 29, 2024

Tour Salem’s Witch Trial History with Antonio Infante

We’re joined by Antonio Infante, a Salem Witch Trials Historic Tour Guide and author. Antonio shares his journey into becoming a guide, sparked by a personal connection to the Salem witch trials through his ancestor. As he highlights the importance of accurate storytelling, Antonio offers a snapshot look at the Essex National Heritage Area’s historic tour that dispels myths about the trials. This episode also explores broader Massachusetts witch trial history and ongoing efforts for justice for all those wrongfully accused, not just the accused in 1692. He gives us a glimpse into his upcoming book about accused witch Sarah Cloyce, sister of Rebecca Nurse, titled Sober and Civil: Being a true narrative of one Sarah Towne Cloyse, formerly Bridges.

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Links

⁠Donate to Our UK Conference Trip GoFundMe Campaign to speak and learn about ending witch hunts⁠

⁠End Witch Hunts⁠

⁠Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project⁠

⁠Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project⁠

⁠Maryland Witches Exoneration Project⁠

⁠Witch Hunt Website⁠

⁠Salem Witch-Hunt Education Project

Transcript

Tour Salem’s Witch Trial History with Antonio Infante Download

September 29, 2024
The Putnams of Salem: A Conversation with Author Greg Houle

Dive with us into one of the most infamous chapters of American history—the Salem Witch Trials. Returning to the show is author and host of The Salem Witch Trials Podcast, Greg Houle, who brings a unique perspective to these events through his historical fiction novel, The Putnams of Salem. As a descendant of Thomas Putnam Jr., a key accuser in the trials, Greg has a personal connection to the story that inspired his writing.

Greg shares his journey in crafting The Putnams of Salem, exploring how his lineage influenced his portrayal of the historical figures involved. Greg’s innovative storytelling approach in his book, which features a dual narrative from the perspectives of Thomas Putnam Jr. and his daughter Ann, offers fresh insights into the trials’ dynamics.

In this conversation we discuss the complexities of the Salem Witch Trials, and the significance of challenging common misconceptions and humanizing the individuals through podcasting and writing. We also discuss how his successful podcast, The Salem Witch Trials Podcast, complements his novel by offering deeper insights..

Throughout our conversation, we examine themes of fear, frontier conflicts, and the personal motivations of those involved in the trials, offering a nuanced perspective that only descendants could provide on a widely misunderstood episode in American history.

Whether you’re a history buff, a fiction lover, or simply curious about the Salem Witch Trials, this episode by Salem descendants promises a fascinating discussion on how fiction can shed light on historical truths and the complexities of the past.

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Links

⁠www.theputnamsofsalem.com⁠

⁠The Salem Witch Trials Podcast⁠

⁠greghoule.info⁠

⁠AP Article: Group seeks to clear names of all accused, convicted or executed for witchcraft in MA⁠

⁠Sign the Petition: MA Witch Hunt Justice Project⁠

⁠www.massachusettswitchtrials.org⁠

⁠Pownal Historical Society on Facebook⁠

⁠Bennington Museum Special Exhibits⁠

Transcript

The Putnams of Salem_ A Conversation with Author Greg Houle Download

August 28, 2024
Witch Trials and Modern Witchcraft Accusations: Insights from 100 Episodes

In this milestone 100th episode of Witch Hunt Podcast, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack reflect on their journey of exploring historical witch trials and modern witchcraft accusations. The episode begins with a recap of the podcast’s evolution from its initial focus on early modern witch trials to its current coverage of the ongoing global crisis of witch hunts. The hosts discuss their exploration of historical witch trials in various locations, particularly in New England and Europe, delving into the social, religious, and political factors that contributed to these events. They examine the impact of witch trials on individuals, families, and communities, both historically and in the present day.

The conversation then shifts to efforts to exonerate and memorialize victims of historical witch trials, highlighting the importance of these initiatives for justice and education. A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to discussing modern witch hunts, also known as harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks. The hosts outline the United Nations’ recognition of this issue as a human rights concern and various efforts by governments, NGOs, and grassroots organizations to address the problem. They emphasize the need for a multi-faceted approach to combat these harmful practices, including education, legal reform, community engagement, and challenging harmful beliefs.

Towards the end of the episode, Josh and Sarah announce their upcoming speaking engagements at two academic conferences on witchcraft in England, where they’ll discuss modern witch hunts, exoneration efforts, and their project tracking spiritual and ritual abuse in the United States. This comprehensive episode serves as both a retrospective of the podcast’s journey and a call to action for addressing ongoing issues related to witchcraft accusations worldwide.

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Episode Links:

Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch Hunts: A Global History

Skeletons in the Closet: The Memorialization of George Jacobs Sr. and Rebecca Nurse after the 1692 Witch-Hunt

Donate to End Witch Hunts

End Witch Hunts

The International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices

International Alliance to End Witch Hunts

Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project

Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project

Transcript

Witch Trials and Modern Witchcraft Accusations_ Insights from 100 Episodes Download

August 14, 2024
Salem Witch Hunt Saga: The First Arrests

Thank you for joining us for this narrative history of the Salem Witch Trials. This third part of our Salem Witch-Hunt 101 series focuses on the first arrests and interrogations of Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba in late February and early March 1692.

On Witch Hunt, the people and key events are real. The examinations are taken directly from the historical record. The depositions of afflicted persons Elizabeth Hubbard and Ann Putnam Jr. are paraphrased for natural conversation, while the deposition of the adult men Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, and Ezekiel Cheever is presented verbatim.

Join us as we spend time in the early moments of the infamous Salem Witch Trials, based on actual words from the historical documents. Whether you’re a history enthusiast or a curious listener, this episode promises to be both informative and enjoyable.

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Helpful Links

Witch-Hunting in European and World History – Ronald Hutton

Donate: End Witch Hunts UK Advocacy Trip Fund

End Witch Hunts

Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project

Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project

Witch Hunt Website

Salem Witch-Hunt Education Project

Learn more about SARA

Transcript

Salem Witch Hunt Saga_ The First Arrests Download

July 23, 2024

The Salem Witch-Hunt Saga: Beginnings

Join Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack on the ‘Witch Hunt’ podcast for the second episode of their ‘Salem Witch-Hunt 101’ series. Josh narrates the chilling events of February 1692 in Salem Village, focusing on the strange behaviors of Abigail Williams and Betty Parris that ignited fears of witchcraft. He explores the harsh winter, social tensions, and the reactions of the community, including the infamous ‘witch cake’ and accusations against Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. In this unique episode, Sarah hears Josh’s account for the first time, providing fresh reactions and questions that enhance the storytelling. The episode concludes with reflections on the motivations behind the Salem Witch Trials, with additional insights from Mary Louise Bingham. Tune in for an engaging retelling of the early days of the Salem Witch Hunt, based on historical records.

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The Sermon Notebook of Samuel of Samuel Parris

The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-By-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege

A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience

The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem

Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project

Witch Hunt Website

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast bringing you the most in-depth coverage of the Salem Witch Trials. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today we are excited to present the second episode in the Salem Witch-Hunt 101 series.
Josh Hutchinson: We're taking a different approach to this one. I'll be telling a narrative of the events of early 1692.
Sarah Jack: And I'm hearing this telling of the story for the very first time, just like everyone watching or listening.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I've really kept this one under wraps from you, so I can't wait to hear your reactions to it.
Sarah Jack: I can't wait to hear what you've done with your story.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, thank you. I think it's going to be quite a new experience for everyone.
Sarah Jack: I'm going to have some questions for you.
Josh Hutchinson: I sure hope so. The Salem Witch Hunt had its beginnings long before the trials began. [00:01:00] We discussed the precursors to the witch hunt in our last Salem Witch Hunt 101 episode. Today, we will focus on events in Salem Village in February, 1692.
Sarah Jack: I am excited.
Sarah Jack: Yes, now that we have those things out of the way, we get to dive in to some story.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we're going to tell some little stories, um, about big events. In these stories we're going to tell in this series, we'll be recreating several major scenes from the Salem Witch Hunt using the facts that are, we get from the records left behind.
Sarah Jack: The records are the story. What we can build out of what is written is all we have.
Josh Hutchinson: And that's what we're working with tonight. So here comes the story. [00:02:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Scene 1, Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony, February 1692. The girl flitters across the room, chirping like a bird. Abigail Williams, the minister's niece and ward, aged 11, has been acting strangely lately. Perhaps a winter's confinement in a frigid house has given her cabin fever. Maybe she's just restless. A preteen in the boring 17th century, Abigail has been orphaned and lives in the care of her relative, Salem Village Minister Samuel Parris, who is known as her uncle, though the exact relationship is unclear. Parris's daughter Elizabeth, called Betty, is at this moment on all fours under a table, barking like a dog, while alternately complaining of terrible pain. Earlier, she had honked like a goose and soared through the air, all the way across the Parsonage's Great Hall. Nobody had seen her toes touching the ground. They'd all been fixated on the [00:03:00] honking and flapping, which would have been hard to ignore.
Josh Hutchinson: Now Samuel Parris paces the floor, following Abigail, constantly praying as he walks behind her. Maybe the girls are ill, but if they are, what manner of illness causes these antics? Whatever it is, the minister has had enough of it. How can anyone expect him to write each week's sermon in this environment? He abruptly stops following Abigail.
Sarah Jack: Two thoughts popped into my mind. Is this truly the first time Betty has been so silly? I think from what we know of what was permitted for behavior, it's possible.
Josh Hutchinson: It is, I'm sure Betty, she's nine years old and Abigail's 11. They're at very silly ages. So probably, but to this extent, it seems like this was the first [00:04:00] time that they were flapping like geese and barking like dogs and mewing like kittens and everything. Um, So it was quite different and everybody was taken aback by it.
Sarah Jack: The other thing I wondered if it went through the minister's mind, is is this affliction? Like, right away.
Josh Hutchinson: Right. He was in Boston at, in 1688 when Goody Glover was arrested and executed for witchcraft towards the Glover children, who behaved in much the same way that Abigail and Betty are described as behaving. And he would have been fully aware, Cotton Mather had written a book about that. And, uh, Samuel Parris definitely was aware, and presumably his children were also aware of that story.
Josh Hutchinson: And this might be something that they [00:05:00] got afflicted, um, through whatever mechanism, and they had imbibed these stories about affliction. So once somebody told them, "oh, you're afflicted" or something, it just triggered these behaviors from them because this is what they have known and heard all their, their lives.
Sarah Jack: All right.
Josh Hutchinson: "I have to get this sermon done, Elizabeth." He says to his wife, the former Elizabeth Eldridge, "I'm going to Ingersoll's. It'll be quieter there."
Sarah Jack:
Josh Hutchinson: "Quieter at Ingersoll's? Well, I'm sure he'd let you use one of his rooms. "
Josh Hutchinson: The minister goes to his desk and grabs his material and Bible. Looking at the ice just forming atop the ink, he says, "warmer at Ingersoll's, too."
Josh Hutchinson: "Why don't you see if he has any more wood to spare?"
Josh Hutchinson: "He doesn't. He's already given us our share. It's those unregenerate types that are withholding."
Josh Hutchinson: [00:06:00] Samuel Parris strides to the door and steps out, letting the door swing shut hard behind him. Betty jumps, striking her head on the bottom of the table. She rubs the sore and then crawls out from underneath, now whimpering like a scolded puppy. Maybe she and her cousin are ill, but, strangely, nobody else in the household has been acting anything but normal. Why has the illness not touched Betty's siblings, Thomas and Susannah? Why not Tituba or John? Why not Elizabeth Parris Sr., who seems to always be sick with something or other?
Josh Hutchinson: Maybe the girls have succumbed to the pressures facing the Parris household this long, cold winter. They received a fraction of the firewood they need to live comfortably, and Samuel often finds himself writing his sermons at Ingersoll's or sometimes the nearby Walcott home or even Thomas Putnam's house. With the minister under intense pressure, [00:07:00] that may have rubbed off on some of the children.
Sarah Jack: It's really important to recognize how brutal that cold was on the Parris household. I mean, you don't feel good when you're cold, and he's writing these sermons that are a remedy to, for his people. They have to hear what he's saying from God's word so that they're headed in the right direction. I just wonder if, if, you know, we say fire and brimstone about some of these messages when he was actually experiencing cold and ice. You just wonder, you know, how much he was taking out on his parishioners because he was so mad that they didn't want to keep him warm.[00:08:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, there was a point where he said, or wrote down in his sermon notebook, I believe, that he would have, he was going to run out of firewood completely the next day. And so he was trying to get, desperately all the time to get more people to give him more, but of course they need their own firewood for the winter. Um, it's the coldest years of the Little Ice Age. And it's Massachusetts, so it's just brutal, uh, going through this winter. I can hardly imagine living in a house where you're all just like huddled real close because your fire is small and you don't have heat, you know, coming from the central hearth all the way through the house, uh, constantly.
Josh Hutchinson: So I guess they wore a lot of coats.
Sarah Jack: They were just cold. [00:09:00] They were cold.
Josh Hutchinson: They were, it had to have been miserable. And then there's all the stresses facing him. There's other parties in the village who don't want him to be a minister anymore. So he's dealing with that frustration. And I'm sure just the stress level in that household was too much for these girls to bear. Um, I'm surprised that the rest of the household didn't have some kind of reaction to that.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. I was just thinking, there's really no evidence of a reaction of, "hey, cut it out, this is unacceptable." They just reacted to the behavior.
Josh Hutchinson: Right.
Sarah Jack: Although there is somebody who did react to somebody's, that's later in the story. John [00:10:00] Proctor. Isn't he the one that just tells her to cut it out?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Yeah. He sits her at her spinning wheel and threatens to thrash the devil out of her if she keeps behaving, because he really believes that she's acting and just playing around and it's going to be dangerous and people are going to get hurt.
Sarah Jack: Yeah,
Josh Hutchinson: He recognizes that pretty early. Yeah. As soon as people started getting arrested, John Proctor knew, um, this is going bad. So.
Josh Hutchinson: So, the minister has prayed for weeks, but nothing in the girls' conditions has improved. They still contort into strange shapes, impossible to be caused by any known natural illness. They writhe in agony and cry out of pain.
Josh Hutchinson: Samuel knows many of the villagers have turned their backs on him. But this seems more sinister, more diabolical. Or [00:11:00] is it God's judgment on him? No, it can't be personally against him. He's doing the best anyone can. Maybe it is to address the sins of the community collectively.
Josh Hutchinson: If praying isn't working, maybe a fast will be necessary. He will preach another impassioned sermon on Sunday, reminding his congregation of the constant presence of the devil, who lurks about the village, as he does any place where such a beacon of godliness as Samuel Parris dwells. Monday, Samuel will hold a private fast.
Josh Hutchinson: It is the devil who has poisoned men's minds against Samuel's ministry, and if there were ever a time for evil to gain a foothold in the village, he knows it is in this period of division. Samuel has to keep up his sermons and has to warn the villagers before it is too late. He will have to alert area pastors too, but maybe it's time for them to come over anyways to hold a significant fast.
Sarah Jack: [00:12:00] Samuel.
Josh Hutchinson: Alas, the cold numbs Samuel Parris's mind as he walks the short distance to Ingersoll's next door. What is he trying to get at in his sermons this week again? Samuel pulls the front door open and steps inside Nathaniel Ingersoll's Ordinary, a tavern that does quite well for itself with its central location in the village and its close proximity to the meeting house. Come Sunday, this place will be absolutely packed between the two services.
Josh Hutchinson: Nathaniel Ingersoll stands at the back of the room, discussing something with his adopted son, Benjamin Hutchinson, who helps out around the tavern. Samuel closes the door behind himself, and the two other men break off their conversation.
Josh Hutchinson: Nathaniel says, Good day, Samuel.
Josh Hutchinson: And Benjamin says, Good morning, Reverend, will you be needing a room again?
Josh Hutchinson: I would be indebted to you.
Josh Hutchinson: Nathaniel says, think [00:13:00] nothing of it, room's just sitting there unoccupied.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Samuel says, there's a ruckus at the house again.
Josh Hutchinson: I figured as much, Nathaniel says.
Josh Hutchinson: Benjamin leads Samuel upstairs and opens a door. Samuel enters and closes the door behind himself. He will be in here all day, except for meals and trips to the privy out in the yard.
Josh Hutchinson: On Sunday morning, with his sermon written, Samuel Parris leads his family the short distance from their home to the meeting house. Entering, they once again find this building even colder than the house they left. There's no fireplace here. There's no grand hearth for cooking and warming. Measuring a modest 34 by 28 feet, the wooden meeting house features a gallery to help fit the many, many people who worship here.
Sarah Jack: And there's a place today that people can visit a replica of the meeting house.[00:14:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Yes. If you go to the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, you get a replica built to the exact dimensions that were recorded in the Salem Village Record Book. It's quite remarkable to go in there and see a pulpit just like the one Samuel Parris would have preached at.
Sarah Jack: I was able to stop by last May, so a year ago, May now, when advocate Dr. Leo Igwe
Sarah Jack: with Advocacy for Alleged Witches was in New England doing a speaking tour and visiting the memorials, and he did his presentation there, standing in front of the pulpit. It was extremely moving to think about what that room symbolizes and, of course, the message today that Leo is giving the world and the work that he's doing to save lives. The other thing that was special to me was [00:15:00] being able to look out of the window at the meeting house and over to the homestead. I just liked looking through that old glass.
Josh Hutchinson: The homestead is such a wonderful place to visit, but getting inside that meeting house for an actual talk was really a great experience.
Sarah Jack: We're so appreciative to the team at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead for hosting him and opening it up to us and, um, all of those who attended.
Sarah Jack: it was very special to, to have him there.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes. And for you listening, we have done two episodes with Leo Igwe, and I do recommend that you go back and listen to those to hear what's going on in the modern world with witchcraft accusations.
Sarah Jack: The [00:16:00] other thing I wanted to point out is unfortunately we can't, um, go to Ingersoll's. But there is lots of photos and chatter among descendants and locals online about its future.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes. And we've recently done a bonus episode on "Nathaniel Ingersoll and His Tavern in the Salem Witch Trials" and recommend you go back and take a look at that or listen to that. And there is a very passionate community online that has developed around what the future might hold for that institution there.
Josh Hutchinson: On January 3rd, Samuel had preached that, "Christ having begun a new work, it is the main drift of the devil to pull it all down." Today, February 14th, he will warn the church of the dangers of [00:17:00] division and devilry. " is a woeful piece of our corruption in an evil time when the wicked people and the godly party meet with vexations by and by to lay down divine providence as if God has forsaken the earth and there were no prophet in his service."
Josh Hutchinson: His vitriol is largely directed at those in the village who oppose him. They've challenged his ownership of the parsonage and his role as a minister. The village voted to withhold his pay and firewood, and once Joseph Hutchinson, a village committee member who had donated the land for the meeting house, fenced the building in. Now, for those of you keeping track, Joseph Hutchinson was the birth father of Benjamin Hutchinson, who he'd put in the care of the Ingersolls, who had lost their only daughter. Joseph himself had seven sons and four daughters, so obviously had a kid to spare for the Ingersolls. [00:18:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Today, Parris will also speak of "the present low condition of the church in the midst of its enemies." Non-Christians have inhabited this continent since time immemorial, and now those French Catholics to the north are encroaching again with the aid of their Wabanaki allies.
Josh Hutchinson: Monday morning, Samuel Parris rises well before dawn with the rest of his household. Betty and Abigail persist in their afflictions. Samuel needs medical advice, but first he will turn to the ministers. He sits at his desk and breaks out his writing materials, but the ink has frozen overnight again.
Josh Hutchinson: "Elizabeth," Samuel says, "warm this ink for me."
Josh Hutchinson: She takes the inkwell and places it in a pot, which she hangs over the low fire. In a few minutes, she returns the ink to her husband. The inkwell is warm to his touch. He sets it on his desk and draws ink into his pen.
Josh Hutchinson: "John," Samuel [00:19:00] says, now handing John a paper, "take this letter to Nathaniel's, he needs to send messengers to the local ministers to ask them to meet me here as soon as they all can attend to see the girls."
John takes the note and departs. Samuel and family spend the rest of the day, amidst numerous interruptions by the girls, fasting and praying, but the girls do remain unwell and continue to behave strangely.
Josh Hutchinson: On February 24th, Parris sends John on another errand. This time he is to retrieve Salem Village's only physician, William Griggs, who lives some distance down the road.
Sarah Jack: pulls Samuel aside
Josh Hutchinson: After Griggs examines the girl, he pulls Samuel aside for a conversation. "They're under an evil hand," he says.
Josh Hutchinson: "You're sure it isn't anything medical?"
Josh Hutchinson: Absolutely. This affliction is not natural.
Josh Hutchinson: "Then Satan is after me." [00:20:00]
Josh Hutchinson: "I'm afraid so."
Josh Hutchinson: In the parsonage and around the village, talk turns to witches. Perhaps the girls were bewitched by one of Satan's agents. Christ knew there were devils in his church. On February 25th, Samuel and Elizabeth Parris travel for the Thursday lecture, a weekly event hosted by various neighboring communities on a rotating schedule.
Josh Hutchinson: While they are away, a neighbor, Mary Sibley, stays with the children. Mary Sibley speaks with Tituba and John.
Josh Hutchinson: "Here's what we're going to do," she says. "Tituba, you collect some urine from Betty and Abigail. John, get the rye flour."
Josh Hutchinson: "What do you have in mind?" Tituba asks.
Josh Hutchinson: "We're going to stop a witch."
Josh Hutchinson: "With urine."
Josh Hutchinson: "By baking a special cake, the girl's urine is needed so we can burn off some of the magic that the witch put in them."
Josh Hutchinson: Soon, Tituba collects the urine of the girls, and John retrieves the heavy sack of rye flour, while [00:21:00] Elizabeth gathers the rest of what they'll need. The three adults meet at the hearth and bake the cake, with the girls wailing in agony behind them, contorting again into several bizarre shapes. After John removes the cake from the oven, Mary calls for the family dog, who eagerly devours the morsel. According to English custom, this witch-finding technique will reveal the identity of the woman who has afflicted the girls. Mary isn't exactly sure how, but her own mother taught her to do this. Maybe the witch will be hurt, or maybe she'll turn up at the door.
Sarah Jack: The witch cake is not voodoo.
Josh Hutchinson: The witch cake was English, and Mary Sibley instructed Tituba and John how to bake it, because they hadn't done anything like that before using English [00:22:00] countermagic.
Sarah Jack: How great if that had burned the magic off. What a great quick intervention that would have been.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, if only that had worked, could have spared months and months and months of trials and, um, all those deaths.
Josh Hutchinson: Now, the same day the witch cake is baked, two more village girls become afflicted. Ann Putnam Jr. is the daughter of Parris ally Mr. Thomas Putnam Jr. and Mrs. Ann Carr Putnam. Thomas and the two Anns have made several visits to the parsonage since Betty and Abigail have been ill. And I want to throw in that Thomas Putnam was also a sergeant in the local militia, serving under Lieutenant Nathaniel Ingersoll and Captain Jonathan Walcott, who are [00:23:00] also important characters in the Salem Witch Hunt story.
Josh Hutchinson: Now, another visitor who's taken ill is Elizabeth Hubbard, an orphan teenage girl living with her relatives, the Griggses. She has also visited the parsonage along with the physician, whom she serves as maid. At 17, Hubbard is five years older than Ann Putnam Jr., making her the oldest person yet afflicted and the first of legal age to be able to bear witness in court. Her age lends credence to witchcraft accusations against villagers Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, whom Hubbard accuses of attacking her spectrally, which is to say the shapes of the women appear to her. They do not visit bodily. Everyone knows witches have the ability to leave their bodies and travel great distances to torment their victims.
Sarah Jack: There's some things, like, here where you say, everybody knows. [00:24:00] There were, this is one of the things that everybody knew. It was like, not a question. They believed it. Just as much as they believed the devil was visiting them.
Josh Hutchinson: Um, when I say everyone, of course, I mean, virtually everyone, um, believed in witchcraft. And if you didn't believe in witchcraft, that led people to call you an atheist, because how could you believe in God, not believe in his adversary, the devil, and then the devil's ability to, uh, contract with witches to do his work?
Josh Hutchinson: The girl writhes, twisting and turning, shouting at the top of her lungs, "they got me!"
Josh Hutchinson: "Who got you?" Thomas Putnam Jr. asks.
Josh Hutchinson: I don't know, but it hurts. It hurts. Make it stop.
Josh Hutchinson: Shh. [00:25:00] It's okay, Annie. You'll be fine. God is with you always.
Josh Hutchinson: It's not okay. I won't be fine.
Josh Hutchinson: What makes you say that?
Josh Hutchinson: I feel like my bowels are being torn out.
Josh Hutchinson: We are praying as hard as we can.
Josh Hutchinson: It's not enough.
Josh Hutchinson: Then we'll fast.
Josh Hutchinson: No, I'm being pinched and pricked and choked right now. Don't you see that? How do you fast that away?
Josh Hutchinson: I'm sorry, Annie, but you know the best weapon is prayer, the best weapon that we have in this spiritual battle.
Josh Hutchinson: What's wrong with me, Father?
Josh Hutchinson: I wish I knew.
Josh Hutchinson: Is it natural?
Josh Hutchinson: No, there is something very dark in this village.
Josh Hutchinson: The spectral figure of a woman approaches Ann, holding out a little red book and a red pen. Take it, she says. Sign the book and you'll be freed from your troubles. And if I don't, then we'll kill you.
Josh Hutchinson: Father, save me!
Josh Hutchinson: If father won't save you, nobody will.[00:26:00]
Josh Hutchinson: God, preserve me.
Josh Hutchinson: Just sign the book and you'll be free from your guilt, worry, and pain.
Josh Hutchinson: What book is that?
Josh Hutchinson: My God gave it to me.
Josh Hutchinson: And who is your God?
Josh Hutchinson: You know who I mean, girl.
Josh Hutchinson: A stabbing pain tears through Ann's chest. God save me, she says. Annie, Annie, Thomas Putnam is calling.
Josh Hutchinson: After a moment, Ann snaps too. The spectral woman has gone away with her book, but Ann just knows she'll be back.
Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Putnam shakes his daughter. "Are you all right?"
Josh Hutchinson: "No, father. A woman came to me with a book and said she'd kill me if I didn't sign it."
Josh Hutchinson: "What woman?"
Josh Hutchinson: "I don't know, but it is none of God's book. It is the devil's book for ought I know."
Josh Hutchinson: "What woman?"
Josh Hutchinson: "I couldn't make out her face."
Josh Hutchinson: But you must have seen her before.
Josh Hutchinson: She had a familiar aspect.
Josh Hutchinson: How did she get in here? I didn't see anyone come in.
Josh Hutchinson: She appeared spectrally from [00:27:00] thin air.
Josh Hutchinson: A witch.
Josh Hutchinson: I think so.
Josh Hutchinson: I knew it.
Josh Hutchinson: But how?
Josh Hutchinson: This explains everything. Mercy!
Josh Hutchinson: Panting, maid Mercy Lewis enters the room. "Sir," she says.
Josh Hutchinson: "Run and get my brother Edward. Tell him a witch has assaulted Annie."
Josh Hutchinson: Mercy turns and strides away to the stairs. A moment later, the front door squeaks open and promptly slams shut. Footsteps ascend the stairs, and Mother ducks into the garret.
Josh Hutchinson: "What's all this about a witch, then?" she asks.
Josh Hutchinson: Annie twists and winds.
Josh Hutchinson: "Look at Annie, Thomas says. A witch has done this."
Josh Hutchinson: How do you know it's a witch?
Josh Hutchinson: She saw a shape.
Josh Hutchinson: What shape?
Josh Hutchinson: A woman.
Josh Hutchinson: Annie groans.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you think this means? Witchcraft in our village?
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and they say the minister's girls are bewitched as well.
Josh Hutchinson: Oh dear, after they've been sick for so long, why do they suddenly suspect a [00:28:00] witch?
Josh Hutchinson: I don't know, but that's all anyone can talk about when I was over this morning. I suppose we'd better fetch Griggs and Parris to tell us if I'm right.
Josh Hutchinson: I'll send Mercy as soon as she gets back from Edwards.
Josh Hutchinson: No, I want to go now. I'll saddle the horse.
Josh Hutchinson: What shall I do while you're gone?
Josh Hutchinson: Pray, he says and mind she doesn't hurt herself.
Josh Hutchinson: God send you back to us safely.
Sarah Jack: So much fear.
Josh Hutchinson: So much fear. There's talk about, um, we recently, in an interview, our guest Francis Bremer talked to us about Chadwick Hansen's book, Witchcraft in Salem, and in there, he posits the theory that if you truly believe in witchcraft, as soon as you believe that you've actually been cursed, your body and mind [00:29:00] takes all that in, and psychogenically you have reactions. You can have psychosomatic symptoms of bewitchment that basically are just brought on by your intense fear. And I believe that's something that is plausible that the girls experienced.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. I mean, they're scared. Their parents are expressing their fear by their response to what's happening to the kids and what they're saying. And yeah, it's just, they have to find the witch.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Imagine if your children were behaving this way, screaming about pain, being twisted up like pretzels and, you know, do just randomly rolling around the room, writhing in agony, [00:30:00] screaming, get off me, get off me, you know, you would think that somebody's attacking them. You can't. I mean, what else do you think at that point?
Sarah Jack: Yeah. If, you know, the cure, the only cure is finding the witch, then that's what has to be found. With the littles that have been in my house, sometimes when they get hurt, they need an ice pack for the injury. They're in pain, you can see the bump on their leg, what's happened, ice is going to make it feel better. It's such a comfort to them that often they might have a bump that they might get bumped and there is no wound. But they want the ice, because it comforts them. And so the ice is an actual remedy for inflammation and swelling, but other times [00:31:00] just knowing that they can go to the freezer and grab an ice pack, and they do it for each other too. I think there's this element of community that, you know, it's a family and you're trying to help each other. And you see that in your own interactions with, um, people in your life. You, you try to solve each other's problems and find the remedy.
Josh Hutchinson: And it's interesting, I had mentioned that Parris had prayed for weeks. He fasted, uh, several times over January and February and the girls, they got sick in the middle of January and this, now we're towards the end of February. It's so interesting to me that it took basically six weeks for them running through all those measures that they normally take when somebody's ill, um, and doing the past, the fasting and the prayer. [00:32:00] You know, nursing the children as, you know, their mothers would have nursed them. Um, others from the community would have pitched in and come to the houses to see how they could help. Um, but after that, they run out of ideas. And basically you're left with, it must be a witch, it must be diabolical, especially after Dr. Griggs says it's nothing natural, uh, at that point, what's left. And like you said, when you know there is something that could cure or help the person in pain, then that's what you do. And when you believe that, that thing that you can do is to stop a witch, you put your whole heart into that. And I think that's what we see, uh, later on in upcoming episodes. We'll see all that playing out that these [00:33:00] people put their hearts in it because they really wanted to stop the afflictions from happening.
Josh Hutchinson: Sometime later, Thomas returns home to find his brother Edward and neighbor Henry Kinney in the Great Hall, praying over Annie, while Ann Sr., Mercy Lewis, and Mercy's sister, Priscilla Kinney, hover over the afflicted girl. When the door shuts, the people in the room stop and turn to Thomas.
Josh Hutchinson: What's the news? Edward Putnam says.
Josh Hutchinson: Where's the minister? Ann Putnam Sr. asks.
Josh Hutchinson: Where's Griggs? Henry Kinney asks.
Josh Hutchinson: Griggs girl is afflicted too. She also complains of women assaulting her.
Josh Hutchinson: Has she named them?
Josh Hutchinson: No.
Josh Hutchinson: And what of the minister?
Josh Hutchinson: He's tied up with his own girls, but he's added Annie to his prayers, says he'll come visit when his man gets back from some errand at Ingersoll's.
Josh Hutchinson: Dear God, Henry says, four of them afflicted now?
Josh Hutchinson: [00:34:00] It's spreading, Edward says.
Josh Hutchinson: The following two days, February 26 and 27, 1692, will prove pivotal, as these are the days the girls begin naming the names. Not one, but three women will be accused by the end of these days. Tituba, the enslaved indigenous woman in the Parris household, is the first accused when Betty and Abigail cry out against her, the woman who has cared for them as much as their own mother has, who will go on to profess much love for them during her examinations by the magistrates. Born in South America or the Caribbean, Tituba may have been an Arawak or a Carib Parris likely purchased her during his time in Barbados, where he tried to run his father's sugar business before his return to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he had for a time attended Harvard College, his academic career cut short by his [00:35:00] father's death in Barbados. To say Samuel was a poor businessman is quite an understatement. The man seems to never quite settle into a profession at which he will be able to succeed.
Josh Hutchinson: At any rate, he had Tituba in Barbados, and he brought her to Boston in 1680 or 1681. Except while he served as temporary minister in Stowe in 1685, Samuel remained in Boston working as a merchant until men from Salem Village approached him about being the town's minister in 1688. When he accepted the call in 1689 and moved his family to Salem Village, he brought Tituba with him. It's unclear when he acquired the man known as John Indian, a man of undetermined Indigenous background. And for a time, a third enslaved person, an African American teenage boy, also resided in the parsonage with the Parrises. However, Parris recorded the boy's death in March 1689. [00:36:00] While Tituba's exact origin is unknown, Elaine G. Breslaw's book, Tituba: the Reluctant Witch of Salem, posits one plausible theory and is very well worth a read.
Josh Hutchinson: On February 27th, Ann Putnam Jr. accuses Sarah Good of bewitching her. Elizabeth Hubbard, meanwhile, names both Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne as her, her tormentors. In a dramatic incident, Elizabeth claims to be followed by a wolf, which is supposedly directed by Sarah Good, or may even be the shapeshifting Sarah herself.
Josh Hutchinson: In 1692, Sarah Good is an impoverished woman with no permanent housing or reliable income. But things hadn't always been that way. Born Sarah Soulart in about 1654, she was raised by respectable parents in Wenham.
Sarah Jack: Her father, John Soulart, was likely French by birth and may have been [00:37:00] Huguenot by faith. He worked as an innkeeper and left behind a healthy estate, but he took his own life in 1672. And unfortunately Sarah was left in the lurch, inheriting only three acres of meadow. So Sarah married Daniel Poole. Who promptly ran up an eye-watering debt, which Sarah was forced to pay from his meager estate after his death, leaving Sarah destitute.
Josh Hutchinson: She next married William Good by 1683.
Josh Hutchinson: William was a weaver and a laborer who never seemed to stay employed long. He and Sarah had to sell off the meadow to pay additional debts owed by Sarah's first husband. William Good's origins are unknown, but he had two children with Sarah. The first, Dorothy, was born in about 1687. The second daughter, whose name is unknown, was born in December 1691. And we have much more with, about Dorothy in our episode with Rachel [00:38:00] Christ-Doane, that you can refer back to learning what happened to Dorothy after the witch trials. At the time she was accused, Sarah Good was in the habit of going house to house, seeking charity. She evidently was given something at least once by the Parrises, but she left the house muttering, raising suspicions.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah Osborne had caused a scandal when, following the 1674 death of her husband, Robert Prince, she married Alexander Osborne, her young indentured servant. She was also involved in a dispute over her husband's first estate with his kin, Thomas and John Putnam, who were the executors. By February 27th, 1692, Osborne had been sick in bed for at least a year and not been able to attend worship at the meeting house all that time.
Josh Hutchinson: All three accused women [00:39:00] were markedly different from the New England Puritan ideal of what a woman should be. All three were outsiders in key ways. Tituba was most clearly an outsider, being indigenous in a period when Massachusetts English settlers were at war with the Wabanaki Confederacy, an alliance of Algonkian-speaking peoples who had chosen to ally themselves with the French over the British.
Josh Hutchinson: But Sarah Good from Wenham was also a relative newcomer to Salem Village. Being indigent placed her further outside the norms of the community. Requesting charity was itself a risky business in the age of witch hunts, as people who refused to give what was asked for felt guilt, and then resented the one who asked. If something shortly went wrong for the refuser, say a child took ill, or a livestock died, perhaps, then the person who refused the gift would suspect the [00:40:00] one they'd refused was seeking revenge through witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: Aren't there some things in the record where those who were turned away for a favor or a handout were mad when it was refused and they wished something ill on the refuser?
Josh Hutchinson: There are a number of cases exactly like that where someone, say, refused to give milk and the requester then said, "your cow will never give you milk or something to that effect in their irritation and anger and, you know, those words come back to haunt them. Definitely.
Josh Hutchinson: Uh, in the case of Sarah Good, though, she's just accused of muttering. And in the next episode, we'll discuss her examination by the [00:41:00] magistrates and what she says about her muttering.
Josh Hutchinson: Lastly, Sarah Osborne had transgressed social norms by wedding a younger man and indentured servant and by failing to attend meetings on Sundays. With three women accused of witchcraft, the witch hunt was ramping up and would soon be in full swing. We'll cover the first arrests and examinations in our next 101 episode.
Josh Hutchinson: And now we'd like to summarize the facts that we covered in today's stories and help separate fact from fiction. In January 1692, Salem village minister Samuel Parris's daughter, Betty, and his niece, Abigail Williams, began displaying strange symptoms and behaviors. Now, there are many, many theories about what caused the girl's symptoms, and many of these theories, such as ergot, have been disproven. [00:42:00] But I believe it's more important to understand the motivations of the adults who filed the complaints that we'll discuss beginning in our next installment. As I mentioned, so many theories about what caused it. Some theorize that the girls ate bad bread and got ergot poisoning. Others point to encephalitis, meningitis, and other physical ailments, while others point to mental health conditions such as mass psychogenic illness. In several instances, fraud was clearly perpetrated. Were the girls and the other people who were known as afflicted lying about everything? Or were they perhaps trying to strengthen their cases against people they truly believed were bewitching them? That's the big question.
Sarah Jack: It's a big question.
Josh Hutchinson: Whatever caused the ailments, we all know how this story ends. By the end of the saga, at least 156 people had been accused of witchcraft. So why did the men file the complaints and make the accusations they did? [00:43:00] That's something we'll be looking at in our future episodes.
Josh Hutchinson: Continuing with the facts, on February 14th, 1692, Samuel Parris did preach that the godly "must war a good warfare to subdue all our spiritual enemies." And the other lines that I quoted that he said in his sermon, he did say as recorded in his sermon notebook. And it is known that Samuel Parris did observe several private fasts. However, we don't have the specific dates for those, so we don't know whether he held one on February 15th, like I said in the story.
Josh Hutchinson: On February 24th, a physician thought to be Salem Village's William Griggs, though there's no record stating a name of a physician, what we have is that from John Hale who wrote a book in [00:44:00] 1697 that was published after his death. We know from his book that this happened with the doctor saying that they are under an evil hand, but we don't know exactly who that doctor was.
Josh Hutchinson: But on February 25th, Mary Sibley instructed Tituba and or John Indian to bake a witch cake to determine who was afflicting the girls, and Ann Putnam Jr. and Elizabeth Hubbard joined Betty and Abigail in displaying symptoms of affliction.
Josh Hutchinson: February 26th, Betty and Abigail did name Tituba as their tormentor.
Josh Hutchinson: And sometime between February 25th and February 29th, several Salem gentlemen and area ministers visited the Parris household and concurred that the hand of Satan was in the girl's afflictions. Under questioning, Tituba admitted to baking the witch cake, but did not implicate [00:45:00] Mary Sibley.
Josh Hutchinson: February 27th, Ann Putnam Jr. claimed that Sarah Good was afflicting her, and Elizabeth Hubbard blamed both Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.
Josh Hutchinson: The four girls continued to be sick on February 28th, a Sunday. As of that point in time, there were four people believed to be bewitched and three people suspected to have bewitched them. And we can't wait to be able to tell the rest of this story to you.
Sarah Jack: That was great, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: Now Mary Louise Bingham is back with another excellent Minute with Mary.
Mary Louise Bingham: According to historian Dr. Emerson Baker, in the early 1690s, the ministers complained of the decline of moral values, which resulted in an angry God, who sought revenge. Their solution was to seek a [00:46:00] moral reformation through the court and strictly enforce laws, which served as moral codes that had not been punished to the fullest extent. The ministers feared the community would fail if there was not a return to God.
Mary Louise Bingham: One of the magistrates at the court in 1690, when this reformation was put into effect, was John Richards, who also served on the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692. One of the concerned ministers was Cotton Mather. According to author Marilynne Roach, John Richards was a church member held in high esteem at the North Church in Boston. So Cotton penned a letter dated February 13th, 1692, asking John to approve a commitment renewal service. According to Marilynne, John, and I quote, "apparently showed no enthusiasm." [00:47:00] Marilynne also wrote that this was not the only time that John Richards ignored the advice given to him by Cotton Mather in 1692.
Mary Louise Bingham: Thank you.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: And here's Sarah with another informative edition of End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for joining us today for this episode. Your unwavering support and the way you share our message are invaluable to us. We're excited to announce a new fundraiser that we hope you'll consider supporting. This podcast is a project of our nonprofit called End Witch Hunts.
Sarah Jack: We have the opportunity to attend a conference at Lancaster University focused on the human rights issue of witch hunting, hosted by the International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices. This event will debut a powerful photo exhibit focusing on harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and [00:48:00] the humanity of people who are accused of being witches globally today.
Sarah Jack: Josh has three photos in the exhibit, and it would be incredibly meaningful for him to be present at its reveal. This exhibit will travel internationally to raise awareness about these important issues, and your support can help make our participation possible.
Sarah Jack: Additionally, we will be gaining valuable knowledge and making invaluable connections, which will advance our interviews and research we do for our education and advocacy projects.
Sarah Jack: We will also have the opportunity to present on our recent exoneration and memorial work in New England, particularly the historic and landmark legislation in Connecticut that formally absolved the witch trial victims of the Connecticut colony. That bill was H. J. 34, a resolution concerning certain witchcraft convictions in colonial Connecticut.
Sarah Jack: If you'd like to contribute to this upcoming opportunity, please donate on our website, endwitchhunts. org. We appreciate anything you can give. Thank you once again for listening, sharing, and supporting us. [00:49:00] Together we can make a difference. Until the next time, take care and stay engaged.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt. We hope you enjoyed today's stories.
Sarah Jack: Join us every week.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

June 25, 2024

Salem Witch Museum: New Artifacts on Display

In this Bonus episode, we chat with Rachel Christ-Doane Director of Education for the Salem Witch Museum about their new artifacts for the exhibit, “Witches: Evolving Perceptions.” The first case features four significant books from the 16th to 18th centuries:

– A 1600 edition of Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum.

– A 1586 edition of Johann Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum.

– A 1729 edition of The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos’d by Andrew Morton (Daniel Defoe).

– A 1796 edition of Robert Calef’s More Wonders of the Invisible World.

These books provide unique perspectives on early modern beliefs about witchcraft, from the notorious Malleus Maleficarum to the critical De Praestigiis Daemonum.

The second case explores witchcraft in popular culture with:

– An 1868 edition of the grimoire Les Secrets Merveilleux De La Magie Naturelle Du Petit Albert.

– A 1919 booklet, “Your Fortune in a Tea Cup,” by Dr. V.M Pierce.

– A signed first edition of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

– A signed first edition of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Rachel shares the stories behind these artifacts and the ongoing renovations at the museum. These new additions provide a deeper understanding of how perceptions of witchcraft have evolved over time.

Tune in to learn about these fascinating artifacts and their impact on the narrative of witchcraft through history and culture and how you can see them for yourself.

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⁠Salem Witch Museum

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B008 Rachel Christ-Doane on New Artifacts at the Salem Witch Museum Download

June 23, 2024
The Puritans with Francis J. Bremer

Show Notes

Dive into the world of the Puritans with Dr. Francis J. Bremer, a historian with over fifty years of expertise in 17th-century New England and Puritanism. Dr. Bremer sheds light on the core beliefs, historical context, and diversity within Puritanism, including the differences between New England Puritans and those who stayed in England. He discusses myths about Puritans as zealous witch hunters and reveals their lasting impact on society, education, and community values. Join us for an episode filled with historical insights and surprising revelations about this influential group.

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Massachusetts Historical Society, Papers of the Winthrop Family

Purchase “Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction” by Francis Bremer

Purchase “The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England” by Francis Bremer

Purchase “John Winthrop:America’s Forgotten Founding Father” by Francis Bremer

Purchase “First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World” by Francis Bremer

Purchase “Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia” by Francis Bremer

Purchase “Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism” by Francis Bremer

Support Us! Buy Book Titles Mentioned in this Episode from our Book Shop

Petition to recognize those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts
List of those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts

Come Visit Us On Youtube

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The Puritans with Francis Bremer Download

June 18, 2024
Nathaniel Ingersoll and His Tavern in the Salem Witch Trials

In this special bonus episode of Witch Hunt, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack detail the history of the Ingersoll’s Tavern in Danvers, Massachusetts. The episode highlights Nathaniel Ingersoll and his wife’s involvement in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, where their tavern served as a significant location for key events and imprisonments. The episode outlines various examinations, complaints, and testimonies that occurred at the tavern, and discusses how the Ingersolls and their associates participated in the witch hunts. The preservation efforts for this historical site, now under threat of decay, are also covered, emphasizing the importance of the tavern in understanding the infamous witch trials.

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Show Notes

00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview

00:48 The Ingersoll Family History

01:36 Ingersoll’s Tavern and Its Role in Salem Witch Trials

03:12 Key Events and Testimonies at Ingersoll’s Tavern

18:03 The Decline of Witch Hunt Activities at Ingersoll’s

21:05 Post-Witch Hunt and Legacy of Nathaniel Ingersoll

23:45 Current Preservation Efforts and Conclusion

Petition to recognize those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts
Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project

Salem Witch-Hunt Facebook Page

SAVE Ingersoll’s Tavern Facebook Group

More on Ingersoll’s Ordinary

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Nathaniel Ingersoll and His Tavern in the Salem Witch Trials Download

June 16, 2024

The Connecticut Witch Trials Trilogy with Beth Caruso

In this episode, we welcome back Beth M. Caruso, author of the compelling novel One of Windsor and its sequel The Salty Rose, to discuss her latest book, Between Good and Evil: Curse of the Windsor Witch’s Daughter, the final entry in her Connecticut Witch Trials trilogy. Beth takes us through the chilling history of the Connecticut Witch Trials, focusing on Alice Young Jr., the daughter of the first person executed for witchcraft in Connecticut.

Beth shares insights into Alice Jr.’s experiences, her family’s history, and the extensive research behind the book, including work with historians Malcolm Gaskill and Kathy Hermes. We also explore themes of trauma, healing, and the lasting impact of the witch trials, along with efforts to honor the victims and educate the public. Join us for a compelling mix of historical insights and personal stories with Beth M. Caruso.

Author Beth Caruso’s Website

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Show Notes

Come Visit Us On Youtube

ConnecticutWitchTrials.org

CT W.I.T.C.H. Memorial

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Sign the Petition to recognize those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts

Witch Hunt: Connecticut Witch Trials episodes

Connecticut Witch Trials with Beth Caruso and Tony Griego of CT WITCH Memorial

Should Connecticut Witch Trial Victims be Exonerated?

Connecticut Witch-Hunts and John Winthrop, Jr. with Dr. Scott Culpepper

Descendants of Connecticut Witch Trial Victims

Introducing The Last Night, a Connecticut Witch Trials Play

Between God and Satan with Beth Caruso and Katherine Hermes

Representative Jane Garibay on Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Legislation

Goody Bassett, Accused Witch of Stratford, Connecticut

Andy Verzosa on Museums, Mary Barnes, and Farmington, Connecticut

Connecticut Witch Trials 101, Part 1

Connecticut Witch Trials 101, Part 2: Witchcraft Belief, the Founding of Connecticut, and Alice Young

Connecticut Witch Trial Victim Exoneration Testimony with William and Jennifer Schloat

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Part 3: 1648-1661

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Part 4: The Hartford Witch-Hunt of 1662-1665

Before Salem with Richard S. Ross III

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Part 5: 1666 to 1691

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Part 6: 1692 and Beyond

Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another episode of Witch Hunt, the podcast where we dive deep into the fascinating and often untold chapters of history, like the Connecticut Witch Trials. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today, we are thrilled to welcome back a very special guest, author and historian, Beth Caruso. Beth is the creator of the Connecticut Witch Trials Trilogy, and she's here to talk about her latest book, Between Good and Evil: Curse of the Windsor Witch's Daughter.
Josh Hutchinson: That's right, Sarah. In this episode, Beth will take us on a journey through the chilling history of the Connecticut Witch Trials, focusing on the life of Alice Jr., the daughter of Alice Young, the first person executed for witchcraft in Connecticut. This episode promises to be a compelling mix of historical insights, personal trauma, and the quest for respectful memory.
Sarah Jack: We'll also hear about the extensive research that went into Beth's book, including some surprising discoveries and the real life connections [00:01:00] between the characters in her narrative. Plus, we'll explore the ongoing efforts to memorialize the victims of these tragic events and Beth's exciting future projects.
Josh Hutchinson: So, grab your headphones and get ready for a deep dive into a dark and intriguing chapter of American history. Let's welcome Beth Caruso back to the show.
Sarah Jack: Hello, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: Hi, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: Hey, Beth.
Beth Caruso: Hi. How are you, Sarah?
Sarah Jack: I'm good.
Josh Hutchinson: Hi, Beth.
Beth Caruso: Hi, Josh. And I hope you're doing well, too.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I am. Thank you.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for returning to the podcast. I am so excited to get to talk to you about your new project, and I want to thank you for all the years you've worked to ensure the legacy of this history, and we are excited to hear about Between Good and Evil: Curse of the Windsor Witch's Daughter. What can you [00:02:00] tell us about that?
Beth Caruso: Well, I'm thrilled to be back. Uh, you two are old friends. That's not a secret. So, um, I'm really happy to tell you a little bit more about the new book, Between Good and Evil. It is the third book in the Connecticut Witch Trials, uh, Trilogy, which by the way, it didn't start out as a trilogy; it started out with a book about Alice Young and then more information just kept coming. And It ended up being a trilogy, but this last one is about Alice, Jr., her only daughter, and what happened to her and what she saw and how she dealt with the trauma of losing her mother to a witch hanging.
Josh Hutchinson: How have the descendants [00:03:00] of Alice Young inspired you?
Beth Caruso: Well, the descendants had asked me a long time ago, after reading One of Windsor, when the book about Alice Jr. would be coming out. And at that point I said, "well, I don't have any plans for it. I just don't have enough information about her." Well, time went by, and there were some things that happened that gave me a lot more information where I got to a place where I could say, "hmm, okay, there's enough historical information now that I can piece together into a dramatic history."
Beth Caruso: Um, one of the biggest developments was, um. I think it's a couple years ago now, The Ruin of All Witches by Malcolm Gaskill. Can you see this okay? Um, he [00:04:00] did research into the witch trials in Springfield, Massachusetts. Of course, you know, up the Connecticut River Valley was a hotbed of the early witch trials in New England. Not just Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford, all the way up to Springfield, as well, with the trials of Hugh and Mary Parsons and subsequently, um, Mary Parsons pointing fingers and accusing other people of being witches, such as, um, Mercy Marshfield, who had originally been from Windsor, um, or had settled in Windsor and then, uh, Mary Bliss Parsons, as well, who, who later had trials of her own.
Beth Caruso: So, what Malcolm Gaskill did, I had read those records [00:05:00] before, but, you know, it's, they can be confusing. There's quite a lot of them, but, you know, this person had this type of aggression towards that person, and then they, Hugh Parsons did all these crazy things, and so did his wife, and without a historian putting it into a great context. It was very confusing. Gaskill was brilliant. He laid out the town of Springfield in a way that was understandable. Uh, the first pages, he says, these are the characters. And, um, I knew that Alice Junior's husband, Simon Beamon, had been living in Springfield, and he had actually been a participant in those trials against the Parsons.
Beth Caruso: Um, But it helped me understand that whole background [00:06:00] much more and how people were interconnected with each other, um, and, and how these trials weren't really black and white. Um, so I had a lot more background information about Alice Junior's life after she married and she went to Springfield and how that all like came pieced together.
Beth Caruso: But I also learned more on my own, and, and with historian Kathy Hermes, um, with our article, which I've been on your show and talked about, it's in Connecticut History Review, and it's "Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch Hunting and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World".
Beth Caruso: We were doing some research at the Connecticut State Archives, and [00:07:00] it was thought before that Alice Jr. had, had somehow ended up in Springfield and ended up meeting Simon Beamon there and then she married there. But we realized by looking at the original, um, archives at the Connecticut State Library that she had indeed stayed in Windsor, Connecticut, which is mind-blowing if you think about the first accusation of witchcraft happening there to her mother and her mother being murdered.
Beth Caruso: Um, we know she didn't go with her historical father, and this was also really interesting, too, in piecing together the story. Um, John Young, he went to Stratford pretty, pretty soon after [00:08:00] Alice Young's hanging. And in Stratford, he dies in 1661, but he was sick for seven months. Still, he died intestate. Basically, he had no will that he left behind. So I thought, well, wow, isn't, isn't that, um, fascinating and dramatic in some way? This, this man who's supposedly her father, like he splits, he goes to Stratford, but somehow she still stays in Windsor. Wow. What a revelation.
Beth Caruso: So you can come up with all kinds of dramatic theories about that. Did she, you know, have a parting of the ways with her father because of him not standing up for the mother? Or was he really more, in fact, a stepfather? Because it's, it, in the records, it shows that John Young was [00:09:00] sick for seven months before he died. If you have a child or children and you know you're sick and you know it's not going well, what's the one thing you make sure you do for your children? You write a will for them. He did not write a will. And furthermore, nobody came to claim the will.
Beth Caruso: So his property in Stratford sat vacant for seven years. The town couldn't sell it. They had to wait seven years to make sure no one would claim it. But once that seven years was passed, the town sold the property.
Beth Caruso: And you can't say this is because, oh, well, Alice Jr. was a woman, because by that point she had four sons. She was married with a husband. So they certainly could have claimed it, but they never did. And so I thought all those pieces together were [00:10:00] pretty interesting.
Beth Caruso: And the other thing, you know, Mercy Marshfield, I told you she was one of the people who was accused of witchcraft by Mary Parsons in Springfield during that time, I think it was early 50s. Correct me if I'm wrong, Josh. Um, but Mercy Marshfield had a daughter, Sarah, Uh, Sarah Miller, she, she married a man named Thomas Miller in Springfield, but they had been in Windsor. They would have been in Windsor for Alice Young's accusations and everything leading up to her hanging. Um.
Beth Caruso: So, Sarah ends up, Sarah, Mercy Marshfield's daughter, ends up being the next door neighbor of Alice Young, Jr., um, and, and this is, again, due to the work of, uh, Gaskill. Uh, they're right next door to each [00:11:00] other. Their two husbands work for William Pynchon, who's the head of the colony. Both of their mothers get accused of witchcraft, you know? So I thought, "oh my gosh, they, they have to be tight." They hold, they're both from Windsor. They have this unique common thing. Both their husbands know each other. They're working for Pynchon. On top of that, they have lots of children, both of them. They both have like a dozen children. And then finally, they, those children intermarry. The, they become truly family.
Beth Caruso: And, um, so I thought, well, that's a great basis too, because here is, I know this has to be, um, a unique friendship and a strong friendship. So when we talk about Alice Jr. and we talk about how she could have made it through, certainly that could have been an element of it.
Sarah Jack: It's [00:12:00] so great to get to talk about the Youngs again. This is wonderful. Um, one of your themes, um, with Alice Jr. in this story is her internal conflicts and the guilt by association. Can you tell us about how that impacted her as a mother and friend and wife?
Beth Caruso: Well, you know, of course I can only theorize, um, but I thought, here's, here's a trauma. Um, there's probably post traumatic stress syndrome in some way. And let me look at, you know, just cases that I know about, some horrific cases of childhood trauma, whether we're talking about like child sexual abuse by priests or, um, doctors or people like [00:13:00] that, or war or things like that, um, or even, even divorce within a family. How do children process that?
Beth Caruso: And for extremely traumatic events, the children will often, you know, push all those traumatic memories, all those things into their subconscious, because it's just too much for their little psyches to handle when they're children like that. And you find them later on as adults with repressed memories that come to the surface that are often quite shocking. So, that's one element.
Beth Caruso: And the other one is that when a child goes through trauma, a lot of times what they do is they internalize it. It's very common in divorce. Oh, what [00:14:00] did I do to cause mommy and daddy to break up? It's my fault in some way. Um, so those are just things that we can easily observe by these childhood traumas that we can see in present day.
Beth Caruso: Well, of course, those things are, you know, part of humanity and the human experience. And so I thought, "well, Alice Jr, it wouldn't be unbelievable at all that she would go through something like that, that she would have repressed memories that would eventually be triggered with time." and as she's more mature as a woman, you know, these memories might seep out and, um, she would have to deal with them. How would she deal with them? Another, you know, great tool to use to [00:15:00] dramatize the story. Um, because what memories are repressed?
Beth Caruso: Well, of course, I, I wanted to paint a good picture of what happens in One of Windsor, some of it fictionalized, some of it real, but I thought, "oh, wouldn't it be, wouldn't it be, um, juicy for readers to realize, oh, well, maybe there's other secrets that were not told and couldn't be told because it's from Alice Jr's viewpoint." And so I tried to do that with her repressed memories.
Beth Caruso: And then also the feeling of guilt, one, because it does fit these childhood patterns of trauma. But also because there was such a stigma in those days about, uh, someone in your family being called a witch. And there were real and deadly consequences to [00:16:00] that.
Beth Caruso: Sarah, you know, in your own, um, family history with the Connecticut Witch Trials and the Benhams and how the the stigma of witchcraft carried on from generation to generation. In fact, with Alice Young, it, it most certainly carried on and we have a story about it.
Beth Caruso: And in this case, a lot of people think that she was actually accused of witchcraft. She wasn't accused, per se, but her reputation was tarnished and known as the daughter of a witch, no doubt by this story. Her, her, um, son, Thomas, and of course this is after her husband dies. Her son, Thomas, gets into a fight with someone, and because he has said that Thomas looks like a witch and his mother's a witch, [00:17:00] um, no formal accusation there, but Thomas was extremely upset by this, because being called a witch and that may lead to being accused of something may lead to, of course, death. And he knew this all too well, and he lost it. He beat up this guy.
Beth Caruso: Um, the guy countersued. The guy brought him to court, but Thomas brought the guy to court as well. They countersued each other. The guy who basically slandered Thomas and his mother got a stiffer fine than Thomas Beamon for beating up the guy. Because I think the courts understood how dangerous it could have been for that family. And people were, this was, I [00:18:00] think in the 1670s. So things were dying down a little bit, at least until they picked up again with Salem. But so yeah, there were real consequences to all these things.
Josh Hutchinson: There were. Just having your reputation ruined in that way could really impact how you were able to do commerce and trade with others in your community and, uh, get the help that you needed from the community, because everybody had to work together.
Beth Caruso: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It wasn't, you know, always black and white, though. And that's, what's so interesting about this story. As I said before, the man that [00:19:00] Alice Jr. marries has been an active participant in the Hugh and Mary Parsons trials. He shares his stories. He truly believes that Hugh Parsons is a witch. And so how ironic that, you know, just a couple years later, basically, he meets Alice Jr. and marries her and in a way I see him standing up for her with the timing of that marriage.
Beth Caruso: The interesting thing about Alice Jr. being in town, in Windsor, in 1654, was that Windsor's second witch trial victim, Lydia Gilbert, was being accused of witchcraft. [00:20:00] So it just so happens that only about two weeks after Lydia Gilbert's conviction is when Simon Beamon marries Alice Young, Jr. And then she's out of town. So the timing is very interesting, because by marrying her when he did, he may have helped to save her life, because, of course, everyone in Windsor is in a witch hunting frenzy once again. Later, you see Simon Beamon go to trial, another witch trial, the one of Mary Bliss Parsons, the second Mary Parsons, I swear it's a nightmare to keep them straight, but he stands up for her. And you know, he talks about her trauma of, of losing a child [00:21:00] and, um, is supportive of her. So there's two sides to the coin, and it's definitely not clear.
Sarah Jack: Lydia Gilbert's story. There's so much more there than, um, what we're able to know about Alice. And what do we need to know about Lydia?
Beth Caruso: Well, the first part of the book, the first third of the book, takes place in Windsor, Connecticut. And I do tell Lydia's story through the eyes of Alice Jr. And I use the latest research to tell her story.
Beth Caruso: Um, there's been a lot, a lot of confusion about who Lydia Gilbert was and did she have children? Who exactly [00:22:00] was she married to? There's a Thomas Gilbert Sr. and a Thomas Gilbert Jr. And most historians think now that she was married to Thomas Gilbert, Jr. And if you don't mind, I want to read the exact passage that really helps us to figure this out that's in the Connecticut archives, the, in the historical record. So in the particular court in 1642, so we're talking about 12 years before Lydia's conviction, there's a record from March 2nd, states Will Rescew, he was the jailer, "is to take into his custody James Hullet, [00:23:00] Thomas Gilbert, Lydia Bliss, and George Gibbs and to keep them in guides or shackles and give them course diet, hard work, and sharp correction."
Beth Caruso: So what were one of the factors of someone being targeted for a witch? Of course, it's previous crime. So you see Thomas Jr. here and you see him with a woman named Lydia, but her name is Lydia Bliss. There was one Bliss family in Hartford that she, that we know of. Um, a lot of times when you have records for families, there may be a missing child or two, so Lydia could be a missing child accounted for in the Bliss family, or she could be a cousin or a stepchild or something like that. But in any case. um, [00:24:00] most historians think that because of this record, and because we know that Thomas Jr. bought land in Windsor, that this is the Lydia Gilbert we're talking about, the wife of Thomas Junior, not Senior.
Beth Caruso: So Thomas Jr., and there's more evidence to show that this is probably the case, although we can't say this for a hundred percent sure. Thomas Gilbert went to, um, Springfield as well, right after Lydia's Hanging. We find him marrying into the Bliss family again in Springfield in 1655. He married, um, a woman by the name of, I forget her first name right at the [00:25:00] second, but her maiden name was Chapin, and she married a Samuel Bliss. He was the brother of Mary Parsons, Mary Bliss Parsons. And so Lydia Bliss could have been the sister of both of them. Lydia Bliss could have been the sister of both of them. Um, and so this suggests, you know, more family connection.
Beth Caruso: The other thing was, we don't, a lot of us don't think that Lydia had any children. For those who think they are descended from her, please don't hate me, um, but I really don't think she had children. And I think this is one of the reasons why she may have been targeted. So some people say, well, no, no, there's children there, because when Thomas Jr. dies [00:26:00] in Springfield in 1662, in his will, he mentions the, the Chapin children, um, he mentions the children that he had in the marriage in Springfield, but he also mentions a previous family of four children. That would have been referring to his wife's previous marriage to Samuel Bliss. It wouldn't have been any children with Lydia. There are no records for children for Lydia. And those children being married to a Lydia Bliss would have already been family to him. So, so there was a combined family there in Springfield already. So, um, this is, [00:27:00] you know, this is all very interesting.
Beth Caruso: And Malcolm Gaskill, again, he, his research was so phenomenal. He spent so much time talking about the witch accusations for Mary Bliss Parsons and Mary Lewis Parsons, um, as their peculiar behavior related to grief and loss of a child. And in those days, fertility was everything for women. They were told by the patriarchy it was important for them. And Gaskill does define and other researchers define how it was suspicious for women who had low fertility, um, such as Alice Young with one child, such as Lydia Gilbert with no [00:28:00] children, and that they would be jealous of women who were fertile and who had lots and lots and lots of children. Of course, back in those days, so much of it was out of their control, right? But, um, this, this fed into all the superstition that they would be willing to make a pact with the devil to improve their fertility. Of course, this is all, you know, patriarchal musings that probably have no, nothing related to reality at all, including real feelings of women at that time.
Josh Hutchinson: We've even seen cases where women were accused of luring children to come with them. And that was suspicious to make you a witch, because if [00:29:00] you had especially lost a child, then there was an assumption that you had that child envy and you craved to have one, because that's the natural role of the woman in that, the thinking of the time.
Beth Caruso: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, that could have played a role in the Hartford witch panic with Judith Ayers, um, befriending little Betty Kelly before she died, helping feed her soup. Supposedly she had lost a child, um, and you know, oh, so now she's, she's got this yearning within, and so is she trying to lure this other child, because she gets blamed, Judith Ayers gets blamed for this child's death. You can see how it all feeds into this story.
Beth Caruso: [00:30:00] You know, what else is part of the book, like the, the aspect of, okay, There's trauma, but then what happens with healing and, uh, respectful memory, especially those witch trial victims who were just, you know, probably thrown in a ditch.
Sarah Jack: Yeah.
Beth Caruso: How this is, uh, part of respectful memory and honoring Alice and the other victims.
Sarah Jack: Beth, the romance dynamic that you're able to weave into your stories is so enjoyable. Is there anything of that nature that you would like to share with us today out of your new book?
Beth Caruso: Hmm. Well, let's see. I can talk to you about when Simon Beamon and Alice Young Jr meet each other again. In my story, I have [00:31:00] Alice Jr. going to Springfield briefly, um, because I had that in One of Windsor, so I wanted to continue that, but then she quickly came back to Windsor to, and I suppose, I'm not sure if this is true or not, but in the story, to live with her Aunt Rhody. As we're talking, you know, I've been saying Alice Jr., but to make it less confusing, I called her Alissa, which is what she was called in One of Windsor.
Beth Caruso: So Simon Beamon, his profession, I told you he worked for Pynchon up in Springfield. A lot of what he did was, besides being a cobbler, was he was a messenger for the leader of that colony. And he often took canoe trips down the Connecticut River, which is called the Big River in those days. And he [00:32:00] made many, many trips to Windsor.
Beth Caruso: So even if they didn't know each other before, like I have in my story, you know, even if it was different in real life, Simon Beamon was often in Windsor, canoeing down the river and exchanging goods, sending messages from William Pynchon to the people of Windsor and probably going down further down the Big River to share news with the Connecticut leaders in Hartford, as well.
Beth Caruso: So in this early chapter, chapter four, this is where Simon Beamon and Alissa, Alice Jr. meet each other for the very first time again. "'Alissa! Alissa! Is that really you?,' a voice beamed from the water. [00:33:00]
Beth Caruso: Aunt Rhody was surprised to hear an unfamiliar voice talking to me and looked on with curiosity. I squinted and looked down to see. I held Rhody's arm.
Beth Caruso: 'That's Simon Beamon, Uncle John's friend and Mr. Pynchon's assistant,' I whispered.
Beth Caruso: She finally remembered and nodded. 'Aye, he works for Springfield's leader. I remember,' she said.
Beth Caruso: Simon was boyish with straight brown hair and navigated the river currents so skillfully he might as well have been a shadfish. His satchel was full of papers for the leaders of Windsor and Hartford from Mr. Pynchon. The leather bag was always kept dry in his capable care. He'd been coming around for a long time to Windsor from Springfield, doing errands for his boss, Mr. Pynchon.
Beth Caruso: I smiled shyly. 'Aye, Simon, tis I, the little girl you [00:34:00] used to tease so mischievously.'
Beth Caruso: He grinned. 'Aye, I was guilty of that. But I needed you to laugh then, so I was only helping your uncle to get a smile out of you. It wasn't so bad, was it?'
Beth Caruso: 'No, well, I suppose it wasn't.' I grinned.
Beth Caruso: 'I was hoping that I would see you here in Windsor. I heard you were here, but never had the good fortune to see you again until today.' He smiled.
Beth Caruso: 'She's become quite the young woman now, almost unrecognizable for the child she once was,' Aunt Rhody said, beaming as proud as if I were her own daughter."
Beth Caruso: And in this chapter, later on, they go on, they're all going to Hartford by river and, um, Alice Jr. was going to take the [00:35:00] shallop with Aunt Rhody and her future husband, but Aunt Rhody, at this time, all these witch trials are, are, they're still going, and now all these accusations against Lydia Gilbert are happening, and she's very worried, and she sees, oh, this man seems interested in Alice Jr., so she kind of nudges her, 'well, why don't you go in the canoe with this guy?' And in this chapter they just they have a lovely time, and they get to know each other, and, um, they truly do love each other, and they have, as I said, about a dozen children together, and he's the, one of the main parts of her healing along with her friendship, and each of her children is a part of her healing, too.
Beth Caruso: Aunt Rhody says to her at one point, 'hold your children around [00:36:00] you like a protective cloak.' Again, this is the idea that women who have few children and no children are very vulnerable. Have many, many children with your husband, and indeed having those children and having a male child and Thomas Beamon at the time that, you know, the slander happens in the 1670s, even though her husband is not around anymore, her son is standing up for her. So having these male children is another form of protection.
Sarah Jack: The healing element in your book is another one of those important threads, as you just mentioned, and, um, I remember, you know, just really, um, reflecting on his [00:37:00] excitement and support of her when she has her first, um, , they have their first child coming, and then as their story unfolds, you just, you see how the family was a strength to her, the, you know, through the very difficult things that come along.
Beth Caruso: Absolutely. You know, in those days she couldn't go to therapy. Um, they had no name for post-traumatic stress syndrome. And so I thought, 'well, back in those days, how would she have healed?' Of course, healing is always possible and to some degree, um, even without the level of knowledge we have about psychology today. And what would have been those traditional ways? And I really wanted to show those.
Beth Caruso: Um, as I mentioned, her, her husband seems to be, you know, a [00:38:00] good guy. After he meets her, he's sticking up for others who have been accused of witchcraft. And they have many children together. And then, of course, Mercy Marshfield's daughter, Sarah, would have also been the neighbor right next door with the same unique experiences supporting her, and they're all, they're having children together at the same time. They would have supported her.
Beth Caruso: Um, but you know, the other part of this is I think that she comes to terms with what happened as she remembers and she understands how she can heal by remembering her mother in a way that's not the witch. She can remember her as a child remembers their mother fondly, anyway, [00:39:00] children who do have a good relationship with their mother. And those respectful memories are not just for those who have passed on. They are for us, to heal us from the grief, especially if it's been a traumatic grief and someone hasn't been buried properly, like a witch trial victim who has just been thrown in a ditch unceremoniously.
Beth Caruso: Um, so for this reason, I have a English ballad that I put, put in the book, and its theme is very much about respectful memory. You know, this is a very common thread throughout all humanity, how we treat our dead, how we remember our dead, especially those that were wronged at some point.
Beth Caruso: And last [00:40:00] year, we all did the journey together through the Connecticut General Assembly to get recognition for Connecticut's witch trial victims. This was also a form of respectful memory, trying to educate the public about who these women really, really were, um, at, uh. Josh recently pointed out at several, um, witch memorials throughout the world, there have been signs like, "just people," "just ordinary people," um, to help get the respectful memory on track and correct the assumptions and the, the, you know, reasons for the tarnished reputations, the, the propaganda against these people when they were alive. So anyway, this is a big part of the [00:41:00] story, as well. And it's, you know, it's the perfect thing to wrap up this trilogy.
Josh Hutchinson: And you've been studying the history of the Connecticut Witch Trials and educating people about it through your books and talks for a number of years now. And I know you're continuing to do that in many ways. Uh, we just had the anniversary episode of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, but the exoneration isn't the end of the work. So what's next?
Beth Caruso: Well, what we're all working on right now is we're discussing, we have a whole group of people in Connecticut, outside of Connecticut. Um, carrying on this whole theme of respectful memory. We would like there to be a memorial [00:42:00] for Connecticut's witch trial victims. In addition to that, there is really a void in telling this history in Connecticut. I mean, it's one thing for myself and others to come up with a few novels. That does help, but, you know, there are, of course, fictional aspects to these.
Beth Caruso: And we want, we would love for people to know the full history, the accurate history, how it was a major important part of the whole witch trial saga in New England, how Connecticut was the first, how we had the first witch panic, um, how these ideas got promoted and spread. And we would like more people to know about that.
Beth Caruso: So, um, we're also working with others in Connecticut, institutions and museums, stakeholders, who are [00:43:00] involved in public history, to talk about ways that this history, the real history, not the propaganda, can be shared, um, through different venues using the archives that we do have in Connecticut.
Josh Hutchinson: Right. And there's also talk about getting something about the Connecticut Witch Trials into the school curriculum.
Beth Caruso: Yes. Well, we had a meeting with someone recently. And, uh, with a few people actually. And that was, uh, that was a pretty cool thing to bring up. We're at the beginning stages, but the work is not done, and, of course, this is all, this is all pertinent to people who are persecuted today as witches, [00:44:00] both, uh, you know, symbolic types of finger pointing as well as real witch hunts. Um, I posted today on CT Witch Memorial Facebook page an article about how exonerations, modern day exonerations of countries' past witch trial victims can have an effect on witch hunts that are still happening in many parts of the world.
Josh Hutchinson: And that article was written by Witch Hunt recent guest, Brendan Walsh.
Beth Caruso: Oh, wonderful. I didn't realize that.
Josh Hutchinson: We can, uh, you can refer back to Brendan's episode to hear him.
Beth Caruso: Absolutely. Yes. Um, I'll have to post that link next.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, it was so, like, seeing the article was exciting and then, you know, immediately I'm like, okay, who, who publishes, oh, [00:45:00] it's, it's Dr. Walsh. So that was like a, a neat surprise.
Beth Caruso: Oh, that's, that's very cool. That's very cool. Yeah.
Sarah Jack: But it just, you know, it's another way you see this conversation that is around this history, it has become ongrowing and very alive and lots of people from all different backgrounds and expertise have insight and reflect on what, what, what does that past mean for what's happening today? So it's really good to see.
Beth Caruso: It is. And there are parallels, you know, not just from a witch trial standpoint, or it's also just generalized misogyny. I mean, some of the things I'm hearing in present day are shocking to me. This, you know, [00:46:00] um, a legislator in Indiana talking about women not voting, how it should be a family vote, and the male in the family should vote, things like this. I'm like, "what? Is this really 2024?" So you know, this is pertinent on so many different levels.
Sarah Jack: Absolutely. Do you have any new projects that you have your sights on?
Beth Caruso: Um, aside from what we just talked about, I am doing, I am working on another novel, and it's also historical fiction, but based on a story, family legend about a kidnapping and immigrants from Sicily. So, um, that it's interesting and, um, [00:47:00] I'm all pumped up about it.
Beth Caruso: It's fun to kind of change gears after a while and share some different history, but, um, that, immigrant histories are very interesting too, because, you know, they didn't just come for economic reasons, um, or more freedom of religion or things like that. I mean, they, they also had hidden histories where they might not have been able to stay in the village or things like that. And, um, it's just so fascinating. And sometimes it can be just as hard to find out about them if they change their names after they come to this country.
Beth Caruso: But, um, not all those things will be an element in the next book, but it just in general, I'm saying, I think the immigrant stories are very interesting and I think [00:48:00] very pertinent to humanize now as well, because, of course, now immigrants are being demonized. Um, so I think this will be an important commentary, not a blatant commentary, but just a story that truly does humanize immigrants and everything that they go through to be a part of this country.
Josh Hutchinson: The level of rancor in politics today, people are literally being called demons, followers of Satan, and evil. It's, yeah. So it's very important to humanize all these stories of different people from different backgrounds. So thank you for that.
Beth Caruso: Completely agree with you, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Beth Caruso: On the same page. We're all part of [00:49:00] humanity.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes.
Beth Caruso: Yes.
Josh Hutchinson: Do you have any events coming up?
Beth Caruso: There is a, there's a fair called Made in Connecticut. I am going to be there sharing the books and connecting with people.
Beth Caruso: Yes.
Beth Caruso: In the fall, I'm also going to be at the Webb Dean Stevens Museum. I'm going to be giving a lecture about the Connecticut Witch Trials there. Um, that's a great venue. So I'm very excited to go to Wethersfield, another, you know, hot spot in the Connecticut Witch Trials. I think there were, well, there were four victims right off the bat that I can think of.
Josh Hutchinson: And where can people go to [00:50:00] learn about your events and your books?
Beth Caruso: I have a website, it's called oneofwindsor.com, and I have links to each book that tell you a little more about each book. I have links to events. I also have a cool link to media. Um. I have been fortunate enough to be invited to be on things like Rhode Island Public, uh, Public Television. I have a clip from that. I have a clip from, uh, some news stations here in Connecticut. I have clips from the Witch Hunt podcast. Um, a couple of your, there's one episode on there now, but I'm, I'm building up the site some more. So there will be more of your episodes that will be linked there.
Beth Caruso: Um, I have a research page, if you [00:51:00] want to learn more about the research that I did with Kathy Hermes, that really went quite in depth about the Alice Young case, as well as a man named Thomas Thornton, her next door neighbor, who, uh, curiously ends up knowing so many people from the Salem Witch Trials and is in Salem at that time hobnobbing with the Mathers and, um, people like that. So we did a pretty in-depth research article about that.
Beth Caruso: Um, so that is there on the site and, you know, I add events to it all the time. I add media to it all the time. I can't wait to post this podcast on it. Um, so yeah, please, please visit the site and, uh, gosh, I, I thank you guys so much for everything you've done [00:52:00] to bring light to this Connecticut history. I think you've done an enormous amount to get the word out, and I appreciate that so much.
Sarah Jack: Thank you so much. It's such an honor that much of that has been something we've gotten to partner with or collaborate with you on. And the broad coalition of descendants and historians and authors, much of which are in Connecticut. And, um, this discussion today is so special to me. And I, I just keep thinking about that very first time I sent a Facebook message to CT Witch Memorial to you and Tony. And I just, I think, 'wow, if I could have looked into the future and seen everything that we were going to learn together. I wouldn't have believed it.'
Beth Caruso: I'm so, I'm so glad you did, Sarah. I'm really glad that you reached out. Um, [00:53:00] and it's, I, I think it's a really good reminder, like you don't know who's going to reach out to you and maybe you don't know them then, but you have no idea what they're going to do with their enthusiasm and their passion, you know. Always keep possibilities open.
Sarah Jack: Well, you're very generous, um, in responding to people. And I think that's one of your great strengths as an author and advocate.
Beth Caruso: Thank you so much. And I have to, I really, I have to say the same for you too. It's, you're very good at connecting people.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much. And we'll have links to oneofwindsor. com in the show notes, and it'll appear on the screen right about here. [00:54:00] So you'll be able to see it.
Beth Caruso: Thank you so much.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much for joining us today. It was wonderful.
Beth Caruso: It's my pleasure, always.
Sarah Jack: Mary Louise Bingham is back with A Minute with Mary.
Mary Louise Bingham: As many of you already know, I have been researching the life and legacy of John Winthrop, Jr. Beth Caruso has been such an inspiration in this endeavor because of her own desire to keep telling his story and help people understand the important role he played in saving many wrongfully accused of the capital crime of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut.
Mary Louise Bingham: Beth and I have had many conversations where I learned so much of Winthrop Jr. 's interest in alchemy, his medical practice. In addition, she has introduced me to some of his very dear friends, such as Edward Howes and Gershom Bulkeley.
Mary Louise Bingham: Beth will also appear in an upcoming presentation of [00:55:00] my program, Wednesdays with Winthrop, Jr. We will keep our audience posted of the exact time and date. Thank you, Beth, for your graciousness and your continued support, and for being the wonderful friend you will always be to me.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to this special episode of Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: Visit us on YouTube.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

May 28, 2024

The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project Marks Anniversary of Exoneration

Join us for a special episode marking the first anniversary of the groundbreaking legislation that cleared the names of Connecticut’s witch trial victims. On May 25, 2023, House Joint Resolution 34 was adopted, officially absolving the innocent victims of the colonial witch trials and offering a formal state apology to their descendants. In this episode, hear from the five advocates who founded the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project in 2022 as they reflect on their journey to legislative success, share their personal experiences, and discuss the profound impact of the 2023 resolution. We’ll delve into their efforts to raise awareness, the plans for a state memorial, and how this historical victory resonates with the ongoing modern witch hunt crisis worldwide. Don’t miss this insightful conversation about justice, remembrance, and the continued fight against wrongful persecution.

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May 24, 2024
Mary Beth Norton on Salem Witch Trials Research

In this episode of “Witch Hunt,” we are privileged to share the expert insights of Mary Beth Norton, a distinguished historian specializing in early American history. Mary Beth shares her profound research on the impact of frontier warfare on the dynamics of the Salem Witch Trials, offering a unique perspective that centers on the accusers. Mary Beth gives insights from her experiences teaching this intriguing topic of history at Cornell University, alongside the compelling witch trial research her students undertook. Join us as we discuss key takeaways from her groundbreaking book, In the Devil’s Snare, and hear firsthand about the innovative research conducted by her students. Don’t miss this deep dive into one of the most mysterious chapters of American history.

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May 14, 2024
The Once and Future Witch Hunt with Alice Markham-Cantor

We present a thought-provoking episode that considers the enduring legacy of witch hunts, tracing their historical roots through the Salem Witch Trials to the present day with Martha Carrier descendant and author Alice Markham-Cantor. Her personal journey and research, lead our reflection on the economic, political, and personal motivations driving witch hunts. Witch hunt history reveals how accusations of witchcraft, intertwined with social disputes and global dynamics, persist across time, necessitating a call for historical truth, awareness of ongoing injustices, and activism against this continuing phenomenon. Alice’s new book, The Once and Future Witch Hunt: A Descendant’s Reckoning from Salem to the Present, releases May 8, 2024, and stay tuned to awitchstory.com for updates on the new documentary, A Witch Story, featuring Alice.

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May 7, 2024
Cotton Mather and the Demoniac with Brendan Walsh

In today’s episode, we sit down with Brendan Walsh, an expert in Early Modern Intellectual History and Religion to examine a chilling account of a 17th century demonic child possession in Connecticut, as chronicled in Cotton Mather’s “Memorable Providences Relating To Witchcrafts And Possessions.” Brendan takes us through the golden age of demonic possession, spotlighting significant figures such as the English exorcist John Darrell and notorious New England minister Cotton Mather.
As we consider the account of the “Boy of Tocutt,” Brendan elucidates how such reports reflect the fundamental Puritan perceptions of the diabolical or malevolent and their assault on the spiritually weak. Join us for a fascinating journey into the past, exploring how immemorial beliefs in witchcraft, the devil’s pact, demonic obsession and possession continue to shape our understanding of evil in our society and ourselves.

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0083 Brendan Walsh Download

April 16, 2024

The Ultimate Introduction to the Salem Witch Trials: Salem Witch-Hunt 101 Part 1

Witch Hunt presents “The Ultimate Introduction to the Salem Witch Trials,” the first episode of the Salem Witch-Hunt 101 series. This episode provides a comprehensive overview of the Salem Witch Trials, emphasizing the event’s extensive reach, the variety of people involved, and its unique characteristics compared to other witch hunts in history. We discuss the origins and progression of the witch hunt, debunking myths and shedding light on the social, legal, and political factors feeding the crisis. Also covered are some of the key accusers, victims, opposition, and lasting legacy of the trials, with an emphasis on the importance of remembrance and learning from this dark chapter in history.

Hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack, descendants of people hanged for witchcraft in the Salem Witch-Hunt, welcome you to explore the witch-hunt in great detail in this episode and the rest of the series. Look for much more in-depth Salem coverage over the coming months and years.

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Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson

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0082 The Ultimate Introduction to the Salem Witch Trials (Salem Witch-Hunt 101 Part 1)Download

April 10, 2024

Detestable and Wicked Arts with Paul Moyer

Paul Moyer delves into New England’s witch-hunt history this week on Witch Hunt. Drawing from his book, Detestable and Wicked Arts, Moyer discusses the origins of witchcraft beliefs, transatlantic connections, and infamous trials like Salem and Hartford. Learn about the societal pressures behind these hunts, from religious conflicts to political turmoil, and gain new insights into this haunting chapter of American history. How did heavy societal expectations on family and marriage bring out the hunting of diabolical duos, couples accused of being witches? Paul Moyer discusses his upcoming book about a gripping murder case set in antebellum America, an enthralling history with themes of social justice and defiance of gender norms.

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March 28, 2024

Stacy Schiff on the Salem Witch Trials

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Pulitzer-prize-winning author Stacy Schiff joins hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack for a dive into the heart of the Salem Witch Trials on this week’s episode of Witch Hunt. Celebrated for her book, The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem, Stacy sheds light on the trials’ misunderstandings, explores their actual origins, and spotlights the pivotal individuals involved. Her insights and story telling make history accessible and engaging. Together, they reflect on the timely relevance of lessons learned from the Salem Witch Trials.

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Stacy Schiff: [00:00:00] There had been witchcraft accusations before, there had been outbreaks of witchcraft before. Never before had there been this kind of prosecution where no one who walked into that courtroom exited innocent.
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt. I'm Josh Hutchinson, but you can also call me excited. We get to talk about Salem today!
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. In this episode, we are joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Stacy Schiff.
Josh Hutchinson: Schiff is the author of six books, including The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem.
Sarah Jack: In this exciting conversation, Stacy clears up some major misconceptions about the witch hunt.
Josh Hutchinson: And reviews many of the theories [00:01:00] that have been proposed to explain what started the witch hunt.
Sarah Jack: And you're about to hear the factors that really did shape the witch hunt.
Josh Hutchinson: And we'll learn about many significant actors, including Tituba, in this conversation with discussion of the roles that they played.
Sarah Jack: It was such a treat to get to hear about her research process and approach to making historical events so understandable.
Josh Hutchinson: Together, we reflect on key lessons from the Salem witch hunt.
Sarah Jack: Welcome Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author known for her compelling narratives and deep research into historical events and figures. Her notable works include The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem.
Sarah Jack: What are some major misconceptions people have about the Salem Witch Trials?
Stacy Schiff: Oh, my goodness, it's such a, it's a long and distinguished list, isn't it? I think generally people tend to [00:02:00] assume that people burned, not hanged. So I think that's the first one. I think the general assumption is that all the victims were women, but as we know, five men were also victims that year. They were not universally poor women, they were not older women. They were, there was a 5-year-old accused as well.
Stacy Schiff: Because I think we take a lot of what we understand to have been the history from Arthur Miller, I think we have assumed that voodoo and naked dancing in the forest were part of it, and that's taken from The Crucible, either the play or the movie, not from the actual events of 1692. And I think the word Salem is slightly misleading because 25 communities wind up being implicated, being involved in any case, not only the town of Salem. And I guess the biggest misconception is that there were witches, of which there were none.
Josh Hutchinson: And what are some of the theories about how the Salem witch hunt happened?
Stacy Schiff: I think that the epidemic that year, the panic that year, has been pretty much written down [00:03:00] to anything you can possibly think of, from regional hostilities, to class conflict, to tensions within the church, to food poisoning, to teenage hysteria, to fraud, to taxes, political instability, trauma due to the frontier with the Native Americans, the weather. You could go mad actually staring at the events and trying to pick a pattern. As with all things, if you're really looking for a pattern, you can almost always find one, which is something of a key to what happens that year.
Stacy Schiff: So I think many of those things have been applied and then discarded. And I think we can get into this. One of the issues, of course, with that year is that so many forces come into play that it isn't predominantly actually one thing. There isn't a key. As much as we would like for there to be one, there isn't a key to the Salem witch epidemic of that year.
Sarah Jack: And how did you manage to clarify the true causes behind the witch trials? You made them so easy to understand for the readers, despite the reputation for [00:04:00] the mystery and the complexity.
Stacy Schiff: Thanks Sarah, that's a lovely, it's a lovely way to put it. I hope it's clear. I think what I did is that when I started the research, I read through all of the paper that survives, and it's about a thousand pages of, as the court papers are missing, but we have about a thousand pages of arrest documents or depositions or jailers' accountings. We have about a thousand pages of paper, and I read through all of that, and try to make that material really speak for itself in some way, because you can see the story mutating from beginning to end. What initially passes for witchcraft when the first girls are afflicted is not what will be discussed as witchcraft by late summer when this thing has really snowballed to just tremendous effect. So you can begin to tease out who's carrying the narrative and how the narrative twists and turns and what the sources of that are.
Stacy Schiff: And I guess to that end, I would say 2 things. I would say. I went back and I read all [00:05:00] eight or nine, I can't remember any longer, volumes of the records and files of the quarterly courts of Essex County, which is not, it's to the years prior to 1692, but it is a complete record of all of the, these are very litigious people, these are all of the collisions in court that all of these families had over these years. And the same issues and the same names come up as you will later see in some of the witchcraft accusations. So that was almost like a template to both the sensibility and the history of these people.
Stacy Schiff: It's interesting that about half of the women who hang had been accused previously of witchcraft. There's obviously some lingering resentment or some lingering questions here. And then the other, from a textual point of view, the other great guide was the writings of Cotton Mather, the minister who's at the center, the young minister who is at the center of the trials, and who had written a bestseller in which he had incorporated an account of the European witchcraft, Swedish witchcraft panic of years earlier, which [00:06:00] infiltrates the New England drinking water and which bears a mark on Salem. I think there's actually, I think, a great doctoral thesis to be written about this, because he imports elements from Sweden that had never before been seen in any kind of New England witchcraft testimony.
Stacy Schiff: That's a long answer to your extremely good question, but that was how I began to decode it. You can see, I read all of the sermons that the girls would have heard that year, and you can see bits and pieces of that sermon in their testimony. You can see that they're recycling the imagery that they've heard on Sundays.
Josh Hutchinson: And what were some of the factors which actually did lead to the Salem witch trials?
Stacy Schiff: Guess the chief ones, this is an overdetermined event. It's very hard, as I said, to tease one thing or another thing out. I would say more than anything, the question that year becomes not what was afflicting these young women, but why was the court so intent on prosecution?
Stacy Schiff: Because there had been witchcraft accusations before, there had been outbreaks of witchcraft before. Never before had there been this kind of [00:07:00] prosecution where no one who walked into that courtroom exited innocent. And for that, I would say that it was something of the political environment which makes that year stand apart. You have on this court a group of men who, for reasons of their own, given political instability of the previous few years, need to prove they are a law and order administration. And in particular, the Chief Justice of the Court, who has been something of a political, he's been very ambidextrous politically. He's played both sides repeatedly. needs to prove that he is solely in command and is not going to relax his hold. And he is the one who's pushing, it's very clear to us, he's the one who's pushing for convictions. So I think that the politics is something that we haven't necessarily paid enough attention to in the past.
Stacy Schiff: I think, as I said, some of those earlier accusations, some of that sense of suspicion that had never really been dissipated before. And you really do have a community that's very much under fire. Salem Village, which is where the first girls begin to show [00:08:00] signs of some sort of affliction of some disorder, is a village that has had serious trouble with its ministers, and in different ways, all of those prior ministers will play a role in what happens this year, but the minister in whose household the witchcraft, so to speak, breaks out, is under siege with his, in his community. He's at war with his parishioners and he's very much driving these events forward in some ways.
Sarah Jack: Were there any other primary actors who caused the witch trials to proceed as they did? And if you're interested in following that with what halted the witch trials?
Stacy Schiff: So yeah, I think you could probably draw something of a schematic if you wanted to just take like the, how does this thing snowball? What are the bases it has to hit, to, to produce this storm of accusations? And I think household under siege, obviously, it's a hothouse environment. You have these girls living in a situation where they can see that their father and uncle is in disfavor with the community, [00:09:00] so there's a sense of an explosion within that household. One of the first people accused, as you know, was Tituba, the Indian slave in the household. And Tituba's testimony is so vivid and so kaleidoscopic and so convincing that once she, and moreover, she establishes, she's the one of the only one of the three first accused who says, yes, witchcraft was at work. Yes, I flew on a pole to Boston with my accomplices. And moreover, I saw these spectral cats. It's a crazy testimony. Once she has established in the eyes of the community that witchcraft has been at work, it's very hard for anybody to reverse course. So that's another sort of post on the way. And then one of the first girls who testifies, a teenager named Abigail Hobbs, who's the bad girl of Topsfield, she then spreads the accusations out beyond Salem Village, because she suddenly points a finger to, toward a former minister of the town, of the village, in fact.
Stacy Schiff: And so there you begin [00:10:00] to see that the thing has tentacles, and it begins to spread beyond the immediate household. And then I guess the, I should add actually, Thomas Putnam, one of the villagers, who has had a run of terrible luck, and who will complain against, I think, 35 of the ultimate accused witches, and who will file the first charges, he does something as well to help this thing explode. And then from the other side, you have the head of the witchcraft court, Stoughton, and you have Cotton Mather, who's always in the background, trying very hard to help advise the court, but always in a way that seems to press them toward prosecution. As much as he's pretending to be even handed, he seems quite intent on somehow exorcising this ill and purifying the community. So you have these other forces that are both massaging the narrative and enforcing the prosecution.
Josh Hutchinson: It's hard to say what single element shuts down the prosecution. A [00:11:00] number of things happen, and I think the timing is crucial, as well. The trials, the witchcraft breaks out in late January, early February. The trials take place largely over the summer. And by fall, the accusations have begun to spread in every direction.
Stacy Schiff: We've got to the point where it is far easier to accuse someone else or to confess than it is to claim your innocence. And so obviously in that situation, the snowballing is out of control. It's also, however, the fall, which is traditionally the season when you wanted to make sure that you had plenty of stores in your cellar and you were ready for the winter, and so the interest in spending all day in witchcraft courtrooms tended to wane a little bit. So it may be that a healthy dose of skepticism begins to creep in for practical reasons.
Stacy Schiff: It's also true that the newly appointed, newly installed Massachusetts governor is not a Puritan. He doesn't buy into these trials the way the other authorities had, and he reaches out late that year to the New York ministers to get their opinion on what's happening in [00:12:00] Salem. And that's the first attempt to go beyond the kind of monolith, which is the New England establishment. And their opinion is very different from what the judges in Massachusetts are hearing. So you get this outside opinion, as well.
Stacy Schiff: And slowly but surely you get people in the community, and Thomas Brattle would be the best instance of this. He's a 35-year-old Boston merchant who doesn't have any relationship to any of the other well born justices, which is unusual, because they are a very inbred, familiar group one to the other, and who realizes that basically if someone gives testimony with her eyes closed, she's not observing what's happening, she's imagining something, and sees that a great miscarriage of justice is taking place and will be very hard to erase from history and very quietly, and in fact anonymously, he writes a small pamphlet about the court's proceedings, and he is one of two voices.
Stacy Schiff: There's a Boston minister as well, also very quietly, who will begin to speak up against the trials, and it may be that at that point, the [00:13:00] accusations have just reached a very high level, and too many important people have been implicated. It may just be that it begins to stretch the imagination. At first, there had been 5 witches, and then there had been 10 witches, and suddenly there were 500 witches.
Stacy Schiff: And it may be, it's as if suddenly everyone awoke from this great delirium is what it does begin to feel like. But even at that juncture, there are two things that are interesting. One is that Stoughton, the Chief Justice, is unwilling to shut down the court, and he has to be forced to shut down the court, because he's convinced still of his rectitude and of the court's probity in prosecuting.
Stacy Schiff: And secondly, and this, I think, is something we tend to lose sight of. The belief in witchcraft will persist well after the trials. People believe that they themselves were innocent or that the accused that year were innocent, but they don't yet lose their faith in witchcraft. It's an interesting thing where the trials end, but there is still this lingering sense that there was something supernatural at work.
Josh Hutchinson: And there's still a lot of supernatural [00:14:00] explanations for Salem. Sarah was talking to somebody the other day who was asking, did they have powers?
Stacy Schiff: When you see, when you begin to read the testimony in court, I don't know if you all have household mysteries the way we do, but the kitchen scissors always goes missing. Who's got the kitchen scissors? You begin to realize how much can be explained by witchcraft. It's such an elastic and versatile definition, and especially in a world where you didn't have science, where you couldn't explain illness, where weather was not something you could understand, much less control, where things seem to happen in the night, where there was a lot of drinking, by the way, where the dark was very dark, where you had Native Americans or people with whom you were at, with whom you had conflicts at your doorstep, you can see how this would be the perfect cauldron in which to dissolve your questions.
Sarah Jack: How should Tituba's station in life and experiences, especially in contrast to those of the Puritan [00:15:00] women, inform our understanding of her role in the witch trials?
Stacy Schiff: Three women are initially accused, and they are the three most obvious women one would have chosen. One is a, one is a woman who's homeless, one is a woman who'd been at, who had sued multiple times and was in disfavor in the community, and the third was Tituba, who's who's the household slave.
Stacy Schiff: And who would have had more, she's the only one of the three, as I said, who actually confesses that she is involved in something satanic, and would have had more reason, obviously, than either of the other two women, to give these men in authority what they were looking for. It's really clear when you look at the papers, how much these young women, in particular, how much all the youngsters really were cowed by these men in authority. These were the most eminent men in town. They lived in the most beautiful homes. They dressedwith the greatest of fashion. And their authority would've been something very difficult to resist for anyone but much less someone who was a slave.
Stacy Schiff: Tituba [00:16:00] has every reason to cough up this extraordinary tale about yellow birds and flying cats and flying off to Boston on a pole. She makes it very clear that the devil has said that if she talked about this, he would slice off her head. So she sounds like she's terrified of something anyway and that testimony possibly was beaten out of her, but even if it wasn't beaten out of her, there's one hint that perhaps it may have been.
Stacy Schiff: Those men knew what they were about to hear, because there were at least three people sitting in the room that day waiting for her to testify. So they knew that this was the goldmine, that she was going to be the witness who was going to make this thing real. It's very hard to believe she would have had any grounds with which to resist them given her station in life.
Josh Hutchinson: Very true. And I have to fess up that my great grandfather, Joseph Hutchinson, was one who filed the complaint along with Thomas Putnam.
Stacy Schiff: I love that. [00:17:00] Wait, are you related to Thomas Hutchinson, too?
Josh Hutchinson: No there's the. Yeah, Salem Hutchinsons and Boston Hutchinsons, and so far, genetically, nobody's found a DNA connection between the two. Anyways, what key lessons should be learned from the Salem witch hunt and applied today?
Stacy Schiff: I suppose we should avoid jumping to conclusions. This is what happens when fear paralyzes reason and when we overcorrect and sort of overanalyze and, I guess what the best that could be said for this real mishap, this tragedy, is that it should serve as a sort of vaccine for us all. We have this instance in our record. We should be looking at it and using it when we think we might be heading in this direction. So we don't end up with McCarthyism, basically. We've seen this, we've seen the dynamic so vividly so often. And it is so clearly where you end up going if you head down the road of conspiratorial thinking. This is the end of the road.
Stacy Schiff: And, as early as [00:18:00] really Thomas Brattle's writings that year, people were very aware of the fact that this was something that was going to be a stain on history, and that was going to be there a blinking red light or a guardrail for future times, which is a, which is indeed how we should be looking at it.
Stacy Schiff: It's always been interesting to me, it's very much in line with Richard Hofstadter's Paranoid Style in American Politics, but it doesn't figure in that book. But it really is the beginning of that this overheated rhetoric and the need, this tribal need to prosecute in some way and the inability to basically defer to reason when you realize that the reasonable is actually the right solution, somehow the complicated answer seems somehow like the more appealing answer often.
Sarah Jack: I wanted to talk a little bit about how you brought out some really strong themes in your book, like the darkness or the tension between people's expectations and disappointments with each other. What, how did you [00:19:00] draw those out into the forefront of your book?
Stacy Schiff: I don't know that I have an exact answer for you. I think what was important to me was to get beyond the theory. I wanted the reader to feel something of what it was like to be in New England in the 17th century, and that is why the darkness became such an obsession of mine, because so much of the testimony is based on a man trying to find his way home from the inn at night and being able to, unable to maneuver through the trees and, therefore, assuming the trees have moved, not that he might have had a few too many drinks earlier himself. But that the darkness is just constant and a sort of disability almost to everyone. So I wanted to bypass the theory at the early end of the book, leave all the explanations to the end, which may or may not have been successful, but just to plunge the reader immediately into what it felt like.
Stacy Schiff: That's why the book begins with Ann Foster, who, and I think I read fairly early on of Ann Foster, who's this older, Andover [00:20:00] farm woman who testifies in court under oath to the fact that she flew through the air on a pole, and moreover, not only flew through the air on a pole, but crash landed. I wanted the reader to think what would possess a person to swear to that under oath? How could you be so certain that this had happened and even tell the authorities about the cheese and bread you had put in your pocket before your flight? So I just wanted to literally plunge right into that New England feel and into this, into where, how a person could wind up believing that of herself, or at least believing that if she swore to that, she was telling the truth.
Josh Hutchinson: On the flying, you had mentioned the Swedish witch trials before, and is the flying, did that come from Sweden?
Stacy Schiff: Oh, I'm so glad you asked because I should have mentioned that, Joshua. Yes, there had never, witches in New England had never flown before 1692. So there were two things that were new. Basically the whole, and I should have gone back to mention this, the whole question of what was a [00:21:00] witch? A witch was basically a devil's accomplice who's target wasn't your body, but your soul. She or he was there to do the devil's work with her little menagerie of helpers who were generally cats and dogs and toads and all the diabolical creatures we can imagine, but the idea of a pact with the devil was very much an Anglo-Saxon concept, while the idea of a witch being able to fly to do her business was not. That was a continental witch.
Stacy Schiff: And continental witches tended to be much more exotic creatures. They engaged in all kinds of sexual acts. Puritan witches never engaged in sexual acts. And they did not have, Anglo-Saxon witches did not have a satanic Sabbath. That, too, was a continental idea. So both the flying and the satanic Sabbath came to New England, it seems to me, through the writings of Cotton Mather, who wrote about that Swedish outbreak of witchcraft, which almost completely parallels what happens in Salem down to the ages of [00:22:00] the first girls who are afflicted, first children who are afflicted, and with very similar results, in fact, in that innocents die. But those two concepts were something that were entirely foreign to previous, both the lore of witchcraft in New England, and to previous witchcraft testimony.
Sarah Jack: Having written extensively on various historical figures and events, how does your latest project, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, compare to your other works in terms of research challenges or thematic focus and the narrative approach you take?
Stacy Schiff: That's a big question, Sarah. To start with the thematic piece, there's a funny footnote in a way to the, with the American Revolution in that Salem lives on. And that's an interesting thing with Salem generally is to see how it then gets recycled and used by different parts of the country.
Stacy Schiff: Abolitionists will end up saying that basically slavery is on par with, essentially, hanging witches and pro slavery people in the South will basically point to New England and say abolition is on [00:23:00] par with, and they'll say the opposite. So both sides will end up going back to cite Salem witchcraft.
Stacy Schiff: But in the run up to the Revolution, as Stamp Act protests and other protests take off, an extraordinary number of people compare the moment to the delusion of 1692. So you get this constant drumbeat of things that there has never been this much unrest. There has never been such delusion. People have never been so mad since the Bedlam of 1692. And it's just funny to see that there's a comparison between Stamp Act protests and trying witches in the court in Salem town.
Stacy Schiff: From a research point of view, I was at a great loss, because although there are things missing from the Salem record, Samuel Adams' papers are very incomplete. He destroyed a lot of paper, because he needed to destroy his trail, because he's obviously fomenting revolution. So there is a no fingerprint school at work here, and I was working from a somewhat mutilated record for that reason. So that was a big challenge, and a challenge that I ended up filling by reading a [00:24:00] lot in the archives in London, which are essentially what his enemies were saying about him. So he would never claim credit, for example, for some misdeed, some street protest or street ambush. But you can be certain that the customs commissioners in Boston or the Lieutenant Governor in Boston was writing back to London saying, 'let me tell you what this rascal Samuel Adams is up to this week.'
Stacy Schiff: So I ended up being able to fill in a certain amount of his whereabouts and his machinations from the other side, with a grain of salt, I should add. And there was a great deal. I think this is a big difference between the two. There's a great deal of Adams in the newspapers, because he's writing constantly for the Boston newspapers, and one of the reasons the Revolution takes off, as it does from Boston, is because there are so many newspapers and such a literate populace.
Stacy Schiff: And that, in a funny way, is a fallout from something that was true in 1692. You didn't have newspapers in 1692, but you did have a highly literate populace, because in order to pray, you needed to know how to read. And it is, in [00:25:00] a funny way, that very erudition that fuels the Salem Witch epidemic, because people have bought into this library of books which Cotton Mather brings to the forefront and which these men are consulting.
Stacy Schiff: And so they have these shelves of literature on witchcraft. What they don't have are the skeptical texts on witchcraft, because those had been banned from coming into Boston. So in a funny way, you have a case of too much erudition. But anyway, it's that very, it's that literate tradition which flows obviously from one book to the other.
Josh Hutchinson: And Cotton Mather, ironically, spurred a lot of the activity on by writing about the other events. So you have the Swedish trials and the Goodwin case, and they're all feeding into the behaviors of these afflicted people. So Cotton was involved from the beginning, I suppose.
Stacy Schiff: It's funny, the court appeals to him, I think, three times. I'm now forgetting, but I think it's three times. And [00:26:00] three times, he basically says, you need to go very carefully, you need to exercise exquisite caution. And then he adds, nevertheless, I would vote for a speedy and vigorous prosecution. And there's always that nevertheless attached to each of his statements. And after the trials, there is a document and I no longer remember if it's 1694 or if it's later, where he talks about how essentially the trials had done good, because they had filled the pews, and they had awakened a sluggish generation to its faith, and really nobody who mattered had been lost in the process. It's not a statement had been meant for public consumption, but it tells you something of how the establishment viewed both the victims and the prosecution.
Josh Hutchinson: It's remarkable.
Sarah Jack: How do you hope your books impact reader understanding of history and its relevance to the present?
Stacy Schiff: I called the trials a kind of vaccine. I like to think this is something of which we don't lose sight, so that we do not repeat this kind of [00:27:00] demented behavior, but generally, on a sort of happier front, I'd like to think that there's something about biography that allows one to open the window to history from a more personal point of view. In other words, through the sensibility of the individual in question, so that if you can see something like the strains and the tensions in the family of someone like Samuel Adams, you can begin to understand why someone would feel so deeply wed to American rights and privileges and so deeply sensitive to British overreach, and therefore begin to publish the kind of supposedly seditious statements that he publishes, and really spearhead what becomes a revolution. Why this cause becomes so very vital to him. And you don't really understand that if you don't really understand sort of the personal history that goes behind it. And I think we lose that sometimes when we talk about history from a higher altitude. I think when you're seeing it through the sensibility of one person, whether that person is [00:28:00] Cleopatra or Samuel Adams, you begin to understand those forces better.
Josh Hutchinson: And what subjects or events are you drawn to explore next? Is there anything that you can tell us about?
Stacy Schiff: I am working on a new book. Interestingly or not, it's actually a return to a subject, something I've never done before, it's a book about, it's another book about Benjamin Franklin, and this time it's about, the previous time I had written about the almost nine years that Franklin spends in France soliciting aid and and guns and men for the revolution, and he comes home in 1785 from that stint and will die in 1790. So this is a book which is going to tell the story of his life through those last five Philadelphia years. So it's really sort of the finale. It's Franklin's last act in a way.
Josh Hutchinson: I'm looking forward to that.
Stacy Schiff: Thank you. So am I. I'm looking forward to having written it, to being on the other side of it.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for your work in your book, but your work today too, [00:29:00] the getting this information out and dissecting it like this is just really key for the world. So I know it sounds dramatic, but
Stacy Schiff: No, it's not. And the one thing we didn't talk about, and to your point, is the silence that comes, that descends after this wipe out, right? Because for a generation, nobody would talk about it. Exoneration was impossible, because people were unwilling even to admit that they were related to victims of the trials.
Stacy Schiff: So you, even in those first, attempts So when you look at attempts at getting reparations for families in 1711, families avoiding the word witchcraft. It's basically, I lost my relative in the recent unpleasantness is essentially what they're saying. And that whole sort of cushion of shame and regret that falls, guilt that descends on the scene afterwards means that so much has been lost to us, so much of the history has been lost to us, so much of the record goes missing, because everyone just wanted to pretend this had [00:30:00] never happened.
Stacy Schiff: And I guess that's why, when we're saying this is really crucial for us to bring back to the forefront, there's your reason.
Stacy Schiff: And now, for Minute with Mary.
Mary Louise Bingham: Let me update you about Female Gleason. We found that Susanna, wife of Thomas Gleason. All the records were found proving she lived at Cambridge in 1665, when she was supposed to have been accused for witchcraft. However, the author who listed a Female Gleason accused for witchcraft in their book did not cite their source. We have reached out to that author, who has yet to respond. However, our team didn't stop. Contact was made with both the Massachusetts State Archives and the Judicial Archives. These archivists exhausted all their resources and could not locate any document tying an accusation to any woman with the surname Gleason.
Mary Louise Bingham: Therefore, until we [00:31:00] hear from this author, it can be declared as of this recording that no woman named Gleason was ever accused of witchcraft who lived at Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in any surrounding town. This is why looking at the original source or primary document is so important. Thank you.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah has End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News. We want to extend our heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of you for your unwavering support for this growing nonprofit. Your monetary donations and the invaluable time you've dedicated as volunteers have been pivotal in fueling the growth of our vital projects. It's through your contributions of time and money that we're able to continue our mission, bringing to light critical lessons from history, and fostering a deeper acknowledgment of witch-hunting today.
Sarah Jack: Your involvement not only aids in amplifying this history, but [00:32:00] also in ensuring that the lessons derived from it resonate far wide and clearly. Thank you for being an integral part of our journey and for your commitment to helping us make a meaningful impact worldwide. Your engagement is what makes all of this possible, and we're immensely grateful for the community we've built together.
Sarah Jack: We're thrilled to announce the upcoming Salem 101 series on witch hunt podcasts. This original series is a comprehensive deep dive into the Salem witch trials written by Josh Hutchinson, also known as @salemwitchhunt on social media, each episode promises to peel back the layers of this unmatched account of community betrayal, guided by the records and writings that have propelled the story to this day. Join us, Salem Witch Trial Descendants, as we examine the year these events unfolded. Join us as we look closely at the fascinating individuals that many of us call ancestors. We will tackle the pressing questions that have intrigued the world, revealing insights that have led to the [00:33:00] current understanding of the Salem Witch Trials. For those eager to broaden their knowledge, we encourage you to explore our past catalog of episodes. These recordings offer an insightful introduction to the subject and cover witch trials that predate Salem, setting the stage for this monumental series.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: Join us again every week.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

March 19, 2024

Newcastle Witch Trials with Dr. Katie Liddane

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Show Notes

In this week’s captivating episode, we are excited to welcome Dr. Katie Liddane, an expert in the History and Heritage of Witch Hunting in the North East of England. Katie takes us through her research and her dedicated efforts to illuminate the Newcastle Witch Trials. We delve into why the Newcastle Witch-Hunt remains less known compared to events like the Pendle Witch-Hunt and discuss Newcastle Castle’s creative approach to engaging the community with workshops on witch trial history. Katie also talks about her active role in creating a memorial for the victims of the Newcastle witch trials, stressing the importance of community involvement and historical fidelity. She sheds light on the necessity of merging historical accuracy with the pop-cultural fascination with witchcraft to fully honor and recognize the humanity of the accused. Join us as we explore an intricate blend of history, memory, and cultural engagement in remembering past witch hunts.

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Walking with Witches by Lynn Huggins-Cooper

Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project

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Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, where we unravel the complex global history of witch trials. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today, we are excited to bring you a special discussion from Dr. Katie Liddane.
Josh Hutchinson: Dr. Liddane takes us through the Newcastle Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: And tells us about her witch trial history workshop at Newcastle Castle, attended by sixth-year students.
Josh Hutchinson: We also explore why the Newcastle Witch Hunt has been overlooked by many, while the Pendle Witch Trials are much more widely known.
Sarah Jack: This conversation is so engaging, you may catch yourself trying to join in with us.
Josh Hutchinson: And we don't mind if you do.
Sarah Jack: Yay!
Josh Hutchinson: Dr. Liddane's work highlights the large absence [00:01:00] and sense of obscurity around neglected historical events like witch trials, especially when pitted against the more renowned historical events.
Sarah Jack: Dr. Liddane emphasizes the importance of remembering our past and memorializing those accused of witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: One of her outreach efforts has been to dress the part of a 17th century woman accused of witchcraft and lead castle tours.
Sarah Jack: Be sure to check out her social media so you can see her in costume. It's awesome.
Josh Hutchinson: It is.
Sarah Jack: Welcome Dr. Katie Liddane. Her expertise spans witchcraft history, folklore, historical fiction, and the intriguing realm of gothic tourism. Her research and creative projects focus on 17th century northeast English witchcraft, and she obtained a PhD from Northumbria University.
Sarah Jack: Could you please introduce yourself and share with the listeners your background, expertise, and professional journey?
Katie Liddane: I'm Katie Liddane. I [00:02:00] recently graduated with my doctorate in December of last year in the History and Heritage of Witch-Hunting in the North East of England. Witch Persecution, I think is in the title. I've been at Northumbria for all three of my degrees and was fortunate enough to get scholarships for both postgraduate degrees. And I guess in the more heritage side of my studies and my experience, I started an internship while I was awaiting the start of my PhD that showed me how heavily influenced by industrial heritage and the Northeast as a center for working class communities and scientific innovation had really eclipsed a lot of the other historical events in Newcastle, including the witch trials.
Katie Liddane: Because the first time I'd heard of the [00:03:00] Newcastle Witch Trials was through a local newspaper article that was from 2008 but had been republished in around 2016 or so. And it was a very brief article that did send me rolling my eyes a little bit, because the article was about the bones of those convicted of witchcraft being accidentally excavated, and the article describes some of the archaeologists or workmen there getting a rash from the bones and describing it as a curse.
Josh Hutchinson: Wow.
Katie Liddane: So
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Katie Liddane: I found that obviously quite a problematic coverage, so I went in search for more to find out more about the Newcastle witches and then to understand how such a large absence and sense of obscurity had developed, especially in comparison with the Pendle Witches that are much more [00:04:00] famous in cultural memory. And I kind of had the idea and the curiosity and then found an opportunity that would fit to allow me to explore it for so long and write about it.
Josh Hutchinson: What a strange thing to put in a newspaper article, getting a rash from handling accused person's bones.
Katie Liddane: And it's not even entirely clear that it was the bones of those convicted of witchcraft. It was just in the general area that we think that the convicted were buried. And again, the article's around Halloween. So I think it was just a kind of spooky ending of the article.
Katie Liddane:
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, yeah. There's always those Halloween articles
Josh Hutchinson: Every year.
Katie Liddane: Yeah. And in terms of what I'd done before the PhD and before working at the North of England Institute for Mining [00:05:00] and Mechanical Engineers, there's an abbreviation for a reason, I had done a Master's of Research in the Heritage Management and History of Crossbones Graveyard in Southwark in London.
Katie Liddane: Have you heard of Crossbones before?
Josh Hutchinson: No, haven't heard before.
Katie Liddane: It's hailed as I think the first sex worker heritage site. And that's because Southwark had a long history as an area for licensed sex work in the medieval period. And Crossbones was a pauper's graveyard for centuries, the kind of two histories had become conflated. And again, it was through the discovery of bones that interest in the site was reignited. I think it was during an Tube in the 1990s that they discovered a pauper's graveyard, and so that kind of gave me, [00:06:00] that masters gave me my foundation to explore the history of the site and the people associated with it, but also how that history morphs through heritage attractions and fiction and public history. So I can see quite a clear link between the two subjects, even though they're like quite different areas of history.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. Is there any links there that you want to talk about?
Katie Liddane: I guess just a shared background of subjects that are usually considered women's history or gendered history, sex work and witchcraft, and the histories, heritage attractions, and businesses sometimes built around the memorialization or lack thereof of marginalized people. But at that time, I'd like to say it was part of a grand scheme, but at that time I'd lived in Newcastle for at least three years and hadn't [00:07:00] heard of the Newcastle witches before. And a lot of people still haven't. So it's been very recently that people are starting to become aware that Newcastle had witch trials. Some people in the town don't even know that Newcastle has a castle. It's something that I've learned from working at Newcastle Castle.
Josh Hutchinson: Some of the work that we've done in Connecticut around the witch trial history is really similar as far as the awareness isn't there in a lot of the community. I have really enjoyed that piece, just having the new learners getting to spread something that is interesting and important. As surprising as it can be when history is just unknown, it's exciting when it gets launched like this.
Katie Liddane: Definitely has been very exciting and the opportunity to talk about it more on podcasts and heritage [00:08:00] attractions has been brilliant as well because that was the intention of my project, really, to explain and understand the obscurity of the Newcastle witches, but also use that to have a wider impact outside of academia. Because I don't think many people are going to read an 80,000 word academic thesis on the role of deindustrialization in the legacy of the Newcastle Witch Trials, but there are opportunities to talk about the Witch Trials and to often clear up a lot of misconceptions that happen a lot with originating in the sort of Halloween articles and popular media that really links the fairy tale or the folk healer witch with those convicted and executed in the 17th century.
Katie Liddane: And I think Newcastle has been especially impacted by what I term in my thesis, but I don't think I coined [00:09:00] the term, 'witch kitsch' in the intervening centuries almost between the trials and their resurgence. Strangely, post 2008, 2008 seems to be a watershed moment for the afterlife of the Newcastle witches. There has been mounds and mounds of witchcraft media that has been drawn upon to a greater extent than the few sources we have of the Newcastle Witches.
Josh Hutchinson: Why do you think that is since 2008? Why has that changed?
Katie Liddane: 2008 was the year of the article about the bones, and it was during renovation work of St. Andrew's Churchyard that what may have been the bones of the convicted were unearthed. But that was also the year that Walking with Witches, which is a children's novel by Lynn Huggins Cooper, based on the Newcastle Witches, was released. And then when you go slightly [00:10:00] further back, I have family history journals that do include excerpts from the burial register with the title, 'Was Your Ancestress a Witch?' Then we get small articles and magazines in the 1970s and things like that, but I think post sort of 2008 is the time where you see the solidification of the Northeast as a post-industrial region and there's been a greater exploration of parts of the region's history beyond heavy industry. And it's enabled people to tap into wider witch kitsch with the regional example.
Katie Liddane: That was already quite a mouthful, but there is like an 80,000 word explanation that starts literally with the witch trials, and then you see a snowballing effect of obscurity, and then a kind of redevelopment of interest. I've not been [00:11:00] able to pin down why specifically 2008, but you can tie it into wider witch literature, occult revivals, interest in the supernatural, and I guess there may have been examples of people finding out about the Newcastle Witches in the same way that I have, and then they've gone through and mined the few resources that there are out there, and we're starting to see more representation.
Sarah Jack: I was just thinking, my journey has not led me to a new degree yet, but I was trying to mine resources about my ancestor who was on trial for witchcraft in the 17th century in Connecticut, and I didn't realize I needed to stick my nose in the academic writings, because I wasn't reading academic writings at that point. I was online looking for people talking about it, newspaper articles, that kind of thing. And it [00:12:00] was really similar the type of witch kitsch that we would find, that I would find, or just lack, other people saying, I don't know, what's out there, and can there be a memorial?
Sarah Jack: And so it's interesting how these histories that do come back alive, the voices start to be heard. It's because there's inquiry, and there's a vacuum there.
Katie Liddane: Definitely, and I think with a more obscure case like Newcastle, I think it's quite important that vacuum is filled in a way in a collaboration between historians and heritage professionals, because there is that danger of this rediscovery stopping with the witch kitsch, and I think especially in a situation such as Newcastle's where there is this kind of more grassroots reengagement with the city's [00:13:00] witch-hunting past. There is that danger that the information or lack thereof that we have about the Newcastle Witches becomes supplemented and our understanding of the Newcastle Witches is that of the hag stereotype or the almost fictional caricature, and that these efforts and these interests don't materialize into memorialization and recognition of victimhood.
Josh Hutchinson: Now one way that you've worked on getting more recognition is through workshops you conducted. What can you tell us about those?
Katie Liddane: I wrote a bespoke workshop at the time for a primary school in the west end of Newcastle called Bridgewater. And the workshop is called 'Familiars and Fear,' and it was written because the children in year six, so that's around 11 years old, [00:14:00] were reading Walking with Witches for their literacy class. And the novel touches on a lot of locations in Newcastle, like Newcastle Castle, and the Lit and Phil, which is the Literary and Philosophical Society. And the teachers wanted to have a school trip to actually visit these locations, and luckily at the time I was at placement at Newcastle Castle as part of my PhD studies, so I was able to write the workshop that tied in with what they're reading at school, but also the wider witchcraft history in the region. Eleven years old is quite young to explain some of these issues, so it requires a bit of simplification and talking about suspicion and rumour and issues like that, but also bringing in issues of gender and class. And we also have a game [00:15:00] towards the end, where one of the children plays a witchfinder.
Katie Liddane: And it's quite similar to Wink Murder. I don't know if you're familiar with that.
Sarah Jack: I believe I am. Is that a group game, and you don't wanna get winked at 'cause then you're dead.?
Katie Liddane: Essentially, yeah, and one of the children, or one of the people playing the game is chosen to be a detective and to work out who is committing the murders. But, this time we have someone chosen to be a witchfinder. The child is taken out of the room and told, essentially the witchfinder was given the equivalent of 106 pounds in today's money per witch, that he would find guilty and do not think that might influence your decision a little bit. And the children in the main room are given cards that they are told will say whether they are a villager or a witch. And in reality, none of the cards say that the children, say that anyone is a witch, [00:16:00] and the kind of game escalates as the children start to accuse each other, the witchfinder decides if he's going to send them to trial, essentially, and then at the end we explain to the children that none of them were witches, and it's a really good opportunity to see the shock on their faces, but also to talk about how easily they started accusing one another. So I think it's a really good way to make the session interactive but also through that and through a more tangible and active lesson, get them the core messages across about what we can learn from witch hunting.
Sarah Jack: The prickers and the finders were a strong part of the Newcastle witch trial history.
Katie Liddane: Yes, so how the witch trials originated in Newcastle was through a petition that was submitted in March of [00:17:00] 1649, for a witchfinder to be invited to the town, and unfortunately, the petition doesn't survive, but we get the sense that the witch finder was chosen by name. He was a Scottish professional witch pricker, and unfortunately, we don't know his name today. But he had a reputation that crossed the border into Newcastle, and when he arrived into the town, thirty people, which would have been around 1 percent of the town's population, were brought forward to be tried by him, and he boasted that he could tell if someone was a witch by their looks alone, but his method in court as a sort of preliminary trial method was pricking with a bodkin, which was a long medicinal pin, and he would prick the devil's marks that he found on the [00:18:00] accused, and particularly in English witch hunting, this was a protuberance like a mole or an extra nipple or a skin tag or something like that that was understood to be the teat at which the familiar spirit would feed. And, out of the 30 people, the wich finder found 15 guilty and were passed on to trial, and then they were convicted at the assizes.
Josh Hutchinson: And he was paid per witch that he found?
Katie Liddane: Yeah, he was paid 20 shillings per witch, and later on, he allegedly admitted to being the death of over 220 people across England and Scotland.
Josh Hutchinson: So he made pretty good money.
Katie Liddane: Yeah, and he was actually discovered to be a fraud after his time in Newcastle, and according to the evidence that we have, he was pursued into Scotland and [00:19:00] executed, and it was on the gallows that he gave the figure of 220, but I've unfortunately not been able to verify that anywhere, so I do have some speculation that in the town's kind of constructing of the history of this event in the five years between the event and the first surviving piece of documentation, it certainly makes the town's officials appear better if they've managed to apprehend him but have not found anything to correlate that he was executed for his involvement at Newcastle.
Sarah Jack: Were there also sociopolitical impacts in the Northeast that contributed to the witchcraft persecutions?
Katie Liddane: The 17th century in Newcastle was a very turbulent period. You've got various sieges by the Scottish. There's [00:20:00] a plague outbreak that was proportionally more devastating than London's 1666 plague. There were pirates at the ports in Newcastle in 1649 to 1650, harvest crises, just decades of political upheaval. And whilst, because we don't have the surviving material of the accusations of the individuals, you can definitely see this escalation over the time period and the fact that witch trial accusations and a reputation for witchcraft took sometimes decades to develop, you can really see, again, like this gradual increase that reached a fever pitch in 1649.
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, this sounds so familiar to what we've heard with other witch trial cases. There's this political uncertainty, maybe some [00:21:00] warfare going on, disease, crop issues. Yeah, these seem to be pretty typical contributors to at least the witch panics that happened.
Katie Liddane: Definitely. And you do see this kind of spread outside of Newcastle in 1649 to 1650. There was a peak in Scottish witch hunting in the same time period, but you also see smaller clusters of accusations in Gateshead, which is just across the Tyne, and the Sheriff of Cumberland sent a letter to London to ask for assistance in a witch hunt, and he was told that essentially the legislation, we're not going to offer any more support. And in the case of Newcastle, they did seek that support from north of the border instead.
Sarah Jack: In the Newcastle case, they were tried in Newcastle?
Katie Liddane: [00:22:00] Yes They would have been tried at the Assizes Court in the Guild Hall, which is just on the quayside, and the witch that was likely held at Newcastle Castle, she was a resident of Northumberland, so she would have been tried at the Morpeth Assizes in Northumberland, but because at the time she was in a different jurisdiction, she would have been held at Newcastle Castle because that was acting as the jail for the county of Northumberland. But she was executed alongside the Newcastle Witches too.
Sarah Jack: How many executions occurred?
Katie Liddane: So there were 14 from the Newcastle Witch Trials, 13 women and one man. And then Jane Martin was the witch who was accused in Northumberland and convicted alongside the Newcastle Witches. But also on the same day, nine Moss Troopers were executed. Moss Troopers are a local name [00:23:00] for cattle rustlers and border thieves. They would essentially use the difference in legislation and jurisdiction to hop across the border whenever they'd committed a crime. The large number of executions taking place on the same day would have been a huge spectacle for people in the region and reinforced the idea of maintenance of law and order and show some stability in a bizarre way. During this period, the number of executions were so large that a special gallows was built. We have record of the construction of an extra large gallows, and this was what made it more surprising to me that the Newcastle Witches had been so little known for so long was that their hanging was the largest hanging for witchcraft in English history. There's, a group of 18 witches that were executed in Chelmsford in East Anglia under Matthew Hopkins, [00:24:00] but they were executed in different locations and at different dates. So it, at the start of my studies, it seemed even more strange that the Newcastle Witch Trials have faded into obscurity.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, that really stands out differently. With Salem, we had 19 hanged, but there were several different dates.
Katie Liddane: Yeah, and I think similarly with Salem, because in exploring this absence throughout my thesis, I wanted to do a lot of comparison to sites that do engage with their witchcraft history, for better or for worse, in different times throughout history. I think it's really important to follow the example of memorialising those that weren't executed as witches, but died earlier in jail, or died awaiting trial, [00:25:00] things like that, so really good to be able to have that comparison of this is how it's been done in another location, in perhaps the most famous place for witchcraft heritage in the world. So this is how Newcastle can learn from that and build upon that.
Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about the memorial effort?
Katie Liddane: We're in the early stages at the moment. It's a project at the moment between myself, the learning team at Newcastle Castle, and Newcastle's Council, the Heritage and Conservation Department. We're working on contacting people that we think would be interested stakeholders, organizations that I've worked with before.
Katie Liddane: And as part of that, I'm quite keen to reach out to other heritage sites in the UK and elsewhere that have witchcraft memorials and to discuss the stories of how they came about [00:26:00] there and really learn from how other sites have engaged with their witch hunting past. Not just to, as I was in my thesis, to look at why Newcastle perhaps hasn't yet but to turn that into an action.
Katie Liddane: We'll look at involving local artists. We've got Bridgewater Primary, the school that I mentioned earlier, involved as well. They did a writing exercise for one of their classes to write a letter requesting a memorial to their local MP. So we are trying to build a communal engagement rather than a sort of top down memorial that someone will read about in the newspaper, like I did the bone discovery.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Sarah and I are involved in an effort to get a memorial for the witch trial victims in Connecticut. So we're at a similar early stage building the community [00:27:00] and starting to conceptualize what it might look like.
Katie Liddane: Yeah, we're also hoping, we're in the sort of blue sky thinking, shoot for the stars phase at the moment, but we'd love to do a community event each year as well, on the anniversary of the executions. So to keep the memorialization process and recognition alive again, rather than just placing a memorial and that being the end of it, but also, I don't know if you've had a similar thought process, but with it being so long that Newcastle has gone without any sort of recognition or memorialization, the aims are a bit higher. Part of our thinking is that we definitely want the names of each of the people convicted and or accused that might have died during the process that they awaited trial, but a [00:28:00] small plaque doesn't seem enough after so long. Envisioning what the design looks like is definitely being influenced, on my part anyway, by the amount of time that there's been nothing.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I'd say shoot for the stars. Definitely.
Katie Liddane: I think looking at the centenaries of other witch hunts and the events around that has been really important in both my research process and in starting to put proposals together for the memorial as well. So the fourth centenary of the Pendle Witch Trials that happened in 2012 has been quite influential in the various events and different means of engaging with different parts of the community. In looking at Salem as well, when I visited Lancaster, it was quite interesting to see the coexistence of serious memorialization, such as the [00:29:00] turset weight markers that were put on the Pendle Witch Trail in 2012, in contrast to the local bus companies having a lady with a pointed hat and a broomstick on the side of their, on the side of their buses.
Katie Liddane: So there's a really, like a really interesting mingling of what the early modern witch means to people and the different ways that regions with a strong witch hunting past engage with that.
Katie Liddane:
Josh Hutchinson: That sounds a lot like Salem. The city emblem is the witch on the broomstick with the pointy hat. So the police and the police cars have that emblem on them, but you do have, you know, multiple memorials to the victims there, where you go, and, they're peaceful, solemn places amidst all the witch kitsch going on all around it. So it's a [00:30:00] this interesting dichotomy.
Katie Liddane: It's really interesting, and I'd say, apart from sites like Newcastle Castle and brief discussion of the trials at the Discovery Museum in the city, Newcastle's engagement is just the witch kitch elements elsewhere, so there are various ghost tours and there's an escape room that do talk about the Newcastle witches, but it is very much in the pointed hat broomstick way.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, I've seen some local community events that embrace the history of a single witch trial victim from their town. And there's a lot of lore that has grown and then been embraced for communities. And then there's these fresher efforts of bringing their humanity to the forefront. But they're just, the lore is just envelopes [00:31:00] that woman.
Sarah Jack: And so I'm learning that, they're forever intertwined, but the life can be spoken about more, and her humanity and the dignity has to be a constant part of the conversation to grow that piece of her story. And one of the recent memorial plaques that went up, it's very brief what it says about her, but you can tell they are recognizing her as a real woman who hanged, but they are also, there's this endearment of the folklore that's been around her that they identify with as the town.
Katie Liddane: Definitely. I think it would be really hard to just engage directly with what we know from the 17th century records and not let any other awareness of what witchcraft and or witch hunting means to [00:32:00] us today to influence that. I think the, it's the coexistence of the pop cultural witch with the recognition of the humanity of those accused is most important.
Katie Liddane: I saw a similar memorial in Forfar in Scotland. That memorial has, it's just a stone pillar with one indentation in the stone per victim and then beneath it just says, 'they were just people.' And I think the demystifying aspect is really important there to, like I say, recognize the humanity and to a certain extent the distinction between those accused in the 17th century and our more modern understandings of the witch figure, whether it be historical or fantasy.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's so true. They [00:33:00] were just people. And I think what you're hoping to do with the annual event is so critical. Hopefully, we can do something like that too, because it's so important to give these victims their humanity and know about them outside of just the kitsch element, get a sense of who they are as real human people just like us.
Katie Liddane: Yeah. And we do fortunately have some small glimpses of what the Newcastle Witches were like as people. So Matthew Boomer, the only male defendant. We know that he was a smith of some form, and he appears in the quarter session records in the years leading up to the Newcastle Witch Trials in petty disputes with his neighbors.
Katie Liddane: We don't have much detail about much detail of what they were about [00:34:00] because the clerk didn't seem too interested by it so he didn't write much down, unfortunately. Men implicated in English witch trials are related to, or married to, female defendants, but we can't find that connection there with Matthew. And we also know a little bit more about Margaret Brown.
Katie Liddane: And in the only account that we do have in depth on the Newcastle Witch Trials and the execution again, we can't really verify this but Margaret Brown is said to have asked for a sign from God for her innocence as she was about to drop, and her blood sprayed across the crowd to the amazement of onlookers. And often when I do public engagement work, I try to explain that amazement meant something different in the 17th century than it does today. But Margaret Brown has a further connection in that one of the [00:35:00] witnesses that gave their testimony to support this account of the witch hunts was her friend Eleanor Loomsdale, and Eleanor spent a year in jail for trying to deter people from giving evidence against Margaret and the co-accused. So we can see evidence of opposition to the witch hunting at the time, and Eleanor getting in contact with the writer of the account years later to give her version of events.
Sarah Jack: Wow. And those that were executed, were they identified early on? How, I know we have the length of the event, but I wondered how quickly some of these people went from not being accused to finding themselves convicted.
Katie Liddane: From the glimpses that we can get from the brief [00:36:00] discussion of the Newcastle Witch Hunt in a kind of full length book that is actually about Ralph Gardner's grievances with Newcastle's council. About four pages of the large book are about the witch hunt and this is essentially, apart from the burial register and financial records for how much it cost to jail the witches while they awaited trial, this four page account is all we have.
Katie Liddane: And in Gardner's version of events there was bubbling unrest and informal accusations being made that caused the petition to be submitted. And the petition was submitted in March of 1649, as I said, but the witchfinder wasn't sought until 1650. So we do see a kind of reluctance, hesitance, for Newcastle's authorities to invite a [00:37:00] witchfinder, or to pay for a witchfinder, possibly. There is a suggestion that there was a sense of informal suspicion and reputation for those that were brought forward. But when the witchfinder did arrive, a bellman was sent out into the town to encourage accusations to be formalized. But I highly doubt that those accusations were generated when the witchfinder was riding through. I think it will have been years in the making for a lot of the people accused.
Josh Hutchinson: Why do you think that it is that we only have that one four page account?
Katie Liddane: The survival of the assizes records is very scarce for Newcastle in that time period. It's hard to trace when they disappear, but they were already gone by the 19th century, when criminal histories and folklore collections were beginning to be compiled of the [00:38:00] region. In terms of why there were few accounts aside from that, I think it was probably the exposure of the witchfinder as a fraud that meant that we don't see the same sort of pamphlets that were produced about Lancaster and the Pendle Witch Trials and things like that, because, and that sort of In the sense of constructing a narrative about a successful witch hunt and the kind of defeat of evil and the defeat of the devil's agents on earth, that witches were understood to be, the exposure of the witch finder as a fraud kind of undermined a lot of that, and it would have been quite severe that the town's authorities had been taken in by a charlatan, so you can see the sense of why they wouldn't have been happy with the trial being discussed.
Katie Liddane: And we do have evidence of that with the four page account, actually, because the 200 [00:39:00] page, 200, 300 page book that it's contained within was actively suppressed by Newcastle's authorities, so we see a kind of censorship of the trial being committed to print, whether it's contained within Ralph Gardner's text against the town's authorities as a whole, or whether it's specifically about the witch trial.
Katie Liddane: In the same year, a pamphlet called Wonderful News from the North Again, that's a term that I have to explain how language evolves over time. It wasn't considered wonderful news at the time in the way that we would talk about it now. But Wonderful News from the North details Jane Martin's accusations, and Jane was the witch held at Newcastle Castle, and the writer of that pamphlet chose to have it printed in London, even though there was a printer [00:40:00] working in Newcastle at the time. Just the brief detail like that gives us a sense that there was an attempt to spread this news outside of the immediate area, or perhaps a reluctance from Newcastle's printer to discuss witch hunting so close to their executions and the exposure of the fraud.
Josh Hutchinson: Interesting. Is there a victim's story that you'd be interested in telling us?
Katie Liddane: In the case of the core Newcastle Witch Trials, we have very, very little information. But I think Jane Martin's story would probably be quite interesting to go into. Like the Newcastle Witches, Jane never made a confession, but her sister did, on her behalf, Margaret White. And Jane and Margaret became involved with the [00:41:00] story presented in Wonderful News because they were named by a cunning man named John Hutton, who was himself being accused of possessing a nine to eleven year old child called Margaret Moore. Yeah, Margaret Muschamp, her mother was Mary Moore, sorry.
Katie Liddane: And as I say, Jane didn't confess. But Margaret White, on her behalf, said that she had entertained the devil and that he knew her so well that that he nicknamed her Bessie, and that she had a black greyhound familiar. And the pamphlet itself was constructed over about four to five years and released to coincide with the Newcastle Witch Trials, quite interestingly.
Katie Liddane: There's quite a long list of Jane's alleged crimes. She was accused of using telekinesis to launch a kiln of oats at a man's head and to kill him. John Hutton, as I say, was accused of shapeshifting into the [00:42:00] form of a dragon, a bear, a horse, and a cow, of causing shipwrecks. And again to go back to Jane, she was also accused of causing a man to have a sore leg. So going from like shapeshifting into a dragon and causing shipwrecks to a sore leg, we see quite a breadth of accusations and forms of magic being used at the time.
Katie Liddane: And in the pamphlet we know that Jane was indicted, tried, and convicted, and taken to Newcastle to be executed. But, she seems to have been, in a bizarre way collateral damage of sorts. Because the mother, Mary Moore, who wrote the pamphlet, was pursuing Dorothy Swinnow, who was a wealthy widow of a colonel. And we know that she fled to Berwick, and the officials at Berwick wouldn't send her back down to Chatham for a trial, but because [00:43:00] Jane was only the wife of a miller, she gets swept up, and because a conviction can be put through with Jane, we see her executed.
Katie Liddane: And I think her tie to Newcastle Castle and the fact that we do know so much more about Jane is why she was chosen to be a castle character, and the design of the castle character that I did in collaboration with the Master's students at Newcastle came after the original Familiars and Fear workshop, but it's been really good to be able to merge those two parts of interpretation together, and the kids engage really well seeing the 17th century costume, and again, with the understanding that these were real people rather than fairy tale villains. So I think that's been a really helpful method of interpretation.
Josh Hutchinson: Is Jane who you portrayed in the costume last year?
Katie Liddane: [00:44:00] Yeah. The castle characters are the illustrations that are commissioned. So there is an illustration of Jane, too, but the castle commissioned the costume to be made by a woman known as the Rogue Needlewoman that does a lot of the costumes for the castle and for local reenactment societies, but Jane Martin is the character that I was dressed as last year, yeah.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we love seeing people in a period costume presenting the information.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. It really caught my eye too, because it was children's education.
Katie Liddane: Yeah, I think it's a really important opportunity as well and to have such an interactive session where the children can directly ask me questions, and I can directly answer them rather than just having these methods of interpretation be released out there. And if people have questions, it's [00:45:00] much harder to ask those and to research to a certain extent, because a lot of people, especially teachers in school, aren't necessarily going to go to academic theses, but to have the opportunity to speak directly to people has been brilliant.
Katie Liddane: The teachers are sometimes a bit reluctant to let the children ask me questions, because they prefer the classroom environment of putting their hand up and or they don't want the children to bother me sometimes, but I think it's brilliant like, I like to wait around at the end of the sessions and have children come and ask me 'what if witches weren't real, then why were people still saying that there were witches? Why did this happen?' And I think that one-on-one engagement is really important, as well.
Josh Hutchinson: What lessons do the children draw from the engagement?
Katie Liddane: Again, it is the breakdown of [00:46:00] kind of very complicated ideas about class and gender. So we discuss the fact that some people who, looked different, may have been accused, people who were ostracized by their communities in certain ways, so it breaks this sort of complex and very historically distant phenomenon of witch hunting into its basic themes to show what we can learn about acceptance and social justice in terms of what, what has happened to the most vulnerable members of society in the past. And through the game especially, the children gain a sense of empathy of what it would have felt like to be accused, or to recognise in themselves impulse to make accusations based on very little evidence.
Katie Liddane:
Katie Liddane: It's been really fun at the castle, especially, to directly [00:47:00] integrate my research and real examples from the region into these activities. I go through various cases and ask the children, ' do you think this person was a witch or what else might have been happening?' And in the game, as well, we see the children are handed curse cards that are real complaints that people made in their accusations about their cow's milk failing or crops failing and things like that and shipwrecks. So it's again been really good to be able to break down PhD level research, speak to children about it, and have them engage and understand.
Sarah Jack: It's amazing. And I really see this long game impact that what you have done is creating, especially with the memorial developing [00:48:00] and the annual tribute that will be happening as these children are growing. It just strengthens that community acknowledgement of the heritage and making memorialization an important part of looking at the history.
Sarah Jack: It's wonderful.
Katie Liddane: Has been a really fulfilling project, and again, as I say, the intention when I started out with my thesis was community engagement and changing this absence rather than just observing it from academia to a certain extent is to be able to build on the memorialisation process, and as I say, recently we're hearing more and more interest from local schools and groups, so it is really nice to see the development and spread of sometimes very surface level awareness that witch trials did happen in Newcastle, and then to have people reach out to the castle and myself [00:49:00] to learn more. So it's a really exciting time for the kind of legacy of the Newcastle Witch Trials.
Josh Hutchinson: As a way of paying tribute, would you be able to read the names of the victims?
Katie Liddane: So the names of those executed in Newcastle on the 21st of August of 1650 were Isabel Brown, Margret Maddeson, Anne Watson, Eleanor Henderson, Elsabeth Dobson, Matthew Bulmer o r Bonner, Ellsabeth Anderson, Jane Huntor, Jane Koupling, Margret Brown, Margret Moffet, Katteren Welsh, alias Coulter, Aylles Hume, and Marie Pootes.
Josh Hutchinson: Katie, I can't tell you how much I've learned from everything that you, I've really learned a lot from you. And I look at how you mentioned how you were looking at other memorials and what other communities have done with the history to [00:50:00] implement and look at what, how you can reach your goals in Newcastle, but I feel like what you've done is so historic and is such a case study in itself and something for other communities to model after. It's incredible.
Katie Liddane: That's really nice to hear, thank you. I again, when I started the PhD, and with the blue sky thinking of the memorial project, I would really like to build a network or engage in a community of areas with witch hunting histories and to learn from each other, to a certain extent, and build an awareness of the witch hunts that fit into a wider understanding of the phenomenon and how you do find specific details that tie the cases to a region, but that also tap into a wider sense of communal memorialization and [00:51:00] its continuing relevance today. It would be great to be able to be further in touch with, with the people.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah we do know a few people in Salem and Danvers, Massachusetts that were involved in the memorials. Have you been able to talk to anyone there?
Katie Liddane: We're still in the early stages of reaching out to that extent, but I did read a lot about the 2016 memorial determining the execution site, and that seems like it was a very intensive project with a lot of researchers and historians that are referenced in my thesis.
Josh Hutchinson: So again, when we have a kind of firmer idea of where we're going with this project, would be brilliant to reach out to those people, too. I've already been in contact with people at Colchester Castle, where some of Matthew Hopkins' [00:52:00] accused were held and in discussion with Lancaster Castle, who were very helpful during my thesis, too.
Sarah Jack: I don't know that I've paid attention enough or I just haven't heard it, but hearing those two terms together, the Witchcraft Heritage, just is like a wake up call for me on messaging and the community engagement piece. I'm so appreciative of that layer of your work.
Katie Liddane: Thank you. It was really, a really interesting thing to be able to explore and to go back to what we were talking about earlier too. It's quite hard to articulate in my thesis of this, in a sense, dichotomy between witch kitsch and memorialization, but to articulate the idea that there is an interwoven relationship between the two.
Katie Liddane: And as you said earlier, I don't think we're ever going to be able to separate them entirely, but I think [00:53:00] witchcraft heritage is a very nuanced topic, and a community to discuss that in is very valuable, especially with regards to sites that are only just moving towards memorialization or moving towards the more nuanced look at their region's witch hunting past.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, one thing that I believe, and I think this especially about Salem, is that the witch kitsch draws people in, and then it gives the historians the opportunity to present the nuanced history to new learners, because there's always a supply of tourists coming in willing to learn.
Katie Liddane: So the relationship is definitely much more complicated than witch kitsch tourism businesses and historians. And so far as we can know about what [00:54:00] happened in places like Salem and Lancaster and Pendle, the detailed documented evidence that we do have does, have to engage with witch kitsch in order for that message to be heard, in a way, so a lot of the way that people do learn about Newcastle Witch Trials in the first instance is through ghost tours, the escape room, and the article, but the important part is when they want to find out more where historians and heritage professionals can step in, so I definitely agree with the witch kitsch being a huge draw at Salem, the interpretation definitely doesn't stop there.
Sarah Jack: I'm just I've just had this realization with Connecticut, one of the questions that we keep having to answer is how can we move forward with highlighting the history and memorials [00:55:00] without the sensationalizing happening? Of course, I'm also seeing this lore that is important to the local culture, but I know that what has the answer is we embrace and develop the heritage, just like we do the other heritage of the history, and we haven't been highlighting that in an articulated way, and I think that can be an answer for that question on gathering some support from stakeholders there.
Katie Liddane: Definitely. I think the witch kitsch is always going to be there in some form, but being able to build something else from that and around that does recognize, again, the humanity of the accused and having a relationship with witch kitsch to a certain extent is very important in raising awareness and recognition of these people as [00:56:00] people. I had a particularly frustrating time in trying to track down one of the strangest misconceptions about the Newcastle Witches, and it was that Matthew Bulmer, the only male defendant, transformed into a black cat and led a load of children to fall down a well in Winleton or Winlayton, the a village in Gateshead.
Katie Liddane: And I haven't been able to substantiate that at all, but the black cat figure is so prominent within witchcraft history that I can, not academically, but I can speculate as to where that came from. But I spent a lot of time emailing the different places that it pops up, and they all assumed that they'd picked it up from the other person.
Katie Liddane: Trying to disentangle where folklore, myth, and witch kitsch becomes involved has been quite difficult, [00:57:00] but has really illustrated the kind of inextricable relationship between 17th century witchcraft history and pop cultural engagements with the witch as a figure in general. And unfortunately, I think the kind of black cat into a well story is more exciting for a lot of people than Matthew Bulmer being a blacksmith that had arguments with his neighbours.
Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
Mary Louise Bingham: Rebecca Fox was distraught, because her daughter, Rebecca Jacobs, was arrested under false pretenses for the capital crime of witchcraft at Salem, Massachusetts Bay, British America, in 1692. Rebecca Jacobs languished in the Salem jail for six months when her mother drafted the second of two petitions on her daughter's behalf. This petition was addressed to the Governor's Council at Boston. Rebecca [00:58:00] Fox advised the magistrates that her daughter was, quote, 'crazed and distracted in her mind for the last 12 years,' end quote. Rebecca asked them to show leniency, because she feared her daughter's mental illness could not withstand the deplorable prison conditions. Rebecca's petitions remain unanswered.
Mary Louise Bingham: Because these petitions have been preserved, we know today that Rebecca Fox's love and devotion for her daughter, Rebecca Jacobs, was unwavering. Here is a short quote by Rebecca Fox to the council, quote, 'Your petitioner, her tender mother, has many great sorrows and almost overcoming burdens on her mind upon my daughter's account. Your petitioner has no way for help but to make my afflicted daughter's condition known to you, end quote.' And she signed this document, 'your [00:59:00] sorrowful and distressed petitioner, Rebecca Fox.' Thank you.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
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This is National Women's History Month. Women have been pivotal and influential across all facets of human history. In March, the United States pays tribute to the enduring legacy and contributions of women throughout its history. National Women's History Month celebrates U. S. women's achievements and struggles. Originating from an 1857 protest by garment workers in New York City against poor working conditions, it evolved into the nation's first Women's Day in 1909 after a significant march for labor rights and suffrage. Official recognition came in 1981 when Congress designated the second week of March as National Women's History Week, later expanding it to a month in 1987. The month is a reflection on women's progress.
During Women's History Month, End Witch Hunts extends a heartfelt appreciation to the exceptional contributions and resilience of marginalized American women. Their narratives, deeply embedded in a diverse tapestry of rich cultural heritages, are essential to the fabric of our collective history. As [01:01:00] educators, these women have imparted wisdom and knowledge across generations, shaping the minds and spirits of future leaders. Their leadership in social and political arenas has been pivotal, driving forward movements of justice, equality, and transformative change with unwavering courage and vision.
Who are our marginalized women? Marginalized women encompass a diverse array of identities and face unique challenges and barriers. These are women of color, indigenous women, LGBTQ women, those with disabilities, the elderly, the impoverished, immigrants and refugees, survivors of violence, single mothers, and those living in conflict zones. Their experiences, marked by intersectional forms of discrimination, underline the pressing need for inclusive support and advocacy. This list is not exhaustive and can intersect, leading to compounded forms of discrimination and marginalization.
Despite marginalization, women have broken through barriers across the arts, sciences, and business, introducing bold perspectives [01:02:00] that challenge restrictive narratives and significantly enhance our collective insight. Their creativity and intelligence has been a beacon of innovation, redefining what it means to lead and excel in a myriad of fields. As entrepreneurs, they have fueled economic growth and community development, highlighting the strength that lies in diversity. Their achievements are monumental, not only in their communities, but in shaping the course of American history.
As we celebrate American women, let us commit to recognizing their invaluable contributions, advocating for their rights, and ensuring that their voices are heard and celebrated. Read about their stories, write their stories, amplify their voices. Their voices, frequently sidelined in dominant narratives must play a pivotal role in leading future generations.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:03:00]

March 12, 2024

Witchcraft in the Granite State: Unveiling New Hampshire’s Witch Trials with Tricia Peone

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Tricia Peone, Project Director, New England’s Hidden Histories

Witchcraft in the Granite State: Unveiling New Hampshire’s Witch Trials with Tricia Peone

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Show Notes

This week on Witch Hunt, we delve into lesser-known witch trials and local lore with Dr. Tricia Peone, Project Director at the Congregational Library & Archives. Our engaging discussion highlights the stories of individuals like Eunice Cole and Jane Walford, bringing to light the history of witchcraft accusations in New Hampshire from the earliest case in 1648 to a significant incident in the 1790s. You will discover how the local community’s efforts to revitalize the reputation of Eunice immortalized her in the public consciousness of Hampton, NH. Dr. Peone provides deep local insights, revealing the complexities beneath the surface. After listening to today’s episode, you might find yourself inspired to explore Eunice Cole’s history firsthand.

Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials 101 Part 1: 1648-1656

Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project

List of those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts

Witch Hunt

Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the leading podcast on the witch trials of the past and the continued witch hunts of today. I'm Josh Hutchinson.

Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.

Josh Hutchinson: We're descendants of women accused of witchcraft.

Sarah Jack: And we're here to tell stories of people like them.

Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we're talking to Dr. Tricia Peone about witchcraft accusations in New Hampshire.

Sarah Jack: In 1648, Jane Walford became the first New Hampshire woman to be accused of witchcraft. Learn what happened to her and the others who followed.

Josh Hutchinson: As in other witch hunts, socioeconomic and religious factors played a significant role in spurring witchcraft accusations in New Hampshire.

Sarah Jack: Spectral evidence was still in [00:01:00] use in a case from the 1790s, a full century after the Salem Witch-Hunt.

Josh Hutchinson: Dr. Peone tells us all about Eunice Cole's case and its unique historical significance.

Sarah Jack: We also discuss recent efforts to exonerate Eunice Cole.

Josh Hutchinson: And close with various commemorative efforts and public interest in Hampton.

Sarah Jack: We are honored to welcome Dr. Tricia Peone. Dr. Peone holds a PhD in history from the University of New Hampshire, specializing in the study of witchcraft and witch trials with a particular focus on New England.

Josh Hutchinson:

Josh Hutchinson: And I am a historian. I specialize in the history of magic and witchcraft in the 17th and 18th centuries. And my job is I work at the Congregational Library and Archives, which is in Boston. And I manage a project called the New England's Hidden Histories Project, which is looking at Congregational Church [00:02:00] records throughout New England and digitizing them and making them accessible by publishing them online. So I've been in that job for about a year, a little over a year, but before that I've worked as a researcher, I've taught classes on the history of witchcraft and public history, and I did a PhD at the University of New Hampshire, and I was focusing on the history of magic and witchcraft in New England.

Tricia Peone: So it is truly my favorite thing in the world to study. And I'm very lucky that right now I have a job whereI get to think about Puritans all day, which not everyone would enjoy, but it can be fun. We get a lot of Cotton Mather jokes at work,and occasionally we do get to do some programming about witchcraft.

Josh Hutchinson: That's excellent. And what drew you into this, the field to study witchcraft?

Tricia Peone: I have a distinct memory of being in the library at the elementary school I [00:03:00] attended and finding a book on the Salem Witch Trials, and I kept returning to that book. It was a really fun book to read, and I figured out later, I tried to figure out what, what,children's books about witchcraft were available in the 1980s to figure out what book it was that I'd been reading. And I think it was Shirley Jackson's History of the Salem Witch Trials. So I think that was the first book that caught my interest at a very young age. When I was in college, I think I was an art major for a while, and then art history, and then I switched over to history, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do exactly, but I found out that you could, in fact, study the history of witchcraft and read some of the exciting books that had come out.

Tricia Peone: There was a huge flurry of publications in the 90s because of the anniversary of the Salem Witch Trials. So there's a lot of new research coming out about the history of witchcraft, and I, my interest was really piqued by that. And I did a master's in history, and I wrote about the Salem witch [00:04:00] trials, and then went on to do a PhD in history. It's not, like, maybe not the best career choice for anyone or for a historian to go into witchcraft studies, but it is probably the most interesting thing that you can study, in my opinion. You'll never be bored. There's talking cats, you got ghosts, you got haunted houses, what more could you want?

Sarah Jack: Today, we're going to talk about witch trials in New Hampshire. What background do we need to know about colonial New Hampshire?

Tricia Peone: New Hampshire is kind of an outlier in New England, although I think other New England states, I think Vermont and Maine and Rhode Island and Connecticut actually could also make that same case, but New Hampshire's a little bit different than what we think about when we think of New England, and you had a great episode with Emerson Baker a while back talking about the Devil of Great Island on his New Hampshire cases. Some of your listeners probably have heard from him how unique New Hampshire is, and it's kind of a weird place on the seacoast in that period, but there are at least four [00:05:00] cases where women face trial or some kind of court action for witchcraft in New Hampshire in the 17th century.

Tricia Peone: What I think is especially interesting about New Hampshire, though, is, particularly in this one case I want to tell you about, which is the case of Eunice Cole in Hampton, New Hampshire. She's charged with witchcraft a few times in the 17th century, but she has this, her story has this kind of a second life in the 20th century. Because this is the first time, it's in 1938, her community, Hampton, goes through basically the first community exoneration for someone accused of witchcraft.

Tricia Peone: And not a lot of people know that story, and it is really interesting. So that, I think that is one of New Hampshire's unique qualities, is that you have a community in the 1930s during the Depression that decides to revisit their past and think about what their responsibility is as a community to people who were accused of witchcraft.

Tricia Peone: So no one was executed in New Hampshire for witchcraft, but there are some formal court cases and there are[00:06:00] at least a dozen or so other pretty interesting accusations of witchcraft that happen. The last accusation that results in the community coming together to take some action is 100 years after Salem. It's in the 1790s. So it,New Hampshire also provides us with some clear evidence that witchcraft continued to be a concern for people, long after the Salem Witch Trials, even after the American Revolution.

Josh Hutchinson: That is a long history of witchcraft accusations. When was the first witchcraft case in New Hampshire?

Tricia Peone: Probably 1648. That's the first one we know of. And that's happening at the same time as the other early cases in New England, right? You've got 1647 and 1648 in Connecticut and Massachusetts with their first cases in court action. So 1648 in Portsmouth.

Sarah Jack: And what were primary factors that led to New Hampshire accusations?

Tricia Peone: The typical ones you'd expect, disagreements between [00:07:00] neighbors, old grudges. Jane Walford, who's the first woman accused of witchcraft in 1648, her neighbors accused her for several decades of being a witch. Someone said they'd overheard her husband call her an old witch, someone said they saw her turn into a cat, and, so those are the kinds of, typical accusations you might hear, but she was pretty interesting, because she took her accusers to court for slander, and she actually won, so that is one of the weird things about New Hampshire, is that at the same time as other New England coloniers are going through their sort of first attempts to formalize court actions against witches, you In Portsmouth, a woman accused of witchcraft is able to successfully defend her reputation. So there's a case where a physician from Boston calls her a witch, and he says he has proof and the court actually finds for her. So they order this physician to pay her five pounds for the damage to her reputation.

Josh Hutchinson: Wow.

Tricia Peone: Certainly [00:08:00] unusual.

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. You expect the slander cases to happen later. Owen Davies calls them the reverse witch trials. So yeah, that's interesting.

Tricia Peone: Yeah, the first, from the first case in 1648, her accusers ordered to publicly apologize to her.

Josh Hutchinson: Really that early?

Tricia Peone: Yep. But that doesn't stop her. The woman accuses her again later.

Josh Hutchinson: Doesn't learn a lesson.

Tricia Peone: Right.

Sarah Jack: Do you, so what would have a public apology been like there? Would have that happened at a church service?

Tricia Peone: I would imagine, typically, it would be at a church service, although Portsmouth is a little different in thatthere were Anglican and Congregational churches competing for a little bit for people's attention. And the court moved around, so quarterly courts moved around, so it's, I don't think it's clear where that public apology would have happened, but, yeah, probably either in a court or the meeting house.

Josh Hutchinson: And how did, [00:09:00] macro scale factors like social, economic, and religious elements, how did those factors play a role in spurring witchcraft accusations?

Tricia Peone: I think in New Hampshire, you can tell those are certainly important elements to accusations. Around 1679 and 1680, when New Hampshire is officially, becoming a royal colony and separating from Massachusetts, there's a little outbreak of witchcraft accusations that happens in Hampton, so you can possibly point to that as saying, there's some political uncertainty going on,they typically, they're these cases in New Hampshire are following similar trends in the 17th century.

Sarah Jack: In New Hampshire, what influenced the proceedings in those trials?

Tricia Peone: I think that the evidence in some of these cases shows that everyone believed in magic, that it's a pretty universal belief, and certainly that's true for 17th century New Hampshire. You get some interesting kind of [00:10:00] little glimpses of what people's magical beliefs were. Like you can tell in the case, The Devil of Great Island, Emerson Baker talks about practicing countermagic. They boil urine to try to break the curse. One of the cases in Hampton shows that this woman, Rachel Fuller, who's accused of witchcraft, it sounds like she, in 1680, she'd been trying to help a sick child, like she'd gone to visit their house. They said that she brought some herbs with her, that she was, like, rubbing her hands by the fire, she spread the herbs around, and she said, the child will be well, and then she told them they should plant sweet bay in front of their house to keep witches out, and then she's accused of witchcraft because the child dies.

Tricia Peone: So I think that it shows us that people certainly did believe in what we might call superstitions today, butyou can also see it as just part of their worldview. This is a way that people thought they could protect themselves, that you could plant some bay leaves by the door to keep witches out. That certain rituals and practices might help with illness. So I think the cases show both sides of that, [00:11:00] so they're accusing people of witchcraft when things go wrong, but if things went well, if that child had recovered, Rachel Fuller probably would not have been accused of witchcraft, if her alleged magic had worked.

Josh Hutchinson: It was just a part of daily life that magic could happen anywhere, anytime around you. And that continues to be the case for many people around the world today. So you've talked a bit about some of the notable cases. You had mentioned that Jane Walford, her accuser that she took to court in 1648, that accuser came back around again to complain about her?

Tricia Peone: Yeah, Jane Walford had, I think her reputation was tarnished in the community, she, I think she was a bit wealthier than her neighbors, but she was widowed. Some of the testimony against her is like[00:12:00] saying that they saw a cat.One woman testifies that her friend was being followed by a yellow cat, and they couldn't catch the cat. There's a lot of testimony about cats as being suspicious, and that's what some of this evidence against her is.

Tricia Peone: Her daughter was later accused of witchcraft, Hannah Jones, who was accused of witchcraft in that case with the Waltons at the Walton Tavern in Newcastle, so you do have that family connection, so I don't think Jane Walford's reputation ever was repaired, even though she was successful in court, which is interesting,even when the courts are reluctant to convict. in New Hampshire, we could maybe say was using a different standard of evidence than Massachusetts, but that still means there's still damage to the reputation and to the family'srole in the community, because her daughter was also accused of witchcraft, so even when she's wealthier, she has the power to take people to court, even taking a man to court for calling her a witch and winning, that's still not really winning in the community, right? That's not going to repair those relationships.

Sarah Jack:

Josh Hutchinson: I was wondering [00:13:00] what would the evidentiary standards have been in New Hampshire at that time.

Tricia Peone: They should have been following English law. They should have been using the same kinds of legal references and guidebooks as Massachusetts Bay would have been using. I have not seen any evidence from courts in New Hampshire of what they're referring to, other than referring to the law in England. So then hopefully what they want is, you always want the person to confess, that's usually the best evidence. If not, you want to have two people who could testify to seeing the same act of witchcraft, something that shows that they're involved in a pact with the devil, which I think is usually why they're talking about cats so much. One, because they're just suspicious of cats, but also if you can show that that cat is their animal familiar, if you can find the witch's mark on their body, which is something they do in the case of Eunice Cole, they do find a mark, then that's evidence of the pact with the [00:14:00] devil. So that's the kind of evidence they're looking for that's the best.

Josh Hutchinson: And who isn't suspicious of cats?

Tricia Peone: I love them, but who knows what they're really up to.

Josh Hutchinson: Exactly.

Tricia Peone: There's a lot of talking cats in the New Hampshire cases. You see it in Salem, too. There's a few, some of the people mentioned a cat talking to them. In one of the New Hampshire cases, a little girl testifies that this gray cat offered her fancy things if she would agree to become a witch. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Those fancy things also appeared at Salem in many of the descriptions of what the devil was offering people.

Tricia Peone: Yep. Yeah. You see cases like the devil offers to help you with your chores, to buy you a new dress, to buy, to give you fancy things. So these are humble requests I think of, to make of Satan.

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We had one in Connecticut where he was sweeping the hearth.

Tricia Peone: You would think maybe a waste of his time, but I guess [00:15:00] not.

Josh Hutchinson: I know, right?

Sarah Jack: Are there any connections between New Hampshire trials and the Salem witch hunt as far as people or families?

Tricia Peone: Oh yeah, quite a few. So Susanna Martin, who was executed during the Salem Witch Trial, she lived briefly in New Hampshire. She lived in Stratham for a while. And one of the first accusations against her that comes up is, so we don't have evidence of it in New Hampshire, but it comes up that this is like, it happened in New Hampshire when she was living there. She's accused of infanticide and fornication and witchcraft. And this is when she was young. I think she was a servant in a house in New Hampshire and then ended up back inwhat's Amesbury, Massachusetts now.

Josh Hutchinson: And there were a few New Hampshire residents who were named during the Salem Witch Trials.

Tricia Peone: Yeah. And there's definitely family connections. There are people who moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire afterwards.[00:16:00] So yeah, there's definitely quite a few New Hampshire connections.

Josh Hutchinson: What kind of spectral evidence comes up in the New Hampshire accusations?

Tricia Peone: There's actually spectral evidence in one of the later cases, the case in the 1790s that takes place in Campton, New Hampshire, which is up in the White Mountains. And it has some parallels to Salem. It's interesting because it's literally a hundred years after the Salem witch trials take place. And that's the case against a woman called Polly Wiley. And the only evidence we really have about her case is a letter. So it's just this one document. It's at the New Hampshire Historical Society. And it is written by the minister, Reverend Selden Church, and he's basically, he writes this letter, it's signed by a group of 14 other men in town.

Tricia Peone: So all we really have is this one document, I'm not entirely sure what [00:17:00] happens afterwards. So we just have this one document that shows us this one moment in time, and I haven't found any other evidence really about who she was, because there's a couple people in Campton and Thornton, a neighboring town, who might have been Polly Wiley , not 100 percent sure yet.

Tricia Peone: So all we really have, we take this document at face value. Basically it sounds like they're responding to an accusation of witchcraft that Polly Wiley makes against several other people in the community. The men who are writing the document and signing it are saying they're not really sure if she is bewitched, if she is possessed. They don't know if she has a medical illness, so they're not really sure what is happening, but what they describe is that she's got bite marks on her, she's seeing things, and from their perspective, these are the men, these are the propertied wealthy men in the town, and the minister, who's the arbiter of this dispute, and what their concern is, They say, it's not safe to be sure.

Tricia Peone: They're not sure if it's the devil or witchcraft or a medical illness, but their [00:18:00] concern is that people in town and people from other towns are starting to come to Polly Wiley to ask her to name the other witches in the neighborhood. Similar parallels to Salem, definitely. You have this, this, asking someone to name, name witches, people are coming to her and asking her, they're trying to test her, doing some of the traditional tests of witchcraft, to figure out what's going on, and so she's got these wounds and scratches all over her body, she is having these difficulties. She says she's seeing people that are invisible to everyone else in the room, but she can see them. So she's seeing these specters and people in town want her to say who they are. So that's all we know. That's all there is.

Tricia Peone: And then we have the 14 men who sign it and say, they're urging caution, basically. They're saying, let's not jump to conclusions, we're not entirely sure what's happening here. It's possible that this is witchcraft. It's possible that these are specters. And so we don't know what happened after that, but it's a weird little glimpse, a little window into what was [00:19:00] going on up in the White Mountains in the 1790s, so it's the period after the American Revolution, they're just founding this town, and there's clearly some kind of tension.

Tricia Peone: And clearly some kind of maybe unexplained illnesses, some other mysterious happenings, but you have a young woman who is essentially saying that she's seeing the specters of other witches and people want more information. But the town leaders are saying, let's try to maybe put a damper on this and take a breath and figure out what's happening. Sadly, we don't know what happens, but it is definitely a, an interesting case.

Josh Hutchinson: It's really telling that a hundred years after Salem, someone presenting the same symptoms as the afflicted of Salem they urge caution now in that new era.

Tricia Peone: And, so we can read it that way, and you're right, they're urging caution, which, but people at Salem urged caution, as well. They [00:20:00] just didn't follow it until it was too late. But we can also read it as this is a continuation of those beliefs, just because the formal trials and executions for witchcraft have stopped in New England by that point. It doesn't, it didn't necessarily stop people believing in witchcraft and believing that witches were responsible for their illness.

Sarah Jack: Yeah, it's interesting to me around that same time in Vermont, we have one secondary source reporting on a witch accusation, and we don't get that lens of the community saying, 'Hey, let's take caution,' but we do know that they, she went before a committee, that they wanted to test her. Was she a witch? They threw her in the river. So here you are, a hundred years later, this is two different states or colonies that it's coming up in the community and they're not exactly sure what to make of it still.

Tricia Peone: [00:21:00] It continues, and just because the courts aren't really interested doesn't mean people aren't interested in it, doesn't mean communities wouldn't take action in both these cases. And I don't know, in Vermont, I don't know if the church was involved or not in arbitrating that dispute, but they certainly were in Campton, in this case in the 1790s in New Hampshire. There's still this role that ministers are playing, because they are still ministers, Congregational ministers, anyway, still had to believe in witchcraft, and ghosts, part of the job.

Sarah Jack: Is there anything else about the Congregationalists really informative to witch trial history?

Tricia Peone: I think, when we think about the Puritans, a lot of the ideas we have about them are they're witch hunters, they'repuritanical, right? We still use that word today, but when we look at the history of witchcraft in New England, that there are people that were congregationalists, attending church regularly who believed in and sometimes practiced [00:22:00] magic.

Tricia Peone: And you see even ministers who are sometimes confused about exactly what's happening in their congregations. A lot of ministers, Cotton Mather, John Hale, they would write about they're parishioners using magic, using witchcraft to harm their neighbors. And they're not always positive what is the real cause when something unusual happens to you or happens in your community, someone's becomes unexpectedly ill, they're not always certain if it's the devil, if it's a medical illness, or if it's caused by witchcraft.

Tricia Peone: And so I think that uncertainty continues definitely in through the 18th century, even in the 19th century, and probably still today, right?

Josh Hutchinson: What are some of the primary sources or documents that have been crucial in your research?

Tricia Peone: Because New Hampshire was part of Massachusetts for much of the 17th century, a lot of the New Hampshire documents are in the Massachusetts State Archives.[00:23:00] So Eunice Cole, I think, is the case where we have the most documentation. They're the most records about her. Jane Walford, there's just a little bit and some of it secondhand, but Eunice Cole, I think we have the most.There's some of her indictments, the testimonies against her survive, and they're at the Mass State Archives. And then, of course, her case is,it's all over the newspapers in the 20th century, so there's a lot of really amazing illustrated newspapers and commentary about her case, where you have people in the 1930s looking back at what survived from the 17th century and reinterpreting the evidence, when they're trying to put forward this effort to exonerate her.

Sarah Jack: I was thinking about that community exoneration effort, and I believe they burned replicas of the court documents as a symbol of clearing her name, purifying what happened. How much additional lore has developed around her? Is she a figure of lore as well?

Tricia Peone: Yeah, so she definitely is. She's so [00:24:00] fascinating, because she was reviled by her community. They hated her in the 17th century. Three decades, she's being brought up on charges. She's kept in jail. They send her to jail in Boston. The town has to pay for her to be in jail. There's a lot of animosity towards this woman.

Tricia Peone: The evidence against her in her cases, which I think they start in her first witchcraft case, I , think is in 1656, but she had faced some other charges before then. She was accused ofslander. She was accused of stealing pigs. So she was known to the community to be somewhat disagreeable.

Tricia Peone: So her first formal kind of accusation of witchcraft is in 1656. Her neighbors offered a lot of testimony against her. She's brought again to court in 1673. And then the final one is in 1680. So you have these three, and evidence survives from these. So we can read the testimony and see what people were saying about her.

Tricia Peone: Her neighbors say things like, they saw her in church once with a mouse in her lap. All right. One of her, one of her neighbors says that she went to [00:25:00] visit a sick friend and Eunice Cole had been there the same day. She had just been there and then the friend comes over. And the man who is sick complains and says that he saw a gray cat near his bed and then he cried out, 'Lord, have mercy upon me. The cat hath killed me and broken my heart.' And it was implied that Eunice Cole was the cat. So she's causing illness. They did find some really great evidence against her, but the court continued to be hesitant to convict her, but they did send her to jail. So they said that, they were suspicious of her and that she should be in jail, but they were not ready to execute her. So they didn't.

Tricia Peone: But at one of her trials, she was sentenced to be whipped publicly and then sent to jail, which is, I think, interesting. And when she's whipped, they see that she has a witch's teat. So she has, they see a mark under her breast that looks like it's blue and they're not sure what it [00:26:00] is and they think that this is where her animal familiars, maybe the mouse, maybe the cats, are suckling from her in the night.

Tricia Peone: And then they go back to look at it again to examine the mark, and she's scratched it off. So she's accused of concealing some of this great evidence against her. She's accused of enchanting an oven. So there's a lot. People say that they heard voices coming out of her house when she was alone. So she's like allegedly having conversations with Satan. She was accused, a girl accused her, a young girl who's nine years old, Ann Smith, she said that she had tried to entice her, that Eunice Cole offered her plums to come and live with her, and the girl said no, and Eunice Cole pushed her and hit her with a rock. So Eunice Cole runs away, a cat appears in her place, this is when the cat offers the girl fine things if she will go and live with Eunice Cole, but she doesn't. There's tons, there's overwhelming evidence, but they found that she wasn't legally guilty, in spite of this testimony, but that there was just ground of vehement suspicion of [00:27:00] her for having had familiarity with the devil.

Tricia Peone: It's cyclical in the community. What's going on? Let's accuse Eunice Cole of witchcraft again. She's in and out of jail. She comes back to town. Her husband dies. She becomes a town charge.And when she dies, according to town legend, they found her in her shack, and they buried her body with a stake through her heart and then a horseshoe around the stake so that her spirit wouldn't be able to escape and haunt them.

Tricia Peone: However, the town folklore also says that her ghost still haunts and walks the streets of Hampton, and so people have said that they've seen her over the years, and to this day, allegedly, her ghost is unsettled and upset, and so that was part of the justification for exonerating her was to appease her ghost.

Tricia Peone: So her whole reputation goes through a rehabilitation, starting in the 19th century, because in the [00:28:00] 19th century you get more of the sort of romantic idea of Puritans and witchcraft. So she's in a John Greenleaf Whittier poem, he writes about her in a poem called "The Wreck of the Rivermouth." And in that poem she's kind of sympathetic. Like, yeah, she caused this shipwreck. But she felt bad about it, right? And it was because people were cruel to her. So in the 19th century, the stories you have about Eunice Cole are more that she wasmaybe a little rough around the edges, but that basically the community was mean to her and had wronged her.

Tricia Peone: It's such a fascinating case. So then what, by the time you get to the 20th century, the community decides, and I'm not totally sure where the motivation comes from in the community to do this rehabilitation and create this monument, but it comes up around the 300th anniversary of the town. So 1938 is the 300th anniversary of the English founding of Hampton. And so at town meeting that year, the citizens get together and they vote to exonerate her and they say they're going to create this memorial. It's not [00:29:00] totally clear like why they want to do this, but what they say, and take it with a grain of salt, is they say in a newspaper article from 1938, they say the reason for the exoneration was part of the current revolt against the Puritan tradition. So that's what some of the people involved were saying, that it's a rejection of the Puritan past, but why in 1938? That's one of the kind of unanswered questions. So they have town meeting in March of 1938. The residents vote on an article, and the article says, quote, 'We, the citizens of the town of Hampton, do hereby declare that we believe that Eunice Cole was unjustly accused of witchcraft and familiarity with the devil in the 17th century, and we do hereby restore her to her rightful place as a citizen of the town of Hampton.'

Tricia Peone: And then they resolved that they would celebrate her during the 300th anniversary that summer, that they would have these ceremonies, which, as you mentioned, it's when they decide to publicly burn the certified copies of the [00:30:00] documents from her various trials. And then they take the ashes from those documents, and they take some soil from where she had lived,some soil from the earth, and they mix them together and they put them in an urn, and then they said they were going to bury that on the town green, but it's actually in the Tuck Museum, so you can go see that and see some of these artifacts from her, from the case of Eunice Cole in Hampton.

Tricia Peone: But it sounds very ritualistic, right? Like they're doing, it sounds a little bit like sorcery to me, like burning these documents symbolically, mixing them with earth, burying them, but that's what they did. And then they declared August 25th of 1938 to be Goody Cole Day. They always call her Goody Cole like the Puritan address, Goodwife, so short for Goodwife, Goody Cole. They had a pageant, they reenacted some of her trials, okay, dramatizing the events, like someone wrote a play, and the town all comes and they listen to this reenactment of the events, there are speeches, [00:31:00] there's a big party, there's the Hampton Beach Bandstand, 3, 000 people attend the ceremony, it's covered in the national news. It got a fair amount of attention. Famous people were there, government officials, they created a commemorative coin and a doll that like, is supposed to look like Goody Cole. Again, slightly witchy, but yeah, and you can see those things also at the Tuck Museum. They have the urn, they have the doll, they have the coins. And there's pictures online if you want to see them. So this, these efforts are all being led by this group, and the group calls themselves the Society in Hampton for the Apprehension of those Falsely Accusing Goody Cole for Having Familiarity with the Devil, and they made membership cards to be in this society. Not like a catchy name, really, but that's what they went with. And so they're making the coin, they make the doll, they're rehabilitating her public image. And it's a moment in New Hampshire history where New Hampshire could have been the site of witchcraft tourism before Salem really [00:32:00] took that on. It could have been Hampton, New Hampshire, and apparently there was some witchcraft-based tourism in the 1930s and afterwards. People visitedone of the alleged sites where she had lived, and they come to see this huge event at the bandstand on the beach. Quite an amazing story. They promised to build a memorial in 1938. They actually didn't. They didn't leave anything permanent after that ceremony, but then in 1963, the town placed a boulder on the town green, and then they put the plaque there at the town's 375th anniversary, which was in 2013, so there is a marker on the town green that you can go and see, but compared to the other markers in New England, this one gets very little attention, right?

Tricia Peone: Literally hundreds of thousands of people will walk through the city of Salem and see the witchcraft memorials there, and very few people know about Eunice Cole or visit her marker.

Sarah Jack: And Eunice was not a confessor. She [00:33:00] didn't confess.

Tricia Peone: She did not confess, and she was not executed, and yet there is a marker, yeah.

Sarah Jack: And what about some of these other stories that we talked about today. Do they have markers or historical sites that are remembered today?

Tricia Peone: The only marker about witchcraft in New Hampshire is Eunice Cole's boulder on the town green in Hampton. There are other kind of, informal markers, there's Witch Creek, which runs through Portsmouth, and that appear that name appears on maps still, like USGS Maps today, and, it's most likely because of Jane Walford. That area where she lived is where the creek, runs through. So that's more informal, but yeah, the only monument to witchcraft in New Hampshire is Eunice Cole's boulder. Although, in the 1970s, there was a museum of witchcraft in New Hampshire, but that's a whole other story. It's not there anymore. It was only there for a few years. It was up at, up at Weir's Beach.[00:34:00]

Josh Hutchinson: And Goody Cole's memory has lived on, and there was an effort to exonerate her just last year.

Tricia Peone: Yeah, I didn't hear as much about the recent effort, but back before the pandemic, one of the state reps from Hampton, Renny Cushing,was, had started that effort. And I talked to him a little bit about it at the time, but then he's sadly, sadly died since then.

Tricia Peone: And I think the pandemic, too. So I hadn't, I actually haven't seen if what the state house actually decided to do in this case. So if you can, if you have an article you could send me, I'd actually love to read it. Cause I haven't seen if they, did they formally do anything? Cause it's a weird case because technically it was Massachusetts that convicted her.

Sarah Jack: It passed the House, but then in the Senate, it was voted down by party lines 14 to 10. And, yeah, but,there [00:35:00] is potential for legislation in Massachusetts that would clear her, so she's definitely not been forgotten.

Tricia Peone: I'll keep following it because it's, it's interesting to think about the fact that Hampton, before any other community, so before Massachusetts exonerated anyone or Connecticut, Hampton did it in 1938 and they did it through a town article. The town passed it. It wasn't the state, but they did it on a town level. Have you seen other towns that have taken action like that? Because I think it's mostly been on the state level, right?

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Windsor, Connecticut has and Stratford, Connecticut did just last fall.

Tricia Peone: Interesting.

Sarah Jack: With Goody Bassett there. Yeah. I think these local community exonerations are so important to building that history at that local level. I think it's really important to see towns who have these connections to these [00:36:00] stories rehabilitating the reputations.

Tricia Peone: It is fascinating to me that New Hampshire did it first, right? It's bizarrethat's what happened. And the other, it was contentious, like not everyone in the community agreed in 1938 that's what they wanted to do. One of the descendants of someone who had accused Eunice Cole of witchcraft wrote to the town and was like, you can't overturn her conviction. You can't publicly say that she wasn't a witch because that disparages my ancestor. His ancestor had accused her of being a witch because she had cursed his cattle, he said, so he objected. And the town had to go through this PR process with him to get him to come to the ceremony. So he, this ancestor of one of her accusers did attend the ceremony, and agreed to like, not make a big fuss, but there were articles in the newspaper about it. Not everyone in the community agreed that they should exonerate someone accused multiple times by many people of witchcraft 300 years later.

Sarah Jack: But [00:37:00] isn't that such a great example of how, even though we fear, how does this hurt the accusers, their descendants or if we're looking at some kind of judgment from the state that just wasn't just, if we're going to make things right for the innocent, what are we, what is that saying about the authority? Or what does that do to the reputation of others? And I think that is an example in other communities that have come together through those questions that you can look at these hard histories, and everybody can come full circle and move forward with this acknowledgment of, hey, some things are not right here, but we want to make them right. And that's such a huge impact for others today.

Tricia Peone: Yeah, I think you're totally right, and I think that also shows the importance of [00:38:00] when a community or on the state level, local or state, like, when they're going through this process, to think about who all the stakeholders are, to think about, not just the descendants of the accused but the descendants of the accusers and having them be part of the process, cause I think, I think a lot of the people who have a genetic connection to the Salem Witch Trials might be on both sides, like you said, right? Josh, like you said, like you have both accusers and accused.

Josh Hutchinson: Right. I have accusers and accused, and I have ancestors who were obviously conflicted about the witch trials. My grandfather, Joseph Hutchinson, ninth great grandfather, he was one of the first accusers who signed the first complaint against Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne, but then later on, he signed the petition in defense of Rebecca Nurse, so he seems to have changed his [00:39:00] mind over the course of the trials, and I think there's a lot of stories like that, and, like you said, genetically, if you're related to one of the accused, because they're all it contributing to the same gene pool, the accused and the accuser families intermarried so much in the following generations that you're likely to have ancestors on both sides.

Sarah Jack: In Connecticut, there was an anonymous descendant who wanted to see exoneration for the accused who descended from accusers. So you have descendants of accusers who feel both ways. And you mentioned stakeholders. We are all stakeholders in this. I think that's why it keeps coming up, because we're the stakeholders of the dignity of humans.

Sarah Jack: And what do we know about it today? And what can we learn [00:40:00] from the bad things that happened in these courtrooms then? Let's look at them, let's look at these stories, the humanity there and have a different chapter ahead, not the same chapters, flipping through the stories that we're seeing on the news now that are too similar.

Tricia Peone: I would like to know more about your job. What can you tell us about New England's Hidden Histories?

Tricia Peone: So New England's Hidden Histories is a project that the Congregational Library and Archives has been working on for quite a while, and it's creating a digital archive to preserve and provide access to all early Congregational church records in New England. So if you go on the Congregational Library and Archives website, you can find New England's Hidden Histories, and currently there are records from more than a hundred churches, and as well as collections of personal papers, so we've got a lot of Cotton Mather's papers,and his father, some Increase Mather papers, as well.[00:41:00]

Tricia Peone: And the purpose is some of these records are, for one, they're really community records, right? Because, in Massachusetts, for example, the Congregational Church was the established church for a very long time. And sometimes a church record book, it's not just baptisms, marriages,it's not just the kind of genealogical information that's interesting for people looking for family members and their ancestry. It's also town meeting records. It's also tax records, like these, the church and state were very intertwined in the 17th and 18th century. And so these records tell a lot of really There are some fascinating stories. There are, you can find stories about, ministers who enslaved people. You can find about churches who purchased enslaved people to pay part of the salaries of their ministers. So there are stories of slavery.

Tricia Peone: There are stories of people confessing to all sorts of things. They would give public confessions in congregational churches, these relations of faith, to talk about their experiences. And you will often have people talking [00:42:00] about, whether it's like fornication or adultery, whatever sins they were committing. And those are some of the I think most interesting, from my perspective, records that you can read is these 18th century people confessing their sins to their entire community. But it also demonstrates again, like the things we see with the Salem Witch Trials of that importance of confession. So we, we talk about that for the Salem Witch Trials, that's what really what people wanted to hear. They wanted that confession of witchcraft and that it has not just this legal meaning, but also a social and a spiritual meaning. And so you can read people's confessions of all sorts of things, occasionally witchcraft, but other things, as well. So yeah, so it's a, it is a digital archive that is seeking to put together the records from congregational churches from all six New England states.

Josh Hutchinson: And what's the most recent date that is covered in that project?

Tricia Peone: We try to go up to about 1850, so we've got records from the 1620s, through about 1850.

Josh Hutchinson: Oh, That's excellent. [00:43:00] Yeah. Because my ancestors were all in the Congregational Church right down to my grandfather, who was a member of the First Congregational Church in Danvers.

Tricia Peone:

Tricia Peone: I think we have some Danvers and Salem church records.

Tricia Peone: It's really fun, it's always fun to see. It's not always a ton of information, but you might see oh, he was at this meeting and they elected him to be a church official or a deacon orjust seeing people's records of their marriage records. It's really, it's interesting to see it, to see the original, to see the actual 17th and 18th century hand of someone recording this information is always, I think it's always fun. It's a way of connecting with the past when you actually can look at these volumes.

Josh Hutchinson: Definitely. Yeah, I've seen the seating arrangements in those records before. Yeah, it gets pretty detailed about everything that went on in that community, especially around the church.

Tricia Peone: Yeah. [00:44:00] Congregationalists and New Englanders were amazing record keepers.

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, thankfully for us.

Tricia Peone: So what survives isis really interesting. It's fun to think too about what didn't survive, right? We know that there are more records of witchcraft that were destroyed, and still,still new things turn up every once in a while. You'll find new documents,so we might not even know of all the New England witchcraft cases yet.

Josh Hutchinson: It's very true. Is there anything else that you wanted to discuss today?

Tricia Peone: I told you about Eunice Cole. I think that's really the most interesting New Hampshire story, is Eunice Cole. And then, yeah, I think the Polly Wiley case, too, of this kind of 100 years after Salem. It's a similar case, but goes in a different direction. The other interesting thing about New Hampshire, I think, is that in the 1970s, there was this museum of witchcraft, again, another opportunity for Hampton to be a witchy tourist destination that just didn't happen. So that's [00:45:00] a much more modern story, so probably not as interesting, but I do think this, the case in Hampton with this,the sort of the reinterpretation and the cleansing of Eunice Cole's reputation and how she changes in public memory over time, from being the most hated woman in the community to being a tragic romantic figure to beingalmost a local legend hero status, someone who was very defiant of authority, she bit a constable, she was, disagreeable, but plucky, right?

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, she had moxie.

Tricia Peone: Exactly.

Josh Hutchinson: Spirit. Yeah. And,it did, when you were describing the 1938 ceremony, it sounded like a ritual of atonement and maybe appeasement. I was wondering, in the 1930s, that's the Great Depression era, were they literally trying to appease and atone for what they did, [00:46:00] who knows?

Tricia Peone: Yeah, I think that's a great question. I want to find some more, see if there are any more records. I've seen the newspaper accounts talking about it, and I, but I wonder if there are any other personal accounts to find still, that kind of are people talking about why they felt this need, because that's, it's an outlier.

Tricia Peone: You have, the 1990s where everyone revisits the Salem Witch Trials. You have the 1880s, I think, is when they first started putting up some of the monuments to to Rebecca Nurse and John Proctor. And that's coming from families who are doing that in the 1880s, 1890s, and then there's this gap and then it's 1938, this community gets together in New Hampshire. And I think, yeah, I think, they're trying to absolve the town of guilt through their efforts, but at the same time, they're trying to make a profit, right? They're like, they're saying like, come to Hampton, come to the beach, buy a doll, get a commemorative coin, come give us your tourism dollars. It's the depression. We, we need it. I think there's a couple of different angles

Tricia Peone: to

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's good, it's a [00:47:00] good marketing strategy, whether that was the intent or not.

Tricia Peone: I'm fascinated too that they're saying in the newspaper that they're trying to reject this Puritan past, 300 years after the settlement of the town. I think Puritans are always being reassessed.

Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.

Mary-Louise Bingham: Sarah Parker was accused of the capital crime for which her mother, Mary, hanged in 1692 at Salem, Massachusetts, British America, witchcraft. However, Sarah was not legally condemned. Still, Sarah suffered the same environment as those who stood trial. After her arrest, she lived at the Salem jail for 17 weeks where she experienced the suffering and sickness of her neighbors.

Mary-Louise Bingham: It was here that Sarah was told of her mother's death, leaving her to grieve in isolation and fear her own fate. She was eventually released from [00:48:00] jail. In 1710, Sarah's brothers added her jail fees into their accounts when they filed a petition for restitution for their mother. Only Mary's fees were reimbursed. In 1712, Sarah filed a petition on her own behalf. She was denied. Sarah's trauma in 1692 was due in large part by the actions of the government. Today, the state of Massachusetts owes Sarah Parker and the Parker family a sincere apology.

Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.

Josh Hutchinson: Sarah has End Witch Hunts News.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501c3 organization, Weekly News Update. The Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project is a project of End Witch Hunts. This project continues its vital mission building on previous legislative successes that acknowledge the convictions of the Salem Witch Trials. Yet, a significant number of Individuals, [00:49:00] notably five executed in Boston and others accused, still lack formal recognition from the Massachusetts General Court for the injustices they endured.

Sarah Jack: The Massachusetts Witch Trials occurred between 1638 and 1693. During this period of 55 years, At least 254 individuals were accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts. 209 of these were complained of, implicated in court, questioned, arrested, and or imprisoned. The other 45 were defamed, named socially, but not complained of legally or have been linked to witchcraft accusations by incomplete evidence. 37 people were indicted apart from Salem and 81 were indicted during the Salem witch hunt of 1692 to 1693.

Sarah Jack: To learn more day by day history on the 1692- 1693 Salem Witch Trials follow our social media channels and tune into the live Salem Witch Hunt Daily Report hosted by [00:50:00] Josh. In addition to the 24 individuals executed by Hanging and the one pressed to death in 1692, at least six others arrested for witchcraft perished while in jail, including the infant sister of Dorothy Good.

Sarah Jack: Also to date the eight convicted in Boston have not been acknowledged. No official apology by the Massachusetts General Court has ever been issued for the witch trials or to the victims. This justice has been delayed for over 300 years. To quote Dr. King, 'justice delayed is justice denied.' Our goal is to secure legislative recognition for all prosecuted under various colonial governments in Massachusetts.

Sarah Jack: Suggesting an amendment to the 1957 resolve could be a viable approach. This amendment would honor victims like Tituba and the accused child witch Dorothy Good, among others, who endured significant trauma and injustice. As highlighted today by Mary Louise Bingham's observations, Massachusetts [00:51:00] victims such as Sarah Parker sought exoneration from the Massachusetts General Court, the very institution we approach today. This historical body once presided over witchcraft prosecutions in the 17th century, and it failed to exonerate Sarah. Now we stand as her representatives, appealing to the current Massachusetts General Court, today ruled by the House and the Senate. To rectify these past wrongs, we invite you to join the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project by signing our petition, volunteering, or making a donation. Your involvement, whether by sharing our content, discussing these issues in your networks, or urging leaders to act, is invaluable. Together, we can nurture values of compassion, understanding, and justice in our world. Support our mission by becoming a financial donor. Visit aboutwitchhunts.com/ to donate any amount you're comfortable with. Your generosity is the backbone of the podcast content you value. Let's commit to making a difference together.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Jack: You're welcome, [00:52:00] Josh.

Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.

Sarah Jack: Please join us next week.

Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.

Sarah Jack: Visit us at aboutwitchhunts.com/.

Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell all your friends.

Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.

Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

February 14, 2024

The Astrologer, the Witch, and the Poltergeist: Massachusetts Witch Trials 101 Part 3

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Show Notes

What happens when an astrologer, a witch, and a poltergeist walk into a barn in colonial Massachusetts? In this third installment of Massachusetts Witch Trials 101 on Witch Hunt, we delve into the intricate narratives of various Massachusetts witch trials that span from 1657 to 1687. Several significant cases are broken down such as those involving Elizabeth Morse, Mary Webster, and John Godfrey.These cases illustrate the trials of the period and their lasting impact. The hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack also touch on their ancestral connections to these trials and discuss their advocacy work to end present-day witch hunts through their organization.

Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England by John Putnam Demos

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England by Carol F Karlsen

Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History 1638-1693 by David D. Hall

The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England by Richard Godbeer

End Witch Hunts

Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project

Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project

Witch Hunt

Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast that investigates the mysteries of the witch trials. I'm Josh Hutchinson.

Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. We are both descendants of persons accused of witchcraft in New England.

Josh Hutchinson: Heck, we're both descendants of people in this episode.

Sarah Jack: And we, in Mary Louise Bingham, are all cousins through our common ancestor, Mary Esty, who was executed for witchcraft in Salem in 1692.

Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we are discussing Massachusetts witch trials before the Salem witch hunt. These cases originated in towns spread across the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies, with witch trials held in places like Boston, Plymouth, [00:01:00] and York.

Sarah Jack: These cases are fascinating, so let's get right to it.

Josh Hutchinson: Do you want to kick things off, Sarah?

Sarah Jack: Sure, we're primarily covering witchcraft accusations made between 1657 and 1683.

Josh Hutchinson: But I want to point out that our first case actually overlaps with the timeline of the trials of Hugh and Mary Parsons of Springfield, which we covered in the previous edition of Massachusetts Witch Trials 101. But continues through the 1660s.

Sarah Jack: Jane James of Marblehead sued accusers for slander in 1650 and again in 1651 and 1667 for being called a witch. On one occasion, she was accused by Peter Pitford of cursing his garden. Another accuser claimed she had appeared at sea in the shape of a cat. Fortunately for Jane, she was never tried for witchcraft.

Josh Hutchinson: The next case involves my possible ancestor, William Browne of Gloucester, who in [00:02:00] 1657 was accused of bewitching Margaret Prince, whose child had been stillborn. Browne was not convicted of witchcraft. Instead, he was convicted of 'diverse miscarriages' and was ordered to spend one week in jail, pay a 20 mark fine, and pay Thomas Prince, husband of Margaret, unspecified costs.

Sarah Jack: Next, we have the long and allegedly magical career of John Godfrey of Essex County. John was in court on witchcraft related matters at least five times.

Josh Hutchinson: John came to New England as a teen in the 1630s and frequently moved around Essex County.

Sarah Jack: In March 1659, 11 people accused Godfrey of witchcraft. James Davis Sr., Jane and John Haseltine, Abraham Whitaker, Ephraim Davis, Benjamin Swett, Isabel Holdred, Job Tyler, Charles Brown, The Widow Ayers, and Goodman Proctor.

Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Hayne [00:03:00] testified about a spectral horse that scared Isabel Holdred. Nathan Gould testified about a spectral snake that scared Isabel Isabel Holdred herself testified about these shape shifting animals.

Sarah Jack: Goodwife and Charles Brown testified about John Godfrey talking about witches, saying they should be treated kindly, or there could be consequences. Charles also reported he once saw a teat under John Godfrey's tongue.

Josh Hutchinson: William Osgood testified that he once, back in 1640, accused Godfrey of making a deal with the devil, and that Godfrey admitted it.

Sarah Jack: On June 28, 1659, Godfrey won two pounds and twenty nine shillings in damages in a slander suit against William and Samuel Symonds.

Josh Hutchinson: Who happened to both be my ancestors. In a document dated March 25th, 1662, Thomas Chandler said that John Care had called [00:04:00] Godfrey a witching rogue.

Sarah Jack: In a document dated March 15, 1663, Essex County Court ordered Jonathan Singletary to appear at the next court, which would be held in Ipswich, to answer charges that he slandered Godfrey by calling him a witch, saying, 'is this witch on this side of Boston gallows yet?'

Josh Hutchinson: John Remington and Edward Youmans said that Jonathan Singletary had told them he'd been visited by spectral Godfrey while in jail. Singletary was ordered to make a public apology to Godfrey or pay 10 shillings. Jonathan Singletary testified that Godfrey indeed visited him in jail and Singletary tried to hit Godfrey with a stone, but Godfrey vanished.

Josh Hutchinson: On June 30th, 1663, the court found for the defendant in the Godfrey versus Singletary suit. Godfrey vowed to appeal.

Sarah Jack: On March 29th, 1664, the [00:05:00] court found for Godfrey and ordered Singletary to acknowledge wrongdoing or pay 10 shillings plus 2 pounds in court costs. In 1666, Job Tyler and John Remington complained about Godfrey.

Josh Hutchinson: On February 22nd, 1666, the court summonsed witnesses to testify about Godfrey's witchcraft. Matthias Button, Sarah Button, Edward Youmans, Goodwife Youmans, Abraham Whitaker, Elizabeth Whitaker, Robert Swan, Elizabeth Swan, Abigail Remington, John Remington Jr., Joseph Johnson, Goodwife Holdridge, Ephraim Davis, William Symonds, Samuel Symonds, my ancestors, Mary Neasse, Francis Dane, my ancestor, Nathan Parker.

Sarah Jack: March 5th, 1666, Francis Dane wrote that he was unable to attend court due to infirmity and rough weather.

Josh Hutchinson: Job, Mary Sr., Moses, and Mary Jr. Tyler [00:06:00] testified that one time when Godfrey came over, a bird appeared with him and then disappeared. Job asked Godfrey about the bird, and Godfrey said, 'it came to suck your wife,' meaning that Mary Tyler Sr. was a witch.

Sarah Jack: Nathan Parker claimed that John Godfrey had said to Job Tyler that he could afford to blow on Tyler and not leave him worth a groat, a coin of little value.

Josh Hutchinson: Joseph Johnson said that Godfrey said, 'if John Remington's son was a man as he was a boy, it had been worser for him.'

Sarah Jack: John Remington, Jr. said Godfrey said to John Remington, Sr. 'if he drive the cattle up the woods to winter, then my father should say and have cause to repent that he did drive them up.' That December, the young Remington was riding his horse when a mysterious crow appeared and harassed them. The horse fell. The bird pecked the dog. Remington got home but was laid up a while with an injured leg. [00:07:00] Then Godfrey came over and argued with the boy and his mother.

Josh Hutchinson: Abigail Remington repeated her son's testimony about what Godfrey said when he came over after the fall, saying Godfrey had bragged about unhorsing a boy the other day.

Sarah Jack: Matthias Button corroborated the Remington's testimony, as he had been there at the Remington house when Godfrey said those things he said.

Josh Hutchinson: Godfrey was found suspicious but not legally guilty on March 6, 1666.

Sarah Jack: John Godfrey passed away no later than 1675.

MarkerMarker

Josh Hutchinson: Elizabeth Bailey of York, now in Maine, made the mistake of letting a rando minister named John Thorp board in her house. Not only did he drink too much alcohol, he also used a ton of profanity, and Bailey wasn't having it. In fact, things got so bad that she ripped her boarder a new one, prompting him to move out. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, that settled that.[00:08:00]

Sarah Jack: Unfortunately, Thorp was a bitter man who couldn't let things go. In an apparent act of retaliation, he accused Bailey of witchcraft ,resulting in her trial by the county court. She must have been ecstatic when the verdict of not guilty was read.

Josh Hutchinson: At the same court that tried Elizabeth Bailey, the minister, John Thorp, was tried for abusive speech to a social superior, excessive drinking, scandalizing two ministers by saying they preached unsound doctrine, and for actually being the one preaching the unsound doctrine himself. He was convicted of all charges and ordered to pay fees.

Josh Hutchinson: In June 1659, Winifred Holman of Cambridge and her daughter Mary were accused of witchcraft by Rebecca Gibson Stearns, who had an affliction not unlike those suffered 33 years later in Salem. The Holmans were arrested. The Holmans were both indicted. Mary probably was tried and acquitted. Winifred may not have been tried [00:09:00] at all. And the Holmans sued John Gibson and Rebecca Stearns for defamation and slander in March, 1660.

Sarah Jack: Gibson had to pay a fine and apologize. Rebecca Stearns was let off the hook, because she was in an irrational state of mind when she made her accusations.

Sarah Jack: Which is interesting because if an accused person was in an irrational state of mind, the accusations had weight.

Josh Hutchinson: Yes, that's a good point, Sarah. Next up we have a rare case from Plymouth Colony. In 1661, William Holmes of Marshfield sued his neighbor, Dinah Silvester, for defaming his wife by publicly calling her a witch. In court, Silvester claimed she had seen Goodwife Holmes in the shape of a bear. The court did not find sufficient evidence that Holmes had contracted with Satan, so they sided with the plaintiff and ruled Silvester guilty of defamation. [00:10:00] She was sentenced to sign an admission of guilt.

Sarah Jack: In 1665, Goodwife Gleason of Cambridge was presented on witchcraft charges. Not much else is known about this case.

Josh Hutchinson: Edith Crawford, a resident of Salem, found herself embroiled in controversy when she was accused of employing witchcraft to burn a house from which she had been recently evicted due to a court decision. In a bold move to confront these allegations, Crawford took legal action in 1667, suing the individual who had leveled the accusations against her, the new homeowner of the property in question.

Sarah Jack: Susannah North Martin is a well-known victim of the Salem Witch Trials. A stretch of highway going through Amesbury commemorates her. She is less known for her 1669 witchcraft trial, which marked the beginning of a long career of notoriety as a witch.

Josh Hutchinson: Born in 1625 to [00:11:00] Richard North, Susannah lost her mother when she was a young girl. She migrated to New England with her father, stepmother, and two sisters in about 1639, when Richard North was one of the initial proprietors of Salisbury, Massachusetts. In 1646, Susannah married recently widowed George Martin, and the couple had nine children.

Sarah Jack: In April 1669, her husband, George Martin, posted a hundred pounds bond to keep Susannah out of jail while she awaited trial for witchcraft. The same day, George Martin filed a defamation suit against William Sargent for slandering Susannah.

Josh Hutchinson: At her first witchcraft trial, Susannah was accused of having her first son out of wedlock and attempting to kill him, and of having another son who wasn't human, but actually an imp. The court did convict William Sargent of slander for accusing Susannah of infanticide and fornication. However, the jury did not convict him for slandering [00:12:00] Susannah as a witch, and he was fined a mere eighth of a penny.

Sarah Jack: Records of Susannah's first trial do not survive, but she's presumably acquitted, as she was soon at liberty again.

Josh Hutchinson: Also in 1669, Robert Williams of Hadley was acquitted of witchcraft but convicted instead of lying.

Sarah Jack: Another witchcraft accusation in 1669 was when Goodmen Cross and Brabrook said that Thomas Wells said he could set spells and raise the devil. He offered himself to be an artist. No formal charges filed. Wells denied the accusation.

Josh Hutchinson: In 1671, an unknown woman of Groton was accused of witchcraft by Elizabeth Knapp, a supposedly possessed young woman serving in the household of minister Samuel Willard, who later earned fame for opposing the Salem Witch Trials. Willard did not trust the devilish voice coming from young Elizabeth, so he kept [00:13:00] secret the name of the woman Elizabeth accused of bewitching her.

Sarah Jack: Then in 1673, Anna Edmonds of Lynn was known as a doctor woman and was presented on charges of witchcraft.

Josh Hutchinson: Next we have the sole Plymouth Colony witchcraft trial, that of Mary Ingham of Scituate. Eagle-eared listeners may remember this case from our February 9th, 2023 episode titled 'Between God and Satan with Beth Caruso and Katherine Hermes.' Unfortunately, not much is available on this case.

Sarah Jack: We've previously covered the case of Alice Young, New England's first witch trial victim hanged in 1647. 30 years later, her daughter, Alice Jr., was accused of witchcraft in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1677,Her son sued the accuser for slander.

Josh Hutchinson: In an intriguing case in 1679 and 1680, my 10th great grandaunt, Elizabeth Morse of [00:14:00] Newbury, found herself accused of witchcraft, following a series of poltergeist like events in her home. The trouble began sometime after William and Elizabeth Morse took in their grandson, John Stiles. Much of this story will be familiar if you've listened to our episode on the Devil of Great Island.

Sarah Jack: First, William Morse said sticks and stones were thrown at his house. The Morses went outside to look and saw nobody, yet stones were still hurled at them, and they retreated inside and locked the door. Later that night, a hog appeared in the house, despite the door being locked.

Josh Hutchinson: The next day, some things hanging in the chimney crashed down into the fire, and an awl disappeared only to come down the chimney. William put the awl away in a cupboard and closed the door, but the awl kept coming down the chimney again and again, three or four times. Then the same thing happened with the basket.

Sarah Jack: Things just continued to disappear and then come [00:15:00] down the chimney.

Josh Hutchinson: Another hog appeared in the locked house.

Sarah Jack: More sticks and stones.

Josh Hutchinson: The pots hung over the fire danced and clanged against each other and had to be taken down.

Sarah Jack: William's ropemaking tools kept disappearing.

Josh Hutchinson: And the bedclothes flew off while Elizabeth was making the bed.

Sarah Jack: Caleb Powell, a seaman, visited often, and he said he would take the boy for a time and see what happened. He took the boy for a day, and nothing happened while the boy was away.

Josh Hutchinson: William Morse gave in a statement on December 3rd, 1679.

Sarah Jack: Thomas Rogers and George Hardy corroborated some of William Morse's testimony. John Richardson said a board flew against his chair.

Josh Hutchinson: William Morse's brother, and my ancestor, Anthony Morse, said he saw the board that hit Richardson while it was still tacked to the window.

Sarah Jack: John Dole said a pin, a stick, a stone, and a firebrand fell [00:16:00] down beside him.

Josh Hutchinson: John Tucker said that while these things were falling by John Dole, John Stiles was in a corner and didn't move.

Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Titcomb said Caleb Powell said if he had another scholar with him, he could find whoever was bewitching the Morse house.

Josh Hutchinson: Stephen Greenleaf and Edward Richardson affirmed seeing the strange motion.

Sarah Jack: John Tucker said Caleb Powell said John Stiles threw a shoe.

Josh Hutchinson: John Emerson said Caleb Powell had boasted about being trained in the black art by someone named Norwood.

Sarah Jack: William Morse also testified to a number of strange events on December 8th, 1679.

Josh Hutchinson: Bread turned over and struck him.

Sarah Jack: A chair bowed to him several times.

Josh Hutchinson: Door closed itself.

Sarah Jack: An iron wedge and a spade flew out of the chamber at Elizabeth without hitting her.

Josh Hutchinson: A drum rolled over.

Sarah Jack: The cellar door flew shut.[00:17:00]

Josh Hutchinson: Barn doors unpinned themselves, and the pin fell out of the sky.

Sarah Jack: Caleb Powell told the Morses that John Stiles had done the mysterious things around the house.

Josh Hutchinson: Powell claimed skill in astrology, astronomy, and the working of spirits.

Sarah Jack: The Morses loaned John styles to Powell. And nothing happened for a time.

Josh Hutchinson: When John Stiles returned to the home, a great noise was heard in the other room, but nothing was seen there.

Josh Hutchinson: And William Morse's cap almost came off his head.

Sarah Jack: There was a hit to William's head.

Sarah Jack: His chair was pulled back as if to topple him.

Josh Hutchinson: And a cat was thrown at his wife, Elizabeth.

Sarah Jack: The cat was thrown about several times.

Josh Hutchinson: Once the poor cat was thrown on the bed, wrapped in a red waistcoat.

Sarah Jack: The lamp tipped over and all the oil spilled out.

Josh Hutchinson: Another great noise, for a great while, described as being very dreadful.[00:18:00]

Sarah Jack: And a stone moved on its own.

Josh Hutchinson: Two spoons flew off the table and the table was knocked over.

Sarah Jack: The inkhorn was hidden, and the pen was taken.

Josh Hutchinson: William Morse's spectacles were thrown from the table.

Sarah Jack: And his account book thrown into the fire.

Josh Hutchinson: Boards came off a tub and stood upright.

Sarah Jack: John Badger said he was at Morse's house when Caleb Powell said he knew astrology and astronomy and could determine whether the diabolical means were used against the Morses.

Josh Hutchinson: Mary Tucker and Mary Richardson said Caleb Powell said he spied through the Morse's window and saw the boy play tricks.

Sarah Jack: Anthony Morse, brother of William Morse.

Josh Hutchinson: And Anthony being my ancestor and William my uncle.

Sarah Jack: Witnessed a brick disappear from his hands and fly down the chimney. Also, a hammer came down the chimney, and a piece of wood and a firebrand, which happened around November 28th. This [00:19:00] testimony was dated December 8th in 1679 by John Woodridge, the commissioner.

Josh Hutchinson: William Morse complained of Caleb Powell for working with the devil to disturb the Morses.

Sarah Jack: Caleb Powell appeared before John Woodridge on December 8th, and the magistrate agreed William Morse could prosecute the case at Ipswich County Court on the last Tuesday of March.

Josh Hutchinson: Sarah Hall and Joseph Mirick testified that John Moores, boatswain of the vessel where Caleb Powell was a mate, said that if there were any wizards, he was sure that Caleb Powell was a wizard. This testimony was dated February 27th, 1680.

Sarah Jack: The court dismissed the case, but declared Powell suspicious and ordered him to pay court costs.

Josh Hutchinson: Israel Webster said John Stiles said that he, John Stiles, was going to hell and could not read on Sundays because the devil didn't let him.

Sarah Jack: Thomas Titcomb said John Stiles, quote, 'used many foul words [00:20:00] on Sabbath day, and when asked if he was going to meeting, he said he was going to hell.'

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, this is so familiar with other afflicted children's stories. When they're asked to do work, suddenly they're afflicted and can't do it, or they're, they're held back by a witch or a devil and they can't do the things they're supposed to do, but they can do, strangely enough, the things that they want to do. Elizabeth Titcomb said there was a mysterious knocking at her door while she was sleeping. It knocked three times, but nobody responded when Elizabeth asked who was there. Lydia and Peniel Titcomb agreed.

Sarah Jack: Jonathan Woodman said seven years ago, he was going home when he saw a white cat, which did play at my legs. As he had no weapon, he only kicked the cat, which cried out and disappeared. He later learned that the Morses had called for a doctor that same night to tend Elizabeth's head.

Josh Hutchinson: Benjamin Richardson testified about something weird [00:21:00] happening at Morse's house.

Sarah Jack: David Wheeler talked about a heifer that came home with a chewed up back twice and got sick and started behaving strangely.

Josh Hutchinson: Joshua Richardson said he tried to stash his sheep in Morse's cow house one time when he was out working on getting the sheep across the river, but Elizabeth Morse chewed him out and he left. When he arrived at his destination, the sheep were all sick and foaming at the mouths.

Sarah Jack: Caleb Moody testified that he lost several livestock in an unusual manner over the 20 years he lived near the Morses.

Josh Hutchinson: And William Fanning described being attacked by a great white cat without a tail. Maybe just a lynx?

Sarah Jack: John Mighill testified that a calf's skin fell off, replaced by something red like a burn before the animal's eyes bulged out of his head, a cow pooped out of its side, and other animals met ill fates.

Josh Hutchinson: Robert Earle said that he visited Elizabeth Morse and heard a strange sucking [00:22:00] sound, like a whelp feeding.

Sarah Jack: On March 6th, 1680, the court ordered Constable Joseph Pike of Newbury to apprehend Elizabeth Morse and take her to the jail in Ipswich.

Josh Hutchinson: Esther Wilson testified that when her mother, Goodwife Chandler, was sick, she complained about Elizabeth Morse being a witch and nailed a horseshoe to the door to prevent witches from getting in. Morse would not come in while the horseshoe was on. Instead, she'd kneel by the door and talk with them from outside. William Moody came to the house of Goodwife Chandler and knocked the horseshoe off the door. Then Elizabeth Morse would come in until the horseshoe was nailed back up. Later, Moody knocked it off and took it away. Once again, Morse would enter the home. Goodwife Chandler began having visions of Elizabeth Morse and then experiencing fits. This testimony was dated May 17th, 1680 and read in court on [00:23:00] May 20th.

Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Titcomb said Susanna Tappan said Elizabeth Morse seized her by the wrist at court to ask what evidence Susanna would give in. That night, Susanna felt a cold, damp hand grab her wrist. She then became Ill, feeling itchiness and pricking throughout her body, her skin dry and scaly. Since then, she has not been out of her house.

Josh Hutchinson: And Elizabeth Titcomb said she told Goodwife Morse about the evidence against her and Morse was greatly affected and fell on weeping and said she was as innocent as herself or the child newborn, or as God in heaven.

Sarah Jack: Lydia Titcomb claimed she and her sibling saw an owl turn into a cat, then a dog. This mystery animal was sometimes completely black. At other times it had a white ring around its neck. Sometimes it had long ears. At other times it had virtually no ears at all. Sometimes it had an extremely long tail. At other [00:24:00] times it had virtually no tail at all.

Sarah Jack: This sounds like a riddle. The beast accompanied them home, scaring their socks off.

Josh Hutchinson: Susan Tappan did testify and said that Morse did indeed grab her by the wrist, but not in court. It was actually after a public meeting on a Sabbath day.

Sarah Jack: Thomas Knowlton said that when he was escorting her to jail, Elizabeth Morse said that she was as clear of the accusation as God in heaven.

Josh Hutchinson: John Chase, another possible relative of mine, said the day Caleb Powell had come to hear his testimony against Elizabeth Morse, he, John Chase, was taken with the bloody flux, which lingered until he spoke against Morse in court. Also, his wife had sore breasts that she have lost them both and one of them rotted away from her.

Sarah Jack: Jane Sewall said that William Morse told her a story about his wife not [00:25:00] being called for at first when Thomas Wells wife was in labor, due to some hesitancy by Thomas sister. The woman suffered a long labor until finally Morris was sent for, at which point the baby came.

Josh Hutchinson: John March said that sometime around 1674, he was awakened by several cats and rats at play together. He flung several things at them but could not strike them. The next morning, he heard Goodwife Wells call Elizabeth Morse a witch to her face. After Elizabeth left, Goodwife Wells told John March that Elizabeth had told her about the cats and rats, and Goodwife Wells wondered how Elizabeth could know they'd seen them, since nobody who saw them had left the house yet that morning.

Sarah Jack: According to John March, Goodwife Wells told him she'd often seen small creatures like mice or rats under Elizabeth Morse's coat. Daniel Thurston and Richard Woolsworth affirmed that they had also heard Goodwife Wells say such things.[00:26:00]

Josh Hutchinson: James Brown, another Josh ancestor, testified that Elizabeth Morse said George Wheeler's vessel would not return from its voyage and that she told him in the morning of his misdemeanors the previous night. He asked her how she knew what he had done, and she said everyone knew. He replied that everyone knew she was a witch. She said, 'our savior, Christ, was belied, and so is you and I.'

Sarah Jack: David Wheeler testified that he had seen Elizabeth Morse, his next door neighbor, do many strange things. And once, he was supposed to do an errand for her and neglected to do it for several days while he was busy hunting geese. He was unsuccessful at getting a bird. Then, Elizabeth Morse told him he wouldn't get any geese until after he finally performed the task. At last, he did what he had agreed to do, and then he was immediately successful hunting geese.

Josh Hutchinson: Margaret Mirick claimed that she had once concealed a private letter, and yet Elizabeth Morse came a few [00:27:00] days later and recited everything in the letter, though she'd most likely never seen it as it was in hiding.

Sarah Jack: A calf belonging to Zachariah Davis mysteriously danced and roared after Zachariah failed to bring Elizabeth Morse some wings.

Josh Hutchinson: Gotta bring those wings, man.

Sarah Jack: Elizabeth was tried in May 1680.

Josh Hutchinson: And indicted on May 20th.

Sarah Jack: On May 22nd, Secretary Edward Rawson wrote that the court decided it was okay to admit the testimony of a single witness to a single event, if at least one other witness brought in similar testimony about another event only they witnessed.

Josh Hutchinson: Governor Simon Bradstreet pronounced the death sentence for Elizabeth on May 27th.

Sarah Jack: However, the governor and assistants reprieved her on June 1st. On June 4th, her husband, William, petitioned for better treatment for her in jail, such as liberty to walk the yard during the day and [00:28:00] to sleep in the common jail rather than the dungeon.

Josh Hutchinson: On November 3rd, the deputies protested the court's decision not to execute Elizabeth.

Sarah Jack: According to John Hale, The governor and magistrates rejected the death sentence because they determined that seeing a specter of Elizabeth was not the same as actually seeing Elizabeth perform witchcraft.

Josh Hutchinson: They also determined that multiple witnesses to the same event were indeed necessary to admit the testimony as evidence.

Sarah Jack: In 1681, William wrote to the General Court on May 14th and again on May 18th, contesting the testimony against his wife and pleading her innocence. And we are writing to the same general court today, asking for these accused witches to receive an apology from the state.

Josh Hutchinson: William Morse won the release of Elizabeth into his custody, and she was placed under a sort of house arrest.

Josh Hutchinson:

Josh Hutchinson: In 1679, an unknown woman from Northampton, Massachusetts was accused of witchcraft. [00:29:00] Unfortunately, no other details are available in this case.

Josh Hutchinson: Moving forward, we get to the 1680 case of Margaret Gifford of Lynn, who frequently appeared in court as attorney for her husband and was accused of witchcraft in 1680. Her so-called unwomanly behavior in acting as attorney may have drawn suspicion.

Sarah Jack: Our next witchcraft suspect in 1680 is Bridget Oliver, better known as Bridget Bishop, the first execution victim of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. But that wasn't her first run in with the law on suspicion of witchcraft. In 1680, she was acquitted of witchcraft, a year after her husband, Thomas Oliver, died. We will have much more on Bridget in our upcoming Salem Witch Hunt 101 series.

Josh Hutchinson: In the 1987 book, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, author Carol Karlsen suggests that the Mary Hale who was accused of bewitching mariner Michael [00:30:00] Smith to death could be the mother of Winifred Benham of Wallingford, Connecticut, who was accused of witchcraft multiple times in the 1690s.

Sarah Jack: In 2007, authors Michael J. LeClerc and D. Brenton Simons used the most reliable sources to connect Mary Hale to Brothers and also to Winifred Benham in their article, The American Genealogist publication, 'Origin of Accused Witch Mary Williams King Hale of Boston and her brothers Hugh, John, and possibly Nathaniel Williams.'

Josh Hutchinson: The article establishes Mary's life since 1654 in Boston, highlighting her family ties and property dealings, and suggests she was married twice, with her first husband's surname possibly being King or Ling, and her second husband's surname being Hale. Established her connection to the Williams family with roots in London and Surrey, England.

Josh Hutchinson: Despite the serious witchcraft accusations in 1680 and 81, [00:31:00] Mary was acquitted. Her family, particularly her brothers Hugh and John Williams, were prominent figures in Boston and Block Island.

Sarah Jack: Her husbands have not been identified. The 1674 Boston tax list records her name as Widow Hale. Only one of her children has been identified, Winifred, but she's recognized as having multiple children.

Josh Hutchinson: She faced witchcraft accusations in February and March of 1680. Michael had lodged at her home and had courted the granddaughter, Joanna.

Sarah Jack: Mary was accused of supernaturally transporting him to a witch's sabbath in Dorchester.

Sarah Jack: During the trial, a form of evidence for witchcraft was presented, centering around a test with a bottle containing Michael Smith's urine. Observers noted that when the bottle was sealed, Mary began to pace restlessly, exhibiting an agitated behavior within her dwelling. Conversely, when the bottle was opened, her restless movement ceased entirely. This correlation between Mary's actions and the state of the [00:32:00] bottle was deemed to be indicative of witchcraft.

Josh Hutchinson: Accuser Margaret Ellis wanted to see Mary burned, which was never done to a witch in New England. But Mary was acquitted, and then no more is heard of her.

Sarah Jack: Mary Hale is my 10th great grandmother.

Sarah Jack: An unknown woman of Kittery was accused of witchcraft in 1682. Unfortunately, no further details are available for this case.

Josh Hutchinson: Mary Webster, wife of William Webster, was examined at county court on March 27, 1683, and the case was referred to the Court of Assistants in Boston.

Sarah Jack: Mary was indicted May 22nd, 1683 and acquitted June 1st, 1683.

Josh Hutchinson: According to witness testimony, she served the devil in the form of a black cat and suckled imps from teats in her secret parts.

Sarah Jack: According to Cotton Mather, Philip Smith was a saintly man who died at the hands of Mary Webster.

Josh Hutchinson: Smith became [00:33:00] unduly anxious about his health and had ischiatic pain in the lowest three bones of his pelvis.

Sarah Jack: Smith became delirious and loudly ranted in multiple languages, or so it was thought. Suffered sore pain from sharp pins pricking him.

Josh Hutchinson: He claimed to see Mary Webster and some others afflicting him.

Sarah Jack: He smelled a strange, musky scent.

Josh Hutchinson: Some of his attendants went and harassed poor Mary Webster, and he was well while they were at it.

Sarah Jack: A container of medicine emptied without spilling.

Josh Hutchinson: People heard a strange scratching sound.

Sarah Jack: There was a mysterious fire on the bed from time to time. It would quickly vanish. Something strange seemed to move in the bed away from Smith's body.

Josh Hutchinson: The night after he died, the bed moved on its own.

Sarah Jack: Two nights after he died, mysterious sounds like furniture being moved in the room where the corpse lay were heard.

Josh Hutchinson: And strange signs of [00:34:00] life in the body after Smith had presumably died.

Sarah Jack: According to lore, Mary Webster was brutally beaten in 1684 by a mob of zealous youth.

Josh Hutchinson: According to Thomas Hutchinson, who wrote much later, the people who went to harass Webster actually 'having dragged her out of her house, they hung her up until she was near dead, let her down, rolled her sometime in the snow, and at last buried her in it and there left her.'

Sarah Jack: In 1685, Mary Webster sued for slander.

Josh Hutchinson: The James Fuller case from Springfield is particularly interesting. Fuller was accused of seeking the devil's aid, a familiar charge.

Sarah Jack: Fuller's change of response to the accusations is especially notable. He initially admitted to the claims but then retracted, stating he had belied himself. This turn of events adds significant complexity, highlighting the [00:35:00] challenges in discerning guilt or innocence in these trials.

Josh Hutchinson: Fuller's case exemplifies the judicial severity of the period. Despite his retraction and claim of lying, the court sentenced him to whipping for wicked and pernicious, willful lying. Such harsh punitive measures were common and reflect the Puritan's strict approach to law and order.

Sarah Jack: The harsh sentence underscored the need for control and punishment of behaviors deemed deviant.

Josh Hutchinson: Cases such as Fuller's were instrumental in perpetuating the fear of witchcraft. Understanding these cases is crucial for comprehending the complexities and fears of early American society.

Sarah Jack: It's also telling that he, a man, was let off of the witchcraft charge and only punished for lying. We have seen this several times with men, but never with women.

Josh Hutchinson: It came up a few times in this episode. Must be a thing.

Josh Hutchinson: The period of 1657 to 1687 saw [00:36:00] no executions for witchcraft in Massachusetts and only one known conviction, that of Elizabeth Morse, who was placed under house arrest instead of being hanged.

Sarah Jack: In the next episode of Massachusetts Witch Trials 101, we will examine the 1688 case of Goody Glover of Boston and what may have led the judges to condemn her after more than 30 years without an execution.

Josh Hutchinson: And stay tuned after that episode for the beginning of our Salem Witch-Hunt 101 series.

Sarah Jack: And now for a Minute with Mary.

Mary-Louise Bingham: You may recall from last week's Minute with Mary that Female Gleason was indicted on the capital crime of witchcraft at Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, British America. This week, the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project is closing in on her identity. Project member and genealogist David Allen Lambert provided the team with marriage documentation for two women who married into the Gleason family. These two [00:37:00] women were alive and living in the area in the mid 1660s. I found evidence that a third woman married into the Gleason family, but her vital dates are unknown. Dr. Tricia Peone, another project member and researcher, provided a resource regarding the First Church of Cambridge records dating to the early 1660s. Diving into the list of members to locate the Gleason family has begun. We've also reached out to Beth Folsom of Cambridge History to help us locate Middlesex County court records for a possible court record regarding Female's indictment. Stay tuned, we are close to identifying Female Gleason's given name.

Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.

Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a non profit 501c3 organization, Weekly News Update. Remember, each case of sorcery accusation or witch-hunt represents real individuals, each with their own names, [00:38:00] families, dreams, and aspirations for peace. It's vital to actively oppose the targeting of vulnerable members within our communities.

Sarah Jack: Education and advocacy are key to ending witch hunts. This entails transforming perceptions regarding the equal worth of every individual, insisting on a moral code that upholds human dignity, and challenging mob behaviors through the enforcement of laws in place to protect victims. If you hold a position of influence, whether in your community, on social media, in educational settings, or within the government, it's your opportunity to advocate and to stand up for the vulnerable. Speak out, raise awareness, and help strengthen organizations fighting these harmful practices.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts firmly advocates for universal human dignity, echoing the United Nations Charter's commitment to human rights, equality, and dignity. We condemn harmful practices related to witchcraft accusations and ritual attacks [00:39:00] as grave violations against human dignity.

Sarah Jack: We urge states and individuals alike to defend and uphold human dignity, protecting everyone from torture, mistreatment, and discrimination. You can join us by amplifying the stories of victims of witch hunts past and present. Engage with advocacy groups, learn through our resources, and voice your concerns to authorities. Your involvement, whether by sharing our content, discussing these issues in your network, or urging leaders to act, is invaluable. Together, we can nurture values of compassion, understanding, and justice in our world.

Sarah Jack: Support our mission by becoming a financial donor. Visit aboutwitchhunts.com/ to donate any amount you're comfortable with. Your generosity is the backbone of the podcast content you value. Let's commit to making a difference together.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Jack: You're welcome.

Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.

Sarah Jack: us next week when we learn about [00:40:00] the witch trials of several New Hampshire residents.

Josh Hutchinson: Visit aboutwitchhunts.com/ and sign up for our newsletter, Witch Hunt Wednesday.

Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.

Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

February 6, 2024

Service Magic with Tabitha Stanmore

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, by Dr. Tabitha Stanmore

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Show Notes

This new episode of “Witch Hunt” features Dr. Tabitha Stanmore, discussing her research on service magic in 14th to 17th century Great Britain with Salem witch trial descendants Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack. She explains the concept of service magic, its practices, and the difference between service magicians and witches. Dr. Stanmore also touches on the impact of religious changes and laws on magic practices. Various aspects of magic, including healing methods, divination techniques, and the use of magic in daily life are delved into. Additionally, she shares about her soon to release book, “Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic” and her collaboration on the Seven County Witch Hunt Project, which looks at the Matthew Hopkins witch trials of the 1640s. The discussion concludes with a reflection on the legacy of witch hunts and their impact on families and communities. Anyone can submit written testimony for MA Bill H.1803. Simply write a short letter stating why this bill is important to: Judiciary Committee at 24 Beacon Street, Room 136, Boston, MA 02133 or by e-mail to michael.musto@mahouse.gov. 

Recommended Reading

Seven County Witch Hunts Project Blog

United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 47/8. Elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks

Papua New Guinea Sorcery and Witchcraft Accusation-Related Violence National Action Plan

Pan African Parliament Guidelines for Addressing Accusations of Witchcraft and Ritual Attacks

Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: Study on the situation of the violations and abuses of human rights rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as well as stigmatization

Websites of Note

Why Witch Hunts are not just a Dark Chapter from the Past

Film: Testimony of Ana

The International Network against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices

Grassroots organizations working with The International Network

Storymap explaining the dynamics of sorcery accusation related violence

Stop Sorcery Violence

Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast that asks how and why we hunt witches and how we can stop. I'm Josh Hutchinson.

Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.

Josh Hutchinson: I'm a descendant of several people accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Hunt.

Sarah Jack: And I have grandmothers who were tried for witchcraft in Salem, Boston, and Hartford.

Josh Hutchinson: On Witch Hunt, we talk about the witch trials of old and the epidemic of witch hunts today.

Sarah Jack: Witch hunts have occurred in all parts of the world, and they've never stopped.

Josh Hutchinson: Today, witch hunts continue to occur in all corners of the globe, resulting in banishment, torture, and even death.

Sarah Jack: In this episode, we're focusing [00:01:00] on the witchcraft of the past.

Josh Hutchinson: Specifically we're dialed into the service magic of 14th to 17th century Great Britain.

Sarah Jack: Our guest, Dr. Tabitha Stanmore, tells us about her upcoming book, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic.

Josh Hutchinson: She explains what service magic is and how it was used in the past.

Sarah Jack: Listen on for a great discussion about what types of service magic were practiced and who practiced them.

Josh Hutchinson: Dr. Stanmore even explains the methods used.

Sarah Jack: And we hear about what she is working on next.

Josh Hutchinson: So sit back and enjoy another mind-expanding episode of Witch Hunt.

Sarah Jack: We welcome Dr. Tabitha Stanmore, author and social historian of magic, witchcraft, and researcher at the University of Exeter, working with Professor Marion Gibson on the Seven County Witch Hunt Project.

Tabitha Stanmore: My name is Dr. Tabitha Stanmore, [00:02:00] and I am a research fellow at the University of Exeter, currently researching the Matthew Hopkins Witch Trials of the 1640s. But my PhD research was in service magic or practical magic in the late medieval, early modern period stretching from 1350 to 1650, which is what my first academic book was about and what the book that I have coming out this year is also about.

Sarah Jack: Does your new book have a title?

Tabitha Stanmore: Yes, it's Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic.

Josh Hutchinson: So looking forward to that. That comes out in May?

Tabitha Stanmore: It comes out in May, May 2nd in the UK and May 28th in the US. and yeah, it should be very exciting. I hope it's going to be very exciting. I've seen the book covers and I'm going to get the actual, physical copies in my hand at some point next week, which is, I just can't believe it's real, actually, it's great.

Josh Hutchinson: Excellent. Yeah. I've pre ordered a [00:03:00] copy, and I'm just waiting and waiting.

Tabitha Stanmore: Oh, that's so kind.

Tabitha Stanmore: Thank you.

Sarah Jack: What do we need to know about the time period and location of your service magic research?

Tabitha Stanmore: So my research focuses on the 14th through 17th century. So that's roughly 1350 when more records start becoming available, and so it's much easier to trace the line of magic in society from that point. And I finish up in 1650 because that is the period where the world really starts changing again in a dramatic way, and after the end of the 17th century, or even middle of the 17th century, society has changed so much that it's not a very useful comparative point anymore, especially in the location that I look at, which is England. And, obviously, 1650, that is the end of the English Civil Wars, which saw the beheading of Charles I, and the, the beginning of the Commonwealth, or, the [00:04:00] Commonwealth, the brief point where England didn't have a monarchy.

Tabitha Stanmore: So I decided it was a good point to stop because at that point we get a real, massive change in society and a massive change in the way that people were living their lives and approaching things and this kind of rise of, I suppose science isn't quite the right word, but skepticism in a new way, which means that the idea of magic changes at that point.

Tabitha Stanmore: But also, 300 years is enough to be getting on with, so 1350 1650, is a, it's a really formative period, I think, for English society, but also a really key point for magical practice in England, and where it starts, it really features very strongly in how people live their day to day lives and try to incorporate both the supernatural and religion and, I suppose, rational skepticism in their daily lives, as well.

Josh Hutchinson: What exactly is service magic?

Tabitha Stanmore: Service [00:05:00] magic is a term that has, I suppose it's relatively new. It's only about 10 years or so that we've been using the term service magic. And it's basically magic, practical magic, that was sold to people in exchange for a fee. So it's literally what it sounds like actually. It's something that you buy and sell. It's a commodity, but it's a supernatural commodity. Basically it's the kind of thing that you use in order to solve everyday problems.

Tabitha Stanmore: Let's say you've had your favorite horse stolen and you don't know who's taken it and you don't know where it's gone. You might go to a magician or somebody who has very strong sort of magical or supernatural skills and ask them to perform a spell to locate either the horse or the person who stole it, so that you can then confront the supposed thief and demand your horse back. Or maybe you'll even ask a magician to perform a spell to force the horse to return, by whatever magical means necessary.

Tabitha Stanmore: It sounds quite [00:06:00] fantastical, but it was something which was incredibly common for people in the medieval and early modern periods, becauseinsurance hadn't really been, hadn't become a widespread thing at that point. A lot of people were living in a very sort of subsisting kind of way, which meant that if you lost something that was valuable, you needed to get it back, and there weren't many other ways of doing it, and you couldn't afford to just lose something. Turning to magic and having people who had the skills to use magic in this way were very, very highly prized.

Sarah Jack: How does service magic differ from witchcraft?

Tabitha Stanmore: That's a great question. If you asked a modern magical practitioner how they differed, I would probably expect them to say that there isn't very much difference at all, because I think with terms like cunning folk or magician or witch, they're almost synonymous in most people's minds nowadays. They are people who are wise, they're people who have supernatural powers that most people don't have access to, [00:07:00] they're people who embrace the supernatural powers that other people fear.

Tabitha Stanmore: But in the 17th century, 16th century, 15th century, the service magicians and witches would have been seen as very, very different people. And the reason for that is because in the medieval or early modern mind, there was an idea that there are two sources or maybe three sources of power that you can tap into if you deal with the supernatural. The first one is religious or divine power. And that's the kind of thing that priests are using on a daily basis, because they have this incredibly powerful supernatural entity, which ultimately that's what God is. He is literally above nature, can break the laws of nature at will. And that's something that religious people, priests especially, can tap into and use in order to change the world. Cunning folk would often say that they used the same kind of power.

Tabitha Stanmore: They'd [00:08:00] say that their spells were prayers. They're calling on the divine, or they're calling on saints to make things happen. They might also say that they were using fairies or pixies or some other kind of pseudonatural, but also supernatural entity to help them do whatever they were doing, especially if that was something like finding stolen goods. Going and asking the fairies was a very common way of finding out where your stolen spoon or your stolen horse had gone.

Tabitha Stanmore: So they're using very benign practices in order to do useful things,these cunning folk, and also priests. Witches, on the other hand, were seen as people who were using dark forces to do bad, negative things. So a witch was seen as somebody who had probably sold their soul to the devil, or at least was using demonic forces, and they were using these demonic forces to do harm in some way, whether that was killing people, destroying crops, in one case making somebody's mill fall down on a completely [00:09:00] still day when it shouldn't have happened at all, and all of a sudden the mill just collapses right in front of the miller. How does that happen? There is no logical explanation. It must be demonic, and it must be somebody bearing a grudge and using their demonic power to cause this harm.

Tabitha Stanmore: So there was a very clear separation in people's minds most of the time between a beneficent cunning person and a malevolent witch. That does all get very muddied when you start looking at theologians and particularly zealous priests and especially when you get into the Puritan movement of the late 16th and 17th centuries, where priests andvery, very godly people would argue that there is no in-between.

Tabitha Stanmore: Basically, you can't have somebody who's using supernatural powers that clearly aren't being brought by God, unless they are using demons, and people like George Gifford, who was a Puritan preacher living in the late 16th century, argued very strongly that nobody who claims to be able [00:10:00] to just heal by, I don't know,just saying some words over somebody could possibly be using God's divine intervention. So they must be using demons. And therefore you do get this mixing of cunning folk and witchcraft, but for most people they would be very, very separate things.

Sarah Jack: Thank you so much.

Josh Hutchinson: I like the period that you cover, because it's so dynamic. There's so much change in it, referenced a little, the change in attitudes toward the source of magical power that a service magician might get. And, in addition to the attitudes, the laws changed. When the Acts Against Conjuration or Witchcraft came in, how did that impact the service magic industry?

Tabitha Stanmore: That's a great question, and it's super interesting, because in some ways, not very much. The Acts Against Conjuration and Witchcraft, and you've absolutely, you're right to use those terms, because they're often called the [00:11:00] Witchcraft Acts, and actually, witchcraft only gets mentioned in the second half of all of these acts, and the first part is very much about conjurations and practical service magic.

Tabitha Stanmore: So some of the things that service magicians would commonly be asked to do was healing, finding lost goods, treasure hunting, making people fall in love. And three out of those four things are mentioned in the Acts Against Conjuration. Treasure hunting was seen as a massive no no, partly because officially any gold or silver found in the ground belonged to the crown. So using magic to be able to dig this stuff up was actually stealing from the crown, which is one of the reasons I think it got mentioned in these acts. So that was very, very heavily penalized in the first act against conjurations, brought in under Henry VIII. It was actually punishable by death,as well as provoking people to unlawful love, and finding lost goods and receiving money for finding lost goods through magical meansis, name checked as very, very bad things that people shouldn't be doing.

Tabitha Stanmore: From my own [00:12:00] research, it doesn't look like anybody actually stopped doing any of these things as a result of this legislation, partly I think because some of the law, the first law against conjurations say under Henry VIII, was so harsh that even magistrates weren't particularly keen on prosecuting this because nobody wants to be sentenced to death for, digging up a field, but also because these services were just so useful.If people don't have any other way of finding their stolen horse, then prosecuting that and stamping out that kind of service just isn't going to last very long. So yeah, it didn't really stop anything from happening in that sense, but there is still a growing sense of concern about what sorts of powers cunning folk might have, because they are lumped together in the Witchcraft and Conjurations Act with witches. And then there's that question of, oh, if you can do this kind of magic, then can you also do this negative kind of magic? So that sort of brings a cultural shift. But in terms of [00:13:00] how often magic was practiced, it probably didn't change it very much.

Tabitha Stanmore: What I will say is that one of the other massive changes that happens in this period between 1350 and 1650 is the Reformation, so the change of the state religion from Catholicism to Protestantism or Anglicanism, as it later becomes. And that does spark a big change in magic, basically because orthodox or acceptable Catholic practices all of a sudden become seen as superstition.Appealing to saints, using prayers to heal, that kind of thing, they all start being seen as quite suspicious under Protestant, doctrine. at that point you start seeing priests potentially who were doing perfectly orthodox things five years ago suddenly being seen as potential magicians who are using their nefarious, popish knowledge to form spells and possibly being in league with the devil as a result of that, because obviously there's a very heavy idea among different Protestant sects that the [00:14:00] Catholics are actually in league with the devil. So that's a really interesting way that the kind of religion suddenly becomes sacrilege and therefore possibly magic, at least in the eyes of some people.

Josh Hutchinson: I'm wondering if that change influenced the number of service magician, magician service practitioners out there, because before the Reformation in the Catholic Church, you can go to the priest for certain things to have objects blessed and your home blessed. And now you can't go to the priest for that anymore. He's not going to do some of the Catholic rituals. So you have to go to somebody still. So I'm just wondering, did that have an influence maybe on increasing the number of lay practitioners?

Tabitha Stanmore: It's a really interesting question. there's some really interesting research by Francis Young, about what happened to monks After the on both before and after the Reformation, because the monasteries are dissolved. All [00:15:00] of a sudden you have a lot of very highly trained religious people who have an ability to read Latin, they understand things like exorcism rituals, they understandall the rituals that, around essentially conjuring and appeasing God. And they are released into society. Some of them obviously go to the continent andjoin monastic institutions in Catholic countries.

Tabitha Stanmore: Other ones stay in England, at which point, you know what, what does happen to them? And it's very possible that some of them did, yeah, end up going out to become magicians for hire, essentially. Whether that's how they saw themselves is debatable. I mean, probably not. But it does mean that, yeah, you do have an alternative option to this kind of like orthodox I'm sure you're all familiar with the idea of Protestant priests, that people obviously turn to for religious help, but also potentially magical help as well.

Tabitha Stanmore: And you do also see a very strong competition going on both before and after the Reformation between cunning folk and priests, with priests going, ' please [00:16:00] can my parishioners stop visiting all of these cunning folk?' They're taking away my business. Because obviously one thing that priests often did wasadminister to the spiritual needs of their community, and that includes the things like blessing fields, helping people to be fertile again, possibly by blessing water and letting people drink it, which kind of borders on superstition even for the Catholicism, but if people are going off to a cunning person instead to get this help or to get healing or spells or prayers, then it is actually taking away from both the income and the use of the church, which was dealt with in two ways.

Tabitha Stanmore: One way was priests complaining and saying, no, this shouldn't be done. We should be stopping this. We should be trying to stamp out this kind of magic. Or priests leaning into it and just selling spells themselves. Which I just, I love. I think it's really wonderful. It's got the adaptability of people and the kind of the grey area between religion and magic. But really clearly shouldn't come through in those kind of examples.

Sarah Jack: What are some [00:17:00] other primary uses of service magic?

Tabitha Stanmore: Healing is definitely the most common, by a long way. And again, before we started recording, we mentioned that everybody on this call currently has a cold, and they don't seem to be going anywhere. and that's, that's obviously true of all of history, right? There's always been sickness. There's always been annoying illnesses that can't be shifted or life-threatening diseases. And especially before the advent of things like antibiotics or vaccines, there is a sort of an endemic sickness, among the population.

Tabitha Stanmore: So a medicine isn't particularly effective a lot of the time. It's very good at treating symptoms. It's not necessarily very good at treating disease. So turning to magic again, kind of makes a lot of sense in that situation, especially when you're using prayer spells. So you're very much appealing to a higher power to say, St. Justinian, for example, please, cure my toothache.It might be the only thing that works, frankly. [00:18:00] So healing was incredibly common. That was one of the things that cunning folk were asked to do the most. Another one was protection, protection in battle, protection for sailors when they are out at sea, to protect them from storms.And I think the most touching one is the amount that magic was used in love spell in. in situations about spells used for love, whether that's making people fall in love with each other or actually breaking people up, potentially, because you're so in love with somebody and they've gone and married somebody else. What are you going to do about that? It's probably a spell that you can use to break that couple up so that you can get that person. And, yeah, again, that's a very, very common use, which was very likely prosecuted a lot of the time, because a lot of the time love magic, it's about community cohesion. It's about keeping people together, especially the number of spells that are often, directed at making a husband and wife get along better, whether that's making the husband less cantankerous or making the wife fall in love with her husband again.[00:19:00] Those kinds of things, they were often available and very simple spells a lot of the time, which kind of, again, I think shows quite how common they must have been.

Tabitha Stanmore: There's one woman in the 15th century who apparently used to wash her husband's shirts in holy water because apparently that made him meek and pliable for the rest of the week. And she must have heard that spell from somewhere. She was also sharing it with her neighbors and passing on that knowledge, which I guess isn't so much service magic. But it is a very obvious use of magic that people needed, and I don't know how many people took up her advice, but she certainly seemed to think it would work, and had been doing it for years by the time she finally got reported to the authorities as potentially not using holy water in the way it was intended.

Josh Hutchinson: One of the uses you talk about is divination. What are some of the key methods used to divine?

Tabitha Stanmore: There are so many, and again, it's fascinating to see how much things [00:20:00] evolve and get adapted according to people's needs, and clearlythey're in trial and error with these spells. One of my favorite forms of divination, which sounds deeply impractical but I love, is the bread and knives method, and that's basically where you take a loaf of bread, and you stick two knives into the sides of the loaf in a cross shape, and then you put a peg in the top of the loaf, and then you, I think you turn it upside down, and then you hold the peg between your hands, and you ask a yes or no question, and basically the bread will spin one way for no and one way for yes. I've only found two instances of it being used. And I think, again, it's because it's so impractical. I did try it once to see if it would work. And you need some really stale bread, you need some very sharp knives, you need a very short hand, so you don't just drop it on your foot. But it's really interesting, because it's a method that is [00:21:00] replicated with different tools, but they all sort of work on the same principle, which is, you ask a binary question, as I say, a yes or no, or is my child going to be a boy or a girl, so one way for boy, one way for girl, or, I don't know. Am I going to get married soon? Yes or no? That kind of thing. And the cross shape I think is quite important, because it's again, it's drawing on that higher power and in this case, probably Jesus. And it's something which is simple, but only certain people, again, could possibly practice it, because you do need somebody who's got that sort of power within them, much like anybody could buy a pack of tarot cards today, but only some people are very good at reading them and have an affinity with them. You get the same kind of thing going on with divination methods. So as I say,the loaf and knives method fell out of popularity probably quite quickly. It appears in the 14th century, doesn't really appear in any other centuries, and mostly around the London area, as well, and doesn't seem to have spread very far after that.

Tabitha Stanmore: More common versions of the same [00:22:00] basic principle are the Sieve and Shears, which is, again, lots of different methods, but basically you take a pair of kind of sheep shearing shears or large scissors and put a sieve on top of those and then ask questions once the sieve is balanced on the top. And again, the sieve will tilt one way for yes, one way for no, and this is much more practical. You're not going to destroy a loaf of bread every time you attempt it. And you're also going to be able to, pretty much anybody will be able to use this method because everybody would probably own a pair of shears and everybody would own a sieve.

Tabitha Stanmore: The fancier version of this divination method is the book and key, and that is one that pretty much only priests used or people who had a very high level of education, because it would use either a Psalter or a Bible, and you'd place a big heavy key inside of the book. And you'd hold the book in between your two bald fists, and then you would ask your [00:23:00] question. And often if it was finding stolen goods that you were trying to find out with this method, then you would start by saying something like, 'by St. Peter and St. Paul, Tony's stolen my horse.' And if the key fell out, then that would be the right answer.But yeah, as I say, this is something that only some people will be able to do, because not everybody had access to printed works and especially not something as sacred as a Bible. And that's by St. Peter and St. Paul, you're definitely summoning divine intervention to make this work. Again, condemned by the church. Still used by the church . And again, a simpler method of that, is just taking a Bible and just opening it at a random page. And the first line from the gospel that you see is the answer to your question, which,some will call that just basic religion or just guesswork, but people would definitely see it as a very reliable form of divination, depending on the answer. So these are some of my favourite ones. I could go on about this forever as you can probably [00:24:00] tell, so let me know if you want any more.

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I'm so glad you explained the Sieve and Shears and the Book and Key. Those actually turn up in New England in the Salem Witch Trials. Both of those methods are said to be used.

Tabitha Stanmore: Yeah, it's definitely an import, that.

Josh Hutchinson: And what are some key methods of healing?

Tabitha Stanmore: One of my favourite methods, which probably wouldn't have worked very well at all, comes from the 14th century, and it's probably quite a lot older than that. And it's basically, again, very strongly religious, it involved saying a short phrase in Latin, something similar to, 'as Mary sufferedin the birth of Jesus, may this person's suffering end,' essentially, or something like that. And while saying that, you would put your fingers into the wound that somebody had sustained, and [00:25:00] make the sign of a cross. Which, given that a lot of these spells do actually have a very strong logic behind them, this one makes no sense to me, because you're just going to be opening up that wound. But I suppose the idea is that you are also inserting some sort of um, ,cleansing in it, because of the, the mercy that Christ showed, to humanity, and the idea of the cleansing of sins and that kind of thing. You might be trying to cleanse the wound by putting the power of the cross inside it.

Tabitha Stanmore: More effective methods, potentially, were ones that involved writing spells onto food, pieces of food, sometimes things like communion wafers, sometimes bread, sometimes cheese, and giving that to the sick person to eat.

Tabitha Stanmore: And I say it would be more effective partly because we all recognise that the placebo effect exists, and so that kind of, that knowledge that you are being cared for and that sort of hope that will be attached to that spell, might well be exactly what you [00:26:00] need, basically, to kind of power you through and overcome your illness.

Tabitha Stanmore: Again, it is something that not everybody could do, sometimes you need to know the right words, and some people just had a better understanding of healing and whether or not this was a lost cause, and often, spells would be combined with other healing methods as well. And that's something that you see with magical drinks, which were also given as a method of healing. Again, they would normally come with some kind of chant that you would do over the the potion.

Tabitha Stanmore: But the things that went into the potions were often things which would be very helpful for curing the disease in the first place. So things like honey, things like garlic, aqua vitae, which is a catch all term for all sorts of different sort of medical concoctions that involve a lot of different herbs. And and often these herbs would have either anesthetic effects or antibacterial effects, as well. So they could genuinely do good, even without the kind of the placebo effect or without the magic that's been [00:27:00] mixed into them.

Tabitha Stanmore: Often healing spells do combine belief, that kind of, the idea of divine power or some other kind of higher power, as well as very strong experience that the cunning person would possess and use as part of their healing. And again, you see that combination in diagnostic services. A lot of cunning healers would try to diagnose somebody's illness, especially if it was something which had come on very suddenly or was just not going away and there wasn't an obvious cause for it. They'd try to diagnose whether or not somebody had been touched by a fairy or whether they'd been bewitched by a malevolent witch. And they do this by taking the patient's belt or girdle and measuring it. And they basically measure it between their extended thumb and their elbow and see, they actually never explain exactly what they see when they're measuring this girdle.[00:28:00]

Tabitha Stanmore: But what I'm guessing is that they're seeing how much weight the person has lost,and if it has been a dramatic weight loss over a very short period of time, then often they would come to the conclusion that this person had been touched by a fairy and they had some kind of terrible wasting sickness. And in that case the cure would be to try to appease the fairies, it would be to try to drive out the curse that somebody had put on the person or try to somehow otherwise fortify the person so they could get through the illness, but they'd use this diagnostic tool to say what the illness is in the first place and also whether the person had any hope of survival.

Tabitha Stanmore: And cunning folk would choose their cases accordingly. If they didn't think this person had any chance of surviving, they would be honest about that. They'd say, 'look, I'm sorry, this person's too far gone, the fairies have got him, there's nothing I can do.' But if there was some hope that they, a person could be saved, and they suspected that it was [00:29:00] witchcraft especially, then one of the things that they would start by doing is potentially performing counter witchcraft.

Tabitha Stanmore: So a very common method for that would be to take a flask of the patient's urine, and this is from the 17th century onwards, it's not particularly common in the 16th century, but it's a continental European import into England. But yeah, you take a flask of the person's urine, you'd put pins and a piece of red fabric or potentially something in the shape of a heart into that flask and then you would stopper it up and you would boil it in the fire or bury it somewhere, and the idea is that that would cause so much pain to the person who would cast the spell in the first place that it would basically rebound and then the witch would be obliged to lift the curse, or at least you'd be able to identify who the witch was and then force them to lift the curse, either by scratching and drawing blood, because that removes some of their power, or by just [00:30:00] intimidating them until they lifted the curse.

Tabitha Stanmore: So there's lots and lots of different tools in a cunning person's arsenal.

Sarah Jack: Would somebody inquire for the services of a magic practitioner to do a curse or harm their neighbor or family or spouse?

Tabitha Stanmore: Yes, although it very much depends on the intention behind it, whether your community would condemn you as somebody who is trying to use witchcraft or not. Again, going back to the stolen goods example, it would be relatively common to say, 'oh, my horse has been stolen, I am going to go to a cunning person and get that cunning person to curse the thief until the horse comes back.' And that wasn't seen as witchcraft, because it's more like restoring justice than doing harm for no reason. And that's quite an important distinction in people's minds. Because again, if you're doing something, if you're causing harm for the right reason, then you [00:31:00] can potentially ask for God's intervention in that, you can potentially ask fairies or whatever. You don't need to be using devilish or malevolent powers to be able to do that.

Tabitha Stanmore: So yeah, so if you're using a cunning person to, even if you're causing, you want them to cause real serious harm or pain, so long as it's for a good reason, it's okay. If you're just doing it because you're just filled with spite, that's when it tips into witchcraft, which does take a little bit of moral arithmetic, but it kind of works.

Josh Hutchinson: I'm not gonna lie, when I started this research, I did not expect it to go in the direction it did. And I, it's really changed my perspective on, on the early modern period, on the witch trials, on witchcraft and people's belief systems and everything else, because it's so different to what I expected.

Tabitha Stanmore: And I didn't realize quite how much magic there was going on, until I started this.

Josh Hutchinson:

Josh Hutchinson: You talked earlier about some [00:32:00] of the healing. They would write things down on food or paper and swallow it. And what were some of the other ways that Christian scripture and teachings were used in magic?

Tabitha Stanmore: I suppose one of the most famous ways, when you think about it, is exorcism rituals, because one of the things that ritual magicians in particular, so very learned magicians who had knowledge of Latin and other sort of sacred languages, one of the things that they could do with their knowledge was repurpose Orthodox Christian knowledge,and, as I say, rituals.Exorcisms obviously are intended to conjure a demon out of a person or an item, but the same method and more or less exactly the same words can be used to conjure a demon into something, whether that is a person, [00:33:00] which doesn't happen too often, thank goodness, but much more commonly into a magic circle, for example.

Tabitha Stanmore: So, that use of scripture, again, often by priests or people who trained as priests and then left their training early so they didn't actually have to take orders or monks would use this power, in order to summon demons and bend them to their will. And the things that they use the demons for vary from incredibly noble to hilarious. For example, on the noble end there is the ability to understand the secrets of the universe and understand the nature of God. So think Dr. Faustus style. He's reached the end of human knowledge, now he wants to understand the secrets of the universe, so he summons a demon, makes a deal, and, well, he thinks that he's forced a demon to tell him all these things. And ritual magicians who were careful about their work [00:34:00] definitely thought that they hadsubjugated a demon to their will, in order to answer their questions aboutthe higher powers.

Tabitha Stanmore: On the funnier end of the spectrum was summoning a demon, or even an angel, in order to learn Latin really fast so that you could get out of your lessons quicker, or summon a demon into a magic ring to make you better at gambling. Or even, potentially, summon a demon, make them look like an incredibly beautiful woman so that you can sleep with them. Real spectrum of human interests there, all of which come down to using Christian scripture in ways that it probably wasn't designed for, but the point of this is that scripture, especially when it was written in Latin, was seen to have power in its own right.

Tabitha Stanmore: It's not almost not even just the divine power. It's the fact that these sounds, these syllables, this conjunction of words in itself is enough. You don't really need to understand it to be able to [00:35:00] use it, which actually is why in some medieval, late medieval, medical texts from the 13th and 14th centuries, you have instructions from the author saying, 'do not share this particular healing charm,' which is sometimes written down in a medical text. 'Don't share this with the wider population because they'll misuse it, because you don't have to understand it in order to make it work.' Bit gatekeepery, but in some cases you can understand why.

Josh Hutchinson: That reminds me of Harry Potter, you still have that, that Latin as magical language kind of thing in our society today. There's these magical words, abracadabra or avaracadabra, if you're a Harry Potter fan.

Josh Hutchinson: Absolutely. And I actually, that's something that always bothered me about the Harry Potter books. Like at no point do they actually learn the theory of magic. And I feel like that's a massive oversight, Yeah, they don't know how it works. They're just. They're cooking the [00:36:00] meal with the ingredients, but they don't know how it all comes together.

Tabitha Stanmore: Exactly. Yeah. It's rote learning and it's lazy, frankly.

Sarah Jack: Right now, I believe you're working on the Seven County Witch Hunt Project. Is that right?

Tabitha Stanmore: Yes, yeah it is. Yeah, so it's a three year, Leverhulme-funded research project with Professor Marion Gibson. I think it's really exciting. So we're looking at what we're calling England's mass witch hunt. So it was the largest witch hunt in England, as far as we know, and it took place during the English Civil War in the 1640s. And it's estimated that about 300 people were accused across seven counties, and of that, over 100 were executed. The thing that this project is trying to pin down is all of the details within that. We don't know exactly how many people were prosecuted, we don't know how many people were executed, we don't know the names of some of those people, and we certainly [00:37:00] don't know the backgrounds of those people either, or what kind of roles they played in their communities, or the kinds of psychological scars that the communities possibly ended up with as a result of these hunts.

Tabitha Stanmore: There's been an over focus, I think, on Matthew Hopkins, the so-called Witchfinder General, and his, co-searcher, John Stearne. And yeah, this project is trying to reorient our knowledge and our focus to look at the accused themselves and their families. So one thing I'm looking at within that, and I'd love to come back onto your podcast at some point and talk about this because I'm very excited about it, is, the children of suspected witches. Because as far as I know, we haven't, nobody's really looked into that in any detail. We do tend to look at the children of witches if they subsequently get accused of witchcraft. But, for example, we have 300 people who were accused, and almost all of those had children. [00:38:00] And we don't know the fates of those, what, did they stay within their communities? Did they end up going to prison alongside their parents? Did they carry a taint for the rest of their lives of being the children of witches? Or were they able to reinvent themselves? We just don't know. And I think that's a massive oversight and one that could tell us quite a lot about early modern witchcraft and the early modern capacity to forgive and forget, which at the moment is just a massive question mark,in our knowledge of the past.

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We definitely want you to come back and talk to us about that and anything else you want to talk to us about. We looked a little into children of the Connecticut witch trial victims. It's very fascinating what ends up happening with the families, like Sarah and I have ancestors who were accused. And so we know a little bit about what happened with our ancestors' families. And it's like you said, that trauma [00:39:00] is there no matter what the result of the accusation is. There's an impact.

Tabitha Stanmore: Absolutely. Yeah. Sorry. I definitely should have been a bit clearer about that. Within England, we don't know very much about the fates, but yeah, it's really exciting to see how much we actually do know about some of the legacies. in, in the U. S. for sure. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating and well done for being alive now.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you. Yeah. Some of my ancestors and Sarah's, were acquitted and released and managed to recover and raise their families and everything. Others weren't as fortunate, but their children lived on and carried their names on.

Tabitha Stanmore: Honestly, the more I look into the early modern period, the more amazed I am that anybody survived it, really. um,

Josh Hutchinson: Just surviving to get born in the first place was so harrowing. Yeah.

Tabitha Stanmore: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. it's absolutely amazing. it's real testament to [00:40:00] human, I don't know, resourcefulness, hope, I'm not sure, but yeah, it's really amazing.

Sarah Jack:

Sarah Jack: And now for a Minute with Mary.

Mary-Louise Bingham: There was a woman living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, British America, indicted for the capital crime of witchcraft in 1665. She is only known to us today as Female Gleason. The reason we know of her existence at all is because her surname is mentioned in the book, Entertaining Satan, authored by John Putnam Demos.

Mary-Louise Bingham: I am sad that I have not yet found a court document stating her given name. I am also sad that her given name was not passed down through the generations. Her very being was almost erased from history. Today, I can assure you that the members of the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project are conducting the necessary research to discover Female Gleason's given name. It will be with great joy to speak her full name [00:41:00] when she is cleared for the crimes she did not commit.

Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.

Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunt, a non profit 501c3 organization. Weekly News Update What impact can the United Nations Human Rights Council have? The United Nations Human Rights Council is an intergovernmental body within the United Nations system that strengthens the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe.

Sarah Jack: The work of the United Nations Human Rights Council includes promotion and protection of human rights, addressing violations and setting standards, encouraging compliance, and standards, promoting prevention, and continuing global dialogue. The preamble of the United Nations Charter states, 'We the peoples of the United Nations are determined to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights and the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women, and [00:42:00] of nations large and small.'

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts staunchly stands for the right of human dignity for all. We believe that this right, inerrant to every person, underpins all rights and freedoms. Harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks is a violation against human dignity. End Witch Hunts implores states and individuals to uphold and protect human dignity. We all must work to safeguard individuals from torture, degrading treatment, and discrimination. We are dedicated to these principles and advocate for their universal adoption and implementation.

Sarah Jack: Witch hunts are a harmful reality that persists, and as a part of our podcast community, you play a crucial role in the collective advocacy. Thank you for tuning in, sharing our episodes, continuing the conversation with your sphere of influence, and asking leaders to take action. We must continue to cultivate the societal values of compassion, understanding, and [00:43:00] justice. It is our collective responsibility as a world community to unite against the inhumane treatment of every individual anywhere in the world, including anyone accused of causing witchcraft harm. Spread awareness. Share this information with your friends, family, and on social media. Use your voice to let others know about the urgency of combating witchcraft accusations and persecution. Support advocacy groups. You can learn all about them on our website and in our advocacy podcast episodes. Contact authorities. Raise your voice by reaching out to relevant authorities and leadership. Urge them to take swift and decisive action to ensure justice for victims and accountability for all involved.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts actively supports exoneration and memorial efforts that aim to honor victims and raise witch hunt awareness. Sign our petition at change.org/witchtrials to urge the state of Massachusetts to amend legislation [00:44:00] acknowledging all Salem Witch Trial victims. Bill H 1803, an act to exonerate all individuals accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials, is currently being reviewed by the Joint Committee on the Judiciary in the Massachusetts General Court. They must choose to pass the bill onto the House by February 7th. Please consider submitting written testimony now as to why you support acknowledging all those who suffered in the Salem Witch Trials. This bill transcends the realm of mere legislation. It holds profound significance in the pursuit of human rights. Beyond the previously exonerated victims of the Salem Witch Trials, this bill sheds light on the vast scale of mass suffering that occurred. It represents a significant step toward rectifying this injustice and delivering more comprehensive justice. This legislation holds the power to provide more long overdue formal acknowledgement to overlooked victims.

Sarah Jack: Join the Massachusetts Witch Trial Justice Project and House [00:45:00] Representative Andres Vargas in advocating for this crucial piece of legislation. Anyone can submit written testimony. Simply write a short letter stating why this bill's important to this address, which will also be in the show notes: Judiciary Committee at 24 Beacon Street, room 1 36, Boston, Massachusetts 0 2 1 3 3 or by email to michael.musto@mahouse.gov. That's M I C H A E L dot M U S T O @ M A H O U S E dot G O V. Let's persist in elevating the voices of both historical and contemporary victims of witch hunts.

Sarah Jack: Our monthly donors are our super listeners. As a super listener, your monthly contributions make a significant impact. Visit aboutwitchhunts.com/ and easily sign up for any donation amount that suits you. Your generosity fuels the content you love.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, [00:46:00] Sarah.

Sarah Jack: You're welcome.

Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.

Sarah Jack: Visit us at aboutwitchhunts.com/.

Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell your friends about the show.

Sarah Jack: Support our effort to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.

Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

January 31, 2024

Marion Gibson on Witchcraft a History in 13 Trials

Buy the book Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson

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Show Notes

Dr. Marion Gibson, highly esteemed historian returns to talk about her new book, ‘Witchcraft, A History in Thirteen Trials’. The importance of the book in bridging the gap between historical witchcraft trials and the concept of witch hunts existing today is emphasized. Learn how the stories of real victims presented in her book explore aspects of witchcraft from a 700-year period, touching on the evolution from being considered a magical crime to being a societal metaphor. Dr. Gibson also delves into the sexism inherent in witch trials, the impact of demonology on witch hunting, the impact of individual testimonies from witch trials and the enduring potency of witchcraft accusations in today’s society. Marion shares a glimpse of her future work around the Witchfinder General trials during the English Civil War.

Buy the book The Witches of St. Osyth by Marion Gibson

Seven County Witch Hunts Project Blog

United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 47/8. Elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks

Papua New Guinea Sorcery and Witchcraft Accusation-Related Violence National Action Plan

Pan African Parliament Guidelines for Addressing Accusations of Witchcraft and Ritual Attacks

Marion Gibson Website

The International Network against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices

Why Witch Hunts are not just a Dark Chapter from the Past

Grassroots organizations working with The International Network

Storymap explaining the dynamics of sorcery accusation related violence

Stop Sorcery Violence

Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast that explores the past, present, and future of witch hunting. I'm Josh Hutchinson.

Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Join us as we explore fascinating tales of witch hunts from the ancient to the modern day, delving into the societal, religious, and psychological factors that fueled them.

Josh Hutchinson: Our podcast features expert interviews, in depth analysis, and compelling storytelling that bring to life the complex narratives surrounding these trials.

Sarah Jack: In this episode, we will be covering both historic and contemporary witch trials.

Josh Hutchinson: That's right. Today, we have the privilege of being joined by scholar Marion Gibson to discuss her captivating new book, Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials.

Sarah Jack: Over the next hour, Gibson will be providing us with a fascinating overview of the evolution of witch hunting and persecution over 700 years, from the [00:01:00] earliest European witch trials in the late 15th century to contemporary cases today.

Josh Hutchinson: By closely examining 13 pivotal witchcraft trials throughout history, Gibson reveals how notions of magic and the stereotypical idea of the witch have been adapted to serve as a convenient enemy and outlet for broader societal fears and prejudices.

Sarah Jack: Gibson will explain how women who were seen as overly outspoken, sexually deviant, or simply unconventional were especially vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft across eras.

Josh Hutchinson: We'll learn how profoundly misogynistic witch hunting manuals helped spread dangerous ideas that enabled the targeting of women.

Sarah Jack: Our discussion will also cover how the myth of the witch disturbingly endures today, with continued cases of witchcraft-related violence globally, as well as powerful figures co-opting the term witch hunt for their own political motives.

Josh Hutchinson: You won't want to miss Gibson's insightful [00:02:00] commentary on the gendered and political dimensions of historic witch hunts and the unsettling parallels that can be drawn with present times. So get ready to journey through 700 years of fascinating witchcraft history.

Sarah Jack: Welcome to Witch Hunt, Marion Gibson, author and historical consultant on witchcraft and magic.

Josh Hutchinson: First of all, I just want to say thank you for writing this wonderful book, Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials. It fills a need that Sarah and I have talked about for something that bridges the gap between the historic witchcraft trials and the witch hunts going on today. So, thank you for doing that.

Marion Gibson: Oh, thank you. That's what I thought needed doing, really. I think you need to, when you've seen the horror of witch trials in the past, and you've read all the history books that you can read about those, it seems to me that it's time to consider how relevant this idea still is today. And one of the things we talked about when we [00:03:00] met last time time was actually, it's very relevant. People keep using the term witch hunts and we know that people are still literally being accused of witchcraft around the world today. So there seemed a need to me to bring the story of the historic witch trial right up to date.

Josh Hutchinson: And the cases you chose are just, they're so good at illustrating, not just individual cases, but the trends and grand themes that connect all of the history and the present together.

Marion Gibson: I'm glad that worked, yeah. Every now and again I find myself still in the process of selecting, if you know what I mean, because I took so long over it and agonized so much over, is this the right one? Is that the right one? Will this really fit? Will this carry the themes through the book? Is this too complicated for the reader because there are some twisty turny moments in the book where the definition of witchcraft shifts? So where it moves, for example, from being a [00:04:00] magical crime to being a crime imagined as one of fraud. And then again, in contemporary times, to being kind of metaphor for a whole bunch of other kinds of things that the society of the time deemed to be unacceptable. So I'm really glad. I'm really glad that I do seem to have pulled that off because it was one of the things that bothered me most writing the book.

Sarah Jack: You have pulled it off and it's going to expand minds and inform and so thank you and great job.

Marion Gibson: Good. Thank you. Oh, that's great. I just come here for validation, basically.

Sarah Jack: Good, good, good.

Josh Hutchinson: You sent the book to the right people.

Sarah Jack: Can you give us a brief overview of what Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials is?

Marion Gibson: Yeah, it is what it says on the tin, but that doesn't quite cover the scope of it, I think. It covers a 700 year period, which again was one of the things that I agonized and worried about writing the book, because [00:05:00] that's a very long period of time. Our first witch trial is in 1485. And our final witch trial is effectively still going on. It's the ongoing legal battle between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels and the many adversaries who were embroiled in that legal battle. So that is our last witch trial. And it tries to tell the story of the idea of the witch and the ways that the idea of the witch has been put on trial, both in formal courts and more informally in society, over the course of those 700 years, to give people a sense of what witchcraft meant in the past, the era of the witch trials, if you like, but then how the idea of the witch is still current today and the era of the witch trials really hasn't finished. So it tries to bring everything up to date and get people to think about what witch means now, and what a witch trial means now.

Josh Hutchinson: I want to get to what a witch is, but you point out in the introduction, [00:06:00] you first need to understand what magic is. So can you explain how would you define magic?

Marion Gibson: It's even harder than defining witches, isn't it? I think magic is a force which cannot be explained by other factors such as science, rationality, observable, physical, or material changes of that kind. But it's more than that, really. It's what people choose to define as magic. So in some cases, some of the phenomena that people have thought were magical in the past or think to be magical today can actually be explained in other ways. But people choose not to because they want to see those things as being magical. And of course, magic can be a positive or a negative thing. So if you accuse your neighbor of being a witch and doing magic, obviously that's a terribly negative thing. But you might also see magic as a positive thing. And one of the ways the witch turns up in contemporary culture is a kind of positive magician, [00:07:00] somebody who's sparkly and glamorous and exciting and maybe even a role model. Magic accompanies the idea of the witch throughout history, really.

Sarah Jack: And what does that lead the witch to be? What is the witch?

Marion Gibson: The witch is a very movable thing, but often defined as an enemy. So one of the places that the witch fits into society, even over such a long historical period, is that they are a very useful enemy. And if they, if you don't think they exist already, you need to invent them because they fill that gap in society where scapegoats and those who challenge authority, people who are subversive, people who are seen to be problematic, certain racial, religious, cultural others. Those people fit. So The witch is is useful when you want to say, I do believe the world is full of magic. It's full of spirits. It's a highly religious world. And I think that because God has his good people on one [00:08:00] side, therefore, Satan must have his bad people on the other side. And those people must be witches and they must be able to do real magic.

Marion Gibson: So the witch is useful more than anything else, useful throughout history.

Josh Hutchinson: One of the things I love about this book is that you're telling the individual stories of victims of persecution. What is the impact? How does that impact our perception of the events to learn the individual stories?

Marion Gibson: I think it's really important. I think it would be quite easy to write a long history of witchcraft where you said all the things that I say about how it's still relevant, et cetera, and how it's now a metaphor for other things. You could say all of that without the individual stories, butI don't think it would really land with people in the same way. And I don't think it would be nearly as engrossing. I find those personal stories the most engrossing and interesting part of writing a history. And I think if you don't feel [00:09:00] history, we talked about this a little bit with my last book, The Witches of St. Osyth, when I came on to talk about that. If you don't feel history, then you don't learn from history. You don't get the sense that, you know what, persecution is a bad thing. We might want to try to do less of it and work towards a world which is more equitable and just and so on. So it's really an attempt to engage people in the story as much as possible by showing individual people who were victimized as witches or who continue to be, and getting people to think but that could have been me, that could have been me in that position, or my neighbor who I care about, or my partner who I care about. I want people to have that sense of emotional investment, and I want as far as possible to give a voice back to the people who were persecuted in the past, and who perhaps were not at the time able to speak for themselves or certainly can't now.

Marion Gibson: I want people to feel those stories and feel like they're on the side of the persecuted [00:10:00] people, and they want to do something to make their stories better known and hopefully stop those kind of stories recurring again. So it's quite a big aim really, but I think the personal is really important.

Sarah Jack: The stories are so engrossing. I really felt the vulnerability of many of the characters. And Tituba has been on my mind a lot lately and how people view her. And I really felt her vulnerability when reading about her. Why are some of these people vulnerable? Why are they easy marks?

Marion Gibson: A lot of it is to do with gender. So about 75 percent of the people who we know were accused of witchcraft across all the jurisdictions that historians have studied were women. So that's a really important thing that seems to make people vulnerable to the accusation of witchcraft. But in her case, there's also the racial factor to be considered, so she's a Native American woman, and she's [00:11:00] positioned as the enemy of the colonists, the people living around her. So there's that. There's also her position within society, so she's an enslaved person and a servant, somewhere on the continuum between those positions, this very disempowered woman sits, depending on whose jurisdiction she's having to live within and how she's being treated by the community around her. All of those things matter. And she's positioned in that way because she's been translocated from one place to another. So sometimes factors like migration matter. Sometimes it's a forced migration, as in her case. In other cases, it's somebody who's perceived to be out of place in some way. And obviously these are all things that we see in today's society as making people more likely to be persecuted and scapegoated.

Josh Hutchinson: In the book, you talk a lot about demonology. What is that? And how did that shape witch hunting?

Marion Gibson: It's really the theory of witch hunting. And it's not [00:12:00] just a theory. It's a practical manual, if you like, for the finding of witches. So theory and practice, and it's stated, and this is where the first chapter of the book kicks off, really. It's stated that witches were the devil's people and they should be hunted down in society. They were more likely to be women than men, some of the first demonologists asserted.

Marion Gibson: And we start off with Heinrich Kramer, or Kramer, one of the first demonologists, somebody who people might have heard of because he wrote the witch hunting manual, Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches, which has become notorious since the 1480s when he wrote it for being not only Yeah, a manual for hatred and for hunting people, but particularly a very misogynistic manual.

Marion Gibson: So demonology didn't really have to go those ways. It didn't have to be as misogynistic as it was, but it seems inevitable in the context of a broadly patriarchal society that it would have gone that way. And people like [00:13:00] Heinrich Kramer make sure that it does. And the first witch trial in the book is his attempt to put into practice his demonology.

Marion Gibson: So he's thinking through these ideas, and he's presumably thinking about writing a manual for witch hunting, but he decides to put this into practice. And one of the trials that I talk about in chapter one is his attempt to do that. He finds a group of women and decides he's going to persecute them.

Marion Gibson: But demonology is really important. It underpins so many of the stories, particularly in part one of the book, which goes from the 1480s to the 1730s, really the period of the witch trials as people tend to think of it. And if it wasn't for demonology, those witch trials wouldn't be possible. So first of all, you need the theory and it's a conspiracy theory. It's about Satan's people in the world and how we must find them out. And here are the ways you identify them. And this is what you need to do to them. If it wasn't for that theory, the witch trials wouldn't have happened in quite the way that they did.

Sarah Jack: What do you attribute to [00:14:00] the level of misogyny that he was directed by writing that book?

Marion Gibson: It's hideous, isn't it? And it's really upsetting to contemplate just how misogynistic he was. It's partly perhaps to do with his position in society. He's a Dominican monk, so he's a celibate individual living in a basically patriarchal, closed, masculine community. But that didn't mean that he had to be misogynistic.Lots of people managed to live in those communities without being as misogynistic as he was. It makes you wonder about factors in his biography, which we don't know about, sadly. We know where he comes from, and we know some of his previous life.

Marion Gibson: He seems to be a deeply unpleasant individual. He was accused throughout his life of all sorts of nastiness, whether that was attacking academic colleagues, embezzlement, and his job was not a particularly attractive one. So he was responsible in part for the selling of indulgences, which is a way that rich people could [00:15:00] basically buy a piece of paper which bought them out of some time in purgatory, burning off their sins, as the theology of the time said that they would.

Marion Gibson: He just seems to have been a really quite unpleasant person, who was haunted by the idea that women were out to get men, and perhaps to get him specifically. But most certainly that he thought that they were ignorant, they were lustful, they were prone to believing the wrong things about God and Satan. They were malevolent and petty and strove to take out their frustrations on other people, primarily men. He identifies them as enemies in a whole variety of ways and it is inexplicable. You can always look at factors in people's life to say, 'that's why they hate that group or that's why they're just so unpleasant to everybody,' but at the end of the day, there is no real clue to why he was who he was. [00:16:00]

Marion Gibson: What is depressing is that a lot of people listened to him and credited what he was saying and thought of him as an expert. Some people questioned it, some people stood up against it, and I think one of the interesting things about that first chapter is that we look at the people who stood up against it, which include the people on trial, the women on trial, and things don't go quite the way that he might have hoped that they would have done, which I think is good because it gives the reader a nice surprise, a starting point for the book, which is not maybe quite what they'd expected.

Marion Gibson: But whilst people challenged him, a lot of people went along with what he said. And of course, that was one of the reasons why the witch trials take off. Sometimes all you need is one quite powerful individual to want to punch down on others. And unfortunately, the human imagination often goes along with that.

Marion Gibson: It was a book that made me think twice about whether I really thought people were at bottom good or bad. And the prevalence of that kind of hatred and the [00:17:00] way that it recurs throughout human history is a really depressing thing. And I think it's something that we really ought to think more about. There are always Heinrich Kramers.

Josh Hutchinson: And to your point that you needed demonology to have witch hunting, you had to have the science of how to do witch hunting, so you needed these books in order to do that. But specifically with the Malleus Maleficarum, if that book had never been written, do you think the European Witch Trials would have played out the same way?

Marion Gibson: That's a really interesting one. Scholars have argued a lot about whether that book is a really key one or not. I think it is. It's very difficult to get a clear sense of how books circulated in this period. We know that they did. And we know they circulated in manuscript and people translated them and passed them around.

Marion Gibson: And if you were a member of an academic community or a monastic community, you might make copies [00:18:00] of books, you might give them to your friends, you might give them as a gift to somebody, you might send them abroad to friends that you'd made through letter writing and things like that. So you can see the kind of network of circulation, but actually tracing the progress of an individual book is quite hard.

Marion Gibson: So scholars have said other demonologies are probably more important, particularly the less misogynistic, less radical ones, if you like. But nevertheless, the progress of the witch hunt suggests to me that all demonologies were important and that a very misogynistic demonology most certainly had a place in the spread of those ideas.

Marion Gibson: Look what the outcome was! Oh look, 75 percent of those who are accused are women. This cannot be really a coincidence. So I do think it was quite an important book and certainly the way it was rediscovered in the 20th century and translated into English for the first time, for example, makes me think that although it's long [00:19:00] pre history of publication and circulation, it's difficult to see the fact that people in the 20th century identified it as a key one and translated it and then talked about it a lot makes me think that actually it probably always was a key text and that we should pay quite a lot of attention to it. It's quite tempting to dismiss it as an outlier, but I'm not really sure that it was.

Josh Hutchinson: It's translated by one of your subjects in here, Montague Summers. Is his translation considered reliable? Is there any other academic translation of it?

Marion Gibson: Yeah, there is. His translation is not considered particularly reliable. He had his own biases and one of the reasons that he turns up in book is that he is fascinated by the idea of witchcraft and Satanism, and to some extent he's quite like Heinrich Kramer. He too is a Roman Catholic clergyman, or at least he presents himself as such. It's not entirely clear [00:20:00] exactly how he was ordained or how he went on that path. He regards himself as somebody who's quite a superior intellect and somebody who might know something about the spiritual world and might have some theories about things like ghosts and vampires and demons and so on.

Marion Gibson: I think he and Heinrich Kramer would have had some things to talk about had they met, but he's also very different, because he's gay and he's quite openly gay, which is a surprising thing for a clergyman and indeed any man in the England of his period. So he's really interesting. He sits on both sides of being, being a scapegoated witch, because he's accused of Satanism during the course of his life. Wow.

Marion Gibson: But on the other hand, being somebody who's very interested in persecuting other people and thus translating Kramer's book. So yeah, it's not a particularly reliable translation because of his own very complicated personal history and his own deep interest in these subjects, which I think [00:21:00] sometimes led him to over read or to propose a controversial interpretation of something Kramer had said.

Marion Gibson: If people want to look at Malleus Maleficarum, the best literal translation, that's one I talk about in the footnotes of the book, and it's by Christopher S. Mackay, and people should look for that one. He's also written a great book on Heinrich Kramer and the witch trial that I talk about in the first chapter. So if you want to know more about that and you feel like you want to read Malleus Maleficarum in a translation that gives you the best possible access to what Heinrich Kramer had to say, then I think it would probably be Mackay's book that I'd point you to.

Josh Hutchinson: Excellent. Yeah, I'm going to pick that up. I know it's going to be an infuriating experience.

Marion Gibson: It really is. Yeah. I get my students to look at it when I teach my module about witchcraft in history and literature, and every year, I go into the first class, it's the first class and I look at their faces and they're just like, what? [00:22:00] What? And sometimes people say to me, 'is this, you know, is this real? Did people really write?' Yeah, yeah, they really wrote this. Yes, they wrote it. They published it. This is what they had to say about the women of their period.

Marion Gibson: And their jaws really drop, especially students who quite often think, oh, well, you know, we've progressed such a long way since this time, I'm not really sure that we still need to be banging on about feminism and talking about the position of women in society. It is always quite satisfying to see those students think,' oh, wait, hang on a minute. No, people can say these kinds of things. And this kind of thing is still said in contemporary society from time to time. And shouldn't we talk about this in our classes?' So I always enjoy presenting it to people. And it will probably be quite a disturbing experience. Yeah. And it sort of should be, but no, I'm not recommending, I'm not recommending you get a mug of cocoa and sit down with your bedtime reading, because you won't enjoy it.[00:23:00]

Sarah Jack: Reading her trial and then thinking about him going on to write that, it really struck me. She couldn't pick up a pen and write her story and push it out into the world. And so here we are in 2023 fighting that story. The power of your pen, your writing is powerful. And it's going to be combating this mentality. So I feel excited about the era we are in, because women can write and express now, but then their words, what they were able to say, the limited power they had, and they got in trouble for it.

Marion Gibson: It's a powerful thing that, isn't it? Yeah. And again, it's quite deeply felt because particularly if you are a woman, you think about how you might have fared in that society. So Heinrich Kraemer, the [00:24:00] woman who is at the center of this Witch Trial in 1485 is a woman called Helena Scheuberin, and she's quite a wealthy woman probably, in a number of ways. She's a merchant's wife. She's had some education. She has some ideas about religion of her own, which is one of the reasons why she's able to stand up and fight back a bit against her persecutors, and she and her husband have access to sufficient money to, spoiler alert, hire a lawyer during the course of her trial.

Marion Gibson: So she's a really important prefigure, it seems to me, of the position of women in contemporary society. And I did find it powerful. And I did find myself thinking, 'you have to write this. You have to write this as a woman. You have to answer back. It may be too late for many of these people, but at least I can say something from my perspective and the perspective of other women. This wasn't right. You shouldn't have done this. This is what I think of you.' And I found that quite powerful. Looking back at my own female ancestors, I've been [00:25:00] going through some of the family records recently for other reasons. My great grandmother couldn't write. She couldn't write her own name. And that's incredibly recent. That's really very recent. And it makes you think about how important it is that women do have that voice and how important it is that we should try and use it to make sure that this kind of institutional misogyny that we see in the world around us doesn't continue to flourish.

Marion Gibson: So yeah, it felt like a powerful thing. It felt like an important book to write and it felt like I had to write it. It was important to try to set the record straight, even though, in many cases, it's many centuries too late. At least something was done, I guess.

Josh Hutchinson: It's definitely important to highlight that these were and still are male-dominated societies and who are they targeting with their witch trials, not usually men.

Marion Gibson: Not usually, [00:26:00] no. And when you look towards the end of the book, you see,in the African communities that I talk about, in the North American communities that I talk about at the end of the book, very often those who are accused are womenAnd they're persecuted, at least in part, for being women under the heading of being witches. So I think this is an argument that we absolutely still have not won. And we still do need feminism. We still do need women writers and male writers who are willing to tell those stories to keep telling them and to keep telling the story of the witch trial as a story of persecution of women specifically, as well as some men as well.

Josh Hutchinson: One thing I like to point out to people is that, in New England, at least 78 percent or so of the accused were women. And that you look at that and see, 22%, that's still a reasonable representation. There's [00:27:00] some men. Half of them were directly connected to a female suspect and they were accused after she was. It's even more misogynistic than when you first look at the 78%, I think.

Marion Gibson: Yes, I think so. That's very nicely put that the men who are drawn into the witch trials are very often drawn in because they're the husband or the son or an acquaintance in some way of a woman who is the primary accused. So yes, they are drawn in. Yes, it's a terrible fate for them, too. But one of the reasons that they are accused is because they're seen to be an associate and affiliates, somebody perhaps who is defending a woman who's been accused first.

Marion Gibson: I do think that is a really important point.

Josh Hutchinson: And then I was just thinking in there, A lot of the representations, the males, even though they're much more rare as suspects, they're given authority over the female witches.

Marion Gibson: Yes, they often [00:28:00] are, which is fascinating to see, isn't it? So even in the course of the accusations, you find that the essentially patriarchal assumptions of those who are doing the persecuting are replicated. It is quite fascinating, isn't it? Once you start to unpick and you look at the kind of qualitative experience behind the quantitative statistics, you find that it is even worse than it looks when you simply look at a table of figures. Absolutely.

Marion Gibson: That's why the individual stories are so important, I think, because you want to think about the experience of those people and why they were put in the positions that they were, and the stories that were told about them, and the stories that they managed to tell about themselves. So that it's not just the kind of hard data, if you like, of history that we're talking about. It's the lived experience of history, which often determines the outcome of events as we know.

Josh Hutchinson: We've talked about a little about why women are accused, but specifically you talk about how[00:29:00] women witches are seen as being unwomanly.

Marion Gibson: Yes, often they are. So women of all ages and classes get accused during the course of the book. So we have very poor women, who barely have enough to support themselves and their families. And we have relatively wealthy women, people like Helena, who we were talking about just now,and we even have noble women. So chapter two is about a Scottish witch trial. One of those who is accused and unfortunately ultimately condemned to death is a noble woman. So we've got all kinds of women, but one of the things that holds all those women's stories together is that they are thought of as insufficiently submissive or insufficiently modest or overly lustful or overly mouthy and difficult, women who fall out with people in their communities, women who are bad mothers or are thought to [00:30:00] be attacking other people's children and just are generally women who are, as you say, sufficiently unwomanly to have attracted the attention of their community. And that does come about in a whole variety of different ways. Maybe they are accused of having an affair with somebody else's husband, or maybe they have an illegitimate child, or maybe they've fallen out with a neighbor in a dispute over, it can be anything really, anything from child rearing to business practices. Maybe they're also notable in other ways.

Marion Gibson: So some of the women, there's a woman in one of the chapters about the English Civil War, who is a disabled woman, a woman who actually only has one leg. So maybe in her case, there's not only concern about her illegitimate child, she has a young daughter outside of marriage, but maybe also they're thinking about her appearance and the way that it's not a traditionally beautiful, attractive womanly appearance that is desirable to men. And therefore they [00:31:00] single her out for those reasons, as well.

Marion Gibson: So there's a whole variety of different ways that women can be thought by others to be unwomanly. And when you look at that again, you just see the unfairness of that stereotyping and the confinements of the image of the woman within these incredibly narrow boundaries to which they must conform or else they're going to find themselves in trouble.

Marion Gibson: And of course they could get into trouble in all sorts of different ways in the societies in which they live. But being accused of witchcraft seems to be quite a powerful tool alongside all the other accusations that might be made against them.

Sarah Jack: Women in leadership roles are labeled as witches by men.

Marion Gibson: Yes, they are. Yes, they are. Yeah. So again, that sort of sense that if you stick your head above the parapet, somebody's going to come along and want to knock it off then. That applies very much across the course of many of these stories. But again, we've got women who are incredibly [00:32:00] disempowered and women who are seen as leaders or who are seen as notable in their society in some way. So all of those kinds of people get accused. And because women are more likely to be leaders in modern society, really that idea has strengthened over time that a woman leader is fair game, can be accused of witchcraft. You know, that can be something as, it's as simple as drawing a cartoon of her or making a crass comment on social media, or it can be people literally believing that woman is a witch and deciding to attack her for those reasons.

Marion Gibson: Again, it's the idea that a woman is a witch is a very malleable kind of idea. You can twist it around any way you want to and make it apply to almost any woman. But if a woman stands out in society in some way, so much so that people consider her to be unwomanly, according to the definitions of their stereotype, then that does make her more likely to be accused.

Sarah Jack: Yeah. She's out of place [00:33:00] and it's because she's evil.

Marion Gibson: Yes, see, that must be it, mustn't it? There we go. There, that's all sorted now. Yeah, that's why women become eminent in their societies, isn't it? Because they're evil, obviously. And yes, it's funny, isn't it? Yeah, we find it laughable, but at the same time, we can see how all around us, that is unfortunately a really serious thing that many people think.

Marion Gibson: And really, I would so much rather that the book contributed to people questioning that. Every time a reader picks up a book, I do want them to think, 'hang on a minute, this actually is still the case, isn't it? I need to notice those instances a little bit more. I need to push back a little bit more against those and think a bit more about why that's that.'

Marion Gibson: Essentially fairly humorous thing might still be possible to be said. Why can we still make that joke? Why can we still make jokes about witches, which we should do because the idea of the witch is inherently laughable, but why can we still do it? And that's, [00:34:00] we can still do it because it still works in society. It still works in culture. We still know people do sometimes think these things.

Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and now we see that powerful women get labeled as witches, powerful men take on the label of witch in that they're the victims of the witch hunt.

Marion Gibson: They do. This was a real gift, I have to say. But it was also one of the things that prompted me to shape the book the way I did. If you'd said to me in the early years of the 21st century, or the 1990s, when I first got interested in witches, if you said to me, people will be claiming in the society around you that they are the victims of a witch hunt, and they won't be the people that you expect. They will be powerful men in charge of the societies that they essentially run. I wouldn't have believed you. I would have thought that's nonsense, isn't it? Of course, they're not going to be doing that, but the fact that they are, this is something that's happened in Britain with Boris Johnson [00:35:00] claiming to be the victim of a witch hunt, just the same as with Donald Trump in the United States.

Marion Gibson: So this travels across cultures, it's not a uniquely American thing. We see this happening quite regularly now, and it was an absolute gift for structuring the book because it gave me the opportunity to demonstrate very, very clearly just how relevant the idea of the witch is, and to talk about that curious reversal whereby it's the wealthy, white male, powerful individuals who are doing the claiming to be the victims of a witch hunt, whereas in fact it's the people who stand against them who are much more likely to fit the traditional stereotype of the witch.

Sarah Jack: You talked about the malleability of the witch. How do we recognize and interrupt a witch hunt in progress?

Marion Gibson: I think I end the book with this, and I've put a checklist, really, at the end of the book so that people can think about this. I think if you are being [00:36:00] asked to persecute and scapegoat somebody and identify them as an enemy of society, and they are female, maybe of a different race to the majority of people in a particular society, maybe they're poorer than the majority of people in a particular society, maybe they stand out in some way and are regarded as being inherently subversive in some way, maybe they're disabled or set apart by their physicality in some way. You might want to consider whether what you're being asked to participate in is in fact a witch hunt.

Josh Hutchinson: So I think if you can look for some of those signs, they might be signs that actually that old human stereotype is reasserting itself.And you're involved with The International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices. What's important about being involved in that?

Marion Gibson: I think it's really important for historians to try and find ways that their work is relevant [00:37:00] today. That's the first thing and secondly, that network is important in trying to stop witchcraft accusations happening today. And there are of course other harmful practices that are involved as well. So for example, people being murdered in order to be used, their body parts, for example, to be used in magical processes. So really the network is about putting together not just a group of experts on witch trials, but also a group of experts on that earlier thing we talked about, magic and human belief in magic, which, there is nothing wrong with at all, but when it leads to harming other people to the extent of killing them even, then clearly that's something that we need to be challenging. So yeah, I'd recommend people have a look at the, the network and some of the people involved in it. People like Leo Igwe, for example, who is an activist against witchcraft persecution and the harmful practices associated with it and has personal experience of being scapegoated [00:38:00] in this way and trying to help people who have today been accused literally of witchcraft, of bewitching their neighbors and worshipping the devil and so on. So if people feel like they want to know more about the notion of witchcraft in contemporary society, want to try and do something about it, then I'd recommend looking at the Network and some of the people involved in it to find out more about that.

Sarah Jack: And you mentioned that Leo and others that are doing work like him are sometimes persecuted. They're misunderstood as being supporters of witchcraft, even. How does fear cloud perspectives on efforts to educate about witch hunting?

Marion Gibson: It's very easy, isn't it, to turn the word witch against somebody, which is one of the points of the book, really. Like I say, it can be used against more or less anybody. Of course, standing up for somebody who is accused of witchcraft can lead to you being accused of witchcraft too. And that's certainly something that we see in the [00:39:00] past, and it's something we see today with people like Leo.

Marion Gibson: And there are other examples that I talk about in the book, too. For example, two female professors who organized a conference at one of the campuses of the University of Nigeria were themselves accused of witchcraft, not ultimately to the extent of being tried, which is great. But they were still accused of witchcraft. And the academic conference about witchcraft persecution was represented by some of the religious spokespeople in the area as being a meeting of witches, a kind of witch's Sabbath, which made things very difficult for them. So that kind of misunderstanding and the harassment that arises from it is one of the things that the network is really keen to combat.

Josh Hutchinson: And we've also seen, in addition, you had that conference in Nigeria that was affected by this belief. We've seen in America, school classes, college courses be cancelled because they [00:40:00] had to do with witch trial history but were represented as teaching occult practices. And I've seen articles about there's a new course being offered by one of the universities in the UK, and they're coming under a little bit of fire, it seems like, for teaching witchcraft and occultism.

Marion Gibson: They are. That would be the university that I actually work at. Yes. The University of Exeter. That's absolutely right. and one of my colleagues has brought together this fascinating master of arts in Magic and Occult Science, I think something like that. And it's pretty obvious really, as soon as you look at the course description, this is about history. This is about the history of magic and she's also based within the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies. So it's specifically about Eastern Occultism and the way that many of the kind of discussions of magic and the [00:41:00] occult in early Eastern societies led to the sort of Western esotericism that people see now and some people practice, but other people just find a fascinating cultural phenomenon. So yeah, absolutely. There's been quite a lot of pushback about the advertisements for this course in some quarters, as if it were an attempt to, to teach people how to do magic and witchcraft, which of course, as academics, it is not our business to do.

Marion Gibson: So yeah, absolutely. These are still very live terms, aren't they? And we do see all the time challenges to particular books in libraries or challenges to courses which examine the history of witchcraft and magic, because people don't always understand that this is, it's just about history.

Marion Gibson: So it's, exactly the same as examining, I don't know, the history of the industrial revolution or the history of 17th century Puritanism or whatever, you can look at anything through the historical lens and find something valuable in it, but people don't always see that.

Sarah Jack: Yeah, it [00:42:00] really speaks to how powerful and dangerous witchcraft is perceived by some who fear it, that even a look at the history is dangerous.

Marion Gibson: Yes. It's almost as if it's going to contaminate you, isn't it? The very word witch or the idea of witchcraft or magic is going to harm you just by your association with it, or by having noticed it. That's a theme that comes up over and over again in the book, actually, the idea that, that witchcraft spreads like a virus the second you engage with it. It will draw you in and either you yourself will become a witch, which is a terrible thing, or you will be the victim of witchcraft, which is also a terrible thing. So there is this sense that it is, it's like a bacteria or a virus or a germ or something like that. And once set loose in society, it can't be put back into the box, if you like.

Sarah Jack: Well, this [00:43:00] is out of the box now too, and it's going to spread. I'm really excited.

Marion Gibson: I'm glad you've enjoyed it so much. I loved writing the book. It was very hard because, hey, it's a 700 year history of some really complicated stuff. And I found it really, really difficult. But I also thought that it was something that needed doing. We need this big history of the idea of witchcraft, because it's something that just hasn't gone away, and to that extent, I suppose it's more relevant in some ways than some of the other histories I've talked about. They too have this long legacy, but we've seen the vitality of the idea of witchcraft. And it's something that surprised me that it's come back into culture with such force and that so many people are interested in it from so many different perspectives.

Marion Gibson: And people are still using the word witch as a weapon, by the self assertion or attack on other people. So I think when you've got something that appears to be part of history, that's just medieval superstition [00:44:00] unites the past, don't worry about that, but you realize that it's actually still very powerful within your society, then that's something that particularly needs the attention of historians, it seems to me. So that's what the book tries to do, show people where it's still relevant and get people to pay attention to it where they see it arise.

Josh Hutchinson: It reminds me of something Wolfgang Berenger said in a documentary video released this summer, Why Witch Hunts Are Not Just a Dark Chapter of the Past. He said, 'there have never been so many witch hunts as there are today.' And people just don't realize that, so I thank you for raising the awareness of that.

Marion Gibson: Yeah, I think that's very true, what he says, particularly if you look at places like Southern Africa, if you look at Indonesia, if you look at Papua New Guinea, some of the places where witch hunting has become most endemic, you can see that actually witch [00:45:00] hunting is more popular than it's ever been. And that's partly because of the spread of different kinds of media.

Marion Gibson: We talked about demonology spreading through textbooks in the middle ages right through to the sort of 18th century or so, but of course now today it's the internet, it's social media, it's podcasts, it's videos, it's in some ways ancient technologies now like video cassettes and audio cassettes and CDs and people think of witchcraft also spreading through cell phones, through private conversations as if it could run through the air and infect people.

Marion Gibson: So all the new technologies, which some people would have thought would have put an end to the idea of witchcraft belief, have in fact just been incorporated into it. And so witchcraft belief and witchcraft trials spread now through new media, just as once they spread through the printed word when that was a new media phenomenon.

Marion Gibson: So yeah, it's, there are more witch trials than there have ever been. He's absolutely right about [00:46:00] that.

Sarah Jack: And that demonology theory is just right there, propelling the fear through modern technologies.

Marion Gibson: Yes, it is. It hasn't really changed that much. It's one of the great human ideas, in this case, a very bad one, that really hasn't changed that much over time. And it's still just as powerful, even though we might've tried to tell ourselves that it really wasn't, and that this was part of history and part of the past, and we'd moved on now, surely, hadn't we, but we hadn't and we need to think about why that is.

Josh Hutchinson: How do things change?

Marion Gibson: How do things change? How do things get better? That's a really difficult question. And I thought about it throughout the course of the book and I, maybe it's just because I'm old and tired, I don't know, but it struck me that they wouldn't. And that seems to me to be a horrifying insight, really, I've always lived as quite a positive person and thought, ah, things are getting better, but I think one of the things we've seen in the [00:47:00] past 10 years, say, is things slipping backwards?

Marion Gibson: So maybe over time things will get better. Maybe we will move on from witchcraft belief. Maybe society will become more just and equal and all the things that we want it to be. But I'm beginning to think that we have to push harder to make that happen because I think we had got quite complacent, or I had anyway, and thought that naturally things were getting better, right? There would be progress. Everything wasn't perfect, everything could get better, but we were broadly moving in the right direction in society. And then a whole slew of things happened that made me think, actually, this wasn't the case. So I'm not sure that it will get better, but I think we have to try.

Marion Gibson: And it takes every person's effort and everybody can do something. Yes, I think so. I think the fact that the stories I tell are individual ones shows [00:48:00] that because sometimes a witch trial can turn on the intervention of a single individual, perhaps somebody you wouldn't even expect. And that can make a huge difference for good or ill. So if we can, yeah, if we can try to be that person, if we can try to be one of those people, then perhaps there is some hope that things will get better and that people will stop being persecuted as witches, both in reality and in metaphor. It would be so nice if we could move on, wouldn't it? I, as much as anybody else, I value the idea of the witch in popular culture and I enjoy consuming fictions about witches, but if only it could be confined to the fictional realm, wouldn't that be a marvelous thing?

Sarah Jack: Absolutely.

Josh Hutchinson: Witchcraft: a History in Thirteen Trials, when is it out in the States and how can people get it?

Marion Gibson: It will be out mid January, so it's out in the UK at the moment, but there will be a lovely American edition with a fabulous cover with a little fiery red cat on it, which I hope people very much enjoy [00:49:00] when they see it. And it's coming out with Scribner, so it should be available in all good bookshops, as they say.

Sarah Jack: What is next for you?

Marion Gibson: Oh, I do know already, which is good. And guess what? It's about witches. I'm going to write a book about the Witchfinder General trials of the English Civil War, which you've probably talked about. Matthew Hopkins, John Stearne, a group of, a merry band of witch hunters, unfortunately, once again, persecuting people from about 1645 to 1647, mostly in eastern England, but a trial that, although it's confined to quite a small locality, is as big as the Salem trial and involves 200 to 300 suspects, possibly as many as 200 people executed, which is absolutely astonishing.

Marion Gibson: I don't think we talk about it enough. People will probably know some of those names. They might know the name Witchfinder General. But for the first time, because of digitization of records, we're able to [00:50:00] explore the whole series of the trials. And they move across seven counties. They are across two years and increasingly records are turning up, which casts new light on some of the people involved.

Marion Gibson: So what I'm going to try and do is tell the stories of some of those individuals, just as I've done in this book, and try to give them back their histories, their voices, and also just talk about, really talk about the national context, and to some extent, the international context, the way that trials like the Witchfinder General trials influence trials in North America, so Salem in particular.

Marion Gibson: But also the way it makes us reflect on, what we think Englishness is, what we think Britishness is, what we think those kinds of identities that subsequently traveled all around the world were. Because it's so easy, I think, for us to present ourselves as this wonderful, enlightened people who value fairness and justice and all the rest of it. But again, recent events have suggested actually we might have a slightly darker history, and it might be quite [00:51:00] important to talk about that. So it will be a book about the biggest English witch hunts and its repercussions all around the world. And that's the Witchfinder General Trials of the 1640s.

Sarah Jack: Fantastic.

Josh Hutchinson: You do give people a taste of that in Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials. once you, everybody out there, once you've read Witchcraft: a History in Thirteen Trials, I know you'll just be salivating waiting for the next book to come out.

Marion Gibson: I can't wait to write it. Yeah. There's one of the chapters deals with parthenogenesis of that hunt and a particular individual who's accused. So yeah, if I can do for many of the other suspects what I've done for her, I should be very happy. Again, it's a very big project and it will take a little while, but I cannot wait to do this. I've already started on the research. In fact, I'm off to Essex, our Essex County here in England, next week to do some more work on it.

Sarah Jack: Wonderful.[00:52:00]

Josh Hutchinson: I want to recommend that everybody follow the project. You're on X as the Seven Counties Witch Project, right? Witch Trial Project.

Marion Gibson: That's right. Yeah. It's @witches7hunt, I think our address is.

Josh Hutchinson: And we'll have that link for everybody in the show description.

Marion Gibson: Please follow along. We do a regular blog, which explores our adventures in different archives.

Sarah Jack: And now, for a minute with Mary.

Mary-Louise Bingham: How do we know what we know? Historian Margo Burns has challenged her audiences many times with that question as part of her public presentations regarding the colonial New England witch trials. As I prepared to tell the story of the evening of the second arrest of Mary Esty for a past episode on this podcast, I contacted Margo. We spent two hours trying to figure out the route George Herrick rode the night of May 20th, [00:53:00] 1692, to apprehend Mary and bring her to Salem for her second examination. We pulled all the information from the best primary source, Records of the Salem Witch Hunt, of which Margo was the project manager with a top notch team who compiled and translated these documents over a 12 year period.

Mary-Louise Bingham: I would like to thank Margo for her time and expertise, and for challenging us lay historians to look to the primary sources so that our ancestor stories will be told with authority. Thank you.

Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.

Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501(c)3, Weekly News Update. This podcast is a project of our nonprofit called End Witch Hunts. It is dedicated to the global collaboration to end witch hunting in all forms. We collaborate on and create projects that build awareness, [00:54:00] education, exoneration, justice, memorialization, and research of the phenomenon of witch hunting behavior. End Witch Hunts employs a three pronged approach to the problem, focusing on knowledge, memory, and advocacy through our various projects. Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn about the projects.

Sarah Jack: Martin Luther King Jr. said, "whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth."

Sarah Jack: Our mission is to actively enlighten the public on historical and contemporary dimensions of all witch trials. Today the issue of witch hunts represents a significant human rights crisis recognized by the United Nations Human Rights Council. This global concern calls upon nations and leaders to intensify their efforts in addressing harmful practices associated with witchcraft accusations. The United States can intensify their efforts, too. There are still witch trial victims here that need a formal apology and exoneration. [00:55:00]

Sarah Jack: Massachusetts Bill H 1803, an Act to Exonerate All Individuals Accused of Witchcraft During the Salem Witch Trials, is currently being reviewed by the Joint Committee on Judiciary in the Massachusetts General Court. They must choose to pass the bill onto the House by February 7th. Please consider submitting written testimony now as to why you support acknowledging all those who suffered in the Salem Witch Trials. This bill transcends the realm of mere legislation. It holds profound significance in the pursuit of human rights. Beyond the previously exonerated victims of the Salem Witch Trials, this bill sheds light on the vast scale of mass suffering that occurred. It represents a significant step towards rectifying this injustice and delivering more comprehensive justice. This legislation holds the power to provide more long-overdue formal acknowledgment to overlooked victims. It symbolizes a collective commitment to dismantling the historical and contemporary shackles of injustice and to find the way to a just and [00:56:00] humane world for all.

Sarah Jack: Join the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project and House Representative Andres Vargas in advocating for this crucial piece of legislation. Anyone can submit written testimony. Simply write a short letter stating why this bill is important. You can send it to this address, which will also be in the show notes.

Sarah Jack: Send to judiciary committee at 24 Beacon Street, room 136, Boston, Massachusetts 0 2 1 3 3 or by email to michael.musto@mahouse.gov. That's m i c h a e l dot m u s t o at m a h o u s e dot g o v.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Jack: You're welcome.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.

Sarah Jack: Join us again next week.

Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts

Sarah Jack: Visit us at aboutwitchhunts.com/.

Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell your friends and family about the show.[00:57:00]

Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.

Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

January 17, 2024

The Astrologer and the Witch Trial with Danny Buck

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Show Notes

Join us this week as Dr. Danny Buck explores astrology and the witchcraft trial of Mark Prynne, a tenant farmer accused of witchcraft in the 17th century by Great Yarmouth town clerk Miles Corbett. The discussion considers the perception of astrology during the golden age of astrology and how it influenced the outcomes of witchcraft accusations in Great Yarmouth during the English Civil War. Learn about the intriguing behaviors of local figures like Miles Corbett, John Taylor and Matthew Brooks during the Great Yarmouth witch trials of 1645 and 1646 and other notable historical men like astrologer William Lilly and infamous Witch Finder Matthew Hopkins. The episode addresses the peak and decline of the fear of witchcraft beliefs, reflecting a notable shift in societal attitudes at the end of the trial.

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Why Witch Hunts are not just a Dark Chapter from the Past, Documentary

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Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: Hello, and welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast that explores historic witchcraft trials and modern witch hunts in search of an end to witch hunting in all forms. I'm Josh Hutchinson.

Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.

Josh Hutchinson: We're descendants of people accused of witchcraft.

Sarah Jack: And we're here to tell stories of people like them.

Josh Hutchinson: We cover the past, present, and future of witch hunting.

Sarah Jack: Witch hunting dates back thousands of years.

Josh Hutchinson: The practice occurred all across the ancient world.

Sarah Jack: And continued through the classical era and the medieval period.

Josh Hutchinson: In Europe, witch trials ramped up in the early modern period and resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands.

Sarah Jack: But witch hunts also have occurred in other parts of the world, and they've [00:01:00] never stopped anywhere.

Josh Hutchinson: Witch hunts, now mostly unsanctioned, occur in all corners of the globe today, killing thousands per year.

Sarah Jack: As historian Wolfgang Behringer has stated, 'there have never been so many witch hunts as we see in today's world.'

Josh Hutchinson: Today's guest is Danny Buck, who introduces us to the witch trials of astrologer Mark Prynne of Great Yarmouth, England.

Sarah Jack: Along the way, we'll meet an interesting cast of characters and learn about astrology's role in 17th century England.

Josh Hutchinson: Danny tells us about the golden age of astrology and the great astrologers of England in the 17th century.

Sarah Jack: He shares the different perspectives on astrology, including the impact of Puritan beliefs on the perception of astrology.

Josh Hutchinson: We'll learn what astrological products exist and what their uses are.

Sarah Jack: Today, we focus on the intriguing figure of Mark Prynne, who was an amateur astrologer who was [00:02:00] involved in locating lost goods and helping his neighbors determine the future.

Josh Hutchinson: We'll also learn about the antagonist to Mark Prynne, a MP named Miles Corbett. We'll learn about his leading role in the witch hunts and the accusations specifically against Mark Prynne. We'll also learn how he was satirized by poet John Taylor, who wrote a book called A Brief Relation of the Idiotisms and Absurdities of Miles Corbett, Esquire, Counselor at Law, Recorder, and Burgess for Great Yarmouth.

Sarah Jack: This is the podcast's second visit to the witch hunt of 1645 in Great Yarmouth. Dr. Buck is going to give us an overview of the witch hunt where Mark Prynne faced allegations of practicing sorcery and using witchcraft. We will also hear about a second round of accusations in the spring of 1646.

Josh Hutchinson: And we'll conclude [00:03:00] by learning the aftermath of the witch hunt, including the fates of both Mark Prynne and Miles Corbett.

Sarah Jack: Welcome, the first guest of Witch Hunt, returning favorite, Dr. Danny Buck, a Norfolk research historian specializing in the connection between witch hunting, politics, and religious division. In his previous appearance, he kicked off Episode 6 with a discussion on witch hunting during the English Civil War in Great Yarmouth, the place where William and Joanna Towne began their family relocating to the New World and settling in Salem Village. Make sure to revisit that fantastic episode. In this discussion, Dr. Buck delves further into the religious and political conflicts that shape the Great Yarmouth witch trial of amateur astrologer Mark Prynne.

Josh Hutchinson: How was astrology perceived in early modern Great Yarmouth? And why was it important?

Danny Buck: There's the three elements which I find very interesting about how astrology was perceived. At one level, it's something that seems very [00:04:00] useful to ordinary people. We've got records going back as far as the 16th century of a man called William Wicherly, who admitted he did conjure in a great circle with a sword and ring consecrated, and Thomas Owldring of Yarmouth, who was a conjurer and had good books of conjuring, who people were going to visit.

Danny Buck: They were seeking to understand the future. And also search for lost property. For others it was actually a way of looking for their, using predictions, to look at their medical health. So find a diagnosis and seek medical treatment. As we're going to look at, for some people this element of astrology cutting into conjuring, the act of charms and raising spirits for advice is cutting into witchcraft, that you're not just looking to do a predictable science, understanding God's plan for the universe with the stars, but in fact actually asking the dead for [00:05:00] advice, or even devils. Finally, there were some people rather cynical about this, even by the middle of the 17th century. People who were thinking that astrology is nothing but a con trick, a way for illiterate peasants or gullible guests to seek lost things from someone who could tell them what they wanted to hear, probably closer to our idea of cold reading,someone who can speak the names of the constellations enough to seem educated or have some secret knowledge over the rest of them.

Sarah Jack: What was the golden age of astrology?

Danny Buck: This is a difficult question. Obviously, astrology has been something that we can go all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia, if not earlier. People have always looked to the stars and tried to seek meaning in them. We think of things like Halley's Comet being seen just before the Battle of Hastings as an ill omen for the Saxons. But the 17th century introduced a couple of elements that made astrology more accurate, or at least to [00:06:00] those who believed in it. Accurate clocks meant that birth dates would not be a vague day, but be put down right to the hour. Increasingly accurate telescopes and astronomical, as opposed to astrological, equipment was being invented that meant that stars could be understood in ever greater clarity and purpose.

Danny Buck: Think it was Bernard Capp who said that the last of the astrologers were the first of the astronomers. I think a very famous astrologer for the court in Poland, Copernicus, started off as the court astrologer. This meant that you could ask for a birth chart from an astrologer and you could put it down to the minute and therefore get what would seem to be an increasingly accurate diagnosis.

Danny Buck: But also, because of the printing press, astrology became ever more accessible to the ordinary person. The astrologer I want to talk about today, Mark Prynne, started his career with basically like a dummy's first guide [00:07:00] of how to look at the stars. Something, a brief of Moulsons Almanac. So again, as opposed to the full book, it's a brief, so it's been shortened and made more accessible for the ordinary reader, as opposed to the larger original, I think it's originally a 15th century French almanac.

Josh Hutchinson: What other products did astrologers create?

Danny Buck: The most obvious one is the element of prediction, which is by casting a chart. This isn't a particularly visual medium, but you can often see them survive in this period, often with a square with a circle inside, or some pattern of that, which is then used to reflect the houses of the stars and their positions and how that therefore interacts with the balance of the humours and health, as well as a person's personality. Again, today art forms tend to be a bit more circular, but they still are used by people. You also have the almanac itself. So the almanac is an interesting [00:08:00] product. Obviously, we still produce almanacs for people. Some of them are not astrological, just to tell us what's happened in a year.Cricketing almanacs, etc. But for the 17th century almanacs, these are being produced annually, often being used to record dates which are important for people to know and how far we are from the creation of the world or the birth of Christ, etc. But they're also used to look at conjunctions. What are the weird

Danny Buck: astronomical phenomena that are going to occur?

Danny Buck: And actually these take on quite a political element. I was just catching up today in preparation for this, and there's a wonderful piece by Imogen Peck called 'A Chronology of Some Memorable Accidents, the Representation of the Recent Past in English Almanacs,' which looks at how in the aftermath of the Civil War,people were still looking and looking at the past through almanacs in a way that reflected their own political biases.

Danny Buck: However, this was a lot more [00:09:00] complex during the Civil War itself, when there were a variety of rival almanacs. In particular, William Lilly is famous because he produced an almanac that showed how the stars were showing that Parliament's victory was imminent, but he did have a Royalist rival producing his own, believing evidence of Royalist victory, which unsurprisingly he fell into obscurity while Lilly, with a somewhat more accurate prognosis, continued to thrive.

Danny Buck: These, weren't, particularly expensive objects. They're almost mass produced, what we refer to often as ephemera. So relatively cheap paper, but were being produced through the stationers companies. They'd often rely on family names, families of astrologers, so in particular in Great Yarmouth we haveGeoffrey La Neve, starting in 1604. On his death in 1613, his nephew Jeffrey, with a J, continued the almanacs until he was dismissed for being a bit dodgy in the local corporation. And his cousin John Neve took over, continuing the almanac from [00:10:00] 1626 until 61. So these reliable names meant that people could trust them. And again, it's something that continues until at least the 18th century. I think Franklin got, Benjamin Franklin of the American Revolutionary fame got his start faking an almanac, claiming the original author had died and he was replacing him in his usual, slightly trollish way. And then on top of this we get some bigger publications. So we've mentioned, Lilly's Christian Astrology, but also these different guides how to, and evolvement.

Danny Buck: It's quite interesting because again, some of these do bring up witchcraft and the ways that astrology can be used against them. Finally, we've got that medical product that this ability to accurately understand people's maladies was quite important. In particular, I find it quite interesting a reference in the Great Yarmouth corporation book to Mark Prynne helping a distracted man in the town's bridewell. So this is the poor relief, the precursor to the workhouse. And again, [00:11:00] distracted, it's a very vague term, but suggests some kind of mental illness. That somehow this astrological conjunction, and again, it fits into our sort of later idea of things like lunacy and that connection between the stars and mental health that still remains current into the 19th century.

Danny Buck: Finally, there's this element of what they could do for you. Well, they can find the things you've lost. So in particular, we know that Mark Prynne found a variety of objects, and it's been satirised by poets afterwards that he could find anything from a calf to a windmill or a millstone, but certainly there's evidence of finding things like a particular, a man called John Sparke, a sailor nearby who had a lost hat, a cushion, and I think a gold ring, so these are an interesting variety of small items that could be easily lost. Again we don't know how much this is cold reading, that he somehow being able to talk to them, is able to deduce what's going on. Or, again, if he's being consulted, he's not necessarily successful.

Josh Hutchinson: It's interesting, you mentioned William [00:12:00] Lilly, and I just want to point out that one of his books showed up in Connecticut in a witch trial of Katherine Harrison and was used as evidence against her.

Danny Buck: That is fascinating. I find that astrologers are still, they are the more acceptable side of magic. At least, your official names, your Lillies,and they've got a high status. They're protected by, they've got connections. William Lilley, he claimed that he'd spoken to King Charles and advised him to not try and escape Carisbuck Castle. it's easy to say after the event, but he also advised parliamentarian generals. And again, there doesn't need to be anything therefore incompatible for some people with astrology.

Danny Buck: But there was also a fear. William Lilly, as well, mentioned there was fear he was accused of being a juggling wizard and imposter. There's a fear about them being compared to necromancers, so being able to somehow predict [00:13:00] using the dead. And again, there's an earlier generation there responding to men like John Dee and John Lamb, who were certainly in this box of people who are engaging in dark magic and dark practice that was unacceptable. Judith Bonzol, in her guide to William Lilly's life, mentioned that he is someone who is afraid of this line, and in particular he offers anti-witchcraft medical treatments, which actually is quite interesting because it's very much linked to the kind of witch bottles, which obviously we've looked at before, where he mentions the need to boil the patient's urine together with pins, nail parings, and the hair of the victim as a remedy against witchcraft.

Danny Buck: But he gave the example that's a relatively scientific explanation. These are natural experiments and work by sympathy, in order to torment the witch and draw her out of hiding, which then, in theory, brought relief to the victim.

Danny Buck: Of course, the most recent volume of Lilly's publications came out in the 1680s, so in time to be influencing the [00:14:00] beliefs of people in Salem.

Sarah Jack: Who was Mark Prynne?

Danny Buck: I've mentioned him a couple of times now. I've found him a wonderful figure. He's one of these people that just jumps out of the records in a really interesting way. Again, I'm very grateful to Peter Elmer, the excellent historian of witchcraft, who's certainly retired now, and getting a chance to speak to him when I was at UEA. And he brought this to attention. He, again, in his index to his wonderful Politics and Witchcraft, he brought up a lot of the details I'm going to rely on. We are always able to see so far because we're standing on the shoulders of giants.

Danny Buck: But he is a fascinating figure. He's definitely an amateur astrologer. Unlike La Neve, unlike Lilly, it isn't his full time job. He's mostly a tenant farmer. In the town, he's renting land from the local ministry at one point and using that. So this is almost like a sideline, as the Americans say a side hustle, to provide a little bit of extra income. So we don't know much about his family, where [00:15:00] he's come from. We do know he's educated, because he's noted as having a very large collection of books for the time, of theological, historical, and philosophical books. Again, he particularly mentions Moulsons Almanac, who we've described as a brief of the famed Shepherds. And we know he's being employed by local residents. So we've got hats, pillows, are definitely being searched for. John Taylor claims a lost cow, calf, horse or cart, silver spoon or bodkin, knife or ring, millstone, windmill, cork. But I think he, again, is being a little bit ridiculous. We know he's being paid 30 shillings, which is quite a lot of money, for curing one Tills, the distracted man who I mentioned earlier.

Danny Buck: And we know that this medical treatment is already current with people like La Neve. This all suggests he is in demand, he is someone who's being employed quite regularly, even if this isn't his full time career.

Josh Hutchinson: What do we need to know about his landlord, the minister?

Danny Buck: We're very lucky that there's an interesting connection here.[00:16:00] Prynne is renting land from Matthew Brooks. Matthew Brooks, as we mentioned a little bit last time, was a veryLaudian minister in a town that was very Puritan, so they did not get on well. So he arrives at the town in 1630 in the middle of a crisis, where they're trying to handle the presence of the town's Puritan minister, who's being pushed to one side by the Dean and Chapter of Norwich, the more Laudian authorities. And he starts making a splash pretty early. By December 1631, he marches into the church and reads the 1627 injunctions against the Puritan minister, which means he's then arrested by the town's corporation. So in particular, Henry Davy, Thomas Green, Ezekiel Harris, and a man who we're definitely going to come back to later, Miles Corbett.

Danny Buck: Because of this, he sends a petition to the king. He's supported to the hilt and in response those people [00:17:00] arrested him were arrested in turn for a while. The king sides with Brooks, he gets authority from it. Brooks works very closely with the bishop of Norwich, Wren, from 1645 onwards, and he carries out a campaign that's really aggressively anti-Puritan. He makes the church look nice. He brings in stained glass windows, he gets rid of the raised seating used by the Puritan authorities so they could look down on the folk of Yarmouth and keep an eye on them, make sure they're behaving properly in church. And this feud between Brooks and Corbett deepens in 1637, when Corbett is accused of harbouring two émigré nonconformist ministers, so some real religious radicals, who'd come over to Great Yarmouth, smuggled in a lot of anti-Laudian books and hidden, pretending to be soldiers who'd been fighting in the Netherlands, and they take dinner in Miles Corbett's house, allegedly.

Danny Buck: Brooks is very diligent about investigating it, like a [00:18:00] little detective. This gets worse from 1640 as Wren, his bishop protégé, has moved on to Ely and, obviously with the collapse of the royal government and the collapse of the episcopate, the Church of England, there's a lot of tension for locals. And we are helped by what for me is a lovely document, a very fascinating document from the Parliamentary Archives, as he writes a petition to the House of Lords saying, 'can you stop them bullying me?' It's not great stuff for, Brooks. Brooks, sadly, I think at one point he mentioned he's being threatened by the wife of the alderman that she's going to throw lime and blind him, lime in his eyes, along with sand. His assistant, Thomas Cheshire, who we're going to come back to, is being, when he's walked through the very narrow streets in Great Yarmouth, which are called rows that go up and down to allow easy fishing in [00:19:00] the town, he's jostled, he's got people slamming their elbows into his back, and he's forced to leave in 1638.

Danny Buck: The saddest example, if you'll forgive my tangent, because this is such a rich colour, that while Brooks has gone to London to defend himself about attempts to try and remove him, there's a large group of angry, drunken locals get together. They have a big bonfire outside his house. They go to Ezekiel Harris, who obviously holds this grudge against Brooks, and they get roaring drunk. He provides them with massive beer. They then turn up to this bonfire. There's supposedly three of them in disguise as the three most important people in the kingdom. Considering this is 1640, I think it's likely you've got the Archbishop Canterbury, William Laud, because it gets mentioned later, the King, and probably Black Tom Strafford, the Earl of Wentworth. They're having this massive party. They, obviously Brooks isn't there. Instead it's just his housemate and his poor, [00:20:00] heavily pregnant wife and their eight children, terrified. And these mass mob comes out knocking on the door, demanding entry in the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury, presumably the man in costume. So again, there's a real tension already, this desire to purge the town of people they see as dangerous and too lenient and not Puritan enough. And it's this crowd that Prynne is hanging out with, so again it's one of the things that's going to be a black spot against him with the Puritan authorities.

Josh Hutchinson: You mentioned Miles Corbett. Can you introduce us to him?

Danny Buck: Miles is a fascinating figure in his own right. So he's the second son of Sir John Corbett, a baronet from Sprowston. That probably means very little to you. Hopefully, there's a Sprowston somewhere in America amongst the other many English renamed settlements, but this one is a slightly unimpressive outskirts of Norwich today, but again, it's [00:21:00] not an unpleasant place.

Danny Buck: He's a well-educated man. He goes to Christ's College, Cambridge in 1612. He attends Lincoln Inn. He's training as a lawyer before being called to the bar in 1623. In 1625, he becomes the town recorder for Great Yarmouth, so that's a role which encompasses both your town's legal expert, lawyer, but also having a role acting as a judge in court cases.

Danny Buck: Obviously it's very important we're coming back to the witch hunt. His brother was the MP for the town and was arrested by King Charles, as well, the five members who resisted his call for a loan to try and sponsor the war against Spain and France,and sadly dies in prison, which again, likely one of the reasons why Corbett is so anti-government and so angry with the Church of England there, as well as his time in Cambridge.

Danny Buck: He also undertook the role for King's Lynn and Aldeburgh recorder, which again is quite interesting, because both of those towns are towns that are touched by the [00:22:00] witch hunt. And again, one of the things I've always wanted to do is to really get into depth and look at some of these communities, because also Southwold is well connected to Corbett.

Danny Buck: Is he someone who's helping to persuade Matthew Hopkins to come along the East Anglian coast, that all these towns are towns which he's connected to? This is something thathopefully Marion will find the answer for that. I'm looking forward to that as part of her wonderful Seven Counties project, but he's definitely someone to keep an eye on for that.

Danny Buck: His allies might say he's a very rigorous man, legally trained, has a very important role to play in the Long Parliament, and he remains as MP up until 1660, so obviously proves himself loyal. He's involved in Ireland, as well, during the Commonwealth, trying to sort out land there. But for his enemies, Taylor describes him as a stiff cathedral hater, a utopian of no religion, and whose [00:23:00] fired zeal led him to be cruel to toothless aged ministers. Even crueler, newspapers in the 1650s were comparing him to the devil, saying he was very dark, which again, I always wonder again, he's someone from Sprowston. Is he quite swarthy? We don't know. There's a couple of lovely prints of him, where he looks he's doing all right for himself in the 1650s, he looks quite prosperous.

Danny Buck: And one of the lovely things we've got in the Norfolk archives is this little paper, it's like a two pieces of A5 folded together to form a little booklet. Which is rather touching, because it notes the date when he was married, and it notes the exact date to the hour his children were born. And obviously this is something he kept with him, which I find very sweet. He's a very human figure despite all this. So his role in the witch hunt? Obviously then we've said that he's the recorder. He's the one gathering the evidence. He's also, in his role as town clark, he's keeping an eye on the papers, and he's likely the person who sent the [00:24:00] invitation to Hopkins to come to Great Yarmouth in the first place. So he's deeply enmeshed.As we look, there's accusations he took a much deeper personal interest in the case against Mark Prynne.

Sarah Jack: What kind of charges were brought against Mark Prynne?

Danny Buck: So in 1638 he's first accused of using charms to locate the lost goods of one John Sparke, a sailor. But in 1645, he faced the much more serious allegations of practicing sorcery, so using witchcraft to locate lost goods belong to Anne Can and John Ringer, who's a mason. He's also indicted for using witchcraft on John Howlett, a goldsmith, and his son also named John, conveniently, who were both sick at the time of the trial.

Josh Hutchinson: Since it's been a while since we spoke about the 1645 witch hunt, can you refresh our memories with a brief overview of that?

Danny Buck: So it starts in the 22nd of April in [00:25:00] 1645, with Howlett and his son John being some of the first people to make their accusations of witchcraft. This leads to eventually ten people being accused, six convicted, of which five are hanged for the crime. There's also a second round of accusations in the spring of 1646, six are made, but all six of them are found not guilty.

Sarah Jack: And how did the community respond to the allegations against Prynne?

Danny Buck: As far as we can tell, early on there seems to be this support, the growing support after this, that there's increasing numbers of accusations that follow this. So we have a few more people, as we noted accusers being brought, not just Howlett and his son. But the trial itself, we have an account of Thomas Cheshire, so the man who'd been the assistant to Brooks, arriving and giving testimony, defending,it's the kind of defense where this man isn't a witch, [00:26:00] he's just a con man, but it's still better than being hanged. So there does seem to be some people willing to rally in his support, and obviously he's found not guilty, so obviously the jury are convinced that he isn't someone who's engaged in witchcraft.

Josh Hutchinson: What kind of evidence would they have presented against him?

Danny Buck: So from the collection, from the account we've got, obviously we have the trial records, and we know people are speaking in evidence for and against. But in particular, we have an account, a hostile account to Miles Corbett that mentions that the evidence being brought in front of the jury included Prynne's collection of astrological books.

Danny Buck: So we've mentioned Molson's Almanac, we've also got a book of merry fortune telling with the forms of dice and stars. Also, something which is referred to as a book of circles, so again, presumably these are different forms of charts being used. I've spoken to some people upon this, and they suggest possibly the [00:27:00] Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomon or something called the Picatrix, which are being brought in front of them as official texts. The allegation is that the names of constellations and the names of the astrological forms sound quite demonic. Col Quintinta, Asaf Petita, Zazara Phila, and the allegation is that Miles Corbett is so ill educated he believes them bitter, stinking, and poxy devils, rather than obviously the form of the stars. He names Alabazama, Copernicus, Rombolax, and Mestopheles. So Copernicus the astrologer being treated as a demonic figure.

Josh Hutchinson: How did Puritan beliefs influence the witch hunt and the perception of astrology?

Danny Buck: Certainly there's an element of Puritan beliefs being used to interpret astrological evidence. Obviously, we've talked about William Lilly. William Lilly [00:28:00] had to directly write a book called Christian Astrology, trying to seek to show this connection between astrological formations as a way to determine the future, as opposed to other forms. It's a very strict and narrow vision of what astrology could be.

Danny Buck: Previous people involved in this, obviously, we've mentioned at the start those two controversial 16th century figures. So they've mentioned the sword and ring consecrated as magical elements that could use to foretell the future. Similar to Debora Moretti when she was talking about the carafe that you could look into the crystal, you could look into the glass, you could see images, which is slightly more dangerous as opposed to just looking plainly at the stars. Again, compare that to our classic image of the fortune teller with the crystal ball, that these things are more dodgy. Similarly, I think John Dee allegedly had an obsidian mirror [00:29:00] taken from the Aztecs that he could use to communicate with angels. This is where it crossed over the line. So there is the possibility of that.

Danny Buck: The contemporary astrologer John Gadbury blamed pretenders for critics connecting astrology to magicians and necromancers.You have the astrologer's club, the educated types who could be reliable, and you have those slipping on the other side into magic, so being magicians and necromancers.

Danny Buck: Also, William Lilly himself sought to reject the dark sentence of oracles. So again, you're not seeking to commune with the dead or commune with devils to tell the future. You are just doing a nice scientific analysis of the stars, certainly in the context of the very favored imagination of the 1640s, where omens seem to be everywhere, and the devil's influence everywhere, looking instead of the heavens to more otherworldly and demonic forces. What's the risk? And as we saw that, John Taylor's [00:30:00] account there with that fear of constellations and devils, the two seeming interchangeable for those who don't know quite what's going on there. Then that astrology witchcraft could seem quite similar or close enough, despite the protestations by those people who wanted to prove it otherwise.

Sarah Jack: With Miles Corbett, he was a Puritan.

Sarah Jack: I'm thinking about the war that's happening, this antagonism that's between Brooks and Corbett, and then you've got this amateur astrologist, the devil in the community, I'm used to hearing how the Puritan ministers are seeing the devil in their people, butthey're seeing the devil from the other side right now in this situation?

Danny Buck: So Miles Corbett is a fascinating figure for that. So we said he's a Puritan, but he's not a Presbyterian Puritan. He's not someone who's seeking to build a new Church of England that's going to be Puritan. [00:31:00] He's instead closer in opinion to the kind of American congregational churches. He becomes a leading member of Great Yarmouth's Congregational Church, and that is a source of tension within the town. He writes letters to the corporation saying, 'why are you trying to exclude the Congregational Church from being part of our Puritan community?' Again, this split in the godly is something that's causing increasing tension. One of the fears of the devil is that he appears as angels in raiments of light, and there we have also groups of Anabaptists in Great Yarmouth at the same time.

Danny Buck: How much conformity can you have? In some ways, seeking someone who is obviously outside the pale you can unite around is something important, but this is something that goes way back. The first accusations are in 1638. While Corbett already has, we'd say, congregational leanings, he's communicating with congregationalists, people looking to build a new church the New England way, that divide is only [00:32:00] caused when there's an actual congregational church there. In this way, his role in promoting the witch hunt, in trying to seek to remove the devil, it provides a mirror to how ministers are, as well, I feel. The ministers in Great Yarmouth are involved in other accusations, particularly against Elizabeth Bradwell, a poor woman. We can see Corbett's crusade here as something that feels very personal, but again, we have reasons for thinking so, because of the way it's being treated as such, that it's used as something to ridicule Corbett later, for his superstition, his foolishness to get involved. But I feel, from the fact that he's so intertwined with these accusations, that it's something he takes seriously.

Danny Buck: And this man, who's been sitting there connected to the old regime and all its corruption provides a useful [00:33:00] vehicle to try and engage in this process of reformation and to reunite these two different kinds of godly people to make them move in the right direction. But again, it's one of those tragedies that, despite all this death that he's willing to engage in, it doesn't work really in the long term.

Sarah Jack: What is the outcome of criticism of this astrology being used by a farmer? As we know, Miles becomes a joke to some about this. What other outcomes were there?

Danny Buck: So this is particularly interesting for me. This is what brings it to life, is that this is used as part of a campaign. There's a wonderful poet, who I think we can describe in detail, John Taylor, who is in London during the 1630s. He's originally a waterboatman. He basically just travels across the river in his little [00:34:00] boat, creates ditties and witticisms, and is a very sharp wit. And now he feels a loyalty to the crown, but he also has a particular enmity against Miles Corbett and Corbett's role in London. The Civil War radicalizes him, so he starts producing political squibs in support of the king and against Parliament. But Taylor was arrested by Corbett and the Lord Mayor of London for seditious words against the five members, the people who the King tried to arrest in 1642, precipitating the Civil War. So Corbett becomes a particularly good example for him of someone he can satirize. He sees him as the classic example of the Parliamentarian elite. These people are officious, they're cynical, they are untrustworthy, and as the wonderfully titled poem, [00:35:00] A Brief Relation of the Idiotisms and Absurdities of Miles Corbett, Esquire, Council at Law, Recorder and Burgess for Great Yarmouth, they're idiots. He creates a wonderful 18 page pamphlet poem which lists 11 idiotisms in total.

Sarah Jack: And you're going to recite the 18 pages.

Danny Buck: Sadly, the last couple of pages have been damaged, but I will have to bring up some wonderful passages on the Corbett trial. This isn't the first time he attacks, Corbett. He does create a satirical parliamentary speech, which is allegedly by Corbett, which again shows his gullibility and his cruelty. And there's another one, 1641, which brings up the witchcraft case again, allegedly about the sort of things that Corbett's done in the year 1641. In the Idiotisms, we have, supposedly, allegedly Corbett presents a dog to the sessions for the crime of stealing some meat and accuses a man of stealing his own goods, even sort of him [00:36:00] getting drunk in the sand dunes outside the town. In particular, by Corbett's credulousness, his ill education, that means he sees Prynne as such a threat. It is a really good way to show the recorder's supposed injustice, credulity, and ignorance. So again, he can ridicule the recorder, he can ridicule puritism.

Danny Buck: Again, it's something that we can come back to because it's a theme that develops later, particularly after the Restoration, and about how people view witch hunting in general, which is part of the sort of end of that. But in this case, it's particularly useful, because he spends so much local detail trying to explain this case and explain why Corbett is useless.

Danny Buck: But he also does it in a way that feels quite modern, that what he ridicules isn't that somehow Prynne is a particularly skilled astrologer. He's just a con man. And it's part of the [00:37:00] expression of the idiotism of Corbett, is that he falls for this common man and sees him as a real danger, so just this sort of part time crook.

Danny Buck: 'There was a juggling, cunning man of fame, a nickname conjurer, Mark Prynne by name, whose skill was in astrology so great, that by that art he many folks did cheat. This Mark, pray mark me now that what here I write, could many fiends and planets recite, and more strange magic words from him would drop, there are in an apothecary shop.'

Danny Buck: Lovely bit where he describes where Thomas Cheshire has proven that Prynne is innocent. 'The substance of the book did straight explain to be as far from Master Corbett's talk as oatmeal is from eggs or cheese from chalk. And by that book's virtue we dare both to swear that no man can ever be a conjurer. They therefore, prayed the jury to conceive [00:38:00] the law cannot this man of life bereave. By their verdict, Prynne not guilty found and escaped a Popham check twixt sky and ground, and there the learned recoverer gained much credit, as some said, if they did not lie that said it.'

Danny Buck: So yeah, it's stirring stuff you could imagine around a pub after a few drinks.

Josh Hutchinson: What ultimately happens with Mark Prynne?

Danny Buck: This is the thing that, again, intrigues me with so much of this, that ultimately I don't know. He's found not guilty, he disappears from the record. Obviously we know that La Neve's almanacs continue into 1661. But we don't really hear much more about Prynne. Doesn't help that I've seen about four or five different spellings of his last name, anywhere from Pryne to Prince. And I know that Marion Gibson's new book is going to go from the ground up. I'm sure she has some tasty titbits for us about his life and career, but sadly this is where his story [00:39:00] ends, obviously a court case triumph for him, but sadly no further details on that.

Sarah Jack: Which I mean, we find that over and over, we hear, we have these court cases, they're intriguing, there's some details, we find, we get a look into a life and then that's the last word.

Danny Buck: Just lucky to have this much snapshots of him and Elizabeth Bradwell that mean we can build the sort of picture of their life and their beliefs, and again how these beliefs are changing, which I think is the most fascinating thing. I think one of the interesting elements in England is how this represents the peak of witchcraft beliefs and how already some of the themes of cynicism and rejection of witchcraft are starting to drop in. Obviously, there's still people like Joseph Glanville talking about witchcraft into the [00:40:00] 1680s. But by 1660s, we have Hudibras, the great epic poem about the life of the Restoration, but also looking back at what has happened in England during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth. And again, one of the first mentions we get of Hopkins and his reputation, along with the myth that he himself was hanged as a witch.

Danny Buck: So certainly that spirit of seeing the Puritan enthusiasm as being falling for fraudsters or an overenthusiasm about this is already coming out of Taylor's work in the middle of the 1640s, that these themes of how puritism is seen as an overreaction, it's interesting how this story is having much wider resonances.

Josh Hutchinson: What happened to Corbett with the Restoration?

Danny Buck: [00:41:00] He's elected to Parliament, and then people remember he's one of the regicides. He's the last person to sign the king's death warrant. So there's a general pardon, apart from the regicide, so he escapes to the Netherlands. So he's there with a group of regicides, and he's eventually caught in a daring raid by George Downing. If you want to know some of this detail, Charles Spencer's Kiss the King has a very vivid account of this. He's brought back. He has a rather touching last meal with his wife. We talked about he's obviously kept a record of her life alongside his, and is then executed for treason. So hanged, drawn, quartered, as you'd expect. So rather a grim end.

Josh Hutchinson: Is there anything else you wanted to touch on today?

Danny Buck: I also would recommend Bernard Capp. Bernard Capp is a really excellent writer in general on Stuart culture, but in particular in this account. He's [00:42:00] written.a very good biography of John Taylor and his fascinating life but also on astrologymore generally, definitely worth a check if you want to find out more of this stuff.

Sarah Jack: And now for a Minute with Mary.

Mary-Louise Bingham: November 23, 2023 was the last time that I visited Salem for at least one year. It was a special visit, because I went to Proctor's Ledge, not only to pay my respects to the 19 men and women who were hanged there in 1692, I also memorialized 19 men and women who were wrongfully accused and murdered for practicing sorcery and black magic as recent as October of 2023. These innocent women and men named came from countries such as Nigeria, South Africa, India, and the United States of America. I also tell the listener when that person died and the [00:43:00] circumstances of their brutal deaths. I urge you to watch this video on YouTube titled 'End Witch Hunts at Proctor's Ledge.' The link to the video will be in the show notes. Thank you.

Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.

Josh Hutchinson: Sarah has End Witch Hunts News.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunt News, a non profit organization, Weekly News Update. Thank you for joining us again this new year in unraveling obscure yet familiar witch hunt stories, true stories that persistently unfold in violence and the death of vulnerable and innocent society members today. We anticipate engaging with you each week as we navigate diverse and nuanced perspectives on magic, witchcraft, and the spiritual and supernatural across time, governments, cultures, and religions.

Sarah Jack: We must all respond to the destructive role of witchcraft fear driven actions. Exploring the intricacies of both historical witch trials and the ongoing [00:44:00] crisis of witch hunting alongside experts provides us with the necessary insights to take meaningful action. Witch hunts are a disturbing reality that persist, and as part of our podcast community, you play a crucial role in the collective advocacy. Thank you for tuning in, sharing our episodes, continuing the conversation with your sphere of influence, and asking leaders to take action.

Sarah Jack: Very recently in Malawi, there has been a heartbreaking incident of an elderly woman nearly buried alive after being accused of witchcraft. Recent podcast guest and Malawi advocate, Wonderful Mkhutche, reported that the sister of the accused witch passed away suddenly after a headache. The accusers then spread rumors attributing the death to magical harm caused by the accused. The victim was rescued just in time by the police, but all the perpetrators must be brought to justice.

Sarah Jack: A statement from Advocacy for Alleged Witches reads, 'we urge the Government of Malawi to take all necessary measures to [00:45:00] combat witchcraft accusations and witch persecution. Authorities should ensure that alleged witches are protected and witchcraft accusers, including those who aid and abet witch hunting in the communities, are punished.'

Sarah Jack: But this isn't isolated to Africa. There were individuals burned and killed just a few weeks before the end of 2023 in India, as well. In one incident, in Assam's Sonitpur district, a 30-year-old woman was brutally assaulted and set ablaze by a neighbor and accomplices. The motive behind the tragic attack was reportedly rooted in accusations of witchcraft harm against the accuser.

Sarah Jack: While attacks are still happening, there are advocates and organizations working to intervene. Please learn about these efforts and support them in any way you are able to. Take the action that you can. We must continue to cultivate societal values of compassion, understanding, and justice. It is our collective responsibility as a world community to unite against the inhumane treatment [00:46:00] of every innocent individual anywhere in the world, such as these women falsely accused of causing harm with witchcraft. Spread awareness. Share this information with your friends, family, and on social media. Use your voice to let others know about the urgency of combating witchcraft accusations and persecution.

Sarah Jack: Support advocacy groups. Organizations like the Advocacy for Alleged Witches are on the front line, fighting against such atrocities. Consider supporting them and similar groups dedicated to ending witch hunting. Contact authorities. Raise your voice by reaching out to relevant authorities and leadership. Urge them to take swift and decisive action to ensure justice for victims and accountability for all involved.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts actively supports exoneration and memorial efforts that aim to honor victims and raise witch hunt awareness. Take a stand for justice. Sign our petition at change.org/witchtrials to urge the state of Massachusetts to amend legislation, ensuring the inclusion of [00:47:00] all those wrongfully executed for witchcraft in the Massachusetts colony. Five women faced unjust executions for witchcraft in 17th century Boston, and it's time to clear their names. Let's persist in elevating the voices of both historical and contemporary victims of witch hunts.

Sarah Jack: Unlock the power of supporting our podcast by becoming a monthly donor. Our monthly donors are our Super Listeners. As a Super Listener, your monthly contributions make a significant impact. Visit our website and easily sign up for any donation amount that suits you. Your generosity fuels the content you love.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Jack: You're welcome.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to the first episode of Witch Hunt.

Sarah Jack: Witch Hunt can't wait to meet with you next week.

Josh Hutchinson: So subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Sarah Jack: Be sure to visit at our new website, aboutwitchhunts.com/.

Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell all your friends, families, and anybody you meet on the street all about Witch [00:48:00] Hunt, your favorite podcast.

Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.

Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

January 3, 2024

The Witch Trial of Widow Krieger with Jamie Franklin

AP Article: Group seeks to clear names of all accused, convicted or executed for witchcraft in MA”

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Show Notes

This week Jamie Franklin, Director of Collections and Exhibitions at Bennington Museum in Vermont recounts the life and experiences of the accused witch Margaret Krieger. Jamie details what is known of her life and her 1785 trial. Learn about the broader context of the time period, the unique colonial history of the Southern Vermont region and the relevance of this topic even today. Integral to the discussion is Joyce Held’s research on Margaret’s life, the Pownal Historical Society’s role in erecting a historic marker, and the public dedication ceremony for the marker, aiming to honor Margaret Krieger’s memory. This lesser known accused witch in the American colonies underscores the significance of understanding the past and its influence on our global present.

Sign the Petition: MA Witch Hunt Justice Project

www.massachusettswitchtrials.org

Pownal Historical Society on Facebook

Bennington Museum Special Exhibits

Saving Africa’s Witch Children Documentary

Why Witch Hunts are not just a Dark Chapter from the Past, Documentary

Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.

Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. About two months ago, a group dedicated a memorial marker in Pownal, Vermont to Margaret Krieger, reportedly the defendant in a 1785 witch trial. We discuss the case in this episode.

Josh Hutchinson: Along the way, we learn about the history of Southwestern Vermont.

Sarah Jack: As part of that, we'll learn about the early German and English settlers of the area.

Josh Hutchinson: Learn the role the area played in the American Revolution.

Sarah Jack: And all about the Krieger family.

Josh Hutchinson: We'll also hear the full account of the witch trial.

Sarah Jack: Find out methods considered to test if Margaret Krieger was a witch.

Josh Hutchinson: And learn the outcome of the [00:01:00] trial.

Sarah Jack: Hear all about the memorable dedication of the marker for Margaret Krieger.

Josh Hutchinson: And learn about the Bennington Museum.

Sarah Jack: This fascinating history of Margaret Krieger is told to us by Jamie Franklin, the curator of the Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont.

Jamie Franklin: My name is Jamie Franklin, and I am informally, I'm just the curator. My formal title is Director of Collections and Exhibitions. And so I'm in charge of, as the title would imply, our collections. We have a large collection of archives, photographs, works of art, really, a really diverse collection that kind of tells the history of our region, Bennington, Southern Vermont, Vermont at large, and the immediately surrounding region in upstate New York, western Massachusetts, really from basically from colonial contact up to the present day.

Jamie Franklin: We have worked a little bit with the [00:02:00] indigenous peoples, and we're doing that more and more but largely from the colonial period up to the present day. And I'm in charge of our collections, making acquisitions, organizing most of our major exhibitions, those sorts of things.

Josh Hutchinson: Great. And what would you like us to know about Southern Vermont?

Jamie Franklin: We're right down here in the corner, Bennington, and even more particularly Pownal, where the Krieger Witch Trial actually occurred, is literally, Pownal is the furthest southwest in the state of Vermont, so we're right, border right up against the Berkshires in northwestern Massachusetts and upstate New York. Troy is just about a 45 minute drive west of us. And Vermont's history is unique in relationship to all of the other New England colonies. We were settled much later than all the other New England colonies. It really wasn't until the mid 18th century that there were permanent colonial settlements being established here in Vermont, and particularly it [00:03:00] started really here in southwestern Vermont.

Jamie Franklin: Bennington is often referred to as the earliest kind of permanent colonial settlement in Vermont, though Pownal has its own unique story, which we will dive into a little bit deeper. Yeah, nowe're right down here in the corner of the state next to New York and Massachusetts, and we have a little bit of a different story than a lot of the rest of New England.

Sarah Jack: What was the pattern of settlement or the communities in the area like at that point in time?

Jamie Franklin: Using Bennington as an example, the first kind of permanent colonial settlement that was established here in Bennington wasn't until 1761. It's a complicated story, because Vermont was the 14th state to join the Union, but it wasn't until 1791, after the Revolution, and the reason for that was because New Hampshire and New York were basically fighting over the land that would become Vermont, and the [00:04:00] original settlers that came up to Bennington started in central Massachusetts, Westfield as well as, Eastern Connecticut, the Norwich, Connecticut area, so the first kind of groups of settlers to arrive in Bennington were coming up from those regions, and they by and large were what were known as religious separatists, so the Congregational Church reigned supreme in New England in the 18th century, and the earliest settlers here in Bennington were basically escaping what they felt was a religious establishment that they no longer agreed with.

Jamie Franklin: They believed that you needed to confess publicly your faith in Christ. And the established congregational churches started to loosen up, and if your grandparents had confessed, then you were automatically inducted into the church, and so these separatists felt that was getting a little too loosey goosey for them, and so they were starting to establish their own churches, but their towns were taxing them to support the [00:05:00] established church. And so they were trying to establish their own churches. Some of those were able to do those within the community, but again, their tax money was going towards the establishment church. And so a lot of them were seeking to get away from that and establish their own churches in places that hadn't already been settled.

Jamie Franklin: And Bennington was one of those places those groups came to, because there really was no colonial settlement here in Bennington at that point. And Pownal was a little bit different. Pownal and the story of the Kriegers was that actually there was Germanic New York settlers who were arriving in what would have been the kind of far eastern reaches of the Rensselaerwick manor, which was basically an area of New York settlement attached to Troy and Albany, New York.

Jamie Franklin: And so there were what were referred to as Dutch settlers, they were actually Germanic settlers that had arrived in Pownal by about the 1740s. But they were basically under the assumption that area was controlled and owned by [00:06:00] New York. But when the English settlers, so the settlers who arrived in Bennington in the 1760s, they were basing their claims to the land on New Hampshire land grants through the English colonies, whereas the Dutch settlers ran into the assumption that it was owned by New York.

Jamie Franklin: When Pownal was formerly chartered by the English in 1760, there were already what were known as Dutch squatters there in Pownal, including the Krieger family and because Johann Juri Krieger, so Widow Krieger or Margaret Krieger's husband, had already established a gristmill there in Pownal along the Hoosic River. They made an exception for him. Most of the what they referred to as the Dutch squatters were kicked out by the English settlers. But they let Juri Krieger stay, because he had established and improved his land. And basically, they needed a mill, and he had already built one. And so they granted him an exception and gave him a plot of [00:07:00] land there next to his mill, where he and his wife, Margaret, and their family lived up until the time of the trial after Juri Krieger passed away in 1785.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you. That was all so very interesting to me. Vermont kind of gets overlooked when you're thinking about colonial history. Think about the 13 colonies and don't realize what the struggle was going on for control of Vermont.

Jamie Franklin: mean, Vermont was actually an independent republic. So from 1777 until 1791 Vermont operated independently of the other United States and had its own Republican government. But it was wanting to be a state, but because of the dispute between New Hampshire and New York, they were operating independently for that period of time and in the period prior to the Revolution, there was a lot up in the air. That's the period of the Green Mountain Boys, which a lot of people, if they know anything about early Vermont history, that's what they [00:08:00] know, and a lot of that was centered right here in Bennington, because we fall right on what became the New York-Vermont border. And that was the disputed area between New Hampshire and Vermont. And that's the larger kind of political context of what was happening here in Vermont during that period.

Josh Hutchinson: I've been there to the Bennington Memorial.

Jamie Franklin: Yeah, the Bennington Monument. Yeah, that was, that was the whole history of the museum and the history of Bennington is connected in deep ways to the Bennington Monument.

Josh Hutchinson: And in the late 18th century, what would life have been like for someone like a Widow Krieger?

Jamie Franklin: Widow Krieger, Margaret Krieger, and her husband, Johann Juri, as I mentioned earlier, they were granted land there by the English proprietors in 1760, and they would have been pretty much out on their own. It wasn't a very thickly established area.

Jamie Franklin: Bennington over the course of the 1760s and into the 1770s, and what we now know as [00:09:00] Old Bennington, which is right here behind the museum. So it's starting to become what you would understand as a community of settlement. There were houses, there were general stores and other stores along the main street. The Kriegers living there next to their mill along the Hoosic River wouldn't have had a whole lot of neighbors. There were a couple of people settled there sporadically beginning in the 1760s under the English grants that were being awarded at that time.

Jamie Franklin: They ran a mill. They had three sons who were born in the period after they settled in Pownal. So actually Margaret and Juri were married in 1745 and probably settled in Pownal shortly thereafter. For Margaret, it would have been, raising the boys, helping Johann with the mill and around the family, probably helping out with livestock. They probably would have raised a lot of their own food, they probably would have had gardens. It would be pure conjecture to think about what their social life, or even what their relationship with the larger community would've been, other than the fact [00:10:00] that we know that they would've been seen as somewhat of outsiders from the beginning, because they were part of the Dutch squatters group, which had largely been eradicated and sent away by the English grantees in the 1760s.

Josh Hutchinson: Sounds like they could have been the only German family there, and that must have been culturally, a big culture shock initially.

Jamie Franklin: Yeah, no, and they were very much a part of that culture. They were married at the Albany Dutch Reformed Church, so they were more connected there, though Margaret herself had actually been born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which is just south of Pownal. She was born there in 1725. Her parents were Germanic. I don't know that larger context. Williamstown was largely a fort and military outpost in the 18th century, so I'm sure that there was some intermingling between sort of the English settlers connected to the fort and some of the kind of Dutch settlers that were on the kind [00:11:00] of far edge of the New York German settlements there, but they lived within the community seemingly working well with their neighbors.

Jamie Franklin: A lot of it is conjecture because we only know the real basic facts about her life. We know when she was born, we know her parents, we know her children, we know when she was married. We know those sorts of basic biographical facts, but everything else, beyond the fact that this was very much on the edge of settlement during this period. A lot of it would be up to conjecture.

Sarah Jack: So they had a long marriage before he passed away. And then what happened?

Jamie Franklin: Johann Juri, or John Gregor as it was anglicized, after establishing himself in Pownal amongst the English, they referred to him as John Gregor Krieger. He passed away in 1785, and so the story of the Krieger Witch Trial as we know it really is only passed down to [00:12:00] us from one a mid 19th century account. And T. E. Brownell was a well respected Pownal citizen. He was a lawyer and he wrote a early history of Pownal in the 1860s. It was actually published as part of Anne Marie Hemenway's compilation of Vermont histories. She edited a multi volume suit of town histories that composed the entire early history of Vermont, and so Brownell wrote this early history of Pownal, and within that early history of Pownal, which was published in the 1860s, as I said earlier, was a one paragraph account, which is really all we have to base our knowledge of the trial itself on. Again a fairly reliable source but coming some 80 years after the events that it purports to tell, and we don't have an exact date for when the trial itself occurred.

Jamie Franklin: However, we can I think, fairly know that it probably happened not [00:13:00] long after Johann Krieger passed away in 1785. Her sons, or those who were still living, at least, actually two of her sons passed away prior to her husband, had established a mill down in Williamstown, where their mother had come from. And they had been down there since the 1760s. So when her husband passed away in 1785, she would have been a widow living on her own on property with a mill that would have been highly desirous to her neighbors, who may not have liked them in the first place or the fact that they were granted land in the first place some 25 years earlier.

Jamie Franklin: And based on our knowledge of the history, the story as Brownell told it, we can assume that she was probably accused of witchcraft shortly after he passed away in 1785.

Jamie Franklin: Their name is Krieger. It's spelled a million different ways, depending on where you look. Brownell actually refers to them as the Gregors, G R E G O R. We generally refer to them [00:14:00] today as the Kriegers. K R I E G E R. Though on their gravestones it's Kriger. K R I G E R. I just used that to preface this because he begins the story with Gregor.

Jamie Franklin: 'Gregor settled a little north of the Rock, which bears his name,' and I'll say Krieger Rocks is still a well known landmark there in Pownal, above the river. 'A very good story, the Truth of which we do not vouch, is told of his wife. This of course brought upon her the envy and suspicion of the good people. And in after years, when witchcraft prevailed and her husband had gone to his long rest, she was accused of being a witch and brought before a committee appointed to judge and dispense justice in such cases.

Jamie Franklin: After reviewing of the grounds of accusation and consulting the evidence of the case, they deferred a direct decision and required that she be subjugated to two tests in order that they might determine the points of witchery. First, that she should climb a tree, and if upon cutting it she was not [00:15:00] killed, she was a witch, otherwise not. Second, that a hole be cut in the ice sufficient to let her body through, and if upon trial she sunk to the bottom, an acquittal should be granted, but if she floated, the penalty of the law should be visited upon her.

Jamie Franklin: After some deliberation, they adopted the latter test, and the poor woman was obliged to undergo the process of sinking, which of course she did. With much effort, she was saved from drowning and allowed to go free, with the wise conclusion of the judge, that if she had been a witch, the powers infernal would have supported her.'

Jamie Franklin: That's the entire account of the Krieger Witch Trial as it's been passed down to us. Everything else just basically has to be inferred through the little that we can determine about her life, which thanks to Joyce Held , who I've collaborated with very closely on this project. Joyce Held is a member of the Pownal Historical Society and has done extensive research to help unearth Margaret Krieger and give her name [00:16:00] back as part of this larger research project.

Josh Hutchinson: There's so much there that I want to touch on. The story of a widow owning property that's coveted by neighbors is very familiar in witch trial history and not having her sons in town to defend her or take, or I assume they didn't take control of their father's property after he died and it went to her. We've seen that several times.

Jamie Franklin: Yeah, no, and again it's supposition, but I think based on the historic record of what we do know as you said, this was a fairly common scenario where she technically legally I, I think wasn't. As you said legally speaking, the land should have passed from her husband to her one living son, but he was already well established with his own mill in Williamstown, south of Pownal. We can [00:17:00] probably assume fairly accurately that the son wasn't going to take over the mill. Her neighbors probably understood the basics of that story and accusing her of being extraordinary, whatever that means. That was basically the only thing she was being accused of, as far as Brownell is telling the story. That's the only real basis that we have of her being accused, but I think the larger context of them having been granted that land somewhat outside of the normal context, because they had established that mill.

Jamie Franklin: 1785, you're still early on. It may have been, I'm not 100 percent sure on this, it probably was still the only mill there in North Pownal in the immediately surrounding area, and mills were very much needed during this period. They would have to grind wheat and corn. They were used for all sorts of reasons. I know when Bennington was being set up, one of the very first things that was ordered was that they put out a call amongst all of the early settlers and said, 'the first person to build a [00:18:00] mill will be granted the land upon which it is built.'

Jamie Franklin: And so these sorts of things were really critical infrastructure in these towns during the 18th century. And having a woman being the only kind of heir to a property that's highly coveted within the community and having the family already been somewhat outsiders, I think we can safely assume that the accusation was largely based on the desire to take that land.

Sarah Jack: And according to the account, it looks like they were using the current legal system to try to uproot her or to proceed. What legal code were they operating under?

Jamie Franklin: They say committee. What exactly that means is a little unclear. Vermont was an independent republic at this time. There probably would have been some committees would have probably been centered around more populated areas, so Bennington would have had some sort of judicial apparatus in effect, but the use of the word [00:19:00] committee, and actually I've also seen it referred to as a safety committee. That term isn't used in Brownell's account, so it's a conjecture, but there were series of committees, one of which were known as safety committees, that were set up during the period of the Revolutionary War.

Jamie Franklin: And because Bennington was an epicenter of the war, we had the battle here in 1777, there was quite a bit of activity, and there was very active safety committees that were going on here in the mid 1770s. Now, by the mid 1780s, I don't know exactly what the relationship between those kind of pre Vermont Constitution committees and the Constitution would have been, but I think it's safe to say that there might have been informal, local kind of safety committees, what would have essentially served as the judicial apparatus of that local community at the time, which would have been composed of her neighbors who coveted her land. That's probably the best guess [00:20:00] that we can make, but I'm guessing that it was something along the lines of what we understand to be a safety committee like those that were operating during the Revolution, probably composed of her neighbors who are the same people who are accusing her of witchcraft.

Josh Hutchinson: Now, you said two of her sons had passed before their father?

Jamie Franklin: One of them passed away. They were granted land and built a mill, as I mentioned earlier in Williamstown. I think that was in 1767. And then four years later, so I guess that would've been 1771, one of her sons passed. And then another one of her sons actually died in the Battle of Bennington in 1777. Yeah, her sons were definitely intimately involved in kind of communities relatively nearby, involved in the Battle of Bennington so they were definitely, they weren't ostracized from their communities in any way.

Jamie Franklin: And then her son would have died a war hero. And it seems a little odd to me [00:21:00] that they go after her after her son's given his life for the new country. But there were other reasons driving them to target her. The irony and I think the kind of contradictions of the Revolution are myriad. We've been doing a lot of research into the role of kind of the black presence during the Revolutionary War and the Battle of Bennington. Sipp Ives is a figure who's only in recent years come to attention, and he was actually a black man who fought for the Green Mountain Boys and lost his life during the Revolution, and the irony of a black man fighting for freedom for his country when he wasn't going to be granted that same freedom that he was fighting for his neighbors. So those sort of ironies, I think abound when you think about the revolution and kind of the quote unquote 'ideals' that were being fought for.

Sarah Jack: Is there anything interesting that happened to her after her trial?

Jamie Franklin: We don't know a lot about what happened to her [00:22:00] after her trial except for the fact that she moved back to Williamstown, where she was born and where her one surviving son lived and had a mill. And I think it makes perfect sense. You're accused of witchcraft, you're dunked in the icy river, luckily you survive, you're saved, you're acquitted. You probably don't want to live there anymore, and it may very well be that she was essentially pushed out, because the same people who accused her of witchcraft and wanted to grab her land may have made life, despite being acquitted of witchcraft, relatively unbearable.

Jamie Franklin: Again, all conjecture but we do know she moved back to Pownal and lived out the last few years of her life there in Pownal with her son and her grandchildren, and which is where she's buried, she's buried there in the West Lawn Cemetery in Pownal, alongside her husband and her sons and grandchildren.

Josh Hutchinson: I find the idea of a tree test very interesting. I haven't encountered that [00:23:00] before in any other witch trial.

Jamie Franklin: The water test is iconic. You see the image of it that was published in the 17th century. Sometimes you see them hanging on chairs with a a seesaw apparatus where they dunk them. Sometimes they're bound.

Jamie Franklin: The idea of climbing a tree. There is at least one other version of the story, which is basically a retelling of Brownell's account. Grace Greylock Niles was another kind of town historian. She was a bit of an eccentric. She wrote a number of books. Her account of the Krieger trial largely parallels Brownell's, but she confuses things and attributes the widow to one of the sons, which made no sense, because the son didn't have a widow, so she gets her facts wrong, but the tree idea is something that just comes up, and in some cases, it seems like she was given an option between the two. In Brownell's telling, it's more like they're going to test her with both, but then in deliberation, they decide that the [00:24:00] water test is the better. If I were given a choice between the two, I'd choose the icy water myself, because there's not a lot of chance you're going to survive, or at least be in very good condition if you're, depending on how high they expect you to climb and how far you fall, that doesn't seem like a very good option.

Jamie Franklin: That's another one I haven't heard of, but it comes up in Brownell's and in Grace Greylock's accounts of the Krieger Witch Trial but apparently it was vetoed. And the water trial is what they ended up going with.

Sarah Jack: My first thought is maybe they were thinking, oh, we're not going to be able to cut through the ice, and she has to be tested. But then they're like how high can she climb? How, maybe she was, strong and sturdy, she was extraordinary, but maybe it was going to be too problematic to do the tree. But man, plunging into icy water. Do we know what month this happened in?

Jamie Franklin: Don't know what time it is, but they mention ice in Brownell's account very clearly, so one can assume, and cutting a hole in the ice. The idea of cutting a [00:25:00] hole in the ice, the river, it's a flowing body of water. Imagine it. Images of this where they're bound and tied and so that there would have been a rope attached to her, so it's not like they just dropped her in, she sank, because then you would have floated down the river, and how do you pull her back up out of the ice when she's out of there?

Jamie Franklin: So I'm guessing they had a rope attached to her that allowed them to pull her back in, but that wouldn't have been pleasant regardless. The tree would have been bad enough, but the ice wasn't a great way to go either.

Sarah Jack: And she could have, she could be the last woman to undergo a water test like that in the colonies.

Jamie Franklin: It's interesting one of the fun little bits that I was able to dig up as, as I was just doing research about this and trying to understand the larger context and, we think of witch trials and, me as somebody who's interested in history and has a basic knowledge, the Salem Witch Trials in the late 17th century, but 1785 is really late.

Jamie Franklin: And [00:26:00] so I was just trying to do a little bit of digging and figuring out what were they talking, what sort of things were they saying about witches, witchcraft, here in southwestern Vermont in the late 18th century. And in fact, I did stumble across a couple of newspaper articles from the Vermont Gazette, which would have been the local, Bennington-based newspaper, one was from the 1780s, around the time of Krieger's trial, and it was more like an oratorical kind of exercise where you see this occasionally where people will write essays to show off their kind of reasoning and debate skills. And this is a letter that was published in the Vermont Gazette, I think it was 1788, where he's basically giving all the reasons why witchcraft is not real.

Jamie Franklin: But then even more interestingly was a wonderful article that was published in the Vermont Gazette in 1801. And it's unsigned, but he refers to the last 35 years, so presumably [00:27:00] he's 35 years old or around that, or maybe 35 years from his, what he refers to as his childhood, and he says that witchcraft has been on the decrease over the last 35 years. So that would have dated back to the 1760s, 1770s, depending on exactly what he meant by 35 years ago and, it's a, it's another wonderfully written article.

Jamie Franklin: The title of the article is Witchcraft, and it starts, 'when I was a boy, I well remember that scarcely a week passed without hearing some notable tale of recent witchcraft. But at this day, we hardly hear such a tale once a month. Then there were at least four able-bodied witches to a town, but now scarcely one can be mustered. Now I know of several whose towns with not a single witch in them. Then, if a teamster had his sled or wheels upset, the nearest witch was sure to bear the blame of it. But now he is forced to lay it off upon a rock, a stump, or a snowdrift. In those days, if a man was taken out of his warm bed and [00:28:00] ridden a hundred miles through the air, it was certainly some old witch who did it. Now it is turned off upon a dream, a disturbed imagination, or at best, the Nightmare.'

Jamie Franklin: And then he goes on about this and then towards the end he goes on to surmise why witchcraft has been on the wane. So he says, they actually talk about the revolution being one of the reasons why witchcraft might have been on the wane, which of course doesn't explain why there was a witch trial in 1785, right on the tail end of the Revolutionary War, but he goes 'no, I hereby declare it is my opinion that this decrease is owing to another cause.' Quote, 'every generation grows wiser and wiser, I will add, better and better, and not a word more.' And that's how the article ends. So that's an article published here in Bennington in 1801, giving some sort of context for the idea that witchcraft and witches were something that somebody growing up in the 1760s and 70s around this area would have found relatively [00:29:00] commonplace.

Jamie Franklin: However, Krieger's is the only known witch trial. Of course, it's a vague record, and there may have been other cases, but we don't know of them. It's the only known witch trial, and it is quite a late date, as you note, 1785. I don't know of any trials anywhere in New England after that date. It's the only one ever recorded in Vermont, to the best of our knowledge.

Josh Hutchinson: The latest that we know of before that would have been a 1697 trials of Sarah's ancestor in Connecticut, Winifred Benham, and her daughter, Winifred Benham Jr. That's the last formal one that we have court records for. But I do want to point out that we've spoken with a witch trial historian, Owen Davies, who wrote a book called America Bewitched. And in there, he says that due to extrajudicial, people taking the law [00:30:00] into their own hands to deal with witches, more people actually died as witches after Salem than were killed by the authorities.

Jamie Franklin: Yeah. And it's tough because there's really no hard documentation to go by here, because Vermont was very much in limbo, literally and certainly figuratively, too, caught between New York and New Hampshire, an independent republic, there's very little kind of formal legal paperwork that survives, and Pownal as a town and a community was extremely small at this period, and I know that Joyce has also gone over to Albany and Troy to try and see if there are any records there, and she hasn't been able to track any down, and we don't have any documentation of it, but that doesn't mean that other examples of this might have happened during the period. Because it seems like the idea of witches and witchcraft, according to that 1801 account, were not something that would have been surprising.

Josh Hutchinson: There were [00:31:00] definitely rumors of witchcraft and off the record accusations going on that are reported in some newspapers through the 18th century and even the 19th century and up to today, you see this occasionally. So yeah, witchcraft belief is very persistent.

Jamie Franklin: And that's actually one of the reasons why I really was excited to be able to do this project and to erect the marker to commemorate the trial, because accusations of witch hunts are something we're hearing a lot about these days, and so I think these issues of false accusations and lack of following the judicial process, those are things that are happening to this day. It's different contexts, but it's still very much something that I think is relevant to us today.

Sarah Jack: I think this historical marker project is really a big deal. I'd love to hear how you got involved, how you and Joyce Held [00:32:00] connected and moved forward.

Jamie Franklin: The Krieger Witch Trial Marker Project was an outgrowth of actually an exhibition that I curated, which is here at the Bennington Museum right now, and it runs through the end of the year. I don't know if anybody's going to hear this before the end of the year, but so the project grew out of that, and actually I reached out to Pownal and the folks at the Pownal Historical Society a year and a half ago now. I don't remember the exact timing, I think it was spring of 2022, and I was working on this project. I wanted to learn what they knew about the Krieger Witch Trial, and Joyce had really been already working on this for a decade or so, trying to dig up information on who Widow Krieger was, what her name was, all of the information that she ultimately discovered.

Jamie Franklin: And I met with them about that, and then around the same time in the summer of last year, 2022, the Manchester Historical Society, which is just north of us here in Bennington, Sean Harrington is the curator of the Manchester Historical [00:33:00] Society, and he partnered with the Vermont Folklife Center, which is the state sponsor of the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, and the Pomeroy Foundation has a historic marker program called Legends and Lore, and the Pomeroy Foundation is probably better known for funding all of the New York State historic markers. The historic markers that are erected now in the late 20th and now in the 21st century are not actually funded by the state of New York. They're funded by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation and so they have this Legends and Lore marker project. Sean Harrington at the Manchester Historical Society worked with Andy Kolovos who is at the Vermont Folklife Center and the William G. Pomeroy Foundation to create a marker to what's known as the Manchester Vampire or the Demon Vampire of Manchester. And so this is a whole other wonderful story, which kind of provides context into kind of late 18th century belief systems here in southwestern Vermont. In [00:34:00] very brief, the story of the Manchester Vampire. The only surviving account is a handwritten manuscript, which is part of a largerearly history of Manchester, which was written by a Pettibone, a well respected member of the Manchester community, believed to be written around the 1860s, and it recalls the story of Rachel Burton. So Rachel Burton was married to Isaac Burton, Captain Isaac Burton, who had actually fought in the Revolution, and she died what we now know as tuberculosis, back then it was consumption in 1791. Captain Burton, her widow husband, remarried, and about a year after he remarried, his second wife also died of consumption, and I hear that story and I go of course, if you're going to accuse somebody of vampirism, it's gotta be the husband, Isaac Burton, but no, it was the first wife, Rachel Burton, that was accused of being a vampire.

Jamie Franklin: You look at it, and you think the reality of it [00:35:00] is Isaac Burton was probably an asymptomatic carrier of consumption, and both of his wives caught it from him, but this was a case where Pettibone tells the story that his friends and family became kind of inflamed with this idea that they needed to dig up Rachel Burton's body, and they actually, the story goes that they burnt her remaining organs in a public spectacle there in Manchester around 1793.

Jamie Franklin: And so they erected this marker to the vampire story there in Manchester last year, and so I connected with Sean Harrington, who I know, I work with closely. He's on a number of committees here at the Bennington Museum, and he connected me with the Vermont Folklife Center and the Pomeroy Foundation, and we decided as part of this larger exhibition project, Haunted Vermont, we wanted to create a historic marker through the Pomeroy Foundation grant program to commemorate the Krieger Witch Trial.

Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about the [00:36:00] dedication ceremony?

Jamie Franklin: I worked closely with the Pownal Historical Society through all of this. The museum was the kind of non profit of note that applied for the grant. We applied to the Pomeroy Foundation through the museum. We were awarded the grant. And then I worked closely with the Pownal Historical Society.

Jamie Franklin: We had our own Krieger Witch Trial subcommittee. So we helped plan the dedication ceremony that happened back in September. And they really wanted to make it a kind of family friendly, basically honoring Margaret Krieger's memory and recognizing the ordeal that she went through, and so we actually started the dedication ceremony with a witches walk. So we invited people to come dressed up as witches, whatever that meant to them. There were a lot of kind of stereotypical popular American culture type witches wearing pointy black hats, black cats, brooms, but I think somewhere around two to three dozen people showed up wearing witch [00:37:00] costumes, and so we had a little parade that was led by a couple of musicians across the bridge, which crosses the Hoosic River, which is right there adjacent to where we put the sign. So the sign is in what's known as Strobridge Park, right there in North Pownal. It's off of Route 346 as you're driving through North Pownal on Dean Road. A bridge crosses the river right there.

Jamie Franklin: So they paraded across the river towards where the historic marker is, and then we had a brief kind of ceremony where I gave some remarks. I talked a little bit. I mentioned the 1801 newspaper article and talking about the idea of becoming better and acknowledging that this is still an issue, people are still being accused unjustly of a lot of things due to various belief systems. And this is something that we need to keep in our kind of collective community memory.

Jamie Franklin: Joyce Held then told the story of Margaret Krieger basically for the first time. She wanted to keep a lot of the information that she had been doing, researching, close to her chest until it was finally made public, and she told that story there[00:38:00] at the dedication ceremony. Sean Harrington was also there as a representative of the Vermont Folklife Center.

Jamie Franklin: And then we revealed and pulled the the cloth off of the marker. And so it was a really fun time. We had live music. We had treats for the kids. There were a lot of young people there. It was really fun, but there were also older people who are very deeply interested in early American, early Vermont history, reenactor types that we're interested in those sorts of things. So it was really wonderful. I think we had something like 100 to 150 people show up for the dedication ceremony there. So it was really wonderful to be able to go through this process of research, of getting the grant, and then finally putting the sign up and seeing that it's a story that really resonated with people today in 2023.

Josh Hutchinson: A great turnout. I'm so glad everybody got to hear the story and why it's relevant today.

Sarah Jack: Is there anything else you would like to share about the museum or [00:39:00] Margaret or anything else you'd like to put out there?

Jamie Franklin: Haunted Vermont was a really fun exhibit. I was able to do research on the Krieger Witch Trial, on the Manchester Vampire. Another kind of integral part of that exhibition is an archive of materials that we recently were gifted by Shirley Jackson's eldest son, Lawrence Hyman. So Shirley Jackson, for those who aren't familiar, was a mid 20th century writer. I call her the queen of Gothic fiction. She's probably best known for her short story, 'The Lottery,' but she also wrote a number of novels, including The Haunting of Hill House, which has received quite a bit of attention in the last couple of years. There was a Netflix very roughly based on The Haunting of Hill House recently. And she actually wrote a book for school aged children ages 8 to 12, on the Salem Witch Trials in 1956 or 57. You think about when that was published and the idea that children should be learning about the Salem Witch Trials was right at the height of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, [00:40:00] and so I say all of this only because we'll continue to have a selection of material from Shirley Jackson's archives out and on permanent display for years to come. It doesn't necessarily tell the Krieger Witch Trial story, but for those who are interested in those sorts of things and in Shirley Jackson's work, her work will continue to be on view here at the Bennington Museum.

Jamie Franklin: We tell the history and story of Southern Vermont, and anybody interested in that material, we're open to the public. We close for a couple of months in the early winter, January, February, and March, but we reopen on April 1st, and we're open through the rest of the year, and we're usually open, depending on what time of year it is. Our schedule sometimes shifts, but during the height of our exhibition cycle, from like June through October, we're open seven days a week from ten to four, usually.

Jamie Franklin: But just check our website. It's www.benningtonmuseum.org. That will have the latest up to date hours and days that we're open. And I encourage people to come and learn not just about Widow Krieger, but about Vermont history at large.[00:41:00]

Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.

Mary-Louise Bingham: Gary Foxcroft began his advocacy when he and his wife, Naomi, began to enroll children deprived of an education in a primary school they built with the support of family and friends at Akwa Ibom State in Nigeria. Many of these children were believed by their families to be practicing sorcery and were thrown to live on the streets. These children were now at risk of being exploited and suffered brutal deaths. Gary and Naomi connected with other advocates to provide shelters for these children and consulted with UN agencies. Gary was the subject of a documentary linked in the show notes, titled Saving Africa's Witch Children. Safe Child Africa is an organization that is based in the UK which was cofounded by Gary and Naomi. After 15 years of advocacy, Gary is now focusing on other [00:42:00] endeavors. Thank you, Gary Foxcroft, for the children that still live.

Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.

Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a non profit 501(c)3 organization, Weekly News Update.

Sarah Jack: We would like to acknowledge the positive progress made by the global community against witch hunts in the past year. At End Witch Hunts, we remain steadfast in our support for and recognition of advocates and organizations driving positive social change in communities worldwide grappling with witch hunts and violence from witchcraft accusations. Numerous initiatives and collaborations are actively addressing this issue. Anti-witch-hunt advocates encompass a diverse array of individuals, including victims, their families, descendants, academics, professors, authors, activists, lawyers, politicians, ambassadors, journalists, podcasters, artists, museum directors, writers, playwrights, [00:43:00] policemen, teachers, genealogists, historians, students, senior adults, middle aged adults, young adults, teenagers, and children. Anyone contributing to the mission to end witch hunts by expanding the reach of impact through their unique talents, skills, and knowledge, be it through education, legal interventions, or courageous conversations, is a powerful voice for the innocent. Whether you've delved into an informative book, participated in an online education or advocacy event, tuned in to a podcast episode addressing human rights, or engaged in the conversation to end witch hunts in any capacity, you too are an advocate for the innocent. We thank you for being a part of this growing movement to stop hunting witches.

Sarah Jack: As we close out 2023, we want to illuminate the remarkable efforts of our dedicated volunteers, creators, and guests, who have been instrumental in shaping our podcast and contributing to the success of all End Witch Hunts education, memorial, and justice initiatives. [00:44:00] These champions are committed to combating the age-old scourge of witch hunts, advocating for change, education, tolerance, and justice on a local and global scale. In a world where fear and disregard for the dignity of all mankind lead to the harm and persecution of vulnerable and innocent individuals, End Witch Hunts aims to be an organization of action.

Sarah Jack: In May of 2023, collaborative efforts to pass state legislation absolving those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut culminated in the adoption of House Joint Resolution 34. This landmark resolution offered an apology and cleared the names of 34 witch trial victims. Our exoneration and memorial efforts aim to honor victims, raise awareness, develop purposeful conversations, and foster understanding about accepting all vulnerable members of a community.

Sarah Jack: Take a stand for justice. Sign our petition at change.org/witchtrials to urge the state of Massachusetts to amend legislation, ensuring the inclusion of all those wrongfully [00:45:00] executed for witchcraft in the Massachusetts colony. Five women faced unjust executions for witchcraft in 17th-century Boston, and it's time to clear their names.

Sarah Jack: Additionally, support the crucial work of memorials for all witch trial victims in Connecticut by visiting connecticutwitchtrials.org. Engage with witch trial memorials. Amplify their stories on your social media and play a vital role in raising awareness. The future safety of potential witch hunt victims relies on this collective effort.

Sarah Jack: Be a part of the movement for witch hunt justice. As we leap into 2024, let's persist in elevating the voices of both historical and contemporary victims of witch hunts. Together, we can demand a future where each individual is accorded the dignity, safety, and respect they rightfully deserve.

Sarah Jack: When the dawn of 2024 breaks on January 1st, we'll have transformed the podcast to its new name, Witch Hunt. We appreciate your ongoing support and can't wait to continue this journey. Work with us in 2024 by discussing why we hunt witches, [00:46:00] how we hunt witches, who we hunt as witches, and how we stop hunting witches. Your voice is part of the work. Visit aboutwitchhunts.com/ starting January 1st, 2024.

Sarah Jack: Unlock the power of supporting our podcast by becoming a monthly donor. Our monthly donors are Super Listeners. As a Super Listener, your monthly contributions make a significant impact. Visit our website and easily sign up for any donation amount that suits you. Your generosity fuels the content you love.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Jack: You're welcome.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.

Sarah Jack: Join us next Wednesday for the inaugural episode of Witch Hunt.

Josh Hutchinson: That's right, subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts and the next episode will be in your inbox on Witch Hunt Wednesday.

Sarah Jack: To visit us, now go to aboutwitchhunts.com/.[00:47:00]

Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell all your friends about this show.

Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more about our organization.

Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

December 28, 2023

The Devil of Great Island with Emerson Baker

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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!

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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.

December 25, 2023

Massachusetts Witch Trials 101 Part 2: Mary and Hugh Parsons of Springfield

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Show Notes

Welcome to the second installment of Witch Hunt’s 101 series exploring the Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials. In Part 2, we delve into the intricate narratives of Hugh Parsons and Mary Lewis Parsons, whose witch trials unfolded in Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, years before the infamous Salem Witch-Hunt took place. This Springfield, MA duo found themselves entangled in what historian Malcolm Gaskill has identified as America’s first witch panic.

The Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project urges the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to acknowledge the innocence of its witch trial victims with an apology. The accused witches spotlighted in this episode have not received an official apology. Explore further details on our project website: massachusettswitchtrials.org. Take a moment to support our cause by signing and sharing the project petition at change.org/witchtrials

TINAAWAHP

IK Ero On Next Steps For Ending Witch Hunts TINAAWAHP

Transcript

[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson:

[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Hi, and welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.

[00:00:16] Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack. In this episode, Massachusetts Witch Trials 101 Part Two, we will delve into the social intricacies of a New England colony building hopeful futures from backbreaking labor and long dreamt dreams in Springfield, a burgeoning company town shaped by William Pynchon's dream in the midst of Old England's conflict.

[00:00:36] Josh Hutchinson: Established as Agawam in 1635 and later renamed Springfield, this is where the lives of Mary Lewis and Hugh Parsons unfolded, intertwined moment by moment with those of their neighbors in this strategically planned community. Immersed in the pervasive fear of witchcraft and inherent distrust of others, this compelling narrative unfolds [00:01:00] profound historical repercussions and enduring aftermaths.

[00:01:04] Sarah Jack: It's the fascinating case of Mary and Hugh Parsons of Springfield, Massachusetts.

[00:01:10] Josh Hutchinson: The pair were engulfed in what historian Malcolm Gaskill has called America's first witch panic. Malcolm expertly unveils the interplaying dimensions of this history in his creative nonfiction work The Ruin of All Witches. Explore more depths of this captivating narrative by reading the book and listening to our delightful interview with him in the episode titled 'Malcolm Gaskill on the Ruin of All Witches.' If you haven't acquired a copy yet, consider supporting our podcast by purchasing it from our bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/endwitchhunts.

[00:01:46] Sarah Jack: In the Parsons saga, fingers began pointing in more than one direction. How did this lead Springfield to the threshold of a witch panic?

[00:01:55] Josh Hutchinson: It culminated from several pressures: economic disparity, [00:02:00] social power concentrated in a few people, and polarized beliefs. Everything was either good or evil, though Satan was not God's equal adversary.

[00:02:10] Sarah Jack: Springfield was an especially competitive atmosphere. In the seventeenth century, twenty five thousand people from Great Britain Migrated to New England. Pynchon selected his Springfield founding settlers to fill community functions, and so they came together from different regions and backgrounds. This is very unlike many of the other regions. Because when you're looking at those people histories, you're often able to trace them all from one ship back to one village.

[00:02:42] Josh Hutchinson: A lot of times the entire congregations moved over from Great Britain to America.

[00:02:49] Sarah Jack: So these folks were brought together and had to forge friendships.

[00:02:55] Josh Hutchinson: When they probably could hardly understand each other. Even though [00:03:00] they're both speaking English, they were speaking very different forms of it.

[00:03:04] Josh Hutchinson: And the people of Springfield were experiencing conflict in all areas of life, including Politics, government, military, religious, economic, cultural, societal, social, interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict.

[00:03:22] Sarah Jack: All of these aspects of life are in turmoil throughout the western world, and this true story highlights an extreme and tragic outcome of this for one early American colonial household. As pressure builds, a release is needed, or the whole system goes boom.

[00:03:38] Josh Hutchinson: With the tumultuous backdrop of the mid seventeenth century Western world, the Parsons' American tragedy unfolds with multiple people accused and most of the town's households involved. Learn the far reaching impacts of the witch hunting resonating through conflicts in Old England, New England, the bustling town of Springfield, and within the [00:04:00] intimate confines of the Parsons home.

[00:04:03] Josh Hutchinson: The 1630s and 1640s were a time of great conflict in both old England and new. In the old, rapid population growth triggered scarcity of resources, and political conflict escalated into civil war fueled by religious strife. In many areas, external pressures combined with local animosities and personal feuds to generate witch hunts. Across the sea, the Winthrop fleet settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a new Israel with life centered around congregational worship.

[00:04:35] Sarah Jack: By settling inhabited territory, the colonists invited armed conflict. Even in their meeting houses, these wide eyed optimists were hit by the harsh reality of disagreement resulting in the expulsion of many who did not tow the official line religiously. As there was conflict within the Bay Colony, so there was conflict between Massachusetts and the other colonial interests, including conflict with [00:05:00] England's French and Dutch rivals and with other English settlers.

[00:05:04] Josh Hutchinson: Amidst all this chaos, a town was planted at the northernmost navigable point of the Connecticut River. This town, initially called Agawam, was established by William Pynchon as a hub for his fur trading and was originally affiliated with the communities to the south on the river in Connecticut.

[00:05:23] Sarah Jack: The settlement, soon renamed Springfield, was located just twenty miles upriver from Windsor, Connecticut and separated from Boston by a difficult overland route of one hundred miles.

[00:05:35] Josh Hutchinson: Springfield was founded as a company town, and all business went through Pynchon. If you wanted permission to settle in town, you saw Pynchon, who limited the number of families. If you wanted to buy goods, you went to Pynchon's store. If you needed to borrow, you went to Pynchon. And he made sure everyone in his town needed to borrow and therefore, everyone in his town was in his employ [00:06:00] and in his debt.

[00:06:02] Sarah Jack: Springfield residents had a besieged and a beleaguered feeling in part based on tensions with the Dutch and with towns down the Connecticut River, in part based on fear of Native Americans.

[00:06:15] Josh Hutchinson: As elsewhere, settlers also feared fire, disease, and famine. As we mentioned earlier, some small New England communities were transplanted essentially altogether from Old England, as entire church congregations followed their minister to the new world, while Springfield, on the other hand, was somewhat more cosmopolitan in that residence came from many different regions of Britain. Customs and dialects clashed like everything else.

[00:06:46] Sarah Jack: Malcolm Gaskill wrote in his book, The Ruin of All Witches, "fear incubated guilt, which was projected and returned his anger. But mainly, the mood that made witchcraft plausible settled in New England because by [00:07:00] the mid sixteen forties, its economic and social woes had reached old world levels."

[00:07:06] Josh Hutchinson: Springfield was planned for profit. Here, intense competition for limited resources, coupled with a dramatic economic disparity and feeling of servitude toward Pynchon, allowed envy and hostility to creep into the community,

[00:07:21] Sarah Jack: Hostility and fear combined poorly.

[00:07:25] Josh Hutchinson: Creating a combustible mixture.

[00:07:29] Sarah Jack: Among those who landed in Springfield was a woman named Mary Lewis, who was invited to work for Pynchon's daughter Anne Smith and her husband Henry. Mary was born about 1610 in the Welsh Marches, and her maiden name may have been Reese. In about 1627, she married a man in Monmouth. His name is unknown, but it may have been a David Lewis. They did not have any children. In the late sixteen thirties, this man abandoned her. Later, Mary would describe him as a [00:08:00] secret Catholic who threatened that he'd do her in if she didn't convert. Mary used means to try to find him, probably employing a cunning person.

[00:08:10] Josh Hutchinson: After her husband left, Mary became a member of William Wroth's church in Llanvaches. Wroth was considered by some to be the Apostle of Wales. Then in summer 1640, Mary went to America. She stayed in Dorchester in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for a few months working for Pynchon before being sent to Springfield to work for his daughter and son-in-law. She arrived in Springfield in spring or early summer 1641.

[00:08:42] Sarah Jack: Pynchon hired Hugh Parsons, whose origins are shrouded in mystery, to be the town's sole brickmaker. Hugh Parsons was a man of few words, but his legacy story is woven with the weight of those carefully chosen words. He's also remembered for wearing a red [00:09:00] waistcoat and smoking a clay pipe.

[00:09:03] Josh Hutchinson: Mary Lewis and Hugh Parsons each arrived in Springfield with hopes and aspirations, fully embracing the rare opportunity to start a fresh and promising new chapter in life. Their presence in Springfield marks the actualization of their opportunity, and both labored with the intent of turning their ambitions into reality. Now recognizing the possibilities harnessed from a marital union, They envision joining forces to construct a shared future and family.

[00:09:31] Josh Hutchinson: On June 2 1645, Pynchon wrote to John Winthrop Senior, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony in Boston, about Mary Lewis's marriage and abandonment. The letter asked Winthrop to decide whether it was right or not for Mary to get married again. And Mary was sent to deliver the letter in person, possibly in company with John Winthrop, Jr., who had been visiting Springfield.

[00:09:59] Sarah Jack: I imagine she [00:10:00] was still traveling with excitement.

[00:10:01] Josh Hutchinson: I imagine that too.

[00:10:04] Sarah Jack: When Mary delivered the letter to Winthrop senior, he read it immediately, but did not reply. Instead, he said he would refer the matter to the House of Deputies.

[00:10:14] Josh Hutchinson: In mid September, Pynchon wrote Winthrop again to remind him. This time, a reply was received in early October announcing that Mary was officially a single person and therefore free to marry again.

[00:10:29] Sarah Jack: The future was bright for the Parsons family. On Monday, October 27, 1645, Hugh and Mary exchanged vows in a civil ceremony officiated by minister George Moxon, adhering to the customary practice in Massachusetts during that period. It's worth noting that in line with Puritan beliefs, Marriage was not considered a sacrament.

[00:10:50] Josh Hutchinson: The joy in the Parsons household was soon accompanied by the revelation of a pregnancy, a fact which was learned in November, just a month after the [00:11:00] nuptials.

[00:11:01] Sarah Jack: The first fruits of their union arrived on August 7, 1646 with the birth of her daughter, Hannah Parsons.

[00:11:09] Josh Hutchinson: By the 1647 tax assessment, Hugh Parsons owned thirty seven and a half acres of land. This land was testament to his growing stake in the community. Not only a landowner, he also took on the responsibility of Springfield's fence inspector, enriching his active role in civic duties and immersing himself directly in the high stakes realm of his neighbor's boundary, it matters.

[00:11:33] Sarah Jack: Cracks were already showing in the marriage.

[00:11:36] Josh Hutchinson: The recently laid foundation of their future was curing with visible fissures.

[00:11:41] Sarah Jack: And they considered marital strife an indicator of possible witchcraft.

[00:11:46] Josh Hutchinson: As Springfield grappled with the onslaught of smallpox and influenza epidemics in 1647, unrest and frustration descended upon the marriage of Hugh and Mary. Mary's hold on reality seemed to [00:12:00] falter, echoing the fatigue enveloping her spiritually, physically, and mentally. This wariness was exemplified by the relentless toil and anxieties embedded in the unyielding, laborious routine of colonial life, a ceaseless grind that rolled seamlessly from one sunrise to the next, offering little respite or appreciation. The spiritual toil of a Puritan woman would have equally drained her, necessitating unwavering self examination and judgment. In this instance, as in many others, these demands morphed into a disorienting self loathing for Mary. This tripartite downward spiral elicited resentment from her husband, Hugh.

[00:12:42] Sarah Jack: On May 26, 1647, just twenty miles down the river from Springfield, Alice Young of Windsor was convicted as a witch and hanged in Hartford. One night, Mary Lewis witnessed an enigmatic light. with these events, Mary Lewis experienced a profound shift in her demeanor, [00:13:00] succumbing to feelings of depression, sadness, listlessness, and a pervasive sense of being mopish.

[00:13:09] Josh Hutchinson: Night after night, yearning for a haven of solace, Hugh found himself greeted by a home wearied not from the day's toils, but saturated with the pervasive misery that Mary had imbued into its very atmosphere.

[00:13:23] Sarah Jack: By 1647, a marital bitterness encroached like ivy. It entwined itself around the fledgling Parsons partnership, steadily increasing its hold and stifling any harmony that could have fostered a healthy and strong alliance. The escalating scope of their discord transformed into an ominous darkness casting an oppressive gloom over their union, its effects seeping beyond the confines of their home into the public eye.

[00:13:51] Josh Hutchinson: In 1648, a tableau of pressures, disappointments and concerns continue to unfold.

[00:13:58] Josh Hutchinson: In April, when Hugh [00:14:00] attempted to secure a plowing job for Mary's former employer, Henry Smith, his efforts were met with rejection.

[00:14:07] Sarah Jack: That summer, England grappled with the second civil war, a royalist uprising in Kent, and the persecution of alleged witches by angry mobs.

[00:14:16] Josh Hutchinson: The arrival of a second Parsons child, Samuel, on June 8, 1648 held the potential to infuse new life or hope into their struggling marriage.

[00:14:27] Sarah Jack: Hugh continued to seek solutions that could help his household and future get back on course. He took on boarders, Sarah and Anthony Dorchester and their three children, but Sarah was dying from consumption.

[00:14:39] Josh Hutchinson: The same year, a new Massachusetts legal code was enacted. In the section referring to witchcraft, they cited Leviticus 20:27, Deuteronomy 18:11 and Exodus 22:18, 'thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'

[00:14:57] Sarah Jack: In the midst of this, the woman governor [00:15:00] Winthrop referred to as a healer, Margaret Jones, was hanged for witchcraft in Boston on June 14, 1648. Thomas Jones, her husband, was also accused in jail. William Pynchon was a magistrate on her trial.

[00:15:14] Josh Hutchinson: The same month, two infant daughters of Anne and Henry Smith, Margaret and Sarah, fell sick. Margaret died on June 24, and her sister Sarah passed a few days later.

[00:15:28] Sarah Jack: As ministers increasingly delved into warnings about the devil and heresy, Mary found herself increasingly preoccupied with the topics of the devil and witches, and her discourse on these matters became her obsession. She talked about them more and more. Her suspicions turned toward the widow Mercy Marshfield, whom she believed to be a witch. While Mercy now resided in Springfield, she had previously faced suspicion twenty miles away in Windsor, a town where ministers had stoked fear by emphasizing the closeness [00:16:00] of Satan and witchcraft. Notably, Alice Young, who had been hanged just the year before, had also lived in Windsor.

[00:16:08] Josh Hutchinson: The year sixteen forty eight concluded with yet another nearby witch execution. In December of that year, Mary Johnson of Weathersfield in the Connecticut Colony was found guilty of witchcraft and subsequently met the fate called for in the law.

[00:16:24] Sarah Jack: On February 6, 1649, Hugh had a disagreement with Goodwife Blanche Bedortha. He swore the following oath to her in front of her husband. 'Gammer, you needed not have said anything. I spake not to you, but I shall remember you when you little think on it.'

[00:16:45] Josh Hutchinson: Blanche awaited the fulfillment of the oath. One night, she noticed an unusual light on her waistcoat after hanging it up for the night. Then in early March, as her confinement period began in preparation for giving birth, Blanche experienced pain [00:17:00] emanating from her chest, extending to her shoulder and neck. During this challenging time, Mercy Marshfield remained by her side for three days.

[00:17:09] Sarah Jack: This trajectory of hardship and frustrations continued into 1649, paralleled by Mary's intense preoccupation of Satan and witches tormenting Springfield. Another Springfield neighbor, Griffith Jones, found himself in need of a knife, but none were in sight. After completing his task, he discovered three good knives exactly where he had previously searched. At that moment, Hugh Parsons was conveniently present. The two shared a smoke before heading off to then the two shared a smoke before heading off to the church meeting together.

[00:17:44] Sarah Jack: New New Year's ushers in great change. King Charles the first is beheaded on January first sixteen forty nine.

[00:17:56] Josh Hutchinson: Following the beheading of the king, governor John Winthrop senior [00:18:00] died just a few months later in March. In April, Mary Lewis Parsons began telling people she suspected Mercy Marshfield of being a witch. Mary told John Matthews she believed his daughter and heifer were bewitched to death by Mercy. She reminded him that it was known in Windsor that Marshfield was a witch, and she didn't doubt that Satan had followed her to Springfield.

[00:18:22] Josh Hutchinson: During that spring, William Branch had a peculiar encounter. One night, he witnessed the spectral boy with a face as red as fire. While it's possible that William was projecting his own anger stemming from Hugh's curse on his wife, that wasn't the interpretation he attributed to the strange sighting.

[00:18:41] Sarah Jack: In May of 1649, John and Pentecost Matthews informed Mercy Marshfield that Mary Lewis Parsons had said she bewitched their infant and heifer. Marshfield complained to William Pynchon who set a slander trial for the end of that month.

[00:18:58] Josh Hutchinson: Hugh began sleeping [00:19:00] in the long meadow at night.

[00:19:02] Sarah Jack: Resources were limited and debts were plenty. One morning, probably leaving the Longmeadow, Hugh went to Alexander Edwards' house and asked Sarah Edwards for milk to settle a debt she owed. When she refused, he left irate. The next time she milked the cow, it gave a third the usual amount, and this time it was the yellow of saffron and tinged with blood. Future efforts yielded milk of other unusual colors. Alexander Edwards informed Pynchon they believed Hugh had bewitched the cow. Pynchon thought it might be a natural illness.

[00:19:38] Sarah Jack: Now Mary Lewis Parson tells John Matthews that her husband, Hugh, is a witch.

[00:19:43] Josh Hutchinson: On May 29, 1649, Mary was tried for slandering Mercy Marshfield and was found guilty. The sentence was her choice, either pay a three pound fine to Marshfield or else be whipped twenty times. Mary chose to pay the fine.[00:20:00]

[00:20:00] Sarah Jack: Hugh expressed dissatisfaction regarding the fine.

[00:20:04] Josh Hutchinson: In late summer of 1649, William Branch was afflicted as he passed the Parsons House, taken with a strange stiffness, 'as if two stakes had been bound to my thighs, this feeling continued for two days along with the burning in the souls of his feet.' In September, there was a smallpox epidemic in New England.

[00:20:24] Sarah Jack: Mary persisted in her vigilant watch for signs of the devil. On a particular day, her attention was captured by a mysterious dog, a creature she suspected Hugh might have sent. Given his previous claim to understanding her private conversations, Mary speculated that he could be supernaturally spying on her. Furthermore, she noted that now whenever Hugh returned home late, a loud rumbling preceded his arrival. Mary discerned the preternatural nature of this occurrence.

[00:20:56] Josh Hutchinson: Baby Samuel Parsons fell ill, and his secret [00:21:00] parts appeared to shrivel, an observation made by George Colton, a condition that's explainable.

[00:21:06] Sarah Jack: Samuel had trouble breathing one night. Hugh, in tears, ran out and got help from Sarah Cooley and Blanche Bedortha. They saw the diseased secret parts of Samuel and recognized it as an area witches would attack because they hated fertility.

[00:21:23] Josh Hutchinson: The Parsons household was fraught with tension. The Dorchester family with several young children boarded there, and the wife was ailing. Amidst this, Mary accused the head of the household of witchcraft, adding to the already charged atmosphere, especially considering her own young children and the ailing baby Samuel Parsons. The climax occurred on the last Sunday in September, when Anthony Dorchester experienced an unsettling incident, his prized root of a cow's tongue vanished from a boiling pot without a trace. Anthony squarely placed the blame on [00:22:00] Hugh's alleged witchcraft as he insisted Hugh was not witnessed near the pot during the disappearance, but certainly was the culprit, cementing all suspicion.

[00:22:11] Sarah Jack: There just didn't really seem to be other culprits to pin some of this stuff on, so it must be the troublemaker.

[00:22:19] Josh Hutchinson: Blame Hugh.

[00:22:19] Josh Hutchinson: you.

[00:22:20] Sarah Jack: Blame Hugh. That night, Hugh didn't come home. Samuel died.

[00:22:26] Sarah Jack: Jonathan Burt found Hugh in the Longmeadow in the morning and told him. Hugh did not respond. He just stomped off to George and Deborah Colton's house where he said to them, 'I hear my child is dead, but I will cut a pipe of tobacco first before I go home.' They had not invited him over. Hugh went home, saw Mary with Blanche Bedortha, Anthony Dorchester, and Samuel's body. Hugh said nothing and soon returned to work in his fields. Samuel was buried later that day after Hugh had invited the neighbors to the simple funeral.

[00:22:59] Josh Hutchinson: [00:23:00] More deaths. On Thursday, October fourth, Sarah Stebbins died. Then on November eighth, sir Dorchester passed away.

[00:23:08] Sarah Jack: In the winter of 1649 to 1650, Hugh threatened Mercy Marshfield with an oath, not unlike the one he had for Goodwife Bedortha. When he went to pay part of the debt for his wife, Mary's witchcraft accusation slander conviction against Mercy. He asked Mercy to relieve a third of his burden. She refused. He said, 'it shall be, but as wildfire in your house and as a moth in your clothes.'

[00:23:35] Josh Hutchinson: Residents of Springfield became increasingly reluctant to engage with Hugh Parsons, leading to tangible consequences. John Matthews promptly canceled a contract with Hugh for chimneys. As the community perceived Hughes threats as more than mere words, his sense of being slighted by them deepened.

[00:23:54] Sarah Jack: In spring of 1650, Sarah Miller, the pregnant seventeen year old daughter of Mercy Marshfield, [00:24:00] began suffering fits. She blamed Hugh Parsons for rewitching her.

[00:24:05] Josh Hutchinson: Simon Beamon refused to help Hugh Parsons carry flour home from the gristmill. Beamon then fell off his horse, and his own sack of flour fell upon him. He rode again, and again he fell. Then he tried a third time, falling again. Hugh was definitely bewitching him.

[00:24:25] Sarah Jack: John Lombard borrowed a trowel from Hugh Parsons to replace one he'd mislaid and thought had been stolen by Native Americans who'd visited on business the previous day. When Lombard spotted the men again, he called for them, but they seemed not to hear. Hugh asked Lombard, why did he call for them? They've stole my trowel, Lombard said. Hugh replied, here it is, and pointed to a trowel on the sill where Lombard had thought he'd laid the one the day before. Hugh returned his bewitching pattern of hiding and appearing tools. Previously, it was knives, And now he had done it with a trowel.[00:25:00]

[00:25:01] Josh Hutchinson: A third baby was born to Mary and Hugh Parsons October 26, 1650, when Joshua entered the world.

[00:25:09] Sarah Jack: Later that winter, Hugh allegedly kidnapped and assaulted Samuel Terry, whom he believed had assaulted his calf.

[00:25:19] Josh Hutchinson: In winter sixteen fifty to sixteen fifty one, more alleged witchcraft attacks occurred in the colonies, and more witchcraft trials brought execution.

[00:25:30] Sarah Jack: Jane James of Marblehead was slandered for witchcraft a second time.

[00:25:36] Josh Hutchinson: Alice Lake of Dorchester was executed for witchcraft.

[00:25:41] Sarah Jack: Tragically, three year old Sarah Matthews, the daughter of John and Pentecost, passed away. Mary Lewis Parsons had conveyed to them a few years ago that she believed Mercy Marshfield had bewitched their infant to death. Now the heart wrenching reality repeats itself as another young child is taken by death.

[00:25:59] Josh Hutchinson: Baby [00:26:00] Joshua Parsons was now sick at three months of age.

[00:26:03] Sarah Jack: In February of 1651, Hugh Parsons went shopping. Simon Beamon claimed to be too busy to help. Hugh said Simon would have been better off to have helped him. At home, Hugh encountered Jonathan Taylor. Hugh told him and Mary what had happened and said, He shall get nothing by it. I will be even with him. I'll remember him. Later that day, Simon was hauling timber when his horses bolted, and he was thrown from the cart.

[00:26:32] Josh Hutchinson: In early sixteen fifty one, news reached the colonies that Bermuda had a witch hunt.

[00:26:37] Sarah Jack: In early sixteen fifty one, Joan and John Carrington of Wethersfield, Connecticut faced execution for witchcraft. It's possible that Hugh Parsons knew John Carrington. When Mary mentioned to Hugh, 'I hope that God will find out all Such wicked persons and purge New England of all witches ere it be long,' Hugh responded with [00:27:00] a scornful gaze. In a fit of anger, he grabbed a block of wood, momentarily raising it as if to throw it at Mary before relenting and dropping it into the fire.

[00:27:09] Josh Hutchinson: Hugh, besieged by mounting frustrations, began issuing threats with each new challenge.

[00:27:15] Josh Hutchinson: This situation worsened when he failed to produce bricks in time to fulfill a deal with minister George Moxon, adding another layer to his already troubled circumstances. He said, 'if Mr. Moxon do force need to make bricks according to the bargain, I will be even with him. If he do, I will be even with him.' Within a few days, Moxon's daughters, Martha and Rebecca, became ill. Moxon believed they were bewitched, while some neighbors thought them possessed. The girls recovered from their afflictions.

[00:27:48] Sarah Jack: Sunday, February 16, 1651, Mary Parsons was at the Ashley Alehouse between sermons when she started spouting off, blaming Hugh for deaths of the Smiths girls.

[00:27:59] Sarah Jack: [00:28:00] She told Frances Pepper that Hugh had bewitched his cow. She claimed Hugh had also bewitched her and announced that 'he cannot abide that anything should be spoken against witches'. Mary then slipped into some sort of trance. She believed during this trance that she agreed to serve Satan and was magically carried off to a witch meeting at John Stemmons' home lot. It was the dark of night, But fires allowed her to see Hugh Parsons, Sarah Merrick, and Beth Sewell.

[00:28:29] Sarah Jack: Mary came to when the meeting house bell tolled. At the second meeting of the day, while minister Moxon held service, other women, including Mary Bliss Parsons, not to be confused with Mary Lewis Parsons, convulsed on the floor in affliction.

[00:28:45] Josh Hutchinson: Two days later, Mary Lewis Parsons was at home when she heard a loud rumble as if forty horses had been there and he walked in, that night, he dreamed about fighting Satan. On Wednesday, February nineteenth, [00:29:00] Hugh asked George Langton to sell him some hay. Langton declined.

[00:29:04] Sarah Jack: On Friday, February twenty first sixteen fifty one, Hannah Langton made a bag pudding, which came out split from one end to the other as if cut by a knife. This was the second time in ten days this had happened. John Lombard and the Langtons decided to conduct an experiment and threw the pudding into the fire. Shortly thereafter, Bess Sewell arrived, though not the expected visitor. The group dismissed her visit and redirected their suspicions towards Hugh Parsons when he arrived an hour later.

[00:29:36] Josh Hutchinson: On Saturday, February twenty second, the Langtons complained about Hugh's witchcraft to William Pynchon. Mercy Marshfield also complained about Hugh that day, as he had allegedly interfered with Blanche Bedortha during childbirth.

[00:29:50] Sarah Jack: Sunday, February 23, the Langtons tried a third pudding, this one dividing into three even slices. They complained again to Pynchon.[00:30:00]

[00:30:00] Josh Hutchinson: Tuesday, February twenty fifth, Thomas Miller was cut by an enchanted saw blade. That same day, Anthony Dorchester complained to Pynchon about Hugh magically stealing his cow tongue root, and Griffith Jones complained about Hugh making knives disappear and reappear.

[00:30:17] Sarah Jack: On Wednesday, February 26, 1651, Mary Lewis Parsons was arrested and detained on charges of witchcraft. Benjamin Cooley and Anthony Dorchester were assigned to watch Mary that night. Mary spoke to her watchers about Hugh's witchcraft. The pretrial examination was the next day, February twenty seventh. Pynchon took statements from neighbors, including John Matthews, Mary Ashley, Sarah Edwards, George Colton, Benjamin Cooley, and Anthony Dorchester. He was arrested later on the twenty seventh.

[00:30:49] Josh Hutchinson: He Hugh was led up the street. As he passed the Stebbins house, Anne Stebbins cried out,' ah, witch, ah, witch!' and collapsed. She had [00:31:00] seizures after. The same day, two year old Joseph Bedortha screamed and cried about a dog only he could see.

[00:31:07] Sarah Jack: Then on Saturday, March first, Hugh was examined by Pynchon. Many accusers testified of their bewitchment at Hugh's hand, and he was asked about afflicting the minister's children. It was noted that his sleeping in the Longmeadow instead of at home was sinister. Lastly, testimony to the indifference Hugh showed upon the death of his son Samuel was most compelling.

[00:31:32] Josh Hutchinson: On Sunday night, March second, Hugh suffered from an internal buildup of pressure, but didn't need to relieve himself when offered. How magical.

[00:31:43] Sarah Jack: March third, Pynchon ordered Hugh to be searched for witch marks.

[00:31:47] Josh Hutchinson: March fourth, baby Joshua Parsons died suddenly. Henry Smith noted in the town register that Joshua was killed by his mother, Mary Lewis Parsons.

[00:31:58] Sarah Jack: Starting March twelfth, hearings [00:32:00] resumed with more accuser testimony, and this continued over several days.

[00:32:05] Josh Hutchinson: Mary Lewis Parsons told Thomas Cooper about her party with the devil's own, Hugh Parsons, Sarah Merrick, and Bess Sewell that happened when she passed out at the ale house in her trance with the devil.

[00:32:18] Josh Hutchinson: Monday, March seventeenth sixteen fifty one, John Lombard testified before Pynchon.

[00:32:25] Sarah Jack: And Sarah Miller had fits a few doors down.

[00:32:28] Josh Hutchinson: Tuesday, March eighteenth, Hugh was examined a second time. This time, Mary was present. In all, thirty five people testified at the two hearings.

[00:32:38] Sarah Jack: Including the minister Moxon.

[00:32:40] Josh Hutchinson: Pynchon asked Mary to sum up her evidence against Hugh. She said that, first of all, Hugh always knew what she'd been talking about. Secondly, strange noises preceded Hugh's returns homes. Third, she'd seen a strange dog in the marsh. Fourth, the misfortunes of his [00:33:00] enemies

[00:33:00] Sarah Jack: On Saturday, March 22, 1651, Jonathan Taylor, Mercy Marshfield, John Lombard, and Thomas Merrick went to see Pynchon and informed him that Hugh had said he had often been afraid that his wife was a witch all the way back on February twenty sixth when Mary was arrested.

[00:33:18] Josh Hutchinson: Monday, March twenty fourth, Hugh and Mary began the journey to Boston for trial.

[00:33:25] Sarah Jack: Mary Bliss Parsons, not to be confused with Mary Lewis Parsons, was called a distracted woman by her husband, who would lock her up in the cellar at night, though she complained it was full of spirits. She also saw spirits while she was washing laundry in the brook.

[00:33:41] Josh Hutchinson: On March twenty seventh, Sarah Miller saw a spectral man. Jonathan Taylor testified April seventh to Pynchon. April twentieth, the Taylor child, Anna, died.

[00:33:54] Sarah Jack: Jonathan Taylor, Mercy Marshfield, Samuel Marshfield, Hannah Langton, and [00:34:00] Simon Beamon traveled to Boston to bear witness at the end of April.

[00:34:04] Josh Hutchinson: Mary was to be tried May eighth by the general court, but she was too sick that day and the next, so her trial was postponed until May thirteenth. That day, though she was still sick, she was tried. She was indicted for witchcraft and for the murder of her son, Joshua Parsons.

[00:34:24] Sarah Jack: The testimonies of thirty people were heard in court, but most were only read. Seven of the thirty witnesses managed to appear in court and swear under oath.

[00:34:34] Josh Hutchinson: Mary was acquitted of bewitching Rebecca and Martha Moxon. However, she plead guilty to the murder charge and was condemned to die. But governor John Endicott granted Mary a reprieve until May 29. Unfortunately, she passed away in prison between the thirteenth and twenty ninth of May.

[00:34:58] Josh Hutchinson: George Colton, [00:35:00] Jonathan Taylor, and Simon Beamon traveled to Boston for Hugh's trial in mid 1651.

[00:35:04] Josh Hutchinson: one.

[00:35:06] Sarah Jack: On June seventeenth sixteen fifty one, Hugh pled not guilty to witchcraft. At the June seventeenth session, Hugh was neither acquitted nor convicted, and the case was referred to the court of assistance. On May twelfth sixteen fifty two, Hugh faced trial by the court of assistance. Although no proof was presented of the charge that a witch was someone who hath or consulted with a familiar spirit, he was convicted. However, the general court overturned Hughes' conviction around May twenty sixth, and he was subsequently released from jail on June first sixteen fifty two.

[00:35:43] Josh Hutchinson: After he was released from jail, Hugh stayed in Boston a while with his daughter, Hannah. Sometime shortly after the trial, other accused witches, Sarah Merrick and Mercy Marshfield, passed away. At nearly the same time, Beth [00:36:00] Sewell and her family relocated to Wickford, Rhode Island.

[00:36:04] Josh Hutchinson: In sixteen fifty four, Simon Beamon married Alice Young junior, daughter of Alice Young, who had been the colonies' first victim of the witch trials.

[00:36:17] Sarah Jack: Hugh and his daughter, Hannah, moved to Rhode Island, probably to Portsmouth, in sixteen fifty eight. He married the widow of John Wood, a sea captain who worked for John Winthrop. Hannah married Henry Matteson and had seven children.

[00:36:32] Sarah Jack: Hugh died June eighteenth sixteen eighty five.

[00:36:36] Sarah Jack: Now for a minute with Mary.

[00:36:39] Mary-Louise Bingham: Sarah, Josh, and I had the pleasure of meeting with advocate Ikponwosa Ero on August thirtieth. I.K., who was born in Nigeria, is a lawyer by trade and spent six years as the first United Nations independent expert on the enjoyment of human rights of persons living with albinism. Her advocacy [00:37:00] focused on leaving no one behind, serving the most vulnerable first. Through her online presentations, I learned that people with albinism living south of the Sahara in Africa are often attacked. Their assailants will smuggle the body parts of the person living with albinism due to the belief that the body parts could be used for witchcraft rituals.

[00:37:23] Mary-Louise Bingham: When asked how she would advise her predecessor at the UN, IK said, "remember who you are working for." Then she concluded, "you are also working for those who have already died untimely deaths due to attack or discrimination whose memory you now honor by protecting others." Thank you, Ikponwosa Ero.

[00:37:43] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.

[00:37:47] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts news.

[00:37:49] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunt urges collective action to end witch hunting practices worldwide. At End Witch Hunts, our unwavering commitment drives us to actively educate and advocate for the [00:38:00] eradication of witchcraft accusation violence. We firmly believe in the power of collective action to bring about positive change. In alignment with our mission, we proudly support The International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices, TINAAWAHP for short. Discover their impactful global advocacy work and their affiliated organizations at theinternationalnetwork.org. Subscribe at the bottom of their home page for the latest updates contributing to a deeper understanding of ongoing initiatives worldwide.

[00:38:32] Sarah Jack: Watch IK Ero's recent keynote on global advocacy for victims of witchcraft accusations and ritual attacks. You can find the link in our show notes. As the first UN independent expert on human rights for persons with albinism, she provides valuable insights and steps for future advocacy in a video titled Keynote for Expert Workshop, TINAAWAHP, November 2023. Gain perspective and consider how you can contribute to the fight for the rights and safety of victims [00:39:00] counting on us all.

[00:39:01] Sarah Jack: Join us for justice for the witch trial victims of Massachusetts by signing and sharing the exoneration petition for the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project at change.org/witchtrials. Massachusetts residents, engage your representatives, and if you're a voting member of the Massachusetts general court, lead or collaborate on the amendment effort to secure formal apologies.

[00:39:25] Sarah Jack: Thank you for supporting our podcast. Consider a financial contribution to empower our education and advocacy efforts. During this holiday season, think of End Witch Hunts for your charitable gifts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to contribute and help bring an end to the dark history of witch hunting practices.

[00:39:42] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.

[00:39:45] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.

[00:39:47] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.

[00:39:52] Sarah Jack: Join us again next week.

[00:39:54] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.

[00:39:57] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com

[00:39:59] Sarah Jack: [00:40:00] com.

[00:40:00] Josh Hutchinson: We're excited about our podcast changing from Thou Shalt Not Suffer, The Witch Trial Podcast, to Witch Hunt in January twenty twenty four. Stay tuned for more great episodes of thou shalt not suffer through December, and look for Witch Hunt, January first.

[00:40:17] Sarah Jack: Thou Shall Not Suffer in Witch Hunt are presented by end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.

[00:40:24] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow

December 8, 2023

Mary Esty: Victim of the Salem Witch Hunt

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Show Notes

In this episode of ‘Thou Shalt Not Suffer, The Witch Trial Podcast’, hosts Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack delve into an intriguing conversation with Mary Louise Bingham about their mutual ancestor, Mary Esty, who was executed during the Salem Witch Trials. They explore their genealogical connections to Mary Esty, discuss her life and tragic fate, and shed light on the historical context of the time. Hear Mary Esty’s own words from original documents, including her impassioned plea to end the witch hunt.

Towne Cousins Facebook Group

Towne Family Association

Petition to recognize those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts
List of those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts

TINAAWAHP

IK Ero On Next Steps For Ending Witch Hunts TINAAWAHP

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Transcript

[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:16] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. In this episode, Josh and I talked to Mary Louise Bingham about our mutual ancestor, Mary Esty, who was hanged for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Hunt.
[00:00:26] Josh Hutchinson: And stay tuned at the end for a special announcement
[00:00:30] Sarah Jack: We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
[00:00:32] Josh Hutchinson: And enjoy any other holidays you celebrate this time of year.
[00:00:36] Sarah Jack: One thing I know you'll enjoy is our chat with Mary.
[00:00:41] Josh Hutchinson: Sarah, how are you connected to Mary Esty?
[00:00:44] Sarah Jack: So Mary Esty was the second Towne connection, direct connection that I found. I knew that I descended from Rebecca since the nineties. That was something my family had passed down. And then when I was doing my own [00:01:00] research, I realized the Mary line was there. I couldn't believe it. Their grandchildren married. So John Esty, their son, married and then had Hannah, and Francis and Rebecca had Elizabeth who married William Russell and William Russell married Hannah. And then my Russell's go all the way to my fifth great grandmother's maiden name was Russell.
[00:01:28] Josh Hutchinson: So you're connected to Mary through a grandchild, and I'm connected to Mary through her son, Isaac Jr., who married Abigail Kimball, and they had a daughter, Sarah Esty, who married Joseph Cummings. How did you say you were connected, Mary, through Isaac Jr. also?
[00:01:51] Mary Louise Bingham: Yes, I'm connected through Isaac Jr., as well. But in terms of the Towne family, so Mary's siblings, [00:02:00] I descend from Edmund, who I found out about first, Jacob, Joseph, and then it was Gail Garda who discovered Mary Esty, and that was such a surprise. I had no inkling about that, it was such a surprise. In fact, it's one of those where I remember exactly where I was when I found out that Mary Esty was my nine times great grandmother.
[00:02:28] Josh Hutchinson: I just found out that I'm an Edmund also.
[00:02:33] Mary Louise Bingham: Here we go again, Josh!
[00:02:37] Sarah Jack: I think it's interesting that Mary Esty, Mary Towne, was not any of ours first known link to the Salem Witch Trials. She was our secondary find. All of us. Second or third, third, fourth, fifth, maybe for Josh, and with history, she always, you know, is a little less known than her [00:03:00] sister.
[00:03:01] Mary Louise Bingham: And that's why I think this episode is very historic, because it's the first episode where we're telling the story of Mary Esty. I don't think I've ever heard any other podcast episode about the Salem Witch Trials even mention her name. They name a lot of the others, but Mary Esty is not one of them.
[00:03:25] Sarah Jack: I'm so excited that we're gonna talk about her today.
[00:03:29] Josh Hutchinson: And if you've listened to this podcast at all, you've probably heard me tell the story about how it was at Mary Esty's sister's house, the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, where I found out my first connection to the witch trials through my ancestor, Joseph Hutchinson, and that inspired me to get into the genealogy, which then led to a cousin in Massachusetts who had our connection to Mary [00:04:00] Esty researched. One Towne led to another in my tree. And now I've got Edmond Towne also in my tree.
[00:04:11] Mary Louise Bingham: Edmund is also an ancestor of Lucille Ball.
[00:04:16] Josh Hutchinson: So I'm a little bit closer to Lucille Ball than I was before. Like, one step on the genealogy.
[00:04:25] Mary Louise Bingham: It really is exciting.
[00:04:28] Sarah Jack: When we first teamed up last year on the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, Mary Bingham and Sarah Jack knew that they were related through Mary Esty, but we didn't know Josh was yet. So three Mary Estys teamed up to work on the exoneration for Connecticut.
[00:04:48] Sarah Jack: That's
[00:04:49] Mary Louise Bingham: Yes.
[00:04:50] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, without realizing it.
[00:04:55] Mary Louise Bingham: I know that's wonderful though. That's our connection, our spiritual [00:05:00] connection to each other, too, so as far as I'm concerned.
[00:05:03] Sarah Jack: right.
[00:05:04] Josh Hutchinson: It's imprinted into our DNA. We're supposed to be friends.
[00:05:14] Sarah Jack: Mary, please tell us the story of the mutual ancestor who brought us all together.
[00:05:20] Mary Louise Bingham: Mary was the sixth child born to William and Joanna Towne about the year 1634 at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. And William was a farmer and a basket weaver in this seaport town, known for its smoked herring, and he lived on a three acre house lot.
[00:05:38] Josh Hutchinson: You can learn more about the lives of William and Joanna Towne in Great Yarmouth by listening to our December 29th, 2022 episode, Rebecca Nurse of Salem with Dan Gagnon, and our November 10th, 2022 episode, Witch Hunts in Great Yarmouth and Salem with Dr. Danny Buck.
[00:05:55] Mary Louise Bingham: So why did the Townes leave? [00:06:00] Well, William wanted to worship as what we term today as a Puritan, but back in the 1600s, that term was considered to be derogatory. William would have considered himself and his family to worship as a community of believers known as the people of God. Their belief centered on reading the scripture without the superstitious articles in the church that had significant monetary value. During William and Joanna's time, some of those items were sold, smashed, or demolished, as in many of the side altars. And according to author Dan Gagnon, the Townes probably attended, and I quote, and unquote, 'unofficial services,' where they hired their own clergy to preach on Sunday afternoons and market days.
[00:06:51] Mary Louise Bingham: The new Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 further reformed the liturgy to resemble that of the Catholic [00:07:00] tradition, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Two years later, between April and September of 1635, William and Joanna decide to leave everything behind, making a dangerous journey across the Atlantic Sea with four children, including one year old Mary, to worship as they saw fit in new surroundings of which held both mystery, danger, and hope.
[00:07:30] Mary Louise Bingham: Upon their arrival, the Townes ended up at the northeastern part of Salem today, which is known as Danversport in Danvers, Mass, current day North Shore Avenue on what was a nine and a half acre farm. Their first house would have probably been an English wigwam, which did not protect well from the outside elements, though there was a fireplace, but the fireplace was made of wood, of all [00:08:00] things. About a year after their move, there was a hurricane, which caused great damage and wiped away many of the homes. So sometime after that, William would have had a more colonial wooden structure built. It was at this residence where the final two Towne siblings were born, Sarah and Joseph.
[00:08:22] Mary Louise Bingham: Young Mary would have learned how to operate the day-to-day activities of the household, such as cooking, sewing, weaving, spinning, using a cheese press and a butter churn, eventually milking the cows, taking care of the chickens, as long as the activity was in the home, in the herb or kitchen garden, or in the barn. Mary would master each skill with precision to perfection. In time, Mary would have to teach her own daughters what she herself was taught by her own mother.
[00:08:54] Mary Louise Bingham: Rebecca moved out of this residence about 1645, when she [00:09:00] married Frances Nurse. Then in 1652, William and Joanna moved the rest of the family more inland to Topsfield on a 40 acre farm, a definite move up for 18-year-old Mary and her family. Eventually, as William and his sons were granted and purchased land neighboring their parents, the entire Towne and Esty families owned the whole length of the seven mile drumlin running from east to west from what is now Essex County Co-op and the Fairgrounds all the way out to Beverly.
[00:09:37] Mary Louise Bingham: What is not certain, however, is whether or not Mary knew Isaac Esty while she was living in Salem or met him when they both lived in Topsfield. The first time Isaac appeared in the court records was in 1652, where he acknowledged judgment to Edmund Botter at a court held at Salem on November [00:10:00] 30th, but this entry does not specify where Isaac was living at that time. Also, 18 years old was considered young for a woman to get married, so she probably was married when she was 20 or 21. And since the Topsfield records from its incorporation in 1650 to 1658 were lost in a house fire, we can't be certain when Mary and Isaac were married and exactly when their eldest child, Isaac Jr., was born. In fact, Isaac Jr. is not even mentioned in the Massachusetts Vital Records to the year 1849 for the town of Topsfield.
[00:10:42] Mary Louise Bingham: But we do know that Mary eventually moved just across the street from her parents after her marriage to Isaac. And we know that Isaac loved Mary, as he demonstrated in both words and action. He said in his petition to the General [00:11:00] Court after he reviewed his travel and jail expenses, as well as the cost to provide provisions for Mary in 1692, that his total expenditures for that year for that travel was 20 pounds. Isaac continued, and I quote, 'besides my sorrow and trouble of heart in being deprived of her after such a manner which this world can never make me any compensation for,' end quote. Today, that dollar value might be about $2,070. Again, this dollar amount certainly does not include the trauma experienced by Isaac himself, his and Mary's children, and their grandchildren. Isaac traveled two times a week for five months, without fail, to bring provisions to Mary. These were long journeys, and Mary spent time in [00:12:00] three jails. The round trip from his home to the Salem jail was 14 miles. The round trip to the Ipswich jail was 14 miles. The round trip to the Boston jail was 44 miles. So this clearly demonstrated that Isaac was a devoted and loving husband to Mary and she a devoted wife to him.
[00:12:26] Sarah Jack: Forty four miles was a long way to travel in those days. Even traveling by horseback, you'd be hard pressed to complete the trip without overnighting somewhere, and he would have had all his work at home waiting for him.
[00:12:41] Josh Hutchinson: And Isaac Sr. wouldn't have been the only one in the family to be affected by this. As he was away, his adult children would have been helping tend to chores on his farm, therefore leaving their own families [00:13:00] and spending more time away than they would have, working extra hours, because they still had to work full time in their own professions and working their own farms and then go off and tend to their parents' farm.
[00:13:17] Sarah Jack: And they were used to seeing their mother there if they were visiting. If they were there before this, they would have gotten to spend time with her.
[00:13:26] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, there was always that empty seat at the table.
[00:13:31] Mary Louise Bingham: Mary and Isaac had nine children who lived into adulthood. At least two of her sons were active in town affairs as surveyors, constables, and bricklayers. Isaac Jr. learned the trade of cooper, presumably from his father.
[00:13:49] Mary Louise Bingham: Both Mary and Isaac were members in full communion at the Topsfield Church before 1684. This meant that the community of believers believed that both [00:14:00] Mary and Isaac were God-fearing Christians and that they were going to heaven once they died. They were among the Elect who received communion once a month.
[00:14:09] Josh Hutchinson: And most colonists were not church members, though they were required to attend services.
[00:14:16] Sarah Jack: Before the Salem Witch Hunt, it was rare for a full church member to be accused of witchcraft.
[00:14:22] Josh Hutchinson: Even in Salem, most of the population was not full church members, so most of the people that accused were not full church members, but there were enough church members accused that it stood out.
[00:14:40] Josh Hutchinson: It's one of the contrasts between Salem and a regular witch trial, which only involved one or two suspects at a time. Those cases, generally, it was not church members.
[00:14:53] Mary Louise Bingham: Mary was also known to tell someone if they spoke out of turn and to be very careful what [00:15:00] they say. She was also described by both the jail keepers at the Salem and Ipswich locations as a model prisoner. So we might assume that Mary did what she was supposed to do, but stood in the truth, or in her truth all the while.
[00:15:20] Mary Louise Bingham: So how do we get from a woman who was totally accepted by her community to a woman accused of being in league with the devil? One reason could be that Mary's sisters, Rebecca and Sarah, were already in jail for the same crime, which increased the likelihood that Mary would also be charged at some point.
[00:15:41] Mary Louise Bingham: Reason two, John Putnam Jr., who is a cousin-in-law to Ann Putnam Sr., said later that he heard Ann Putnam Sr. say something about the Townes sister's mother, gossip also most likely heard by two of Mary's chief [00:16:00] accusers, Ann Putnam, Jr. and Mercy Lewis, who was the Putnam servant living with Thomas Putnam Jr. and Ann Putnam. And please remember, it was believed that witchcraft could be passed from mother to daughter.
[00:16:15] Josh Hutchinson: John Putnam Jr. testified that, 'I, the said John Putnam, had reported something which I had heard concerning the mother of Rebecca Nurse, Mary Esty, and Sarah Cloyce.'
[00:16:27] Sarah Jack: And Ann Putnam Sr. testified that, quote, 'Young John Putnam had said that it was no wonder they were witches for their mother was so before them.'
[00:16:37] Mary Louise Bingham: Sure enough, the warrant for Mary's arrest was issued or sworn out on April 21st, and her chief accusers were Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, and quote unquote 'others.' She would have been brought to Nathaniel Ingersoll's tavern until it was her turn for her pre-trial examination, when she would have walked down the [00:17:00] street to the meeting house. And the meeting house would have been packed on the inside, and people peering in the windows on the outside, making it very difficult to see. The atmosphere inside would have been incredibly noisy and disruptive. But Mary stood her ground against her accusers and the magistrates, even though they tried to bully her into a confession with leading questions such as, 'What do you say? Are you guilty? And, what have you done to these children?' Mary replied, 'I can say before Christ Jesus, I am free. I know nothing.' The magistrates then ask, 'how can you say that? You see that these tormented and accuse you. You know nothing'? Then Mary turned the tables and questioned the magistrates, 'would you have me accuse myself?' they reply, 'yes, if you were guilty.' Then they continue to badger her. 'How [00:18:00] far have you complied with Satan, whereby he takes this advantage against you?' Mary replied, 'Sir, I have never complied but prayed against him all my days. I have no compliance with Satan in this. What would you have me do?' And then they repeat, 'confess if you'd be guilty.' Mary doesn't waver, 'I will say it if it were my last time. I am clear.'
[00:18:28] Mary Louise Bingham: After Mary's pretrial examination was done, she was taken to the Salem jail and stayed there until possibly May 13th, when she may have been transferred to Boston. And this, we are not sure of because Margo Burns has stated that that particular document has a tear in it and it's missing one of the names. But we suppose that that's Mary Esty, because all of the others in Topsfield who the warrant went out [00:19:00] for that same day were all transferred to Boston at that time.
[00:19:03] Mary Louise Bingham: It seems that three of Mary's accusers changed their minds regarding her guilt, and she was released from prison on May 18th to the home of her son, Isaac. Her family must have been relieved, and the Nurse and Cloyce families must have received hope that maybe Rebecca and Sarah might be returned to their homes, as well.
[00:19:26] Mary Louise Bingham: So why not go home to her husband? One might surmise that Isaac, Sr. may not have been able to adequately nurse Mary back to health and since Isaac, Jr. only had his wife Abigail and their infant daughter at their house, he and Abigail may have been the best choice to care for Mary until she could return to her home. Sadly, that did not happen.
[00:19:52] Mary Louise Bingham: There were a lot of people in and out of John and Hannah Putnam, Jr. 's house on May 20th. The [00:20:00] reason? Because their servant, Mercy Lewis, who previously was a servant to John's cousin, Thomas Putnam, Jr., was violently sick in both mind and body. In fact, Samuel Abbey got wind of Mercy's condition, and he went to the Putnam household to see what was happening.
[00:20:20] Mary Louise Bingham: He saw Mercy in bed and unable to speak. Because John was not home, Hannah asked Samuel to retrieve Ann Putnam Jr. so that she could ID the specter who tormented Mercy. Samuel returned with Ann and Abigail Williams, and possibly Sarah Trask, who was along for the ride. So Ann and Abigail ID'd the specter as the quote unquote 'woman who was sent home the other day,' end quote.
[00:20:50] Mary Louise Bingham: The other specters were visiting as well, namely Anne Whitridge and John Willard. According to Ann and Abigail, they all seemed to be [00:21:00] attacking Mercy while she lay still and unable to speak. But that changed, and Mercy, when she was able to speak, begged God not to let the specters kill her. She further declared that Mary's specter would kill her by midnight, because Mercy remained steadfast in her belief that Mary was a witch, when the others basically cleared her.
[00:21:24] Mary Louise Bingham: Mary Walcott entered the scene at some point that same day and said Mary's specter told her that she would kill Mercy by midnight if she was able. So finally, Constable John Putnam returned home about 8 p. m. with his friend, Marshal George Herrick, as well as Benjamin Hutchinson.
[00:21:45] Josh Hutchinson: Benjamin Hutchinson was my ninth great granduncle, and this isn't the only time he stuck his nose in it. In fact, we'll have tales of some of his adventures in future episodes.
[00:21:56] Josh Hutchinson: And Mercy Lewis is my cousin. [00:22:00] So I'm related to so many of the characters in this episode. It's really personal to me and to see my relatives, Mercy Lewis and Benjamin Hutchinson being deployed almost against Mary Esty, my grandmother, is very weird to me to think about all my relatives fighting for life in such a way. We got Mercy and everybody, Benjamin Hutchinson, thinking that Mercy's going to die by midnight if they don't go and arrest Mary Esty, and just so tense for both sides. And I'm related to people on either side and that itself being related to the people who did the accusations, who made the arrests, that is a weighty [00:23:00] kind of ancestry, and the way I tried to use that to understand why accusations were made, and that helps to learn how we can stop witch hunts if we understand how they started in the first place, and having ancestors who accused gets me thinking about that a lot.
[00:23:28] Mary Louise Bingham: They seriously thought that Mary's specter would kill Mercy before midnight. Now the rush was on to apprehend Mary. Though John and Benjamin's travels for the next three hours or so are not recorded, George Herrick's travels are, and it's possible that they all may have traveled together. Anyhow, Herrick would have traveled south five miles to John Hathorne's house so that Hathorne could sign the complaint. Then [00:24:00] Herrick travels north 8 miles to Isaac Esty Jr. 's house. Isaac probably saw Herrick approach the house, gathered Mary, and swiftly brought her downstairs into the basement, which would have been a small root cellar at that time And she was probably crouched, most likely in a fetal position, by the cornerstone. Words were most likely exchanged between Isaac Jr. and Herrick. I cannot even let my mind and heart begin to imagine the gripping fear Mary experienced as she heard everything going on, then to hear those footsteps approach closer and closer until they find her and she is arrested yet again. And lore states that Herrick was not patient with those whom he arrested.
[00:24:54] Mary Louise Bingham: Then Herrick, with Mary, was required to travel nine miles south to [00:25:00] Beedle's Tavern in Salem. This must have been harrowing again for Mary. The men testified that they had returned to John Putnam, Jr. 's house by midnight only to discover Mercy was still not well, and she continued to have seizure like fits, complained of severe stomach issues until she fell asleep at dawn.
[00:25:22] Josh Hutchinson: When they put the time, the midnight deadline in here, it really gets very dramatic and intense. It's like watching a Hollywood thriller with that bomb ticking down and are they going to be able to defuse it in time?
[00:25:42] Sarah Jack: It's like a scene. It gives us the opportunity to see this commotion and this reaction and this fear and these men going after, hunting the witch. And I, personally, a lot of times I'm thinking of just that courtroom [00:26:00] and people riled up and, backing each other, but this is different.
[00:26:04] Josh Hutchinson: And it shows you the intensity of the fear of witchcraft that they're willing to travel all these miles at top speed trying to arrest her before the deadline so that Mercy's affliction would stop and she wouldn't be murdered. They think they're preventing a murder by doing this.
[00:26:30] Sarah Jack: Was John Hathorne asleep or was he waiting? He was probably asleep and they didn't mind waking him to stop the murder.
[00:26:39] Josh Hutchinson: It's a warrant getting issued to call the judge in the dead of the night and try and get a suspect apprehended or a site searched in a hurry. And This guy's dead asleep, passed out, who knows what condition he's in.[00:27:00]
[00:27:00] Sarah Jack: is recovering, presumably.
[00:27:04] Josh Hutchinson: Presumably that family doesn't know what's going on at the Putnam house, because they're all in bed for the night. And they're thinking she's a free woman and she's going to be okay. And then it gets pulled back. That's, gut wrenching. It's ripping your heart right out of you. Imagine what both of the Isaacs felt at that moment and the rest of the family.
[00:27:31] Josh Hutchinson: You think your wife and mother is in the clear and then she's just jerked away from you.
[00:27:39] Sarah Jack: And they know she's innocent. It's like a community betrayal to them.
[00:27:44] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it would be so easy just to be angry at basically half the community is lining up against them. So many powerful people, the Putnams being involved and getting [00:28:00] George Herrick out in the dark of night. He also, the marshal of Essex County, would he have been asleep? Was he still awake on duty somewhere?
[00:28:12] Josh Hutchinson: How did they get him over there to Salem Village so fast?
[00:28:17] Sarah Jack: Not one of these men said, hold up, let's discuss this in the morning, because there wasn't time.
[00:28:24] Josh Hutchinson: And they're just, yeah, because there's that midnight deadline, it's that ticking clock, just ticking down and they're desperate people at this time, willing to do basically anything. It's I picture, just horses zipping along rough trails and roads in the dark at night, people carrying lanterns or torches, maybe.
[00:28:54] Sarah Jack: And Mercy's suffering.
[00:28:56] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and Mercy the whole time is having this, these [00:29:00] seizures, these fits, and everybody around her is just gotta be so tense with worry. So everybody here is getting dragged through the emotional wringer this night. Nobody's winning this one.
[00:29:19] Josh Hutchinson: So arresting Mary Esty, maybe it saved Mercy Lewis's life in these people's minds, but it didn't stop her afflictions altogether. So what does that mean? What are the implications of that? Does it mean there are other people afflicting her, or is Mary Esty somehow still doing damage from jail?
[00:29:46] Sarah Jack: There would've been accused in the jail, right?
[00:29:48] Josh Hutchinson: There would have been other accused people in the jail.
[00:29:50] Sarah Jack: Yeah. So Mary arrives at the I can just imagine the wail, the wailings that could have happened, the gasping, [00:30:00] the shock, the disappointment, and the fear.
[00:30:04] Josh Hutchinson: Right.
[00:30:05] Sarah Jack: Big brother or Yeah, Big Brother. When the house is sequestered those, they're waiting to see who's gonna come to the sequester house. shocked who walks in. But this is not just somebody losing a game.
[00:30:22] Josh Hutchinson: I'm just thinking about the people who were in jail already. They get awoken in the middle of the night, they're curled up on their piles of straw and trying to sleep on the rough floors of the really dank dungeon. And they had woken up and they're in their half. Asleep state seeing Mary Esty come to them thinking, Oh, I was so hopeful when she got released that the rest of us would soon be released. And now she's back.
[00:30:59] Josh Hutchinson: [00:31:00] Totally stunned, totally caught off guard. Yeah. Just in shock, jaws dropped to the ground and just, still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. Am I seeing this? This is Mary Esty? Yeah. And I'd be crying my eyes out just thinking, I thought I might have a chance to get out of here like she did.
[00:31:22] Sarah Jack: Because nobody's been hanged at this point.
[00:31:25] Josh Hutchinson: No, this is still early. Nobody's been tried yet. But there've been people sitting in jail for two months by this point and just more and more people getting thrown in jail. And finally, there's a ray of hope for all the prisoners when Mary's freed that, oh, maybe, they're coming to their senses and this madness is going to end and then she's back.
[00:31:53] Sarah Jack: Absolutely. Because it's been several [00:32:00] people were hanged in the colonies.
[00:32:02] Josh Hutchinson: But the recent Goody Glover hanging in 1688, just three and a half years before this is unfolding would have still been,
[00:32:15] Josh Hutchinson: ,
[00:32:15] Josh Hutchinson: yeah. And that is tied to afflictions of children. And you're seeing that scenario play out but on this much larger scale. There's many more afflicted people, and they're pointing the finger at everybody. It doesn't matter your status or anything. They're coming after you.
[00:32:39] Sarah Jack: Those afflictions were affirmed by the authorities just a few years before.
[00:32:46] Josh Hutchinson: Cotton Mather himself had written his book, Memorable Providences, which featured the Goody Glover case and the so called possession or affliction of the [00:33:00] Goodwin children, the four children she was supposed to have tormented. And so that's fresh. People have read that book. They've heard that book being read. They've seen it around, they've heard sermons about witchcraft and everything, so it's all in their minds, and this is unfolding in real life, in their own lives.
[00:33:29] Sarah Jack: Right before their eyes.
[00:33:31] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's just shocking. I would have been so bewildered and befuddled by Mary's return, panic stations right there.
[00:33:46] Mary Louise Bingham: Since the records of her second pretrial examination do not exist, one can surmise that Mary was interrogated this time at Beedle's Tavern or at the Salem Town Meeting House. Either way, [00:34:00] Mary was sent to the Boston jail on May 23rd. Two days later, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyce were transferred to that same jail. This would be the last time that all three sisters were together and hopefully found some type of comfort in each other.
[00:34:20] Mary Louise Bingham: In a deposition offered against all three Towne sisters, and most likely used at both Rebecca and Mary's trial, was that of John Putnam Jr. and his wife, Hannah. He spoke of his own afflictions, from which he recovered, and the afflictions of his infant child, who died. John and Hannah described the affliction of their baby as similar to those afflictions suffered by those who accused Mary. John and Hannah were so frightened for their child's life they sent for his mother and, later, a doctor. His mother believed the child was bewitched, and the doctor could not offer relief. John [00:35:00] said that the baby died such a violent death, and I quote, 'being enough to pierce a stony heart,' end quote. However, he does not say who bewitched the child.
[00:35:15] Mary Louise Bingham: So the gossip of which John referred somehow morphed into Joanna Towne, Mary's mother, being accused as a witch about 22 years prior to 1692. After researching, I discovered that Joanna was never formally accused of being a witch.
[00:35:34] Mary Louise Bingham: While Mary was in jail, her sister in law, Mary Browning Towne, who was the wife of Edmond Towne, was summoned to appear in court with all of her children on September 7th. They don't show up. Mary Towne issued a statement September 8th that the entire family was too sick to appear in court. At this time, her daughter, Rebecca, was [00:36:00] continually falling down for no apparent reason.
[00:36:03] Mary Louise Bingham: A second summons was issued only for Mary and her daughter, Rebecca, to appear. The return for the summons does not exist, so one might assume that Mary doesn't show up again, and it turns out that her daughter, Rebecca, does accuse Sarah Cloyce of bewitchment. The fact that they don't show up for Mary's trial does not save Mary's life, but it may have helped to delay Sarah's trial and saved Sarah's life. You see, the indictment against Sarah, which involved her niece, was returned ignoramus, along with the other three indictments. Sarah Cloyce never stood trial.
[00:36:48] Mary Louise Bingham: On September 9th, Mary and Sarah offered three suggestions to the magistrates. Number one, judges should offer legal advice to the accused, who did not have legal [00:37:00] representation. Number two, testimony should be heard from the family of the accused, their neighbors, and their religious leaders. And number three, balance the testimony of the afflicted with legal evidence.
[00:37:16] Mary Louise Bingham: Furthermore, Mary's solo petition to the court, which was composed to save others from being hanged, though her date was already chosen, suggests that the magistrates examine the afflicted separately and try some of the people who confessed. Mary was confident that some of the confessors were actually innocent and believed that they were innocent. And they disguised the fact that they had nothing to do with witchcraft.
[00:37:45] Mary Louise Bingham: Mary was hanged on September 22nd, 1692. Some of the family members start to petition to lift the stain from their family name in 1703. Isaac Esty, [00:38:00] Sr. and Jr., as well as Mary's daughter, Sarah Gill. And the same thing happened in 1709 and was signed by Isaac Esty and John Nurse, among others, who had other family members that were hanged. And then, of course, Isaac Senior's petition, spoken of earlier in 1710. October 17th, 1711, was Mary's reversal of attainder. Isaac had possibly passed away. His death date is not recorded, and Jacob is a subscriber for the Esty family. They were awarded the 20 pounds, and it was equally divided amongst their surviving children, who were Isaac Esty Jr., Joseph Esty, John Esty, Benjamin Esty, Jacob Esty, Joshua Esty, Sarah Gill, and Hannah Abbott.
[00:38:59] Sarah Jack: [00:39:00] We would like to close this segment with a reading of a petition Mary Esty submitted to the governor, judges, and ministers.
[00:39:06] Josh Hutchinson: The humble petition of Mary Esty unto His Excellencies Sir William Phipps, to the Honored Judge and Bench now sitting in Judicature in Salem, and the Reverend Ministers humbly showeth that whereas your poor and humble petitioner, being condemned to die, do humbly beg of you to take it into your judicious and pious considerations, that your poor and humble petitioner, knowing my own innocency, blessed be the Lord for it, and seeing plainly the wiles and subtlety of my accusers, I myself cannot but judge charitably of others that are going the same way of myself if the Lord steps not mightily in. I was confined a whole month upon the same account that I am condemned now for, and then cleared by the same afflicted persons, as some of your honors know. And in two days time, I [00:40:00] was cried out upon by them and have been confined, and now am condemned to die. The Lord above knows my innocency then, and likewise does now, as of the great day will be known to men and angels.
[00:40:14] Sarah Jack: I petition to your honors not for my own life, for I know I must die, and my appointed time is set. But the Lord, he knows it is that if it be possible, no more innocent blood may be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. I question not, but your honors does to the utmost of your powers in the discovery and detecting of witchcraft and witches, and would not be guilty of innocent blood for the world. But by my own innocency, I know you are in the wrong way. The Lord in His infinite mercy direct you in this great work if it be his blessed will that no more innocent blood be shed. I would humbly beg of you that your honors would be pleased to examine these afflicted persons strictly and keep them apart sometime, and likewise to try some of these [00:41:00] confessing witches, I being confident, there are several of them has belied themselves and others, as will appear, if not in this world, I am sure in the world to come, whither I am now a going, and I question not but you'll see an alteration of these things.
[00:41:15] Josh Hutchinson: ThEy say, myself and others, having made a league with the devil, we cannot confess. I know, and the Lord knows, as will shortly appear, they belie me, and so I question not but they do others. The Lord above, who is the searcher of all hearts, knows that, as I shall answer it at the tribunal seat, that I know not the least thing of witchcraft, therefore I cannot, I dare not, belie my own soul. I beg your honors not to deny this, my humble petition, from a poor, dying, innocent person, and I question not, but the Lord will give a blessing to your endeavors.

[00:41:56] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to stay tuned for a special announcement [00:42:00] following End Witch Hunts News.
[00:42:01] Sarah Jack: Discover your Towne family heritage with the Towne Family Association, dedicated to preserving the history of William Towne, Joanna Blessing, and their six children, including the three sisters from the Salem Witch Trials, Rebecca, Sarah, and Mary. Open to all interested in Towne family history, membership costs 22 for individuals and 25 for families annually. Take advantage of the special two year memberships at $40 for individuals and $44 for families. Join the community on Facebook in the Towne Cousins Facebook group to connect with over 2,000 other Towne family descendants. Embrace your roots. The Towne Family Association gets together every year for a reunion. In 2024, it will be in Salt Lake City, Utah. Find out more, visit the Facebook group Towne Cousins today.
[00:42:52] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts urges collective action to end witch hunting practices worldwide.
[00:42:57] Sarah Jack: At End Witch Hunts, we firmly believe in the power of [00:43:00] collective action to bring about positive change. In alignment with our mission, we proudly support the International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices. Explore the impactful work of this global network and its affiliated advocacy organizations at theinternationalnetwork.org. Take a moment to visit their website, where you can scroll to the bottom of the homepage and subscribe to receive their latest news and updates. By staying informed and sharing what you learn in your daily conversations, you contribute to a deeper understanding of ongoing initiatives worldwide.
[00:43:35] Sarah Jack: Join us in actively participating in these crucial efforts. Our podcast episodes feature insightful conversations with experts deeply involved in the network. Hit play to gain valuable perspectives from Damon Leff, Leo Igwe, Govind Kelkar, Samantha Spence, Amit Anand, and Miranda Forsyth. By listening to their experiences, you'll not only broaden your knowledge but also become a part of the movement against witch hunts. [00:44:00] Together, let's make a difference.
[00:44:02] Sarah Jack: Are you a part of the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project? It is seeking exoneration for wrongfully convicted individuals in Boston's witch trials. We aim to secure formal apologies for all formerly accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts. Give your support by signing and sharing the petition at change.org/witchtrials. If you're in Massachusetts, engage your representatives in proposing the amendment. And if you're a voting member of the Massachusetts General Court, lead or collaborate on this amendment effort. Reach out to us for support. Let's unite to close this chapter of American history. Take action now.
[00:44:38] Sarah Jack: Thank you for supporting our projects by listening to and sharing our podcast episodes. If you'd like to further contribute, please consider a financial contribution. Your financial support empowers us to continue our education and advocacy efforts. During this holiday season, we invite you to keep End Witch Hunts in mind when considering your charitable gifts. We have [00:45:00] donate buttons on our websites. Your gift is tax deductible. Your support is instrumental in driving positive change and bringing an end to the dark history of witch hunting practices. For more information and to contribute, visit endwitchhunt.org.
[00:45:16] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:45:17] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:45:19] Josh Hutchinson: now we have our special important announcement.
[00:45:25] Josh Hutchinson: Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast will be renamed Witch Hunt and the change will take effect January 1st, 2024 when the ball drops in New York City.
[00:45:41] Sarah Jack: Josh and I will continue to host the show with important contributions from Mary.
[00:45:46] Josh Hutchinson: Witch Hunt will feature interviews with leading scholars and advocates.
[00:45:50] Sarah Jack: Topics will include past witch trials, modern extrajudicial witch hunts, and everything in between.
[00:45:58] Josh Hutchinson: We will also continue [00:46:00] to create 101 episodes about specific events, regions, and topics.
[00:46:05] Sarah Jack: As well as bonus episodes focused on representations of witches and witch hunts in popular culture.
[00:46:12] Josh Hutchinson: So thank you for continuing to listen to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast, and for listening to Witch Hunt next year.
[00:46:21] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:46:23] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:46:26] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:46:29] Josh Hutchinson: Which will become aboutwitchhunts.com/ January 1st. And remember to tell your friends about Witch Hunt, coming January 1st, and stay tuned for more great episodes of Thou Shalt Not Suffer all through December.
[00:46:46] Sarah Jack: Thou Shalt Not Suffer and Witch Hunt are presented by End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:46:54] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

November 30, 2023

I Be a Witch: A Film about Salem Witch Trial Victim Ann Foster

Petition to recognize those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts
List of those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts

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Show Notes

Meet Lori Prescott Hansen and Matthew C. S. Julander writer and co-director of the upcoming film I Be a Witch. The film tells the story of Lori’s ancestor, Salem witch trial victim Ann Foster of Andover Massachusetts. Ann’s story is told through visions and memories that Ann is experiencing during her last days in the Salem jail. Lori and Matthew reflect together on the making of the movie and the impactful lessons the history offers.

I Be a Witch Facebook Page

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Transcript

[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast, the show that asks why we hunt witches and how we can stop hunting witches. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:19] Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack, and today we speak with Lori Prescott Hansen and Matthew C. S. Julander about their film, I Be a Witch.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: The film tells the stories of Lori's ancestor, Salem Witch Trial victim Ann Foster of Andover. Based on actual events, Ann's story is told through visions and memories Ann is experiencing during her last days in the Salem jail.
[00:00:43] Sarah Jack: Welcome Lori Prescott Hansen, Salem Witch Trial descendant, writer, and actress, and I Be a Witch film director, Matthew C. S. Julander.
[00:00:52] Lori Prescott Hansen: I'm Lori Prescott Hanson. I always throw in the Prescott, because I live in a small town, and there's five Lori Hansons just here. My husband and I have been theater artists for a long time. We actually met in a production of King Lear. And we began to do professional storytelling quite a while ago. And we've been doing that ever since. He taught theater at the university here for 20 years, and I did a lot of directing of shows here and here in small town, Idaho as far as being a storyteller goes, there's not a lot of venues unless you create them yourself. And so that's what led me along the path of doing one person shows. And this one about Ann is the second one I've done. And so that's my background. Matthew, take it away.
[00:01:47] Matthew C. S. Julander: So I'm in Utah. I went to film school at Brigham Young University and then zapped off to Los Angeles for close to 20 years of unsuccessful attempts to make my way into the film industry in earnest. So I worked on a few shows and made some corporate videos and just bounced around.
And then eventually decided to move back to Utah. And at which point I met Sherry Julander, who I then married and she is the lady who co directed our movie. And also adapted the screenplay from Lori's one-woman show. And so the story goes that I don't know, two years ago Sherry comes to me and says, 'Hey, I have some friends who are putting on a one woman show up in Idaho,' so we drove for six hours and like about hour one of the drive, she said, Oh, by the way, it's a middle aged woman doing a one woman show. And she was worried that I was going to hate the whole thing and want to turn
[00:02:43] Lori Prescott Hansen: it under wraps.
[00:02:44] Matthew C. S. Julander: But so she waited until we got far enough along that I was stuck. So we went up and watched it, and the story is really compelling. I was just struck. And so I, as soon as the lights came up, I turned to Sherry and said, we, do you want to try and make a short film out of this? And thus was hatched our little plot here. What started as something that was going to be a 25 to 30 minute movie has ballooned up to a short feature length movie. And now we're on your podcast.
[00:03:16] Lori Prescott Hansen: Sherry was actually a former student of my husband's. And so we had worked together. I've done plays with her in the past. And we had talked years ago about wanting to do something around Salem just because we've both always been intrigued by the subject. Then I found out later my ancestor was actually one of the accused women, and Sherry said that name sounds so familiar and she went back and checked her personal history and lo and behold we are both descendants of Ann Foster. We felt a real a real bond and a real kinship doing that. And something that we meandered around years ago finally became a reality.
[00:03:58] Josh Hutchinson: Wow. What's it like to find out that your friend is also your cousin?
[00:04:03] Lori Prescott Hansen: It couldn't have happened to a nicer person. I love her. I love her to death. And she is an amazing actor as well as screenwriter, and she and Matthew are a force together to be reckoned with, as far as film production. We're really excited that they joined on.
[00:04:23] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Sarah and I also have a common Salem ancestor. We started doing this show, and then found out that we're cousins.
[00:04:31] Lori Prescott Hansen: Really?
[00:04:33] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we're both from Mary Esty.
[00:04:36] Lori Prescott Hansen: Oh, wow.
[00:04:38] Josh Hutchinson: yes.
[00:04:39] Lori Prescott Hansen: Yeah. You hear all these names and there's so many stories. So many stories. Yeah.
[00:04:48] Sarah Jack: Do you wanna tell us about Ann Foster's story?
[00:04:52] Lori Prescott Hansen: My son called me one day. He's known as a storyteller. I've always been drawn to crone figures, to wise women, to that sort of thing. And jokingly have always said I'm part witch. But he called me one day and said, "did you know that you are related to an accused witch of Salem?" And it just floored me. And I, cause I had no idea. So I went back and he showed me the timeline, the link from grandmother to grandmother. And she's my 11th great grandmother. And so I began to just read into her life, and the more I read, the more compelled I was and because her story is so unique and uniquely tragic, because of the elements in her life that it just it just pulled me in, and I wanted to do something about and for this woman that I felt a real kinship to. So that's the kernel of the beginning of it for me and my appeal to Ann, because like I say, even if she weren't a relation, her story is so compelling, because it's very unique in its own right. Go for it, Matthew.
What was it about Ann that sucked you in as a non relation?
[00:06:14] Matthew C. S. Julander: Something that I found striking about this whole process is how much of just the dialogue in our movie is pulled straight from like court reports. This is apparently what, at least whoever was writing it down, got, is the exact things that people were saying. And so that makes it very it does make it very personal.
And you're saying, 'oh my gosh, this isn't just a story, this isn't the Avengers, this is like a real person that all this stuff happened to.' So as we set about to make a movie of it, in large part we just followed what we saw Lori when she put on the one woman show, but we, we treated it with a certain degree of gravity or reverence or care, because we wanted to keep it a true story. We wanted to keep it true to what, as far as we can tell, Ann Foster might've really felt. I have a feeling that Lori might be, I don't know, a feistier person than Ann was? Because I'm told that at the time of, yeah, maybe Ann was feistier in her younger years, but at the time of her incarceration, she'd gotten on in years and she was quite feeble.
[00:07:20] Lori Prescott Hansen: No one will ever accuse me of being feeble.
[00:07:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: But on the other hand, just from the life that she led and some of the things that she did that were contrary to what would have been culturally accepted, especially since being culturally accepted was, I think it was a much bigger deal for the Puritans in New England. I think she probably was a feisty lady. She probably was a little bit of a rebellious lady. And maybe she was forced to be that way just because she married a guy who was way too old for her and defied some expectations.
So in any case, it was really interesting being able to look into the life of this very real person and have some of the words that she came up with when she was in the trial, when she was giving her confession and just trying to not just see through that window, but try and open that window up to other people so they could see into it as well.
[00:08:14] Josh Hutchinson: And so this began as a solo project, a one person play, and then evolved from there. What can you tell us about the one woman play?
[00:08:27] Lori Prescott Hansen: When I began writing this whole thing, I began it through a storytelling approach. I was going to tell her story third person. And I actually wrote it out, and I began reading it to my husband, and I realized it was so boring, and it sounded like a book report. And so I played around with combinations of narration and then character, and that became really singsongy back and forth and he finally said one day, you just need to write it as a play. And so I did. I take on other voices throughout the script but not a lot. It's mostly her own voice, her own words. My creation, but it's through her voice. And yeah, it was really well received where I've done it. I've only really done it a handful of times.
But the thing that really turned the corner for me on writing it was my husband again, who is also a playwright, said to me one day, 'you're writing it like you're writing about a woman who knows she's going to die. And he said, that's not interesting. You should be writing about a woman who is fighting to live.' And that was like a huge light bulb moment for me, and I realized he was exactly right, and that's when the writing really began to flow.
And like I say, it was really well received. I was really very proud of it. When Sherry and Matthew came up and saw it and they talked to us about it directly after the show, honestly, I feel such a, not ownership, but such a, this is my thing. And I was really afraid to turn what I had envisioned and done over to someone else. And if it hadn't been that it was Matthew and Sherry, I may never have said, 'okay, you can take this and do it you want with it.' But I did. And I couldn't have been more happy.
They were true to Ann. They were true to her story. They were true to how I envisioned the show, and they only heightened it with a full cast and fleshed out dialogue and lots of scenes in the jail. And anyway, so that was the metamorphosis of it for me.
[00:10:57] Sarah Jack: Is there anything about her history, the story, that you want to share today?
[00:11:03] Matthew C. S. Julander: I can give you like a slight overview of what what the story is about. So Ann Foster was in Andover. She was not among the first people that were accused or tried for witchcraft. Her story started because there was a man in her town. So Joseph Ballard's wife was ill and he thought maybe it was witchcraft. He had heard about all these people getting accused and convicted of witchcraft in Salem, so he went down to Salem and grabbed some of the teenagers who had been accusing people and brought them back up to Andover.
And they spotted Ann Foster and accused her of being a witch. And so then she was dragged in and eventually tried, convicted, and set up in the the Salem jail. We basically tell that story and something that's interesting. This is maybe not so much about Ann's story, but it's more about how this, the way that we tell the story is like structured.
When Lori wrote this script, she wasn't following like the formulaic stuff that they use for say, like writing screenplays. Whereas the story that we told it's almost as if the inciting moment happens before the story starts. And it happens like in a flashback because the whole story is told from Ann Foster's perspective in the Salem jail. And the question that we're trying to put into the minds of the audience right out of the gate is, 'okay how did she get here? What happened? How did this madness ensue?'
And then she just tells the whole story. She goes back to the whole Salem witch like craziness, to her earlier life. She talks about how she was married to a man who was quite a bit older than she was. She talked about her children. She talks about something that happens, one of the terrible events that happens to one of her children, which maybe I don't want to reveal yet, because you have to watch the movie. All these things could have had an influence on why the people of the time thought, 'oh, yeah, that makes sense that Ann Foster would be a witch.'
[00:13:00] Lori Prescott Hansen: Because when you're already the other, you're a sitting duck.
[00:13:03] Matthew C. S. Julander: She was already like an easy target for the accusations. I think that everybody who does a Salem witch trial story or tries to tell the story, the central question is, 'how did this happen?' It's always, 'how did this happen? How did these people get to the point where they're actually executed people for a thing that nowadays we see is just like being a fiction, just completely made up?
And so we tried to get in there, too. And because we have Ann's personal story. And some of the things that she said, we have some of her words, we can say, okay, this is at least the perspective of one person, how she was able to, how she sees it ,why she was dragged into it.
One of the striking things for me is that Ann Foster herself, in our dialogue, she says, 'Oh, I believe there's witches. I'd just be not one of them.' That's not the exact quote, but it's close. So it's oh yeah, everybody believed that it was real. But everyone also knew about I'm not one, though.
We even got into the idea that some people maybe started toying with the idea that, 'am I a witch? Maybe I've had bad thoughts about this person or that person. Maybe I projected some evil onto that person. Maybe that's some witchcraft. Maybe I'm somehow involved.' And that's the sort of thing that allowed it to roll.
[00:14:21] Lori Prescott Hansen: That's one Ann's lines in it is, 'can one be a witch and not know it?' Which is an interesting question. The most poignant question to me that we raise in the script is a line of Ann's. She's in jail. She's been there quite a long time. And she says, 'so what do you do with a broken, old witch?' No one's paying for her to get out, whether they could or chose not to, we really don't know. She's there for the duration until she dies
[00:14:52] Matthew C. S. Julander: Spoiler alert.
[00:14:54] Lori Prescott Hansen: So what do you do with people like this that are the throwaways? Even though your sentence has been stayed, you're still a convicted witch. That's probably the most poignant question to me in the film is 'what do you do with a broken, old witch?'
[00:15:12] Matthew C. S. Julander: And it's maybe not a question that we answer in great detail. It's something that the audience is left to think about for themselves. Because since we stay in Ann's, in her perspective, in her mind the whole time, it's yeah, we don't know why her son Andrew never showed up to pay the jailer's fees.
[00:15:30] Lori Prescott Hansen: Abraham is the one that paid to take her body. They paid to retrieve her body. They did not pay to have, you had to pay for everything. You had to pay for your straw. You had to pay for your chains. You had to pay for your food or water, anything. And we don't know if they didn't have the money to pay her way out or whether they chose not to. We know they did not sign the petition that the town raised when everyone had decided enough was enough. Whether they didn't want to bring more attention to her story or there's just so many questions that we don't have answers to.
[00:16:07] Matthew C. S. Julander: So we asked the questions.
[00:16:09] Lori Prescott Hansen: We asked the questions, and we did take a bit of a slant on things, because we realized if we're going to do this project, we have to make choices. We can't just have the whole thing be ambivalent. We have to make some choices. I hope they were the right ones, but we'll see.
[00:16:28] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I think the creative piece of telling the story is an essential part. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys have put together.
[00:16:38] Matthew C. S. Julander: So are we!
[00:16:40] Lori Prescott Hansen: Me too.
We actually just did our first submission of it.
[00:16:45] Matthew C. S. Julander: That's a rough cut.
[00:16:47] Lori Prescott Hansen: It's this close to being done, but we were able to slip it in on a deadline that was important to us. Yeah, it's very close. We actually, the four of us traveled three weeks ago? Four weeks ago? We actually flew out to Andover and Salem and met with some people out there and particularly in Andover we met with a woman that works at the North Church, which is the congregation Ann would have been part of. We met with the caretaker of the cemetery on the South side of Andover.
We met with Jill Christiansen from the Salem Witch Museum, and she was very, very helpful and very kind. And in fact, all of them were, and it just, we really hope to be able to do a screening in, I would really prefer Andover to Salem, because that's where it began, and that's where it would be full circle. So anyway, we've talked to a few people and nothing's set in stone, but we're excited, excited.
[00:17:58] Josh Hutchinson: A lot of people don't realize the involvement of Andover, even though Andover had more accused than Salem did.
[00:18:10] Lori Prescott Hansen: And Martha Carrier was from Andover. It's almost treated as an afterthought in some ways to Salem, and I guess that's probably because of the hype.
And I think there are many people in Andover that feel those strong, still connections to their history.
[00:18:30] Matthew C. S. Julander: It's striking as we went to the graveyard at the South church in Andover and then the other, the cemetery it's up closer to the North Church. When we went to those places and we looked at gravestones, I was struck that very often the people who were buried in, the official graveyard, the official cemetery, are what I would now consider the villains of this story, lots of the judges, but none of the people who were accused of witchcraft and then who would not cop to it.
The ones who would never give up and say yes, I'm a witch. The ones who actually maintain their integrity, those are the ones that don't get to be buried there. And, it's not even sure where many of them any of them, are buried. Because even the ones that were officially hanged, it's they have a, there's a Walgreens. Up the street from, that's where the which memorial is it?
[00:19:23] Josh Hutchinson: That's the Proctor's Ledge,
[00:19:25] Matthew C. S. Julander: the proctor's ledge. So they have a sense of, we think they must be buried here or here, but it's not really known.
[00:19:33] Sarah Jack: It's the exact situation in Connecticut with their victims and the, the founders that ran the witch trials and those kind of things. Their statues are there honoring the history, the impact of their history. And we worked on an exoneration project for the Connecticut victims last year, and the state did pass a bill apologizing to the 34 indicted, 11 hanged.
Now we're working on. State memorial for the victims and one of the things that we're up against is making room for these accused because there's already, all the space is taken by those who have already been buried and honored and,
[00:20:22] Josh Hutchinson: in a lot of cases are the accusers.
[00:20:24] Sarah Jack: They are the accusers. When you started talking about that, I'm like, oh my goodness, there's some other ancient burial grounds in New England, it's the same situation.
[00:20:32] Lori Prescott Hansen: And just following your Facebook posts and that, I realized that the Connecticut thing has been a passion project for you a labor of love, and,
[00:20:43] Sarah Jack: Yeah. It was interesting because there were local Connecticut residents and advocates and descendants who, for many years, have tried to get an acknowledgment. And then last year when North Andover was working on Elizabeth Johnson Jr. 's exoneration. It was happening during the 375th anniversary of the hanging of Alice Young who was the first hanged in Connecticut and it just seemed so unfair that nobody knows her name. She has not been apologized to, and it really just fired a bunch of us up and everything, it was just the right timing. The politicians there were ready to make an attempt, and so this project, which we've talked quite a bit about in several episodes, it was a passion, and we all came together and found a route to that apology.
[00:21:37] Lori Prescott Hansen: Wow.
[00:21:39] Sarah Jack: But now they need a memorial. There's a few individual bricks in some of the local towns honoring some specific victims, but there's nothing. Nothing, there's no monument for the history, so that's what's next. We'll see how that unfolds.
[00:21:59] Lori Prescott Hansen: Yeah. Because people don't even really think of Connecticut. It's that Salem story, no, it was all over. Yeah. Connecticut was earlier than Salem and Massachusetts, wasn't it?
[00:22:13] Josh Hutchinson: It, yes, it began much earlier, started in 1647, so 45 years before. But Andover also, there's not, a specific site to go to in Andover to remember the victims from there. And there were, what was it? 45 or 48 people accused from Andover? Very high number. And there's nothing there, there's no plaque, there's no statue, there's no wall or benches or
[00:22:52] Matthew C. S. Julander: Something that when we set out to make this movie, making movies can be a pretty A large undertaking. Although this movie was quite small by comparison to some. We shot the entire thing in a 20 by 30 garage. So even though it is a period piece, we built a couple of sets.
So we have a prison set that is meant to look very realistic, and we had a Foster home set that ended up looking very realistic over the course of the shoot. The first scenes that we did in that, we only had two walls of that set, but later on, we built out the whole thing. In any Case it takes over your life for a while, because you end up realizing, oh, it's I'm building a house. There's something where you have to decide that you want to go through all the trouble, right? You have to tell yourself this is worth it. And so as we've been talking about the people who are past and the people who went through this incredibly unjust situation, and some of them lost their lives I, I was thinking, eh, whether you believe in an afterlife or not, I would think that those people, maybe it doesn't matter what we think of them now, right?
If you don't believe in an afterlife, then clearly they don't care. If you do believe in an afterlife, they might be busy with something else. And so it's maybe not so much for them that we do these memorials and that we try to try to set things right. It might be more for us. And so that's the thought that I had when we were making this film is, 'I want this film to be something that shows how that happened back then.'
In that sense, that those who don't learn from history will repeat it. If you do learn from history, hopefully you grow. And yeah. As we were making the film, I was always trying to think, okay, how is this going to affect people? How can we show people something that hopefully makes them into better people?
And the crazy thing about the whole witchcraft trial fervor that ran across Europe and then America in many cases, it wasn't as if there was some ulterior motive. But a lot of times it was just, I don't know, the arrogance of the judges. The arrogance of the people in their religion thinking that they were infallible. It was just, things got out of hand, and people's emotions were driven to a certain direction and there was no one to say, 'whoa, let's calm down. Let's think about this.' And so it seems like that is an informative lesson for us right now. And maybe always, everybody always likes to say, 'Oh, in our time, things are so tough.' And it's so similar to now. And you could say that about now, you could say that about probably any epic in the Earth's history as well.
In any case, it seems like it's a useful story for us to look at and say, 'Hey, do I have any prejudices? Do I have any arrogance? Do I have any beliefs that are untested that I'm so sure about that I would do something that might turn out to be reprehensible?' And I hopefully the movie and these stories, and even when we talk about the monuments and trying to call attention to it, so like Alice Young that nobody's ever heard of. If we can call attention to these people and say, 'look, these stories all happened,' hopefully that'll affect us now and say, 'okay I don't want to create another story for somebody 375 years from now to look back at and go,'
[00:26:06] Josh Hutchinson: And Ann Foster's story is so compelling because of so many reasons. You alluded to earlier something that happens to one of her daughters before the trials. And then there are things that happen to her family during the trials.
[00:26:27] Lori Prescott Hansen: Ann, humble, meek, fragile, old Ann was very well known, because of her family and what had happened in it. Everyone knew Ann Foster's history. She was very ripe for the picking. Yeah.
[00:26:45] Matthew C. S. Julander: I think that's actually an interesting thing about the story. So maybe most people's entrance into their understanding of the Salem Witch Trials is the Crucible. That seems to be the most famous story that's been told. But the Crucible sets it portrays John Proctor and is it Elizabeth Proctor? They're portrayed as having John had an affair, right? He's portrayed as having this sin that he committed.
Ann is interesting in that there's really no sin for her, but there is this circle of bad things that have happened, things that, okay, your son in law is a really bad guy though and maybe there's a little impropriety with this and maybe like your granddaughter is a bit of a mess. She's not being very Puritan. There was things that made it look like she could be looked at as being bad somehow.
I think that's a really important thing to look at in the story. If I were to tell another story from the witch trials, I maybe would want to do one about Rebecca Nurse, because she's theoretically like the perfect Puritan, just angelic in every way.
But the idea that I'm going at is some of these people who got roped up in this, they really were unimpeachable. I guess you can't say they were above reproach. They would probably, had their, personal interactions where they might get mad at somebody or do something that people would remember and think of them as having been sinful or wicked or something.
They really were just good people, just fairly honest, fairly good. People like hopefully you and me.
[00:28:10] Lori Prescott Hansen: And John Proctor himself, the same thing that, historically there was not an affair or anything like that. That was Arthur Miller's slant on it that pulled us all in. John Proctor was unique in that he didn't buy it, and he decided he was going to beat the witchcraft out of, was there, was it Mary Warren? And because he didn't go along with it, he was pegged.
The other thing that was interesting about Ann, too, with Joseph Ballard is that was the first time anyone had gone to Salem and literally recruited these girls and brought them back to Andover. And then they singled out Ann, who they already were aware of who she was, everyone was, but that was interesting to me, the lengths that he went to to find a witch, to literally go recruit the girls and bring them up to Andover from Salem.
[00:29:08] Josh Hutchinson: That was a major turning point in the course of the witch hunt, bringing them to Andover, starting that whole, it just snowballed after that, Andover, you had Martha Carrier accused previously to that, but it was limited to her.
And then that just opened the floodgates, and they had the mass touch test where they brought everybody in and had the afflicted people touch them to see if that cured them.
The touch test, basically the belief was that when a witch used their magic against their victim they're transferring this effluvia, this kind of substance from the witch to the victim, and then on contact, the substance would go back from the victim into the witch.
[00:30:09] Lori Prescott Hansen: A literal substance.
[00:30:11] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, a literal substance that they could...
Yeah, so they could beam at you through the evil eye
or they could get you with it, an image of you, there was, there were poppets and image magic and spells and curses. So they had a few ways to strike at you. But there were ways to cure. You just had to get really close to the person you thought had bewitched you.
[00:30:40] Matthew C. S. Julander: So what the part about it that was backwards is they would, they would blindfold or somehow make it so that the witch was unaware of who was touching them, but they would let the person, the afflicted, still be able to see. So when they did these touch tests, the afflicted person would come in, they'd know exactly who they were touching, so if they like, oh, it's Ann Foster is the one we're accusing. When I touch Ann Foster, I'm suddenly going to not be afflicted anymore, right? So they could clearly fake it. Whereas, Ann Foster didn't know who was touching her, right? So the idea was, 'we don't trust the witches, so we have to blindfold them. But clearly our accusers are perfectly honest, good people, so we don't have to blindfold them.'
And that's just you guys are very bad at interrogation. It never occurred to you that maybe the accusers are not being honest. If we're doing the test, either they're being honest or they're, it's one of the possibilities that we should be testing for. And we can, we just blindfold everybody.
[00:31:30] Josh Hutchinson: Or even if they truly believed that the person was bewitching them, they would behave differently around the person. They buy into this stuff, they first, they see that person, they fall into one of their fits, then they touch the person believing that's going to cure them, and the fit suddenly stops.
[00:31:54] Lori Prescott Hansen: We have tried with the film to be as accurate as we know and as we can be. We all felt, I think, a real sense of obligation to do that. We want it to be true to her story. It's sensational enough on its own. We didn't need to hype it up even more than her story already is. To me, it may be the most compelling of that era, her story, because of so much, but I'm also biased.
[00:32:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: We've talked about how in Andover, it was like a much bigger problem. It was, it's really where it got it blew up more. I said something that maybe for the listeners, it'd be nice to clarify. I said maybe it was because of Ann. So Ann Foster apparently is the first one to have ever said that there were 300 some odd. 307, oddly specific, but maybe she knew that would, made the story sound more authentic. She said there were some 307 witches in our county and nobody had ever put a big number on it like that. And so maybe when she said that, everybody was like, and so then the authorities are like, 'okay buckle on your swords, boys. We got to go pick up some more people,' or something like that.
[00:33:06] Josh Hutchinson: That's also something that makes her confession really interesting, and it is a big turning point, again, in the witch hunt, because, early on, Tituba says there's nine witches, so they're looking for nine people, but then the number just keeps growing, and then it leaps with Ann Foster to this 300 some people, and yeah, they really were looking under every stone, trying to find a witch in Andover.
[00:33:40] Lori Prescott Hansen: Was she the first one, I can't remember, was she the first one in her confession that talked about flying on a stick, or had someone done that before her?
[00:33:49] Josh Hutchinson: Tituba had talked about it.
[00:33:54] Lori Prescott Hansen: and even that she had cheese in her pocket, which I thought was not funny, but like that's really specific. And you do get the idea, too, the question is raised, she was old, she was feeble, she was frail. Did she start to believe these things? Was her mind beginning to wander? Was she confessing to save herself and members of her family, to take it on herself? We don't know all those things, but they're all really compelling questions.
[00:34:27] Josh Hutchinson: And we do know that people, as you mentioned earlier, were thinking, 'could I be a witch and not know it?' Was a theme that was going through the Andover Confessions,
[00:34:41] Lori Prescott Hansen: Right.
[00:34:42] Josh Hutchinson: People questioning themselves, could I have committed some sin that turned me over to the devil?
And could I unwittingly be causing these people harm?
Yeah, people were truly confused about it.
[00:34:59] Lori Prescott Hansen: It's interesting too, to me, that Ann called out Martha Carrier. She wasn't guiltless in accusing others. In her mind, Martha Carrier is already in prison, so I'm not doing any additional harm. You could spend years delving into all of this and never get to complete answers.
[00:35:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: I feel like one of the things when we're trying to figure out how it all happened is this idea of like they had competing virtues. Like one of the virtues was you had to have faith and believe. And another virtue was you had to have integrity and be honest. And those were competing virtues in the sense that say with John Proctor, who thought that all the witch stuff was a bunch of hubbub. And Lori said he tried to beat it out of his servant. He's, ' I'll show you, say that you've sensed witches, whack whack, do you still sense witches? Nope!' For that, for Proctor to do that, it's like he's saying, 'okay, so witches, that's a bunch of nonsense,' but witches are in the Bible and witches are something that we all believe is part of, it's tied to the religion.
And so is John Proctor like showing a lack of faith and a lack of belief? That means John Proctor is not virtuous. But on the other hand, John Proctor went to his execution and wouldn't say that he was a witch. He would, he never I don't want to say admitted because that suggests that he actually was. He never copped to it, right?
And so in that sense, he had the other virtue of the integrity. So these people who were trying to say, 'maybe I am a witch. Can I be a witch and not know it?' That's their attempt to make those two competing virtues work together. I'm still going to believe, but I don't want to lie. It's a form of like cognitive dissonance for them, but like that's an interesting and I guess kind of awful way that they had to try to do the mental gymnastics to make it so they could keep all their virtues.
[00:36:52] Josh Hutchinson: That's a really good analysis. And there was so much going on in Andover contributing to the confessions. Really most of the people in Andover did ultimately confess, and they were being pressured by their own families to do so, because there was a rumor going around that if you confessed, you'd be spared.
[00:37:17] Lori Prescott Hansen: be forgiven. You were capable of being forgiven or of repenting.
[00:37:22] Josh Hutchinson: Unfortunately, they did end up convicting a number of people who confessed, but fortunately for them it was late enough in the game that they were never actually executed. But that rumor was going around. And then there was the whole, 'could I be one and not know it? Everybody's telling me I am a witch. If the magistrate is telling you you're a witch, and he's a reliable guy and trusted and looked up to, and maybe you start believing him instead of yourself.
[00:37:58] Lori Prescott Hansen: And if you look at that in terms of Ann, she had so much tragedy in her life that maybe this has happened because I am this and she's old and she's feeble and she's worn down and she's seen so much in her family that's just remarkable. I'm sure she was just, in some ways, just done.
[00:38:21] Matthew C. S. Julander: I do wonder how she came up with all the details that she came up with. Like the bird that came black and left white, or the dog, the stick, the cheese in the pockets. There were so many like interesting little tidbits. It's is it because she was in that kind of feeble place and her mind was just making things up now and she was in fever dream mode? Or was she like knowingly trying to protect her family and she's, this is the best way to do it. I've seen enough lying. I if she had, but I'm going to do details with the lies so they seem more.
[00:38:52] Lori Prescott Hansen: And the details of life that are given extra magical or whatever stories to explain them. Ann had a bad leg or a bad hip. She says it's because she fell off the stick. So anyway, just so many things that make it. It's interesting and sad and educational that, if we can learn the lessons that we ought to learn, we'd be better off for our own futures.
[00:39:23] Matthew C. S. Julander: Somebody was talking about how dense those forests are and imagine them without electric lighting, like how there'd be so little that you could see and how everything would be so close. There was the dangers of getting diseases. There was plenty to be afraid of that you couldn't see and wouldn't know was coming, right? And that seems like that also made it rife for people to work up in stories of things and to believe in things that maybe weren't there. It's a really strange place.
[00:39:53] Lori Prescott Hansen: New England is, it's to me a magical place. It's beautiful. It's picturesque. The houses are amazing. I love the styles and all that. I love the toll roads, but it's interesting that such a tragic thing could take place in such a beautiful place. And that's, that happens everywhere, it can happen anywhere. And it was the frontier, particularly Andover. It was the frontier.
[00:40:22] Josh Hutchinson: I've camped in the forest near Andover. There's a Harold Parker State Forest right there. And I spent about 10 days, I believe, in the woods right there. And even today, the woods are so thick that if you're out on one of those hiking trails, it doesn't take long to not have roads and sounds from roads and so just imagining back then, and coming from England where it's a little more crowded and there'd be some more lights to this very wilderness. It's so hauntingly frightening. You actually have wolves and bears and things that they don't have in England anymore. Yeah, it's just a spooky environment, but so beautiful.
[00:41:16] Lori Prescott Hansen: beautiful.
[00:41:18] Sarah Jack: At this stage with your project, what is it that you need from listeners, from supporters?
[00:41:25] Lori Prescott Hansen: We need viewers. Yeah. And exposure. Exposure. That's why we appreciate this podcast so much because it's huge. It's a huge benefit to us. So we need energy.
[00:41:39] Matthew C. S. Julander: We are going to try to put it into festivals, and as we do, we'll post about it on our Facebook page and on our website so that anybody who's interested in seeing the film can go see it. So one thing would be great for us is if you go search for I Be a Witch on Facebook and follow us there. Or you can go to ibeawitch. com, bookmark that, and go back to it. You can also go to ibeawitch. com and find your way to the Facebook group from there.
And that way, anybody who's interested in the film can keep track of, like, where it ends up, so where they can see it. And that, then, as we start, rolling it out and showing it in different places, the exposure would be great. If you, if... If you want to help us with the film, you can, "Hey, they just said they're going to be in this film festival in North Carolina. Everybody who wants to go see it in North Carolina." And that, that, that'd be helpful for us. Eventually, we hope to get it onto a streaming platform. And when we do that, of course, we'll tell everybody where that is. And then it's just a matter of, yeah, tell your friends, go watch the movie.
[00:42:38] Sarah Jack: And right now they can watch the preview,
[00:42:40] Lori Prescott Hansen: They can. You can watch the trailer.
[00:42:42] Matthew C. S. Julander: The trailer's on ibeawitch. com.
[00:42:44] Lori Prescott Hansen: The trailer, I have to say. I'm tickled with it.
[00:42:48] Josh Hutchinson: We'll have a link to that in the show description to both the Facebook and the website. And as you start to have showings, we'll definitely share that on our social media to help get the word out. It's something that our listeners are going to be interested in. We'll definitely be helping promote that as we can.
[00:43:12] Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
[00:43:14] Mary Louise Bingham: Alice Markham Cantor, a freelance writer and a fact checker for the New York Magazine. She is creating a database regarding worldwide witch hunts. Alice uses her writing skills by weaving the common threads of witch hunts from the 1300s to the current day. Alice introduced me to the story of Iquo Edet Iyo, a prosperous woman looked on with suspicion for years who was accused of using black magic to cause a motorcycle accident at Cross River State, Nigeria. As a result, Iquo was brutally murdered in October of 2022. Alice reminded me that there are over 1,000 innocent people killed due to ongoing deadly witch hunts every year. I encourage the listeners to read Alice's story titled, "Social Turmoil Has Increased Witch Hunts Historically" on Portside.Org. Check out her profile on theinternationalnetwork.org. Thank you, Alice Markham Cantor, you are one powerful advocate.
[00:44:17] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[00:44:22] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[00:44:25] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts urges collective action to end witch hunting practices worldwide. At End Witch Hunts, our commitment is unwavering to actively engage in educating and advocating for the cessation of witch hunting practice. We can do this through the power of collective action. Thank you for already supporting our projects by listening to and sharing our podcast episodes. If you'd like to further contribute, please consider a financial contribution. Your financial support empowers us to continue our education and advocacy efforts. As the holiday season approaches, we invite you to keep End Witch Hunts in mind when considering your charitable gifts. We have donate buttons on our websites.
Our latest historical justice initiative, the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project, is dedicated to securing formal exoneration for those wrongfully convicted as witches in Boston. We are also seeking a formal apology for all documented victims of the Massachusetts Colony Witch Trials. Each of these individuals has a story of innocence, Injustice and life altering consequences due to false accusations. You can make a difference immediately by signing and sharing the petition. Do so now at change.org/witchtrials.
If you live in Massachusetts, you can share this project with your legislative representatives and ask them to propose the amendment. If you are a voting member of the Massachusetts General Court, we need you to lead or collaborate on this amendment effort now. Please consider reaching out to the project so that we can support you as you propose or support such an amendment. Please take action, and let's work together to help close a chapter of American history that calls out to us all for answers.
Commemorating Goody Glover Day, November 16th.
On this day of witch trial memorialization in Boston, we want to highlight the significance of November 16th, proclaimed as Goody Glover Day by the Boston City Council in 1988.
Goody Glover, an Irish Catholic widow, was falsely accused, convicted, and hanged for witchcraft on this date in 1688. We invite you to commemorate Goody Glover Day by visiting her memorial plaque at the parish of Our Lady of Victories. The memorial plaque recounts the tragic tale of Ann Glover, emphasizing her unwavering commitment to the Catholic faith.
You may not be able to visit the memorial plaque, but you are able to pay tribute through various means, including social media discussions, coffee shop conversations, educational programs, and moments of reflection. Your support is instrumental in driving positive change and bringing an end to the dark history of witch hunting practices.
For more information and to contribute, visit endwitchhunts. org.
[00:46:58] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:47:01] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:47:02] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:47:07] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:47:09] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:47:13] Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:47:16] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[00:47:19] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:47:24] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

November 16, 2023

Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials 101 Part 1: 1648-1656

Petition to recognize those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts
List of those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts
Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth Century New England
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England
End Witch Hunts

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Show Notes

In Part 1 of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast’s Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials 101 series, we start at the beginning of witch hunt history in Massachusetts Bay Colony, decades before the famous Salem Witch-Hunt. This episode focuses on the stories of those accused of witchcraft who faced trial in Boston, including Margaret Jones, Alice Lake, Elizabeth Kendall, Anne Hibbins, John Bradstreet, Jane Walford, and Eunice Cole.

The Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project is asking for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to proclaim the innocence of its witch trial victims. The convicted victims talked about in this episode have not been exonerated, and no Massachusetts witchcraft trial victim has received an official apology. Please visit our project website at massachusettswitchtrials.org for more, and please take a moment to sign and share the project petition at change.org/witchtrials

Transcript

[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Hello, and welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast, the show that asks why we hunt witches and how we can stop hunting witches. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:20] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. This episode is the first part of a Massachusetts Witch Trial 101 series.
[00:00:27] Josh Hutchinson: We're so glad to be able to give this part of history the detailed coverage it deserves.
[00:00:33] Sarah Jack: Massachusetts had more witch trials than just Salem.
[00:00:37] Josh Hutchinson: That's right. Before 1692, witchcraft trials were held in Boston.
[00:00:42] Sarah Jack: Let's dive into the details.
[00:00:44] Josh Hutchinson: Though rumors of witchcraft arose soon after settlement of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, and were certainly making rounds by 1638, when Governor John Winthrop wrote that Jane Hawkins "grew into suspicion to be a witch", it took many years of suspicions under normal circumstances to trigger formal witchcraft complaints.
[00:01:09] Sarah Jack: Between 1648 and 1693, two hundred and seventeen individuals were formally charged with witchcraft, and several others sued their accusers for slander. For a complete list of victims, visit massachusettswitchtrials.org
[00:01:27] Josh Hutchinson: 156 people are verified to have been formally accused during the Salem Witch Hunt.
[00:01:35] Sarah Jack: And 61 were accused before Salem.
[00:01:38] Josh Hutchinson: A total of 38 were convicted, 30 in Salem and 8 in Boston.
[00:01:44] Sarah Jack: In all 24 were hanged and one was pressed to death in Massachusetts . These 24 hanged included my ancestor, Rebecca nurse,
[00:01:54] Josh Hutchinson: And our mutual ancestor, Mary Esty.
[00:01:58] Sarah Jack: You know the 19 hanged in Salem, and you know Giles Corey's story, but do you know the 5 victims who were hanged in Boston between 1648 and 1688?
[00:02:08] Josh Hutchinson: And over the years, at least six additional people died in jail while awaiting either trial or execution for witchcraft.
[00:02:18] Sarah Jack: In total, 118 people were indicted, including my ancestor, Mary Hale.
[00:02:24] Josh Hutchinson: And my ancestor, Mary Osgood, as well as several of my aunts, uncles, and cousins.
[00:02:30] Sarah Jack: Another 99 were complained of, arrested, jailed, and/or examined, but their cases did not go to trial.
[00:02:38] Josh Hutchinson: In many of these cases, we simply do not have complete records to know the outcomes.
[00:02:46] Sarah Jack: Contrary to popular belief, confessing to witchcraft did not save your life. Before Salem, several confessors were put to death in both the Massachusetts and Connecticut Colonies.
[00:02:57] Josh Hutchinson: During Salem, several who had confessed to witchcraft were indeed condemned to die and death warrant was issued and a date set for execution. However, the governor stepped in and metaphorically called the warden at the last minute. Those who had been condemned were reprieved.
[00:03:21] Sarah Jack: I want to hear about the first woman formally charged with witchcraft.
[00:03:25] Josh Hutchinson: The first woman formally charged with witchcraft in Massachusetts was Margaret Jones, who was accused in 1648. We know about her case primarily through the journal of Governor John Winthrop and a book by minister John Hale, which was written a full 49 years after Margaret's trial.
According to John Hale's recollection, Margaret "was suspected partly because that after some angry words passing between her and her neighbors, some mischief befell such neighbors in their creatures or the like." These neighbors used counter magic to identify the witch who'd bewitched or charmed certain objects, which they burned. Margaret unfortunately came to the house where the objects were burning at the worst possible time and was assumed to be the witch.
According to Winthrop, Margaret was a healer, but one whose malignant touch could cause deafness, vomiting, and "other violent pains or sickness," and whose medicines also had unspecified "violent effects." But if someone didn't use her medicine, she told them they would never be well, and accordingly, they never got well. Margaret was also supposed to be able to foretell the future, and she knew things that she wasn't privy to from private conversations in private houses.
During the investigation, Margaret and her husband, Thomas, were both watched. Now watching was an English technique for detecting witches, which was popularized by the self-defined Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, during his East Anglia witch hunt in the mid 1640s. Watching involved sitting a suspect in a room, keeping them awake hour after hour, and watching to see if an imp or familiar would come in to feed, because witches were said to feed their imps and familiars from teats, which were often hidden in their secret parts.
Men would take shifts watching, instructed to keep the victim awake no matter what and use any means necessary to wake them up if they did fall asleep, because also once the person was sleep deprived, they were more likely to confess.
[00:06:22] Sarah Jack: Couldn't the watcher become sleep deprived?
[00:06:25] Josh Hutchinson: Yes. And in this case, while Margaret was being watched, one of the watchers saw a small child in her arms who ran away into another room and then vanished when the watcher followed. Perhaps the watcher himself was suffering sleep deprivation, as you said, Sarah. But others also claimed to see this apparent familiar in different locations associated with Margaret at other times.
In addition to being watched, Margaret was examined for witch's teets and was found to have one in her secret parts. They described it as being "as fresh as if it had been newly sucked, and after it had been scanned, upon a forced search, that was withered, and another began on the opposite side."
Alice Stratton attempted to defend Margaret by saying that the teats were just scars from a difficult childbirth, just as Rebecca Nurse argued in Salem 44 years later. Subsequently, Alice Stratton would find herself accused of witchcraft. Ultimately, Margaret was convicted, and she was condemned to die by hanging.
On the day she was to be executed, young John Hale and some neighbors went to the prison and exhorted her to confess and repent. They were not there to save her life. They were there to save her soul. However, she refused to belie herself and maintained her innocence up until her death later that day.
Now, according to John Winthrop, the same day and hour she was executed, there was a very great tempest at Connecticut, which blew down many trees. Then, following Margaret Jones's execution, her husband Thomas tried to board a ship to Barbados but was refused passage due to lack of payment. While anchored at Charlestown, before it could even get underway on the Charles River to Boston Harbor, this ship, carrying a load of 80 horses, began rocking side to side violently, though the weather was calm. And so this continued for 12 hours.
At some point while the ship was struggling, a witness ran to the county court, which was in session, and told the magistrates about the rocking and also told them about how Thomas Jones had been denied passage on that ship and hey, wasn't it weird that the husband of an executed witch would be refused passage and then the ship would have these troubles? The magistrates agreed with that logic. How could you not? So they send an officer over to arrest Thomas.
Now, according to the account of Winthrop, as the officer was crossing over on the ferry, someone said to him, "you can tame men sometimes, can't you tame this ship?" And the officer answered, "I have that here that it may be will tame her and make her be quiet." As the officer was showing his arrest warrant to this other person, the ship slowly began to stop swaying. The stoppage of the swaying was completed once Thomas was behind bars.
Unfortunately, we don't have good records to show us what became of Thomas after this incident. We don't know how he lived out the rest of his life.
[00:10:36] Sarah Jack: Do we know anything of their children? She had a birthing scar.
[00:10:40] Josh Hutchinson: We don't have anything about their children. We have very scant records of this couple. We basically know about them through the witch trials.
[00:10:51] Sarah Jack: We know that there were accused witches who didn't have a full house of children or they lost their pregnancies or infants.
[00:11:04] Josh Hutchinson: We will talk about that during this episode, because there is a recurring theme of childless women who were perceived by the others to have child envy and want a child for their own by any means necessary, including witchery.
[00:11:27] Sarah Jack: Let's talk about Alice Lake from Dorchester. She was a wife of Henry, a mother of four. We don't have a lot of information on Alice Lake, but what we know is sad. We know that later she confessed that she "played the harlot" when she was young and single. During that time, she became pregnant. In trying to hide her shame, she attempted to terminate that pregnancy but failed. Following this event, she considered herself to be a murderer, because she had made the attempt. As shown by the cases we've already covered and many still to come, infanticide and perceived sexual immorality are more reoccurring themes in witch trial accusations.
According to Nathaniel Mather, brother of Increase Mather, when another child died, Alice Lake was visited by the devil in the child's shape.
The exact timing of Alice's trial is unknown, but she is believed to have been executed in about 1650. As with Margaret Jones, Alice received visitors on the day of her execution, who likewise pleaded with her to confess and repent. They were trying to save her soul. Following her execution, Henry moved to Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Four children remained in Dorchester, where one died. The other three later moved to Rhode Island and then uprooted to Plymouth Colony with their father.
We have heard from Alice Lake descendants.
[00:13:00] Josh Hutchinson: We have, and we want to hear from more descendants. If you're out there listening to us, please get in touch. The contact information is in the show description.
Another person accused of witchcraft around this same time was Elizabeth Kendall of Cambridge. Again, like Alice Lake, the date of Elizabeth's trial cannot be pinned down but is believed to have been somewhere between 1647 and 1651. The one and only source that we have for her case is John Hale's book, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, which wasn't published until 1702, so only very limited information is available about Elizabeth.
What we know from Hale is that she was accused by a nurse from Watertown, who claimed that Elizabeth had bewitched a child to death. This nurse stated that Elizabeth made much of the child and it was well, but then it changed color and it died a few hours later. On the basis of this witness testimony and other, unspecified evidence, Elizabeth was hanged, despite her own protest of innocence.
After the hanging, Watertown's deputy to the General Court, Mr. Richard Brown, questioned the parents of the child, the Jenningses. This couple told him they hadn't suspected Elizabeth at all. They'd actually believed the nurse was to blame for the child's death, because she had kept them out in the cold. Later, the nurse was jailed for alleged adultery. While there in the jail, she gave birth to a child born out of wedlock. For this, Mr. Brown visited her and told her off, saying, "it was just with God to leave her to this wickedness, as a punishment for her murdering Goody Kendall by her false witness bearing. The unnamed nurse died in prison, and her false allegation was never investigated any further, and Hale did not note what happened to the child that was born in prison.
[00:15:26] Sarah Jack: Here's a couple that should be familiar to you if you've been reading an important history book this past year. Mary Lewis Parsons and her husband, Hugh, were formally charged with witchcraft in Massachusetts. They were featured in our fifth episode with Malcolm Gaskill on his book, The Ruin of All Witches, and will be featured again in our next Massachusetts 101 episode, along with fellow Springfield residents, the widow Mercy Marshfield, another Mary Parsons, and Alice Young Beamon, daughter of Alice Young of Windsor, as well as a few familiar faces from down the Connecticut River.
[00:16:07] Josh Hutchinson: In 1652, John Bradstreet of Rowley was charged with witchcraft and presented to the Essex County Quarter Court. Allegedly, John had been claiming to perform magic and saying he was hearing mysterious voices. These things led to suspicion that he had familiarity with the devil. According to the complaint against him, he said he read in a book of magic and that he heard a voice asking him what work he had for him. He answered, "go make a bridge of sand over the sea. Go make a ladder of sand up to heaven. And go to God and come down no more." The court, reviewing this evidence, ruled that John had not actually committed witchcraft but had simply lied about it, a decision that they would make in certain cases for a handful of men.
[00:17:06] Sarah Jack: I was just gonna say, "wait a minute."
[00:17:09] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, they never did this for women, but men, they would say, "oh, you can't be a witch, you're just lying about it. So you're on a first name basis with the devil, but you lied about that." Whereas women, they just say, "take a hike."
So the court ruled that he just lied about it, and he had also been convicted of lying previously in 1650, so this was considered a repeat offense, and so they ordered him to either pay a fine of 20 shillings or submit to a whipping if he couldn't pay.
[00:17:49] Sarah Jack: A ladder of sand, that's interesting.
[00:17:54] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. This guy was like, "you build me something impossible," and are basically just telling the devil to get lost. And even though he told the devil basically to leave, or whoever the voice was that he was hearing, he told them to leave, but he still got in trouble for talking to them.
[00:18:18] Sarah Jack: Jane Walford of Portsmouth was accused of witchcraft in 1648 and won a defamation suit against her accuser, Elizabeth Rowe, who was ordered to apologize and pay two pounds plus court costs. Eight years later in 1656, Elizabeth Rowe's husband, Nicholas Rowe, and six others brought witchcraft accusations against Jane Walford to the court. This time, magistrates bound her over for 20 pounds as assurance she would attend the next court session.
Nicholas Rowe claimed in court that Jane Walford came to him in bed in the evening and put her hand on his breast so that he could not speak, and he was in great pain till the next day. Witness Susannah Trimmings said that on the evening of March 30th, 1656, on her way home, "she heard a rustling in the woods, and presently after, there did appear to her a woman whom she apprehended to be Old Goodwife Walford. She asked me where my consort was. I answered I had none. She said, ' thy consort is at home by this time. Lend me a pound of cotton.' I told her I had but two pounds in the house, and I would not spare any to my mother. She said I had better have done it, that my sorrow was great already, and it should be greater for I was going a great journey, but should never come there. She then left me, and I was struck as with a clap of fire on the back, and she vanished towards the water side, in my apprehension in the shape of a cat."
That night, according to Goodman Trimmings, Susannah was ill, a condition which persisted at least until April 18th, when the Trimmings gave in their testimony. Elisa Barton said she was there while Susannah was sick, and her face was colored and spotted with several colors. Her eyes looked as if they'd been scalded.
An unidentified witness testified in June that he was actually with the Walfords on March 30th, and Jane was at home at least until it was very dark out.
[00:20:25] Josh Hutchinson: He's her alibi.
[00:20:27] Sarah Jack: John Puddington claimed that three years ago, Jane Walford said that her own husband called her an old witch. Agnes Puddington claimed that on April 11th, 1656, Mrs. Evans came over and lay at her house all night. Around sunset, Agnes saw a yellowish cat, and Mrs. Evans was like, "a cat has been following me all around, everywhere I go." John Puddington then tried to shoot a cat in the garden, but it got up on a tree, and the gun wouldn't fire. Following that, Agnes saw three cats but could not tell which way they went as they exited the area.
Three unnamed witnesses claimed that Elizabeth Rowe said Strawberry Bank had three male witches. They were Thomas Turpin, who had drowned, a second man called Old Ham, and the third was "nameless because he should be blameless."
[00:21:18] Josh Hutchinson: Nameless because he should be blameless. That totally sounds like a Johnny Cochrane court statement. OJ Simpson should be nameless because he should be blameless.
[00:21:33] Sarah Jack: This testimony against Jane Walford did not sway the court. Upon a magisterial review of the evidence, Jane was cleared by proclamation, so her witness was key.
[00:21:45] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, her alibi held up. Susanna Trimmings' statement did not fit, so they did acquit.
[00:21:52] Sarah Jack: In 1659, Jane won a slander case against Robert Couch, a physician who claimed he could prove she was a witch. How was he proving it? This time, she was awarded six pounds.
[00:22:06] Josh Hutchinson: I bet he was going to look at her secret parts.
[00:22:09] Sarah Jack: It's very likely.
The stigma of witchcraft remained with Jane even beyond her death and passed down to her five daughters.
[00:22:18] Josh Hutchinson: Now we're turning our attention to Mrs. Anne Hibbins, who was accused of witchcraft in 1655. Now, Anne had immigrated to Boston with her second husband, William, back in the 1630s, leaving three sons behind in England. After arriving in Massachusetts, William set up a shop as a merchant and also got into politics.
Things were going well for the couple, when a dramatic business error cost William 500 pounds, which was a huge sum of money that people would literally probably have killed for back in that day, because the average person had an estate, probably more in the 100 to 200 pound range. So this is way more than what other people have total.
[00:23:13] Sarah Jack: Unexpected financial devastation.
[00:23:16] Josh Hutchinson: Yes. And what brings tension into a marriage more than an unexpected financial burden? And so this is often cited as occasioning a major personality change in Anne. Thomas Hutchinson later wrote that "losses in the latter part of [William's] life had reduced his estate," and this is Thomas Hutchinson saying this, not Josh Hutchinson, "increased the natural crabbedness of his wife's temper, which made her turbulent and quarrelsome." And there's that word again. We've got another quarrelsome dame, yet another one of those themes that pops up. A woman speaks her mind, so she becomes quarrelsome and therefore suspect, because who but the devil's handmaiden would be so damned quarrelsome.
[00:24:24] Sarah Jack: Exactly.
[00:24:26] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. So despite the financial setbacks, William continued to be elected to public office.
They had this financial setback, and then in 1640, the family suffered a different kind of setback. This began as a dispute between Anne and some joiners, who were a type of carpenter, that had done some work on the Hibbins house, and this dispute escalated big time owing probably to Anne's assertive, or quarrelsome, nature, depending who you talk to. Anne didn't like the quality of the work. She didn't like the price that she was charged in the end. So she was very agitated, and once she got going on this, she wouldn't let it go.
The church steps in and tries to mediate, because the joiner that she's arguing with is also a member of the church that she's a member of, which is at the time in 1640, the one, just called the Boston Church. So the church elders, the minister, people are getting involved in this, and ultimately decide that Anne is raising a fuss about nothing, and the men are right, and she should mind her place in society, and shut her mouth. And so they tried to make peace, but she wouldn't accept it. And because she wouldn't accept what the church had offered to mediate, and because she was usurping her husband's authority as the head of the household, she was excommunicated in 1641, even though her husband was this prominent figure being elected to offices. They still kicked her out, said, "you're not welcome in church anymore," and they literally told her, "you can go to hell now." But whatever ill will Bostonians harbored toward Anne, they didn't seem to hold it against William, who was elected an Assistant. This is the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature at the time, the General Court, the House of Assistants, and he's elected to that in 1643 and reelected every year until his death in 1654.
But once William was out of the picture, it didn't take long for the neighbors to come for Anne. The year after he passed, Anne was tried for witchcraft by the Court of Assistants, the very institution to which her husband had belonged for nearly a dozen years.
And here's another theme that we see recurring, widows with money appear to have been more vulnerable to witchcraft prosecution. We see the same thing happen in Connecticut with Katherine Harrison. When John Harrison dies, the neighbors really turn on Katherine, and she ends up being charged with witchcraft, just like Anne here.
She's vulnerable. There's no husband. She doesn't have any male relatives in the colony. Her sons are back in England, remember? So they're not going to be any help. And basically there's no men around who the other men would actually listen to. So the men are just saying, "oh, that, that woman over there, she's been in trouble for years and years. She must be a witch."
And Anne was convicted by the jury. The magistrates actually refused to accept the verdict and instead referred the case to the full General Court, which would include Assistants and the Deputies, and they held a retrial on May 14th, 1656. So this is about a year after her arrest, and she's convicted again. So this time, everybody just consents to the decision of the General Court, and she's hanged June 19th, 1656.
So the decision to hang Mrs. Anne Hibbins was not popular with everybody. There was an element out there talking against this. Bravely, minister John Horton is said to have said, "Mistress Hibbins was hanged for a witch only for having more wit than her neighbors."
[00:29:40] Sarah Jack: You think about these women who were retried. It could have gone either way.
[00:29:47] Josh Hutchinson: The story of Eunice Cole begins in England and ends in New Hampshire, but is mainly a Massachusetts tale.
Okay, so here we've got a prototypical witch. This is your ordinary suspect kind of figure. Eunice Cole has a reputation also for being a quarrelsome dame, she has a checkered past with several arrests for different things, she's older, by the standards of the day, and impoverished. So here's basically this old, grumpy lady, but basically she's past her childbearing years, and she's got no money. She's very vulnerable, a person on the fringe of society.
Rewinding back a while, it's 1637, and William Cole is in the employ of a merchant in London, England. But William, he longs to go to New England, so he makes a deal with his boss, and his boss says, "okay, I'll let you off the hook for future service, and I'll pay for your passage across the Atlantic and your wife's passage, if you agree to send me 10 pounds once you get over there." So they make this deal, they travel over.
In November, 1637, a bill is sent to them, and this still exists today, somehow, remarkably, and states the nature of this agreement. So that's how we have all this information. Another bill, actually a claim filed in court against William Cole 20 years later for the same debt, also exists. William couldn't come up with 10 pounds in 20 years. He couldn't save half a pound a year. That's just either shows you their financial situation, the dire straits that they're in most of that time, or maybe he just wasn't very happy with his old employer, and he didn't want to send him the money. He was like, "hey, I could use this 10 pounds. I got stuff to do."
[00:32:34] Sarah Jack: He probably thought it was going to fall off the credit report after seven years.
[00:32:38] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, exactly. But they're still after him after 20 years, they hire an agent in Massachusetts to pursue this for them. So they're really determined to get their 10 pounds.
Now once they were in New England, the Coles first settled south of Boston in a settlement called Mount Wollaston, which is now Braintree. In Mount Wollaston, William received what historian John Demos describes as a small land grant. Now this town was also the starting point in Massachusetts for the unorthodox minister John Wheelwright, who the Puritans deemed to be an antinomian. Wheelwright uprooted and, along with a lot of his flock, moved to Exeter, in what is today New Hampshire, at the time of the move, was outside of Massachusetts control.
Now the joke's on them, because they get up there, and in 1643, Massachusetts says, "hey, we're making another county," the original Norfolk County. And this consists of basically anything between the Merrimack and Piscataqua and about a dozen miles inland from the ocean. So you've got the towns of Exeter, Hampton, Portsmouth, they're part of this new county along with Salisbury and Haverhill in what is still today Massachusetts.
So William Cole goes up along with Wheelwright and becomes a founding member of this town. They signed a covenant agreeing to abide by godly laws that would be enacted by the town of Exeter, and William signed with his mark. The Coles lived in Exeter for five years, and in 1643, William was elected to serve the community as fenceviewer, which was actually an important job. It sounds odd today to say, "oh, we're hiring you to go around viewing fences." But at the time it was critical in keeping harmony between neighbors to make sure there weren't gaps in fences or loose parts that animals could get through and ravage a neighbor's yard, which going back again to Sarah's grandmother, Rebecca Nurse, pigs got into her garden and she got angry about that, and it's like the one recorded instance out of all the testimony against her where she showed anger, because pigs were eating her garden, and that's her vegetables and herbs and everything that she needs for cooking. Fence viewing was serious business.
For unknown reasons, in 1644, the Coles uprooted once again and moved over to the coast to Hampton.
[00:36:06] Sarah Jack: I really wish I knew why, because this is where things start to get really juicy.
[00:36:11] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, once they get to Hampton, it gets real. Eunice starts getting arrested left and right. Their financial situation really just nosedives. It wasn't very good where they were, but it just bottoms out in Hampton. So in 1645, Eunice was charged with making "slanderous speeches" against some women.
And in 1647, Eunice and William were charged for withholding pigs that were owed to the plaintiff in this case. Apparently they had made some arrangement where they were going to sell or give to this person pigs and they really, this person really wanted their pigs. So the court did rule in favor of the plaintiff and said, "Coles, you've got to hand over these swine."
But the Coles, they decided to fight back and literally. The constable comes over to take the animals. The Coles start screaming their heads off. Eunice is reported to literally just be shouting, "murder, murder," and William is going, "there's thieves in this town. All these thieves in this town." And they're just shouting this. The constable grabs a pig or two, so the Coles, what do they do? They bite his hands. What else would you do? He takes your pigs, you bite his hands. He didn't drop the pigs, so they pushed him to the ground, and then they pulled the pigs from his arms. And after this, they faced more charges, but unfortunately, no record exists today of the outcome of these added charges.
That same year, William is rated on the Hampton tax list, he's in 51st place, income-wise, out of 60 people. By 1653, he is 72nd of 72, dead last in the financial hierarchy of Hampton. He is literally the poorest man in town.
Eunice, again, she went to court in 1651 and 1654 for similar things about mouthing off. And historian John Demos in his work, Entertaining Satan, Demos states that Eunice was involved in even more trials. We don't have records of those to know what they were all about.
So now we get to the year 1656. Hampton has about 350 people. More than three out of five residents are under the age of 20. So they're all kids and teenagers, 62 percent of the population is under 20. So that leaves around 130 adults that are 20 or older. And among these adults and possibly even among the younger people,
[00:39:48] Sarah Jack: Yeah, that just made me think about the influence of children on these witch trials sometimes.
[00:39:52] Josh Hutchinson: We get to some good ones coming up.
So suspicion is building about Eunice, the words getting around, the children have probably heard the gossip, maybe their parents have even told them some things about it, or they've asked, because you hear that Goody So-and-so's a witch, you go running to your parents like, "is she really a witch? Do I have to be afraid of her?" I would have so many questions and concerns as a child.
So this gossip is spreading. For one thing, it's because Eunice is an outspoken woman. Another count against her, she's got no children, so she's the antithesis of the godly housewife and mother that the Puritans expect women to be, and she would have felt that pressure. Even today, women report feeling intense pressure to get married, to have children, to be mothers. But back then, imagine just how intense that pressure would be on her. Everybody would be saying, "Eunice, you gotta have kids. You gotta have kids." And then by 1656, she's too old to have kids. So what does she do? According to neighbors, she was very interested in their children. And we'll talk about that in just a moment.
Eunice often made snappy remarks when confronted, and one time she was bold enough to just barge into a meeting of the Hampton selectmen and demand that they give her aid, because they were giving aid to another couple that was somewhat better off, and yet the town's trying to say, "you've got resources, you have an estate, use that to pay your bills," and she just wasn't having it. So she just went in and told them what the deal was.
Now, a few days later, the man who was receiving the aid lost some livestock. So this follows the same worn, old pattern we see again and again. There's a difference of opinion, an exchange of words, and soon there's an injury or damage to something or someone valued by the person who's the target of the witch's malice.
Now, as a child-free woman, as we've said, Eunice was immediately sus. But when she hung out at the bed of a neighbor's child who later died, many were convinced she had killed the child out of envy. And this child envy theme would feature heavily in her multiple arrests for witchcraft.
But it wasn't only children that Eunice envied. Apparently livestock were also vulnerable to her jealous gaze. A witness testified that they had caught her eyeing their sheep and asked, "what on Earth are you staring at?" And Eunice supposedly said, "what is it to you, sawsbox?"
Another person who testified, Thomas Philbrick said he lost two calves and reported that cole had told him that if his calves "ate any of her grass, she wished it might poison them or choke them," and then they died. So of course it's gotta be her. It can't be a coincidence.
[00:43:32] Sarah Jack: Didn't in America Bewitched, doesn't Owen Davies talk about the cattle getting ill? In the fur balls inside from the grass.
[00:43:44] Josh Hutchinson: oh yeah. Yeah. The hairballs.
So in 1656, Eunice was tried in Boston for witchcraft. A number of witnesses came out against her, representing the full spectrum of the income ranks of Hampton. There were upper class, middle class, lower class people engaged in testifying against Eunice. So in a lot of cases, it's middle class against middle class or maybe lower class against lower class, because it's generally who you're associated with most closely are the people that are actually going to accuse you. Who are you interacting with every day? And generally you don't see someone like a Eunice Cole interacting with the upper crust, and yet upper class residents are coming out to say that she has harmed them with her witchcraft.
[00:44:52] Sarah Jack: It's a really good point.
[00:44:54] Josh Hutchinson: Unfortunately, half of the depositions against her have been lost over the 300 some years since the trial.
Now, Eunice, another thing that she's associated with is animal familiars. We talked about the watching and how they, the animals, imps or familiars would suckle on a witch's teat to get their nourishment. This is just watching her during Sunday meeting. Apparently minister's up there giving the sermon, and a woman named Mary Perkins sees a mouse just pop out of Eunice's cleavage and scurry away. At another service, a witness heard a sound like the whine of hungry puppies coming from under Eunice, very suspicious, of course.
Another charge leveled at this time was that Eunice bewitched the oven of the constable who brought her aid when aid was rendered to the Coles. This person who brought her the food and fuel, apparently he had more bread at home than he was bringing to her, so that's unfair. And apparently she was vindictive because he had more than she had, and she cursed the stove so that the owners couldn't make their own bread at home.
In a loss that has frustrated historians to no end, there's no record of the verdict in Eunice's 1656 trial. So historians debate whether she was convicted or not. Now, she wasn't executed, so John Demos contends that she was likely not convicted, because witchcraft's a capital crime, and you're basically automatically executed if you're convicted. But there's a record that Eunice was whipped and that she was imprisoned indefinitely, so historians, including Carol F. Karlsen, argue that Eunice was most likely convicted but spared death for unknown reasons, because if she wasn't convicted, why was she whipped and committed to jail for life or the pleasure of the court?
[00:47:38] Sarah Jack: But there are no other known accused witches from the mid 1650s that were convicted and jailed.
[00:47:47] Josh Hutchinson: Right. The others all leading up to this that were convicted, we've covered Margaret Jones, Alice Lake, Elizabeth Kendall, Ann Hibbins. They're all executed after convicted. One we'll cover in the next episode, Hugh Parsons, gets convicted, but then he gets acquitted in a new trial, and then he has to leave for Rhode Island.
Whatever the case with Eunice, the 1656 trial was far from the last time that she was persecuted as a witch. Indeed, she would reside in the Boston jail off and on for the next dozen years and would face more courts on witchcraft charges over a span of about 25 years. Now, the man who whipped her was Salisbury Constable Richard Ormsby, and he claimed that when he stripped her shirt off to whip her, he saw under one of her breasts "a blue thing like unto a teat hanging downward about three quarters of an inch long, some blood with other moistness." So here's another document stating that she was whipped, she had been charged with witchcraft, and then she was whipped.
So while she's in jail, maybe in the first year that she's in there, she petitioned for early release on the basis of her age, and especially the age of her husband, William, who was about 88 years old and needed her help. She also bemoaned the plight of her estate, and she promised good behavior if released, but the court's response has not survived, and she apparently remained in jail for a little while, but Eunice may have been back in Hampton in 1658. John Demos points out a 1659 town record that includes a notation of a payment of five shillings to constable Richard Ormsby for expense about G. Cole, presumably Goodwife Eunice Cole. And this entry's marked 58, so presumably it's about 1658.
So now in 1659, the even more aged William Cole petitioned for relief. He couldn't farm anymore, had no children, and he couldn't afford to hire a farm worker. He had received some aid previously from the town in 1658, but one of the problems that he had was that he'd signed over the property to his wife in 1656, and she keeps being in and outta jail, so it's hard to manage her property. She's not there. He's considerably aged and can't really take care of himself the way that he used to. So the general court gets this and they invalidate the transfer of the deed to Eunice Cole. And then they ordered the town of Hampton to take possession of the estate and use the proceeds from it to support the Coles.
Within a year of the 1659 petition, Eunice was back in Hampton, again getting in trouble for unseemly speeches. In 1660, she's charged for this, because she allegedly asked a girl named Huldah Hussey, "where's your mother, Mingay, that whore? She's abed with your father, that whoremaster." And this gets her in big trouble. This is something you don't just go and say to a girl back then.
By 1662, Eunice was back in the Boston prison, and she again petitioned for her release. That same year, William Cole died, May 26th, 1662. And after his death, Eunice was totally destitute. He was already the poorest man in town, and his income gets taken away. Now there's a complicated situation with his will. He, for some reason, maybe because Eunice was in jail, I don't know, he decides that he's going to bequeath his property to another man and so the town of Hampton, which is supposed to control the Coles' property, doesn't like this, so Hampton petitioned the General Court regarding William's will and also the possible return of Eunice Cole that they were worried about that year.
On October 8th, 1662, the General Court met and declared, "that the said Eunice Cole pay what is due on arrears to the keeper and be released the prison on condition that she depart within one month after her release out of this jurisdiction and not to return again on penalty of her former sentence being executed against her." So she's more or less released on parole, and she doesn't stay out of jail very long before she's back in trouble.
By October 1663, the county court had split William Cole's estate between Thomas Webster and Eunice Cole, who received a grand total of eight pounds to take care of her for the rest of her life. And this eight pounds doesn't even go to her, because it's ordered to go straight to the Hampton selectmen so they can provide for her upkeep.
And then, once more, in 1665, Eunice submitted a petition to the general court to be released from imprisonment. So at some point she was put back in the jail. The court this time agrees to release her only if she gave security and left the colony forever. She couldn't pay. She had to remain in jail.
But sometime between 1668 and 1671, Eunice was released, because by 1671, she was back in Hampton, totally broke. Now the town built a home for her. By tradition, it's a small hut. Anyways, they give her the shelter, and they ordered that each family in town would take turns providing food and fuel a week at a time.
In 1673, she was charged again with witchcraft and in court in Boston. This time she's accused of shape-shifting into human and animal forms to convince a girl, Ann Smith, to live with her. Again, this is the child envy thing coming up. She's supposed to be basically a child snatcher. And she desperately wants one of her own and will use her witchcraft to attain what she desires, according to the townsfolk.
She's accused of many other things, acquitted on all charges. However, the court specified that though she was not legally guilty of witchcraft, the court vehemently suspected she had familiarity with the devil.
In 1680, New Hampshire was granted its own status, independent of Massachusetts. That very year, once New Hampshire becomes its own thing, Hampton residents take Eunice back to court, complaining against her once more for witchcraft. And we'll have even more on this 1680 episode, because more people were involved in this than just Eunice. This was a miniature witch panic.
In 1680, the court didn't find enough evidence to bring her to trial. The Hampton Court, like the Massachusetts General Court before it, "vehemently suspects her so to be a witch."
Now, fast forward to 1938. Hampton celebrated its 300th birthday, and one of the things that they did was actually recognize Eunice Cole. At a town meeting, the citizens of Hampton unanimously passed a resolution to clear her name. The resolution stated, "we believe that Eunice (Goody) Cole was unjustly accused of witchcraft and familiarity with the devil in the 17th century, and we do hereby restore to the said Eunice (Goody) Cole a rightful place as a citizen of the town of Hampton." and today, a stone memorial to Eunice stands on the town green, and the town hall houses an urn which is said to contain Eunice's remains.
Earlier this year, a bill to exonerate Eunice at a state level was voted down by the New Hampshire Senate after having passed the House. So now the Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project seeks to have her good name restored by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Eunice Cole deserves to be exonerated and to receive an apology.
[00:58:05] Sarah Jack: The witch hunt victims we have discussed today need your voice. The four innocent people we covered who were convicted and executed in Boston have not been exonerated, and they are not alone. Others were convicted in Boston in the years before the Salem Witch Hunt. In addition, none of the alleged witches of Massachusetts have ever received an apology. Thou Shalt Not Suffer would like to see exoneration for those convicted and an apology for all accused, whether the case was handled out of Boston, Salem, or anywhere else in Massachusetts. Our petition is available at change.org/witchtrials. Sign and share today.
[00:58:49] Josh Hutchinson: We hope you've enjoyed this first episode of our Massachusetts Witch Trials 101 series. And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:59:01] Sarah Jack: Join us again next week and stay tuned for another Massachusetts 101 next month.
[00:59:06] Josh Hutchinson: Please rate and review the show wherever you're listening.
[00:59:10] Sarah Jack: And don't forget to hit that subscribe button.
[00:59:12] Josh Hutchinson: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:59:16] Sarah Jack: And check out endwitchhunts.org. Goodbye.
[00:59:21] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

October 19, 2023

Irish Witch Trials with Andrew Sneddon

Witches of Islandmagee Commemoration Project

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Show Notes

This episode on Irish witch trial history takes a close look at the 1711 mass witch trial in Islandmagee through an illuminating conversation with Dr. Andrew Sneddon of Ulster University. We discuss what took place and learn about why there may have been fewer witch trials in Ireland than in other countries during the early modern period. We cover critical aspects of the witchcraft accusations, like Demonic obsession and possession, and address the similarities between Islandmagee and witchcraft accusations in Salem, and other New England witch trials. Dr Sneddon and his colleagues have launched a historic multimedia Islandmagee witch trial history commemoration project that opens September 9 in Northern Ireland. Find out what you can experience in person and what is available to experience online.

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Transcript

[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Hi, and welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:26] Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we speak with Dr. Andrew Sneddon about witch hunts in Ireland.
[00:00:34] Sarah Jack: This episode is full of Irish witch trial information.
[00:00:40] Josh Hutchinson: We'll learn about the Islandmagee Witch Trials, Ireland's largest witch-hunt.
[00:00:48] Sarah Jack: There were eight women imprisoned and one man, a father and husband, likely executed.
[00:00:57] Josh Hutchinson: The victims were Janet Carson, Janet Latimer, Janet Main, Janet Miller, Margaret Mitchell, Catherine McCalmond, Janet Liston, and Elizabeth Sellor. And the man who likely was executed was William Sellor.
[00:01:17] Sarah Jack: Dr. Sneddon and his colleagues have rolled out an exceptional exhibit with the Carrickfergus Museum that is hosting it September 9th through November 16th.
[00:01:33] Josh Hutchinson: This exhibit's got it all. It's got images, video, virtual reality, a video game, a graphic novel, an animation, and a play? It's got it all.
[00:01:52] Sarah Jack: A historic play from 1948, couple years before The Crucible.
[00:02:00] Josh Hutchinson: Before the Crucible, there was this play.
[00:02:03] Sarah Jack: Witches in Eden,
[00:02:05] Josh Hutchinson: Witches in Eden. Check it out.
[00:02:09] Sarah Jack: The Ulster University Research Project was led by Dr. Helen Jackson, Dr. Victoria McCollum, and Dr. Andrew Sneddon. There's also a range of objects from the Carrickfergus Museum's own collection, plus loaned items from the National Museums Northern Ireland and the National Library of Ireland and Belfast Central Library.
[00:02:30] Josh Hutchinson: Sounds exciting. Count me in.
[00:02:32] Sarah Jack: It's amazing what is available on the website to be able to look at and learn and enjoy. But, getting to go in person. It's a historic presentation of witch trial history, so what an incredible opportunity. If you can go, you need to go.
[00:02:52] Josh Hutchinson: You do. And for those of you who can't, w 1 7 1 1 .org, w1711.org, is the place to go to check that out. They've got videos you can watch and images to look at and history to read up on, including all of the transcripts of the trial records from the Islandmagee Witch-Hunt.
[00:03:19] Sarah Jack: So spread the word. Let your people know that this is going on. Get them online looking. If they're in the area, send them over to go experience what's available.
[00:03:31] Josh Hutchinson: Be there.
One thing you'll notice at the exhibit and in this episode is how similar the Islandmagee witch trials were to many of the other witch trials that we've heard about, including those at places like Salem. And there's this element of a possible diabolical possession, and we talk about how there's a fine, flexible line basically between possession and bewitchment, basically comes down to who the victim blames. Does the victim say that the devil is affecting them directly, or do they blame it on a witch?
[00:04:24] Sarah Jack: And there's some great comparisons in the dialogue today, right out of the Salem history.
[00:04:32] Josh Hutchinson: Out of Salem, out of Connecticut, out of so many places, there are these cases with afflicted persons behaving very similar to how people behave when they're possessed by the devil, according to the set down traditions that we have from this time period.
[00:04:58] Sarah Jack: We are so happy to have Dr. Andrew Sneddon here today. He's the leading expert on the history of the Islandmagee Witch Trial of 1711 and has published widely on Irish witchcraft and magic. He has spent the last decade taking the untold story of the Islandmagee Witches and Irish witchcraft to a new, diverse, international audience. He has worked with numerous libraries, archives, museums, community, educational, and women's groups. He's the president of Ireland's oldest professional historical Society, Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies.
[00:05:34] Josh Hutchinson: What sets the Irish Witch trials apart from others?
[00:05:38] Andrew Sneddon: I think the lack of them, probably, you start with a negative, Irish witchcraft. There was only a handful of trials now in the early modern period. Now there's a lot more trials after, ironically, the witch legislation is repealed. And they're involving witch accusation at some level, but they're not witch trials per se. But during the early modern witch hunts there, there's very few of them.
[00:06:07] Sarah Jack: The Witchcraft Act was enacted in 1586, but not repealed until 1821.
[00:06:14] Andrew Sneddon: Absolutely. So it's actually a copy of the Elizabethan Act of 1563, which I know that you've covered before, in other programs. This is part of the Elizabethan colonial rollout of legislation to, Uh, Ireland and did the roll out the Witchcraft Act as well. You're right, it's there right until the early 19th century. And it's almost, by that point, it rolls out of the imagination of the elites and it is just an administrative cleanup, I think Ian Bostridge said it was at one point, but that doesn't mean that popular witchcraft belief isn't everywhere, or that all elites don't believe in witchcraft anymore. But definitely of that legislative level after the Irish Parliament is away it's repealed.
[00:07:05] Josh Hutchinson: Can you quantify how many witch trials there were in Ireland?
[00:07:11] Andrew Sneddon: There was many accusations and formal accusations, but there were usually coming from Presbyterians and Presbyterians coming from Scotland with their own witchcraft place where, as you know, it was really bad. So they're coming after 1660, so most of them are not going to trial.
So there's loads of accusations that we know of, and some of them get to court, but don't go anywhere. So there's actually only two trials, two main trials. There's some trials before the 1586 Act and obviously ones after it, but there's only two main, one of Florence Newton in Youghal in Cork in 1661 and Islandmagee Witches in County Antrim in what is now Northern Ireland in Ulster in 1711, and this is nine people.
We don't really know what happened to Florence Newton, if she was executed or not. Some people think there are, but the, I've transcribed the, all the documents. It doesn't tell you what happened to her. And we know that the eight Islandmagee witches were not executed and, the, they missed out that, just, a legal nicety and on the day of the trial, and they were imprisoned under the 1586 Irish Witchcraft Act for four times in the pillory on Market Day, as well. And the one male witch we think might have been executed
[00:08:28] Sarah Jack: How do you think he would've been executed?
[00:08:32] Andrew Sneddon: Well, do you remember what we were talking about, the rolling out of the Irish witchcraft legislation was just a rolling out of the English witchcraft legislation? Again, by 1600 the older Gaelic systems of law, the Brehon law and systems of legal prosecution are being replaced at a county level in the 32 counties, at least with the English system.
So what you know about the English witch trials and how they were actually like governed, just put that in Ireland. So you've got justice of the peace, you've got magistrates, you've got the grand jury of 23 men. You've got the assize court. So all the things that are keeping witchcraft prosecution low in England, which it was quite hard to get somebody prosecuted for witchcraft in England, are operating in Ireland. So same legal administration, same courts, same law. And it's coming from Scottish Presbyterians. That's where the accusations are coming from. So it's very weird. It's a Catholic country with Presbyterians making the accusations, mainly that we know, and an English court system
[00:09:45] Josh Hutchinson: So it's a jumble of three different sets of beliefs and rules and traditions. Four.
[00:09:54] Andrew Sneddon: Four 'cause what we haven't talked about is a mass of the population. So you start getting Protestants coming in after the Reformation. Even before that Ireland has a colonial past from the 12th century, but they're in increasingly coming in after the 16th century and the plantation, and the people who are bringing them with them strong belief in witchcraft are usually coming from England.
So if you go back to Youghal, that is a puritan settler English place. It's in Cork. And so you will see familiars, and you'll see swimming. You'll see tropes that are in English witchcraft there. And then if you go up north, if you go to Islandmagee, you will see more Presbyterian and tropes.
But the fourth one is the mass of the population. The kind of, at this period, 80% of the population, they still Irish speaking, Irish Catholics, population and they are not making formal accusations. Now, in the past we would argue that it was because they didn't want to go to Protestant courts, but we found out that they did for other things, so they might have for witchcraft, it's still a permanent argument perhaps, but we've looked at, Ronald Hutton and myself, and we've looked at belief more, and we would suggest that they just, it's not that they didn't believe in witches. They just believed in a witch that was less threatening, that attacked agricultural produce, stole milk and butter.
Now, you get this in Poland and places where they do execute witches, but the threat level is higher there, because they have a higher demonic input to them. There is no demonic input to these beliefs. These witches are women. They shapeshift into hares to steal milk, and you get that more in the folklore, or they use a sympathetic magic to transfer the goodness from their own crops to elsewhere.
Now you will see this in Isle of Man, you'll see it in Wales, and you'll, as I said, you'll see in other countries. But when it starts to become a wee bit demonic or it becomes more of a problem, then that's when you start getting, I think, the prosecutions of witches. And you don't get that in Ireland, in this period, anyway. So the mass of the population have a low threat level of witchcraft. They have a witch figure, or it's nothing.
[00:12:16] Josh Hutchinson: So the people accused of witchcraft, generally, they weren't killing children and causing people to be sick, that kind of thing?
[00:12:26] Andrew Sneddon: Yeah, I, and they weren't actually formally accusing them. They might have been doing it, probably don't know, because we just don't have their records. They're, they were an Irish speaking population, and we don't have, we don't know quite frankly. We know very little, we know about the beliefs usually transmitted through English, unfortunately, rather than, there is very little in Irish and it's mainly legal and political, and that has survived in manuscript form and nothing about witchcraft. It's usually transmitted through, as some people would say, the colonial gaze through English.
But let's go back to Islandmagee and let's get back to Youghal. What they're shared is, they're very similar, in fact, to Salem, the start of Salem. They're very similar to what you're getting in Lowland Scotland in the 1590s and the early 1700s. They are witchcraft trials involving demonic possession, where the main is demonic possession. Now, I know that there's controversy over whether there was demonic possession in Salem at the beginning, but definitely like the tropes are all there, the similarities, the fits, and the young people and blaming other people for that, blaming witches rather than blaming the devil himself, which would, indicate some sort of, sinfulness in their own parts. So they blame witches for their symptoms, so you get spectral evidence, although unlike Salem, it's not kicked out, it's the main one in Islandmagee, and it's the main one that's used in Youghal, as well, although witness testimony, as well.
And they actually in Islandmagee bring forth the vomited objects. That's why, we'll talk about it later, but that's why we've represented them in the VR. There's a material culture there. Yeah.
[00:14:27] Josh Hutchinson: But the demonic was unusual for Ireland, even the type of possession that was occurring was that unusual?
[00:14:36] Andrew Sneddon: It wasn't unusual given who it's happening to, so you're getting demonic possessions in the late 16th century and early 17th century in England. And then lo and behold, you'll see it in Cork in 1661 among the same people, the settler populations. And then you're seeing it increasingly in the north of Ireland in Ulster from the people who are coming from Scotland.
I know that Brian Levack in a great book on witch-hunting in Scotland argued it was the Calvinist Network, the British Calvinist Network.
[00:15:09] Josh Hutchinson: Sarah and I were talking about demonic possession yesterday, and there was really like a fine line between what's demonic possession and what's bewitchment. So yeah, so sometimes hard to say.
[00:15:27] Andrew Sneddon: It is hard to say in some circumstances, but you can see when they're talking about the devil made me roll about or the devil will not get me, and when they're in their fits or their convulsions, as well, when, you know, the witches are visiting them, is it that's what's causing the convulsion or is it the devil or? It's much more clear cut when you go to certain places in Europe, when you're getting whole convents are demonically possessed.
But it is direct demonic possession, rather demonic possession via witchcraft. It starts to get a bit gray when you, when it's involving witchcraft, but I think in some clear cases that is clearly not your normal witch trial.
[00:16:09] Josh Hutchinson: It's easy for things to get out of hand. You mentioned Salem and Islandmagee starts with this possession or affliction, and then you bring in the spectral evidence. It's really easy for things to start getting outta hand.
[00:16:25] Andrew Sneddon: What I argue in my book, Possessed by the Devil, it was 2013, it was a long time ago I wrote. I'm writing a second edition as we speak, but what I suggested was what was key here. And especially when you're looking at 1711, within the grand scheme of things, it's a period of decline, perhaps not in belief, that's a tricky one, but definitely judicial skepticism and a drop in trials, different times, different places, different reasons, different rates of decline. We know that. But there definitely is trailing off. And what you need, a committed central actor. And again, Levack would argue they're following a cultural script here that's easy to learn. You need a central actor who's keeping it going all the way through that you can focus your attention on.
Now she is Mary Dunbar, she's 18. She's educated, she is visiting a family where there has been demonic obsession and the matriarch has died in suspicious circumstances. Now, she is as I said, educated, biblically sound. The male authors of the sources tell you that, at pains, that she's good looking and she's trustworthy and all this stuff, and they're always demoniacs, demonically-possessed people are always showing themselves to be paragons of virtue, and I think she does that.
Contrast against the eight women that she accuses, first of all, who are tried at 31st of March, 1711. They are visually different. They're disabled. Two of them have lost an eye, one has fell on a fire and is burnt down one side, she has a crooked hand, one has, in the parlance of the time, a club foot. They're a small pox scarred. And the idea that everybody was small pox scarred, , I don't think is true when you read diaries at how people are affected by their visual change.
So they'll look different, but they're also act different. They challenge patriarchal norms, they drink strong alcohol, wine, they smoke, they resist arrest. They don't follow the prosecution process. They try to evade it at every turn. And even when they have no idea what's going on at the trial, they still plead guilty and deny their innocence, right to, so there, there is resistance and there's agency, but these are marginal women. They're poor. They have dubious reputations. Some of them could have been practicing at some level popular magic. The contrast is really palpable between believable witches, marginalized people, and the believable accused. So they're believable witches and she's a believable witness. And it's a heady combination.
Then Mary Dunbar dies three weeks after the first trial. We don't know why. And it took me going through every newspaper in 1711 in Ireland, and I found it. And basically, yeah she died and, but she'd already been accusing a final witch, William Sellor. Janet Liston was his wife, and his daughter was Elizabeth Sellor. Basically, it went from a misdemeanor to a felony, because she had died in the time that she had accused him. And he went to trial in 1711. Like we do a lot of the time in Scottish trials, we are assuming that he was executed.
[00:19:58] Josh Hutchinson: So the eight women, they're tried first, and then Mary Dunbar dies, and then William Sellor is tried with the enhanced charges?
[00:20:08] Andrew Sneddon: Yes. And that's it. There is no more under the 1586 Irish Witchcraft Act. There's one, an interesting one, in 1807 where the person could have been prosecuted for witchcraft. Mary Butters, she's a cunning person. She's a magical practitioner or a service magician, if you want to use that parlance, and she tries to cure a bewitched cow, just like we were talking about there, and ends up killing everybody in the house. Her magic goes wrong and she kills them by carbon monoxide poisoning by burning sulfur in a house to where everything has been sealed up.
She could be done under the 1586 Irish Witchcraft Act, but isn't. And it just shows you there's no, at a judicial level, anyway, by that time to try people for witchcraft under the witchcraft act, so it's a dead letter in that sense. Doesn't mean belief has went anywhere.
[00:21:06] Sarah Jack: Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means, that she was a cunning woman?
[00:21:12] Andrew Sneddon: If you look at the main historians, but the parlance, maybe it's changing. Some people don't like cunning folk because it's, it is anglophone. But and I want to widen the, the parameters of it, but there are among many magical practitioners, and I'll no go through them all, there's so many different ones and the borders between them are very different. But a fortune teller, for example. But a cunning person, I would say, is a multifarious magical practitioner. That is somebody who's commercial who usually charges money or goods in kind and usually perform more than one magical service. Now, this can be thief detection. This can be a counter magic, which is bread and butter a lot of the time. And that means detecting, thwarting, or bringing witches to the authorities. But they also can do some magical healing using herbs or spells or whatever that is not caused by supernatural means, that are natural means. And there's some divination in there, as well, as I said, lost or stolen goods, but also thief detection and that sort of thing. So they're remarkably consistent, cunning folk, that particular type, I think, from the early modern period, right through in the modern period. And you get 'em all over Europe, and you get them in America as well, right up to the late 19th century, possibly beyond.
[00:22:35] Josh Hutchinson: When people were accused of witchcraft in these few cases in Ireland, how were they tested?
[00:22:45] Andrew Sneddon: Yeah, this is the thing, spectral evidence, by this time, they haven't used it after, I think, is it 1655 in England? And obviously, it's overturned in Salem and this is 1711 we're talking about. So they know there is ultimately question, so they, they do blind tests, almost pseudoscientific the, because a demonic possessed person will get worse when the person approaches them or touches them.
And they actually did that in some trials. I think they did that in the Bury St. Edmonds, one in 1645 in England. And they get the person to touch them. That could be said, oh, they're just seeing the person that they want to get executed and acting up. So they get them and bring them in silently and get them to come in behind them so they can't see it. They also get a lineup. They bring 30 people, from everywhere, 30 women from everywhere and line them up. And she has to pick out the witch. She says she's never met them before. She only has met them when they attack her spectrally.
[00:23:48] Josh Hutchinson: A lot of that sounds so familiar with Salem and other witch trials that we've talked about on the show before. In Salem, they did the touch test, the exact same thing. I wish they would've done a lineup, because that could have eliminated some of them who, the witnesses who were accusing didn't, like you said, they'd never met a lot of these people that they were naming beforehand, and so they would name somebody in some far off town and have no idea who they were when they saw them, except that they were the only one that was brought in. So by process of elimination, they're like, oh, that's Goody Sandwich or whoever it was.
[00:24:39] Andrew Sneddon: The problem there is that Mary Dunbar says she had never met them before, but she's able to pick them out every single time. Every single time.
[00:24:47] Josh Hutchinson: So she knew them somehow?
[00:24:49] Andrew Sneddon: Yeah. I argue in the book that she's got an accomplice.
[00:24:51] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We know in some of the testimony in Salem, there's accounts given by like defense witnesses that say we heard that afflicted accuser ask somebody, "who is that lady who's up there, who's the prisoner at the bar?" And they would get information from the crowd. But yeah, she must have known somehow. You don't get a hundred percent right.
[00:25:19] Andrew Sneddon: No, and you, the public spectacles. The house was absolutely full, and you could argue if it's demon possession case. It's a chance to see the devil in action. You are basically touching the other world through this person. And yeah, there's no tv, This is something that's happening in a community in a peninsula that is eight miles long with 300 people in it. You can see why everybody's interested in it. And you're right, there could be all sorts of things that, that are happening that are culturally transmitting this to her. The idea that is a cultural script, that she's actually following a script, but she's also reacting like every good actor to the audience.
This is why I think their symptoms change in demonic possession cases. Now not all of symptoms are simulated. They can start off simulated and then become unsimulated. They can be suffering from some illness. Now, I couldn't, I went through all the types and I couldn't see, and they usually would bring this up at some point. And they did before in other occasions in Ireland, but they didn't, here. I think it was simulated to some extent in Mary Dunbar's case.
[00:26:40] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I have some theories about that too, about how in Salem, at least, the afflicted persons, there might've been some illness, there might've been just a genuine fear that they were bewitched and like you alluded to, with the touch test, they get near the person that they think is afflicting them, they're gonna act out somehow just because the fear is gonna overwhelm them.
[00:27:08] Andrew Sneddon: They know what's expected culturally, there's a cultural script. They know how to react in a demonic possession case. They know where it is and that's when, we've always tried to, I've tried to do is that the idea of these people live in a magical moral universe where spiritual essences are constantly interfering in your world, everybody believes that some sense, not everybody, but a lot of people, the accused and accusers would believe in witches and witchcraft and the possibility of demonic possession. But then again, you've got quite a lot to gain. We've talked about the forces, the patriarchal forces, that brought the eight women to the fore, those patriarchal forces were also constraining Mary Dunbar. She's in a tight, clerical family. She's not considered in Ireland an adult. Doesn't matter if she's 40 until she's married. Even then, I understand the agency, I understand resistance, and understand the ways that you can overturn patriarchy and the forces that cut through patriarchy, but it still limits your options. And so you could see it in that sense as well.
It's a reaction against are very strict, gendered, patriarchal upbringing. You are able to swear in the minister, punch 'em, spit on them, rip up bibles, cavort, and roll about in beds with young men without any damage to your reputation. You can move from the margins of adult attention to the center stage of a drama of your own creation. Now, this is James Sharpe who put words to this and Philip Almond, when he was studying mainly English demonic possessions. But I think it's, I think it's a good explanation. I don't think it's total explanation in all demonic possessions, but I think it works here.
[00:29:00] Josh Hutchinson: It works in so many cases that we've heard about of this kind of thing it's these young women who have the pressures to get married and be good Christians and good mothers and wives, and they're acting out against the system that's squeezed them into that role.
[00:29:24] Andrew Sneddon: Absolutely. And so that's why, accuser and accused, and putting pejorative spins on both, I think is a mistake. I think you have to understand the situation they're in.
A community itself is under pressure because the Presbyterians are being basically turned against, they, they help to defeat the the Catholic uprising and they help bring William of orange to power and then they're abandoned by the Church of Ireland.
They're trying to shut down their schools. They're trying to enforce old laws. After 1704, they force 'em out of local government. So they feel that they're their whole raison d'etre is under threat. Their whole religion and religious freedom are under threat. And that's the Presbyterians in 1711. Now, you get economic downturn and then you get famine, and then they all go, like whole communities from where I'm sitting, just go to America. Just, we're talking a minister and 300 families, they just go to America.
There's pressures there and communities under crisis. All these things make whatever problems you've got worse. We've all lived through covid. If you were having anything, any problems in Covid, the wider situation made them worse, and I definitely think you've gotta look at that when you're looking at Islandmagee, as well.
[00:30:51] Josh Hutchinson: We've heard about this almost formula of this confluence of all these tensions that has to occur to put the pressure on the community so that they start seeing witches, things like the warfare and the crop failure and religious conflict.
[00:31:13] Andrew Sneddon: Absolutely. Yeah. It's a whole load of things. Not all the time, but it's a whole load of things going wrong at the same time when you get a mass trial.
And this is a mass trial, nine people. So it is.
[00:31:26] Josh Hutchinson: Out of a community of 300, that's a lot of people. We've talked about the demonic possession. In Islandmagee, there's also a talk about a demonic boy. What can you tell us about that character?
[00:31:42] Andrew Sneddon: He is part of the demonic obsession. It's like it's a precursor, it's where the demon, and you'll see it quite a lot of the time in Presbyterian Ulster, where they get the elders from the Presbyterian church and they get a minister to come and investigate instances of this, where a demon is basically wrecking the house. Fast forward 150 years and it's a poltergeist, but at this point it's demonic obsession, and the demonic boy seems to be at the core of this. And he a appears to old Mrs. Haltridge. Now old Mrs. Haltridge owns the house. She's the widow of a Presbyterian minister and that's where Mary Dunbar visits, 'cause she is the niece of Anne Haltridge. After that, she's died in mysterious circumstances and that's when it all kicks off.
The demonic boy visits old Mrs. Haltridge and threatens her and grabs a Turkey cock and tries to kill it with a sword and smashes windows. But do you remember I was talking an accomplice? One of the persons who see this is the servant, Margaret Spear, and she is around a lot when this happens before me comes and then she's around that when a lot it happens, 'cause this behavior continues. They only, I think, Mary Dunbar only sees the demonic boy, once or twice. Now the demonic boy is obviously, a demon and it's recognized sometimes it's called a spirit. And this is the popular imagination. Sometimes specters and demons, there's a porous boundary between them, they're always coming up against it. You've mentioned it already, the unstable meanings all the time when you're dealing with witchcraft. And I think that is definitely one of them. The demonic boy. He is dressed in black. He's got everything that tells you he's a demon.
[00:33:43] Josh Hutchinson: It sounds like he was a little prankster or something to me.
[00:33:48] Andrew Sneddon: Or it's fantasy.
[00:33:50] Josh Hutchinson: Either one.
[00:33:51] Andrew Sneddon: The demonic body wasn't seen by many, but a lot of the witnesses saw the other stuff, right? So they saw a big bolster pillow about two foot high walk across the floor of the kitchen. They saw a petticoat just twirling. This is like horror movie stuff, twirling in the middle of the floor. You've got lithobolia everywhere, getting pelted with stones and other classic demonic obsession possession thing. Cats, there's some demonic cats in there. If you wanna see something similar, look at the trial of Jane Wenham in 1712, a year later in Hertfordshire loads of people have written loads of good stuff on it. But you can see some of the politicization happens in 1711 in Islandmagee, as well. You see it becoming a party political tool between whig and Torries, only it's reversed in Ireland. The Torries want to let the Islandmagee witches off, and the Presbyterians want to get her prosecuted.
[00:34:50] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we have a couple of these stone throwing demon cases in New England, also. There's one we're looking at in Massachusetts right now, the Elizabeth Morse case, with her grandson that comes to live with her and then all the weird stuff starts happening with the bed moving in the night and stones coming in the chimney and all these things. So that sounds like it was the demonic obsession playbook.
If you want to talk about the 19th century, what happens then as far as witchcraft accusations?
[00:35:27] Andrew Sneddon: They don't end. I have argued elsewhere that witchcraft belief, there is people who publicly deny it and then what they do actually suggests that they do believe in it, right? So they say they don't believe in witches, but they will put up witch stones to protect their houses or they will maybe accuse somebody of witchcraft or they will not go somewhere or something, it'll affect their behavior.
And then there's people who say they believe in witchcraft and this and accuse people of witchcraft and follow through it even to the court, and you're getting this in the 19th century in Ireland. So by the late 19th century we were talking about kinda polarization between Gaelic Irish Catholic belief and Protestant settler belief. I think they come together in a kinda perfect storm.
So the Protestant belief, you get more of this kind of dairy stealing seeping into that. And you can see it even when it goes to some, go to the church courts, the Presbyterian church courts. You can see it by the late 1700s and again, I think on the other side, Gaelic Irish communities, what you'll see is by the 19th century definitely is witches can harm human beings more. And itself, the act of, especially after the famine in the 1640s that stealing produce and in rural areas becomes a bigger problem and something, especially among the communities where these accusations are happening.
So people are accusing, again, accusing their neighbors, usually co-religionists. There's usually not Catholic v Protestant, it's usually Catholic against Catholic, and they're accusing them of killing cows, stealing butter, stealing, even transforming into hare, sometimes, but usually just stealing butter, using the evil eye on their cows, using charms, buried on their land, things like that, and they're accusing each other, but they can't really take them to court because after 1821, there's no act to do it by, and whether they want to anyway, but what they take things into their own hands, so you'll get accusers just like in England and just like in 19th century America accusers grabbing them and swimming them and, you know, beating them up. But in Ireland, it's usually rather than mobs doing it as an England, in some places in America in the 19th century, in Ireland, it's usually individuals.
So what you'll do is you'll think somebody has been stealing the milk produce from your cows using sympathetic magic. And you'll get cases where they shoot them, they hit them with shovels, they hit them with reaping hooks. There's one murder. And Will Pooley again is doing some brilliant work in France showing that this is happening in France as well.
And so you're getting accusers taking it out that way, but they're also using the lower courts that are rolled out after 1840s, the petty sessions. And so what they're doing is they can't prosecute somebody for magically stealing their milk or their butter or killing the cow, but what they can do is they can do them for theft. They're, you know what they think they've magically stole their milk, but they're just doing them for theft.
The people who are accused are also using the law to accuse their accusers of slander. And sometimes they're finding themselves in hot water, because what they're doing is reacting to the accusation by beating up the accuser. So they're doing the same thing and or slander in the accuser, so you're getting flooded after 1840s up to the end of the 19th century of these accusations, usually in lower courts, but sometimes they go to the higher courts, like the quarter sessions or the assizes when some serious, when they're slashing people, and it's not just like a factional violence, this is violence it targeted to, against something you think has bewitched you or the other way around. And so you're getting that right up until the end of the 19th century. I think that the last one that I came across, it tails off in the 20th century, and the last one's in 1946. The last big one is 1927, so it's tailing off definitely in the 20th century. Courts are just turning their backs, especially when the island of Ireland separates into Northern Ireland and the Republic in 1921, but the belief's still there and you're still getting it in rural areas right up to the end of the 20th century, belief, especially in witches who can harm cattle or steal produce and occasionally harm humans.
[00:40:15] Josh Hutchinson: 1927, huh?
[00:40:18] Andrew Sneddon: Yeah. And you'll see as well, if you look at the material culture, if you look at some of the objects that survive, and this is a real one, a witch stone, hag stone. You'll see these in museums in Northern Ireland and they're hung in buyers or sometimes wee ones around the necks of the cows to protect them.
So they, they do take it seriously. They're used against fairies sometimes, as well, and also, yeah, I think it's important to look at doubt and to look at saying one thing and doing another. But I think it's very important to understand as well, in the Irish context, at least, people are believing in witches, they're frightened of them, and they're doing something about it for a good party in the 19th century.
[00:41:00] Sarah Jack: I don't understand, like that's less than a hundred years ago. How did so many of us forget and we don't understand what these protective things are just a century later? How did that happen?
[00:41:17] Andrew Sneddon: Just like cultural memory and social memory, there is a great book by Guy Beiner called Social Forgetting. And I've argued in a book in 2022 called Representing Magic that you've got all this kind of popular belief, right? But the books and sermons written by male elites are saying they're using enlightenment rhetoric. They're in the 19th century.
But the idea that we are enlightened elites. We are enlightened. This land's enlightened. We are moved beyond the ignorance and the bigotry of the witch hunts. Look how great we are, and they use it as an example to place distance between them and themselves. And it's easier in, in Ireland 'cause there's so few of them anyway, it's the same rhetoric you'll see in England and you'll see in North America as well.
The historians will talk about historic witch trials in the 19th century and the antiquarians, and completely ignore the fact that all this is happening around them. And you'll see it in the cultural representations, as well. Ian Bostridge and Owen Davies were saying that witchcraft is history, basically. And it's the same thing. It's, it is when you deal with witchcraft, you deal with the historic example. So when the 19th century, they love talking about Islandmagee, they love talking about Youghal. They don't discuss the fact it's happening all around them. And what they also do, they, and invest it with gender ed language as well. By the 19th century, the end of the 19th century, is weaponized by the newspapers. And so what they start talking about, again, some of the same newspapers as reporting the crimes at another part of the newspaper are saying, "oh, there is some belief, but we're past that." But still, it is still there.
And the historians, as well. And the newspapers are gendering it just as female. Now as we, we saw 1711, there was a male witch, but also in the 19th century, a lot of these people who are accused are actually male, as well. I think it's something like 40%. I can't remember the figures off top of my head, but I think Will Pooley's finding this in France as well, that there's a far greater proportion of men, so their gendering it as female. They're just saying it is something that's passed and that has been reproduced in newspapers and then it's been reproduced in culture and poetry and paintings and drama. And I think that's where it is, and you'll find that in Ireland.
And you know what they'll say why are you doing witchcraft? And I was told by hundreds of people, even historians, what are you doing, because there wasn't any in Ireland. I think part of that is a problem that it was remembered at a local level 'cause people in Islandmagee for two centuries after it remembered it, but there's a discursive silence around it as well.
When we are saying about this kind of, almost discursive silence, that's, if you're looking at kinda official sources, you're looking at sermons, you're looking at male elites. But if you take on board folklore and material culture, if you go beyond the kind of, you don't know, almost the official to the vernacular, whether it is in Irish or English, if you go to the folklore, then you will find, I think this more and more, and that's where I have went as well to learn about witchcraft. And it's something that Guy Beiner argues as well, that when he was talking about the 1798 rebellion it's forgotten in certain spheres, but kept alive in others in different ways, in, in different contexts. And I think it, it works for the Islandmagee trial as well.
[00:45:00] Josh Hutchinson: Talking about the material culture, what were some other forms of protective magic that might have been employed?
[00:45:08] Andrew Sneddon: The big thing you know, would be, especially, and in Ireland would be protecting the churn. So you would put hot embers into the churn when you're churning. You would maybe have something roundabout the churn. You would make sure that people didn't say things or do things, you wouldn't have anybody looking at the churn. With children as well you have a lot of, especially when they were young, a lot of rituals and sometimes objects used to protect against witchcraft.
But just like in everywhere else, you get written charms are held close to the body, especially in soldiers. You get personal amulets all those sorts of protective magic. And you get, it's used in Islandmagee, as well. She first goes to a Catholic priest who, she's a Presbyterian, but it just shows you the cross boundaries of popular magic, because he's meant to have the best charm. So she goes to him, it doesn't work, and then she goes to a Scottish man, and he has one that works, but it makes her worse. So they cut it off, and it's a magical string that she uses , but they also use herbs as well. Especially this is something that's probably argued more by Ronald Hutton. He would say that witchcraft belief wasn't taken up as much because the Gaelic Irish believed in fairies and a lot of the things that fairies did were blamed on witches but use a lot of vervain and other plants were used, foxglove, all the kind of stuff, and mountain ash as well. You all the ones you see elsewhere would be used either to cure or as protection, but they're limitless. I could go all day on the different types.
[00:46:50] Josh Hutchinson: The commemorative project and exhibition, can you just explain that in a nutshell to begin with?
[00:46:57] Andrew Sneddon: This is a commemorative an a memorialization. The first plaque to Islandmagee Witches was erected this year. That was something outside the project, something we were involved in, but something that was outside this project. No. And we have taken it forward with this exhibition.
It's the first exhibition of an Irish witchcraft trial. And it's happening here. As far as I know, it's the first one. And it comes out of a project called the Islandmagee Witches a creative and digital project. The website is, and I'm sure you can put it up in yours, w1711.org, and all the outputs are there.
And what we wanted to do was to take this to another level. I have a practitioner of public history. I've done TV and podcast, but it mainly radio and TV and talks. And I took it all after it broke in 2013. I took this everywhere. I was talking about it a lot. This is creative collaboration of public history where the historian is actually helping to create a history as well.
So the outputs are that, so we are wrote with a local graphic artist from Derry, Londonderry, a graphic novel about the trial. We also wrote with it, the project I'll say is led by me and Dr. Victoria McCollum, but it involves a whole load of people from Ulster University as well, and a lot of funding from Connected and AHRC and things like that.
But the VR was with Dr. Helen Jackson. And that makes you become demonically possessed. And we're trying to get across what it's like to be demonically possessed, but also what it's like to be accused in a kind of way to deal with intangible cultural heritage in a very immediate and immersive environment and let people engage with the story that might not otherwise engage with it.
So the VR there, but we've also got a prototype of a video game. Again, it's a kind of serious video game where you go into the shoes of the accuser. And it's just trying understand the moral choices and why people accused, not just to understand the accused, but understand the accuser and why these things happen. So that's the video game.
And then there's a bespoke animation. We got a local all women animation studio in Belfast to create a 14 minute animation, which I scripted on it. And that is actually in the VR app, but I think you can access that through the website, as well. And the graphic novel, as well. And we got local people, and we got staff and students Adam Melvin and Brian Coyle and Sabrina Minter. They were working on the computer game. And Adam was working on the score, so he has come up with an original score for the VR.
Lastly no, we're doing a lot of workshops as well. So we're doing creative writing workshops, we're doing printing workshops, but we're also putting on a play called Witches in Eden. And this is produced by Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick, Ulster University, Victoria and myself.
And it's involving staff and students, and Witches in Eden was written in 1948, just before The Crucible, and it actually contains a lot of the tropes of The Crucible, by Olga Fielden, who was a Belfast based playwright. And it's never been put on since I think 1951. And I wrote about that in Representing Magic, the 22 book, as a kind of idea of exploring the cultural representations and the afterlife of the Islandmagee trial. But, Victoria had a great idea. Why don't we put it on and, so it'll be on, in the Riverside Theatre at the end of October in Coleraine in Northern Ireland. The exhibition is in Carrickfergus, and that is on the ninth, and it runs to the 16th of November, 2023. There's a big launch in the 16th.
The great thing about it, so the exhibition space right, is across the road from where the trial happened. Touching distance.
[00:51:10] Josh Hutchinson: Wow.
Wow.
[00:51:13] Andrew Sneddon: So, yeah. And you can see more about it on the website. We're working with other people who work in memorialization, as well, the University of Highland and Island working with RAGI and other people who, who have worked on, how to memorialize in different ways, not just through plaques, but through digital and creative technologies and storytelling.
[00:51:34] Josh Hutchinson: It's such a creative way to present the story to this generation of people. Use all the technology that's available and it's like you've covered every form of media that you can, basically.
[00:51:53] Andrew Sneddon: It is been quite thorough, but it was organic. We didn't go right. We're doing everything right,
[00:51:57] Josh Hutchinson: yeah,
[00:51:58] Andrew Sneddon: but, but we work in a university with such talented people like Brian and Adam and Sabrina and Victoria and Helen and Shannon Devlin and the history department, as well, and Lisa Fitzpatrick, all these people who are so good at what they do. And if they come together and we work as a team, it's amazing what you can achieve.
[00:52:18] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I'm hoping it serves as an example for other locations where there were witch trials.
[00:52:25] Andrew Sneddon: Yeah. And so you don't go down the Disney World of war, aspect, you know that some places are, over commercialization, certain that with respect, and the historical aspects we respect as well, that there were real people with descendants that are still around.
[00:52:44] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Speaking of the commercialization, you were recently in Salem actually, weren't you?
[00:52:51] Andrew Sneddon: Yeah. I've been before and to be honest, the first time I went I was more kinda whoa than the second time, yeah, I was doing a kind of tour, so we went, Victoria and I went Steilneset Monument, monument in Vardo in Norway in winter, which was mad at the Arctic in winter.
[00:53:12] Josh Hutchinson: Wow.
[00:53:13] Andrew Sneddon: and that was absolutely beautiful and, in the snow and in it, so well done, just look it up if you don't know about it, is to 91 people executed in that region, Finnmark in the 17th century, mostly women, some indigenous people as well, and then going to Salem as well, where the history, you've got the kinda big set pieces of the memorialization, but the history otherwise is fighting to get out.
[00:53:45] Sarah Jack: Yeah.
[00:53:46] Andrew Sneddon: So you're, you are looking for the history, and I love them in memorials. And I and I like the most recent one, is it 2016? That was erected. I didn't see that the first time I went, but I've seen that and I think the all got their, the all get their they're good points.
I do think the memorialization is very good and I do like them, and they're very important, especially in that context, you've got a statue to Samantha from Bewitched.
[00:54:13] Josh Hutchinson: Oh yes. There's a statue of her, just like a block or two away from the first memorial to the witch trial victims. Yeah, it's interesting juxtaposition there, the history and the modern.
[00:54:31] Andrew Sneddon: Yeah. That's why I haven't tried, a disentangle, and we just discussed it there, the kind of, what happened and the way it's been represented and the way it's used, and I think that you can be creative with it. And I think you can, I don't think you, you can, you have to say the historians just know the the story because we've read the documents, now on the website, I've put every document for the Islandmagee trial. I've digitized them. They're all there for you. But it's more than that. And we've included them in the exhibition as well.
But it's more than that, and that's why we've got the workshops, the storytelling, and the printmaking. People can make their own histories, and we shouldn't try to have ownership completely as historians of these stories. So that is not what I'm saying. I'm just saying sometimes the representations that you know are not all positive, and and the commercialization aspect that are not all positive.
[00:55:27] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, but a lot of those attractions, they do get people's attention. It's just somebody has to come in and say, set the record straight at some point.
[00:55:40] Andrew Sneddon: The thing is as well, what happens is what, 2,500 executing Scottish history and 38 in American history, but most popular consciousness would say, what's the big witch trial? What do they think of Salem And that, I was talking to somebody the other day when we were actually launching something and yeah, they were absolutely gobsmacked. And I says, yeah, there was more people executed in one car park in Perth in Scotland than the whole of Salem. And that has only been righted now in the last two years with this new kind of campaign. And for the, I didn't, I'm Scottish I'm from Glasgow. I did not hear of any of this growing up. I didn't know there was any witches in Scotland. But I think that's changing as well. That kind of, and then that's the power of representation. That's the power of cultural representation and what a leaves out and what puts in.
[00:56:32] Josh Hutchinson: It's remarkable that you can grow up and not hear about these things. And there were just so many in Scotland. We hear that from people in places like Connecticut in the US where there were witch trials and people just don't know that they happened. You grow up, you go to school there, and they never talk about it. But for a whole nation like Scotland to just turn its back on the memory. That's really something.
[00:57:03] Andrew Sneddon: Yeah. Again, forgetting, so it's we're putting it behind us. It was a bad time. We were one of the first enlightened countries in Europe. We were the home of moral philosophers and Adam Smith, Glasgow University, and Edinburgh University, and St. Andrews. We're not all about witches. The people who were writing history in the 20th century perhaps, no interest in that either, 'cause it's ordinary people.
[00:57:30] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we saw that with Connecticut. A lot of the antiquarians in the 19th century wanted to show the state in a good light, and so they would poke fun at Massachusetts and say that we never had anything like that here. They did.
[00:57:47] Andrew Sneddon: That's exactly what was happening in Ireland, yeah. Putting distance between I, Owen and Davis does it brilliantly in America Bewitched, is putting distance between, the past and ourselves, and using it as an oppositional tool regionally, as well. look at.
[00:58:00] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. They did that in the States with Salem before the American Civil War. The southern states were poking fun at the northern states for having witch trials. And yeah, you just use it as this political thing later on, and then today, of course witch-hunt has become just a real political metaphor that's used, I would say way too often.
[00:58:30] Andrew Sneddon: You've had Marion Gibson on talking, and she brilliantly showed the kind of misogynistic aspects of The Crucible. And arguably, the Crucible brought forth that idea of the witch-hunt as politic, getting rid of your rivals, and it's used a lot of the times, I think, misogynistically today by men who you know are accused, of all sorts, but accusing his accusers using that, which is doubly insulting, I, I don't like modern appropriation of the word witch-hunt, because as your whole podcast shows, it's so complex even to appropriate it at all. It's so reductive. But to appropriate it in that way is particularly bad, I think.
[00:59:14] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. And there's still people dying in literal witch hunts. And then you're gonna use that as a political thing and say, no, I'm a victim here. You're not.
[00:59:26] Andrew Sneddon: Yeah. And it's usually the worst type of people who are using it.
[00:59:30] Josh Hutchinson: Yes,
[00:59:30] Andrew Sneddon: I'm.
[00:59:31] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. The ones who are guilty as sin. Yeah.
So I definitely encourage everybody to go check out that exhibit. I really wish that I could be there to see it myself. It sounds amazing. So many different aspects coming together to really immerse people in this.
[00:59:56] Andrew Sneddon: Absolutely.
[00:59:57] Sarah Jack: And now for a Minute with Mary.

[01:00:07] Mary Bingham: For me, the most important reason to memorialize is to remember. We memorialize a loved one or an event through the preservation of memories, perhaps sharing stories, looking at a scrapbook, listening to a compilation of that person's favorite music, erecting a burial monument. Creating a celebration of life ceremony.
No matter what we do to memorialize a person, group, or people and or event, we keep their legacy alive. When I first started to roam Essex County in search of my ancestors, I looked for their burial sites to visit their graves, to pay my respects, and to thank them for their decisions which caused me to be alive today. I still do that from time to time. Then they wanted to find where they lived, how they lived, where they walked, discover their experiences, funny, odd, different, wonderful, and sad. It was during this part of my journey, which led me to stand where some of my ancestors were hanged to death in the area of Proctor's ledge at Salem Mass in British America, 1692. A simple, beautiful, and important memorial was built and dedicated at that site on July 19th, 2017, so that the area would no longer be lost to history.
Now, descendants can visit from time to time to pay their respects. Another beautiful memorial was dedicated 25 years prior to Proctor's ledge in 1992, and is located in Salem abutting the Charter Street Cemetery. 20 beautiful stone benches are attached to a stone wall lined with beautiful trees and historic homes for descendants and many visitors to sit and contemplate the lives of those whose names are engraved on each of those benches who were executed in 1692.
However, my favorite memorial to the victims at Salem is the monument that was also erected in 1992 and is located on Hobart Street in current day Danvers, Mass. The beautiful life-sized stone monument is in two parts. The front displays the Book of Life with a replica of the iron shackles that accused would have worn while in prison. The back displays the Puritan Minister. The one thing that stands out is that this is the only monument that lists the 25 names of the people who died as a result of the Salem Witch Hunts that year, the 20 that were executed and the five who died in jail. Not only that, but also engraved are the powerful statements that the accused said during their pretrial examinations. It is a wonderful way to contemplate their lives, offer a glimpse into their horrifying experience, and share lessons on how we can learn from history.
And here are all their names. Infant daughter of Sarah Good died in prison before June. Sarah Osborne died in the Boston Prison May 10th, Bridget Bishop hanged June 10th, Roger Toothaker died in the Boston Prison June 16th, Sarah Good hanged July 19th, Susanna Martin hanged july 19th. Elizabeth Howe hanged July 19th. Sarah Wildes hanged july 19th. Rebecca Nurse hanged July 19th. George Burroughs hanged August 19th. George Jacobs, Sr. hanged August 19th. Martha Carrier hanged August 19th. John Proctor hanged August 19th. John Willard hanged August 19th. Giles Corey died under torture September 19th. Martha Corey hanged september 22nd. Mary Esty hanged September 22nd, Mary Parker hanged September 22nd, Alice Parker hanged September 22nd, Ann Pudeator hanged September 22nd, Wilmot Redd hanged September 22nd, Margaret Scott hanged september 22nd, Samuel Wardwell hanged September 22nd, Ann Foster died in prison December 3rd. Lydia Dustin died in prison March 10th, 1693. Rest in peace. You'll never be forgotten.
May those who suffered a similar fate at Ireland in 1711 also rest in peace. Thank you.

[01:05:08] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:05:10] Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

[01:05:20] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501(c)(3), Weekly News Update. Witch-hunt memorials and commemorations serve as enduring tangible reminders. They provide comfort and solace and education. We can touch the cool, solid surface of a monument like we are reaching out and connecting with witch trial victims of the past, even though they're no longer physically present. Tributes like historical fiction, coffees named in honor of a witch trial victim, stone and metal monuments, and arts that teach and commemorate, like Salem by Ballet Des Moines, the play Prick, the play The Last Night, the play Saltonstall's Trial, the play Witches in Eden, the Echoes of the Witch photographic documentary, and multimedia museum and online exhibits like w1711.org, are a lasting witness of the impact these lives had on the world. You can listen to previous episodes to learn more about each of these projects. I hope the w1711.org project brings you to reflection, contemplation, and advocacy action.
September brings cooler temperatures, crisp, warm colors in nature, and a season of anticipated festivities, like fall festivals that hold meaningful rituals, well-planned get togethers and individual and group celebrations across the earth.
We are moving into the final quarter of the year and considering and planning for what lies ahead after December. What lies ahead for thousands of vulnerable world citizens is experiencing unjust violence due to excited sorcery accusations inside their communities. When individuals are branded as a witch and blamed for causing harm with witchcraft, their actual safety and life is in danger, and it often comes at the hand of their own families and neighbors. Please learn more about the advocacy that is happening around the world by going to our show notes and finding links to advocacy groups.
Thank you for being a part of the Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast community. We appreciate your listening and support. Keep sharing our episodes with your friends. This podcast is a project of our nonprofit called End Witch Hunts. It is dedicated to global collaboration to end witch hunting in all forms. We collaborate and create projects that build awareness, education, exoneration, justice, memorialization, and research of the phenomenon of witch hunting behavior. End Witch Hunts employs a three-pronged approach to the problem, focusing on knowledge, memory, and advocacy through our various projects. Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn about the projects. To support us, make a tax deductible donation, purchase books from our bookshop, or merch from our Zazzle shop. Have you considered supporting the production of the podcast by joining us as a Super Listener? Your Super Listener donation is tax deductible. Thank you for being a part of our work.

[01:08:07] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[01:08:09] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:08:11] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:08:15] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[01:08:17] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:08:20] Sarah Jack: See what's going on at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:08:23] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends and family and everyone that you meet about Thou Shalt Not Suffer.
[01:08:31] Sarah Jack: Support the global efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[01:08:38] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

September 7, 2023

Prick: A Play of the Scottish Witch Trials

Prick, a new play by Laurie Flanigan Hegge, directed by Meggie Grievell

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Show Notes

Writer Laurie Flanigan-Hegge, director Meggie Greivell, and puppet artist Madeline Helling speak about their new play production Prick. Prick is inspired by the Witches of Scotland campaign and tells the story of folk who were victims of the terrible miscarriage of justice of the witch trials in Scotland. The story of Prick traverses magic and memory, fact and fiction, past and present. This special conversation is a reflection of the evocative, poetic, and satirical way artistic work can deliver a relevant and critical message about our history and human experience.

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Transcript

[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Hello, and welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:26] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: Today we're here with the makers of the play Prick, which is now showing at Edinburgh Fringe. We are talking to writer Laurie Flanigan Hegge, director Meggie Greivell, and puppet artist Madeline Helling.
[00:00:46] Sarah Jack: Prick is a satirical play about Scottish witch trials.
[00:00:50] Josh Hutchinson: Features stories of three witch trial victims, including an unknown woman, Marioun Twedy, and Isobel [00:01:00] Gowdie.
[00:01:00] Sarah Jack: There's difficult topics dealt with in the story, like pricking and shaving and watching of the alleged witches, and it's really an important part of understanding what thousands of women went through a few centuries ago.
[00:01:19] Josh Hutchinson: Puppetry is employed throughout. The art of the puppets is masterful, and how they're used in the scenes really brings life to the settings, and the puppets help make uncomfortable topics more comfortable. It's a quite enjoyable play. There's dark comedic elements to it, and it's got the devil himself.
[00:01:48] Sarah Jack: Laurie, Meggie, and Madeline have a great conversation with us about how this play came together, the significance.
[00:01:59] Josh Hutchinson: A [00:02:00] lot of the themes of the play are very relevant today, including the ever present element of misogyny in the witch trials and in women's lives these days, also. And so you learn about the double meaning of the name Prick, why they chose that name.
[00:02:25] Sarah Jack: In this conversation, they share some things that you're not gonna get from just attending the play, so this is a really great opportunity to understand the layers. Here is a special conversation about Prick, which was written by Laurie, directed by Meggie, with puppets created by Madeline.
[00:02:48] Josh Hutchinson: What brought your creation team and performance team together?
[00:02:53] Meggie Greivell: So I reached out to Laurie last summer with [00:03:00] the hopes of writing a play about the Scottish Witch Trials, because it had piqued my interest since I moved to Scotland in 2021. I found out about the North Berwick Witch Trials, and I was very shocked and angered. And I'm graduating with my master's in directing soon. And this project is my directing thesis. I needed a play that was a new work, and I reached out to Laurie, because I'd worked with her before at the History Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I really loved her writing. And she said yes, she was interested in writing this play, and that's how we began. And Laurie, do you wanna take it from there?
[00:03:43] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: It was interesting, because when Meggie asked me to do it, it was at a point where I had been, is the word fallow? When you don't have, you haven't been writing or like it, it had been a very fallow time for me, and I was just so happy to have a project to explore, but [00:04:00] I didn't know how to get into this project at first. The subject was so huge, and once I started researching, I felt pretty daunted by kind of the scope of it and a little bit nervous about the fact that I'm an American playwright who has, at that point I hadn't been to Scotland and I didn't really understand the history.
[00:04:21] And then as things clicked along in my research, things started coming together in my brain. My introduction to this piece was through listening to modern media, which is podcasts. I was listening to your podcast and Witches of Scotland podcast and getting to know all of the amazing writers and historians and researchers through their own words.
[00:04:49] And as time went on, I got more and more immersed in the understanding of the witch trials and how things connected. And I'm still right now [00:05:00] working on understanding what's happening in the modern world, which I was just saying, Sarah, that I had listened recently to your episode about Papua New Guinea, and it was, came for me at a very timely moment in my own understanding of just how our modern world is expressing this same horror that the women in this play lived through. But you'll notice in the play that media and the, kicking off with news of Scotland and my little kind of twisted take on that it is directly related to my relationship to media and the subject of the witch trials and the spread of witchcraft through the modern world.
[00:05:40] Sarah Jack: And did you guys plan on incorporating puppetry?
[00:05:45] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, I would say right out of the gate I knew that I had the title Prick before I had anything else. When I heard about witch prickers I was, I said, "Meggie, I'd like to call it Prick." And she said, "yes, please do." And I knew that I wanted pricking [00:06:00] and the pricker to be a theme of the play but that I did not want to ask any actor or audience member to be subjected to seeing any kind of torture or harm inflicted on a body on stage.
[00:06:17] And so from the gate, I said, I'd like to incorporate puppets. And by the way, my neighbor across the street is a puppet artist that I've been dying to work with. That's Madeline Helling. She's with us today. And I told Meggie I wanted to use puppets. She gave me a wholehearted endorsement and Madeline was immediately part of the process. Madeline, do you wanna say anything about that?
[00:06:41] Madeline: Oh yeah, just Laurie said, "I have this project, it's about the witch trials." And I, yeah, it was an easy yes, easy thing to say yes to. The theme and working with Laurie and then doing this in Scotland was very exciting. Yeah, and Minneapolis is a really vibrant puppet community, so [00:07:00] I've had a lot of amazing experience working with a lot of amazing people here. That helped me gain some skills to do that.
[00:07:09] Josh Hutchinson: That's interesting. I didn't know that about Minneapolis.
[00:07:13] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, it's a hotbed actually. There's a large puppet community and the, so the vocabulary of using puppets is something that I'm really familiar with as a theater artist, and I think, because of that vocabulary, and Meggie has lived in the Twin Cities too. We know, we all understand like what a puppet can mean in terms of emotion and how evocative a puppet can be. It's like a musical element. Does that jive with what you would say, Madeline, that there's a lyricism to using puppets?
[00:07:41] Madeline: Yeah, I think it's just a language understood the world over and it's a street language that like, it's just, it's a cheap art form that is, there's roots in it all over the world. And in that way it has this sort of universality to it. And there's this way that [00:08:00] puppets, like everything they do has to be articulated. And in that way it can draw a little more focus and attention on certain elements, physical elements like breath is an action in a purposeful way, which is, I feel like for this play, for Prick it makes so much sense to have puppets in it.
[00:08:22] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: We also wanted to incorporate aspects of the world, of the other world, the familiars. and. When I said to Madeline, "I'd like a fox, a jackdaw," immediately that was possible and shape-shifting is possible. And it did organically change. My first draft, I think, Meggie, I said that there were puppets attached to bodies on stage, and that was just my first thought about it. And it evolved into the design that Madeline brought to us. But yeah, Meggie, I don't know. What did you think when I said puppets right away? You never seemed to fight that.
[00:08:55] Meggie Greivell: I jumped right in. I was gonna say puppets are also [00:09:00] having, I think, a golden age in theater right now. In the UK they are, I think in the US they are, too. But in the UK, especially, with shows like a Warhorse that was, took over the West End and the Life of Pi right now has just won so many Tony Awards. The puppet artists and the tiger won a Tony Award. It was the first ever puppeteers to win a Tony Award, the seven actors that play the tiger.
[00:09:28] I'd never done it before, and I thought this sounds like a great opportunity to learn and for all of the student actors to learn, as well. And also I knew that it would help tell our story that we wanna tell, especially with The Accused puppet and not wanting to show a woman being tortured on stage. But also The Accused has become this really powerful symbol for women not having control over their own bodies during the witch trials.[00:10:00] And I think puppets bring magic to the theater. Like they belong in the theater and on the street, as you say, Madeline.
[00:10:09] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: It's interesting that we discovered the disassociation that people experience when they're experiencing trauma is personified by having the characters in our play talking about what happens. But it's embodied by The Accused, our puppet that we call The Accused. And so that was a very organic discovery that felt totally right. When we observed what that disassociation looked like on stage, it felt, like, oh my gosh, yes. It just felt really central to the whole premise of the piece. And we were working really quickly in conceiving and creating this piece. It was a beautiful discovery that felt completely in alignment with what we were trying to do with the piece.
[00:10:49] Meggie Greivell: And all of the audiences have been responding really strongly to all the puppets, and they understand the symbolism of The Accused immediately. [00:11:00] We've had really, really powerful responses about that and the familiar puppets as well.
[00:11:08] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: So in the piece we have three different women who are called into what we call a liminal space, and when they get there, they are conjured into the space by the ensemble, and they are facing off with the pricker character. And in that space, The Accused appears. And so when the women are conjured and they are representing their own, this kind of core character, The Accused is with them.
[00:11:35] Meggie Greivell: The Accused represents all three of the women, but also each of them individually, as well.
[00:11:42] Josh Hutchinson: Can you talk about what pricking is?
[00:11:46] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: ah, pricking.
[00:11:47] Meggie Greivell: Yes.
[00:11:48] So pricking in Scotland during the Witch Craft Act, there were witch prickers who were employed to prick and torture the women. So there, there [00:12:00] actually were witch prickers. But the play also has a beautiful double entendre. Pricking symbolizes women being pricked with misogyny, as well.
[00:12:12] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: So the witch picker would use an instrument or a tool to search for a spot on the woman's body that wouldn't bleed. Witch prickers weren't part of every single trial, but they came and went in the Scottish Witch Trials, and they were sometimes charlatans, brutal. Women would be shaved, stripped, and searched and pricked with an iron rod, looking for a place on their body that wouldn't bleed. And if it was found or falsely found, it was stated that was where the devil's mark was.
[00:12:47] Meggie Greivell: And they were paid very well to do this, and they're very respected in the community.
[00:12:55] Josh Hutchinson: I would say for our audience, a [00:13:00] similar thing happened when they would have a group of women, a jury of women search a female suspect the body looking for witches' teets. That's what they were looking for at Salem and other American trials, and they didn't use the torture method of pricking along, but if they found an insensitive place, sometimes they would stick a needle through it to see if it drained any fluid. And yeah, they would just check for insensitive locations that stood out as unusual.
[00:13:41] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: To think that a person would be touched in this way. And I, I think it's interesting that prickers in Scotland and the witch trials had their eras. It wasn't consistent throughout, but prickers would show up.
[00:13:57] One of the characters in our play, Marion Twedy [00:14:00] was pricked and actually that I found her in the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database. And it so happens that she had two really interesting, compelling things about her case, one that she was pricked and one that she never confessed. But in her pricking, they did discover the devil's mark. We don't know what that was, but we know that she was pricked and that without a confession, the mark that was found on her was enough to end her life.
[00:14:31] Josh Hutchinson: Terrible. We, Sarah and I have ancestors who were examined that way in the Salem witch trials, not with the pricking but with the close inspection of their secret parts. And teets were found, and they said, "get some more experienced women over here." But for the pricking, it's just extremely invasive and misogynist to have a man doing that to a [00:15:00] woman. That just is so brutal. I can hardly imagine it.
[00:15:04] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: The fact that sometimes the pricking instrument was a fake instrument that was enough to condemn a woman was that's not something we addressed in Prick. There was a lot I couldn't address just because the play is a one act play, but it did give a character a line, "you're pricking me now with every word," and to me that is that is the thread that Meggie was talking about earlier about the misogyny piece. Not every woman was pricked, but we all know what it feels like to be pricked in some way. And I'm not suggesting that the kind of pricking that these women underwent was in any way comparable to the pricks I felt in my life, because it's not the same, but that kind of image is resonant for all of us, I think.
[00:15:51] Sarah Jack: Absolutely.
[00:15:52] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: I asked Madeline to create different size prickers, too, so that each character is met with an [00:16:00] instrument that gets bigger and bigger as the piece proceeds. So it starts out as a normal size, and then she plays with scale. So by the end, we see that this pricker is like the boogeyman is holding this pricker, and it's a little bit more universal.
[00:16:13] Josh Hutchinson: Such a powerful image.
[00:16:16] Madeline: And you just wonder at one point the person instigating or physically doing the harm disassociate themselves. So when we were like working through that piece in the show, that pricking object, like we just worked with the power that object held a bit, which was an, I dunno, it's just an interesting exercise, those elements and objects of torture.
[00:16:49] Josh Hutchinson: It's amazing to me that anybody made it through without confessing.
[00:16:55] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Zoe and Claire on the Witches of Scotland podcast, they talk about that a lot and [00:17:00] the whole thing about Scotland doesn't torture. It's like there was no torture in Scotland. It's just such a ridiculous thing to suggest that's not torture. I would've confessed for sure I wouldn't have been able to take that pain. That's how I think. Maybe I'm wrong, but.
[00:17:14] Meggie Greivell: And Marion Twedy, did you, I can't remember if you said this earlier, but the character, Marion, our play, she did not confess, and we have that in the play. She's one of the women who did not confess, which is just so unimaginable to think about that.
[00:17:32] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we have cases where the interrogation itself was intimidating enough to get a confession without the added physical duress, and it's just a marvel to me that anybody got through that process and even lived to be tried.
[00:17:56] Sarah Jack: Does the play open with a strong start [00:18:00] or do you ease the audience into things?
[00:18:02] Meggie Greivell: I would say it opens with a strong start.
[00:18:05] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: It opens with it well, some audience members have described it as a chant or an incantation. But it starts with a list of communities around Scotland and one of our actors, she's from the Isle of Skye, and she said, "oh, this sounds like a walking song," and she came up with the song to go along with it. So it comes across as this really beautiful kind of chant, and then it's followed by an incantation welcoming the women into the space.
[00:18:33] Meggie Greivell: It's a very haunting song. And we were using, Laurie wrote a heartbeat into the script and we organically discovered this, I found this very large stick at a store called Pound Savers, which is like the dollar store. And in the rehearsal room we discovered that it made a really great heartbeat sound, and that's in the song [00:19:00] and throughout the play, as well.
[00:19:02] But it's become a symbol as well for a broomstick, as well as other types of domestic things, like a butter churn. And we also learned this was a happy discovery, coincidence, but also works really well with the play that in Scotland, a lot of the ministers and commissioners that were involved in the trials, they used questioning sticks. In the opening song, it sounds almost like a sea shanty or like this haunting folk song. And Laurie's written all these really beautiful words and incorporated in the Scottish cities where the witch trials happened into the song.
[00:19:42] Josh Hutchinson: What stood out to me about the opening song is just how long the list of those cities is, the communities where witch trials happened. It's dozens of places.
[00:19:56] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: And yet it's still not comprehensive, right? That was my fear. What did I leave [00:20:00] out? And even now as I'm talking about things that are happening, as I'm trying to wrap my mind about where things are happening in the world, I feel like, again, not comprehensive to understand where modern witch hunts are happening. Just everywhere yet in between is how I got through that as a writer.
[00:20:19] Meggie Greivell: And that's one of the lyrics in the song as well.
[00:20:22] Josh Hutchinson: You talked about one of the women who's a victim who's in the play. Who are the other main characters whose story's being told?
[00:20:33] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: The first is an unknown woman, which was very intentional. I was really struck by the sundry witches and all the people whose names are lost. And so she was really the first woman to be conjured in my mind and also to be conjured into this world of this play. And she doesn't know who she is, which is part of her journey.
[00:20:59] [00:21:00] She arrives in on the scene and is confused. She's come back, because she's looking for her baby, her bairn, and doesn't find her baby there. And she tries to leave, and they pull her back in. And we call her the unknown woman. She's an individual, but she represents many of the sundry witches who have no stone, no memorial, and no way of knowing who they are, erased by time.
[00:21:27] Meggie Greivell: And Laurie writes very beautifully into the unknown woman's language that she has no stone. That's a through line throughout all of her scene.
[00:21:39] Sarah Jack: So many elements of this work are just so incredible. I was so thrilled to see this aspect that you put into the story, because the unnamed, for the reasons that you just mentioned, but there's so many we don't know their name. You think about like with this specific [00:22:00] unnamed woman, she didn't know who she was. It's so striking, because before they're accused and examined, these women felt very confident, possibly some did, from testimonies you read, they're confident they're not a witch, they're confident that they're clear before God. And there's other historical unnamed individuals that are memorialized.
[00:22:26] And then I think of when we were working on our exoneration legislation in Connecticut this past year. There is an unnamed person in some records, but the politicians didn't include it in the final draft that individual who could have represented so many, who could have been a symbol for these women like your unnamed is, she was removed from that legislation, and that was so disappointing to me. I [00:23:00] am so thrilled to see that a part of your message.
[00:23:04] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: That's heartbreaking. The fact that we don't know who she was doesn't change the fact that she existed. I think this is what's so important about memorialization, too, is that marking someone's life acknowledges, it's like how we all wanna feel seen, right? I wanna feel seen. You wanna feel seen. To be unseen and to be invisible is another insult. And then for, I think for these women who were Christian women, to not be given a Christian burial, at least in their own understanding of the world as they know it, they're not seen in the world, in the afterlife, in the way that they wanted to be seen. That's an aspect for her, too, that she's stuck in purgatory or whatever it is, the liminal space.
[00:23:45] Meggie Greivell: And Laurie used the Scottish Witchcraft database to get information for the three accused women in the play. And we learned that there are thousands of unnamed in the [00:24:00] records here. So it's a lot really.
[00:24:04] Josh Hutchinson: I found the line in the play about the and sundry witches were killed so powerful, because it shows how little these women were valued. You don't even deserve to have a name, like you're just erased entirely.
[00:24:26] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, I think we included the definition. Our version of this play has three men who play various roles, and then three women who play various roles, plus each having their own individual women. But the chorus of men says sundry witches confessed. And one of the women says, "sundry: definition, various items not important enough to be mentioned individually." And that's what it comes down to. It's you're not important enough for us to know who you were.
[00:24:51] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Our listeners here will be familiar with a lot of the women who are just known as Goodwife or Goody, [00:25:00] because their first name, nobody bothered to record that. They just recorded that they were the wife of so-and-so and the man mattered, but the woman who was the actual target, her name didn't matter. So yeah, it's very moving.
[00:25:20] Sarah Jack: I also think it's a recognition of the modern victims that we're just getting to know. We know of such a small fraction of the individual cases. So here today, there are unnamed victims.
[00:25:36] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, and I think it's hard for people when you don't have a name or a story to attach to something to actually hang their understanding on what happened. If it's oh, this woman, this happened to this woman or these women, versus knowing the names of people who are going through this trauma, that's a completely different thing. It's like a personification in a way. [00:26:00] Sundry objectifies people. It makes them into just another witch, when it's an individual who has a story and a life and a history and a family and a living, breathing identity.
[00:26:11] Madeline: It is incredible the power that language has here in dehumanizing. That's actually like what my college thesis was about, our language and use of the words torture and terrorism around like torture tactics used, created by the US government, used in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. And dehumanization that happens to each of those individuals and the things that are defined as torture and those that are not, and those are, that are defined politically and have ramifications of teeth attached to them. It's really interesting what happens when certain words are attached to things and then a whole people become numb to the realities of what that means, of the people behind those [00:27:00] things, or the victims.
[00:27:00] Josh Hutchinson: And there's more than just the pricking in the play. There's also the watching, which was another form of torture. Can you talk to us a little about the watching?
[00:27:13] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: That's really interesting, because one of the things that we discovered in the writing of the piece was that the cast was really interested in kind of understanding what it meant to be watching, too. And you may have noticed that a character who is just a general farmer becomes a watcher, and he has this really beautiful arc throughout the piece.
[00:27:36] That's, those are his words. He was talking about how he felt about playing this role, that his character had an arc. He went from being an accuser to a watcher to the spouse of a victim and essentially a nonbeliever at the end in God or the devil. But that watching piece, people were paid to [00:28:00] watch women, keep them awake, keep them from falling asleep. Sleep deprivation was a a form of getting a confession, and they, the people who were, the women and their families were paying for the candles that the watchers were using. They were paying the salaries of the watchers. This is another weird aspect of the economics of it, is that it got turned back to the families at the end. You, this is your bill for what your witch costs our community.
[00:28:28] You were just asking about the watchers, but it's a bigger answer. We were really curious about what it was like to be responsible for inflicting this on someone else. Our watcher walks into the room and sees his wife in a witch's bridal, which was a way of keeping a woman awake, keeping her tongue from being able to talk and a terrible torture device. And that's bridal is on our puppet, the accused. And I think people respond to that in a way that's really shocked. [00:29:00] Even though you know it's not on a person. It's very evocative.
[00:29:04] Josh Hutchinson: So the watching we're talking about, you would sit a woman in the middle of a room and have somebody keep them awake for days on end, and they're looking to see if a familiar or imp comes to feed while they're watching, so the witnesses can confirm that the suspect has had a contract with the devil.
[00:29:33] And they did that also in England. Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, is known for doing that. And there's at least one case in New England that's documented of Margaret Jones of Charlestown. She was watched in this way.
[00:29:49] But in your play, I know the characters are awake for untold hours and days, [00:30:00] and at that point, you're just delirious, and who knows what you're seeing even to get a confession out of you at that point, doesn't seem like it might be the most accurate confession that you're gonna get, but it's what they wanted to hear is what the person would say.
[00:30:18] Madeline: Important to note that in Scotland at the time, torture was illegal and known to produce inaccurate information. So there was that piece of recognition there, on the books in Scotland as the official way of the land. And then the reality of the witch trial.
[00:30:38] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: And what do they say? It takes 48 hours before you start hallucinating when you're sleep deprived. Or I hope I'm getting that when I was just in Edinburgh last week, somebody was talking about that, that you are not a reliable witness after being awake for 48 hours. And there is records of a lot of these people being kept awake for days at a time, like you said.
[00:30:59] [00:31:00] I took the perspective that a person who was kept awake like this would do anything to make it stop. That is part of this piece, as you mentioned, but it's a thread that goes through every single trial that we read about the sleep deprivation.
[00:31:13] Meggie Greivell: And it was often the accused family members or friends or neighbors who were doing the watching, which I find like just so incredibly harrowing. That's with all of the witch trials. I know that was something that happened where neighbors had to be complacent, and that's the something that just really disturbs me so much, and I think Laurie wrote that so beautifully.
[00:31:41] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: These really small communities, everybody knows each other, right? They're accusing people they know, they're watching people they know, and they're executing people they know.
[00:31:49] Meggie Greivell: Yeah.
[00:31:51] Josh Hutchinson: And you do see that with the modern day witchcraft persecutions, as well. The [00:32:00] accusation often comes from within the family, and it's just so extra tragic that it's somebody that you know and you trust turns against you.
[00:32:12] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: The third woman that's conjured into our space is probably the most famous of all the Scottish witches, Isobel Gowdie. And she was the last character to come to me. What we love about Isobel Gowdie is how much agency she has in her confessions, or seems to have in her confessions and what she means to people now, that she represents somebody with power.
[00:32:37] And as we were creating this piece, Meggie asked for a powerful character to come into the, this realm. And she was the obvious choice. I wanted to be really careful about how I present her, because I know she has so much meaning to so many people, right? And there's a lot that's unknown about her, [00:33:00] but her confessions are long and interesting and curious and awesome in a way.
[00:33:07] They're just such interesting documents, but we really don't know how she got to those confessions. We don't know if she was pricked or not. There was a pricker in the area, and yet there's no record of the pricker being part of her trial. There's nothing sure about whether she was watched or kept awake. We don't have that information, but we know what she said and it's so interesting. So she was fun to write, and she's, I think Lisa McIntyre, who plays her in this production, really enjoys the power and the fact that she's a bit of a baddy. She gets to speak truth to power and own her own story in a way that the other characters don't, Isobel.
[00:33:49] Meggie Greivell: Laurie and I talked about how we made the choice to give her power back because Laurie was saying, we don't, [00:34:00] nobody knows why she said all things that she said, or if it was really just the ministers and the investigators putting words into her mouth or making these things up or if it was from sleep deprivation.
[00:34:12] But we've made the decision to have her kind of take her power back and say, "no, I did do these things. I did turn into a jackdaw and attacked the pricker."
[00:34:24] Josh Hutchinson: What are some of the other things that she confessed to?
[00:34:28] Meggie Greivell: Part of it though, is she did turn into a lot of different animals.
[00:34:33] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: She did say she did a lot of shape shifting. So Isobel Gowdie, her confessions are pretty remarkable. She says things across a huge gamut, like she's confessed to mixing the body of an unchristian child with nail trimmings, grain, and colewort. I'm reading this right now from the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, but she said she chopped it all up and used it to take away the fruit of a man's corn. Just think about that, [00:35:00] chopping up unchristian child with nail clippings.
[00:35:02] It's ah this flying in a straw broom was a thread that we see the witch on a straw broom. That was a, an Isobel Gowdie kind of a one of her biggies. She talked about elf shot. She would fly around and use elf shot, flick it with her thumb, and kill people to send a soul to heaven, but the body remained on Earth, according to her confessions. Talked about meeting the queen of the fairies, taking away milk, doing things in the devil's name. She said she um, destroyed, let's see, she made an image of the laird of Park to destroy his children, and she went into great detail about how she did this. She confessed a lot to shape changing jackdaws, cat, hare, and we really play with that shape changing aspect in our show. I could go on and on, but she's got a lot of really specific things. And she had four, I think four sets of interviews or [00:36:00] interrogations, and she got more and more specific with each one.
[00:36:02] Sarah Jack: I was thinking about some of the New England witch trials, and there's actually some of the afflicted girls either in Connecticut or in Massachusetts had very detailed accusations. I don't know if there's anything quite that detail coming out of New England in the record from an accused.
[00:36:24] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, incredibly detailed. She talked about her specific ritual acts, shape changing, using magic, things she did at the Kirk of Auldearn, communal sex with the devil. That was one. He had sex with her whole coven. And meeting and dancing with her coven. She talked about the fairies. She hit the greatest hits of everything. And she gave them all the information that they wanted to have.
[00:36:53] She explicitly said that the devil rebaptized her as Janet, that she had sex with him, [00:37:00] and that his member was great and long, and that younger women had greater pleasure in sex with the devil than with their own husbands. The idea of sex with the devil was really important to the Scottish witch trial confession logs that they would put together. And we also play with that a little bit in our show, that whole thing of this obsession with sex, which is fascinating to me, but also just strange.
[00:37:27] Sarah Jack: We learned of some of that this fall when we talked to Mary Craig, that was really where I was introduced to what a big part of that history it is.
[00:37:43] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Your interview with Mary Craig was one of my favorite interviews. She was a great resource.
[00:37:47] Sarah Jack: You had a couple lines that the devil said that I loved, and the first is, "I get the credit and I don't have to do any of the work." And [00:38:00] I also, I thought it sounded just like him to say, "I've been here a while. You were nay paying me mind."
[00:38:06] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: It was fun to write for the devil. It was fun to write that character. And I have to be reminded that for in this world, that the devil was absolutely real. The fact that I personally don't believe that the devil exists doesn't matter. These characters believed that the devil existed, and it was a great and real threat. And that's the first thing that when I'm talking to modern people about this play, that they're like, "oh, really?" But the devil was a threat.
[00:38:36] Josh Hutchinson: They didn't just believe in the devil. They believed that he was roaming around physically as a person and luring people over to his side to sign contracts with them, which I found interesting in the symbolism in Scotland of someone [00:39:00] becoming the devil's with the touching of the head and the foot. I found that to be very interesting also.
[00:39:08] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: And claiming everything in between.
[00:39:10] Josh Hutchinson: Yes.
[00:39:11] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, I believe that was in Isobel's confession, as well, if I'm not mistaken.
[00:39:18] Josh Hutchinson: I think that I read that in that scene. Where she says she's be been baptized as Janet. Yeah. Which I love the Janet and Janet show, because those names, I've listened to all of Witches of Scotland, and Janet and Jonet just come up again and again in the Scottish witch trials.
[00:39:40] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, that's where I got that.
[00:39:43] And it was also a happy accident that our actor who plays Janet in the Janet and Janet scene plays Isobel Gowdie and says, "no, I am Janet. You'll call me Janet." And so that was just another kind of discovery of another added layer of something cool.
[00:39:58] Josh Hutchinson: Another [00:40:00] theme in there is the labeling of women as quarrelsome dames. And you took that from the reality.
[00:40:11] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: There was a lot to mine. And I think that as a woman of my time, I relate to that a lot. And as I get older and feel like, yeah, I'm gonna take up as much space as I want in this world, I see how some people respond to that. We take the quarrelsome dame mantle pretty proudly. Would you say Meggie?
[00:40:37] Meggie Greivell: Definitely, we are quarrelsome dames.
[00:40:41] Josh Hutchinson: Yay.
[00:40:42] Meggie Greivell: embrace it.
[00:40:43] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I'm so happy to hear that.
[00:40:46] Meggie Greivell: I think, yeah, as women, we've all experienced times where we've been told that we're too loud, too rude, too bossy, too something. That's an aspect right there that we still have [00:41:00] so far to come with in terms of misogyny. The accused women were called quarrelsome dames then, and now we're just called something else.
[00:41:09] Josh Hutchinson: Now we see a lot with women politicians still getting labeled as witch.
[00:41:16] Meggie Greivell: Yes, definitely like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and here in Scotland no, Nicole Sturgeon, the former Prime Minister of Scotland. She has been called a witch several times.
[00:41:33] Josh Hutchinson: I've seen some of that, and it's just very inappropriate. It feels like men feel threatened when a woman comes into her power and can't just share responsibilities with women. You gotta feel threatened. They're taking over your job or something, but they're not, so [00:42:00] chill out dudes.
[00:42:01] Meggie Greivell: Exactly. As a female director, I've encountered that over my career, as well, with being in a position of power in what is still male-dominated industry. Some pushback definitely.
[00:42:17] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: It is interesting to write a piece that's like blatantly naming what most women agree is an experience of being responded to or being pricked by misogyny. It's interesting to encounter what that's like for an audience member who doesn't feel comfortable with that. I think that I'm comfortable with someone being uncomfortable with this piece.
[00:42:46] And part of the reason why I infuse comedy or dark comedy into a subject like this is because that's one way that I can acknowledge that this is a I, [00:43:00] we all know what we're seeing here, right? We know what we're seeing. We're getting what we're seeing here. And it's just a way of acknowledging something that but just putting it into a vessel of communicating that is not a victimized place. That's a more of a an owning the power of what it means to be having this conversation at all.
[00:43:25] Madeline: I think the way you wrote it, Laurie, with the kind of time shifts to the modern platform with like comedic elements allows us to take in the gravity of the reality of the situation. And I feel like in many ways, like comedy, is it the element of that is necessary in this piece. It's not like we're just diving into some disaster tourism situation, like we're getting into something that's relevant and related to now, and you give like those little plant the seeds so people are [00:44:00] making connections. So like why does addressing this thing that happened a long time ago matter now, and how is it still happening, and what are the ways that even in the same place, even in, how is that still showing up?
[00:44:14] Because all of those pieces are still very much alive. And then there are other places in the world where like the reality perhaps even looks similar. But there's also that piece where like this history is a part of our history. And yeah, I feel like it makes it more accessible in a way to have the juxtaposition of that, of the conversation going on, like within the piece.
[00:44:40] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Madeline, something you just said about the disaster aspect. Like I didn't, that's another thing I didn't want, I didn't want it to be torture porn. That's a terrible word, but I didn't want everybody, everyone to come and see a piece that lives in a place where women are being harmed for an hour or more.[00:45:00] That color and that kind of gut punch, that's not interesting, and it's abusive. It's an abusive thing to do. I wanted people to be able to come in and out of this space and our characters and their cast to be able to come in and out of this space, have a conversation that needs to be had, raise a voice that needs to be raised, and by the grace of something, let them exit that space and move, shift into something else.
[00:45:24] And that, again, was a discovery along the way. But I felt it was important to lean into that as it was unveiling itself to us in the process. And our cast is doing a great job of navigating the kind of different colors of this piece. It's hard to describe, though. It's hard to explain, a piece about witch trials that has comedy in it. It seems a little hard to explain, but.
[00:45:50] Meggie Greivell: The piece really does lift up all of the women and gives them their voice back. And I think that is the most powerful [00:46:00] part of this. And the last word in the play that Laurie wrote is, "and the rage." So we have that whole aspect of it. It's giving the voices back to these women.
[00:46:11] Madeline: Also wanna add that in the process, like the week that we were over there, Laurie and I were over there working with actors. She was like, "I want you guys to tap into this and then I want you to tap out, like physically, do hands up. Okay, I'm getting into this role. I'm putting this on for a moment. But we're not like doing this to each other. This is we're agreeing right now." There was just this like little element of consent exercise that happened, like for the actors. It was like this facilitated thing that was, it was just nice to come in and out like that as a cohort.
[00:46:44] Sarah Jack: I just think undertaking this topic as a visual and audible presentation. It is such a layered undertaking, just like the history is, and you used the word [00:47:00] unveiling. It's an opportunity to unveil what we can't get everybody to acknowledge. I just keep thinking about the complexity of the reality, but then also, when I was reading through the script, there's just, all, Meggie said the double entendres, and then the iconic symbolisms, and you even got an apple in there with the devil, and the catchphrases, but then the puppetry and everything about it was just, I think it's such a remarkable piece of art. And thanks for putting it out there. It's important. It's so important.
[00:47:41] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: I really appreciate that. I was really nervous about kind of the tone shifts right out of the gate, and so I really appreciate that feedback. And if something didn't work, I would wanna know that too, right? Because I feel like this subject and these people and just the larger conversation needs to be right, [00:48:00] like the history needs to be correct. The level of respect needs to be correct, and I'm serving a bigger thing, which is why I'm so pleased to be working on this project.
[00:48:12] Sarah Jack: I was gonna add, too, that whole comedy element, it's in the history. There's so many times where we're looking at these dispositions or different things we can read that were happening or people were saying, and you just are like, this can't even be real. It's sadly hysterical, and so I think that's a really great thread to be able to weave in to the storytelling, too, like you did.
[00:48:37] Meggie Greivell: It was all so much about fake news being spread around, which Laurie has written that in so well into the play, as that's so relevant today.
[00:48:47] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Honestly it was my, weirdly my way into this piece, 'cause I would say, I don't know how I'm gonna get into this piece, I don't know what my way in, I don't know what my way in is. And then it was, fake news. I was like, that to me, that was the [00:49:00] hook that got me started writing in the first place.
[00:49:03] I typically write musical theater pieces, and so when it came to the monologues that the women were doing, I didn't really know what to do. So I said, okay, I'm gonna treat this like it's a lyric. And if I were writing a lyric, I would just be brain draining all of my ideas about things that could be in a lyric. And then I would take that kind of dump of writing and find kernels inside of it to craft into a lyric.
[00:49:27] But I approached it in that way and I realized, oh no, this is the same approach, like they are having this moment of expression that is simply for their a mining of their emotional life at this moment of time when they're being when they're being interrogated. And it It felt the same to me as a song moment where it was, we call it sometimes in, in crafting musicals, theater, in crafting songs, a vertical expression instead of a long horizontal line. It's what is your thought? We're gonna go deeply into [00:50:00] this thought. And for me, it had a lyrical element in working it. And I think that's what I love about working with the puppets, too, is that the puppets to me have a lyrical element, too, because their movement is so expressive, and it's like the actors are singing the puppets alive.
[00:50:18] Madeline: I'm curious now. I haven't seen the script in a long time and probably haven't seen the things until it was like puppet does something here. And then Laurie would come to me and be like, "so what can I do?" So it was fun, I was building even as we got to Scotland and was building the week that we had with the actors.
[00:50:38] I'm curious what it says now when you're reading it, Sarah, because I'm like, oh, that, like we developed those things together and like we didn't really know what it was capable of until we're like figuring out what it's capable of doing. Yeah, just a funny curiosity thinking like, how does that look on paper now?
[00:50:59] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: I don't think I [00:51:00] changed it in the script. I think the script just says, "the fox comes through" or that, yeah. But to Madeline's point about working collaboratively, I knew who the cast was before I had written a word of the play. So I was setting this piece onto this cast, and I was writing for the actors that I had, which is a really a luxury when you're a playwright to be able to write for actors that you know who they are. It's the best case scenario, I think.
[00:51:25] Madeline built The Accused, this woman puppet, which is gorgeous. And she built a fox, a cat, a jackdaw, and then a flock of jackdaws, a flock of 13 jackdaws. And the script, it just says that they sweep through, and some actors use them throughout the entire play, and they're just beautiful.
[00:51:50] Sarah Jack: I wanted to give you guys the opportunity to read something from the script.
[00:51:55] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: Yeah, I'd love to. Would you like to hear the Unknown Woman or from [00:52:00] Marion Twedy?
[00:52:01] Josh Hutchinson: I vote for Unknown.
[00:52:04] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: This is an excerpt from the Unknown Woman. So in this monologue, by the time we get to this place, she's realized that there's no stone. No one knows who she is. She's been wiped off the face of the earth, for all practical purposes. She explains that she understands why she was accused, that she doesn't blame her accuser, but that she didn't do what she had been accused of.
[00:52:30] And she's completely vulnerable at this point. So we hear the crescendo of a heartbeat, and she's alone.
[00:52:40] "Let me die, I think. I will tell them whatever it is they want to hear. If only I can get some rest. Only, but there is no rest for the wicked, they say. Am I wicked? I was baptized. I'm a Christian. My bairn was baptized, had a Christian burial. [00:53:00] How did it come to this? I'll tell them whatever it is they want to hear, I'll tell them, yes, no, whatever I'm supposed to say to make this nightmare end so I can sleep, so I can hold my bairn again. But there is no rest for the wicked. Let me die, I think. I want to die. I think. I think I'm dead, for here I am here in this purgatory. Is this purgatory or is this someplace worse? Some kind of purgatory with no hope of escape? Is this hell? There's no rest here, no bairn, no breath. I do not lay in consecrated ground. I have no stone. Ah, that explains it. That explains why nobody visits me. Nobody comes to weep or laugh or make a pencil rub or write a poem or mark a holiday.[00:54:00] Will I my soul, will my soul ever be allowed to be at peace? Will I ever hold my bairn again? You damned me to an eternity of what, what you damned yourself, they said. How? How? I made a charm the way my mother taught me, the way her mother taught her, the way her mother taught her. They said I danced with the devil. If I did dance, that's all I did, dance. I don't know what I did. I don't know anything anymore."
[00:54:33] I didn't use Scottish dialect. I'm not gonna pretend to be Carys Turner, the beautiful performer who does that in our play.
[00:54:42] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much.
[00:54:44] Sarah Jack: Thank you so much.
[00:54:46] Josh Hutchinson: Wonderful. I just want to talk for a moment about how people can see the play. Can you tell us about how it's playing right now and any future plans that you have?
[00:54:58] Meggie Greivell: Yes, so [00:55:00] it's right now we are on until the 25th at the Space on the Mile at 11:15 AM on odd days. We are hoping, really hoping, that it gets picked up for a tour in the UK and Scotland. We've had a few producers, so fingers crossed on that. And it will be filmed professionally on the 21st, so we will have it archived, and so we will have a film version of it, and we hope to bring it to the US, as well. Laurie hopes to bring it to the US, as well. So we just are right now, our fingers are just crossed that we can get it on a tour.
[00:55:41] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: If anybody's interested in reading the play to produce a version of it, feel free to reach out to me, and I'd be happy to send a copy of the script.
[00:55:50] Josh Hutchinson: It's such a powerful story that needs to be told. So I wish you all the best of luck getting it picked up for tours.[00:56:00] It's so good to give voices to the voiceless. So that's something that we want to do with the podcast, as well, is tell the stories of these people, even the unknown person that Sarah was talking about earlier, they need their story told. So I think you, I think that theater is an excellent way to introduce the story to audiences.
[00:56:29] Sarah Jack: Is there anything else you wanted to be able to express today?
[00:56:34] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: The people who were prickers were individuals, and in our world they're represented by this kind of boogeyman character who's a pricker, not a specific individual.
[00:56:47] Meggie Greivell: And he represents all of the men of the time who are abusing their power.
[00:56:52] Madeline: I maybe wanna add that there was a lot of deliberation that kind of went into landing on doing one woman puppet, [00:57:00] and we talked about making specific puppets for each of the actresses, of their like particular faces, sculpting off of their pictures. And yeah, it was just a vibrant conversation and we landed on this, but in a way also just thinking about honoring the larger experience, I think landing on one woman.
[00:57:21] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: I would say that people respond to seeing that one puppet as a very universal creation and see themselves in it. I the feedback that we've gotten from people is that was the right thing and that it really is very resonant. I also wanna say that this piece is still alive, right? So it was created super collaboratively and quickly and generously by all of the collaborators that were involved. Meggie brought the idea, Madeline was part of it from the very beginning, and the students gave us a lot of feedback in the process of writing. First time that they saw a script, it was just [00:58:00] the first 30 pages. That was the first time we said, "okay, how do we feel about these tone shifts? How do we feel about the fact that it moves through time and space?"
[00:58:09] And we were all in agreement. As I went forward writing pages for them about what that would look like, they would come back to me and say, "we wish that the devil would come back."
[00:58:21] "Okay, what does that look like?"
[00:58:23] "We wanna see King James again."
[00:58:25] "What does that look like?"
[00:58:26] "What if the watcher in the next scene is the farmer watching his wife?"
[00:58:30] "Oh, that's a great idea. Let me see what that looks like."
[00:58:32] So those, and it's still a new work and I suspect that the next production will have edits, like a new play does when it goes into another iteration. So I'm really excited to see how this play continues to grow. And I would say that if anybody does wanna do this piece, that they should hunt down Madeline Helling to work on the puppets with them.
[00:58:52] Madeline: Well, and I'll say too on that note, like there was a lot of changes. She'd be like, "oh, I met with the cast. So this whole part has changed." Like every [00:59:00] time there was like a Zoom, there was like both of you could attest that there were many changes that were made. So on my end I kept being like, "okay, you're not ready for that part, so I'm just gonna hold off or build this thing and then change it." And just given our time constraint and like what I needed to craft, it was like, okay, I'm just, I was just like crafting at a pace that went with the ebb and flow.
[00:59:22] Laurie Flangian-Hegge: I'm just grateful to Meggie for having this idea and bringing it, she, she actually, when she first in invited me to this piece, she said, "I just got back from having dinner at The Witchery." There's this restaurant called The Witchery in Edinburgh. It's a fancy, beautiful restaurant, but she said it's a restaurant called The Witchery on the grounds, essentially of where the witches were burned. And that felt off to you, would you say, Meggie? That felt.
[00:59:50] Meggie Greivell: Yeah, that's how this all started. The first time I went to North Berwick too, when I'd never been there before, and I learned about the North Berwick witch [01:00:00] trials, and I was completely floored and disgusted. There was just a tiny little plaque in this old church by the sea about it, but nothing else.
[01:00:10] And then from there I kept getting even more enraged. Like Laurie said, I went to The Witchery and my family, and it's this beautiful restaurant with exquisite dining options. But yeah it's where the witches, the women were burned. Not the witches. The women, or the women were burned.
[01:00:29] And I also went on a tour, a ghost tour about a few months before I approached Laurie, and they pulled out thumbscrews that they, I replicated thumbscrews. I don't think they were real. And they took, were asking for volunteers to put them on, and I think they put them on me, and everyone was laughing and I was just disgusted this isn't funny but that's a problem with Edinburgh. It's very exploitative of the witch [01:01:00] trials and I know it's like that in Salem, as well. I just thought this is a story that needs to be told, and theater is what I do, so that is going to be the medium for it. And I reached out to Laurie on a whim, and I got lucky.
[01:01:18] Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
[01:01:22]
[01:01:29] Mary Bingham: Recently I suffered a situation which resulted in my feeling anxious, heartbroken, and most sadly not wanted. Luckily, I have a wonderful community of family, friends, and social services in which I can tap into if needed until I get back on my feet. I am grateful.
[01:01:49] This is not the situation for those women of Ghana accused of witchcraft. They are accused for causing sickness to their neighbors, weather [01:02:00] conditions to cause crop failures, among other things. Those women who are not beaten and burned alive for this crime they did not commit, were sent to one of six witch camps where their living situations were abhorrent at best.
[01:02:15] I cannot begin even to fathom their feelings of total abandonment and betrayal at the hands of their neighbors and family members. Yes, family members. I shouldn't complain. I will survive. Some of these women will not, but there is hope. In 2005, ActionAid started to infiltrate these camps with basic life necessities. The advocates also educated these women and children, informing the women of their rights. In 2011, the women were thus able to stop the Ghana government from closing the camps the following year. Quick closure could result in homelessness [01:03:00] and possibly death by those wanting these innocent human beings dead. They spoke loud and strong using every media and social service at their disposal, increasing benefits for themselves to survive.
[01:03:15] For me, I look forward to the day when my living situation improves. However, I look more towards these women who survive circumstances I will never understand. They are the heroes along with the advocates who risk their lives to save the many for whom they advocate. Thank you.
[01:03:34]
[01:03:42] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:03:43] Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[01:03:47]
[01:03:53] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501(c)(3), Weekly News Update. We must continue to educate [01:04:00] against witch-hunt behavior and provide communities with the resources to feel safe together and to work together. If you are in the position to positively impact the communities that experience witch-hunt behaviors, stand in the gap with active advocates now.
[01:04:14] Today, the victims of sorcery accusation related violence must not be nameless and disregarded. We may not know the names of men and women who were attacked today, but we know what is happening. We can speak about their stories and their innocence. We can continue to educate the world about which hunting today. We can acknowledge the crisis. Know that the victims have names, that they have lives, that they have plans, that they want their beautiful tomorrow. If you are in the position to positively impact the communities that experience witch-hunt behaviors in which attacks, stand in the gap with active advocates now.
[01:04:46] I am descended from two well-known accused witches, one whose name was used in the iconic play of The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Rebecca Nurse is a name that is familiar with everyone who knows even a little about the Salem witchcraft trials. She said on the record, the [01:05:00] world will know my innocence. We do know her innocence, and we can name her as innocent by name. Rebecca Nurse
[01:05:06] was not a witch. Some of the trials on record have accused identified only by their husband's surname as Goodwife or Goody. Goody Knapp, Goodwife Bassett. We do not know the given name of these women, but we do know that they were innocent of causing supernatural harm. Goody Knapp and Goodwife Bassett were not witches.
[01:05:24] In the American colonies, we have primary sources indicating that at least one unknown person was accused of witchcraft crimes in Connecticut. Unknown was not a witch. Unknown was innocent. Although some names are recorded, the names of thousands of other imprisoned and executed alleged witch across Scotland are unknown. They were innocent. They were not witches.
[01:05:45] When we hear the name of Rebecca Nurse, Marion Twedy, and Isobel Gowdie or other named, executed witch trial victims, may we always see their unnamed sisters, the unknown victims standing there with them in history, unforgotten. Today, 70 years after The Crucible, [01:06:00] the play Prick is memorializing the thousands of women who suffered and died as unnamed alleged witches. This play recognizes them. It is a memorial to the unknown. We must remember them. Thank you, Prick, for honoring their memory in a significant and beautiful way, and for educating the world about witch trials through creative art.
[01:06:18] You are part of Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast community. Your listening and support is part of the work that keeps the critical conversation on ending witch hunts alive and expanding. When you share episodes with your friends, you are making an effort against violence. Having conversations about what is going on is an easy way that you can jump in to end witch hunts. Advocates worldwide are using their particular abilities, influence, and social network. And when you also listen and share, you are part of strengthening that network. It takes every mind, every voice, every small effort. You are a part of the world network that succeeds because of collaboration and collective efforts. When you speak up about sorcery accusation related violence, you will get questions [01:07:00] about the issue. Questions regarding violence against alleged witches can be scary, but we have your back. Not only have you garnered the answers by listening to the conversations on Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast, you can direct anyone to the program for more information. You can reach out to us with your questions and comments anytime. We are on all social media platforms and have a contact form on our website. Let us know how the conversation is going for you in your sphere of influence. We want to know. Reach out.
[01:07:26] Visiting our websites and the advocate websites listed in our show notes often is another way to stay up to date and support the work. To support us, make a tax deductible donation at endwitchhunts.org. Your support funds are witch trial history and advocacy education projects. You can purchase most of the books discussed on Thou Shalt Not Suffer episodes in our online bookshop, or you can buy it directly from the guest. We sell End Witch Hunts, Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, and Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast t-shirts and coffee mugs online in our zazzle.com shop. Make a purchase to support us.
[01:07:59] Have you [01:08:00] considered supporting the production of the podcast by joining other listeners as a super listener? Thank you for adding our Super Listener program to the way you support us. Your super listener donation is tax deductible. Thank you.
[01:08:13]
[01:08:19] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[01:08:21] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:08:22] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:08:28] Sarah Jack: Join us next week for another important episode.
[01:08:31] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:08:34] Sarah Jack: I hope you're visiting us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:08:38] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[01:08:42] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[01:08:48] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:08:51] [01:09:00]

August 24, 2023

Italian Witchcraft Trials with Debora Moretti

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Show Notes

Take a first look at witch trial history in early modern Italy. Dr. Debora Moretti, of the University of York Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies shares her research on Italian witchcraft beliefs and trials during the Roman Inquisition. What type of historical record is available today from this period in Italy? In this intriguing conversation she talks about witchcraft belief variations around Italy, some differences and similarities between Italian witchcraft beliefs and those found in other countries, Witch Sabbat details, and word origins for varying terms for the word witch in Italian.

Transcript

[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:25] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:27] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, Dr. Deborah Moretti of the University of York Center for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies tells us about Italian witchcraft beliefs and trials.
[00:00:40] Sarah Jack: I am so excited that we got to talk about Italy. There are so many variations in witchcraft beliefs around Italy, and Dr. Moretti is the person to learn about it from.
[00:00:52] Josh Hutchinson: In addition to learning about the witchcraft beliefs in Italy, we'll compare differences and similarities with beliefs found in other countries.
[00:01:04] Sarah Jack: There's a lot to learn about the witches sabbat, and it's in this episode.
[00:01:10] Josh Hutchinson: And we'll learn about the differences between demoniac and non-demoniac witchcraft, and we'll learn about the Inquisition's role and practices in witchcraft trials in Italy.
[00:01:24] Sarah Jack: Dr. Moretti talks to us about the records of some specific witch trials that occurred in Siena and Piedmont, and it's fascinating.
[00:01:35] Josh Hutchinson: Among the many words that we'll learn for witchcraft, one is masca. We'll learn what that term refers to, what the origins of the word are, and who was the last masca.
[00:01:51] Sarah Jack: Here is Dr. Deborah Moretti, who holds a specialized master's degree, an MLitt in ancient history and archeology from the University of Florence and a PhD in history from the University of Bristol. She has taught courses and seminars in ancient history and medieval and early modern history at the University of Florence and Bristol.
Her research interests cover the history of Italian witchcraft in medieval and early modern period; ancient, medieval, and modern European paganism and magic, and also material evidence of magic in archeological context. Her published research focuses on the interactions between magic, its archeological evidence, and the social perception of the historical practitioners of magic and witchcraft.
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[00:02:35] Debora Moretti: The curiosity in historical studies and archeological studies is out there. I have just done a three days public outlet for archeology. I had many young people, they're doing also history, and the interest is there. So that's a positive sign. We, as you know, we just did in July a witchcraft conference, magic and witchcraft conference over two days. We, when I say we, it was myself and Tabitha Stanmore from University of Exeter, we organized the conference, and we focused, we really wanted to give more space to early career researchers following magic and witchcraft academic studies. And I have to say many people were surprised of the interest.
The interest is still there. There are new avenues being studied, being researched. Therefore, I think magic and witchcraft studies are still in a very good place. There is a new blood coming in, and it was really exciting to have them all. Great exchange of ideas. We both have learned quite a lot.
And because of that, next year is already in preparation. Next year will be the third year. So last year, it was just me organize it, and I had big names like Ronald Hutton or Owen Davies, Marina Montesano from Messina University, just to assess their research, where this year we focused on early career researchers, because we wanted to see is there a follow up to the big names? And there is.
So yes exciting times for studies in magic and witchcraft in all directions from spatial analysis to linguistic analysis, not just history or archeology, ethnography, anthropology. So it's still very vibrant, which is good to see, really. And also I think what excited me the most was how we are all prepared to embrace different type of media. So rather than follow the classical conferences, symposia, publication, there is more interest in having a more wider outlet, in social media and platforms like Instagram or, I'm not quite sure about TikTok, but Facebook, yes, I say I knew that the field was not stalling. I knew that it was still, the academic research was still carrying on, but I think I came out of the two days conference quite refreshed, knowing that yes, we are still there, we're still working, we're still researching in different areas to answer the many questions that still need to be answered.
[00:05:27] Sarah Jack: Dr. Danny Buck tweeted out a lot of his experience as he was there, and it was very enticing, and it sounded like the topics and the discussions were really, what he was sharing really highlighted what you just shared for sure. I followed a lot of new historians that I hadn't been aware of yet, and I thought some of their focus topics were really important, too. So what an exciting time.
[00:05:58] Debora Moretti: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes.
[00:06:01] Josh Hutchinson: I think of this as something of a golden age in witchcraft academic studies. There's so much research out there now, where, when I first got interested in witch trials about 15 years ago, there were a few books around, some of them older, but now it's just, I can't keep up with everything that's coming out. It's so wonderful.
[00:06:34] Debora Moretti: Yes, it's, as I said, is refreshing to see. So of course, up to maybe five years ago, everybody was following the same pathways, because I think the usual pathways have to be explored more in depth, and now that we have explored them, there is like an explosion. For example, there is a focus on the inner emotions of basically of both the accusers and the people that were accused and even of the judges or the inquisitors, what was their background culturally, but also what was the input that put them there to ask certain questions? There is a focus on, as I said spatial narratives.
So, for example, there was a panel dedicated to the location of the Sabbat. So you, wherever you go in Europe, nevermind just one country, but in Europe altogether, you have different places that've been chosen to represent the perfect location for the sabbat by the people at the time. So you have liminal places. Therefore, you have a wooded area, you have the forest, you have the mountains, you have the sea.
And of course these liminal places were connected to the local culture of specific groups at the time. So what was important for their economy? What was important for their livelihood? What was important in the fears, like the fear of the forest, that contributed to create the perfect location of the sabbat?
[00:08:20] Sarah Jack: I was also thinking about the circle of borrowed concepts.
[00:08:24] Debora Moretti: Yes that's mine. I'm really proud of that. Of course, I was referring to what I am studying specifically. So that is the context of the Roman Inquisition trials. In the trial documents, you see, there has been an argument in the last 20 years on how really the Inquisition trials documents are primary sources to understand the perception of witchcraft and witchcraft practices at the time, in both the people who were accused, the accusers, but also the inquisitors, because it's like a dichotomy.
So you have a more learned approach to witchcraft beliefs or it's more a theological approach. And that was what was driving the inquisitors and the judges. And then there is more a folk approach or folk perception of magic and witchcraft. And that's what you can read in the depositions of both the accused and the accusers.
Borrowing concepts, the idea behind that is that when somebody accused somebody else, they brought to the table their own perception, cultural and folk perception of what they believed a witch was or witchcraft acts were. And they were confronted by the perception of the Inquisitor of what a witch was and what witchcraft acts were.
And of course, the two met during the witchcraft trials and there is evidence of the one part influencing the other. Also you have to think that a witchcraft trials was not just one event. And despite the, both the accusers and the accused were told of not discussing the trial outside of the tribunal, discussion did happen.
So whatever the Inquisitor or the judge said was then reported to the wider village people. And it was absorbed in a way, but also the other way around. There is the folk perception of witchcraft and witchcraft practices, and then you have the more learned perception of witchcraft and witchcraft practices that come together and influence each other. That was the idea of the borrowed concepts of witchcraft beliefs.
[00:11:12] Josh Hutchinson: Turning our attention specifically to Italy, what elements of witchcraft beliefs are unique to Italy?
[00:11:20] Debora Moretti: The first element is the longevity. So let's talk about the folk perception of witchcraft and what a witch is in the witchcraft trials. So the archives that I am using, they're dated between 1570 to 1780, more or less, and the same concepts come through across the 200 years period. Two different perceptions.
So there is still the idea of a witch as we have been told a witch should be, this almost supernatural figure, who would fly to sabbat either on top of a mountain or in a forest or somewhere else, have a pact with the devil, participate to the sabbat, so gathering of people. And during that sabbat they would do certain things, learning the dark art, copulating with the devil, eating specific things, amongst which, babies. So you have the supernatural witch, but then at the same time you have also the more practical witch, which is a normal person that has the capability of working sorcery for both a positive and negative end.
So you find the same spells throughout the 200 years period. And I'm not sure if I confront them with the English trials, for example, I'm not sure you find the same chronological broadness of certain beliefs. At least the practical side of beliefs is there is a famous spell the spell of the carafe or specifically called the Spell of the White and Black Angel, which you can find as early as mid-sixteenth century, but then you can find in mid 18th century. Is the same spell that has been maintained and practiced across the country.
So I would say the longevity, yes, the longevity of the beliefs, but also the practices is one characteristic of Italian witchcraft beliefs. Some others, for example, how to remove the evil eye has survived till now. I have example of the evil eye and how to remove it in trials dating mid to late 16th century. And then, I have my great-grandmother who was born in the late 19th century, who used the same practices to remove the evil eye.
So can we say that certain spells have survived throughout centuries? Yes, but with a condition. So where in the 16th century you would see a more defined perception of the supernatural, nowadays, removing a evil eye is just a matter of fact practice. So it has a less supernatural perception in it, if you like. So definitely let the longevity of the beliefs both as what a witch is and what the practices are. It's just that nowadays, because there is no pressure of the inquisition at certain practices are not, even in the 18 19th century, certain practices are no longer considered maleficia. So there's no connection to heresy. They're still there in some form. So continuity. Absolutely. The perception has changed. We no longer think that the devil has a major part in it. We are no longer talking of heresy, but we are still talking of bad and good practices, and certain practices are specifically maintained to help people to overcome certain problems.
[00:15:37] Sarah Jack: So as a little bit of an explainer, I'm wondering so like when you look at the New England witch trials, which is very different in every way, there is no longevity of practice, understanding. They're not even, there's no spells as a part of the trial history. But there are the hidden protective magic in their homes. The magic is there somewhere, but we don't really understand what their perception of it was. And we don't even have a perception of it today here in the United States. It's very interesting to me that we were targeting and murdering women as witches in the United States, but there wasn't even that element of spells or anything with it. So it seems very different, and I just wonder what people need to understand about that.
[00:16:33] Debora Moretti: I think the element was still there, but has not been recorded in the primary documents. Owen Davies has written a great book, I think it came out in 2013, which was America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem. And he pointed out that the perception of witchcraft and magic practices did not end at 1692. They carried on, but is the documentation that has changed.
He looked at different records, and he found evidence that the perception of witchcraft beliefs and beliefs in witches carried on later on and only petered out around the 1960s. Personally, what I really think is that there you had the same elements. So there were certain beliefs, certain practices that gave a push to the witch-hunt, but perhaps they were not recorded, because you have to understand the media through which this information has come to us. Now, I am lucky because I have the Inquisition records, and they were very meticulous in recording what constituted a witchcraft crime or a heretical crime. But if the local judges or the local priest did not record that and focused only on the heretical element or only on the pact with the devil, that's what we have.
So we have to remember that witchcraft-related sources are incredibly biased and they've been biased from the time that were created. So we have to see who wrote them, who actually wrote the documentation, why the person has written them, and what was the purpose of the final document? So again, if I make you a comparison with Inquisition trial documents, we know that the Roman Inquisition dealt with heresy. Therefore, in the interrogations, you can see how the Inquisitor was chasing the heretical crime. So of all the many things that the accused person was telling, the Inquisitor focused on the heretical crime, and that is a form of biased. Now we are lucky. I am lucky because everything was recorded.
But if in your case, the person noted down on the document decided that a certain spell did not qualify as heretical and did not fit the agenda of that specific trial, it was left out. So the fact that references to spells are not there does not mean that they were not there. It probably, in fact, very likely means that the person writing down did not consider them important to the agenda that the person was following or the trial agenda.
So we have to be really careful in how we handle any document that is related to witchcraft accusations, because ultimately they were written by somebody who did have an agenda. Therefore, large parts were left out. In Italian witchcraft trials, we, back 20 years ago, we were saying, oh yes, from the late 17th century witchcraft trials were no longer important. They didn't happen or they petered out. That's not quite true. The agenda of the inquisition changed. Therefore, the questions during the interrogations did not cover some elements. You have to understand what was behind the interrogation. What was the agenda of the institution or person that was carrying out the interrogation? What was the ultimate goal? So for the Roman Inquisition was to find out heretical practices, because they had jurisdiction only on practices that had a heretical nature. The rest, they didn't have jurisdiction on them.
I think I would say the first step for anybody that wants to get into witchcraft studies is, especially if they're working on archival material, is to understand the institution that has created the archival material and what was the ultimate goal of this institutional judge or, I don't know, tribunal? What was the ultimate goal? Was it really persecuting every form of magical practices, or was it just one section, were they chasing only the pact with the devil? Therefore, in that case, they would've left out everything else. They would've left out, I don't know, healing practices that might have had a magical side to them or other things, because did not support what they were chasing, basically.
And Owen Davies has used, as I said, different materials like newspapers, ethnographical material, and I love the book. And he, I think he showed that the perception of witchcraft did indeed change, but accusations were still there. The perception of the malevolent witch was still there. It was just in different primary sources. It was treated differently by the legal system. It's a different form, but the beliefs themselves, they were still there and I think, maybe spells and magical practices were there, but they were not recorded because not necessary for what they were looking for.
[00:23:10] Josh Hutchinson: They did record a few practices, divination, but not the spells. They would mention that a person would go away mumbling, but they wouldn't say what the person said. They never wrote down the words. They just wrote down that, yeah, they might have cursed this person. But the words weren't important for whatever reason.
[00:23:36] Debora Moretti: Exactly. Where again, I am lucky because the words were recorded is like in the case of Caterina Caponero, for example, we are early 17th century. She was, by the time she was accused and therefore put on trial, she had a 20 years career of magical practitioner, if you like, and she did all sorts of things. She did love spells, she did healing spells. She was quite well known in the community. The real reason why she ended up in front of the Inquisitor was because of this specific Spell of the White Angel, Black Angel, which the inquisitor's manuals saw as heretical because, shall I tell you what the spell is so you understand?
This is a spell that is very famous, and, as I said, it has survived. It was practiced across Italy for 200 years. So basically the person doing the spell would collect holy water from a church and put the holy water in a carafe. The person then would get a holy candle, usually what was leftover of Candlemas, so a specific type of candle. They would put the candle, so the carafe on the table, the candle behind the carafe, and then they would ask either a child or a nun, somebody who had not had sexual intercourse or a virgin human being to look into the carafe. So the candle would create shapes into the water and the person would tell the magic practitioner what the shapes were, and the magical practitioner would basically understand what the shapes were, and this spell was usually done for either finding treasures or recovering stolen objects.
Now, even some churches across Italy would ask the help of magic practitioners to use this spell, if they had some goods stolen by others. Now, Caterina was really good at it because there is a woman accusing her, saying that she didn't want to get involved with her, but she was desperate to find the stolen goods. So she went to Caterina, and not only Caterina saw where the goods were, but Caterina also saw who had stolen the goods and we don't know if then the woman went and got her goods back. But she was adamant on the fact that Caterina was, she never said, oh, she's good, but she said something on the lines of, I was surprised, and she was right. She told me who they were, and I knew that they were these people. So of 20 years magical practices career, the Inquisitor just focused on this one because the Inquisition manuals said that the black angel is the devil. So the magical practitioner was interacting with the devil.
And that was that. Nevermind the fact that she cured many people. Nevermind that she used other things for love magic. That was the thing that got her in trouble, and she was in and out of prison for decades and she got tortured for this. And she was basically kept in prison. So you see if the Inquisitor or the tribunal was not really careful in taking notes of what she was saying, we would've missed her spell, her love spells, or her healing spells, and we would've known of her, only of the white angel, black angel spell.
See how very narrow it's, so it depends on who is down the interrogation. So yeah it's very, the sources are very biased from the very beginning. So I think one who wants really to approach the trials documents has to keep that in mind all the time.
[00:27:50] Sarah Jack: Yeah. I just keep thinking about Samuel Wardwell in North Andover, and part of it's my own as I've come along trying to put all this together. He has this fortune telling. He's known, or it's brought up about him. He's questioning it. If these practices were getting them in trouble, but they were known to do it and comfortable, like, why were they so surprised for getting in trouble when they were publicly doing these things?
And now I'm seeing that many of them were, it was a very, possibly a very normal part of their interaction with each other, but because of what the target of the Salem witch trials was, which was the devil and the covenanting. There are these tiny little flickers of magical practices, even in the Salem witchcraft story. And it doesn't fit, it doesn't make sense. But that's why, this is why, what you are explaining is the answer to that.
[00:28:51] Debora Moretti: Even further back in time many practices were in place generation prior the person being accused of witchcraft. Now, you would wonder why all of a sudden what they have been prac, like Caterina, she has done that for 20 years. What happened to suddenly make her a heretical witch?
There is a shift with the at least I'm talking of course, for Italian witchcraft here, specifically. So when the Reformation kicked in and the Roman Catholic Church kicked back with a Counter-Reformation, so we are mid 16th century, the Catholic Church had to reform its ways so could fight back the Reformation. In reforming itself, push down on its flock. The supervision of the Church of its flock's practices became more focused.
So the general people had to follow a tighter line, a better Christian behavior. So all of a sudden the practices that they are carried out and learned from their parents and they have freely carried out up to that point, became dangerous practice, or the church started to consider them dangerous. Therefore, they became suddenly visible. And what the church did was also to invite the general public to come forward, if they had known of people practicing heretical. And they did, the population did. So the church provided a platform and the people used the platform. So we tend to say that the witchcraft accusations did not come from above, they came from below. So once there was a platform created by the Church, the general people used it, and that's when the accusations started. And the accusations, a good percentage of the accusations, were between neighbors, within the same family, and what propelled these accusations were usually bad social interactions.
There is an example in the witchcraft trials of Novara in the north in Piedmont, where a woman, an elderly woman, she was a widow and her husband, and you can read this in the trial, her husband left with good money, which was unusual. So she ended up lending money to different people, farmers, traders, et cetera, because that's how she would have an interest and have a better life.
When the time came that these people had to pay her back, that's when they accused her of being a witch. So she was bad-tempered, and everybody knew that. And they used that to say that she was a witch, so they didn't have to pay the money back. So you see, once they had the platform upon which to act, they did act on it, and they accused, whoever they were unhappy with at the time. They accused these people.
But then if you come forward to nowadays, don't you think people would do the same? If the authorities created a platform where you could get rid of your neighbor that has been making your life miserable for 15 years, wouldn't you do that? I think what happened there is a very human behavior. Pettiness, jealousy, even competitiveness played a role and also social situation. Generally speaking, these people struggled in their day-to-day lives. So they had to make their lives better, and they had a place to do that. They had a stage upon which play all these things.
So witchcraft trials are, gosh, so complicated. There are so many factors that one has to keep in mind, and that's why it feels like you are never a specialist. You are one person that continues to study even the same witchcraft trials, because you have to approach them from different viewpoints, and you have to understand exactly the role played by everybody in a specific trial. You can't just see the side of the accused. You have to see the side of the accusers. You have to understand what type of economy was there at the time. You have to understand the political scenery of the time, the religious background of the time, and then also considered, in my case, what was the ultimate goal of the Roman Inquisition? What and who were they chasing?
It is like Caterina, for example, she was a bit surprised of all these accusations. And she did say, "I've been operating for so many years." And she actually did say, "I even went around saying, 'oh, I'm really good at doing this and that magical practices.'" And she had a good trade, and she could not understand why all of a sudden she was being accused by the very same people who she helped, because the main accuser on her trial was a really disgruntled wife who had a cheating husband. And the wife thought that the cheating husband was cheating on her, because he was somehow bewitched. Personally, I don't think so, but there you go, that's my very personal opinion. But previous this so she accused the two women who took away her husband and then she accused Caterina of providing the magical meaning for these two women to steal her husband. Now, previous that, few years previous that, and this is in the trial, the same wife did go to Caterina for a love spell, to have her husband back.
So Caterina gave her the spell of the magnet. Literally was a piece of magnet that had been baptized in the church. And Caterina called the wife to keep it either in her mouth when she was kissing the husband, or in other parts of her body while they were doing other things, so the husband would be attracted to her, literally magnet attraction. So Caterina is saying, "but I have helped you with your husband, so why are you now accusing me of this?"
So you can see the social interconnection. These trials are never in isolation. You have to keep in mind the social context of them amongst all the other things. And that's why I say trial documents are complex. You have to read them in context. I am fond of giving the stage to the people that were in the trial rather than me making assumptions. I like them to be the main actors, because it's them who we should be listening to. And also the judges and inquisitors, because it's only them that can tell the story appropriately.
And then we have to place these stories within a really wide cultural, political, social, economic background. And I think only then we can get a glimpse of really what happened to have the full picture of them.
[00:37:11] Josh Hutchinson: Many excellent points. In Italy, in your articles, you've written about the regional differences in the witchcraft. Can you explain some of those? What was the difference, for instance, between belief in the Alps and belief south of the Alps?
[00:37:31] Debora Moretti: Yes. So this was part, this was the main part of my PhD thesis. So I worked on two different archives. One is the inquisition archive of the city of Siena, which is still is thankfully in Tuscany, so we are talking center north of Italy. And in the Episcopal Archive of the city of Novara, which is in Piedmont, therefore in the North.
And the witch trials of the Novara archive, they are, the events took part in two very small villages in the Alps. Now, the difference between, and I'm going to give you the general differences. Otherwise, we will be here for three days. So the main differences are that in the Novara archive, the witches, or the accusations carried out, present the supernatural witch, the heretical witch, as we know it from Central Europe, so the typical witch that we know.
So the person, supernatural person, who would indeed fly to the sabbat on top of a mountain, in a gathering, the sabbat, where first and foremost they would meet the devil. They would kiss his bottom of the devil and then have sex with the devil and then dance obscene dances. And usually they were dancing backwards, and then they would have lots of food, always without salt. One of the preferred food was children, there's a lot of children.
So that's the stereotypical, heretical witch that was pushed by the elite of the time. So that is the heretical witch. Whereas in Tuscany or in the Siena archive, there are references to the sabbat, but they are, they're almost like passing by references. And the figure of the witch is not really the heretical witch. You have more a low level sorcerer. So the person who would learn certain spells and they were not necessarily all bad. So the majority of the spells that you find in the accusations that you find in the north, as I said, they are heretical acts and mainly killing children, adoring the devil, and all that. So that is pure apostasy, and that's why that is a heretical crime. Where in the Siena archive, you find healing spells, you find love spells, you find what at the time called a tero tero spells. So they are spells to make, usually men, win games or find treasures. You do have references to the devil, but they are very specific. The adoration of the devil in Central Italy or in the Siena archive is usually associated with priests, nuns, or educated people.
The references to the devil of your normal folks is, you don't find the devil much, and when you do find it, it has almost like a secondary role. They addressed the saints, they addressed God, they addressed the angels, they even addressed stars, certain stars. And then if all that did not bring a change, then they addressed the devil. The devil was not that important. It was part of a supernatural universe. They, the majority of these people, apart the few, like the priests or the aristocrats or the nuns, the majority of the people accused were poor people that were struggling, so in the trials, you see how they justified certain acts as a way of making their life better. So sometimes you have people saying, when they've been asked, did you address the devil? And they say, oh yes, but it wasn't my first choice. I went to Saint So-and-so first and then the angel, and then the bright star, and then I have to go to the devil, because nobody else made it happen.
So you have this feeling that the sabbat is not important. Not even in the accusations, because we have, if we want to understand the sabbat, we have to read the accusations. So in the accusations of the Novara Piedmont North, you have, people accusing somebody else of going, flying to the sabbat and committing apostasy and kissing the devil's bottom. Where in the Siena Archive, there's not much there. There, there are references, but they are not your typical heretical gatherings.
Now, you find different references to different type of sabbats across Italy. So these are not the only two typologies. It's almost a regional perception of the sabbat. But whereas in the north you have your typical sabbat that you also have in central Europe, for example, or even in Scotland, in the center and maybe the south is more local. So you have the walnuts of Benevento or you have other types of sabbats. So they're more folk perceptions of the sabbat. Where in the north, as in the rest of Europe, is the stereotypical sabbat that was imposed from above.
[00:43:18] Josh Hutchinson: So it's more of a diabolical pact that's important in the north, and in the south, it, and central, it sounds like it had more to do with magic that was being used for practical purposes, and it's the magic itself doing the harm versus what the source of the magic is. Yeah. Okay.
[00:43:43] Debora Moretti: Exact perfect. Perfectly. Yeah. Perfectly spotted.
[00:43:47] Josh Hutchinson: you. Can you tell us about the different words there were for witchcraft and witches?
[00:43:57] Debora Moretti: Oh, yes,
[00:43:58] Josh Hutchinson: know you pointed out several of different words and they had somewhat different meanings.
[00:44:04] Debora Moretti: Yes. So strega is the one that we all know the best, because it is the one that comes from Latin. And that has survived into modern time. But then you have, for example, the masca, that seems to come from a more Germanic type of substratum. This is my hypothesis, the different names for witch in Italy, they are determined by the different languages in different regions. For example, in the areas that were because you have to remember that in Italy you didn't just have the Roman Inquisition, you also had the Spanish Inquisition in the south and some parts of the center. And then you had the Episcopal tribunals, et cetera. So it was a very complex religious situation regarding witchcraft.
So you have in some part of Italy witches is that are called bruja, for example, that comes from Spanish. So that's an influence of the language. And masca, for example, comes from the Germanic, I think. It's definitely Longobard, or Lombard as, as you say in English, of Lombard origins. So the the terminology of witch depends on the subcultural substratum of different regions.
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[00:45:33] Debora Moretti: And then, of course, you have, so in the modern language you have strega, fata, and maga. So the fata is derives from the Latin word for fatum, which is a prophetic declaration, an oracle, or a prediction and is more, the fata is more of benign folklore figure. So it's not necessarily a witch, but sometimes fata has magical powers, and they were usually benign, but if humans treated them badly, then they would take revenge on them, basically.
Maga is, it comes from Latin. And it comes from Maji, from the Persian Maga, in fact derived originally from Greek, and then it was used in the Latin language. So it comes from that word, from the Persian word that means learned and priestly class. And then it became more like of a magical practitioner. And in the modern Italian folk tradition, the maga would be also synonymous of a healer or cunning woman. Now you do have the male version as well. So maga mage is for it's a female magic practitioner where mago magi is a male magic practitioner. They're less threatening figures, but they certainly still have magical powers.
The strega is absolutely a negative figure, because it really comes from the Latin strix and striges. So there's no way to find a benign character in the name. The masca, again, that's specific to the northwest of Italy, is mostly a negative, is still is today seen as a negative magic practitioner. And he still, now, it's one of the most famous type of witches in Italy to the point that Piedmont, for example has a specific tourist sector dedicated to the masca.
So yeah, so you have your typical witch the strega, which is definitely negative, has negative attributes. Then you have the fata, which is more of a folk benign entity that can turn nasty, but usually as a vindictive act. You have the maga or mago, which is more cunning folk type of person.
And then you have, there are many others, many others. And then you have the masca, which is again, has a negative connotation but at the same time has also a cunning folk vibe to it. So it's more complex than just either the strega or the maga.
So the strega is negative totally. The maga is mainly cunning folk type of figure. It could turn nasty, generally speaking magic practices, the fata is more of a folklore, supernatural entity. And then you have the masca, which is the demonic witch but at the same time is also the cunning folk type of person, because they usually were, next door neighbor who during the day they would do the normal things every person would do. And they, in the night, they would transform themselves into these demonic figures. There are many others, many others. And the variation in the terminology, I think is because of the cultural substratum. Is there being a Spanish influence there? Therefore, you might have a different type of name. Is there being a Greek influence in the region? Then you have a different name. It depends on where you are in Italy, to have different terminology to express the term witch.
[00:49:37] Josh Hutchinson: And can you tell us more about the masca? In one of your articles, you break down the origins of the word and where that might've come from. Can you tell us about that?
[00:49:50] Debora Moretti: Yeah. That was a mental exercise on my part. I wanted to see, because it's such a well-known character or figure, I wanted to see if I could find material evidence of its provenance. So I have chased the etymology of the word, and I have traced it back to believe it or not proto-Indo-European to a proto-Indo- European root of. Now the pronunciation of in European, it's all made up. So forgive me if I just don't pronounce it well, but who knows how they pronounce it? So is mezeg, which meant to knit, plait, and twist. And that came down to Proto-Germanic mask, and it had cognates in all the Germanic dialects. So you find in, you find it in Old High German as max, and that is sixth to ninth century. You have it in the Old German or Old Saxon of eighth, 12th century as masca. You have it in German from the 16th century as masca. So you know through different yeah, Germanic dialects.
So what is this mental exercise on the etymology of the word I, in my article, I throw it out there that the modern masca, which was definitely a witch figure in the Lombard low codes, comes from an even more ancient figure that was associated to bog bodies.
I know this is a bit of a leap of faith, and I say that maybe the original etymology of masca, which means, as we said to knit, plait, twist is perhaps a memory of a practice carried out from Iron Age cultures in Europe to basically deliver bodies into bogs. And they were usually pinned down by knitted material or twigs. So that's the mental exercise.
Now, I have no evidence of that, because we need more work, but we know for example, from Tacitus that certain individuals within certain societies were punished by drowning in marshes or bogs, and they were pinned down into the bogs. So in my article, I'm just wondering if the Lombard witch, masca witch, has survived as a witch figure in modern time, still called masca, actually is a memory of an ancient, sacrificial or punishment of certain individuals not well accepted within specific societies.
We know from Tacitus that the people that were pinned down in bogs were prostitutes or unclean individuals. Not quite sure what that means, but clearly there were individuals that were not well accepted within the society where they practiced this. I don't think there were sacrifices per se, but they were definitely killed because of their perceived crimes.
So could that be, maybe there is still more work to be done, because it's very difficult to bring together the philological interpretation of a term and then find the archeological evidence, an act that we can see in the archeological records that could explain the evolution of an etymology and then can that be transferred to historical figure. That was a mental exercise.
I think it is possible, because bog bodies are a specific, it was not your usual burial. There were reasons, either rituals or social reasons for certain individuals to be dumped into marshy areas. Why were they pinned down? They were, we know that, I dunno if you know what hurdles are, but they are like mesh twigs, and so they were properly kept down in the bog. And because of this mesh situation or even bodies that have been wrapped up, I was just wondering, is there a connection, because the etymology of the word masca takes you all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, meaning knitting, meshing. Is there connection there?
But Yeah, it's all hypothetical.
[00:54:43] Josh Hutchinson: And you talk about the last masca killed in Piedmont.
[00:54:50] Debora Moretti: Yeah.
[00:54:50] Josh Hutchinson: When did that occur?
[00:54:53] Debora Moretti: Early 19th century. And she was the post medieval masca were considered witches, and they were told to possess a specific book that would give them the power to carry out their acts. And the book was called Book of the Fisica. She was accused of having one of these books, and the book apparently had belonged to the family for a very long time. She was accused of causing illness and death to two people in the village. So authorities were called, but nothing was done. Therefore, the people of the village decided to take matter into their own hands.
And they choose two men to have it killed. And these two men were never prosecuted for the murder, because the village basically supported the alibi. Therefore, they were never prosecuted, and yes, she was killed by them just because the village thought that she was a witch.
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[00:56:02] Sarah Jack: I have to tell you that this is a little bit off, and we don't have to keep this in the episode, but I have to tell you, I can't help but think of Dorothy Good right now, Josh.
[00:56:12] Debora Moretti: Again, the connection there is an historical connection to bog bodies and witches. But again it's not a direct connection. So the main direction in the Burgundian laws, so that is. 500 AD. So we are early, early medieval Europe. There is a chapter that says, tell how adulterous women should be treated. And there is a connection, of course, between the adulterous women, prostitutes. And then there is an associations of prostitutes with witches. And adulterous women should be drowned in bogs, basically.
We have the archeological evidence of bog bodies. Then you have Tacitus that mention certain unholy or I can't quite remember what he named them, but certain individuals in society that deserve to be drowned into bogs. And then you have the Burgundian laws that specifically refers to how an adulterous woman and prostitute should be dealt with.
So there is something there. Now we, as Ronald Hutton always say never join the dots, because that is a very long chronological period to assume something. So there is definitely something there. But even in my article, I say, is this too much of a leap of faith because you, you would need to have direct references all the way through. So from, early, early medieval to then post medieval, either Europe or Northern America, to definitely say absolutely there is absolutely a connection between bog bodies and witches. But it's fascinating. I like to think that there is something there. Otherwise I would've not gone through, the etymological research on the word masca. So if I put my scholar cap on, I would say, yeah, we have to be careful because do we have evidence in, so after, let's say after the seventh century AD, do we have evidence of that?
We don't really but as a person who is really passionate about witchcraft studies, yeah. , no even here, even in Europe, there's no association between bog bodies and witchcraft directly. So it's just me working on the masca, which is, Italian. Really. So no bog bodies are all, I think from late bronze age, iron age period type of they do have them here in England as well. Definitely in Scandinavia and Central Europe as well. But not in later periods well, not yet. Who knows, maybe.
[00:58:58] Josh Hutchinson: But the point of going back with the word is basically the words meaning evolved over time to become witch. It started out as a different kind of situation of an unclean person and then evolved somehow.
[00:59:17] Debora Moretti: I only gave you like the shorter road from Proto-Indo-European to the Lombard word masca. But there are more bits in between which allowed me to have an hypothesis on, a theory on this. But yes, we start with something that means, knitting or mesh ending then into a witch figure, which is an incredible, incredibly large leap of faith. I give you that. But I think there is something about it, and when I will have a little bit more time, I will expand this with some philologists so they will know better about the evolution of Proto-Indo-European into then Germanic languages, et cetera. Because I'm not a philologist. Then, yeah, I can look better into the bog bodies, see if we have more later evidence.
So yeah it's intriguing. Absolutely. Just it needs to be taken with a little bit of a pinch of salt. I personally think there is something there, but it needs to be studied in depth. Really.
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[01:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: The masca, what were some of their powers? I know you talk about their spirit coming from their body.
[01:00:28] Debora Moretti: Yes. So they had the ability to operate outside their body. So in folklore evidence that were collected quite recently in the 1980s people remembered, so we are talk, the majority of the people talking about their memories, they were, in 1980, they were around like 70, 80 years old, and they referred to traditions that came from their parents. So we are looking at the end of the 19th century. So they would say that one of the most feared characteristic of the masca was that she would, let's say they were doing some work together in an evening. So the village was gathered together, she would fall asleep and then she would, her soul or spirit would come out of her mouth and she would commit witchcraft acts in a spirit form.
So that was one of the most feared elements of the masca. That way that could fly. And there are some references to how they would, in that form would collect the fat from children. And they would keep this fat in jars hidden in their homes. And then they would use the fat to enhance their magical powers and then to fly further.
And in one of the folk references there is, there was a gentleman who said, I remember in my village. So as I said, yeah, the these folk narratives were collected I think it was 1980s or early 1990s. So the gentleman said, I remember of a masca farfalle, which is butterfly. And she was basically a woman masca, a witch, benign for what the person was saying, who would every so often fly back to her own country, which was France, so she could fly as a butterfly.
So yeah, they had this power of either operating in spirit form, coming out from the bodies through the mouth, or fly around like butterflies.
[01:02:43] Josh Hutchinson: It sounds so familiar to with New England witches they were, a lot of the evidence that came in was spectral evidence, and it was about the specter of the individual leaving the body and going off to do the nefarious things. And it would fly to Sabbaths and go into people's houses in the night to injure them, make them sick, just torment them in some way, and then return to the person.
And there's stories of, there was one woman who had, I believe, catalepsy, and she would pass out basically. And so they found her body lying there still and revived her. But then in later years, they were looking back on that incident and they're like, yeah, we should have known she was a witch right then, because her soul left her body while she was snoozing.
[01:03:50] Debora Moretti: Yeah, that's why in my PhD I said that the masca is more of a strictly speaking, demonic witch because she would operate, in the same way that demonic witches would operate. So yeah. But that the idea of the masca being the demonic witch was perceived earlier on, even in the Lombard law codes because the masca was somebody who, like a strega a witch about witch would eat a man inside out. So they had supernatural abilities to hurt people from inside out. Absolutely differently from the various witches from the Siena Archive, for example, where you really don't have that.
There are a few elements that they did hypnotize parents inside their own homes to steal children and then steal the fat of the children. But again, they, compared to the quantity of the trial documents, these elements are few in percentage. The remaining they are just, they were practical witches, if you like.
[01:05:03] Josh Hutchinson: Yes. And I'm really curious what did the witches do with the baby fat?
[01:05:12] Debora Moretti: In both the Siena archive and then the Novara archives, they would cover themselves with the fat, and then they would be able to fly or being able to summon the devil to fly with the devil. Yeah, it was, it would enhance their powers.
[01:05:33] Josh Hutchinson: And when they flew, would they fly as their human form, or would they always transform into something else, or?
[01:05:45] Debora Moretti: You also have metamorphosis. But usually they would fly on a horse, in fact not even fly. So sometimes once they anointed themselves a goat would appear that's the devil. And the goat would take them to the sabbat. Sometimes is a speaking horse. Sometimes they would fly themselves.
So it depends. There are so many traditions on how to get to the sabbat. There is one common element, though, while in motion they could not mention God, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, or any of the saints. Otherwise, their magical power would disappear, and they will fall down. And there are some of them that will say, and all of a sudden, I woke in the middle of a field covered in bruises, because I said Dio, Maria and Jesu, and all the magic disappeared, and then they became normal again.
[01:06:46] Josh Hutchinson: We had them on broomsticks. Sometimes Satan would appear as a horse or a dog or some animal to them, but usually they would ride on a pole to the sabbat. And
[01:07:01] Sarah Jack: about each other? Isn't there a couple that just rode another witch?
[01:07:06] Josh Hutchinson: There was something where they made somebody ride them. But there were also, there were crashes. There were times where the poles snapped, and they fell to the ground. And that's recorded in their confessions. And there's one story of one, one witch clinging onto the other for dear life, because she was falling off the pole. So they were very elaborate in their descriptions of flight in New England, at least during the Salem trials, when the devil really played such a critical role.
[01:07:44] Debora Moretti: Yeah. I found detailed narration of the food that they would have at the sabbat. Loads of food, high status food. So that is almost what they were wishing, because of course their daily food wasn't that type of food. And all the time the food had no salt in it, because the salt, again, would annihilate the magical power, and sometimes they say basically great variety of food, really lush, but then when they ate it, it tasted charred material, like sand or burned material. So that gives you the idea that even in their narratives, they knew that all that was just an illusion, the illusion of the devil.
[01:08:35] Josh Hutchinson: The salt is very interesting because I've seen that elsewhere used in protective magic to form a circle around you of protection, that kind of thing.
[01:08:50] Debora Moretti: We still have in Italy. I remember seeing my mom spreading salt at the bottom of our external staircase to make sure that there was no evil coming in. And we still say, do not spill salt. And if you do, then you have to chuck a little bit behind your shoulder to make sure, so the salt has always had magic, a counter witchcraft or counter magic properties of it was an apotropaic mineral. It's being used in antiquity, as well. Yeah.
[01:09:22] Josh Hutchinson: I just had this idea of the salt as, we talk about sympathetic magic and where a property, there's a transference of some property, of something that's like another thing. And the salt, because it preserves the food against rot and decay. Maybe it also protects the person in other ways.
[01:09:51] Debora Moretti: That is very possible. Very possible. Also, remember that salt has healing properties. What is the first thing you do when you cut yourself if you don't have whatever the name of the, alcohol based solutions, you just use hot water and salt. So yeah, it's healing property and preservation of food. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Sympathetic magic right there.
[01:10:21] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. You'd mentioned some other sympathetic magic earlier. Was that common in witch trial cases?
[01:10:31] Debora Moretti: Absolutely. The most used spells, for example to prevent fertility in a man, one of the most common spells were the knotting of the string. So you can see the, so you are knotting something therefore the man will stop being fertile, for example. And then, yes, the the spell of the magnet. So it's literally a piece of magnet that was baptized. So you see, they were practicing magic within their own cultural background. So they were religious people, they were Catholics. So for something like a magnet to be active, to be magical, to kick in the sympathetic element of the magical practice, it had to be baptized.
And this was, the baptizing random objects, was a thing, because we find sermons that, stating this ignorant, backwards, people bring all sorts of things to be hidden under the altar to be baptized. So the priest would not know what he was baptizing to give the magical power to certain objects, because the church itself had a magical element. And that's why amongst the different apotropaic object, you would also have saints figurine carried on the body or prayers carried on the body. Their perception of atropaic was vast and certainly included liturgical objects, liturgy itself. Everything was, could be used, in a different way from what.
[01:12:20] Josh Hutchinson: And people still wear protective medallions and amulets today.
[01:12:26] Debora Moretti: Yes, absolutely. This again, is one of those human element, that never goes away. And I think there is at least for me, it's comforting to know, because I use amulets, I wear certain type of stones in my jewelry or a specific metal in my jewelry. And it is for me, a sort of comfort to know that what I am doing has been done for thousands of years, but also that is because this is my perception of what witchcraft is, or not necessarily witchcraft, because witchcraft was almost created with the demonization of magical practices.
But yeah, magic is a sort of, you are nowadays, why do you practice magic is to have, bring control to your life, to almost shape the universe around you so you are in control. And for what I read from the, not all of them, but a good percentage of the witchcraft trials documents. That's why some of them did that, because they say that I had no bread for three days. I had no food for two days. Hence doing this. And also there is a practical element is Caterina, she made money, good money in selling her spells.
So yes, there is a psychological element to magical practices. So they're almost a way, a coping mechanism. So if life is particularly hard on you, you try to take back control, and I think as it applies today, it did apply back then. And there is the element and then there is the practical element.
So people either truly were magical practitioners and they made money out of it, or they pretended to be magical practitioners, so they could basically almost force people to help them. Otherwise, they would put spells on them, even if they were not magical practitioners.
[01:14:40] Josh Hutchinson: Was there anything else you wanted to talk about before we wrap up?
[01:14:46] Debora Moretti: We have to have more social media coverage, academic study of witchcraft and magic has to have more media coverage. Because in the past tended to be more for specialists, where I think it has to go out there to a wider public. So thank you very much. Thank you to your listeners.
[01:15:08] Sarah Jack: And now for a Minute with Mary.

[01:15:19] Mary Bingham: The name Putnam has caused many to cringe when we talk about the Salem Witch Trials. After all, some of them were the main accusers in 1692. But only some of them. In fact, only a small few, Thomas Junior, his wife and daughter, Ann Senior and Ann Junior, Thomas's brother Edward, and Jonathan, a cousin of Thomas and Edward. If I missed a Putnam or two, it's not more than three. Here's the deal. My fellow volunteer at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, John Fellows, readily tells our visitors the name Putnam is like the name Smith. To further that point, archivist for the town of Danvers and the historian Richard Trask says that the Putnam clan made up 12% of the entire population of no more than 550 living in Salem Village in the late 1600s. These Putnams included the families of the daughters who married and started families of their own.
So what were the views of the other Putnams regarding the witchcraft allegations? One can't speak for all of them, but we know one thing for sure. Several signed the petition in defense of Rebecca Nurse. One of them was my 10 times great-grandfather, Captain John Putnam. It's interesting to note that Captain John was at that time in heated arguments with the Esty and Towne families regarding the boundary dispute between the towns of Topsfield and Salem Village in Massachusetts Bay Colony, British America.
These families with whom Captain John was ready to do physical battle were close relatives of Rebecca Nurse and her sister, Mary Esty, both hanged in 1692. However, Captain John never accused Rebecca Nurse or Mary Esty of witchcraft, as did his nephew Thomas and his family, never. The other Putnams who signed the petition in defense of Rebecca Nurse were Captain John's wife Rebecca, Jonathan Putnam, Benjamin Putnam, Sarah Putnam, and Joseph Putnam.
Just because someone was named Putnam doesn't mean they were accusers. Hopefully, I have laid this misconception to rest, for a few minutes, anyway. Thank you.

[01:17:53] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:17:54] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

[01:18:05] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) weekly news update. Today is World Day Against Witch Hunts. Humanity, has not yet gotten past the fearful behavior of hunting vulnerable people, witches. Witch hunting targets the vulnerable and innocent.
Please join me right now and have a 30-second moment of reflection for those who have been executed as witches.
If you would like to spend more time reflecting, you should do so and pause the episode.
On August 10th, 2020, World Day Against Witch Hunts was started in order to recognize the violence in at least 41 countries around the globe, such as countries in Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, where fearful, panicked people target vulnerable, scared people because of witchcraft fear and blame.
The victims are hunted, tortured, and often killed. The inaugural World Day Against Witch Hunts was in 2020. This date of remembrance was chosen to honor the attack on a woman in Papua New Guinea on August 10th, 2012. She was accused of being a witch by residents of her village and tortured for days. She survived the violence, was able to escape, and was brought to safety with the help of advocate and Swiss nun, Sister Lorena Jenal. And so the International Catholic Mission Society launched August 10th as the day to draw attention to the devastating consequences of sorcery accusation-related violence and witch hunts, to connect experts and advocates, and to grow awareness and pool violence prevention and education initiatives.
Work with us on growing this day of remembrance, and take time to post words like August 10th, World Day Against Witch Hunts 2023, in order to amplify this annual day of education and remembrance. We want it to be an annual anticipated day of recognition for the victims and advocates facing this crisis daily. It is a memorial day and a day of education. Worldwide, multitudes of victims do not have a physical memorial, but they now have the World Day against Witch Hunts. Tell your friends about it and send them our way to learn more.
Thank you for being a part of Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast community. We appreciate your listening and support. Keep sharing our episodes with your friends. Have conversations with them about what you are learning and how you want to jump in to end witch hunts with your particular abilities, influence, and network. Community development that works to end witch hunts is an ongoing, long-term, collective effort for all of us to participate in. You can learn more by visiting our website and the websites listed in our show notes for more information about country-specific advocacy groups and development plans in motion across the globe.
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[01:21:42] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[01:21:44] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:21:45] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:21:51] Sarah Jack: We'll be back to talk with you next week.
[01:21:54] Josh Hutchinson: So subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and you'll have that episode downloaded and ready to go when it comes out on Thursday.
[01:22:03] Sarah Jack: Visit our website thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:22:06] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, acquaintances, and neighbors about the show.
[01:22:11] Sarah Jack: We thank you for supporting our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit us at endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[01:22:19] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

August 10, 2023

Massachusetts Witch Trials with Alyssa G A Conary

History Camp Boston, August 2023

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Show Notes

Introducing Alyssa G. A. Conary, Historian and Author of witchcraft, magic and 17th century New England. In this conversational episode covering Massachusetts witch trial history, Alyssa, Josh and Sarah discuss shocking aspects of these stories including the courts, magistrates, ministers, misogyny, what was written about the behavior of the accused, and the circumstances around their trials. Hear how the Boston witch trials, the Salem witch trials and the witch trials of Connecticut connect, compare and differ. Find out more about History Camp Boston 2023, where Alyssa presents her research. We address the importance of seeing and responding to humanity in all people on our planet. This discussion communicates End Witch Hunts’ message: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

The Pursuit of History Organization

A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft, John Hale

U.S. Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability

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Transcript

[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:25] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:26] Josh Hutchinson: We're going back to Massachusetts this week.
[00:00:30] Sarah Jack: But not to Salem.
[00:00:32] Josh Hutchinson: That's right. We're taking a field trip this week.
[00:00:35] Sarah Jack: So pack a snack and enjoy the ride.
[00:00:39] Josh Hutchinson: You'll love this fun conversation along the way.
[00:00:42] Sarah Jack: We talk about the Boston Witch Trials.
[00:00:45] Josh Hutchinson: That's right. There were witch trials in Boston long before the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem.
[00:00:51] Sarah Jack: We talk about Margaret Jones, Elizabeth Kendall, Alice Lake, Anne Hibbins, Goody Glover, and Elizabeth Morse.
[00:01:00] Josh Hutchinson: And we learn a valuable lesson that we can all apply today.
[00:01:04] Sarah Jack: Alyssa G. A. Conary is a historian and writer. She will be giving her Boston Witch Trials presentation at History Camp this month, and she was kind enough to discuss some of it with Josh and myself. Grab your beverage, pull up your chair, and lean in.
[00:01:19] Josh Hutchinson: We hear that there were witch trials in Boston. Is that true?
[00:01:25] Alyssa Conary: Yes, there absolutely were.
[00:01:29] Josh Hutchinson: And approximately what years were these held? What kind of range are we looking at?
[00:01:35] Alyssa Conary: There's a little bit of a question as to when the first was. It was, usually people say 1648, but it's possible that it was 1647. And then that goes into the mid 17th century. And the last execution for the first era is 1656. And there's no executions for a really long time. There's some trials, but no executions. And then you have 1688, you have another execution. And then after that is Salem. So Salem that's just like a totally different story.
[00:02:12] Josh Hutchinson: Yes.
[00:02:13] Alyssa Conary: Yeah.
[00:02:14] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. What are some of the key differences to make that a different story?
[00:02:22] Alyssa Conary: Salem is a witchcraft panic. It's funny, because you always want people to understand that witchcraft prosecution was not strange then. That was pretty normal, because people believed in witches. But even within the history of witchcraft prosecution, Salem was an outlier. Because before Salem in Massachusetts had just been like putting one or two people on trial at a time. There was periods of time in between. It was usually for some mundane misfortune or something like that, that someone would be accused. There are also more serious cases people thought people were being murdered by witchcraft, but which fascinates me, but that's, again, that's a whole other thing.
So for the most part it was just these pretty simple cases, and they didn't execute many people. I don't think they liked to execute people for witchcraft. The execution rate was pretty low. Then you get to Salem, and it's a full-blown witch panic. And you have the afflicted people, mostly girls, but there were some others.
Geographically, it's much wider than it had been in the past. There's way more suspects. There's tons of people in jail, and then you've got these judges who are using pretty much any kind of evidence that they wanna use and just convicting, literally everybody that they tried in 1692 was convicted and sentenced to death. So it's just something that is an outlier from the rest of the history of witchcraft in Massachusetts.
[00:03:57] Sarah Jack: And you're gonna be talking a little bit about this at History Camp. What is History Camp?
[00:04:03] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, History Camp is awesome. I think I went, I think it was maybe the first or second History Camp that I actually went to in 2015, I wanna say. And my, he wasn't my husband then, he is my husband now. We were best friends back then, but we were just like super excited about going to this, 'cause we're big history people and it sounded like perfectly nerdy and perfect for us.
So we went that year and didn't speak or anything, but it was just, it's just a full day of history lectures. And you get to choose which one you wanna go to. So there are different slots and like at any given time there's like several different lectures going on. So you can choose, okay, I wanna go to listen to this topic or that topic. And then this goes all day from nine to five. So it's just basically the best thing a nerd could ever attend.
[00:04:51] Josh Hutchinson: I really hope to be able to do that sometime. It sounds like a festival for history nerds.
[00:04:58] Alyssa Conary: It's great. It started as just this event, and then the founders of the event went on to, I think it was in 2019, they created a nonprofit organization called The Pursuit of History to oversee History Camp, and then they started taking it to different places, like I think there's one in Virginia now, and there's one in Philadelphia. That's the latest one. Started in Boston, but it's it's spreading, like Salem witchcraft. Sorry, that was lame.
[00:05:24] Josh Hutchinson: That's a perfect analogy.
[00:05:27] Sarah Jack: It's a, it's an exciting and positive one, though.
[00:05:31] Alyssa Conary: Yeah.
[00:05:32] Josh Hutchinson: You had mentioned early on that there was a gap in the executions between, I think 1656 and 1688. Why was there such a long period where they weren't executing anyone?
[00:05:47] Alyssa Conary: I think they, like I said, they didn't like to execute people. I think for a long time that they were just, "yeah, we're not really gonna do that anymore." Maybe, you know, it wasn't a conscious decision, but it was just, they were just very, it was actually a situation where from the top, the Court of Assistants, the judges, the center of the thing in Boston, they were like a mitigating force on this witchcraft accusing, so they'd be like, you know this, okay we'll hear this case, but it was hard to prove in court.
So it was hard. It was really, it was hard to get a conviction. And then you have 1688, which happens. That one's kind of weird, because you do have afflicted children, so it's like a, it's like a lead up to Salem. There is an execution in that case.
But before that, I just, I think that they were just slow to wanna execute people, which I feel like the stereotype of Massachusetts puritans is probably just the opposite, but, in my opinion, they didn't wanna do it. They felt like they had to sometimes, but they didn't love doing it.
[00:06:50] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, in the early years, Connecticut was the place where you were more likely to get hanged, and that really surprises people.
[00:06:58] Alyssa Conary: Yes. Yeah. Connecticut in the 1660s had a big witch panic, and that was huge until Salem happened and Salem was much bigger. But yeah, Connecticut was not a good place to be accused of witchcraft.
[00:07:13] Sarah Jack: And the 1688 case, was that Goody Glover?
[00:07:17] Alyssa Conary: That's Goody Glover. Yep.
[00:07:19] Sarah Jack: And why was she chosen as a scapegoat?
[00:07:22] Alyssa Conary: She was Irish. And it's interesting, because there is that scapegoating aspect of witch hunting, but at the same time, usually the majority of people that are being accused are members of the community who are basically just like their accusers, the same religion, oftentimes they're neighbors. They're pretty much like the same people that they're accusing. It's like this purge from within a community.
But you would have, once in a while, you'd have someone who was inside a community, but who was an outsider on the inside. And that's the case with Goody Glover. She was an Irish Catholic woman, and her first language was Irish Gaelic. She was someone who stood out, and that could be part of the reason why she was accused to begin with.
[00:08:05] Josh Hutchinson: How many people were executed before Salem?
[00:08:10] Alyssa Conary: Before Salem, in Massachusetts, it's five people.
[00:08:13] Josh Hutchinson: And who was the first one?
[00:08:16] Alyssa Conary: The first one, that's a little bit confusing because it could have either been, most sources say Margaret Jones, but there's some question as to when Elizabeth Kendall was executed. It could have been earlier, but we're not positive, because the sources are very bare.
[00:08:32] Sarah Jack: And what are those early sources that discuss those two ladies?
[00:08:37] Alyssa Conary: So for the most part, with the five who are executed, who are the ones I've done the most research and reading on, there are no trial records for any of them, any of the five. There's some kind of strange gaps in the Court of Assistants records there. They're missing basically all of the early stuff.
I think it's in like the 1670s that, the record kind of begins. So they're missing the early stuff, and then strangely they're missing like 1687 and 1688, which is exactly when Goody Glover happens. So you really don't have court records for these five women, but you have contemporary accounts.
So with Margaret Jones, you have Governor Winthrop, his journal, which is great. And you also have John Hale's book, Reverend John Hale's book, Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft. And then for Elizabeth Kendall, I think it's just Hale. That's the only source we have for her. And so we know it was sometime between 1647 and 1651. But we can't exactly be sure when.
[00:09:44] Sarah Jack: What does he say about her?
[00:09:46] Alyssa Conary: For Elizabeth Kendall?
Yeah. So he basically, he was very small. He actually visited some of these people in jail, John Hale, when he was a child. And I don't remember if he visited Elizabeth Kendall, it might've been actually Margaret Jones that he visited, but for Elizabeth Kendall. So what happened with her was she's interesting because, you always hear people believed in witchcraft. So I know there wasn't a lot of fraud. And I do believe that, I don't think that there was a lot of fraud, people accusing people knowing that they were lying about it. But this is a case where it's pretty obvious that's what happened.
So a nurse, so Elizabeth Kendall, she was from Cambridge. A nurse from Watertown accused her of bewitching a child to death, and the nurse testified that this is what she said here, actually have her words, "Elizabeth did make much of the child, and then the child was well, but quickly changed its color and died in a few hours after." So what happened is Goodman Jennings, who was the father of the child, he was apparently unaware of the evidence that was given against Elizabeth, because after she was executed, we don't know what was said in court or what the evidence was in court, 'cause we don't have the record, but after her execution, a deputy to the general court named Richard Brown went and talked to the Jennings family. And he asked whether the family had suspected Elizabeth of murdering their child. And the father was like, no. They thought the child's death was the nurse's fault, because she had kept the child outside in the cold for too long.
And this is the same nurse who testified against Elizabeth. So basically it looks like what happened was she just blamed Elizabeth for something that she had actually done. So the nurse was subsequently actually in prison for adultery, Hale says and she gave birth to a child, apparently in jail, and Richard Brown, the deputy to the general court, he visited her in jail and apparently told her, and I have that quote as well.
"It was just with God to leave her to this wickedness as a punishment for her murdering Goody Kendall by her false witness bearing." So there is a very clear example, early example of a fraudulent witchcraft accusation.
[00:11:57] Sarah Jack: Wow. That's so interesting, because that's like a question people have often about the different cases, and here is the story. That is the story. And then I was curious, you're calling her a nurse. How is that different than, so like for non historians who are, hear that healers or midwives are involved in which trials, what's that role of the nurse?
[00:12:22] Alyssa Conary: You know what? I'm not sure to be honest why she is called mmm a nurse. I think that might have just been like a modern word that they used to call her. I'm not sure that was actually in the historic testimony that they called her a nurse. I would have to double check about that. But but yeah you get to, you're mentioning that the healer midwife sort of myth, which I've actually been thinking a lot about lately.
So you can see that people in the medical profession were also accusing others. So it wasn't, it wasn't just people coming after healers and midwives. Actually midwives mostly gave evidence against accused witches, because they would be the ones who would search their bodies for witch marks.
But that being said, there is something to it. There's some kernel of truth in this this myth that healers were targeted. I don't think that there's evidence in New England for the doctors going after midwives. That's one big myth. I don't think there's evidence for that, but, and Paul Moyer actually, who just recently published a book about witch hunting in the Atlantic world, he looks at New England, but he ties it into things that were happening in England at the same time. So he describes it really well. He says that there's no like clearcut connection between midwifery and witchcraft accusations. But there is this sort of connection between like healing in general and like medical practice in general, because being a healer, you'd be put in these situations where someone could end up dying under your care.
And then that was the perfect opportunity for a family member to accuse you of witchcraft. So just by the nature of the profession, you were more vulnerable, I think. I don't think that there were a lot of healers accused, but it did happen. There's some truth to it. Truth for sure.
[00:14:11] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I haven't seen many that stand out as like professional healers. I've seen a lot who seem to have had things in their medicine cabinet, so to speak, that they used to treat people within their own home. Yeah.
[00:14:28] Alyssa Conary: Of course. Yeah. Which is what mainly would be the role of the woman in the house. As far as the people who were known as healers, I think out of the like 27 that are tried in Mass Bay before Salem, I think there's only four who were known as being healers in their community.
So it did happen, but probably wasn't an organized conspiracy against healers and midwives.
[00:14:54] Sarah Jack: We did some research when we were working on our episodes that we put out on the Connecticut history and looking at some of those individuals, and sometimes an author would label somebody a healer, but there was maybe one thing mentioned that could be viewed at in a different way even, or just as the medicine cabinet healer
[00:15:25] Alyssa Conary: right.
[00:15:25] Sarah Jack: there, is there record or diary or anything that ever talks about one of these women who you know was doing that for her neighbors regularly?
[00:15:36] Alyssa Conary: I think with the four that are more known as healers in their communities, there's I don't know of any diaries. I just know of contemporary accounts of their accusations. I know, let's see, there's one, Mary Hale, she's a Boston widow. She had a sort of, I don't wanna call a hospital, but like a place where people came to be like cared for.
And this ended up not, it didn't end well for her because she was accused of witchcraft, but she was acquitted, so she was never executed. But for the most part, like Josh was saying, it's unclear, because medical care was usually done at home by the woman in the house. So someone could be involved with healing, but not necessarily be known as a healer.
[00:16:24] Sarah Jack: And Mary Hale is my 10th great grandmother.
[00:16:27] Alyssa Conary: Stop it. Are you serious?
[00:16:29] Sarah Jack: If like the records indicate that she was indeed Winifred Benham's mother, have you looked at that at all?
[00:16:38] Alyssa Conary: No, I haven't.
[00:16:39] Sarah Jack: Winifred Benham was and her daughter, Winifred Junior, were the last case tried in Hartford, in 1697. But if you go back to Mary Hale's case, her granddaughter, Joanna, ties Mary and Winifred, because Joanna is Winifred's daughter.
[00:17:00] Alyssa Conary: Wow. It runs in families, right?
[00:17:03] Sarah Jack: Yeah. And it's interesting, both Mary and Winifred Senior disappear from the record after their trials. There's nothing that shows when they died or where they went. Joanna, you can trace into New York and Winifred Junior, you can trace her marriage too. But both of those senior women, we know nothing after they were acquitted.
[00:17:26] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, I know there's so many like that, because 17th century women, there's not much to start with. There's not that much out there about them. So yes. So many of these women, we do lose them after the trials. That's the last we hear of them. That's fascinating, Mary, so you're a Hale. Wow. Very cool.
[00:17:45] Sarah Jack: Yeah. And I didn't understand that connection until our Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project started, 'cause we just were doing more research. And since that's my direct, Winifred was my interest in the Connecticut witch trials. That case, there's a lot of, it's not misinformation, but it's not primary source information that's been passed around, where she's possibly buried, which there's actually no indication of her burial, 'cause there's no indication of her death either.
But there's a really great article that I found that talks about the trial records for Mary Hale and then that's how that author made the connection. And that was exciting to me, because that was like, oh, this is record because with Winifred and Winifred Junior, there's not much actual trial record.
[00:18:37] Alyssa Conary: For Mary Hale there, there is an entry in the Court of Assistants that mentions her. There's not transcripts. I don't think there are trial transcripts for any of them, but yeah, I do remember seeing Mary Hale was mentioned in the Court of Assistants records as a widow from Boston.
[00:18:53] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Were there other cases that you know of witchcraft being passed down in the family?
[00:19:01] Alyssa Conary: Oh yeah, for sure. The one that comes to mind right now is Ann Burt from Lynn, who is one of the women actually who was known as a healer and, in the community. And she was tried and evidently acquitted. I don't know if there's an actual record of her acquittal, but she shows up later, so we know she wasn't executed, so she was probably acquitted. Her granddaughter is Elizabeth Proctor from the Salem Trials. So there was that suspicion hanging on her, because of her grandmother being accused of witchcraft. I think it is mentioned at least once.
[00:19:42] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I was curious about that. How many of these earlier trials in Massachusetts maybe had some connections to Salem or other trials?
[00:19:53] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. You have the same, it is the same guys in charge in the mid to late 17th century. So you have some of the same judges at the trials. Mary Hale's acquittal, you have Nathaniel Saltonstall, William Stoughton, Bartholomew Gedney, and John Richards are the judges involved, and she's acquitted. Mary Webster, 1683, you have William Stoughton and Bartholomew Gedney and also acquitted. James Fuller, acquitted in 1683, also you have William Stoughton which it just makes me wonder if he was just seething, because we know he was very enthusiastic about convicting witches. There must have been, like I said, these sort of other forces that were keeping it in check back in the 1680s, and then when Salem happened, he just got to let it rip pretty much. So yeah, you do have some of the same guys that are on the Court of Assistants.
And then you have a couple of Salem victims who are actually accused for the first time earlier in the century. Susannah Martin, who's actually my husband's ancestor, she was acquitted of witchcraft in 1669. And then you have Bridget Bishop, she's acquitted in, presumably acquitted, 'cause obviously she wasn't killed until later. In 1680 so she's not Bridgett Bishop, yet, she's Bridget Oliver at that time.
So you do have some people showing up in more than one story and then showing up again in Salem, for sure.
[00:21:19] Sarah Jack: It was so enjoyable to hear you say who was sitting at her trial, Mary Hale's. Thank you I had not seen that yet.
[00:21:27] Alyssa Conary: It's four of the guys who were on the Court of Oyer and Terminer. And I think it's interesting that Saltonstall was on there. He's the one who left early on. He is, "you know what? I don't have the stomach for this. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take off," we presume.
[00:21:41] Josh Hutchinson: It is fascinating.
[00:21:43] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. It's the same guys, it's just something changed. Basically, what changed for Salem was that there was no one in charge after the charter was revoked. And even though they had this new charter in 1691, they hadn't reestablished the courts or the laws yet. So it was the governor, Phips, was like, "let's set up this court illegally." And the judges got to pretty much convict people however they wanted to. That's one reason why Salem got so out of hand, because these guys are, it's the inmates running the asylum here. There are no rules. There's no one in charge really.
[00:22:21] Sarah Jack: It makes me think of this meme that I've seen. The guy hands a note to this officer, and the officer reads it, and it says, "oh, this just says you can do whatever you want."
[00:22:32] Alyssa Conary: So basically what happens, that's what Phips gave to William Stoughton. He had carte blanc. Phips didn't want anything to do with it. He just wanted it to go away. So he just hands it over to them and is, "okay, do what needs to be done."
[00:22:45] Sarah Jack: Whereas the Boston Court was running for more than just...
[00:22:50] Alyssa Conary: Exactly, yep. It was a center of political power. And it was, there was checks and balances, which is not, again, what people think about Puritan New England as being this moderate place. It is obviously, it's religiously driven, but they took laws seriously, and they didn't, like I said, I, they didn't wanna execute a bunch of people.
Yeah it, and it changes. It changes, and it has a lot to do with the politics. And I think the best book for understanding kind of the situation with the charter and with the political climate is Emerson Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft. If anybody's really interested in learning more about the judges and the politics, he does a really excellent job of explaining that whole dynamic.
[00:23:33] Josh Hutchinson: I'm wondering, was there a lot of spectral evidence involved in cases outside of Salem?
[00:23:41] Alyssa Conary: No, absolutely not. It was not seen as very reliable or valid evidence. And of course, in England you have these guys writing handbooks on how to prosecute witches. And there's some differing opinions. Some of them do put stock in spectral evidence, and others say, "no, it can't be used to prove witchcraft."
But for the most part, I think in New England, in the 17th century, no, they didn't wanna use that to convict people. The big thing that would get you convicted was a confession, again, before Salem, because Salem is completely different. But before Salem, you wanna get that confession. But that doesn't happen very often.
So another way to get a conviction would be to have two witnesses who witness the same sort of act of witchcraft. And that was another big way to get people convicted. But no, spectral evidence was not really seen as a reliable way to prosecute people. I think with Elizabeth Morse from Newbury, who actually was convicted in 1679 but then reprieved, actually, I think it's John Hale, who later says her being reprieved might've had something to do with the fact that the judges did use some spectral evidence to convict her and then subsequently realized, "okay, maybe we shouldn't have done that." So yeah, no, it was not reliable.
And then again, like we have said a million times, and then in Salem it was just like night and day. It was just like, okay, we're just gonna use, it's, it was a free for all.
[00:25:12] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. And it's like you said, a lot of the same people making the decision to suddenly include spectral evidence.
[00:25:21] Alyssa Conary: It makes you wonder what they were thinking at those earlier trials where people were being acquitted. I think about Stoughton just probably super angry every single time someone was acquitted. He had to play by the rules.
[00:25:34] Sarah Jack: He was ready to unleash when 1692 came.
[00:25:38] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, he was ready. He was ready. To me, he's the biggest villain. He's the biggest Salem villain in my mind, for sure.
[00:25:44] Josh Hutchinson: I agree. One that judge that surprises me is Waitstill Winthrop, because his father, John Winthrop, Jr. was very opposed to spectral evidence, and he brought in the two witness rule into Connecticut witch trial cases, and then Waitstill's like, "whatever Dad."
[00:26:06] Alyssa Conary: John Winthrop, Jr. It's funny. And then you go back to his father and his father was just like super haunted by all of this stuff and did some very strange things. But yeah, it is interesting that Waitstill Winthrop then, maybe it was a way to differentiate himself from his father.
[00:26:24] Josh Hutchinson: Sided with granddad or something.
[00:26:28] Alyssa Conary: I mean, I think Winthrop was pretty earnest in wanting to believe what he thought was the right thing to believe. But yeah, you can't read his diary without thinking, "wow, the guy was such a jerk." Yeah, he said some pretty interesting things, and the antinomian controversy, he did some pretty questionable things. Yeah, that, it is really interesting to look at those three generations and how their opinions differed and their actions differed, for sure.
[00:26:55] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I noticed the victims we've talked about so far have all been women. Why were women the predominant victims of witch trials?
[00:27:08] Alyssa Conary: The short answer is that they were believed to be more susceptible to the devil. And I always giggled to myself when I see that in, in a book and the scholar will say it wasn't because of misogyny, it was because they were believed to be more susceptible to witchcraft. And then I say to myself, "isn't that pretty misogynistic?" I don't know. And this isn't every book about witchcraft, but it's just a few times I've read these people dance around it. They don't want it, they don't wanna admit that it's misogyny. But it's absolutely an aspect I think it wasn't, again, just like with the midwives, I don't think it was this coordinated conspiracy like, "oh, we're gonna, call them witches just so we can kill them." No, they really believed in witches for the most part. But yeah, they thought women were more likely to be witches, and something like four out of five of people accused, I think, I wanna say it was four out of five were women. Something like 80 to 90% I wanna say. And that differed in other parts of the world. There were some places where actually more men were accused. But when we're talking about England and New England, there is an aspect of misogyny to it. Women were definitely more likely to be believed to be witches for sure.
[00:28:18] Sarah Jack: I wish there was more information on Thomas Jones. There's some secondary mentioning of his being accused or arrested after his wife had been hanged for witchcraft. I don't know any more than that, but I know that's like somewhat different than some of the other situations where the husband and the wife were arrested together, and then the husband was not found guilty.
That would be in Connecticut, or the couple in Connecticut where they were both found guilty. I wanted to know more of this backstory with the Jones that when his wife was hanged, it wasn't over. I wish I knew. And then is he the first man that we know of in Massachusetts who was accused?
[00:29:00] Alyssa Conary: I'm not sure about that. That is pretty, pretty early. He's definitely one of the first, and he is absolutely. He is put in jail. But he's never prosecuted, I don't think. And then you get to the Parsons where it's the opposite. But yeah, you do see these sort of like married sort of duos where they'll both be accused, but generally speaking it was much more likely that the wife would be executed statistically speaking. So there you go again.
[00:29:33] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and it's really similar. We've had guests on recently talking about witch hunts today, and you still see that pattern with the women in most locations. There are like regions of Papua New Guinea where more men are accused, regions of other nations where more men are accused. But overall, it's still that very high ratio of
[00:30:01] Alyssa Conary: Yeah.
[00:30:01] Josh Hutchinson: women to men.
[00:30:04] Alyssa Conary: And I think it's a bigger question. Why do men kill women? Like I said, it's not, the witchcraft accusations, it's not a coordinated conspiracy clearly, but there's gotta be some reason why men kill women. It's just, it's always been that way. It's still that way today. I think we have to ask those questions, like, why? And maybe instead of shying away from the misogyny piece, confront it.
[00:30:30] Josh Hutchinson: Yes.
[00:30:31] Sarah Jack: Yeah.
We need to do it for the future victims. Discussing it, talking about it, those conversations have to become more comfortable.
[00:30:41] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, absolutely. I think as far as like the witchcraft scholarship goes, the early stuff, the Margaret Murray and all of that, and the fertility cults and the, I, people wanted to react against that scholarship and didn't wanna make it about misogyny, but it's there. It's there, and we can't ignore it.
[00:31:02] Josh Hutchinson: It's pretty plain when you see the comments of some of the people in the New England Witch Trials, at least, some of the comments that the men made about the women, like Cotton Mather's not my favorite guy. He's not he's not so nice when he writes about, say, Martha Carrier as a rampant hag, and John Winthrop's not so kind calling everybody a witch and everything.
[00:31:34] Alyssa Conary: oh, Yeah, Winthrop, man, he writes some real misogynistic stuff. Cotton Mather, he's fascinating to me, cause initially he's telling the judges to use caution at Salem. And then he becomes the guy who does the whole government defense of the trials.
But yeah, yeah, one thing, Winthrop, he really, the way he wrote about Margaret Jones to me was like, ugh. Wow. He talks about her "behavior," quote unquote, at her trial. And I have his quote here somewhere, and it's just, here it is. "Her behavior at trial was very intemperate, lying notoriously and railing upon the jury and witnesses. And in the distemper, she died. The same day and hour she was executed, there was a very great tempest at Connecticut, which blew down many trees."
And it's dude, like, if you were about to be executed, maybe you'd be acting intemporately, like I think, and then you get the account from Hale about her, and Hale is saying he went to visit Margaret, and they had urged her to confess, and she had insisted, "as for witchcraft," this is the quote, "as for witchcraft, she was wholly free from it, and so she said unto her death," and it just gives her like more of this like earnest sort of victim, description of her as like this earnest victim. And then you have Winthrop who's basically describing her as like this crazy woman who's yelling and screaming.
But of course she was, like, she was going to be executed for something that she was denying, and she was terrified, and she was angry. And it's just like what he says, it's just just being a crazy woman, just lying and railing upon people. And yeah, that one has always really bothered me.
[00:33:16] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's like blaming her for you, just saying, oh, she was hysterical. And uh, you know, he doesn't use the word.
[00:33:25] Alyssa Conary: Pretty much. Yes. She's a hysterical woman. It's like women weren't allowed to be people at so many times in history and even today, but we don't even have to touch that. Obviously it's an issue. Obviously misogyny is an issue. It always has been. And it is still today.
[00:33:44] Sarah Jack: I wonder how Margaret's fight for her life, since she was one of the early ones, intimidated the next women.
[00:33:57] Alyssa Conary: Yeah.
[00:33:57] Sarah Jack: It didn't play out well for her. Her fight didn't, and then they're being read or reading the account that there was the hearsay of the account or they witnessed it, and then how she was recorded in history.
[00:34:11] Alyssa Conary: It's terrifying. There's also this account after she's indicted of her sitting with her friend, Alice Stratton. And the account was given that she that Alice Stratton had a bible on her lap, and they were both crying, and that has always hit me pretty hard, too. Margaret Jones is fascinating to me and I just wish that we knew more about her. So you get this whole gamut of emotions from this woman who's facing this terrifying thing and it just makes it so real.
[00:34:44] Sarah Jack: yeah.
[00:34:44] Alyssa Conary: You read these accounts. Yeah. Makes it so immediate and scary and I'm sure people reading about that, hearing about that, more likely, would've been terrifying to hear for sure.
[00:34:58] Sarah Jack: And possibly at that point she had hope that someone was gonna hear her message and hear her plea. It was worth fighting for it, because what if somebody stands up for her?
[00:35:12] Alyssa Conary: Exactly. And nobody did. And apparently she made the weather really bad in Connecticut.
[00:35:19] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
[00:35:20] Alyssa Conary: Silly.
That, that was a big, that was a big witchcraft belief back then was that witches could control the weather. But yeah, it's just, it's very sad.
[00:35:29] Josh Hutchinson: On this topic of misogyny, I was thinking about how the women were physically examined, at least at Salem. Were they physically inspected in these earlier trials, as well?
[00:35:43] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. And that would actually mostly be by other women. And yeah, it, I mean it went on in the earlier trials too, to find, try to find, the witches teat or the witches mark that was not good enough to convict someone, but it was good, like corroborating evidence if they had other evidence. And God knows what they were actually looking at. I actually think Alice Stratton had something to say about that, because they did supposedly find a witch's mark on Margaret Jones. Yeah, she they found a witch's teet, and Alice Stratton says it's just an injury related to childbirth.
[00:36:19] Josh Hutchinson: Like Rebecca Nurse.
[00:36:20] Alyssa Conary: Exactly, yeah, exactly. They're seeing these marks or whatever, which probably have perfectly reasonable explanations, but but yeah, they are it is, it's it's an assault. It's an assault being, their bodies being searched, for sure. But like I said, it was usually women who did it, but I'm not gonna, I'm sure at some point there were men doing it as well. And that's horrifying to think about. But yeah, that's an assault, basically.
[00:36:46] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's so invasive, and I've noticed in my reading of witch trials that for women, the witch's teet is almost always found in the secret parts. For men, it's on their shoulder or their neck or something.
[00:37:05] Alyssa Conary: That, That. Interesting. Yeah.
[00:37:07] Josh Hutchinson: So yeah, they didn't get the same
[00:37:09] Alyssa Conary: like someone's just really preoccupied with a female genitalia. There's so much, there's so much here that is just so clear, so clearly, just.
[00:37:21] Sarah Jack: Preoccupied but unaware at the same time. It's surprising that they couldn't start to understand it since they were looking at it
[00:37:30] Alyssa Conary: interesting is
If they had midwives looking for it, these midwives must have seen things like that before. So why would they be so quick to say, were they pressured into saying it ever that it was a witch, I don't know. I that's the thing is you always wish you could be there and see the things that happened that weren't written about, and I can only imagine. I can only imagine. I bet some women went through some really horrible things
[00:37:55] Sarah Jack: Rebecca said, take another look. Have an actual expert look, because
[00:38:01] Alyssa Conary: Yeah.
[00:38:02] Sarah Jack: is wrong.
[00:38:03] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. Her case is, that's a tough one.
[00:38:07] Sarah Jack: she's she's my ninth great grandma. So I get real
[00:38:11] Alyssa Conary: How many,
[00:38:12] Sarah Jack: her
[00:38:13] Alyssa Conary: oh, wow. Do you have any more? Is that the only two? Mary Hale and Rebecca Nurse
[00:38:18] Sarah Jack: so mary, It is a lot. Mary Esty, her sister, their grandchildren married and I descend. There's a line of Russells that goes down several generations and I descend out of there. And so I knew about Rebecca since I was a teenager. And then as I started doing my own research seven years ago or so, I realized, oh, Mary is my grandmother too.
and
[00:38:41] Alyssa Conary: fascinating.
[00:38:42] Sarah Jack: a few years after that, I discovered Winifred on my dad's, side of my tree. And then I'm like, oh, I wanna find out where her memorial is. And then the rest
[00:38:51] Alyssa Conary: So when did your family leave New England? 'cause they must have been there early on.
[00:38:55] Sarah Jack: They all left pretty quickly. So the Towne descendants moved into Vermont, that I come from, and then my line left Vermont about five generations back from me and moved into the Midwest. So I am, I'm an Iowan. And All of my New England ancestors, and there's a lot, they ended up coming through Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa.
[00:39:22] Alyssa Conary: Oh, that's fascinating. My husband, he is his family, it's like they came over from England and they're still there. Like they never, it's, he is, oh my gosh. He's related to so many colonial people. And like I said, Susannah Martin is his ancestor, which I find, I always look at my kids and think, wow, it's really cool, because she was such a firecracker. I really think that's a plus to be a descendant of Susannah Martin. She was awesome.
[00:39:50] Sarah Jack: Awesome.
[00:39:51] Alyssa Conary: But he, let's see, I think he's a Towne as well, somehow not a direct descendant of one of the sisters, but one of a descendant of one of their brothers. I think. I have no ancestors that I know of that my, all my ancestors were Quaker, not, I haven't found any that were actually executed, but definitely put in jail a lot.
[00:40:10] Josh Hutchinson: Wow.
[00:40:11] Alyssa Conary: yeah.
[00:40:12] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I'm also a Mary Esty descendant. My grandfather was from Danvers and he just moved to California after World War II. He, the Navy sent him there and he stayed so up until two generations ago, a quarter of my family at least was Essex County
[00:40:35] Alyssa Conary: You're recently from Danvers. Yeah. That's fascinating
[00:40:37] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Pretty recently. Just yeah, just a couple generations ago. I feel a closeness to Danvers and that area and
[00:40:47] Alyssa Conary: I love Danvers.
[00:40:49] Josh Hutchinson: Uh, like dozens of ancestors and close relatives that were involved in Salem on the accuser side as well as the accused and the in-between just playing different roles, giving testimony, signing petitions.
[00:41:07] Alyssa Conary: Her letter, Mary Easty's letter, that, that blows my mind. They just, the Peabody Essex Museum had a, an exhibit, a Salem Witch Trials exhibit, and they actually had the actual piece of paper on display. And that was crazy to see. Yeah.
[00:41:23] Sarah Jack: Yeah. You know that no more innocent should die. She said that in 1692, and that hasn't stopped yet. So I'm really motivated by those words of her to keep pulling out the education and pushing out the word, because the innocent need to stop dying. They, those women who were pleading for their lives then didn't want others to suffer.
[00:41:54] Alyssa Conary: And it's happening.
[00:41:56] Sarah Jack: Yeah.
[00:41:56] Alyssa Conary: again and again. Yeah.
[00:41:59] Sarah Jack: I was curious if you wanted to tell us anything about the hanging site in Boston.
[00:42:03] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. Traditionally, people have believed that in the 17th century the hangings were on Boston Common. And I know that in later centuries, actually, there were a few people hanged on Boston Common, as we know it today. But in the 17th century there were other pieces of land that were common land, and if you look at the maps from the early 18th century that exist, the gallows was actually on Boston Neck on some common land there. It's likely that sort of led to the misconception that they were happening on Boston Common, because that was also Boston land. So there is evidence, at least by the mid 17th century that yeah, people were, the gallows people were being executed on Boston Neck, which was this little tiny strip of land that connected the Shawmut Peninsula to the mainland.
Now there's a bunch of landfill around it, it's, there isn't a tiny little strip of land anymore, but it's clearly marked on these early 18th century maps that that was the execution site,
[00:43:01] Josh Hutchinson: So basically instead of hanging them in the center of town, they're taking them out towards the edge of town.
[00:43:10] Alyssa Conary: Which was usually the case in 17th century New England, is they would execute people outside of town.
[00:43:16] Sarah Jack: Which is a possible detail in Connecticut, in Hartford, possibly. We don't know.
[00:43:25] Alyssa Conary: Do they, I don't even, you know what, I'm so uneducated about the Connecticut trials, even though I find them absolutely fascinating. Do they have a, know of the execution site in Hartford?
[00:43:34] Josh Hutchinson: We think that we have a leading contender for it. It's, there's an old land transfer from the early 18th century that references a plot of land where the gallows once stood, and you can trace that, who owned that land, through the generations up till now, how it's transferred over the years, and what it's transformed into.
But there's a legend that goes along with it of the Witch Elm. And back in 1930, they tore this witch elm down. So it, that doesn't stand there anymore. But the gallows were supposedly, like near that tree. That tree was the landmark. It used to be on a rise, which has since been graded down level, but it was up above, and it's about a mile from downtown Hartford. So again, it was on the town edge, it was on a road leading to the cow pasture. And yeah, it's just at the edge of what the town was at the time.
[00:44:47] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. Yeah. Which that is to be expected, which is the reason why Boston Neck is such a better location than Boston Common, because it was on the outside of town. So that's at least, Anne Hibbins and Goody Glover I'm pretty sure it would've been Boston Neck. Yeah.
[00:45:06] Sarah Jack: And would've they discarded the bodies right there?
[00:45:09] Alyssa Conary: I think that was usually the practice with executions. I don't specifically know of any evidence, but it's probably, it's safe to say that is most likely what would've happened, yep.
[00:45:21] Josh Hutchinson: Okay. The question, what lessons can we learn from the past witch trials that we could apply today?
[00:45:30] Alyssa Conary: Oh man. Yeah, that's a, I actually love, as a historian, on the one hand, you have to be able to recognize that the past is unique and that it has to be looked at for the sake of looking at it. And it has to be looked at from its own perspective. But, that being said, I think, I do think that there are, lessons. I do think that if history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it rhymes. Someone said that once, I cannot remember who said that, but I loved it that history rhymes. So I think it is very useful to look for lessons.
And as far as witch trials go, I think the lesson is to not get carried away. If you're looking at things like Salem, singling people out and demonizing them is something that humans have always done. But we can get into this sort of mode where we're not even seeing clearly anymore, where it's just like other people aren't even people to us anymore. And I think being able to pull ourselves back and ground ourselves back in, in a place where we can look at others and actually see them as people is really important.
And it's scary, because, America today and like how divided we are. It's such a cliche, but it's true. And people, I feel like people don't even really see the humanity of other people at times. So I think that's the lesson is just stay in touch with people's humanity, other people's humanity. Don't forget about it. So I think that's probably one of the biggest lessons.
[00:47:13] Sarah Jack: I think that's such a good reminder, because if things are hard and ugly, which surround a lot of witch hunting situations, and you hold onto that strand of humanity, it's the lifeline. It can pull everyone through to the other side less harmed. Working together, finding the common ground, healing through something together instead of divided would be great.
[00:47:43] Alyssa Conary: Absolutely. Yeah. To think more about what you have in common than what might be different. That I think that loss of humanity is, and you see it in all kinds of discrimination and singling out of people. So it's just important to not forget that we need to take care of each other. That is just like something that is just gets so lost today is there's just no concept of I think the the sort of importance of taking care of other people is just like completely lost in our political discourse today. Yeah. It's all about seeing the humanity of others for sure.
[00:48:24] Josh Hutchinson: Right now there's a lack of a collective, a feeling of that our society is a collective
[00:48:33] Alyssa Conary: a
[00:48:34] Josh Hutchinson: society. Yes. It's more I am out for me. Yeah, and you're out for you and yeah.
And then it's easy if I have a problem to go blame it on somebody else. I don't want to take responsibility. Like the case you mentioned earlier where with the nurse and the baby died, because she had it out in the cold, if that's the way it went down. It's the same kind of thing today where something bad happens and you weren't prepared for it and instead of saying, "how could I have prepared for this?" You say, "who's responsible?"
[00:49:16] Alyssa Conary: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's just that loss of the idea of actually being responsible for the people around you.
[00:49:25] Josh Hutchinson: We talked to economist Boris Gershman about what can be done about witch trials, and he was talking about how having a social safety net is important, because people are less likely to go out looking for who to blame if they've got some kind of backup, insurance. And I've heard that the ending of the early modern witch hunts, it coincided with a lot of institutionalization, but it also coincided with the advent of insurance.
[00:50:00] Alyssa Conary: I think that's valid. Absolutely. When people are without any sort of help or any sense that things are gonna get better or that they can be better, absolutely the tendency for human beings is to lash out and blame someone. But yeah, no, I think there's absolutely something to that makes sense.
[00:50:20] Josh Hutchinson: To change the subject a little bit, the question that just came to me was, had to do with Matthew Hopkins of England, the infamous witchfinder general that he called himself.
[00:50:36] Alyssa Conary: Okay.
[00:50:37] Josh Hutchinson: He wrote his book, A Discovery of Witches. And in that book he talks about his methods that he used and those included things like watching people to see if their familiars came to feed. Were any of those techniques employed in the Massachusetts Witch Trials?
[00:50:57] Alyssa Conary: Yes, Margaret Jones was watched, and that was, it's funny, because it was, that's around the same time that's happening in England. So they are reading and hearing about Matthew Hopkins and that's evidence that they're using some of the same tactics here. So that's great evidence of the sort of back and forth that's happening between England and New England at the time. She was watched while she was in jail and I mean I, it could be seen as a form of torture, really. It's Matthew Hopkins. Wow. That whole thing was horrifying. Again, Paul Moyer's book, which why can't I think of the title?
[00:51:36] Josh Hutchinson: Detestable and Wicked Arts.
[00:51:38] Alyssa Conary: That's it. Yes. I love it. I've read it twice.
He actually does, he makes that argument that, it's not a coincidence that this all starts up in New England around, 47, 48. That they are, hearing about what he's doing and going for it. And I think that makes a lot of sense.
[00:51:56] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I
[00:51:57] Alyssa Conary: But as far as
his methods go, I think Margaret Jones is the only one that I can think of specifically that we'd know one of his tactics was used.
[00:52:05] Josh Hutchinson: okay. Yeah. I think that people have this vision of New England as really being this independent entity, but it's obviously, it was very close with England, even though not geographically. You talked about the flow of information going back and
[00:52:26] Alyssa Conary: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, they're, they're English. These are English people living across the Atlantic Ocean, but they're still English. And there is this back and forth, around the time of the English Civil Wars and you have people going back to England to fight for Cromwell.
And you even have Hugh Peters who's one of the first Salem Reverends who goes back and he becomes, he's executed. He is one of the regicides who's executed for being a conspirator in the death of Charles I so there's absolutely. And there has been some written about this. I feel like there, it's not a ton, but I feel it's an area that's probably rich for a lot more research. But you do see these events in history that really remind you that these are English people living in New England.
[00:53:17] Josh Hutchinson: It is interesting, like you said, when these witch trials start in New England, because in Connecticut you have Alice Young in 1647, and that's Matthew Hopkins time right there.
[00:53:32] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, it's right there. It's something that I actually wondered about years ago and was like, I wonder if that's a thing and that, Moyer's book comes out and he just really lays it all out, like in a way that is just it's so obvious, that and it's crazy that no one had ever, really explicitly stated that before. But that's another book that I highly recommend if you're interested in this, because it's just phenomenal.
[00:53:56] Josh Hutchinson: Another great book on that Malcolm Gaskill's The Ruin of All Witches
[00:54:02] Alyssa Conary: Yep.
[00:54:02] Josh Hutchinson: And,
um,
[00:54:04] Alyssa Conary: that book.
[00:54:05] Josh Hutchinson: He also talks about the other factor in New England's settled first in 1620 and then Salem's founded in 1626. And there's people there for a couple decades before you start to see these trials. And I thought that his explanation of it takes a lot of like neighborhood friction basically building up these tensions and suspicions build up over the years.
[00:54:36] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. They don't have beefs with anyone, yet. It's, everyone's just gotten here, so it takes some time. For sure. That's a, an absolutely spot on observation. I love that book. That book is just, talk about humanizing people from the past. He really just makes it feel so immediate. That's my favorite thing. Malcolm Gaskill is not only is he this, it's gonna become like a Malcolm Gaskill lovefest. Not only is he a phenomenal torian, but he is such an incredible writer. That book, like if you wanna get if you wanna feel close to the people that this happened to. That's the book to read for sure.
Either that or Marilynne Roach, Six Women of Salem is the same sort of deal. That book just makes you feel like really another example of a great historian and a fantastic writer. Those two just really make you feel close to those victims, for sure.
[00:55:28] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's like reading a novel or a almost a memoir. It's so personal and,
[00:55:36] Alyssa Conary: it's,
[00:55:37] Josh Hutchinson: And Malcolm Gaskill and Marilynne Roach, both just the details that they put in there. It makes it just seem so real, like you're watching it unfold.
[00:55:49] Alyssa Conary: Yeah, it is. It's almost like watching a movie.
[00:55:52] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, it's, those books are so good.
[00:55:56] Alyssa Conary: Yeah. They're great. I.
[00:55:58] Sarah Jack: What do you think, Josh? What else should we extract?
[00:56:01] Josh Hutchinson: We haven't talked about Alice Lake. Do you have
[00:56:06] Alyssa Conary: Alice. Yeah.
[00:56:07] Josh Hutchinson: Lake?
[00:56:09] Alyssa Conary: I, she is so fascinating to me. I know I say that about everyone 'cause they're all fascinating. But Alice Lake. Wow. I try, I have tried so hard to find more information about her and I cannot find a darn thing, let me tell you. And that's probably actually something that I'll continue looking for in the future, because I just need to know more about Alice Lake.
[00:56:34] Josh Hutchinson: Yes.
[00:56:34] Alyssa Conary: So yeah, just to talk about so the only evidence we have for what happened to Alice Lake is Hale. It's just his explanation of her being executed for witchcraft. Okay, so Alice Lake, she's from Dorchester and she's tried and executed, we think a about 1651.
What Hale says is, okay, so on the day of her execution she's visited by Reverend William Thompson of Braintree, who is trying to convince her to repent her sins. And she denied she was guilty of witchcraft. She said, I'm innocent, but and this is, this part is so sad. She said, I'm innocent, but I deserve to die basically for my past sins. And she said, and I have her quote here from Hale. "She explained that she had when a single woman played the harlot and being with child used means to destroy the fruit of her body to conceal her sin and shape." So basically she had an abortion, and she said, "I deserve to die because I had an abortion."
And I just, that is just so poignantly sad to me. She saw herself as actually she believed that she was a murderer. And it just makes you think a lot about how these different, like women's issues and these events that happen in women's lives, like how those interplayed with the belief in witchcraft.
And actually infanticide is something that you see a lot that coincides with witchcraft accusations. And there's also suspicions of infanticide or maybe actual infanticide. Parsons is a good example of that as well. So it's just more of that issue of like women and witchcraft.
Like I feel like there's just so much more there to look into and examine. And Alice Lake, it's funny because we actually know her children end up in Rhode Island with their father. And so it's just, it is crazy that we like know what happens to them, but we know so little about her life, like almost nothing.
There was one more bit of information about her and it was a letter to Increase Mather from his brother. Nathaniel told Increase, he heard Alice Lake was lured by the devil when he appeared to her in the likeness and acting the part of a child of hers than lately dead on whom her heart was much sad.
So there you go. There's another just devastating event in a woman's life that could in some way be tied to an accusation of witchcraft. It's just really sad. It's you think about all the pain and then on top of that, then she is executed for witchcraft. It's just awful, and she thinks she deserves it.
So yeah, Alice Lake is someone to me who is just especially fascinating and I really wish I could find out more about her.
[00:59:16] Josh Hutchinson: It reminded me of some other stories of women who decide that having an accusation brought against them means that they've done something else wrong other than, they know that they're not witches, but they look what other sin did I commit that this is
[00:59:38] Alyssa Conary: Right.
[00:59:39] Josh Hutchinson: to me?
Yeah.
[00:59:40] Alyssa Conary: Exactly. Yeah. That's,
[00:59:43] Sarah Jack: And in modern politics, there are some
[00:59:46] Alyssa Conary: Yeah.
[00:59:48] Sarah Jack: men politicians who would believe that, because they said that when we were, when we were
[00:59:54] Alyssa Conary: that for sure. Hmm.
[00:59:54] Sarah Jack: for the exoneration of the Connecticut victims, there were some politicians that were highly concerned that we did not touch what other moral infractions, these culprits would've participated in, that we only acknowledge the compact with the devil because surely they were bad people already.
[01:00:17] Alyssa Conary: There must be something else. Yeah. That's scary. And then when you talk about lessons you can learn, it feels like it's right. It really does sometimes feel like we're ripe for something like this to happen, and I hope I'm wrong. I really do. I hope it doesn't go that far.
[01:00:33] Sarah Jack: It's
[01:00:33] Alyssa Conary: and I know it is happening in other places for sure.
It, I just feel like
[01:00:39] Sarah Jack: It's gonna come down to the people standing up.
But it's that whole concept of speaking up for those that aren't in the room. That's what's gonna stop it. There, there was this one attack in Papua New Guinea where a brave son pulled his mother off of the fire who was being burned for witchcraft belief. And she was harmed and she, she is suffering from what she went through, but he was brave and saved her life. And those are the types of actions that people will have to keep stepping up and doing, because it is possible for sanctioned witch trials to happen again. It, there's,
[01:01:27] Alyssa Conary: yeah. Oh 100%. Yeah, it could happen for sure. It could absolutely happen. And I spend so much time these days like just looking at that rhyming, like I was talking about, that rhyming between history and being pretty freaked out by it, honestly.
It's just interesting too that we've been saying this whole time that all this stuff about women is happening, again, and it's just all feels so familiar. Really does.
[01:01:57] Sarah Jack: And now Mary Bingham is back for Minute with Mary.

[01:02:08] Mary Bingham: Sarah Jack recently asked the listeners a vital question in the past episode of this podcast, Ending Sorcery Related Violence with Miranda Forsyth, as part of the End Witch-Hunt News segment. Sarah's question, is your family precious? My answer. You bet. Sarah was referring not only to each of our nuclear families, she also challenged me as a listener to place myself in families where witchcraft accusations destroyed that tight family unit.
These accusations where the wrongful accused were murdered, caused harmful disruption and displacement, which not only sadly affected one generation, but many to follow. . This was the case of four year old Dorothy Good in 1692, whose story was so eloquently told in the episode of this podcast, Rachel Chris Christ-Doane on the Salem Witch Museum and the life of Dorothy Good.
This was also the case for Kepari Leniata's six year old daughter who was viciously attacked for supposedly bewitching her friend who became seriously ill and died. As was the belief in 1692 when Dorothy Good's mother, Sarah was hanged for witchcraft, some still believed that witchcraft or sorcery, as it is known in Kepari's home country of Papua New Guinea, is passed down from mother to daughter.
You might remember that Kepari was brutally murdered for the false accusation of sorcery herself when her daughter was only eight months old, leaving behind not only this precious infant, but a son and a husband as well. This family unit was smashed into pieces.
Her daughter's vicious attack happened in 2017. However, there was hope when activists Ruth Kissam and Anton Lutz stepped in and saved the girl's life. Ruth welcomed her into her home and family. Ruth's brothers and nephews took such good care that she was able to find a new safety net. Ruth's family became her own.
For more information on Kepari's story, please read my two articles regarding her case and that of her daughter on medium.com, "Kepari Leniata" and "Kepari Leniata: Her Legacy Lives On." Please listen to the two podcast episodes with Miranda Forsyth and Rachel Christ-Doane. Place yourself in these situations. Always stay tuned to listen to Sarah's End Witch Hunt News for current global News as to how communities and organizations fight daily to stop Deadly Witch Hunts. Then visit endwitchhunts.org to see how you can help to save a life. Thank you.

[01:05:11] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:05:14] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

[01:05:24] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a Nonprofit 501(c)(3) Weekly News Update.
So what exactly is this History Camp Boston that you heard about in Alyssa Conary's episode? It starts with The Pursuit of History, a nonprofit organization. They engage adults in conversation about history by connecting them with historic sites in their communities and across the country through innovative in-person and online programming.
Their in-person annual events include History Camp Boston, Pursuit of History Weekends, and the weekly live, online, in-depth History Camp Discussions with noted historians and authors. History Camp Boston 2023 is about to become history, so don't miss it. It's in Boston, August 11th through the 13th, and they offer a scholarship for a free day for students for the August 12th date. See our show notes for the link. Get there.
Every week, Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast brings both the history of the past witch trials and news and education about the current global effort of ending modern witch Hunts. Would you be surprised to hear that the United States is engaged in global development partnerships that can affect witch-hunt violence? In 2023, the United States has now kicked off a 10 year long-term initiative that will impact witch-hunt violence. The US Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability is a long-term initiative to redefine how the United States prevents violence and advances stability in areas vulnerable to conflict.
As you have learned from our academic, economist, and activist interviews and suggested books and other research reading, addressing witchcraft-related violence begins with offering solutions for communities that may reduce gender violence and offer stability for the vulnerable.
The countries and communities targeted in this strategy are Coastal West Africa, Haiti, Libya, Mozambique, and Papua New Guinea.
Quote, "these plans represent a meaningful, long-term commitment by the United States to build the political and economic resilience of partner societies by making strategic investments in prevention to mitigate the underlying vulnerabilities that can lead to conflict and violence and are critical to achieving lasting peace." -- President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. March 24th, 2023.
Please read about this initiative now. Click the link in our show notes to see the USAID pamphlet on this initiative. Have you heard of the US Government Agency, USAID? The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, is, quote, "the world's premier international development agency and a catalytic actor driving development results. USAID's work advances US national security and economic prosperity, demonstrates American generosity, and promotes a path to recipient self-reliance and resilience." The USAID receives its funding from Congress. Thank you for being a part of the Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast community. We appreciate your listening and support.
Keep sharing our episodes with your friends, have conversations with them about what you are learning and how you want to jump in and end Witch hunts with your particular abilities influence a network. Community development that works to end witch hunts is an ongoing long-term collective effort for all of us to participate in.
You can learn by visiting our websites and the websites listed in our show notes for more information about country specific advocacy groups and development plans in motion across the globe. Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. And now that it's back to school pre-game time, be sure to share a link with your teacher friends. To support us, make a tax-deductible donation, purchase books from our bookshop, or merch from our Zazzle shop. Have you considered supporting the production of the podcast by joining us as a super listener? You can be a super listener by committing to as little as $3 a month, but don't stop there if you are really excited about our programming, go ahead and add a zero to that three. Your super listener donation is tax-deductible. Thank you for being a part of our work.

[01:09:13] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[01:09:15] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:09:17] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:09:21] Sarah Jack: Please join us next week.
[01:09:23] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:09:26] Sarah Jack: Visit us this week at thoushaltnotsuffer.Com.
[01:09:29] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[01:09:32] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts.
[01:09:35] Josh Hutchinson: Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[01:09:38] Sarah Jack: Please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening.
[01:09:43] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

August 3, 2023

Rachel Christ-Doane on the Salem Witch Museum and the Life of Dorothy Good

The Untold Story of Dorothy Good, by Rachel Christ Doane

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Show Notes

Learn about the latter life of Salem witch trial victim Dorothy Good and Discover what the Salem Witch Museum is all about as we chat with Rachel Christ-Doane, director of education at the Salem Witch Museum.

Rachel discusses the history of the museum and the story of the building, the exceptional online educational programming that is available and she explains what a tour of the museum is like. You even get to hear a little about the tourism of the iconic city of Salem, aka Witch City. Next Rachel discusses her recent research project that has brought shocking details to light of what life became for Dorothy Good, the four year old child that was tried for witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials. During our advocacy talk we reflect on the plight of people in need in early modern New England and how we stop hunting witches.

Links

www.salemwitchmuseum.com

Podcast Episode “Leo Igwe on the Deadly Witch-Hunts of the 21st Century”

Podcast Episode “Witchcraft Accusations in Nigeria with Dr. Leo Igwe”

Salem Witch Museum Presentation by Dr. Leo Igwe Advocacy For Alleged Witches

Documentary:”Why Witch Hunts Are Not Just A Dark Chapter From the Past”

The International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Other Harmful Practices

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Transcript

[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:25] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:27] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we talk to Rachel Christ-Doane, director of education for the Salem Witch Museum, about the museum, Salem, and the tragic life of Dorothy Good, youngest victim of the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:00:40] Sarah Jack: This is such a special episode. We are talking to the Salem Witch Museum in this episode. If there is an extended tour, this might be what it's like. You're gonna learn so much about the Salem Witch Museum history, their robust educational programming, and the future of the museum.
[00:01:01] Josh Hutchinson: We'll get the behind the scenes of the Salem Witch Museum. Rachel has done a lot for the museum. She does excellent research and has put together a number of very special educational opportunities and offerings. You can find many of them on the website, salemwitchmuseum.com. Others you can experience in the museum or purchase in the gift shop, such as their descendant packets of information on the victims of the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:01:41] Sarah Jack: And those packets were researched personally by Rachel and Jill Christiansen.
[00:01:47] Josh Hutchinson: They do thorough research putting together biographies of each of those individuals who were involved in the trials, and as Rachel says, coming up in the episode, it's an extended project. They're always coming out with new packets.
[00:02:08] Sarah Jack: I visited the Salem Witch Museum for the first time in May.
[00:02:12] Josh Hutchinson: How was your experience there, Sarah?
[00:02:15] Sarah Jack: It was really exciting. I actually enjoyed seeing the tourists' excitement as they walked in. And it's just you're anticipating what is it you're gonna learn? What is it you're gonna see? And the staff is so welcoming.
[00:02:36] Josh Hutchinson: I was actually there at the same time you know what that experience was like. I've been to Salem several times, but that was my first time going in the museum and seeing their highly engaging presentation about the history of the Salem Witch Trials. And the tour guide was very knowledgeable. After the initial presentation, you'll be guided into another room where you'll see exhibits on the history of witch trials and the image of the witch over time, and then you'll be taken to a wall with a timeline of witch hunts over several centuries.
[00:03:28] Sarah Jack: You are left wanting more, and that is why their virtual programming is so great. You can stay in touch and keep learning.
Our visit was extra special, because we were accompanied by Dr. Leo Igwe, director of Advocacy for Alleged Witches, and that same day he did a virtual presentation for the Salem Witch Museum, which you can watch, and we have the link in our show notes.
That really was special that we got to do that with him.
[00:04:02] Josh Hutchinson: You'll remember Dr. Leo Igwe from two of our previous episodes, and we'll have links to those in the show notes.
We're also going to learn about the history of the Salem Witch Museum's iconic building.
[00:04:16] Sarah Jack: What is dark tourism? Is Salem tourism and its attractions dark tourism?
[00:04:21] Josh Hutchinson: We're gonna get an introduction to young Dorothy Good, who was four years old when she was arrested in the trials. We'll learn what happened to her and her family.
[00:04:35] Sarah Jack: Rachel has uncovered new details of Dorothy's life after the trials.
[00:04:41] Josh Hutchinson: We'll learn where she went and how she lived.
[00:04:46] Sarah Jack: You will also find out a little bit about Ann Dolliver and how some of her adult experiences mirrored what Dorothy and other women in those situations suffered through.
Welcome Rachel Christ-Doane, the director of education at the Salem Witch Museum. She holds a bachelor's in history from Clark University and a master's in history and museum studies from Tufts University. Today she's going to introduce us to the educational programming the Salem Witch Museum offers and introduce us to the recently discovered details of the life of Dorothy Good, Salem's youngest witch trial victim.
So we're gonna start with talking about the museum first. Can you tell us when it was founded?
[00:05:31] Rachel Christ-Doane: The Salem Witch Museum was founded in 1972, so last year was our 50th anniversary.
[00:05:39] Josh Hutchinson: Wow, that's a big one.
[00:05:41] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, it was very exciting. It was a lot of fun. We had a private party, but various kind of Salem officials came, and then quite a few people who were involved in actually creating the museum were here, which was really neat to meet them, because our museum's a very kind of unusual format. It's presentation-based, and especially for the seventies, that was a very unusual way to present historical information. So it was really neat hearing about what the process was like creating it and how it's endured and remained, with kind of minimal changes over the years. That's really it. It was like a series of happy accidents led to this place, which is very neat.
[00:06:24] Josh Hutchinson: We had a great time there in May, and we love the building that you're in. What can you tell us about that?
[00:06:32] Rachel Christ-Doane: We are very fortunate to have it, but it's also one of our kind of greatest obstacles. So it's a really neat historic building. It was built in mid 19th century, and it was constructed as a church. So it was originally constructed for the East Church congregation of Salem that eventually became known as the Second Unitarian Church, and it served as a church until about the like 1940s, quite, quite a long time. And then the congregation disbanded and was absorbed into other local churches. The building was then an antique car museum for a while. It was an auto and Americana museum, which the pictures from that museum were really wild, seeing these old timey cars in here. And then there was actually a really serious internal fire that destroyed a significant portion of the inside, the internal portion of the museum. So the car museum was gone, and the Salem Witch Museum was founded a couple years later.
[00:07:31] Sarah Jack: It's very fortunate that they didn't just level it and leave, start from scratch, because the image is such a iconic piece now.
[00:07:42] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, that's actually the second fire in the museum's history that we know of. We're actually internally not sure that some say there were three fires. There were definitely two. There was another one in the early 20th century, which damaged the towers. So we have those two towers in front of the museum and they actually used to be much taller, and the fire weakened one of the towers, so they both had to be taken down, reduced to their present size. So hopefully that's it for fires with the building.
[00:08:13] Josh Hutchinson: And for our listeners who haven't been able to join you there yet, what is the presentation like? What's a tour consist of at the museum?
[00:08:25] Rachel Christ-Doane: So we're a two-part presentation. So the first part, you go into a large darkened auditorium, which was actually where kind of the main congregational space when this building was a church. And you see an audiovisual presentation about the Salem Witch Trials. So it's about 20 minutes long. Large life-sized dioramas that tell you the story of the Salem Witch Trials from the very beginning to the very end, an overview of the event. It is theatrical. It's intended to be entertaining, engaging, I should say, but it is a history presentation at its core. And then our visitors go into a second exhibit, which was added in 1999. It's called Witches: Evolving Perceptions, and that's about the evolving image of the witch, the European witch trials, modern day witchcraft. And then we talk a little bit about the meaning of the word witch-hunt and why we should be learning about these events.
[00:09:24] Sarah Jack: Your social media is really strong, and you're always enticing us into the programs that you're offering. Do you wanna tell us about what programs are available and how people can experience those?
[00:09:38] Rachel Christ-Doane: One of the silver linings of the pandemic we can say is we really surged into kind of the virtual stratosphere. So one of the resources we've been offering in the past couple of years are these virtual programs, which are honestly really fun. They're maybe my favorite part of the job. Myself and our assistant education director, Jill Christiansen, work on these programs from year to year.
So we typically offer three to four programs a year, sometimes more, sometimes less. And they cover just a variety of topics from researching the Salem Witch Trials and how historians make mistakes in the research process, we did an event about that this year, to contemporary witch hunts, such as those that are going on in Africa, which we posted a guest lecture. Dr. Igwe was here this year. We do events about women's history. We did an event about race and the Salem Witch Trials a few years ago, where we talked about how contemporary conceptions of race informed the way the trials or impacted the way the trials took place and then also how ideas about race have informed the narrative of the witch trials over time. So it's a variety of different events.
We create in-house a lot of lectures, which is really fun for us. And then we also bring in guest speakers. And that's just been a way for us to widen our audience and get our information out to people who can't necessarily come visit us in person or who want to visit us in person but haven't had an opportunity yet.
[00:11:11] Sarah Jack: I just appreciate how broad and deep and enriching the program topics that you offer, and as an out of state descendant, I gleaned a lot of history and information from attending, last May, I attended the panel that you did with several of the Salem authors and that was probably my introduction to the museum, actually. And then getting to visit this May, a year later. But I really appreciate when I see that a program is gonna be happening, it's not, "oh, it's more of the same thing." It's always something that is gonna be really important for people to get to experience. So thanks for doing that.
[00:11:54] Rachel Christ-Doane: Thank you. That's always really good to hear. And that's the kind of best part about this subject is it's so rich, there's so many different angles you can come into talking about the history of witchcraft. I don't think we'll ever run out of topics for these events.
[00:12:11] Josh Hutchinson: And you have another event coming up that looks very intriguing.
[00:12:16] Rachel Christ-Doane: It's July 20th. We are offering an event called Witch Trials and Antisemitism: a Surprisingly Tangled History. So this is an event that I personally have really wanted to do for several years now. So basically we're gonna very broadly be discussing the kind of overlap in connections between the treatment of Jews in European history and witches. And essentially the kind of very short version is a lot of the stories that are used to demonize Jewish individuals in the medieval period, stories about how Jews eat children and kill babies and drink blood, things that are, of course, 100% incorrect. These are just stories used to demonize others.
Those same stories end up getting recycled and used again during the witch trials period. But instead of being used against Jews, they're used against witches. So we're gonna really dive into that overlapping history, and we felt that this was a particularly important topic to talk about, because there has been such a surge in antisemitism over the past few years, and a lot of these same stories are coming up again.
There's this secret conspiracy of people who are hiding in plain sight, and they're eating children, and it's you hear a lot of rhetoric today that could have been copied and pasted from 1200 or 1500, so we felt like this was a really important topic to really dive into.
And it's a little bit outside of our comfort zone, cuz we're really diving into the medieval period. But we've put a lot of time and effort into this research, and we've had some really wonderful outside sources consulting with us for this. So I think it's gonna be a really great program.
[00:13:59] Sarah Jack: That's wonderful. Would you like to tell us how you got started at the museum?
[00:14:05] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, I ended up here by accident. I always say. It was a fortuitous journey. So when I was in the midst of my undergrad career, I was a history major, and I was interested in women's history, and I didn't quite know how I was going to ever make money out of, find a profession that would actually pay me to do that kind of history.
I applied to a bunch of different museums across Massachusetts, thinking it would be good to just get some experience in a museum space. And I applied at the Salem Witch Museum, and they had a opening position. So I worked here on the floor as just a general staff member, and I just fell in love with Salem and with this history. And I, you know, have have been here ever since. That was 2015. So I ended up finishing out my undergraduate career really focusing on witchcraft history. And then when I graduated, I came back to the museum and was able to pursue a master's degree while working here. And I've been the director of education since about 2018.
So it's been a really fun journey and now I always joke that I'm so specialized in this now I can't leave. Not that I would ever want to, this is definitely a job like no other, which is really special.
[00:15:24] Josh Hutchinson: We're so glad that you're there. You're doing wonderful work with all these programming and the educational offerings that you have. I know summer's a busy season for you, but what is life like there in October?
[00:15:41] Rachel Christ-Doane: So I've been working here for about eight years now, and even in just that time, October has become steadily more and more difficult to manage in some ways as time has gone on. So for those who might be listening who don't know, October is by far the busiest time of year for Salem. The city sponsors an event called Haunted Happenings. It's a fall festival that goes on for the entire month of October. And it was actually envisioned as, it was created as, a one weekend event in 1982. It was just supposed to be two days. And nobody could have foreseen how popular this festival would become.
There's all kinds of things happening throughout the city throughout that time. The different businesses do special events and things like that. There's tours, there's concerts. It's a really fun time to be here. But Salem is actually quite a small city. We were never meant to be hosting a festival that's this popular.
So even in the past few years since the pandemic, last year, we had the busiest year on record. We had over a million people come in the month of October, which was just unbelievably crazy to a point where the city's infrastructure simply can't handle it. Restrooms were breaking all over the city, like the plumbing of Salem couldn't physically handle it. It's a testament to how much people love Halloween and the popularity of that particular fall holiday, which people now very strongly associate with Salem. So it's a blessing and a curse.
It's really fun to work here in October to a degree. You get to meet people from all over the world who are in full-on Halloween costumes for the entire month of October, who are just so happy and excited to be here, so that's really fun. But at the same time it's also very demanding, and people tend to get a little frustrated trying to get in and out of Salem and are maybe not so nice to the service workers while they're here. So this is a friendly reminder to always be nice to service workers wherever you go, because it's people just trying their best to make your visit fun.
So it's good, and it's stressful. And it's also what allows Salem to thrive as a community, because the revenue that's generated in October is what keeps the city going throughout the winter. So again, it's a blessing and a curse all in one.
[00:18:12] Sarah Jack: And is there any other aspects of the tourism that you might like to speak to as far as the city or your museum?
[00:18:21] Rachel Christ-Doane: So I always say that Salem is a very unique example of tourism. We're a case of what would be called dark tourism. Contemporary tourists traveling to a site associated with dark or tragic history. So Salem is this very kind of unique, strange place because when most people think of the word witch today, they don't necessarily think of the historic criminal offense of witchcraft.
Of course, they know witch trials happened here and usually are aware that resulted in the deaths of innocent people. But for most people, witches are a pop culture phenomena. They're Hocus Pocus and Harry Potter and Wicked and Charmed and all of these kind of beloved cultural figures we know today.
So that makes tourism here very tricky, because what draws people here is not necessarily a colonial history lesson. It's this kind of deeper story of the supernatural and magic and the occult and things like that. Which I always say is not a bad thing. It's very tempting to condemn the contemporary tourism industry here and say, "this is so inappropriate, none of it should happen. Why would the city feed into this at all?" And I always say, it's not a bad thing that people have this in mind. You can't criticize people, because that's just what our culture is today. The important thing to do is once they're here and they're excited about being here, is to then use it as an opportunity to educate them about the importance of this history and what really happened and what a witch really was in 1692.
And you know, I won't flatter myself to say that every person leaves our museum, for example, with this kind of more enlightened view of the witch, but we certainly hope that many of our visitors do. And again, it's this kind of really unique opportunity to educate that most historical sites only dream about. So it's an interesting place, Salem.
[00:20:26] Josh Hutchinson: And what are some of the historical points of interest that are near the museum?
[00:20:33] Rachel Christ-Doane: There's lots of stuff nearby the museum, lots of places with direct connections to the witch trials and also just to the broader history of Salem. Salem is an embarrassment of riches when we talk about the history here, beyond the witch trials.
But in terms of our witch history, we're very close to several important sites. The site where the Salem Jail stood is right around the corner from our building. The site where the courthouse was and the meeting house. Those are all very near where we are. And when you guys were here, we obviously, we did a little walking tour and showed you the sites. And we do have a witch trials online sites tour on our website, where you can see different sites in Salem and across Essex County that have these connections.
So even if a marker isn't there today, we will show you the approximate location and the history of that site. That's our assistant education director's baby. That's a project she will work on for the rest of her life. So it's an ever expanding resource. But then we also have the Witch Trials Memorial that's very close to us.
So that memorial was actually in part created by our museum. We were very involved in its creation. Our director at the time and education director were extremely involved in organizing the tercentenary and the creation of the Witch Trials Memorial. And we actually have an entire virtual lecture about the history of the memorial, if anybody is interested in it, but that site is a really special place. It's right next to the Old Buring Point Cemetery, which is one of the oldest cemeteries in America, and several of the judges from the witch trials are buried there. Yeah, if anybody's ever visiting Salem, I always recommend going to the memorial, because it's really, it's a good place to reflect on what really happened here and the real people who were involved.
[00:22:25] Sarah Jack: Yes. Thank you so much for that walking tour. It was really memorable to be able to do that with you. And we had Dr. Igwe with us, and I remember when we were at the memorial, when we walked up and he saw the quotes there from some of the victims, how much that struck him, because he hears those words now too many times where he's working. So thank you for giving us that extra little history lesson and experience when we visited.
What is next for the Salem Witch Museum?
[00:22:59] Rachel Christ-Doane: It's kind of a two-part answer. So we're in the midst of the series of very large updates, interpretive updates. This is something we've been working on for many years now. The kind of first leg of this project was updating our second exhibit, Witches: Evolving Perceptions. So when I say updating, the kind of most significant element of this is removing some dated scholarship.
So scholarship, as we know, changes all the time. We learn more and more all the time about this history and kind of particularly in regards to witchcraft history. This field is still relatively new. It doesn't become a very serious academic discipline until the mid 20th century. So a lot of research has been produced since the creation of our museum and the creation of these exhibits.
So updating the interpretation, removing some dated content, such as when that exhibit, second exhibit was created. It was widely believed that a million people were executed during the European witch trials. Now, we now know that that's actually impossible given the population of Europe and the effects of the Black Plague. And historians have come up with the more reasonable estimate that it's closer probably to about 45,000 people on the lower end of the spectrum. Getting rid of information like that, adding new information just in response to our audience and what we see people interested in learning about, adding some new artifacts back there has been a big push in recent years.
We have a first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in our section where we talk about the evolving image of the witch. We do actually have a copy of the book, The Malleus Maleficarum, which was an incredibly important text during the European witch trials. It was a manual for witch hunters. We have a copy of that and several other texts related to demonology in our collection that are not yet on display, but are hopefully going on display in the next few years.
And then the next big saga or the next chapter is updating our main presentation and doing the same thing, removing points of dated scholarship. So that presentation was created in 1972, and since 1972, we've learned a lot about the trials. We've learned a lot about the kind of story of events. So the kind of cause and effect at the beginning of the trials, particularly the role of Tituba, who's an enslaved woman who's one of the first accused. That's something we've learned a lot about and had to unlearn some narratives since 1972. Things like knowing the location of the hangings, knowing it's not Gallows Hill, it's Proctor's Ledge, these are all relatively recent elements of the scholarly conversation. So all this to say, this is the next big project.
But the project has been going on for many years now, and it's been a series of really unfortunate events. The first time we started working on this, the front of the building started to separate from the building. It started to sag off. So that was a million dollar project just to fix the structure of the building.
And that's why I say our building is a blessing and a curse, because maintenance to a 19th century building is very difficult. And then the second time we had pulled the plug on this, it was January of 2020 and a couple months later, the entire country shut down. So we are now in round three.
I swear if there are any more destructive, life-altering events, we're gonna have to burn a sage bonfire or something, cuz it's feeling like this project is a little cursed. But anyway that's the next big thing on our horizon is just finishing finally that big project so that we can move on and work on building additional exhibits and adding additional content and things like that.
[00:26:44] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for sharing so much about the museum. We absolutely enjoyed ourselves there and your programming. And you also are heavily involved in research, and you've done some very incredible research into Dorothy Good, one of your subjects. And could you introduce Dorothy to the audience?
[00:27:10] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah. So Dorothy is arguably one of the saddest stories from the Salem Witch Trials. So she is the daughter of Sarah Good, who's one of the first people accused. She is executed during the trials, and Dorothy is four years old, so she is accused of witchcraft not long after her mother. She is arrested and placed in prison, and she remains in jail for about eight months, seven or eight months. So she's not released from prison until December of 1692. And she is so traumatized by her experience that she is never able to recover. Her mother dies. Her infant sister, who accompanies her mother to jail, because she's too young to be separated from her mother, also dies in jail. And she's four years old, shackled in a prison cell. So the emotional trauma she carried with her through the rest of her life is just, it's very hard for us to really even imagine today.
[00:28:15] Sarah Jack: I was wondering what, were there other types of situations where they would have imprisoned and shackled a child of that age during that time?
[00:28:25] Rachel Christ-Doane: Maybe. It's very hard to envision. There are cases of extreme poverty where, they wouldn't necessarily, and this is also a little bit later after 1692, you wouldn't necessarily be arrested and shackled, but you might be sent to a poor house. But yeah, it's very difficult to envision another situation where a child that young would be arrested for a crime. It would have to be a very unusual situation.
[00:28:54] Sarah Jack: It really struck me when you were giving your presentation for History Camp and you talked about what it would've even been like to get her to the prison, that she would've not walked herself there. She would've been brought there, like physically carried, picked up.
[00:29:12] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah. So my research in recent years, the past couple years, has been about her adult life. And I stumbled upon these records in the Salem town selectmen record book that show she kind of, as an adult, bounces around from house to house for most of her adult life, because she's unable to care for herself. So it's this really horrible story about not only the youngest accused witch during the Salem Witch Trials but also the life of a colonial woman who couldn't contribute to society. So if you weren't able to fulfill the role of mother, wife, keeper of the house, society struggled to deal with you.
And honestly, it's, that is true to this day, right? We still have a difficult time dealing with people who can't contribute to society. And Dorothy is, it turns out, a really clear example of that, so I have been working on this research about this story of her adult life for a few years. I published an article in the American Ancestors Magazine this past, I think it was the Spring edition, where I talk about the discovery and what we know now.
And now I'm currently pivoting and trying to work on this as a full book, just really diving into what do these records really tell us about a woman in the 18th century who couldn't function, who's struggling with a mental health issue, whatever that may be in clinical terms? She's not able to care for herself, so what does that mean? So it's really depressing research, but it's really interesting, and it certainly aligns with, I've always been interested in women's history. Turns out women's history is extremely depressing.
[00:31:05] Josh Hutchinson: What does the story mean? What is the importance of this new information about Dorothy for understanding the aftermath of the Salem witch trials?
[00:31:17] Rachel Christ-Doane: Sometimes people are a little shocked when they hear that 20 people are executed and shocked in terms of they think that number should be much higher. And I think that stems from the Salem Witch Trails are just so famous. You hear about them in popular culture so frequently. They're arguably the most famous witchcraft trial in Western history. So they assume that the, quote, unquote, "body count" should be higher or it should have been more brutal or something like that. And this is a reminder of 20 people being executed is a very large amount, number one. We can't discount that, but then we also can't discount the people who lived afterwards were forever altered by this experience. You didn't just go back to your day-to-day life like nothing had happened. So many people were traumatized, would've certainly struggled to live in this community or just live out the rest of their lives. We can only imagine, especially those people who were imprisoned for months and months. So it's kind of a reminder of these events were absolutely devastating to every person involved, not just the executed but the survivors were also forever destroyed by these events.
[00:32:36] Sarah Jack: And in the Good case, prior to the execution of Sarah, their family was already really struggling. Mr. Good wasn't necessarily helping Sarah contribute to society, and now she's gone, but he is still there. So Dorothy still has a father. Did he remarry? Did he take care of Dorothy? What happened?
[00:33:03] Rachel Christ-Doane: So he does remarry. He remarries relatively quickly after the trials. I don't remember the date exactly, it's I'll have to look it up, but it's maybe a year or two later. It's pretty fast, which was not uncommon during the time, especially because he now has this very traumatized four-year-old daughter. He likely needed a partner in the house to help him. He actually submits a request for a reparations payment when the reparations process is happening in the 1700s. And previously, that request for a payment had been all that we knew about Dorothy.
So he says in that payment that he is asking on behalf of his wife who's died, his other child who has died, and then his daughter Dorothy, who was shackled in a prison for months. And he says she is "chargeable, having little or no reason to govern herself." So when you look up the phrase chargeable, it actually means she's expensive. So meaning that her care is difficult, it's taxing on him financially. And then saying with little or no reason to govern herself, we have long inferred that meant she's clearly struggling with some sort of debilitating mental illness as a result of her trauma.
So we know that she lives with her father for quite a few years after the trials and his new wife. However, she in, I think it's around 1708 or so, starts to appear in the care of other people. So he clearly is not capable of taking care of her. And when he actually is awarded his reparation payment in 1711, he directs that payment go to the person who's currently caring for her, which indicates she's not living with him, certainly by that time.
William Good does not come across as a good person in history, and it's always hard to draw those definitive lines about who's a good person and who's not, especially cuz we have such little information about them. But he's not a good provider for Sarah. We know that the couple were destitute, they were forced to beg in the years before 1692.
Then during Sarah's trial or pre-trial examinations, he comes forward, and he says that she's probably a witch. Like he implicates her. And then after the trials are over, he ends up giving up Dorothy into the care of somebody else. We don't know what's going on with him. Maybe he's struggling with his own demons. Maybe he just wasn't capable of providing for a child that was that sick. But he does abandon her ultimately into the care of someone else. And then he disappears. And interestingly, his second wife, whose name is Elizabeth, she actually appears in the Selectmen records as well and seems to be in the care of other people. So I think he abandons both of them. He either dies, and his death is not recorded, which is certainly possible, or he just disappears, and he leaves them both, and he moves away. So either way, not a great ending for William Good.
[00:36:06] Josh Hutchinson: And given the struggles that her family had with poverty and then her own challenges, I'd like to know, was there a system in place to aid people who had needs like that?
[00:36:21] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yes. And that's actually why we know why there are records about Dorothy in the years that follow. So New England's poverty laws are very much mimicking the poverty laws in England. So essentially they're supposed to have an overseer, set of overseers of the poor, people who pay attention to the poor in your area and make sure that they're being cared for.
They do have a requirement about quote, unquote, "deserving poor." So these are people who are legal residents of your town. So that's to say that if somebody wandered into your town who was from Billerica, let's say, wanders into Salem Village. Salem Village would not be legally obligated to provide for that person. They would pass them back to Billerica, because it was Billerica's duty to be the one who's caring for them.
So it's, yes, they did have a system in place to care for them, but it's, they're really trying to pass people off. They try very hard not to have to care for you if they don't have to. And basically the systems that it is in place for many years is people would be put into the care of a local family. So you would live with someone for X amount of time. Usually they're doing it year by year, and the town would pay that family for your care. So they would pay for your clothing, for your food, things like that, and then, a year later, if that family still wanted to take care of you, they would keep you, and there would be a notation about it in the selectman records, or if not, somebody else would take you in, ideally, and the cycle would continue.
So that's how I was able to find Dorothy, is I was looking in the selectman records for somebody else, for Ann Dolliver, who is also accused of witchcraft, and she lived where our museum actually stands today. I was trying to figure out when her death date is, and I knew she was involved in this system of caring for the poor. And in looking for her, I found all these records from selectman, year to year, commenting on the care of Dorothy.
[00:38:28] Sarah Jack: Who ended up taking care of Dorothy?
[00:38:31] Rachel Christ-Doane: So it's a series of people. There's a Putnam who actually cares for her for a little while. It's Benjamin Putnam. Who is in terms of, if you know anything about the witch trials, the Putnam's are the villain family. They're the chief accusers, we can say, Thomas Putnam's family is. But this is a very large family, and there's certainly members of the Putnam families who are not involved in the witch trials or are sympathetic to the victims. So Benjamin is part of the family where his father hadn't been very involved. He hadn't been very involved. His father signed a petition, in fact, in favor of Rebecca Nurse. So they seem to have been sympathetic to the victims.
So he cares for her for a while. He then passes away, and his son Nathaniel takes over her care for a little while. And then she actually disappears and comes back pregnant. So that's, we don't really know what happened, or I'm working on finding out what happens to her, but whether she got pregnant living in Nathaniel's house, whether she left the house, went somewhere else, and returned pregnant is unclear. There is no record indicating who the father of the child is, so it's a big question mark. She and the baby end up living with Nathan for a little while, and then she bounces around from a few different houses.
She ends up in the house of corrections for a little while, which is like a poorhouse. It's places that people who were impoverished, who weren't showing signs of participating in society at all, so who were not helping in the houses they were living in or being quote, unquote, "lazy." Things like that could get you a stay in the house of correction. So she's there for a little while. She ends up getting pregnant a second time and gives birth in Concord, which is very confusing. How and why she ends up in Concord is still very unclear.
And then ultimately she ends up for most of her life, or most of her adult life, in the care of a man named Jonathan Batchelder, who lives in Beverly. He's very interesting, because he actually testified against Sarah Good years before, during the witch trials. He's young at the time. He's a a teenager. But he's one of the people who offers testimony against her. So we can make all kinds of speculations about is he taking care of Dorothy, Sarah's child, out of guilt, out of Christian charity, because he feels remorse for what he did? Whatever the case, he ends up taking care of her and her second child.
And then after Jonathan dies, Dorothy disappears, no idea where she goes. That's, I have some theories about it, but no definitive proof. And we don't know when or where she dies definitively, although I'm probably gonna spend the rest of my life trying to figure it out.
[00:41:20] Josh Hutchinson: One of those men you mentioned in your talk and in the article in American Ancestors was Robert Hutchinson, and he's my ninth great grand uncle. And thought I'd mention that. But his father, Joseph, was one of the ones who accused Sarah Good. So I always wondered, once I learned that Robert had involvement with Dorothy Good, was he making up for something? It's speculation, of course.
[00:41:49] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, that's fascinating. Especially because, so I will confess, I have a negative view of Robert, because Dorothy doesn't seem to wanna stay with him. So there's two or three occasions where she's, there's a record that says she's supposed to go into his care, and then she ends up somewhere else, either in the House of Corrections, or she ends up in Concord giving birth to a child.
She, it seems like there's a couple of attempts for her to stay with him, and she does maybe stay with him for some amount of time, but it's very interesting to me that it doesn't really stick. And we can make a lot of speculations as to why, so I, we all have like fictional narratives of what's going on, and then I kind of wonder if maybe she just didn't like him or didn't like living in his house for some reason. Is something going on there? But that's very interesting. If you find anything else about your relative, let me know.
[00:42:43] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:42:45] Sarah Jack: My speculative narrative on that situation is maybe Mrs. Hutchinson didn't want her there.
[00:42:51] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah. So the kind of darkest narrative, I will confess, is she does get pregnant around one of the times where she's supposed to be living with him. Is he the father of her child? That is total speculation. I have literally no reason to think that other than she's just near him. But so I don't wanna slander the name of Robert Hutchinson, but it's interesting to consider, you know, especially because we have no leads.
Normally in a case of an unwed mother, or I should say regularly in a case of an unwed mother, they would really try to figure out who the father is, because that helped with the financial situation. It was in the town's best interest to have a recorded father, because then they could be financially responsible for the child, as opposed to if no father is named, then now you've got a baby born out of wedlock, so you have to support the mother and the baby.
I have been through the records looking at cases of premarital sex and bastard children, and there's a lot of records of women and their baby daddies, for lack of a better term, that the court would force them to on record say who it was, and Dorothy just does not appear in those records. So that's really interesting. Could they just not get her to say who it was? We don't know. Given her mental state, was she capable of telling them who it was? It's unclear. We don't know how cognitive she is. We don't know how she might not have been a verbal person. It's very kinda shady the way her mental health is described.
So yeah, we can, we can, and I do, make many speculations about it on my own, but in lack of firm evidence, all we can say is there's two babies. One's a boy and one's a girl, and we have no idea who the fathers are.
[00:44:42] Josh Hutchinson: And you mentioned a house of corrections. What was that?
[00:44:49] Rachel Christ-Doane: So it's like a workhouse, poorhouse. So the house of corrections in Salem is actually built as an attachment onto the jail, which is a whole other layer of kind of, a whole other disturbing layer here, because Dorothy is certainly in jail in Salem for some amount of time. I don't think she's there for the majority of her imprisonment. I think she's in Boston. But she was brought there for her initial questioning. She may have been transferred there at some point. Her mother is certainly transferred there before her trial. The fact that Dorothy is then as an adult sent to the house of correction, which is just a building added on to that jail space, that's horrible that we can only imagine how triggering that would be.
So when people who are sent there, there are some lines in the records describing other women who are there, who were set to work like spinning and things like that. So this was a place for people who, again, were not contributing to society. There's some very strong language in the Massachusetts laws that say, if you're idle, if you're slothful, things like that, you will be sent to the house of correction. So yeah, what she's actually doing in there, who can say, but other people who were in that situation were required to like spin wool and things like that.
[00:46:13] Sarah Jack: I was wondering who took care of her children.
[00:46:17] Rachel Christ-Doane: So both children become indentured servants, which was very common for children in that situation. Even if both parents were known, if they were both impoverished parents who couldn't necessarily care for the children, the kids would be sent out to work in other people's homes and be raised there.
So an indentured contract essentially says you are going to be a servant in my home for X amount of years. I believe for boys it's 18 years. For girls it's 21 years. I think I could have that backwards, but I think it's boys 18, girls 21. And in exchange, the master of the house will teach them a set of skills. So they will clothe them, they will bathe them, they will feed them, and they will teach them a trade. So for girls, domestic work, for boys, depended on the trade that person was in. And we'll teach them to read and write. We'll teach them some amount of literacy. So it was, in a way, kind of a good solution.
The idea was a child will be able to leave an indentured contract and have a trade, so be able to support themselves to some degree. So we know that her daughter is indentured to Nathaniel Putnam, and she's there for her set term, and her son, whose name is William, is indentured to Jonathan Batchelder.
And Dorothy actually disappears before Williams' indentured contract is up. So I would assume both kids stay where they're supposed to be for their full contracts. But I haven't been able to find any records of where they might go from there. Maybe they die, maybe they move away and they're just gonna appear in a different town records. They're not in the vital records at all. So that's another thing I'm gonna be hunting down for the rest of my life. I was joking with Marilynne Roach, the historian, that this is gonna deteriorate into me going selectman record to selectman record, town to town. And she laughed, cuz she wrote the Day by Day Chronicle, which took her like 30 years. So who am I to complain?
[00:48:27] Josh Hutchinson: And is it known what trades the children were being trained for?
[00:48:35] Rachel Christ-Doane: So Dorothy, the, girl is being trained as a domestic worker, so to be able to serve in a house. I don't remember off the top of my head what William's trade was. I think it might have been carpentry, but I'll have to look it up. The indentured records for both of them exist. This housewright? And there's no record of him. I have got, so he's living in Beverly at the time. So I have been to Beverly to look through their records to see if there's any indication of him working as a housewright. And nothing yet. Unfortunately, their records are missing a big chunk in the exact time I'm looking for, which that happens. Maybe there was a record of him that just hasn't survived. So we will never know.
[00:49:19] Sarah Jack: Some of the timeline of Dorothy's adult life shows that she was a wanderer. It looks like there's records that show she was warned outta town. What does that mean, warned outta town?
[00:49:31] Rachel Christ-Doane: So warned out of town is essentially somebody who is being forced to leave for one reason or another. So it oftentimes has to do with a woman becoming pregnant. And it has to do with your status as a resident. So again, if you're not considered to be a legal resident of that town and you do something that it is not favorable to the town. For example, Martha Carrier, she and Thomas Carrier are warned out of Andover after the smallpox epidemic in the 1690s. So they don't actually end up leaving, it seems. They're told to go, and it doesn't seem like they do. So it's like a kind of official notice saying you need to go.
Dorothy is warned out. In her case, which is very common, it's after she gets pregnant, there's this notice that says you have to go, we're not taking financial responsibility for you, essentially. In her case, she doesn't, she also doesn't leave. And it seems that she then immediately kind of ends up in the care of Nathaniel Putnam. So my thought is that there's this notice issued and Nathaniel steps in and says, "I will take her, and she will live with me, and that will be the solution to this."
Yeah, it's, it's just kind of part of their system of caring for the poor. It's a really kind of brutal system of care and it's, a lot of it has to do with money, as it does today.
[00:50:54] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's just another layer of this multi-layered tragedy. Just that she gets pregnant, has children, the fathers don't step up, the town won't want to assume the bills, so basically nobody does, except that, fortunately, Nathaniel Putnam does offer to take her in.
[00:51:20] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, but there's, this is just one case of, it's an interesting and really sad window into women's lives, of what happens if nobody stepped up for you. You're just left destitute. And Sarah, her mother is in that position. She's got, she does have a husband, but the husband's pretty useless. She's wandering around the town, she's, she doesn't have anywhere permanent to live, and she's got a four year old and an infant baby in 1692. And her life has deteriorated into just living off of charity.
[00:51:56] Sarah Jack: I just think that it's really gonna be incredible as you're working on your book that you can take, you know, this tale of little Dorothy from the Salem Witch Trials. But these records that are emerging are going to put a lens on the experience of women in the 17th century in these situations. So it's really a beautiful thing. She's gonna be able to teach us more about those experiences, and you're able to give that to the world. So thank you.
[00:52:29] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, and I say that there's a silver lining to this horror. It's, number one, it's, it gives us this really interesting window into the life of impoverished women in the colonial period. There has been some really excellent work about women's lives during this time. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, for example, has written some phenomenal works about being a woman and just your day-to-day life.
But it's so rare to have information about impoverished people, because they don't, they're not showing up in the records, unless they're, they have done something wrong. They're not, they're, the records of their lives don't exist. So having access to that is really incredible.
But I also, I've said a few times this discovery is meaningful, because it also tells us that Sarah Good's line might have continued. So until now, we've thought that it stopped after Dorothy and her sister, who dies, and Dorothy, we just assumed didn't have children, and we now know she has both a son and a daughter. You know, I've yet to figure out what happens from there. But the fact that she has two children certainly may suggest her line continues. So that would be really incredible to find out that she has living descendants to this day.
[00:53:48] Josh Hutchinson: We're talking about 17th and 18th century, how unfortunate people were treated, and, unfortunately, our legacy of treatment of the unhoused, the impoverished, unwed mothers hasn't been stellar since then, either.
[00:54:09] Rachel Christ-Doane: I'm thinking that's the epilogue of this book is that we, when we're talking about the 17th century or the 18th century, we tend to say, "oh, those unenlightened early colonists, they were just less intelligent than us today, more brutish, less civilized. And we have made it so far since then." And the truth of the matter is that is absolutely not the case. We have so many similarities with people living during this time. We are still struggling with the same issues they struggled with. We may have indoor plumbing, but that doesn't make us better than them or more intelligent than they were.
So that's something that I always feel like it's really important to stress. And yeah, in this case, looking at the treatment of unwed mothers, of women who struggle with a mental illness that's debilitating, there's a lot of similarities between then and now. And we can't ignore them.
[00:55:09] Josh Hutchinson: There are so many laws that really disturb me today, and more come up every day about, that almost make it illegal just to be impoverished. You can't sleep in public. People are taking benches away, so you can't even sit down in a lot of places, and it just makes it, it's an impossible situation you're in already, and it's so much harder. You end up spending a lot of time behind bars, unfortunately.
[00:55:43] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yep. And again, it's not very different. It's not so different from the 17th century, unfortunately.
[00:55:49] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and so we don't know where she went after Salem and Beverly?
[00:55:57] Rachel Christ-Doane: Not definitively. So I say at the end of the lecture there's a theory. So there is this very intriguing newspaper article that is published in New London, Connecticut that says, that's a death notice for a woman named Dorothy Good that describes her as a transient, vagrant person who has been found laying dead in a bog meadow. And it is, I don't remember the exact timing, but it's maybe like 20 years after she disappears. So I can certainly speculate.
I think maybe, and this is all super speculation, but Jonathan Batchelder may have been a consistent person in her life. She stays with him for a very long time. That's the truth of the matter. Does she feel safe with him? Does she, is that kind of becoming a home for her? And then he passes away, and she disappears? So my thought is, and she also has this recorded tendency to wander, that's something that comes up in the records a couple of times, that she's a wandering person. So my thought is he dies, and maybe she leaves, and she just ends up wandering town to town, maybe getting warned out of other places. That's my, not hope, but going forward, my last kind of thread here is looking at other notices of people being warned out to see if she appears anywhere else that would at least give us some indication of where she is.
And maybe because it's a period of numerous years, she certainly theoretically could have wandered as far as Connecticut. It's a very long period of time she's missing. That is a very far distance to go. It seems impossible, but it's, it is, it is technically possible. And just the description of her, Dorothy Good, a transient, vagrant person. It sounds like her, it sounds the way that she's described in the records in Salem.
So it's been pointed out by my colleague, this could also be her daughter, whose name is also Dorothy Good. It seems less likely to me, because Dorothy Good, Jr. is in a more stable situation. She's an indentured servant for Nathaniel Putnam. She's learning a trade. It feels to me like why would she end up being a transient person? It's possible. But yeah, it does feel like that could. I have this kind of just feeling it's her. I can't say it definitively, but, and what a horrible ending, though. Like part of me doesn't want it to be her, because if it is, she ends up dead in a bog. She ends up dead outside probably having died from exposure. And that's horrible. I really want her to have ended up somewhere where she's being cared for by a loving family. But who can say? It doesn't always work out that way, unfortunately.
[00:58:53] Sarah Jack: Yeah, it's really incredible that a name was even included in that description, because then it, you could have never put this as a possibility to her story. And then I know you had mentioned how this post was in multiple news outlets. That's very interesting.
[00:59:14] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, it's republished in three other papers in addition to the one in New London, including one in Massachusetts. There's, I believe it's two in New York, one in Massachusetts. I did have a long conversation with the historian in New London or the archivist in New London about this. She very kindly is the one who helped me find the full text for it. And she was wondering, is it just because it's so sensational of a story, it could just be that's a horrible way for someone to die. Maybe that's why it's published in multiple news outlets. It also feels to me, though, like it's certainly possible people were aware of her role in the witch trials. It's a reach, because they don't say anything about the witch trials in that death notice. Maybe that's why it reaches so far is because people are aware, or maybe people regionally had been aware she was involved in the witch trials in New London, and they wanted people back home to be aware she had died. So it's a very interesting little piece of text.
And I also mentioned in the article that Good is not a very common surname at this time. If you look in vital records in both Massachusetts and Connecticut, there are very few Goods, if any, beyond this family. There's variations of the name Good, like longer versions of the name, but just to have someone with the last name Good, and then to have also the first name Dorothy. It's either a very remarkable coincidence, or it's one of the two Dorothys from Salem.
[01:00:47] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, after I had heard you mention that, I did some searching online, and it was very difficult to find anybody named Good. It, you'd think it sounds like it would be a common name, and then it's absolutely not.
[01:01:05] Rachel Christ-Doane: There's lots of Goodwins, there's no Goods. And that actually makes it very difficult. I have no idea what William's story is, Sarah's husband, where he's born, where he comes from, where he's living before he meets Sarah, that is all up in the air. Because again, there's just very, there, I have not been able to find any mentions of his family or his lineage at all.
So that's another kind of big question mark of where did he come from? Is he the one who's starting the kind of Good family name here? Because there are Goods showing up in the 19th century, so a full century later. So what is happening there? That's an interesting question.
[01:01:52] Sarah Jack: Yeah, this research on Dorothy Good and then how could pieces get filled in through identifying descendants, that is like, there's so much promise there possibly.
[01:02:07] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah. That's the interesting part about a research project like this is there's a lot of possible ends, and some of them will have reward. I went to the Phillips Library looking for indentured records, not knowing if I would find anything, and I did find William and Dorothy, so that was a huge day for me. But then, going back and looking again through prison records and court records of unwed mothers and their children, nothing, dead ends. That's the kind of frustrating and rewarding part about research is you'll have a spurt where you find something and it's thrilling and then dead ends for years. So we'll see.
[01:02:53] Josh Hutchinson: I was really blown away that you found anything at all, because I had always thought that her story dead-ended with her just being chargeable and needing maintenance the rest of her life.
[01:03:07] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, me too. This, as I said, was a total accident. It was just, it was research about another person who I didn't know if I would be able to find anything about her. But, Ann Dolliver is a pretty obscure research subject. She, she, like Dorothy, is another person who struggles with mental health issues. She's the daughter of Reverend John Higginson, who is one of, he's the older minister of Salem in 1692. So I was just looking for, I knew she was in the care of the town after her father died, and I felt like logically there should be a record of the payments for her care from that point on, cuz it's a financial transaction, and theoretically when those payments stop, that means she has died. And so I was just super lucky to have access to the selectmen records. They were digitized only a few years ago, evidently. And it, you could have knocked me over the day where I started to realize that there was another very familiar name in these records that I kept coming across.
So yeah, it's, it was all just kind of luck. But and it also begs the question of what else is hiding out there, what other stories are in records that we haven't found yet?
[01:04:28] Josh Hutchinson: And Ann Dolliver also is interesting to me that she ends up in a similar situation, because of who her father was and the status of her brother, John Higginson Jr., also.
[01:04:40] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, so she actually has a lot of similarities to Dorothy, in a way. So she is married to a fisherman in Gloucester, who appears to be a horrible guy. They have three kids together, and then he abandons her. So because he has abandoned her, she ends up having to come back and live with her father.
And the similarities are in terms of the way that they're described in records indicates she's not stable to a degree, you know, and again it's such vague language, we can't really make a diagnosis of what's going on in either case. But Ann also seems to really have struggled with what they would call melancholy. She is not able to live independently or remarry. And she ends up in the care of another family, very similar, in a similar way that Dorothy does, who take care of her for the rest of her life, again indicating she's not able to support herself, and she actually ends up living away from her children like Dorothy, probably because she either couldn't or wouldn't care for them.
So yeah, it's, again, it's just a window into this is what happened to a woman if you couldn't marry and have kids and fulfill your expected role.
[01:06:00] Sarah Jack: I think it's incredible how, when historians and writers and researchers like yourself start to work on a story, records start revealing the story. It's, it really is like a voice from the past, but it's also a look into ourselves. It's such an important thing, the story. So I'm so excited about this era of research in general for our society and, but particularly with the witch hunts it, there's so much to glean from it.
[01:06:36] Rachel Christ-Doane: Yeah, very much so. My hope is that these warned out records will show up, so that's, it's why you can never put the pen down, right? Because things will just keep coming up.
[01:06:47] Josh Hutchinson: Do you have anything that you want to add or anything else you wanted to talk about? Either the museum or anything else?
[01:06:57] Rachel Christ-Doane: I would say that just the best way to keep up with what we're doing here is following us on social media. So we are just @SalemWitchMuseum on both Facebook and Instagram, and actually TikTok, also, which kind of our new, newest addition to social media, which I still don't know if I like or not. But yeah, that's where we post about our upcoming virtual events like the antisemitism lecture, which is coming out next week. And that's where we post about new research that's going on, like additions to our online sites tour or new descendant packets. We will actually have hopefully five new descendant packets, we currently have four finished, we're going for the fifth, that will be ready in September this year. So that's where you can see what's new, what's happening, and then also just our day-to-day, what our hours are and things like that. Please follow us on social media, and then check out our website, which is salemwitchmuseum.com, which has a whole bunch of different resources for descendants, for teachers, for students, for just avid history lovers. So yeah, that's the best place to see what we're doing and what's going on here.
[01:08:04] Josh Hutchinson: I also want to plug your YouTube channel. Do put these wonderful virtual events on there, and I've gone again and again to watch video after video, so I appreciate that you do that.
[01:08:20] Rachel Christ-Doane: Thank you. Yeah, that's another one. We also have the videos on our website as well, so there's a couple different places you can see them, but we always try to record virtual lectures. The only lectures we don't record are the ones that are ticketed, which these days are not many. Almost all of them are free now. So if we can record it, we do. And then, yes, those are available on our YouTube page and also on our website.
[01:08:43] Sarah Jack: And now for Minute with Mary.

[01:08:54] Mary Bingham: Joanna Towne. I would like to address the misconception that our grandmother, Joanna, was accused of being a witch. She was not formally accused ever, but she was named in 1692, long after her death.
The misconception originated circa 1670 when Reverend Thomas Gilbert of Topsfield was accused of being drunk before Sunday service, during Sunday service, and at the dinner following the Sunday service. Actually, he was so late to service that morning that some congregants actually left, but those who stayed were in for quite a show. Thomas was seen falling as he entered the building, slurring his words, and messing with the order of the service so that Isaac Cummings stood up and declared, "Stop. You are out of order and dangerously close to blaspheming the Lord's name." Thomas told Isaac to zip it and sit down. Things got so wild that Thomas quit his ministry at Topsfield right then and stormed out of the building, only to return three weeks later.
If that wasn't enough, there was a dinner that same afternoon after the fiasco at the parsonage, where many accused the minister of swigging too generously from the communion cup he shared with the diners, one of whom was Joanna Towne. Joanna, however, was the only person in attendance at that dinner who did not notice any odd behavior displayed by Thomas, nor did she think that he drank too much from the cup.
When this matter eventually went to court, Joanna proclaimed that everyone else was wrong. According to Joanna, Thomas ate and drank in moderation that day, and he was fully aware of his behavior.
Fast forward to 1692, 10 years after Joanna died. John and Hannah Putnam's infant daughter became sick and died within two days. Sadly, the child died such a violent death, as John Putnam said, it was enough to pierce a stony heart. According to a prior conversation with his cousin-in-law, Ann Putnam, Sr. regarding Joanna Towne's daughters, he said that the apples didn't fall far from the trees. John had heard that rumors that Rebecca Nurse's and Mary Esty's mother was a witch. After all, it was a common belief that witchcraft was passed from mothers to their daughters. John concluded that since Rebecca and Mary's specters could not kill him, they killed his child.
The Putnams were distant cousins to the Goulds, who were present at that service and dinner at Topsfield in 1670. Ensign John Gould, who filed the complaint on behalf of his wife against Thomas Gilbert, does not mention Joanna Towne in his complaint, though she offers the deposition in defense of Thomas. So I can only speculate that the gossip about Joanna's role traveled via the Gould family members, most likely those female family members, to their Putnam cousins who lived five miles south in Salem Village. I imagine these families visited from time to time, therefore sharing some of the gossip from their towns.
Thank you.

[01:12:42] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:12:44] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

[01:13:04] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501(c)(3), Weekly News Update. Today is July 20th. It is the day after the 331st anniversary of the hanging of five innocent alleged witches in Salem, Massachusetts on July 19th, 1692. The mother of Dorothy Good, Sarah Good, was among them, along with Sarah Wildes, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth How, and Rebecca Nurse. Rebecca, an accused elderly woman, was examined the same day Dorothy was examined.
The Rebecca Nurse Homestead Facebook page posted yesterday, quote, "accounts say that Rebecca Nurse was seen to be praying while on the cart and right before execution, only stopping to look at her children and family in the crowd. Sarah Good would have none of that. When they arrived at the hill, Reverend Noyes urged her to confess so she would at least not die a liar. She denied the guilt. Noyes said he knew she was a witch. 'You are a liar,' she snapped. 'I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.' This curse was based loosely on a verse in Revelation.
What happened to these accused witches of the past is not unlike what is happening today. What you learned about Dorothy's experience as a four-year-old and the outcome of her adult life is the same story we hear today. Right now, people are targeted and hunted just like the Goods. They're believed to have used sorcery or evil to cause misfortune to their family, neighbors, or community. In many, many countries today, misfortunes like dangerous weather and unexplained or even everyday common sickness or death are still believed to be caused by humans doing supernatural harm.
In Ghana, women are hunted as witches, and thousands of them are now in refugee camps. These refugee camps are known as witch camps. The women sent away to them are alleged witches. They're innocent. They are not witches. These are not witch camps. These are refuge camps loaded with forgotten women, women who have not forgotten the life they were torn from, women who carry the visible scars and damage on their bodies from the attacks they endured. They survived brutal attacks, but now they are set aside. Their existence is buried in the past that they were plucked from. They're barely surviving. Many of them do not survive.
Multitudes of women do not supernaturally cause mischief and misfortune. Once a person, once a child, is targeted as a witch, their old life is over. Nothing is ever the same for them again, the family is never whole, they are no longer in their home with their family unit living life as it was prior to the accusations. Most often, extended family is no longer close. Family is scattered.
Awareness of the violent, modern witch Hunts against alleged witches is increasing across the world. You are aware and can take action, share the information, make a financial contribution to an advocacy organization. International media, organizations, governments, and individuals are taking action and educating about it directly in the affected communities. In Africa, India, Melanesia, and in additional affected places, many advocates are risking their lives to educate, rescue, intervene, and rehabilitate victims in the communities gripped by harmful practices and violence due to sorcery fear or witchcraft fear.
The United Nations Human Rights Council is acknowledging the crisis and urging additional efforts by all stakeholders. We are all stakeholders in efforts to stop these witch attacks and abuse crimes against men, women, and children. When you see it in the news, read about it and share it. Educate yourself and others.
Next week, you'll hear from advocate and professor Miranda Forsyth, director of the working committee of The International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices. Expect to hear specific ways many organized groups of people are working as advocates. Learn about Papua New Guinea's action plan for sorcery accusation-related violence. Expect to hear specific ways you can start advocating. You do not have to wait to get involved. It is everybody's business to take a stand against the violence humans endure due to the supernatural fears of other humans.
Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast supports the global efforts to end modern witch hunts. Get involved. Financially support our nonprofit initiatives to educate and intervene. Visit endwitchhunts.org to make a tax-deductible contribution. You can also support us by purchasing books from our bookshop, merch from our Zazzle shop, or by subscribing as a Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast super listener for as little as $3 a month at thoushaltnotsuffer.com. Keep our t-shirts, available on zazzle.com, in mind when you start to get excited about Halloween 2023, and buy some fun wear. Sport one of our awesome shirts, and introduce people to the podcast or one of our projects by leaving your house looking cool.

[01:17:57] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[01:17:59] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:18:01] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:18:06] Sarah Jack: Thank you for joining us every week for our great episodes.
[01:18:10] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:18:12] Sarah Jack: Don't miss one. Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:18:16] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends.
[01:18:19] Sarah Jack: Please support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit us at endwitchhunts.org to learn what we're doing.
[01:18:26] Josh Hutchinson: And please rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:18:32] Sarah Jack: Thank you.
[01:18:34] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

July 20, 2023

Karin Helmstaedt on Why Witch Hunts are not just a Dark Chapter from the Past

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Show Notes

Learn about witch trials in the Holy Roman Empire and the deadly witch hunts occurring today. We interview Deutsche Welle presenter Karin Helmstaedt about her documentary, “Why Witch Hunts are not just a Dark Chapter from the Past,” which you can watch on YouTube. Karin tells us about her ancestors burned as witches in Winningen, Germany, and we learn nuances of the trials in that area. We discuss the current global crisis of violence against persons accused of witchcraft and talk about the many similarities between witch hunts across time and space. We also connect historical social injustices to our advocacy questions: Why do we hunt witches? How do we hunt witches? How do we stop hunting witches?
Why Witch Hunts are not just a Dark Chapter from the Past
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Transcript

[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:25] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:26] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we speak with journalist Karin Helmstaedt about her documentary, Why Witch Hunts are Not Just a Dark Chapter from the Past, which you can watch on YouTube.
[00:00:37] Sarah Jack: The video covers European witch hunts of the past, as well as the modern global crisis of attacks on persons accused of witchcraft.
[00:00:44] Josh Hutchinson: Check the video out after you listen to this episode. The link is in the show description.
[00:00:49] Sarah Jack: Karin told us about her ancestors accused of witchcraft in what is now Germany.
[00:00:53] Josh Hutchinson: And we spoke of our ancestors accused in New England.
[00:00:57] Sarah Jack: We talked about why women are more likely to be accused of witchcraft.
[00:01:01] Josh Hutchinson: And covered other similarities between witch hunts across time and space.
[00:01:05] Sarah Jack: The sheer number of attacks occurring today is eye-opening.
[00:01:10] Josh Hutchinson: Historian Wolfgang Behringer says there are now more people dying in witch hunts than ever before.
[00:01:16] Sarah Jack: Tanzania alone has lost upwards of 30,000 people to witch-hunts since independence in 1961.
[00:01:23] Josh Hutchinson: And these attacks are happening in over 60 nations today.
[00:01:28] Sarah Jack: Affecting hundreds of thousands of people every year with psychological and physical violence that leads to neglect, displacement, homelessness, physical disability, and even death.
[00:01:38] Josh Hutchinson: What lessons can we learn from past witch hunts?
[00:01:41] Sarah Jack: And how can we apply those lessons today?
[00:01:44] Josh Hutchinson: Witch hunts are not just a dark chapter from the past.
[00:01:47] Sarah Jack: Here is Karin Helmstaedt, a Canadian born journalist, moderator, and TV host based in Berlin, Germany. She studied in Toronto, Montreal, and Paris, and embarked on her journalistic career in sports, writing for newspapers and magazines before making the move into broadcasting. Since 1999, she's been one of the most constant faces on Germany's foreign broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, presenting a number of news and culture magazine formats. She currently co-hosts DW's Arts and Culture News in English. Fluent in three languages, Karin is also a sought after moderator and consultant for conferences and events around Europe, with experience in a broad range of sectors, including communications, food and agriculture, and rail transport.
[00:02:28] Josh Hutchinson: We appreciate your film, Why Witch Hunts are Not Just a Dark Chapter from the Past. We've watched that several times and are so appreciative that you're drawing attention to the subject. Can you tell our listeners about your film?
[00:02:45] Karin Helmstaedt: Yes, I can. Thank you for having me. It started off as an idea for a format that we developed at my network where I am currently working, Deutsche Welle. And I had this idea in my head for a very long time and didn't really know how I was going to approach it, because I knew that we had an ancestor in our family who had been burned as a witch.
And it seemed to me that I hadn't seen any material done on witch hunts in the time that I've been at Deutsche Welle, which is really quite a long time. So I pitched the project, and it was accepted and got started with researching the witch hunts in Germany and of course in this particular community where my ancestor was.
And I tracked down a historian who, Walter Rummel, who is just amazing because it was really just like a meeting of the minds because he did his PhD on the witch trials in that entire area of southwestern Germany. And there were a lot of them right along the Mosel River, and it was so interesting because when I called him and asked him and told him that I had this ancestor and her name was Margarethe Kröber, he was totally excited because he knew exactly who I was talking about, and he had literally gone through all of the witch trials in sort of several communities in a relatively large radius around that area and had analyzed them in terms sociologically and looking at what had motivated all of these particular cases. And so I was able to do a lot of research, a lot of really specific research with him into her case.
And during that, I discovered, of course, that there were all kinds of other relatives, if you will. They were more distant relatives, perhaps. She's like a direct line and a kind of a great grandmother, 11 generations back, that would be. But I discovered all of these other people who had been affected and of course the entire families, and the connections that I got from Walter were a couple of other historians, Rita Voltmer being a very important one, but Wolfgang Behringer also, who was really key in alerting me to the fact that there were still witch hunts going on today. And so that in the end ended up being the arc of the story for the film.
And that's how I ended up including the chapter on modern witch hunts and the things that are going on in places like Africa and Papua New Guinea and many places in southern South Asia and also in Latin America. We couldn't fit it all in, obviously, to the film, but we had to do a bit of a bit of a sorting out.
But that's essentially how the film came to be. And we're very happy with it. I worked on it with a colleague of mine called Ulrike Sommer is her name, and we spent a lot of time really going through it all with a fine tooth comb and condensing, condensing, because of course we didn't have hours and hours that we could fill, but we're very happy with the result. We're very, certainly, very happy with the response.
[00:05:55] Sarah Jack: It's been a great response. What would you like us to know about her? And I'm curious about how you knew about her history.
[00:06:04] Karin Helmstaedt: That's an interesting story, because when I was a young teenager, I came to Germany for the first time with my family. My father is from East Germany originally and married my mom who's Canadian. So we, I grew up in Canada, but we came to Europe to visit for the first time and were visiting relatives of his mother down in the Rhein -Mosel area.
And we visited this one aunt of his, and he told her I guess, that we were going to drive through Winningen and retrace some steps. I think there are some grave sites there as well. I don't remember those very well, because what stuck out for me was that, when this aunt said, "if you're going to Winningen, you have to visit the Hexenstein."
And my father said, "oh, what's that?" And so he told me this when we got into the car, and of course I was 14 years old and know I was very impressionable. And the idea that we had a witch in the family, this was absolutely amazing to me. And we went to this monument, which of course is featured in the film. It's the oldest, I now know, the oldest monument to persecuted witches in Germany. It was erected in about 1925, I think. And her name is right on there. And it was just a really, it made a huge impression on me, this idea that somebody in our family all these hundreds of years ago had suffered this fate and was actually memorialized on this stone.
It's like an obelisk, and it never left me. And it was a story that I put in on my back burner, for many years. I probably should have done something about it earlier, but you know how life is, you think things happen, and you have kids, and you move, and I ended up moving to Europe, and yeah, eventually just decided, it was also interesting because it was during the pandemic that I decided I've gotta tackle this story. I've gotta do something and make use of this time and possibly start thinking about actually doing something about this story. So that's how it started. It really goes decades back.
[00:08:02] Josh Hutchinson: That reminds me so much of my own story of how I got interested in the witch trials, because my grandfather was from Danvers, Massachusetts, which used to be Salem Village, and there is the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, the property of one of the well-known victims of the Salem Witch Trials. And at that property there's a monument to her and there's also a monument to people who defended her, and my ancestor, Joseph Hutchinson, is on that monument, but the way they spelled the name, it's J O S apostrophe H, so it looks like it says Josh Hutchinson, which of course is my own name.
[00:08:52] Karin Helmstaedt: It is your own name.
[00:08:53] Josh Hutchinson: I saw that in stone at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, and I've just been fascinated with the witch trials since then.
[00:09:01] Karin Helmstaedt: Yeah, it's an interesting thing to look at a kind of a legacy like that. And interestingly enough, when I went to Winningen and started the research, I asked about that monument. There's very little known about the motivation for having put it up or who exactly put it up. I couldn't find an awful lot of information about that. There are mistakes on it as well. It's not complete. And as I discovered, the mother of my ancestor was actually the very first woman burnt as a witch in Winningen, so the whole thing started with her, and the date of her execution is actually wrong, as well, if you look into all of the trial records.
So Walter Rummel ended up being really helpful to me because I bought, I, I found an old secondhand copy. I searched and searched on Amazon and found an old secondhand copy of his thesis, which is a book, and spent ages reading it, and just my jaw just kept dropping further and further, and I would get on the phone to my dad and say, "you have no idea how many people." Really quite a lot of people, because interestingly enough, of her generation, Margarethe's generation, not only she was accused of witchcraft, but also her cousin, as I say her mother already was killed 11 years before, her aunt, so the mother's sister, and then every single one of her brothers and sister-in-law. So in other words of that one particular branch of the Kröber family, they executed all the spouses. So that's interesting and we can talk a little bit more about why these things happened and what Walter Rummel was able to tell me, because even he found that pretty extraordinary that a family was so taken to the cleaners, as it were, in in that sense.
[00:10:52] Sarah Jack: Yeah. Do you wanna speak more about that right now?
[00:10:55] Karin Helmstaedt: It's interesting, because the historians that I spoke to, so Rita and Wolfgang and Walter, and I spent really a long time talking to all three of them. The belief is generally accepted that all of the people who were burned for witchcraft or accused of witchcraft were healers and wise women and cunning women, midwives, herbalists, all that kind of thing.
And so that was, of course, one of my first questions when I was talking to them. And they told me that, based on their research, and this doesn't necessarily have to be the case for everywhere else, like, for instance, in places like Scotland or in places like some of the eastern European countries, but certainly in that area of Germany, and in their experience and their analyses of the trial records, which are copious in many regions, in certain regions of Germany, and in this one in particular, there's hardly a midwife to be found. That's really not the case for any of these victims.
So what was at work was social ladder climbing, if you will. There were sort of tiers of society, and there were levels of society that essentially wanted to take out slightly more powerful or wealthy individuals. But she came from quite a wealthy winemaking family and married into my father's mother's family, so the, that's where the Kröber name comes from. And that her husband was a judge, and he was one of a long line of judges. And afterwards his son became a judge. And a lot of these professions seemed for a while to be handed down. So you were in a bit of a social set, and it seems that another branch of his own family was not happy with the amount of wealth, I suppose, that was accumulated, the amount of influence that they had in the town, and I think it was very much a tactic to go after these men by literally taking out their wives, accusing their wives of witchcraft. And there was also the one man involved, as well, and he was one of the wealthiest people in the town at the time.
[00:13:15] Josh Hutchinson: And you share in the film that women were about 80% of the victims in the European witch hunts and that they continue to be targeted today, as predominantly women are accused of witchcraft. Why do you think that is that women are more likely to be accused of witchcraft?
[00:13:38] Karin Helmstaedt: That's also one of these interesting questions that I think obviously there is the misogynistic element, the fact that women had a lesser position in society at the time, and there were reasons to want to get rid of women, to get rid of uncomfortable women. But it's, I guess what was very interesting to me was to learn just how many men had been involved, and it was almost always a question of wanting to usurp their influence and their power and their wealth. With the women, it's tricky, I think. The misogynist element is there, and it was possibly very much sparked by some of those early texts by people like Heinrich Kramer, the Malleus Maleficarum, which I mentioned also in the documentary.
These seminal texts that described what a witch was about gave rise to a lot of the imagery that was created around witches and witchcraft. And those were primarily female, simply because someone like Heinrich Kramer actually had a real bone to pick with women. He was somebody who had tried to go after a woman in Austria for witchcraft, and I think that effort was foiled, actually. And then he left Austria and wrote that book, and a lot of the trouble started there. There was trouble, there were ideas of witchcraft that had already been created by the church, but he really crystallized a lot of that.
And great levels of description such that then the art world, and the publication of that book actually coincided also with the invention of the printing press, pretty close together, such that these texts, but also the ideas that were then able to fuel an artist's imagination, could spread a lot faster.
And I think that's how the ideas of female evil and the ability of women to be closer to the devil and their tendencies to wanna be closer to the devil, I think that really took off in the imagination of a lot of people at the time.
It's interesting. I guess one of the biggest surprises for me also was, there were several things that were surprising. First of all, you're surprised to hear that actually it wasn't midwives and herbalists and these wise women. Second thing was that men were involved and so that was interesting.
But the really shocking thing to me was that basically half, over a third to half of the witches, of the people who were executed as witches, in the entire 300 years of the great European witch hunts happened in the German-speaking area. That is something really interesting and makes the whole thing incredibly complex, because you're looking at an area of the map, the Holy Roman Empire it was at the time, which was much, much bigger than modern day Germany, so that included areas of Northern Italy and actually parts of France. It also included Austria and Switzerland, the whole German speaking area. It's really shocking to think that those numbers have been, well, largely ignored for a very long time. People haven't really paid attention to that.
You think back to a number of the traumatic things that were happening in that part of the world at the time. And my ancestor was killed in the midst of the 30 Years War, which was just devastating and there are so many factors that influence the number of witch Hunts in Germany. That it, we probably need three hours of a podcast to go through the history. But one of the things that was so influential was climate, and this was also complete news to me. There was a phenomenon called the Little Ice Age that was going on in much of northern Europe for an incredible amount of time, literally from the 14th century all the way into the mid 19th century. That there was a very stark cooling and a lot of years of really poor harvests.
And this climate element had a huge impact on Germany, first of all, because it's in Northern Europe, but Germany's also landlocked. Just in terms of its geographical positioning, it was really hard hit by that phenomenon, by the Little Ice Age and unable to, it didn't have sea access to mean that it could necessarily get grain and get supplies from elsewhere very easily.
So people were really down and out, suffering great hardship at the hands of these marauding armies, the Swedes and the French, and everybody who was marching back and forth over their territory during the 30 Years War. And the other thing that I learned from Wolfgang Behringer. Wolfgang Behringer was the first one to actually do this analysis of climate and come up with this theory that actually of the 300 years of European witch hunts, it went in cycles, and you had three waves, actually. And those three waves are, interestingly enough, always about a, an entire lifetime. I guess if you look at a at the length of a long lifetime, 70 to 80 years, and every 70 to 80 years things would pick up again until they finally, eventually completely died down.
It's very interesting that climate affected things and forms of settlement, according to Wolfgang Behringer, were also very important. So for instance, there were hardly any witch hunts in places that were extremely rural, this is in Germany, anyway, or in nomadic peoples. They tended to concentrate in places where people are in a village situation and where people are eventually, as in Germany, getting crowded.
That's the other thing about Germany is that it's actually always had a lot of people in a relatively small geographic space. So when you end up with these phenomena of towns building up and people are sitting on top of one another, that's when you get a lot of the comparing what you have with what I have and a lot of these developments of social situations that can possibly be a fertile ground then for that kind of, and then the weather doesn't work and then the harvest fails and then somebody dies and then there are all these reasons, the same reasons that we see in the modern witch hunts today.
The things that are happening in Africa, for instance, it's the same kinds of patterns that reproduce themselves. So it's always a question of forms of community and whether those forms, whether they're somebody is trying to get an advantage. And unfortunately we seem to repeatedly tend to do that.
[00:20:31] Sarah Jack: There's so many striking comparisons, and one of the things that you said a few minutes ago really made me think of the modern was when you talked about the multitude of victims in the German history, that we don't really fathom it. People don't really talk about it, understand it, and that is part of with the modern. People don't have a concept of how rampant it is for the modern victims.
[00:20:58] Karin Helmstaedt: Yeah, it was upwards of 25,000 people in Germany, which is just a staggering number really when you consider that it's between 50 and 60,000 all told. So that's including places like Iceland, Norway, Sweden, all of the other countries where witch hunts did happen. 25,000 people.
And I really think something really interesting happened. Once the film was online and people were watching it, people started responding, I had a number of really interesting responses from women in Germany who said, "why haven't we looked into this more deeply in terms of what this can mean or has meant or means continually for female identity in Germany? How many cases of generational trauma are there that have never been considered?"
And when you look at some of the work that's been done in Scotland, also, for instance, by the Witches of Scotland, Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi, who've been doing that fantastic campaign up there. They've looked into a lot of the cases in Scotland and actually talked to social scientists who have indicated that when you take a family like that, you completely snuff out their wealth, usurp their fields and their lands and possibly even their livelihoods. You completely demote that family. That family has to start again from zero, and possibly those families actually never get back to the position that they had or never get back to the actual. It has a knock on effect or a domino effect, if you will, very far down the line in generations.
That was something that was really interesting to me, because I think it's interesting to look at what people have said, and I've had a lot of response from people who have, like yourself, Josh, who have some relative that was affected in the Salem Witch Trials or in Connecticut or in Scotland or in England, and the ideas are really so multifaceted in terms of how these particular tragedies have affected the different families. The stories are as long as my arm, the list it's amazing. So I think every case is individual and every family is individual and a lot of these communities have had different ways of dealing with things.
Some of them had just a few families affected. But a town like Winningen, where my ancestor came from, we're looking at between 160, 200 people at the time. 21 people were killed, 24 were accused, so three managed to get off, which was also remarkable, but only happened towards the end of things. When you consider the number of families that were affected then, those 21 people that got lost, and you look at that one branch of my family where literally every spouse was knocked off and those people had to go on and very often married again. But my ancestor actually already had two children, so those two children also they lost their mother. They were six and three at the time. And that was also a really interesting thing, even when I was researching with Walter, because he was pretty much also thinking that it was mostly older women. It was mostly older women who actually had some status, possibly widowed. And here was my ancestor, a mother of two boys, six and three years old. So there were a lot of these stereotypes that just disappeared through the detailing of this story.
[00:24:32] Sarah Jack: I really loved that you were able to do that with your narrative.
[00:24:37] Karin Helmstaedt: It was very lucky. And again, it's because of this, of the fantastic treasure trove of trial records that are available for that area. It's not the case everywhere. It's, for instance, in France, it's very interesting. A lot of stuff did happen in France, but there's relatively speaking, little documentation about it. I've talked at length with Rita Voltmer about that. When you don't have that documentation, then you really are guessing. You're taking, records come from everywhere. You're looking at diaries, you're looking at, Walter was able to analyze, for instance, all of the receipts from the time, for instance.
One of the stories that was really shocking in the case of my ancestor is she was actually, I had to fudge this a little bit in the film, because she was actually killed on the same day as another woman. There were two women killed on the same day, and they had an enormous party after that was over, and it's detailed. It's absolutely crazy the amount of detail that exists about that particular. It was like a bonfire. You've got two women literally burning on this pyre, and they had all kinds of wine, and there were local, what would you call them, restaurateur, who just made a killing on this kind of thing. And that's all documented that these things happened.
It was absolutely shocking that so much was available, and yet when you see how much is available, for instance, another really interesting detail of the trials, the trial records in that area, is that most of them were written for about 15 to 20 years. They were written by one scribe. It's the same handwriting over and over again. And this guy, I don't exactly know where he lived. I did figure out what his name is, but his handwriting, very, very beautiful 17th century script. And you go through pages and pages and pages and pages of this stuff.
And at one point Walter said to me, this guy, he wrote them all at the time, so he was literally just moving around the communities when a trial came and needed to be protocoled. And we're talking, this guy was present for the torture. He was present for the accusation, for the witch commission basically accusing the women, and then they were tortured, and then they were executed. So there were all these phases, and this is, it's all documented like a diary. But you didn't necessarily have that wealth of information in other places.
[00:27:07] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, there's so many parallels that I know our listeners who are familiar with witch trials in other areas will pick up on. On the documentation, Salem is well documented, but the other New England witch trials are not.
You have a lot of the same things. The ratio of men to women is about the same. It's something like 80 to 85% were women in New England. Salem was a little bit heavier with the men. There was maybe a quarter of the victims were men. But you have the same things going on with the Little Ice Age, the crop failures, the storms. You have the situation where people believe it's the midwives and healers, but it really wasn't. You have warfare or tension as if war is coming played into it, the local economics played into it. In Salem, overcrowding played a role, because there were refugees from warfare that came into Essex County, where Salem was the seat. And so there were a lot of extra people vying for resources, as well. So there's really just, it's remarkable how the European, New England, and modern-day witch trials, it flows.
[00:28:35] Karin Helmstaedt: There's so much. Yeah. That's so interesting what you said about the overcrowding, and the other thing that comes into it, of course, is religion. And another really surprising thing that I discovered, because everybody thinks the Catholic Church was the main motor of the whole thing, and Walter and Wolfgang Behringer basically told me that was not necessarily the case in this area. And interestingly enough, that particular community, Winningen, was a Protestant community. So we're talking, we're post reformation now, and the reformation happened in, I guess it was 1517, it's when it started. Martin Luther was actually quite keen or quite a sort of an encourager of witch hunts. There wasn't necessarily on our side in that sense.
But you had this Protestant community surrounded by other Catholic communities, and then you had a kind of a bit of a pressure cooker situation that developed because there used to be, and I forget what the word was for them in German now, but there used to be basically sort of seers who would go around to the Protestant communities and check to make sure that everybody was behaving properly and minding the new doctrine and not stepping astray with all of the ritualization of the Catholic religion was left behind by the Protestants, so they were really very strict, and there really was a kind of a situation that developed where they felt they had to be the more chaste community, the community that was more on the ball, that was paying attention to all of this possible influence of the devil. And it turns out that some, many Protestant communities were actually more zealous in going after people for witchcraft than Catholic ones, which is also a little bit counter to what we tend to hear and believe. But it's interesting that France, which is a predominantly Catholic country, Portugal, Spain, they had much lower incidents of witch trials than Germany did. Although Germany had a lot of Roman Catholicism still at the time. Obviously there was huge tension with the Reformation and then the Counter Reformation.
But even if you look, for instance, in the difference between Scotland and Ireland. Scotland was predominantly Protestant, and the witch trials there were really fired on by King James VI. And in Ireland, where they were Catholic, I think there were three or four victims, like you can count them on one hand. So that's a really interesting thing to look at. It's really interesting to look at those numbers and to look at the fact that up in Sweden, they were also actually Protestant, I think in the Norwegian area, as well, where witch trials happened. A lot of the things that you think you knew, or that I thought I knew and many people thought they knew are not necessarily the case.
And yet these, all these parallels exist. And the one thing that I remember Rita Voltmer saying to me that she couldn't believe that people were still thinking that it was midwives and herbalists, because there really is so much evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, there probably are a few communities where that, those kind of women did end up in difficult straits, as well.
You can never blanket statement anything about it, because Europe is complicated at best today, and it certainly was complicated back then.
[00:32:03] Josh Hutchinson: This idea of a religious cleansing or purification that you bring up, I think is important in the European witch trials. We spoke with Mary W. Craig about Scotland, and when the Kirk became Protestant, they were getting rid of the old Catholic rituals, and they also came down harsh on people who had the still pre-Catholic mythology and what they termed to be superstitious beliefs.
So it was really the heavily Protestant areas that were seeking this cleansing. And there were lower incidents in like the Highlands and Islands, which were still more Catholic. The Kirk didn't have as much control there.
[00:32:55] Karin Helmstaedt: It is super interesting and the other thing that comes to my mind when you talk about that with sort of the religious tension is, and what had a huge effect on the German, the prevalence in Germany, is the governance structure as well. So the governance structure in the Holy Roman Empire was incredibly fragmented. You had all these little kingdoms and fiefdoms and principalities, and some of them in the area that we're talking about with my ancestor were actually governed by religious figures. And in this particular case, there was one Catholic and one Protestant. It was actually a dual influence that was going on there.
And when you had that kind of fragmented governance from the top, what it allowed was less centralization in terms of the laws. And what happened was that you ended up having these situations like a poor harvest or something terrible has happened in a community. And it was the people, it was actually usually a bit of a grassroots movement that decided this person is a witch or that person is dangerous for our community, let's go after them. And the pressure from the bottom was difficult to counter for these sort of fragmented governance structures. They couldn't necessarily control all of these small communities, which is why you had many cases of localized witch trials in this area around the Mosel, and you can just go through all those communities, and there were witch trials everywhere.
[00:34:34] Josh Hutchinson: That's actually another theme that I've noticed in England and New England, that witch trials occurred largely at times when the government had less control. In England, you have the Matthew Hopkins witch hunt, and that occurred during the civil wars, when Parliament and the King were vying for power, and in Connecticut, the colony of Connecticut started witch hunting in 1647. They didn't get a charter from the king to be a colony until 1662, which is when the executions ended before their governor returned with the charter in 1663, they had the last execution in Connecticut, and then Salem also, Massachusetts, the king had revoked their charter, and they just received a new charter in the year 1692, so there was all this weaker central government.
[00:35:37] Karin Helmstaedt: It's interesting that, I mentioned France earlier, and France had a very centralized system, and that meant, for instance, that if you were somewhere in the middle of the country and decided you wanted to accuse your neighbor of being a witch, you ended up having to take that case to Paris and prove it.
And that centralized system alone was what meant that it was much, much harder to actually bring people to a death sentence for witchcraft in France than it was in Germany. In Germany, you ended up having these local witch commissions, which were severely under pressure by their local populations, and with all of the other motors that were happening, the somebody wanting to gain an advantage here or there, and and that's why a lot of real chaos happened, certainly in that period between 1630.
And there's another community in Germany the city of Bamberg, you might have heard of, is down in Bavaria or in Northern Bavaria. And it was just decimated back around the same time, between 1628 and 1632, I think. So again, right smack in the middle of the 30 Years War, and I think over a thousand people were burnt there. And you ended up literally with, I think it was Walter who quoted one of the, there were the writings of some religious man, and I should figure out exactly who that was, that I can quote it properly, but there was, these religious eminences would travel through the countryside. And this one made an observation that the entire countryside was literally smoking pyres. And that's a very powerful and brutal image, and that's what things pretty much looked like around that time. Bamberg is also a very interesting place to visit if you are interested in witch trials, just because it also has a very tragic legacy.
[00:37:37] Josh Hutchinson: I used to live pretty close to there in Schweinfurt.
[00:37:41] Karin Helmstaedt: Oh.
[00:37:41] Josh Hutchinson: My dad was in the Army, so I was a child, but yeah, we were in that region.
[00:37:47] Karin Helmstaedt: Yeah. Beautiful area.
[00:37:48] Josh Hutchinson: Oh, yeah. Gorgeous. I loved it.
[00:37:51] Sarah Jack: Could you tell us what the witch commission was?
[00:37:54] Karin Helmstaedt: It was basically a group of people who were local magistrates, but not necessarily all, groups of local men who had the backing of the local governance, and there were usually about five or six of them that would come together and then create a bit of a power node within the community. And once you got denounced to them, then you had to prove your innocence.
And the interesting thing with the trials, the way they happened in this area of Germany is that they insisted on a confession. You deny that you're a witch, it's not a confession. And so torture was used in order to extract that confession. And once the confession came, then you had admitted you were a witch. You had lied under duress, under the duress of torture, but you were at least able to be executed and have your soul go to heaven. So the whole religious element came into play there, as well, that you had to be exonerated in a religious sense. You had to be cleansed. And that's of course why the bodies were burnt.
It's interesting that people also always think that witches were burned at the stake. They weren't necessarily in in a lot of places. As in Salem, a lot of people were hanged. In Germany, what happened, there were people who were burnt alive, but in this particular community, and with my ancestor, they beheaded them first and then actually just burnt the bodies. But the idea of burning the bodies was to completely cleanse this mortal shell that had been sullied by the devil.
[00:39:48] Sarah Jack: What did the shaving, how did that play into that? Was that part of the cleansing steps or was it humiliation?
[00:39:56] Karin Helmstaedt: That was, yeah, exactly. That was something that happened during the interrogations. And they did in Germany what they called a peinliche befragung, which is essentially equivalent to a torture session. So it's an interrogation that becomes extremely physical and involves a lot of duress for the victims, and there were a lot of things that they employed. For instance, sleep deprivation was probably the simplest and one of the most perfidious techniques, simply because of course, once people had been deprived of sleep long enough and physically harmed so much, then eventually you're willing to admit anything just to make it stop, just to make this agony stop.
But the shaving was for two reasons. One, it was humiliation, especially with the men. The men were shaved completely, beards were completely taken off. But it was also with the idea of being able to locate this devil's mark, which at the time they believed every witch would have. You were pretty unlucky if you had something like a large, conspicuous mole or any kind of conspicuous birthmark. Something like that, of course, could be construed as something like that, and that's one of the reasons that they shaved their bodies as completely as possible. But it definitely also had a, an element of humiliation.
[00:41:11] Josh Hutchinson: And two of those themes you just spoke to are also present in the modern day witch hunts. In your documentary, you spoke with the woman who was shaved, and you showed images of someone who had been burned. And recently in Nigeria, a woman was burned alive, and that's garnered a lot of attention.
[00:41:39] Karin Helmstaedt: Yeah. We haven't talked about Leo Igwe yet, have we? And Leo is someone I discovered really on the basis of the fact that I had learned this from Wolfgang Behringer that there were so many witch trials going on in the modern world, which of course, if you haven't been paying attention to that, it's amazing how many people still comment after watching the film that they had no idea that this was going on.
Researching further, I found Leo Igwe and talked to him, and he has this advocacy group, the Advocacy for Alleged Witches, and the tales that he can tell will just curl your hair. It's happening all over the place in multiple countries in Africa. And it's interesting that, from what I understand, it isn't necessarily there always something where the communities themselves are using the word witch. That's an English word that we've imposed upon it, but the mechanism is the same. Something has happened in the community. Somebody needs to be scapegoated, and it ends up being a woman or an older person, who for some reason is either easy to get rid of, and possibly there's something to be gained by getting rid of that person.
The mechanisms are all the same, but they're not necessarily being called witches. They are being accused also even by local healer people who decide, okay, let's get this person outta the way. So there's a lot of, I think it's just the same societal mechanisms that are happening there, and we call it witch trials, but it's not necessarily how those communities are understanding it with that particular word.
[00:43:28] Sarah Jack: They're finding the culprits of misfortunes and those culprits are using powers outside of natural phenomenon to influence.
[00:43:38] Karin Helmstaedt: What is going on in so many places in Africa, and so many of the cases that Leo Igwe is dealing with, is just utterly brutal situations, what we showed in our film, the women being banished or having to literally escape to these witch camps and witch villages, which are places that are essentially just a refuge for women who can no longer be a part of their family. They can no longer be a part of their community. It's really tragic.
[00:44:07] Sarah Jack: And did you visit a witch camp? I wondered how you got your interviews with those women. They were really powerful interviews.
[00:44:15] Karin Helmstaedt: Indeed. And I have to do a shout out to Isaac Kaledzi, who's our correspondent in Ghana, and we worked very closely with him, and he was able to travel to Northern Ghana because Gambaga is up in the north. It's quite difficult to access. It's also quite difficult because of the language differences. So he had to find a translator and was able to visit and get that footage for us. So unfortunately I didn't get to visit it myself. On the other hand, it's a pretty tough journey. But Leo Igwe has done field work there, so he's definitely been to a number of those villages.
[00:44:50] Sarah Jack: Seeing the captured testimony of the women, seeing them visually, knowing what Leo's message has been, and then it just, it was really brought together well, and I think, I just think it's so important for people to hear from those women.
[00:45:08] Karin Helmstaedt: Yeah, indeed. They don't get a voice often enough. And I think the idea of what Leo is doing is trying to be able to integrate them back into their communities, that sometimes is successful and oftentimes is not. It's really tough, as well, that there doesn't seem to be a lot of political will to change things. There are even cases in some African countries where they've been wanting to bring witchcraft back into the penal code. It's very difficult conditions of course, because every community is so different. All of the countries they're dealing with multiple languages, traditions, make it extremely difficult to penetrate with one clear message about that kind of thing. And I guess Leo's point is that education is the only hope to change it.
[00:46:04] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, he's working on his critical thinking initiative, which I think will be very helpful. But in the documentary, Wolfgang Behringer has some very eye-opening quotes about the scale of witch persecutions today. He says that there are more witch hunts happening today than there were in the European witch trials.
And I'd noticed some more parallels there. You were talking about the witch persecutions in Africa and Asia, and right now we're experiencing climate change. There's famine, there's large number of natural disasters occurring. And that rang a bell with what you're speaking to. Now it's the heat and the storms becoming a problem, where before it was the cold, but it's draining resources and pushing people to great lengths to secure their food.
[00:47:09] Karin Helmstaedt: People need a reason to, they have to understand, find a way to understand what's happening. And I know that with the communities that Leo is in contact with, a lot of those communities are not, they're very rural, and there's not necessarily a lot of formal education. And as long as you've got traditional beliefs in magic and superstition, and as long as those kinds of things are there, in the absence of widespread formal education, that sort of pushes that stuff off in, into the realm of of superstition where it belongs and not actual crime, then yeah, he's up against. It's I guess we can't talk about it enough because we're only gonna make a dent at this point, but a dent is a dent. You have to start somewhere. He's certainly doing a lot of good work.
[00:48:06] Josh Hutchinson: Oh, he definitely is. I also have noticed that there's a lot of religious conflict in many of the areas that are hotspots today. Nigeria, I know, is a very divided country religiously. In Papua New Guinea, we've read about intertribal conflict. So these other tensions are also happening as well as the economic pressure.
[00:48:34] Karin Helmstaedt: Indeed. And I remember when I was talking to Wolfgang, it was just, it was so shocking to me, because I think he mentioned that literally just one country like Tanzania had more people killed than, more than 50,000, which would pretty much totals what happened in the 300 years in Europe. And it's almost bizarre to, or impossible to, even conceptualize that. But I think what's going on there is that populations are so much bigger. The population of Nigeria is literally booming. It's the most populous country in Africa, and it's growing all the time. So I think a lot of these issues of resource scarcity and the overcrowding that you mentioned, for instance, that was even happening in a place like Salem, that's gonna be happening very acutely in a lot of places in Africa, just as one example, because of course it's not just there. Yeah. South Asia, there's a lot a lot of problem with that as well.
[00:49:37] Josh Hutchinson: Speaking to how widespread it is, I even read this morning a case here in the United States, in the city of San Antonio, Texas. Just this morning there was a report from the San Antonio police that a man allegedly shouted, "it's time to kill the witches," and then swung a sword at an acquaintance, cutting his nose. So it's everywhere. It's not Africa, it's not Asia, it's worldwide, the Americas, everywhere.
[00:50:10] Karin Helmstaedt: To get back to the comments section on the documentary, that has been hugely eye-opening, because a lot of people, a lot of people also in our modern times identify with nature religions like wicca. They identify, that's another point that we touch on is that witchcraft is something that is very attractive in turbulent times, like what we're experiencing. And there has definitely been a bit of a renaissance going on. I would say it's been going on really quite a long time. At least five, if not 10 years. I think if you talk to people who are really in, in the mil ieu they will say that they've been noticing it for a good decade.
But a lot of the comments that have come in, because we asked for people to share their stories, and people have been very forthcoming with some of the stories that they've shared, and a lot of stories have been of personal persecution or of the fact that I am this way, I practice this, but I'm very quiet about it, because I know that, and a lot of the cases that are mentioned are happening in the United States, and people do not feel safe declaring or openly saying that they practice a religion like that.
[00:51:28] Josh Hutchinson: And you shared a little about Boris Gershman's study on witchcraft belief and how many people in the world believe in the evil eye and the power to curse someone. And It's widespread. It's every country. The lowest is about one in 10 to upwards of 90% in some nations. In America, one in six people believe that there is this evil witchcraft occurring, not this peaceful, Wicca, nature-based belief. They believe that any form of witchcraft is inherently evil.
Marker
[00:52:07] Karin Helmstaedt: Indeed. And that's, I think there's a lot of clashing with the Christian religious beliefs without going too far into sort of saying that it's fundamentalists, but there are very extreme beliefs out there. And I think certainly judging by some of the comments that have arisen, you realize that some have a very black and white view of how these things can be, but happily, a lot of responses have been ones of respect, with a call for respect as well of all of the different interpretations, that witchcraft can take. And they are many.
[00:52:48] Josh Hutchinson: You talk about how the archetype of the witch, the view of the witch has changed in modern times, and we've seen portrayals in film evolve over time to go along with that. And I wonder if you could speak to any of that.
[00:53:09] Karin Helmstaedt: Yeah, that's the whole sort of popular culture thing, which I guess, it's interesting. When I started researching this, I said, "okay, I'm gonna do a film on, I'm gonna find out about my ancestor, and then I'm gonna do this arc over to witches and witchcraft in popular culture." And it just goes on and on. You get into a kind of a, I don't even know if you could call it a rabbit hole, because that's too small. It's a more like a spiderweb, and it just goes and goes. It feels like a universe and then another universe. And there's so many different levels to how the witch has been portrayed, first of all, in the initial kind of visualizations of her and how that has influenced art and how that has influenced literature and of course literature, the witch in Hansel and Gretel, all of those Grimm's fairytales and the witches that were really not only incredibly embellished, but also romanticized in the romantic period. There were incredibly, yeah, I guess embellished is the word, sort of portrayals of how a witch could be.
It's so interesting, because the witch as a being who is somewhat marginal, as a marginal on, in, in terms of the the core of a village or a society, a small society, is somebody who is an outcast, but she's also feared, she has powers perhaps that people need to be worried about, which is one of the reasons they were persecuted. Those early portrayals of the witch were really something that you could invert and make and claim for yourself, this idea of her being a powerful woman who says my way or the highway of I'm not, I don't need the rest of the community. I can survive on my own and make my own rules. I think that's been a very attractive aspect of the entire concept of witchcraft and the idea that you could possibly then create and influence your own life with magic is something that's different again.
You've got the Wicked Witch of the East and the Wicked Witch of the West, and then of course the Good Witch. And I think it's interesting because those images have also really influenced how we think about witches and popular culture. And they're everywhere. They're everywhere. And they're quite often extremely compelling individuals and extremely, obviously in many interpretations, very sexy individuals.
And I remember when I was a kid, even before I discovered, so I hadn't left Canada for Germany yet, I had not yet made my first foray to Germany or to Europe, so I had no idea that we had a possible ancestor who had been burned as a witch. But I was completely into witch novels and various stories of witchcraft and a lot of that kind of thing simply because they are attractive figures.
[00:56:10] Sarah Jack: I had that same experience when I was like a tween. I was reading any book that had a witch character in it or if the teens or the neighborhood kids were fearful or looking for somebody or if their home was near graveyard. Like any kind of that I could find like that I was reading it, and then when I was 15 I found out that my ninth great grandma was Rebecca Nurse from the Salem Witch Trials.
[00:56:39] Karin Helmstaedt: You're both related to the same person. That is so interesting.
[00:56:44] Sarah Jack: We're related to her through her sister Mary Esty, who hanged. One of our other colleagues, Mary Bingham, is also a descendant of Mary Esty. And then I also descend from Rebecca, cuz their grandchildren married. But it was a great aunt that had been doing family history, and I, for a long time, alls I did was have this little pedigree on a piece of paper, and it said Rebecca Nurse hanged as a witch in Salem 1692, and I just didn't really do much for a long time on that. I just had no concept of the significance of that.
What you said when you spoke to the pop culture and the archetype of the witch, I found so much of what you said very important. So thank you for articulating all of that. And it isn't lost on me that a lot of these countries right now with vulnerable women who are experiencing violence, their culture isn't in a place where western culture is with women in power. They don't have that opportunity to try to seize back power or find an identity like we can here. And I was just thinking about that, how that is definitely, they're in a different, where they fall in the social order, and I mean they have all of that stacked against them now.
[00:58:05] Karin Helmstaedt: Very interesting. It's interesting that your ancestor was also your ninth grade grandmother. So was mine. It is really interesting. When I of course sent the link to this film to my entire family in Germany, because actually I have a lot of relatives here. And it was so interesting that everybody knows that stone, because we have family reunions traditionally every four years or so of the German side, of my father's mother's side. And it's so interesting that we take a Sunday walk up to that stone. So I've been there many times, and we always talk about it and look at the names on the stone, and there she is. But nobody was very interested in finding out more.
So in the end, a lot of them were really delighted that I did find out a bit more and that we now know a bit more about her. And she was quite a feisty piece of work, too, which is I think possibly the finding that I was happiest about, because I felt really like I had been able to sketch her personality, figure out exactly what she was like, read some of these really key entries in some of the protocols, the trial protocols. That let me know what kind of a person she was, and she was a person who really spoke her mind, and that also possibly didn't play well for her. But it's nice to think that you've been able to give this person a bit of a profile, a bit of form again, so that people can understand.
[00:59:37] Sarah Jack: You, were her voice now. I was really, I at her death, her meekness that she expressed with what she said, that's what Rebecca Nurse was like when she was in court, too. It's very interesting. They were strong women, and these are different women, different cultures, same, not quite the same era, cuz Rebecca was 70ish in the nineties, 1690s. But during her examination, often when she was questioned, she was standing up for herself ,not submitting to what they were saying necessarily. And it sounds like your grandmother was much like that.
[01:00:17] Karin Helmstaedt: Yes. And at the end, nevertheless was forced to make this admission and this kind of public apology that is, I think, the most heartbreaking moment. When I was reading all of that with Walter, that really hits your solar plexus, because what you realize is that there was no way out of the whole thing but to lie. And yet, for a woman of that level of religious faith and fervor that they had at that time, lying is also a mortal sin. And so you were lying to get out of this unbearable situation, and at the same time, really not even sure that you were gonna make it to the afterlife or that you were gonna be accepted into heaven, because you've just literally told a lie.
That I think is something that it's very hard for our modern, relatively, areligious existence and state of mind to relate to exactly how, what kind of a conflict that for a person. So that was I think, what really stuck with me, those two aspects for her.
[01:01:31] Josh Hutchinson: . Women speaking their mind is a persistent theme in witch trials we notice in Salem, the women who spoke back that they didn't believe that the bewitched people were actually bewitched, and they refused to go along with the story that they were told. And then the Witches of Scotland Podcast, Claire and Zoe often talk about the figure of the quarrelsome dame that recurred so often in the records.
We're near the end of our time, so I wonder if you have any closing remarks.
[01:02:12] Karin Helmstaedt: I guess just thank you for having me on the podcast and for sharing your stories with me ,because it's, once again, amazing to me how many parallels there are with these stories and it's great to know that there are other people who are so interested in making that period of history come alive.
I think it's very important. We're living through a period here in Europe again where we're looking at how the mistakes of history get repeated and repeated, and it's all the easier to repeat them if people don't know what happened. So these are histories, I think the histories of these women that we're talking about, these victims that we're talking about, they're histories that haven't really been given much time, much space, much publication, as we know now, of course, there's all kinds of stories coming out and a lot of written accounts of even the witch trials in England and Scotland. And I'm planning to also write something about Margarethe, as well. You leave something for posterity for your own children and their children, because that stone is still standing on the top of that hill in Winningen, and people have to know what went on there.
[01:03:20] Sarah Jack: Mary is back with Minute with Mary.

[01:03:31] Mary Bingham: The fun for me is deep diving into the documents to help tell the stories of the people who lived so long ago. When I started my work on Sarah Wilds, I read every online article I could find. Then I read all the entries in every book on the Salem Witch Trials I could find. Most said the same things about her, like she had an unsavory past based on two court cases, which are often quoted way out of context. Finally, I was able to purchase a copy of the Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, my Salem Witch Trial Bible. It is a collection of all the available documents, verbatim and in chronological order.
I studied all of the depositions offered for and against Sarah, the petitions, her jail transfers, and everything else included in the documents, which were now at my fingertips. Looking at the original sources allowed me to get a glimpse of her life, her relationship to her husband and her son, as well as her neighbors.
Not any other book tells us that her son, Ephraim, thought of his mother as a friend. The primary document pertaining to his position for restitution does, whereas that document. In Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. No other book tells us that Sarah shared a cart with Ann Pudeator on her return trip to the Salem Jail from Ipswich, except Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. No other book quotes Sarah, when she angrily said to John and Joseph Andrews, "it is a brave world if everyone did what they would." After all, they took a scythe from a tree after Sarah said that there was none to lend. Records of the Salem Witch Hunts mentions this. This book is a must own for anyone seriously studying the witch trials.
Another great source for putting together great colonial stories, Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County. This is the source I used for the story I will tell in next week's minute with Mary about the supposed witchcraft allegation against Joanna Towne, the mother of Rebecca Nurse, Mary Esty, and Sarah Cloyce.
Tune in next week. It's a great story. Thank you.

[01:06:07] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:06:09] Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

[01:06:28] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501(c)(3), Weekly News Update.
Witch hunts across time. Witch hunts past. Witch hunts present. Once a person, once a child is targeted as a witch culprit, their old life is over. Nothing is ever the same for them again. The family is never whole. They are no longer in their home with the family unit, living life as it was prior to the accusations. Most often, extended family is no longer close, family is scattered. My ancestors tried for witchcraft were hanged in Salem, and we do not know for sure where their bodies were buried. Probably on family land. Rebecca Towne Nurse is likely on the homestead. Maybe Mary Towne Esty is on hers.
We do know many of the Towne families scattered out into other settlements, other colonies after the Salem witch trials. My ancestor tried for witchcraft in Boston was acquitted, but to date records after the trial giving any sort of timeline for the remainder of her life have not been identified. Her life course was altered. What happened to Mary Hale? Her daughter, my ancestor tried for witchcraft in Connecticut, also acquitted, disappears from the record. We know she and her husband fled their land in Wallingford. We know where some of their daughters settled. But to date, Winifred Benham disappeared from the record after her final witch trial. What became of 4 year old little Dorothy Good, arrested and tried for witchcraft in the Salem Witch-Hunt? What happened to enslaved Tituba after the trials were over? We know nothing of Tituba's fate. Due to uncovered records in 2022, we know the unfortunate course Dorothy's life took. It was unsettled, she never landed on her feet. There was continued turmoil and misfortune. Learn more about those records next week on Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast when this important newly uncovered story is told by Rachel Christ Doane of the Salem Witch Museum.
What happened to those accused witches of the past, is not unlike what is happening today. Today, thousands of people are targeted and hunted. They are believed to have used sorcery or evil to cause misfortune to their family, neighbors, or community. In many, many countries today, misfortunes like dangerous weather and unexplained sickness or death are still believed to be caused by humans doing supernatural harm.
In Ghana, women are hunted as witches, and thousands of them are now in refugee camps. These refugee camps are known as witch camps. The women sent away to them are alleged witches. They are innocent. They are not witches. These are not witch camps. These are refugee camps loaded with forgotten women. Women who have not forgotten the life they were torn from. Women who carry the visible scars and damage on their bodies from the attacks they endured. They survived brutal attacks, but now they are set aside. Their existence is buried in the past that they were plucked from. They are barely surviving, many of them do not survive. Thousands of women did not supernaturally cause mischief and misfortune. They were vulnerable and now they live a life uprooted, suffering from what has been done to them.
Once a person, once a child is targeted as a witch, their old life is over. Nothing is ever the same for them again. The family is never whole. They are no longer in their home with the family unit, living life as it was prior to the accusations. Most often extended family is no longer close, family is scattered.
Awareness of the violent, modern witch hunts against alleged witches is increasing across the world. International media, organizations, governments, and individuals want it to stop and are taking action and are educating about it. The United Nations Human Rights Council is acknowledging the crisis and urging additional efforts by effected states and by all stakeholders. We are all stakeholders in efforts to stop these witch attacks and abuse crimes against women and children. When you see it in the news, read about it and share it. Educate yourself and others. Today you have heard from alleged witch descendant and journalist Karin Helmstaedt. Go watch her documentary today. Share it today. Her documentary, Why Witch Hunts are Not Just a Dark Chapter from the Past, features important interviews with several experts, including Advocacy for Alleged Witches director Dr. Leo Igwe, Witches of Scotland advocate Dr. Zoe Venditozzi, modern attack victims, and witch trial historians. You will see the faces of modern witch attack survivors and hear from their own voice what has happened to them. Please see the show description for the link to watch it.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project has started to collaborate with individuals and organizations in discussion about a future Connecticut State Witch Trial Memorial. This will not be in the place of local community tributes for the individual victims like Alice Young, Goody Bassett, or Mary Barnes, for example. To join us in the early stages of brainstorming and recognizing what descendants and Connecticut residents would like put together to pay tribute and educate, please contact us now.
Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast supports the global efforts to end modern witch hunts. Get involved. Financially support our nonprofit initiatives to educate and intervene. Visit EndWitchHunts.org to make a tax deductible contribution. You can also support us by purchasing books from our bookshop, merch from our Zazzle shop, or subscribing as a Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast super listener for as little as $3 a month at thoushaltnotsuffer.com. Keep our t-shirts, available on zazzle.com, in mind when you start to get excited about Halloween 2023 and buy some fun wear. Sport one of our awesome shirts and introduce people to the podcast or one of our projects by leaving your house looking cool.

[01:11:59] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[01:12:01] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:12:02] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:12:07] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[01:12:09] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:12:11] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:12:14] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[01:12:17] Sarah Jack: Please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
[01:12:21] Josh Hutchinson: Support our efforts to end witch hunts.
[01:12:23] Sarah Jack: Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[01:12:26] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

July 13, 2023

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Part 6: 1692 and Beyond

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Show Notes

This is Part 6, the final installment of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast’s Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series. This episode completes the overview of Connecticut’s known witch trial victims with only fact backed, trustworthy research and sources. Take advantage of the expansive bibliography and do some educational reading. Dig into the research with us. This Connecticut witch trial history introduction series has been created with thoughtful inquiry and consideration of historian expertise, historic record and available archived material. Next you will be ready for Connecticut Witch Trials 201, but hold up, first we have more 101 series’ coming your way this summer and fall: Salem Witch Trials 101, Modern Witch Hunts 101, and 18th-21st Century Witch Hunts 101. All of our series and episodes work to teach the world regarding witch hunts: How do we know what we know? We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Transcript

[00:00:00]
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:26] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: This is the sixth and final episode of our Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series. We'll cover witch hunting in Connecticut from 1692 onward.
[00:00:38] Sarah Jack: We begin with the story of the other New England witch-hunt of 1692.
[00:00:43] Josh Hutchinson: The Stamford-Fairfield Witch-Hunt of 1692 began with the alleged possession or affliction of Katharine Branch, a servant in the household of Lt. Daniel Westcott.
[00:00:55] Sarah Jack: On May 27th, Lt. Westcott complained to the authorities that his servant had been bewitched for more than five weeks.
[00:01:03] Josh Hutchinson: Contrary to popular belief, the 17th century colonists did not jump to conclusions when a person presented symptoms of affliction.
[00:01:13] Sarah Jack: In Salem, Samuel Parris's daughter and niece were afflicted for about six weeks before the first complaints were filed against any suspected of witchcraft. In fact, the girls were afflicted for a month or more before witchcraft was blamed as the cause of their maladies.
[00:01:26] Josh Hutchinson: In the Stamford-Fairfield witch hunt, several neighbors were indeed skeptical of Katharine's fits. Rather than rush to judgment, some conducted experiments, as we'll talk about later.
[00:01:39] Sarah Jack: Author Godbeer says Stamford people did not assume blindly, but tried experiments to determine.
[00:01:45] Josh Hutchinson: Richard Godbeer says, "what matters is understanding what people believed and thought was going on and what shaped their behavior."
[00:01:54] Sarah Jack: After five weeks of dealing with an afflicted servant, Daniel Westcott was convinced that she was being afflicted by witches, so he complained to Major Nathan Gold, Captain John Burr, Captain Jonathan Selleck, and Lieutenant Jonathan Bell.
[00:02:09] Josh Hutchinson: He described the affliction of his servant to them.
[00:02:14] Sarah Jack: Katharine's fits started in April of 1692 while she was gathering herbs.
[00:02:20] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "she was seized with a pinching and pricking at her breast. She being come home fell acrying, was asked the reason, gave no answer, but wept and immediately fell down on the floor with her hands clasped."
[00:02:35] Sarah Jack: This condition lasted two days.
[00:02:38] Josh Hutchinson: Then Katharine said she saw a cat.
[00:02:41] Sarah Jack: She was asked what the cat said.
[00:02:43] Josh Hutchinson: I really seriously wonder here, why did they ask what the cat said?
[00:02:50] Sarah Jack: You mean like how they assumed it was talking to her.
[00:02:54] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Why would you assume that the cat was talking? Because she said she saw a cat. And your first question is, what did it say? Not what color was this cat? How big was it? Where was it? We didn't see a cat.
[00:03:08] Sarah Jack: They knew their witch lore.
[00:03:11] Josh Hutchinson: I guess, but it still seems strange to ask that question.
[00:03:16] Sarah Jack: It was a leading question, which could have planted ideas in Katharine's mind.
[00:03:21] Josh Hutchinson: A theme to remember. At any rate, Katharine said that the cat had promised her fine things and that, quote, "she should go where there were fine folks."
[00:03:34] Sarah Jack: Her fits continued.
[00:03:36] Josh Hutchinson: She was asked about the cat again, only now there were multiple cats.
[00:03:41] Sarah Jack: When they spoke, they told her they would kill her.
[00:03:44] Josh Hutchinson: She saw a table of meats in a room with 10 sitting and was invited to eat.
[00:03:50] Sarah Jack: I have to just stop and say, I think a lot of us think our cats are thinking those words. We just can't hear it. So I can see how if someone is in hysterics at all, them imagining a cat saying it would kill them, it's not that far of a leap.
[00:04:11] Josh Hutchinson: No, people probably have that dream all the time.
[00:04:16] Sarah Jack: 13 days passed, and she was still afflicted.
[00:04:20] Josh Hutchinson: At one point she had 40 fits in one night, and for the first time she blamed witchcraft.
[00:04:28] Sarah Jack: She cried out, "a witch. A witch."
[00:04:31] Josh Hutchinson: And said that she felt a hand.
[00:04:34] Sarah Jack: The next week she saw, quote, "a woman stand in the house having an silk hood and a blue apron."
[00:04:41] Josh Hutchinson: The evening after that, quote, "she meet an old woman at the doors with two firebrands in her forehand. The woman had two homespun coats, one tucked up around her, the other down."
[00:04:56] Sarah Jack: The following day, she named Goody Clawson.
[00:04:59] Josh Hutchinson: And then she saw Clawson often for a week.
[00:05:03] Sarah Jack: "She said in her fits, 'Goody Clawson, let's have a turn at heels over head,' withall saying, 'shall you go first or shall I?' Said she, 'if I go first, you shall after.' And with that, she turned over two or three times, heels over head."
[00:05:17] Josh Hutchinson: Sometime later, she saw, quote, "a short old woman and lame, calling her Hook Back, Crump Back, having on a homespun coat and waistcoat and a black cap."
[00:05:29] Sarah Jack: Quote, "her master being gone a deputy to the court of election at Hartford," she named Mercy Woodbridge, then changed it to Holbridge, who lived in Campo.
[00:05:39] Josh Hutchinson: At some point she saw a, quote, "a black woman, thick lips, and of a middle stature, neither old nor young who had on an old large Samar, a dirty shift, and a dirty cap."
[00:05:54] Sarah Jack: Quote, she cried out in her fit, "Mercy, why do you meddle with me? I never did you any wrong. What's that to me, if my master did?"
[00:06:03] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "The woman told her that he had wronged her in giving in evidence against her."
[00:06:08] Sarah Jack: Quote, "sometimes for several days together, she'd be almost wholly dumb. At other times, singing, laughing, eating, riding."
[00:06:18] Josh Hutchinson: This is another thing that reminds me of Salem. There the afflicted persons would at times be well and, at other times, be in their fits.
[00:06:31] Sarah Jack: Katharine supposedly levitated, "she was carried up against the planches."
[00:06:37] Josh Hutchinson: The next night, Wescott, quote, "saw her move on the floor upon her back without stirring hand or foot to make that motion."
[00:06:47] Sarah Jack: Katharine was examined by the court on May 27th, 1692.
[00:06:52] Josh Hutchinson: She named Goody Clawson, Goody Hipshod, and Mercy Holbridge Disborough.
[00:06:59] Sarah Jack: She said, quote, "she went thither [to Compo] on foot by day, and that Mercy was her pilot thither and back again."
[00:07:08] Josh Hutchinson: On May 28th, Elizabeth Clawson was examined at a court in Stamford.
[00:07:13] Sarah Jack: She did, quote, "absolutely and peremptorily deny herself to be any such person."
[00:07:19] Josh Hutchinson: She did admit to quarreling with Daniel Westcott eight or nine years before.
[00:07:24] Sarah Jack: Elizabeth was searched by five women.
[00:07:27] Josh Hutchinson: Mary Ambler, Sarah Finch, Betha Wood, Sarah Trehearn, and Martha Holmes.
[00:07:35] Sarah Jack: Nothing unusual was found.
[00:07:37] Josh Hutchinson: Mercy Disborough was also examined at a court in Stamford on May 28th.
[00:07:43] Sarah Jack: Mercy, quote, "denied herself to be any such person or that she any ways knew or was privy to any means whereby the girl was so afflicted."
[00:07:51] Josh Hutchinson: She averred that she never saw or knew of the girl before now.
[00:07:57] Sarah Jack: Disborough's body was searched by seven women, Mary Ambler, Sarah Finch, Bethia Wood, Sarah Trehearn, Widow Hardy, Martha Holmes, and Elizabeth Clemence.
[00:08:08] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "they found a teat or like one in her privy parts at least an inch long, which is not common in other women."
[00:08:18] Sarah Jack: Back in court, Katharine Branch is lying on the floor, looked at Disborough and said, quote, "'tis she, I am sure tis she' and presently fell into a like paroxysm or fit as she usually is troubled with."
[00:08:31] Josh Hutchinson: Clawson and Disborough were searched again, and the jury of women returned the same findings. Clawson was clean, Disborough had a teat.
[00:08:41] Sarah Jack: On June 2nd, a special court was held in Fairfield.
[00:08:45] Josh Hutchinson: Mercy Disborough asked, quote, "to be tried by being cast into the water" to, quote, "vindicate her innocency."
[00:08:53] Sarah Jack: Mercy Disborough was water tested on a Monday.
[00:08:57] Josh Hutchinson: And she said, quote, "do you think that I would be such a fool as to be hanged alone?"
[00:09:03] Sarah Jack: On June 4th, 80 neighbors signed a petition defending Elizabeth Clawson.
[00:09:09] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "since we have known our said neighbor, Goodwife Clawson, we have not known her to be of a contentious frame nor given to use threatening words or to act maliciously towards her neighbors, but hath been civil and orderly towards others in her conversation and not to be a busybody in other men's concerns."
[00:09:29] Sarah Jack: At court on June 6th, Mercy was examined.
[00:09:32] Josh Hutchinson: And witness Thomas Bennett said, quote, " Mercy Disborough told him that she would make him as bare as bird's tale."
[00:09:41] Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Bennett said, "Mercy Disborough did say that it would be so pressed, heaped and running over to her," after some difference that was about a sow of Benjamin Ramsey's."
[00:09:51] Josh Hutchinson: This was apparently a reference to Luke 6:38. In the King James version, this verse reads, "give and it shall be given unto you. Good measure, pressed down, and shaken together and running over shall men give into your bosom, for with the same measure that you mete withall, it shall be measured to you again."
[00:10:14] Sarah Jack: Elizabeth definitely felt like she was getting told what goes around comes around.
[00:10:19] Josh Hutchinson: She definitely saw it as a threat that you're gonna get what you give and so expect payback.
[00:10:30] Sarah Jack: Thomas Bennett lost two calves. Within two weeks of this loss, he lost 30 lambs. Later he lost two more calves.
[00:10:39] Josh Hutchinson: Henry Gray said, quote, "Mercy Disborough said she could not abide that said Henry Gray ever since he bought a parcel of apples of her mother, Mrs. Jones." And Elizabeth Bennett Senior and Elizabeth Bennett Jr. both confirmed this.
[00:10:55] Sarah Jack: Quote, "about a year ago or something more than that, he had a calf very strangely taken and acted things that are very unwonted. It roared very strangely for the space of near six or seven hours."
[00:11:06] Josh Hutchinson: Also, a lamb acted in a very strange manner and died.
[00:11:10] Sarah Jack: Two or three months ago, he tried to bargain with the Disboroughs for a calf, but they couldn't agree to a price. Mercy was supposedly pissed. Quote, "Disborough's wife was very angry and many hard words passed."
[00:11:23] Josh Hutchinson: Also two months ago, he lost a cow.
[00:11:26] Sarah Jack: A heifer was ill, so he cut off part of the poor cow's ear and then whipped her with his cart whip. When she ran, he continued to whip her until she was well.
[00:11:35] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, WTF is up with these people and the way they treat animals?
[00:11:42] Quote, "the calf he had of said Disborough looked like a new calf. The hammer strokes and crosses was plain to be seen in the calf from the time he had it until a short time before he carried it home, and then in about a quarter of an hour, the calf changed its looks and seemed to be an old calf that had been used about 20 years and that sundry nails appeared, which he could not see before." It was some kind of something made out of a calf skin that they called an old calf and would've had hammer strokes and stitches in it.
[00:12:25] Sarah Jack: So Henry was at his brother Jacob's house, and Mercy was there. She said, quote, "that because he would not have the cattle, she had said that it should cost him two cows, which he told her he could prove she had said."
[00:12:39] Josh Hutchinson: That same day, and Gray believes at the very same time, one of Thomas Bennett's cows was taken strangely, and Bennett used his cart whip to torture that animal until it acted well again.
[00:12:55] Sarah Jack: And the same day, Gray got home, and his wife told him that she had to call for the cart whip to whip a strangely affected calf, but it got well before the whip came.
[00:13:04] Josh Hutchinson: Ann Godfrey went with young Thomas Bennett's wife to Disborrough's house and, quote, "told Mercy Disborrough that Henry Gray's wife said she had bewitched her husband's oxen and made them jump over the fence and made the beer jump out of the barrel."
[00:13:22] Sarah Jack: Quote, "Mercy answered that there was a woman came to her and reviled her and asked her what she was doing. She told her she was praying to her God, and then she asked her who was her God? Also, she told her that her God was the devil. And Mercy said she bade the woman to go home and pray to her God. And she went home, but she knew not whether she did pray or not."
[00:13:42] Josh Hutchinson: Ann couldn't sleep one night.
[00:13:44] Sarah Jack: Quote, "she heard a noise about the house and also heard a noise like as though a beast were knocked with an ax. And in the morning there was a heifer of theirs lay dead near the door."
[00:13:54] Josh Hutchinson: Another time, Ann had a sick sow, and Mercy came by. Ann told her folks wanted to subject her to the water test, but she wouldn't need any water test if she didn't unbewitch Ann's sow, which soon got better.
[00:14:10] Sarah Jack: John Grumman Sr., about five years ago, his child was ill. Young Thomas Bennett threatened Mercy Disborough and told her to unbewitch the child. She approached it, the child, and stroked it and said, quote, "God forbade that she should hurt the child. And soon after the child was well."
[00:14:28] Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Bennett Jr. said he had threatened to tear Mercy's heart out.
[00:14:33] Sarah Jack: Eleazer Slauson said, quote, "he lived near neighbor to Goodwife Clawson many years and did always observe her to be a person for peace and to counsel for peace. And when she hath had provocation from her neighbors, would answer and say, 'we must live in peace for we are neighbors.'"
[00:14:50] Josh Hutchinson: And Clement Buxton confirmed this testimony.
[00:14:53] Sarah Jack: Joseph Stirg and Benjamin Dunning heard Mercy Disborough, quote, "say if she were hanged, she would not be hanged alone. He told her, she implicitly owned herself a witch."
[00:15:04] Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Haliberch the jailkeeper said Mercy Disborough told him and others that she had been tormented all night. Haliberch told her it was the devil. She agreed and, quote, "said that it told her that her soul was damned for yesterday's work."
[00:15:23] Sarah Jack: Mercy later owned this account in court and said, quote, "she believed that there was divination in all her troubles."
[00:15:29] Josh Hutchinson: Joseph Bulkley confirmed Haliberch's testimony.
[00:15:34] Sarah Jack: Samuel Smith, Sr. also confirmed Haliberch's testimony.
[00:15:38] Josh Hutchinson: Joseph Wakeman said, quote, "he heard Mercy Disborough say that she trusted in the Lord Jesus, and if he deceive her, she would not have others to trust in him."
[00:15:50] Sarah Jack: Daniel Westcott, June 7th, 1692, said he went to Elizabeth Clawson's house on June 6th and talked to her about her actions and asked if she would be ducked. She said she'd do it, if Stamford minister John Bishop and the authority said it was reliable.
[00:16:05] Josh Hutchinson: Later that night, Katharine Branch had her worst fits yet.
[00:16:10] Sarah Jack: That night, Daniel's child climbed out of bed.
[00:16:13] Josh Hutchinson: When Daniel returned the child to bed, he lay beside Katharine Branch, quote, "to hold in her fits, which being straining, lolling out her tongue, and jumping up and down, and she took hold of my hands, and immediately something whipped me across my face like a cord that I both felt and heard the stroke, and it smarted for some time after."
[00:16:36] Sarah Jack: On June 13th, Katharine Branch testified to Jonathan Selleck in Stamford.
[00:16:41] Josh Hutchinson: She claimed she'd never heard the names of the people she had accused until, quote, "they themselves told her, which appeared to her."
[00:16:49] Sarah Jack: Quote, "there is a girl and a woman, which the said Kate calls the girl's mother appear to her and they say they live in Fairfield, but their names she cannot tell and that also there is two more appears to her, the one from New York called Mary Glover, as she told the said Kate, and the other name Goody Abison from Boston, as the abovesaid girl told Kate her name."
[00:17:09] Josh Hutchinson: IRL, Goody Glover of Boston had been hanged in 1688, and a Mrs. Mary Obinson was named on October 10th, 1692 by the afflicted girls of Salem. Obinson was not arrested.
[00:17:24] Sarah Jack: Katharine named Goody Miller, who was formerly called Goody Hipshod or Goody Crump.
[00:17:30] Josh Hutchinson: Katharine claimed that Goody Miller and Mrs. Abison, as she called her, were the ones who actually took Daniel Westcott's child out of the bed and laid it on the floor, and Miller again took the kid out of bed last night.
[00:17:45] Sarah Jack: On June 28th, Katharine testified to Jonathan Selleck in Stamford. Last Saturday. Elizabeth Clawson appeared to her and afflicted her worse than usual, held her head back, pulled her arms, and pressed upon her. Clawson afflicted her again, quote, for a night or two following.
[00:18:01] Josh Hutchinson: Since Clawson was jailed in Fairfield, only Goody Miller appeared and afflicted Kate.
[00:18:07] Sarah Jack: Daniel Westcott backed her up, saying, quote, "that on said Saturday night, his maid Kate was extremely afflicted, making a terrible screeching noise, crying out, 'Goody Clawson, Goody Clawson, why will you kill me? Why will you torment me so?' Her head being bent backwards down to her back, I went to lift her up. She was so extreme heavy that she seemed to me to be three times heavier than that at other times, and said maid said, often, 'get off of me,' two or three times. In said fit, said Kate shook and the bedstead so terribly hard. It much a frightened us."
[00:18:40] Josh Hutchinson: John Finch was a witness that Saturday night, quote, "and tried to lift said Kate and found her so extreme heavy that he never found nor felt any the like.
[00:18:50] Sarah Jack: After the interview, Kate walked 40 or 50 rods from Selleck's house and fell down and, quote, "looked black in the face."
[00:18:58] Josh Hutchinson: Jonathan's son, John Selleck, and cousin, David Selleck, brought her back to the house.
[00:19:05] Sarah Jack: Quote, "In coming out of that fit, fell a screeching crying out, 'you kill me, Goody Clawson, you kill me.'"
[00:19:11] Josh Hutchinson: Kate had terrible fits all night and sometimes spoke to apparitions.
[00:19:16] Sarah Jack: She said, quote, "I will not yield to you for your witches, and your portion is hellfire to all eternity."
[00:19:22] Josh Hutchinson: She said, quote, "Goody Clawson, why do you torment me so? I never did you any harm, neither in word nor action,' saying, 'why are you all come now to afflict me?'"
[00:19:33] Sarah Jack: She named Goody Clawson, Mercy Disborough, Goody Miller, a woman, and a girl, quote, "whom she called Sarah."
[00:19:40] Josh Hutchinson: She said, "is Sarah Staples your right name? I'm afraid you tell me a lie. Hannah Harvey, is that your name? What is the woman's name that comes with Hannah Harvey? Mary Harvey, the mother of Hannah Harvey?"
[00:19:55] Sarah Jack: More cats appeared to Kate.
[00:19:58] Josh Hutchinson: Also a creature, quote, "with a great head and wings and no body and all black appeared."
[00:20:07] Sarah Jack: She asked Hannah Harvey if it was her father.
[00:20:09] Josh Hutchinson: She named Goody Staples, grandmother of Hannah Harvey, mother of Mary Harvey.
[00:20:15] Sarah Jack: "She fell into a fit, singing songs and then tunes, as Kate said, gigs for them to dance by each taking their turns."
[00:20:24] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "then said Kate rehearsed a great many verses which are in some primers, and also the dialogue between Christ the young man and the devil, the Lord's Prayer, all the commandments and catechism, the creed, etc., and several such good things."
[00:20:40] Sarah Jack: Quote, "some persons attempted to cut off a lock of the said Kate's hair when she was in her fits but could not do it, for, although she knew not what was said and done by them and let them come never so privately behind her to do it, yet she would at once turn about and prevent it. At last, David Waterbury took her in his arms to hold her by force that a lock of her hair might be cut, but though at other times a weak and light girl, yet she was then so strong and so extreme heavy that he could not deal with her, nor her hair could not be cut."
[00:21:10] Josh Hutchinson: On June 29th, quote, "Katharine Branch coming into her senses about nine of the o'clock in the morning, being questioned what she saw and who afflicted her the night past, saith that going homeward she was met by Goody Miller riding upon a black cat."
[00:21:26] Sarah Jack: Jonathan Selleck sent letter to Nathan Gold Magistrate dated June 29th, 1692.
[00:21:32] Josh Hutchinson: He told Gold that his son, John Selleck, would fill him in on the details of the wild night with Kate.
[00:21:38] Sarah Jack: And he related a story about trying to have Goody Miller arrested in Bedford, New York, where she was under the protection of her two brothers, Mr. Theale and Mr. Ambler who was there. Quote, Mr. Pell and Justice Theale would not do anything," even though Kate was taken there and identified Goody Miller.
[00:21:55] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "Abraham Andler told Daniel Wescott he knew what would become of her if she was sent down to us here. He not being willing to do it."
[00:22:05] Sarah Jack: Selleck said that the New York Attorney General would not order Goody Miller taken into custody. Selleck encouraged Nathan Gold to send to the governor of New York to request the extradition of Goody Miller.
[00:22:16] Josh Hutchinson: Selleck suggested that he could write to Colonel Caleb Heathcote, an influential landowner in New York, quote, "who hath the greatest interest in this present governor of any man in New York."
[00:22:29] Sarah Jack: On June 30th, Mary Newman said that two years ago she had an argument with Elizabeth Clawson and exchanged words. The next day, three of Newman's sheep died suddenly.
[00:22:39] Josh Hutchinson: On July 12th, John Tash swore his testimony before John Reynolds in Greenwich.
[00:22:46] Sarah Jack: About 30 years ago, Goodman and Goody Owen asked him to go to George Woolsey's house in Jamaica, Long Island with Mary Staples.
[00:22:54] Josh Hutchinson: Riding a horse with her behind him, they came to a rough slough, and he couldn't sense her behind him, so he reached back to her and felt nothing. When they got through the slough, Staples was back on the horse. This happened at the same spot on the way to Woolsey's house and on the way back.
[00:23:12] Sarah Jack: John Pettit, august 4th, 1692, Stamford. Quote, "John Pettit sayeth that he heard Daniel Westcott's wife say Kate told her that there came a fine man to her and told her that her brother was dead and that he would not trouble her no more in three weeks."
[00:23:29] Josh Hutchinson: On August 24th, Jonathan Bell wrote, quote, "Daniel Westcott came to my house upon the Saturday before he went to May Court and told me that his maidservant said that there came a gentleman to her that told her that her brother that was at Christopher's was dead, upon which she cried and was sad and told her that she should have no more fits this three weeks."
[00:23:53] Sarah Jack: Susannah Bell testified the same.
[00:23:57] Josh Hutchinson: That same day, Samuel Blatchley said that Abigail Cross said that Abigail Westcott Daniel's wife, mentioned Mercy Disborough's name in the presence of Katharine Branch. Abigail Westcott replied that Katharine was in a fit when she said that.
[00:24:13] Sarah Jack: Also on the 24th, Lydia Penoyer related that Katharine Branch told her that she, Katharine, quote, "never told Joseph Garnsey and Nathaniel Wyatt that she was possessed."
[00:24:25] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "she heard her aunt Abigail Westcott say that her servant girl Katharine Branch was such a lying girl that not anybody could believe one word what she said and said that she heard her aunt Abigail Wescott say that she did not believe that Mercy nor Goody Miller nor Hannah, nor any of these women whom she had impeached was any more witches than she was, and that her husband would believe Katharine before he would believe Mr. Bishop or Lieutenant Bell or herself."
[00:24:56] Sarah Jack: Katharine Branch and Daniel Westcott testified before Jonathan Bell on August 25th. Both testified that Katharine was afflicted in her sleep and her head was drawn back to her back.
[00:25:07] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "he got up and found her head drawn backward to her back and her body bowed upward a foot from the bed and her breath stopped."
[00:25:16] Sarah Jack: On August 29th, Joseph Bishop reported that he had asked Katharine what she saw in her fits. She said, cats. Abigail Westcott pressed her on it.
[00:25:25] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "Katharine answered, 'cats, if they be cats, they are no ordinary cats ,for ordinary cats can't turn themselves into a woman and then into a cat again and sit on the rail and jump on the wheel.'"
[00:25:38] Sarah Jack: Abigail Westcott asked Katharine to describe the woman she wore, quote, "serge cloth and the best homespun. I think she had pretty thick lips."
[00:25:48] Josh Hutchinson: In undated testimony, Joseph Garnsey told a story about an experiment performed during one of Katharine's to see if she would react when threatened with a knife in real life. She immediately snapped out of her fit and ran out of the room. The experiment was tried again, and she again came to. This time, she said, "I am possessed with the devil, and he appeared to me in the hen house in the shape of a black cat and was earnest with her to be a witch and if she would not, he would tear her in pieces."
[00:26:22] Sarah Jack: Then she said she saw the devil. According to Garnsey, quote, "just at this time to my appearance, there seemed to dart in at the west window a sudden light across the room." Kate saw the devil as a white dog.
[00:26:35] Josh Hutchinson: Kate told Garnsey she had seen the devil appear in the shapes of Goody Clawson, Goody Miller and Mercy Disborough. The devil told her that it was really him.
[00:26:45] Sarah Jack: "She said she could not tell. They might be honest women, for ought she knew, or they might be witches."
[00:26:52] Josh Hutchinson: Nathaniel Wyatt confirmed Joseph Garnsey's testimony.
[00:26:57] Sarah Jack: In undated testimony, Ebenezer Bishop testified that during a fit, Katharine Branch, quote "said, 'now they are going to kill me and crying out very loud that they pinched her on the neck and calling out that they pinched again. I sitting by her, I took the light and looked upon her neck and I see a spot look red, seeming to me as big as a piece of eight. Afterwards, it turned blue and blacker than any other part of her skin, and after the second time of her calling, I took the light and looked again, and she pointed with her hand lower upon her shoulder, and I see another place upon her shoulder looked red and blue, as I saw upon the other place before, and then after that she had another fit."
[00:27:35] Josh Hutchinson: Hannah Knapp corroborated Bishop's testimony and added that she saw scratches upon Kate.
[00:27:42] Sarah Jack: In an undated testimony, Abigail Cross said, quote, "upon some discourse with Daniel Westcott about his girl's dissembling, said Daniel said that he would venture both his cows against a calf that she would do a trick tomorrow morning that nobody else could do."
[00:27:56] Josh Hutchinson: Abigail asked, "can you make her do it when you will?"
[00:28:00] Sarah Jack: Daniel said, "yes, and when I will, I can make her do it."
[00:28:05] Josh Hutchinson: Nathaniel Cross corroborated his wife, Abigail's testimony.
[00:28:09] Sarah Jack: Abraham Finch, Jr. testified that quote, "he being a watching with the French girl at Daniel Westcott's house in the night, I being laid on the bed, the girl fell into a fit and fell across my feet. And then I looking up, I saw a light about the bigness of my two hands glance along the summer [beam] of the house to the hearth ward, and afterwards I saw it no more."
[00:28:31] Josh Hutchinson: Kate said, "Goody Clawson came in with two fiery eyes."
[00:28:35] Sarah Jack: David Selleck was lying on the bed beside Katharine while Abraham was lying on the chest. David started up and said, "she pricked me."
[00:28:43] Josh Hutchinson: "The French girl answered, no, she did not. It was Goody Crump, and she put her hand over the bedside and said, 'give me that thing that you pricked Mr. Selleck with.' And I catched hold of her hand and found a pin in it, and I took it away from her."
[00:29:00] Sarah Jack: On another occasion, Elizabeth Clawson said, "she had not confessed, nor would not confess as long as she had breath to draw or to that effect."
[00:29:09] Josh Hutchinson: On August 29th, 50 year old man Samuel Holly, Sr. stated that, quote, "being at the house of Daniel Westcott in the evening, I did see his made Katharine Branch in her fit that she did swell in her breasts as she lay on her bed, and they rises like bladders and suddenly passed into her belly and a short time returned to her breast. And in a short time, her breasts fell and a great rattling in her throat as if she would've been choked. All this I judge beyond nature."
[00:29:43] Sarah Jack: Daniel Wescott confirmed this testimony and added, quote, "that when she was in those fits rattling in her throat, she would put out her tongue to a great extent I conceived beyond nature, and I put her tongue into her mouth again, and then I looked in her mouth and could see no tongue, but as if it were a lump of flesh down her throat, and this oftentimes."
[00:30:04] Josh Hutchinson: On August 30th, Daniel Westcott said, quote, "as she lay on the bed at her length in her fit and at once spring up to the chamber floor without the help of her hands or feet. That's near six feet, and I judge it beyond nature for any person so to do."
[00:30:21] Sarah Jack: On August 31st, John Knapp confirmed what Daniel Westcott said the day before.
[00:30:26] Josh Hutchinson: That same day, David Selleck said, quote, "in the night when said Katharine was in her fit, she, looking off the bed, said, 'Goody Miller, hold up your arm higher that the black dog may suck thee better.' Again, she said, 'Goody Miller, I never thought so much before, for now I'm sure you are a witch, for you have got a long teat under your arm.'"
[00:30:50] Sarah Jack: Abraham Finch, quote, "saw a ball of fire as big as his two hands pass along the summer [beam] to the hearth, and then vanish away."
[00:30:58] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "she said that she saw Goody Clawson come in with fiery eyes."
[00:31:03] Sarah Jack: Lying in bed beside Katharine, with Abraham Finch lying on the chest, David felt a prickling in his side.
[00:31:10] Josh Hutchinson: Katharine said, "'Goody Crump, give me that thing that you pricked Mr. Selleck withall.' Then shutting her hand, Abraham Finch reached hold of her hand, and we found a pin in it."
[00:31:21] Sarah Jack: This should have been seen as clear evidence of fraud.
[00:31:25] Josh Hutchinson: On September 7th, Sarah Kecham reported, quote, "I asked her to ride, and then she got to riding. I asked her if her horse had any name, and she called out and said, 'Jack.' I then asked her to sing, and then she sung. I asked her that if she had sung in English, she could then sing French, and then she sung that which they called French."
[00:31:47] Sarah Jack: Thomas Austin told Kecham he knew that Katharine was bewitched. Kecham said that she doubted it. She didn't believe there was a witch in town.
[00:31:56] Josh Hutchinson: Then they did an experiment. Thomas Austin said that a bewitched person would laugh themself to death if a bare sword was held over them. They tried, it and Katharine laughed. But then they tried it without telling her, and she did not react at all.
[00:32:15] Sarah Jack: John Bates Jr. confirmed Kecham's testimony.
[00:32:18] Josh Hutchinson: On September 10th, Edward Jesop testified in Fairfield that last winter at Thomas Disborough's house, there was a pig roasting, with skin like normal pig. When it was placed on the table, the skin was suddenly gone. But when Thomas Disborough began cutting it, the skin reappeared.
[00:32:40] Sarah Jack: Later that evening, there was a debate over scripture. When Mercy Disborough brought out a bible, Jesop couldn't read it.
[00:32:48] Josh Hutchinson: On his way home, he needed a canoe to get across Campo Creek, but he couldn't move the canoe into the water.
[00:32:55] Sarah Jack: He tried to ride his old cart horse, Joe, around but couldn't get the horse to stay on the road.
[00:33:01] Josh Hutchinson: It took all night to get a little over two miles.
[00:33:04] Sarah Jack: On September 12th, Daniel Westcott testified that some years since he had quarrel with Elizabeth Clawson over the weight of some flax.
[00:33:12] Josh Hutchinson: Some short time after, Daniel's daughter, Johanna, was taken with fits.
[00:33:19] Sarah Jack: She continued to have fits at night for about three weeks.
[00:33:22] Josh Hutchinson: Then upon the advice of neighbors, the Westcotts sent their daughter to Fairfield, and the fits stopped.
[00:33:29] Sarah Jack: Abigail Westcott corroborated the testimony.
[00:33:33] Josh Hutchinson: On September 12th, Abigail Westcott claimed that Elizabeth Clawson once threw rocks at her.
[00:33:38] Sarah Jack: Another time Clawson called her a quote, "proud slut," and said, quote, "are you proud of your fine clothes and you love to be mistress, but you never shall be mine."
[00:33:48] Josh Hutchinson: Daniel Westcott's enslaved indigenous boy saw a string tie itself around Katharine's neck.
[00:33:58] Sarah Jack: Abigail Westcott witnessed the marks around Kate's neck after Daniel removed the string.
[00:34:03] Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Penoyer said that Goodwife Clawson argued with Mary Newman, whose daughter had allegedly stolen, quote, "apples or nuts or grapes or some such thing. " Clawson said, "if she allowed her children to steal when they was young, how would they be when they were old?"
[00:34:22] Sarah Jack: Thomas's wife's, Lydia, agreed to his testimony.
[00:34:26] Josh Hutchinson: Sarah Bates said that when Kate had the first fit, the Westcotts sent for her to attend to the girl. Upon evaluating the girl, Bates decided she may have a natural illness.
[00:34:38] Sarah Jack: She suggested they burn feathers under Kate's nose and also suggested a few other remedies for fainting fits.
[00:34:44] Josh Hutchinson: While Kate was in a fit, Sarah Bates and Abigail Westcott decided to bleed her. When they approached to draw blood, Kate snapped out of the fit.
[00:34:54] Sarah Jack: Then she did let them take blood from her foot, and when she had laid a while, quote, "she clapped her hand upon the coverlid and cried out. And one of the girls that stood by said, 'mother, she cried out,' and her mistress was so affected with it that she cried and said, 'she is bewitched.' Upon this, the girl turned her head from the folk, as if she would hide it in the pillow, and laughed.
[00:35:14] Josh Hutchinson: Mary Lockwood confirmed this testimony.
[00:35:17] Sarah Jack: Swimming test witnesses Abraham Adams and Jonathan Squire made a statement.
[00:35:22] Josh Hutchinson: Both testified that, quote, "when Elizabeth Clawson was bound hand and foot and put into the water, she swam like a cork, and Joseph Stirg labored to press her into the water, and she buoyed up like a cork"
[00:35:36] Sarah Jack: Court of and Terminer, September 14th at Fairfield.
[00:35:40] Josh Hutchinson: Magistrates Governor Robert Treat, Deputy Governor William Jones, Major Nathan Gould, John Allen, Mr. Andrew Lee, Captain John Burr, Mr. William Pitkin, and Captain Moses Mansfield.
[00:35:54] Sarah Jack: Crown's Attorneys Lieutenant James Bennett and Mr. Eliphalet Hill.
[00:35:59] Josh Hutchinson: Mercy Disborough was arraigned.
[00:36:02] Sarah Jack: The grand jury indicted her.
[00:36:04] Josh Hutchinson: Disborough pled not guilty and agreed to stand trial.
[00:36:08] Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Clawson was arraigned.
[00:36:12] Josh Hutchinson: The grand jury indicted her, as well.
[00:36:15] Sarah Jack: Disborough and Clawson were searched yet again by a jury of women.
[00:36:19] Josh Hutchinson: This time, Clawson had, quote, "in her private parts more than is common to women. We can't say teats but something extraordinary and Goody Disborough's was something like it but a great deal less, Goody Clawson's a dark red, and Disborough's of a pale color."
[00:36:38] Sarah Jack: Katharine Branch testified September 19th, quote, "sometime this last summer, she saw and felt Goodwife Clawson and Mercy Disborough afflict her, not together but apart, by scratching, pinching, and wringing her body."
[00:36:51] Josh Hutchinson: The grand jury presented Mary Staples, Mary Harvey, and Hannah Harvey.
[00:36:56] Sarah Jack: The court called three times for witnesses on September 15th, and then again called for witnesses on September 16th.
[00:37:02] Josh Hutchinson: Only two witnesses appeared, quote, "and what was objected seemed to be of no great weight."
[00:37:10] Sarah Jack: The court cleared the three women by proclamation.
[00:37:14] Josh Hutchinson: The jury could not reach a verdict on Clawson or Disborough.
[00:37:18] Sarah Jack: Court sent to the General Court for advice.
[00:37:21] Josh Hutchinson: And sent the prisoners to jail.
[00:37:24] Sarah Jack: The court was dismissed until a response was received from the General Court.
[00:37:28] Josh Hutchinson: On October 13th, the General Court ordered a new court session to be held ASAP.
[00:37:34] Sarah Jack: Court reconvened on October 28th in Fairfield.
[00:37:40] Josh Hutchinson: Disborough was convicted. The court sent the jury to reconsider. They didn't change their verdict. The court accepted it, and the governor issued the death sentence.
[00:37:52] Sarah Jack: Clawson was acquitted. The court accepted this and agreed to release Clawson from jail upon payment of her jail fees.
[00:37:59] Josh Hutchinson: The court sought advice from the clergy.
[00:38:02] Sarah Jack: On October 17th, Joseph Eliot, Timothy Woodbridge, and unnamed others responded.
[00:38:08] Josh Hutchinson: They said the swimming test is unlawful evidence.
[00:38:13] Sarah Jack: Quote, "the unusual excrescences found upon their bodies ought not to be allowed as evidence against them without the approbation of some able physicians."
[00:38:21] Josh Hutchinson: They further said that Katharine Branch may have dissembled, and you can't trust spectral evidence, because it may be counterfeited by the devil, so she's not a reliable witness.
[00:38:32] Sarah Jack: Quote, "as to the other strange accidents as the dying of cattle, etc., we apprehend the applying of them to these women as matters of witchcraft to be upon very slender and uncertain grounds."
[00:38:43] Josh Hutchinson: Richard Holmes testified on October 27th in Norwalk before Thomas Fitch.
[00:38:50] Sarah Jack: Quote, "my mother [a midwife] told me that the report was true and that Elizabeth Clawson was not as other women were."
[00:38:57] Josh Hutchinson: John Finch testified on October 28th in Stamford that about a year ago, he had a difference with Elizabeth Clawson. Soon a child was ill for two weeks and died.
[00:39:09] Sarah Jack: On May 12th, 1693, magistrates Samuel Willis, William Pitkin, and Nathaniel Stanley issued a defense of the reprieve of Mrs. Mercy Disborough.
[00:39:17] Josh Hutchinson: For one thing, they had the authority to do so.
[00:39:21] Sarah Jack: They had their reasons to believe the death penalty was not appropriate for Disborough.
[00:39:26] Josh Hutchinson: The jury was altered between court sessions. Quote, "one man altered, the jury is altered."
[00:39:32] Sarah Jack: "We had a good account of the evidences given against her that none of them amounted to what Mr. Perkins, Mr. Bernard, and Mr. Mather, with others, state as sufficiently convictive of witchcraft."
[00:39:44] Josh Hutchinson: There was no confession.
[00:39:46] Sarah Jack: They did not have two good witnesses to prove works above the course of nature.
[00:39:51] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "as for the common things of spectral evidence, ill events after quarrels or threats, teats, water trials, and the like with suspicious words, they are all discarded and some of them abominated by the most judicious as to be convictive of witchcraft."
[00:40:09] Sarah Jack: Further, the witch-hunt in Salem proves these things are nothing but trouble and, quote, "will make hanging work apace."
[00:40:16] Josh Hutchinson: And at some point, Deputy Governor William Jones wrote out a document called "Grounds for Examination of a Witch," which we've previously read on this podcast in Connecticut witch Trials 101 Part One.
[00:40:32] Sarah Jack: Gershom Buckley later wrote a brief summary of what happened in 1692 saying, quote, "a time was appointed for execution, but upon motion, three of the Assistants of Hartford send down a reprieve, whereby the execution is suspended till next general court."
[00:40:47] Josh Hutchinson: In 1693, Hugh Crosia of Fairfield was accused of witchcraft after he claimed he had made a pact with Satan and sealed it with his blood. The indictment also referred to Crosia afflicting unspecified people.
[00:41:02] Sarah Jack: Crosia admitted in court that he had lied about the pact with the devil.
[00:41:06] Josh Hutchinson: On May 8th, the grand jury returned the indictment ignoramus, meaning there was not enough evidence to go to trial.
[00:41:14] Sarah Jack: Crosia was released upon payment of jail fees.
[00:41:17] Josh Hutchinson: Here's the story of accused witches from a founding family in Wallingford. The victims were Winifred Benham, Sr. and Winifred Benham, Jr. This family, like the Staples-Harvey family, included three generations of women targeted as witches in a direct line of descendants, as the mother of Winifred Sr., Mary Hale was tried as a witch in Boston, Massachusetts about a decade before.
[00:41:43] Sarah Jack: The genealogy story of Winifred Benham, Sr. has been confusing due due to the complexity around her name origins and the thin trail, her mother's marriages, and court case. We won't get into that today, because what we can know of the Benham women's link to mother Mary Hale is through court record statements and family connections through legal records.
[00:42:01] Josh Hutchinson: Winifred Benham, Sr. and Winifred, Jr. can likely be linked as the daughter and granddaughter of accused Boston witch Mary Hale. By looking at court records, Winifred Sr. and Mary Hale both gave their testimonies in a deposition in a 1656 lawsuit for Hugh Williams. This is pieced together in the July 2007 American Genealogists article called "Origin of Accused Witch Mary Williams King Hale of Boston and Her Brothers Hugh, John, and Possibly Nathaniel Williams" by Michael J. LeClerc and D. Brenton Simons.
[00:42:38] Sarah Jack: In their depositions, Mary refers to, quote, "her brother's house," and Winifred refers to, quote, "her uncle's house" in the lawsuit naming Hugh Williams as the brother and uncle. The article goes on to explain how record evidence connects the Williams brothers together and to Mary Hale and Winifred Benham, Sr. The article further establishes this link with trial records from the 1680/81 witchcraft case of Mary Hale, wherein she identifies Winifred's daughter, Joanna Benham, born 1662, as her granddaughter, as well as a deposition from Joanna in the case where she identifies herself as Mary Hale's granddaughter.
[00:43:13] Josh Hutchinson: Witchcraft charges against Mary Hale in February and March 1681 stemmed from the suspicious death of Michael Smith, a mariner who had formerly lodged at Mary Hale's house and who had attempted to court her granddaughter, Joanna Benham. Smith claimed shortly before his death that Mary had bewitched him while he was at the Isles of Shoals and at Bilboa and further that in a separate incident, she transported him to Dorchester, where he encountered a coven of witches.
[00:43:44] Sarah Jack: After his courtship with Joanna failed, Smith began seeing another young woman named Margaret Ellis of Boston, who became one of the chief accusers against Mary Hale when the mariner died under strange circumstances. According to the article, among the unusual witchcraft evidence used against Mary was a test using a bottle containing Smith's urine. When the bottle was stopped, Mary moved to and fro in an agitated manner throughout the house. When it was unstopped, her movement ceased. It is unclear whether Mary Hale was convicted because no further records have been identified yet. We have no record of her life after this. We do not know when or where she died.
[00:44:21] Josh Hutchinson: Mary Hale's daughter and granddaughter, Winifred Benham, Sr. and Jr. were also destined to endure witchcraft charges.
[00:44:30] Sarah Jack: Winifred Sr. had moved with her husband, Joseph, in 1670, Wallingford, Connecticut, before her mother Mary Hale's trial. Joseph Benham, like his father, John Benham, was one of the 37 founders of Wallingford. We know what land the Benham men held in Wallingford and that they had meeting house seat assignments in Wallingford, as well.
[00:44:48] Josh Hutchinson: Legal troubles for the family began in 1691, when Joseph Benham was tried for describing the selectman of Wallingford as quote, "no more fit for townsmen than dogs." In the following year, he threatened a neighbor, Goody Parker, with his gun for casting aspersions witchcraft upon Winifred. Joseph had already had his mother-in-law and daughter Joanna embroiled in a witchcraft trial in Boston
[00:45:16] In 1692, several townsfolk, such as Hannah Parker, Deacon Hall, and Anna Street, approached Reverend Samuel Street for guidance and together reported a formal complaint against Winifred Benham to the county court. Winifred Sr. was charged at the New Haven County Court for witchcraft, but the court found insufficient grounds to convict her.
[00:45:38] Sarah Jack: It appears she pleaded innocent and did not implicate others as witches. She was released with the warning that more suspicion would bring more charges. It is believed that in June of 1693 there was further examination about witchcraft, but we currently have no record.
[00:45:52] Josh Hutchinson: In 1697, Winifred Benham, Sr. was accused of witchcraft again, this time, along with her 12 or 13 year old daughter, Winifred Benham Jr. Winifred Sr. and Winifred Jr. were sent by local officials to high court for witchcraft charges to the Superior Court in Hartford.
[00:46:10] Sarah Jack: With no further witch trial cases on record, this leaves the Winifreds as the last two accused witches sent by local officials to a higher court in the New England colonies.
[00:46:19] Josh Hutchinson: The court records indicate that present were Robert Treat, Esq., Governor; William Jones, Esq., Deputy Governor; and Major Moses Mansfield, Assistant.
[00:46:31] Sarah Jack: The accusers represented at this trial were Ebenezer Clark, Joseph Royse, and John Moss, Jr.
[00:46:37] Josh Hutchinson: They testified that Sarah Clark, daughter of Ebenezer Clark, John Moss III, son of John Moss, Jr., and Elizabeth Lathrop, were physically harmed by the apparitions and witchcraft of Winifred Benham, Sr. and Winifred Benham, Jr. or by the devil in their shapes. Joseph Benham was ordered to pay 21 pounds for their appearance and for them to be jailed until the next convening of the court in October.
[00:47:04] Sarah Jack: On October 7th, 1697, the court of assizes met in Hartford, and prosecutor Daniel Clark argued that Winifred Benham, Sr. and Winifred Benham, Jr. of Wallingford had made dealings with Satan and, through this relationship, had been causing mischief around the town of Wallingford, hurting numerous people and disturbing the peace. They were also accused of causing the death of a baby.
[00:47:24] Josh Hutchinson: More details on the Winifred Benham, Sr. witch trial saga appear in the writing of Robert Calef in his More Wonders of the Invisible World. He reported that she was searched for teats and water tested. This is where it is stated that the Winifreds were acquitted in the 1697 trial and fled to New York.
[00:47:44] Sarah Jack: Like her mother, we lose the trail of Winifred Benham, Sr. We do not know when or where she died or when or where she is buried.
[00:47:51] Josh Hutchinson: John Benham, son of Winifred Sr. and Joseph Sr. was a resident of Kings County, New York, and two of the Benham daughters, Anna and Sarah were then living in Richmond. In the records of the Dutch Church on Staten Island, it states that Anna Benham and her husband, Lambert Johnson, had a daughter with the namesake, Winifred, who was baptized in 1696. As this family was already on Staten Island, Winifred Benham Sr. may have fled here, as Calef reported.
[00:48:25] Sarah Jack: More than one granddaughter was named Winifred after the Benham Winifreds. I'm a descendant of Winifred Sr. through her son Joseph, Jr. I have been contacted by several descendants in the past year looking for more information on how she's being remembered by the community, including one descending line that had passed down the oral history of Winifred Sr. being an accused witch. This was passed down to the current living generation, all the way down to living grandsons. That is touching.
[00:48:52] This past March 1st, at the Judiciary Committee hearing on HJ 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut, I gave in person testimony as a descendant. It was an unexplainable, proud experience to be able to give testimony in support of a state exoneration for my accused witch ancestor. The state representative representing Wallingford, along with others, voted no against the resolution at the judiciary hearing. But support for HJ 34 kept growing, and legislators representing Wallingford later voted yes in the House and Senate.
[00:49:23] After an amendment to the resolution in the House ,State Representative Craig Fishbein did change his original stance against the resolution. And after voting no on March 1st, he voted yes on May 10th, that accused witches Winifred Benham, Sr. and Winifred Benham, Jr., women of a founding family from his district did deserve an apology for what happened to them.
[00:49:43] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for that, Sarah. Your testimony was excellent.
[00:49:48] Sarah Jack: Sarah Clother and Goodwife Brown were accused of witchcraft by Bethia Taylor of Colchester in 1713. Taylor withdrew the charge and apologized in public.
[00:49:57] Josh Hutchinson: Sarah Spencer was accused of bewitching her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Ackley in 1724, Spencer sued Ackley for 500 pounds damages for defamation and won five pounds.
[00:50:11] Sarah Jack: In 1742, Elizabeth Gold of Guilford sued Benjamin Chittenden for 500 pounds for defamation. The court found for the defendant, Chittenden, due to an insufficient declaration by the plaintiff, Gold.
[00:50:23] And now Mary Bingham is back with another great Minute with Mary.
[00:50:28] Mary Bingham: May 25th, 2023, the day when those accused, convicted, and hanged for the capitol crime of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut were finally cleared. This is the day I will never forget. The first order of business for me was to travel the two hours south to Hartford from my hometown in New Hampshire and arrive by 11:00 AM. All I wanted was to be with the people, my people, who worked tirelessly since May 26th of 2022 to secure justice for these victims who lived over three centuries ago. They lived in our hearts in an indescribable way that day.
[00:51:11] Not knowing the city of Hartford, I wound up parking at the Old State House, thinking it was close to the capitol. Wrong. I ran 15 minutes clear across town in sandals that would've no doubt twisted a smaller ankle than mine, and I almost fell into a sinkhole, as I rushed across the further side of Bushnell Park.
[00:51:34] When I entered the capitol, after going through security and then ascending four floors to the gallery, I was never so happy to greet my fellow team members with warm hugs and smiles. Then the wait for final passage of our bill, HJ 34, began. We weren't sure how long that would be before the bill came before the Senate, early in the afternoon or closer to midnight, so we listened to some of the other important bills presented that day, went for lunch in the cafeteria, hung outside the gallery and talked, and then went downstairs for ice cream.
[00:52:14] At 4:30, some of us were still downstairs when the urgent text came through that our bill was now before the Senate. We ran up four flights of stairs in record time for the final time that afternoon. When I took my seat, I felt like everything was surreal. I listened as the senators spoke for well over an hour. Final passage of this bill meant so much to us, the descendants, those who still suffer brutally as a result of active witch hunts today, as well as those who risk their lives advocating for the modern day victims. We knew from firsthand knowledge that other countries watched to see what the state of Connecticut would do. At about 6:00 PM Eastern Time, the bill passed. Connecticut had corrected the historical record for the world to see.
[00:53:09] What joy and exhilaration I felt, as tears of relief fell from my eyes for about 10 minutes straight. I was so grateful to finally meet and thank in person State Representative Jane Garibay and State Senator Dr. Saud Anwar, who were workhorses on behalf of this bill. Then I got my private wishes, to celebrate with my team members over good food and a nice glass of wine.
[00:53:36] The following day, I realized my ultimate dream, when I knelt down and ran my fingers through the earth where both Alice Young and Lydia Gilbert lived and walked. Another most wonderful part of this journey, to meet people who have not only become friends, but who have become my family. We will always have this shared historical experience that is special to us. Sarah, Josh, Beth, and Tony, thank you for making it special.
[00:54:05] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[00:54:07] Josh Hutchinson: And here's Sarah with End. Witch Hunts News.
[00:54:11] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News.
[00:54:14] Quote, "the world redeemed from superstition's sway is breathing freer for thy sake today," by John Greenleaf Whittier, a Quaker poet. These are the last lines of the memorial poem on the Rebecca Nurse Monument at her homestead museum. Breathing freer for thy sake today. The power of breathing is life. Life is powered by breath, inhaled and exhaled from our lungs. Draw it in with me.
[00:54:41] This breath saturated the moments of the witch trials of the 17th century American colonies. Breath was huffed and panted in affliction. Breath was held and paused in fear. Fleeting breaths, wheezed and gasped. Breath was crushed from lungs with weight, breath choked and spit as it condemned. The last breathed words hung from the gallows. The last gasp. The dying breath delivered the final twitch. Then the hunt ran out of air and these Hunts ceased.
[00:55:09] Now let's exhale with easy resting breath. Rebecca and her fellow persecuted accused witches are at rest. They've been acknowledged by their descendants and society, are memorialized through education, monuments, ceremonies, family societies, media, the arts, books, poems, photographs, podcasts, and conversations between us all, all over the world.
[00:55:34] But reality is the world is not free to breathe redeemed from superstitions. Witch hunts truly continue. The vulnerable who are hunted are holding their breath in fear, and we who are not hunted must continue to use our breath to teach. Now I'm going to breathe down your neck about ending witch hunts. The witch hunts of today are more than a remnant of witch trials and witch hunts past. Like before, women, men, and children are blamed for misfortune and curses. They are unjustly punished. They're still using their breath to plead, to plead their innocence. They do not want to suffer. We must keep working to make people aware that witch hunts are not the result of superstition and hysteria, but rather a natural human reaction to pressure and strife, an impulse we must understand in order to control .
[00:56:19] The same factors which led to Salem are present today. They're always multiple factors that are repeatedly found in combination. Single bullet theories ignore the human fear of the Other that is behind it all. Vocal advocates in countries gripped by witch hunts are asking us for acknowledgement and support. Listen to them and talk about what they are telling us. Join them as they wish to memorialize and remember their victims. Accused witch memorialization and remembrance helps us grieve, and it connects us with ancestors, modern victims, and all fellow human beings who suffer this injustice. It teaches us to make things right when we can, to keep working for a world safe from witch hunts against the vulnerable. Continue to expand the remembrance of witch trial victims in your community's history and of all witch-hunt victims. Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast supports the efforts to end witch hunts. You can learn more by visiting our websites and the websites listed in our show notes for more information about country-specific advocacy groups.
[00:57:15] Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop, merch from our Zazzle shop, or make a financial contribution to our organization. Our links are in the show description.
[00:57:27] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that excellent report.
[00:57:30] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:57:32] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast
[00:57:36] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:57:39] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.
[00:57:42] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com
[00:57:45] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[00:57:47] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:57:53] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:57:56]

June 15, 2023

Dan Gagnon on Salem Witch Trials Victim George Jacobs, Sr.

A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse by Daniel A. Gagnon

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Show Notes

Welcome back local historian Dan Gagnon, who brings us the unexpected journey of Salem Witch Trial victim George Jacobs Sr., one of the men executed for witchcraft on August 19, 1692. We discuss the complicated trauma and experiences of the many members of the Jacobs household involved in the trials. Learn about the fascinating travels of George Jacob Sr’s remains. Where did his bones rest across the centuries and why were they being moved? We address the importance of victim memorials and exonerations of innocent accused witches by contrasting the way Rebecca Nurse has been remembered to the way George Jabob Sr was set aside. The Rebecca Nurse Homestead history is discussed, and this part of the conversation will be meaningful to descendants. This discussion communicates End Witch Hunts’ message: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Skeletons in the Closet: How the Actions of the Salem Witch Trial Victims’ Families in 1692 Affected Later Memorialization, by Daniel A. Gagnon, New England Journal of History

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Transcript

[00:00:00]
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:26] Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we speak again with author Dan Gagnon, who wrote the article "Skeletons in the Closet: How the Actions of the Salem Witch Trials Victims' Families in 1692 Affected Later Memorialization", which was published in the New England Journal of History in 2019. And we'll be talking to him about George Jacobs, Sr., the oldest Salem Witch Trials victim. We'll talk about how his family got caught up in the witch trials and how disruptive that was.
[00:01:03] Sarah Jack: It was really interesting to hear how when faced with charges, the different family members responded.
[00:01:10] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, that was very interesting. They all have different reactions that we will get into later, but you have the whole fight or flight or freeze response, and you get all three answers when they come for the Jacobs family.
[00:01:30] Sarah Jack: I enjoyed this look at the afflicted girls. It's the older afflicted young women, and how greatly their accusations stuck.
[00:01:45] Josh Hutchinson: We'll get into how weak the evidence was and how heavily it depended upon the testimony of these girls and young women and other afflicted persons.
[00:01:59] Sarah Jack: We talk a little bit about the jail time and the execution on August 19th, 1692.
[00:02:08] Josh Hutchinson: We'll talk about who else was hanged on that date and what other events unfolded.
[00:02:16] Sarah Jack: George is highlighted in this article by Dan, because of the stark contrast between his burial and memorialization compared to someone like Rebecca Nurse's burial and memorialization.
[00:02:31] Josh Hutchinson: We'll ask why some people received physical displays of their family's memory while others were kept in their family's hearts alone. And we'll learn about the history of how all that unfolded and how he finally received some recognition.
[00:02:56] Sarah Jack: It's thought-provoking in regards to how different families have responded to the witch trial history over the years and how that plays into the remembrance of the victims, as well.
[00:03:13] Josh Hutchinson: And I don't think any of that should reflect on George Jacobs, Sr. himself. I always find him to be a heroic figure in the witch trials, one of those several people who stood against the charges against him, and he delivered some of the best lines of the witch trials in the face of the questions from the magistrates while the afflicted girls were putting on a spectacle around him.
[00:03:47] Sarah Jack: Another indication that he's someone who is a hero is even though some of his family members might have had some disappointing responses that greatly impact the outcome of his trial, you find that he made decisions in the end with his will that were favorable for his family.
[00:04:07] Josh Hutchinson: He made sure that they were going to be provided for in the future.
[00:04:12] Sarah Jack: I thought it was really good that Dan points out that these people who are facing death are still dictating their wishes on the handing down of their property and personal artifacts. They have that power left. That power, you know, is a statement.
[00:04:32] And now welcome back Dan Gagnon, local historian and author of A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse. Let's take a journey with Dan to the George Jacobs, Sr. witch trial of 1692 and on the journey of his restless bones that finally found peace centuries later.
[00:04:54] Dan Gagnon: So with the 1692 Salem Witch-Hunt, the era of memorialization takes place much later, really doesn't start till 200 years later, just about. The first memorial dedicated to one of the victims of the witch-hunt is the memorial to Rebecca nurse in 1885. Then in 1892, the 200th anniversary, right next to the 1885 Memorial in Nurse Family Cemetery, there's a monument constructed to those who defended Rebecca Nurse in 1692.
[00:05:33] Then after that, the next era of physical memorialization doesn't happen till 1992. In 1992 in March, the Salem Village Memorial on Hobart Street in Danvers is dedicated with the names of all of those who are killed in 1692. And it's placed right across from where the original Salem Village meeting house would've been. And then that summer of 1992, the City of Salem dedicates a memorial in kind of an empty lot in downtown Salem. Then most recently, not till 2017, on the 325th anniversary, the City of Salem dedicates a memorial near Proctor's Ledge in Salem, which is about the area where we believe the hangings probably took place.
[00:06:22] Josh Hutchinson: Great. I don't know if you've noticed, but my name is on that 1892 Memorial. It has Joseph Hutchinson, but it spells it J O S apostrophe H. So it looks like Josh. That's what got me into this whole thing, was my first visit there. I saw my own name and was like, "wow, Josh Hutchinson defended Rebecca Nurse. That's awesome."
[00:06:48] Dan Gagnon: Oh, that's cool.
[00:06:50] Josh Hutchinson: So that's how I got into it. And then I think the the 1992 Danvers Memorial might be on Hutchinson land, originally, Joseph's land across from the meeting house. He donated the land for the meeting house.
[00:07:08] Dan Gagnon: Yeah. Yeah, so definitely across the street and probably the other side of the street, too, where the memorial is.
[00:07:15] Josh Hutchinson: That's what I think just looking at the Marilynne Roach map, I got that impression. So at least to me it's on Hutchinson land, and that's my ancestor.
[00:07:26] Dan Gagnon: All good.
[00:07:27] Josh Hutchinson: That's how I got into all this stuff. But going on to the next question, you mentioned that there is a memorial for Rebecca Nurse. Why is there not a memorial or was there not originally placed a memorial for George Jacobs, Sr.?
[00:07:46] Dan Gagnon: So with George Jacobs, I always thought this was an interesting case. It's in a way maybe most interesting for what happens after he dies, after he's killed in 1692, but he is not remembered until March of 1992 when the Salem Village Memorial includes everybody's name. That's the first time that he has his name carved on any stone in his memory. Now, in terms of the reason for this, when I examined his case, the, I guess the foil of a case was I saw Rebecca Nurse as she's the first memorialized. He is not memorialized for 300 years and trying to figure out the difference.
[00:08:38] What I had come across is really, it's not through any fault of their own. They're both accused. They both say that they're innocent. They're both found guilty and executed anyway. They even have like similar language. Rebecca Nurse says she's as innocent as the child unborn. He says, "I'm as innocent as the child born tonight." It's so similar. They're both similarly old members of the community, but the only difference that could cause this seems to be their family members. With Rebecca Nurse, the Nurse family does really the greatest job out of the families of anybody accused in standing up for her, in defending her, collecting evidence, not giving up, all the way towards even after she's found guilty, trying to lobby the governor, and then after the trials are over, about two decades later, lobbying the province of Massachusetts to try to clear their names. They do everything that they can.
[00:09:37] In contrast, Jacobs family does not. With Jacobs, we have the twist where his own granddaughter essentially turns sides, testifies against him. We have that. There are other members of the Jacobs family accused, and that makes it a lot messier to remember.
[00:09:59] Sarah Jack: I was doing some digging around online trying to learn what is out there about George? What do people say about him? And I saw. That there appeared to have been a photo of possibly his home at one point. Do you know what happened to his house, if that was his home when it was destructed?
[00:10:19] Dan Gagnon: Yeah, we do have photographs of it. Some of the photographs come from the era of the New Deal as part of Roosevelt's New Deal Projects is the Historic American Building Survey that thoroughly documents the house, photographs the inside, the outside and such. The house at some point, which is fortunate that they documented it, cuz in the 1930s, it is struck by lightning and burns down, and just a hulk remains. And then in, I believe it's 1940, it was as close as I could get to the date of when it actually was taken down, it's removed then.
[00:10:57] Josh Hutchinson: Wow. That's really tragic how that ended, because it stood there for so many hundreds of years, 250 years past the trials, it's finally being torn down. But so fortunate that there are photographs, and you can see what it looked like and get a sense of how that property was. So regarding George Jacobs, where was he first buried?
[00:11:24] Dan Gagnon: So with Jacobs, he is one of the few victims of the witch-hunt that we believe, or in his case, we have much more conclusive proof, was buried by his family after his execution. The others that have strong claims to this are Rebecca Nurse, John Proctor, Jacobs, and there's some theories for probably a couple others.
[00:11:50] It's believed that Jacobs is reburied on his farm. Now, his farm was in the very top of what was considered the Northfields in Salem. He actually lived on the farm next door to the one that Rebecca Nurse grew up on. They didn't live there at the same time, like he bought it after she, her family moved away, or she at least moved away. So that's an interesting coincidence. And so today it's in Danversport, part of Danvers, and it's right along the border with the city of Peabody. His farm basically like was the line?
[00:12:26] Sarah Jack: Wow. And what caused them to exhume those bones, his likely body?
[00:12:34] Dan Gagnon: So with his body, it was buried there towards the corner of his fields, and when it's buried, he doesn't get a headstone or anything with his name like that. It's just known that at this corner of the field is where they'd put him. And the family remembers this. It's not a secret. It's known that that was the case, not just by the family, but by the neighborhood, which we'll see evidence for that in a second, and just ignored. He's not buried next to a family member or in a family cemetery. It's just him alone stuck in the corner.
[00:13:12] He will be exhumed now the first time in 1854. He will be exhumed twice, and each time is weird in a different kind of way. The first time, so in 1854, his family sells that field to another guy. This person had heard that George Jacobs might be buried in this field, and as he's buying the land, he kinda wanted to see if it was true. So he digs him up. They find bones, they mention like hair, like real parts of him there. And what they do is they put him back in like, all right, he's here, and then they put him back.
[00:14:00] This, however, becomes really big news far outside of Danvers and Salem. It's reported in newspapers as far south as Virginia. It's, again, it's no secret. It's front page news, really across the country that they found one of the Salem witches, and somewhere along the line, it seems to be here, but allegedly they took a finger out and they put it in a glass bottle. This is kept by a person in Danversport who's an antiquarian, a local historian, Samuel Fowler and his family, and he keeps it, his, a brick house at the port corner in Danversport. A very nice house. It was owned by Historic New England for a while. It's very nice. And it was just kept. It had been claimed that they had somehow found this bones in the 1780s, but there's no record of it ever being exhumed in the 1780s. So it must have been here in 1854. That just seems to be the case. And, but other than that, he's reburied and he'll be left for about a hundred years.
[00:15:17] Josh Hutchinson: And then he was exhumed a second time.
[00:15:20] Dan Gagnon: Yes. So this time is an accident, whereas the first time was on purpose. The second time with his house having burned down, fallen apart and his farm open, the farm will be subdivided. And what happens is in the 1950s, they're bulldozing, flattening the land, dividing into house lots like it is today. There's the roads Jacobs Way, Jacobs Landing, and others. But those two are named after him, at least. What happens is while they're bulldozing, they find bones. They stop, of course, and try to figure out what's going on. They know that this is just at about a farm, it's not a cemetery. And by that point in time, they've forgotten about old George Jacobs.
[00:16:10] So what happens next is a little bizarre and confusing, but really what it stems from is if you put yourself in this position in the 1950s, like what the heck are they gonna do with him? There's no family that like comes to claim him 300 years, almost later. There's, can you prove at that point that it's him. Can you prove that it's not? It's just a lot of mystery. What happens is he'll be turned over essentially to a cemetery in town. It's not owned by the town, but it's associated. It's its own corporation, and they just keep 'em in a box in this granite building, which is where in the old days you'd have to keep a body when you couldn't dig a grave with the frozen ground. It's the winter. The building where they would store remains.
[00:17:10] It ends up in a couple different places. It was given to a local lawyer, Steven Weston, who was involved in purchasing Endicott Park which is actually a lot of land that was part of Salem Village that's now preserved as a park. It had been farmland. It's now a town of Danvers Park. He kept it as a lawyer, interested in historic preservation. He was trying to figure out what to do with this. And I apparently never really came to a conclusion. He had a fancy house. And as it goes, his housekeeper eventually is fed up and threatens to quit because she's dusting around the box with a human body in it, in his dining room.
[00:17:50] And so that's when he is actually the one who gives it to that cemetery to keep in the winter storage building. It's there for years, and then it will be taken out late 1960s and by another local historic preservationist who had heard it was there. You just heard a rumor, asked the cemetery people, "can I go see the box?" And they say, "sure." And then they said, "we don't want it, do you?" And he said, "sure." Trying to figure out keep it until there's a way to resolve this, but it's not gonna be resolved in the 1960s, seventies, or eighties. And it really isn't resolved until 1992.
[00:18:30] In the meantime, he's just in a box. It's even displayed a couple times. My favorite one, since I went to school there, is it ends up in the Danvers High School cafeteria at one point. The Danvers Historical Society used to have like a community antique sale, essentially. And when they would do this, they'd always have a table of exhibits, as well, so you know bring people in.
[00:18:57] And so he, him in a glass box, was on the table of exhibits, along with John Hathorne's notebooks that were borrowed from the Essex Institute, alleged George Jacobs' canes that were also the property of the Essex Institute. So interesting display table. But it's odd. He then he ends up in the Danvers archives for a while, just in a box on the shelf. While he is there, is the first time they really try to confirm, like, the identity of the remains. It's still difficult to go through and document, because you can imagine that those who had it at the time were you know concerned about this, were genuinely trying to do the right thing here and rebury him somehow, but it is a little weird. So they get a a pathologist from one of the Boston hospitals to come and look at his bones and examine them. Even here, there's no signed written report. There's a tape. It was said into a tape recorder, the doctor's examinations. So there's not a paper trail.
[00:20:04] And what he said was that, from the historical evidence that he had been given ahead of time and then his examination of the bones, that it does seem to be Jacobs, that it's an elderly man. We think Jacobs was in his early eighties. There's one record of somebody named George Jacobs being born in 1609. Many historians think that's a record for our George Jacobs. This is tough to pinpoint, but we know that he was quite old, so was an old man. He suffered terrible arthritis in his legs. We know George Jacobs had to walk with two canes, so that seems to fit.
[00:20:45] They knew it was a European man. Weird for the settlers from Europe to have just buried one person alone. That's not really typical. It's not a Native American burial from that time period or anything such as that. And so just really by eliminating variables, it seems quite credibly that it's probably him, especially with the documented family tradition that he was always there and then they found him right there.
[00:21:13] What ends up happening in the end is this is, unfortunately before DNA tests really, or anything like that, and they never as part of this examined or compared it to the bones in the bottle at the Essex Institute, now the Peabody Essex Museum. That on one hand is a missed opportunity, but on the other hand, without DNA testing, like how could you have ever actually compared them? There's really no, what could you have done?
[00:21:48] So in the end, he's buried in 1992 at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead Cemetery. He has no family connection despite the Nurse Family Cemetery. The main reason for that is simply it was the only place they believed another victim of the witch-hunt was buried. It's always been thought Rebecca Nurse was buried there. Makes sense, therefore, to put him there. The volunteers at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead had, were those who were working to try to resolve this weird situation. And so of course, we're willing to do this with the help of others in the community, and so that seemed to make the most sense.
[00:22:26] With his burial, as you can probably imagine it. What would be proper? How, what service would you have? These were all really significant and complicated questions. This event was done not a hundred percent publicly. There was one part that there was a service of burial, and then he's buried in August of 1992. Then there was a like kind of remembrance ceremony that August that was published as one of the events for the tercentennial of the witch trials.
[00:23:04] With his burial, it was done by a minister at the Baptist church in Danversport. Now you might think, all right if he's a Puritan, why would you get the guy from the Baptist church? They didn't really like each other back then. That's not what you'd expect. All of his descendants had attended that church. So it seems to fit. Some of his descendants had been deacons in the church. One of 'em, my great-grandfather worked for one of the Jacobs on the farm in the early 1900s, the one who was one of the deacons there. He just worked as a farmhand for Jacobs, can't tell you which generation that was. So yeah, they had the minister from that church, who was willing, cuz he had known or think he knew the family's association. So that was the kind of service that they held.
[00:23:55] Josh Hutchinson: On the other hand, Rebecca Nurse, when she's buried on her homestead, she's left alone. They don't dig her up. They don't put her in a box.
[00:24:07] Dan Gagnon: Yeah. It's just assumed that she's there, the oldest being under just plain field stone rocks. Nobody has ever, in the sense of like DNA testing or anything? No. That grave has never been disturbed and won't be. It's just somewhere there. That's the question that people often ask who visit the Nurse house is like, "why haven't you started digging people up and DNA testing?" I was like that's very not respectful of a cemetery. And so the only reason that Jacobs has this examination opportunity is really because he wound up dug up by accident.
[00:24:43] Josh Hutchinson: I just wondered because with the memorials, Rebecca gets very different treatment than George, and then it seems like, the body itself is, it's respected and left alone.
[00:24:57] Dan Gagnon: Yeah, with their memorials, you're right to point to that. Whereas Nurse in the middle of the cemetery, again, not necessarily on top of her grave, but just the middle of the cemetery has that wonderful obilisk made outta Rockport granite. It's carved, it has a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. It is really the height of remembrance. With Jacobs, that was another question they had in 1992 is, if you bury him, how are you gonna mark it? And what they do is they have a simple, it's a reproduction of what a 1690s slate gravestone would've been. To see examples of those, the burial ground in downtown Salem is a good example of other stones such as that. They're pretty simple. It really just has his name and dates and a little skull symbol at the top, which was typical of that time. But it is very simple and in comparison. Yeah. So still now there's this kind of continuing disparity, but in a way, Jacobs is the one who actually got the most typical final resting place with a service and a typical headstone.
[00:26:08] Sarah Jack: Yeah, it's interesting. Neither of their stories died. His just has been carried on by these strange circumstances around his body and land. It's very interesting, and thank you for going through that very interesting, I better come up with a better word, timeline of how it was, his resting place was considered, what do we do? What else would be special about the Rebecca Nurse Homestead burial grounds?
[00:26:44] Dan Gagnon: So being one of our earliest cemeteries around, it's significant cuz we believe it as the grave Nurse, it's the site of that first memorialization of the victims of the witch-hunt. And again, it is really significant. They later put up that monument to those who signed the petition for her. That's another aspect that really hasn't gotten its fair shake at remembrance. That's the only example of that.
[00:27:10] But the cemetery continues to be important with later generations. We assume that her husband is also buried in there, some of her sons, her son-in-law, John Tarbell, who plays a role in the witch-hunt, is buried there, as well as his son, also John Tarbell, is buried there. When we get to the American Revolution, we have Rebecca and Francis' great-grandson, also named Francis Nurse, answers the call that they've elected to Concord with the Danvers militia to go fight against the British soldiers. We have other graves in there of those who fought in the revolution, either the Nurse family connection or when they're extended family cousins, a branch of the Putnam family, buy it. Some of those were the revolutionary generation. And the last burial there, other than George Jacobs, the last regular burial is in the 1920s, so it continued to be in use for quite a while.
[00:28:10] Sarah Jack: When I recently visited the Homestead for the first time, the day of Dr. Leo's talk, getting to walk through the field out to the burial ground was very moving to me. Cuz I felt like here, here I am middle age, I've known about her since I was a teenager. I'm finally getting out here, and then getting to just walk the path where many other people who have memorialized her have walked, where family members, community members, the Nurses walked, it was really moving, and it was spring, and there were lily of the valley. I just was, that was a really wonderful experience to add onto, actually, I'm getting to go over to these beautiful monuments, and they are really beautiful, and it's been taken care of so well, and the trees are so grand. I, I love right now that they have these magnificent trees looking over everything, too.
[00:29:08] Dan Gagnon: And with that cemetery, those trees, the giant, really tall pine trees are there in 1885 when they dedicate that memorial to nurse and they're already like medium sized trees at that point. So they are much older than that. I can't really guess how old, but they're quite old. And with the cemetery, it was recently restored by the Rebecca nurse Homestead. There were some stones that had broken and fallen. Some were barely legible, and there were some stones that were missing. When the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, the current museum, it's owned by the Danvers Alarm List Company, the nonprofit group of Revolutionary War reenactors, they had purchased or started leasing and then purchased starting in the late 1970s around the bicentennial and purchased it in 81.
[00:30:02] They purchased it from Historic New England, who was putting it up like open market for sale, which was worrying and dangerous. It had been bought in 1909, originally, to be preserved. And when the Alarm List took over in the seventies, in one of the outbuildings, they just found a bunch of headstones, didn't know where they went.
[00:30:27] And so that was done really like during the pandemic, those two summers, working with Epoch Preservation that works in like historic cemeteries in Ipswich, historic cemeteries in Salem, real experts. And I had gone to Richard Trask at the Danvers Archives to see what the oldest photos he had of the cemetery, and we could match up the shape of the stones with the picture and then check, okay, that one seems to go there. Oh, and that person is a husband and wife. So that probably goes there and matched through both family evidence, the picture evidence. We have some surprisingly old photos of that cemetery from the late 1800s. And so we were able to piece together every stone we had where it belonged. So it is the most complete that it has been in like almost a hundred years, since, at least the early 1900s.
[00:31:20] Josh Hutchinson: That is remarkable. Now I want to turn to get a little background on George Jacobs, Sr. Do we know much about his early life? Do we know where he was born or when he came to New England?
[00:31:35] Dan Gagnon: So we have very sparse details. It's interesting with those involved in the Salem Witch-hunt, how the, their background information, the depth of it that's known today radically varies. With Jacobs, we believe he was born in 1609. That's the date that historians have typically gotten back to, which would make him 83 in 1692. He is the first generation to come over, like Rebecca Nurse, though he is a dozen years older that he was born in England. The 1609 date, there's a record of somebody of that name being baptized in West London. So one assumes from that area. We don't know exactly why his family comes over, but with all those early settlers, it's really puritanism. It's their religion. They're being persecuted in England. They wanna come to Massachusetts to establish their own society and be Puritans, and George Jacobs from his statements in the witch-hunt, clearly that is very important to him. So I would point to that as the main reason.
[00:32:47] Sarah Jack: And what kind of work did he do?
[00:32:50] Dan Gagnon: So Jacobs, he has a farm in the Northfields area, which at that point in time that was all entirely farmland. You had to take a ferry across the North River from downtown Salem, and then there's one main road, and it's just farms, fields, stretching out from there. I can't tell you exactly what crops he grew. Really, all of those farms had a variety. With the farm, the previous owner, Waters, Richard Waters, who it's now Water Street and it's the Waters River after him, so Waters was the one that was Rebecca Nurse's neighbor, and at that point in time, Waters raised cows. So there is the potential for that, as well, but most of it was just purely like growing crops on those farms.
[00:33:40] Josh Hutchinson: And what do we know about his family?
[00:33:45] Dan Gagnon: His family is interesting, which plays into kind of how they end up intentionally, unintentionally, a whole variety, really fragmented when the witch-hunt breaks out. We know that he lives there. His son, George Jacobs Jr., will live there. His son's wife, Rebecca Jacobs, lives there, and his granddaughter Margaret, we think among others. Those are the ones that will play a role in the witch-hunt elsewhere. He has a daughter, Ann Andrews, who lives elsewhere in Salem Village at that point in time. So he has family around. Near him there's several, which again, I would see as a similarity to Nurse. It's not quite as big, but the idea that you have a couple generations right nearby.
[00:34:35] Sarah Jack: And he mentioned in his examination that he was unable to read, when they were asking him about praying with his family. Is it unusual that at that time he was not a reader, owning land and not reading?
[00:34:51] Dan Gagnon: It's interesting. With so many of the Puritan men, that is important to them as it's, they believe, necessary for each person to read the Bible. Massachusetts is really, at that point in time, the most literate place on earth when it's the Puritans, because they wanted everybody to at least have a basic understanding of reading the Bible. With my own research, looking into different cases in the witch-hunt, he is the only one who seems to admit that, that I've ever come across, at least in, in my travels here. By contrast, there are women who might not know if they could read or not, but we know that they couldn't write, and they had other people sign for them and things such as that. So that is interesting.
[00:35:48] If he had been his son's generation, it would be very striking. Him being one of the oldest in town and knowing in England the literacy rate was way lower kinda explains it, but no, one would've thought that in his 83 years in that type of a society, that one would've picked that up, knowing that like religious importance angle. So it is a little surprising just given that one specific time and place.
[00:36:23] Josh Hutchinson: Why is it important to talk about George Jacob, Sr.?
[00:36:27] Dan Gagnon: Jacobs' case is one that we see with all of them. We have innocent people that are convicted and killed, and his somehow is all the more powerful, because his granddaughter turns against him. And as part of that saga, you see firsthand how flimsy the accusations are. This reveals it, I think, in a way that other cases don't.
[00:36:58] With Jacobs, he's accused by Sarah Churchill, who was hired servant of his in his household along with then Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam Jr., Abigail Williams. And in terms of where he falls in the timeline, there's the first accusations. The first the afflicted begin to be afflicted late winter and then into February. They'll be the first accusations into March. His hearing is May 11th. So he's past kind of that first phase.
[00:37:35] With his case, it's interesting, because he's accused, and his granddaughter is accused simultaneously here, and they have hearings on the same day. They're hearings that appears that they're literally back to back, because we know that George Jacobs is in the next room during his granddaughter's hearing or just outside the door. So we think that they were back to back.
[00:38:01] Now, the accusation against him is, he's a, quote, "dreadful wizard," which appears in several of the testimony against him. That is probably one of those phrases that Thomas Putnam adds when he writes for these young women, their depositions. We see this in several instances, as I'm sure other others on the podcast have mentioned that. All right. These three people didn't probably use exactly the same phrase when they were talking to Thomas Putnam. He probably just wrote it that way. Just seems likely.
[00:38:35] And in particular, beyond that, the accusation is that since he walked with two canes that he used them to beat Sarah Churchill or that his specter did this. Obviously, he was not able to go around hitting anybody, cuz he needed two canes to walk around. He's not, agile enough to do this. So it's his specter, that's the accusation. With this, that's what takes him arrested, hearing on May 11th. And what happens, when I mention that they were almost at the same time as the one with his granddaughter, is he maintains his innocence. He knows nothing of it with witchcraft. She will confess, and then she goes on to testify against her own grandfather.
[00:39:24] And Jacobs, being right outside the room, is told by a witness. Someone comes out to him and tells him his granddaughter has confessed. And to paraphrase, he says, "confess to what?" and is told that she is confessing to having a contract with the devil and their definition of witchcraft.
[00:39:40] Josh Hutchinson: Through the records that we still have, is it possible to glean anything about his personality?
[00:39:48] Dan Gagnon: This is tough. So what we have is Sarah Churchill's accusation when that was one of the pieces of evidence that we might have. I would tend to totally discount that. The accusations say such wild and crazy things that I don't take any of that seriously in terms of one's personality, when the accusations are as wild as as a gentleman from what was, what's now today that the town of Middleton, who was accused of walking on a flying saucer down the North River. So I take those accusations, and think that means you can't trust any of them. I don't know.
[00:40:26] There's another example. The one time he ends up in court, and it's remarkable. It only happened once, cuz everybody in Salem Village is like suing one another. So it seems, if you read those court records, it's amazing the number of times people are in court. See him only once. He got into some kind of physical fight with one of his neighbors, we don't know the circumstances. We don't know who was right, who was wrong. We don't know what was going on. So I wouldn't quite draw a conclusion from that, either. I will say that some in the 19th century do describe him as a cantankerous old man because of that, but I'm not sure that reputation is earned. We really just don't know.
[00:41:10] Josh Hutchinson: I think that's a great way to answer that, because you can't infer so much from one isolated event, and you don't have any details about it, so why read into it? I'd seen somewhere that he's described as having a temper and being feisty, et cetera, but how do you know?
[00:41:33] Sarah Jack: One of the things that I read into, but I agree with you and Josh on not reading into things, but one of the things that I read into was when he said to the magistrates that he was as innocent as them. I wondered if that is an insight into his confidence. I know that, I, it seems like the men who would try to rise up to these levels of, that they don't belong in typically found themselves in trouble.
[00:42:04] Dan Gagnon: I think using his statements in front of the judges is a much better way to figure out his personality. From those, we do see that he's just very forthright, that not me, I didn't do it. And he's very clear and he's almost a little forceful in that. So perhaps one could read that. He's at least very determined that he is innocent with his great quote that they put on the Salem Village Memorial in Danvers, "burn me or hang me. I will stand in the truth of Christ. I know nothing of it." With "it" meaning witchcraft. So he is, he's pretty unambiguous there and very direct.
[00:42:42] Josh Hutchinson: And he is pretty witty. He says, "you tax me for a wizard. You may as well tax me for a buzzard." So that probably didn't sit well with Hathorne and Corwin, but it's pretty funny.
[00:42:57] Dan Gagnon: Yes.
[00:42:59] Sarah Jack: And then another point that you know, you can compare Rebecca and George, they were both determined when they were facing those magistrates in the words that they said and in fighting for themselves.
[00:43:11] Dan Gagnon: It would've been so easy to back down that, Sarah. That's an important point.
[00:43:15] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, he stands out as one of the heroes of the trials because of his fortitude. He's up there with Rebecca and Mary and the others who maintained their innocence throughout. All 19 who were hanged maintained their innocence, and he goes to his death bravely, seemingly. And do we know anything more about his servant, Sarah Churchill? Do we know her background?
[00:43:47] Dan Gagnon: She is one of the, not the very first round of those who became afflicted with these. She is also slightly older. She's 20, whereas some of the very early who are afflicted, like Abigail Williams is 11, Ann Putnam, Jr.'s 12, Mercy Lewis, who also accused him, is 17, though. She's not among those who are afflicted in the first couple weeks, but as it expands out. And with her, there's a couple instances that spring during the witch-hunt where people testify that they hear, either they say directly or overheard some of the accusers essentially saying their accusations aren't true.
[00:44:32] With Sarah Churchill, we have George Jacobs' daughter, Ann Andrews, that her and Sarah Ingersoll, the wife of the Tavern Keeper. She's also a tavern keeper, but the Ingersolls run the tavern. That they overheard her saying that the afflicted accusers essentially threatened Churchill into accusing Jacobs, according to their testimony given to the court, where they claimed that she told them that she had to go tell, and she mentions Mr. Noyes, the minister in Salem. I'm not clear why him specifically, but apparently him specifically, that she thought her master, she puts it ,George Jacobs, her employer was a witch or else basically they would accuse her. This is early for us to have this sort of doubting comment, but it's interesting that the two women overhear her say this. This does not get in the way of Jacobs being convicted.
[00:45:34] And then we have something similar with his granddaughter, Margaret. Why does she confess? Why does she then testify against her own grandfather? This is strange. And so what happens is George goes to trial in August. He is put on trial on August 4th, summer. And Margaret, I mentioned that Margaret is about 17, his granddaughter's about 17 at this point in time. She goes through that spring after having confessed. Three days after her and George have their hearing, basically, the rest of their family's accused. Margaret's parents, George Jr. and Rebecca Jacobs are both accused. George Jacobs, Jr. flees. Rebecca Jacobs is arrested at home.
[00:46:29] Rebecca Jacobs seems to be, Margaret's mother, mentally unwell. So Rebecca Jacobs is described by her own mother, Mrs. Fox, as, quote, "crazed, distracted, and broken in her mind." So with this household yeah, the mother of the family appears to be unwell. You can't quite guess from that description but somehow mentally not stable.
[00:46:58] With her in jail, spring, summer testifies against George at his August 4th trial, and then he's convicted and she has a change of heart. And what she says really draws back to Sarah Churchill's statement, I would say. So at some point in the first two weeks of August, but a after the fourth, and she has a written recantation of her confession, which is interesting cause what, was she then able to write? Or did someone write this for her? We don't really know. And the reason for that is that document is something that we find copies but not to hold in our own hands an original. With her recantation, she says her quote is, "they," meaning the people that accused her back in May, quote, "told me that if I would not confess, I would be put down into the dungeon and would be hanged, but if I would confess, I should have my life, the which did so afright me with my own vile and wicked heart to save my life, made me make the confession." So it's again just being like threatened and pressured into it.
[00:48:19] Sarah Jack: And she did end up serving time in the jail. I was thinking how scaring the young girls like that. It would be very scary. They saw little Dorothy Good was over there in the jail, so they knew it didn't matter what your age was, they're gonna lock up a witch.
[00:48:39] Dan Gagnon: The accusation against her is as real as the one against Jacobs. And we see where that led in his case, in that even though she recants after the conviction but before the hanging date, it doesn't matter. He is still hanged, even though essentially one of his lead witnesses has changed their tune, but it, that doesn't change his conviction.
[00:49:00] Josh Hutchinson: And is there any real evidence? Is it all spectral evidence? What's the evidence the jury uses to convict him?
[00:49:09] Dan Gagnon: It's really just based on words. It's words like his granddaughter's. We don't exactly have her testimony against Jacobs. We know that she has testimony, we think at the grand jury and the trials. But we don't actually know specifically what she said against him. We just know from her recantation that, yes, she apparently testified against him, but we don't know the exact words.
[00:49:37] Sarah Jack: What about Sarah's words? I'm wondering, because he does discuss the devil can take any form with the magistrates.
[00:49:49] Dan Gagnon: Yeah, he's one of the earliest with the devil can take any form that seeks to undermine the belief that some thought that the devil only takes the form of someone who's essentially a guilty person, somebody who gave him permission to do so. That is a not really a legal, but more of a theological debate going on.
[00:50:17] And it is interesting that George Jacobs is one of the first to raise that. That he sees through it. When Rebecca Nurse is examined in late March, it doesn't, she doesn't quite take a position but mentions that, like, her position is she has a comments about perhaps the devil can use my shape. She's not really taking a position. It's just, I guess that was her assumption that she, what she believed, whereas Jacobs is clear that, yeah, he thinks that could happen to an innocent person, and basically the devil could frame you.
[00:50:56] There'll be a lot more debate about this later in 1692, because it comes down to the obvious. The obvious rebuttal is, "you trust the devil? You shouldn't, you know what he's up to. You probably shouldn't be trusting his actions as evidence against somebody," which seems as though that would go to the strongest counterarguments here in 1692. But those who bring it up, it doesn't have that power that one would logically think that it would.
[00:51:26] So he's right to mention that. He's early on to mention it, but when they, his specter again is the example of the two canes allegedly attacking Sarah Churchill. Cause obviously he cannot do this physically. We know from his condition. But that he doesn't think that's him and he says it is not, and that he's innocent. It must just be someone basically impersonating him, I guess would be the way to put it.
[00:51:50] Sarah Jack: Yeah, that is interesting because Rebecca would've also been too frail to do the choking.
[00:51:57] Dan Gagnon: Yeah. With her saying she had been essentially sick in bed for eight or nine days before she was arrested in March, she's not going around whipping someone with a chain or strangling people or anything like, no. That, again, you're right to point that out as a another example of that not being logical.
[00:52:15] Josh Hutchinson: When was George Jacobs, Sr. executed?
[00:52:19] Dan Gagnon: August 19th. So he's executed along with John Proctor, along with the Reverend George Burroughs, who Margaret Jacobs also apparently testified against, because we know that she also recants her testimony against him and apparently goes in person to apologize to him in jail. So one assumes he also said that to her grandfather. But we don't specifically have a document that she also personally apologizes to him. But I guess one would assume.
[00:52:55] It's the August 19th, which interesting in that's when we see men executed for the first time in 1692. And then, of course, the last execution in September is also both women and men, which is probably one other way that Jacobs is, with your question about the significance of his case, is the majority of people accused of witchcraft in New England are women, especially pre-Salem. When we get to Salem in 1692, we have a surprising proportion of men. Still mostly women, though, but it often is that the men who are accused are, I don't know, a little bit overlooked, in that they don't fit that stereotype of it being women. And again, with this witch-hunt and with previous witch-hunts, I probably shouldn't say a stereotype, cuz that, I mean that, unfortunately, is the true pattern that it is mostly women, overwhelmingly.
[00:53:54] But the cases of the men accused are by definition kind of a different category. It's a different social background to these accusations. And so with him, I think that's significant. The only case, one of the men that really gets discussed the most is John Proctor, and, unfortunately, most people do that through The Crucible, which isn't really true and doesn't really do that any justice as to who he actually was. So that's a different category.
[00:54:31] Josh Hutchinson: The August 19th hanging, as you mentioned, is significant, because it's the first time there's four men and one woman hanged. And yeah, it's the first time they execute the men. But also Robert Calef wrote about the August execution and the supposed actions of Cotton Mather.
[00:54:55] Dan Gagnon: Yeah, the showdown with, not showdown, but the sort of last, that's a showdown, I guess the, that last moment with Reverend Burroughs who, and this is not a like legal belief at the time, it's more of a folk belief that one could not recite the Lord's Prayer if one was a witch, that somehow by signing a contract with the devil, you could not repeat those words, which has a certain logic to it that one would, if one believed you signed a contract with the devil, one could see why that would conflict with that. We first see this, I believe, in Bridget Bishop's case, where she tries to recite the Lord's prayer back in June, and she does garble a line or two, and that's seized upon. With Burroughs, though, at the gallows, he does recite it correctly. He's a minister. Of course, he knows how to say that, and it causes doubt at the last minute in the crowd, and you're right, Reverend Mather says, steps in and then says to execute him anyway, that doesn't change the situation. And again, legally, no, it did not change the situation. There's no law saying if you could do that, you weren't a witch. But in people's minds that would lead to doubt.
[00:56:14] Josh Hutchinson: And George Jacobs, I believe Sheriff Corwin confiscated some of his property.
[00:56:22] Dan Gagnon: Yes. This is a topic that is almost a rabbit hole to get down, the seizing of property during the witch trials and that so many people think that's like a cause of the witch trials, and no, people's property was not seized, other than a couple exceptions. The exceptions are for people who fled. So it's not George Jacobs, Sr. who fled. It's his son. The sheriff goes, but they're all living in the same household. So Sheriff Corwin goes there and seizes belongings that he says belonged to George Jacobs, Jr., who fled, which is a little dubious, but especially because it's really George Jacob's, Sr.'s house, and so you wouldn't assume that the belongings were the son's. This is a messy one, and it's recorded as that he even allegedly seizes the wedding ring off George Jacobs' wife's, Mary's, finger, which doesn't make sense, because he's not the one who fled. It's a son who fled. Why would you take the wedding ring from the mother of the person who fled and not their wife? This is bizarre, and he's clearly not following the law.
[00:57:48] The one clear-cut example we have of alleged or so-called forfeiture of property is Philip English and his wife Mary. They live in downtown Salem, very rich. They flee after if they had been in custody, and their belongings are seized, and they never get 'em back, even when they sue. And it is unfortunate. But in that case, that was the law that they were legally charged with the felony. If they did obviously flee, can you lose your belongings? It's definitely not fair or just, but in that case, that is following the law.
[00:58:25] With Jacobs, this is him being overzealous and not making sense and not the way that it should have been done.
[00:58:33] Josh Hutchinson: And the seizures, the property basically was seized for the king, is that right?
[00:58:39] Dan Gagnon: Yeah. It's in the name of the king. It would've gone to the government of Massachusetts, not to the sheriff. And with that process is fine with the Englishes. The Sheriff Corwin is not in the background trying to make himself rich in such a case. With this one, it's also less clear.
[00:59:02] I'm not sure I've ever come across an inventory of what was taken. So here you see something a little sketchy that, although it's one isolated incident, this is what leads people to think that was a motivation, that this was all a scheme by the sheriff and such. Whereas Corwin doesn't become the sheriff until around the time Oyer and Terminer is established at the end of May. He's brand new to the job, cuz they didn't have a sheriff until the new governor arrived. And then we had sheriffs, so he couldn't have had the job prior to that. He was not the marshal of Essex County, which was the prior name for the job. So he's new in it and no, he wasn't there when this all started. He did not have a job when it all started. So he's not a reason for the accusations starting.
[00:59:47] Sarah Jack: That's a really good point. And what was the deal with the will? Who was ultimately cut out and who was left in?
[00:59:57] Dan Gagnon: As part of that, what we know is that when Margaret Jacobs goes and apologizes in jail to the Reverend Burroughs, she does that on August 18, the day before, he and her grandfather are going to be executed. So we assume that she also talked to him, who was also in the jail, probably in the same room. But we do know that he had at least heard that she recanted, because he writes Margaret back into the will at the last minute. This again is another argument against the seizing of property is that these people in jail, that with land holding, it would only be the men who were in jail. Only men could own real estate, real property at that point. They do write their wills and that they are carried out. So he does change his will, because he knows or thinks at least it will be carried out. We see John Proctor in jail will write a will, because he knows it will be carried out and go to his heirs, that they're not losing their farms from this.
[01:01:10] And that's one of the arguments against that. But that is one of those, one of those, I don't know, misconceptions, I guess that just goes and goes, cuz in a way everybody wants a very complicated event to be easy to explain. And yet that theory would make it easy to explain. The problem is it's not true.
[01:01:34] But they always want what's the one answer that kind of unlocks the whole thing? Whether the one answer is land or the one answer is that ergot, dare I say the word, that they always want the one thing, and there, there just is no one thing.
[01:01:52] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I look at that, you're looking at this single bullet theory that it just took one thing, and to me it's a way of absolving humanity of having these behavioral tendencies that we have that are really what explains what happened, comes down to human behavior. And we don't want to admit. It's almost a cop out to say that, "oh, they must have been on drugs. We're not capable of doing that."
[01:02:26] Dan Gagnon: Yeah, you're right with that example, it's a way to actually, it's an excuse. It excuses what has happened.
[01:02:32] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Something very strange and peculiar must have happened. It can't be this confluence of all these events and situations that happen regularly. Things like the economic hardship and the warfare and the fear of being attacked in your village. Those things that still happen today and disease and childhood death, stuff that's hard to explain. People want to say, "that happens all the time. So surely that can't be the reason why that happened," but it is. It's normal situations that just converge and create these conditions.
[01:03:17] Sarah Jack: And who did end up with George Senior's property?
[01:03:21] Dan Gagnon: It does remain in the Jacobs family. They do own it through the 19 hundreds and through 1854 when it's divided. So it does continue through, which is also a, comparison to the Nurse family that the family like doesn't go anywhere, or at least one part of the family always stays on that farm.
[01:03:43] And with the family, afterwards, Margaret is in jail for months and such. Her mother Rebecca had been in jail for months. And that's when we get that document of Rebecca's mother, Mrs. Fox, asking for Rebecca to be released because of her mental health. And so the family is very much disrupted, the whole family by this. And on top of Rebecca being put in jail, Margaret does have siblings who are just left there, and the parents, one was arrested and one flees, so presumably with their grandmother, but that really wrecks the household.
[01:04:21] Sarah Jack: Is there anything else about George or Rebecca or your article that you'd like to touch on?
[01:04:30] Dan Gagnon: I think one other thing to mention is with Jacobs having a strong physical legacy like Nurse and the Nurse family, but in a way even more that his farm is there till 1940, allegedly his finger exists in the storage of the Peabody Essex. Peabody Essex also has his canes that are donated at early 1900s. With the Essex Institute, the precursor to the Peabody Essex, their cataloging is not excellent, and so when it has an early 20th century date, that's when they went through and gave it a date. Who knows how long it had been in that room, but that's when they first gave it a number. So that's vague. That was allegedly given by one of the descendants still around who had kept them in the family. So that part has at least some traditional backing to it. They were recently on display last year at the PEM. And really beyond that, George Jacobs' case is famous for the giant Tompkins Matteson painting done right around 1854, and it was done because of the brief exhumation of his remains. That also now is in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum. The giant painting is not with historically accurate outfits or room decor, but it's one on book covers all the time. George Jacobs down on one knee, like pleading before the judges as his accusers, the young women, are like falling down all around him.
[01:06:12] That for somebody who is so mistreated after death, as well as during his life, and weirdly almost intentionally forgotten about, that painting of him in the 1850s is one of the prime images of the Salem Witch Trials we see today. That's just not necessarily what one would expect.
[01:06:31] Sarah Jack: Here's Mary with Minute with Mary.
[01:06:34]
[01:06:41] Mary Bingham: After the executions stopped at Salem in 1692, people immediately moved forward with their lives for their survival. Soon after these horrific circumstances, the affected families found comfort within their nuclear families and from outside sources. This was evident in the Wildes family. Ephraim Wildes clearly stated in primary sources that his father, John, discussed the tremendous monetary loss the farm suffered when Sarah was incarcerated that year. Don't forget, John and Ephraim had to pay not only for her jail fees, but for her personal needs, as well as for her shackles. Ephraim also spoke to his own relationship with his mother in his petition to the court in 1710 describing his loss of, and I quote, "so dear a friend." John and Ephraim's personal conversations probably were a guiding force to help them navigate their immense grief. John Wildes was about 74 years old when Sarah was executed. Before Sarah's arrest in the April of 1692, there were only four adults, one toddler and one infant living at their house on Perkins Row. There is no evidence that the Wildes family had either slaves or indentured servants. They may have received help to run the farm from their Averill relatives, living very close by.
[01:08:17] Sarah's physical absence put the entire family at risk, and most of the household chores fell now to Mary Wildes, Ephraim's young wife. Sarah was incarcerated at Salem from April 22nd until May 13th, when she was transferred to the Boston Jail. These jails were small, overcrowded, rotten, filthy, stinking spaces not suitable for human beings to live. Sarah was housed both at Salem and the Boston jails for about two months total with her stepdaughter and son-in-law, Sarah and Edward Bishop, as well as George Jacobs, among others.
[01:09:00] John and Ephraim made the trips to the jails once or sometimes twice a week, much to Sarah's relief, one can be sure. Though the trip to the Salem jail was about eight miles, the trip to Boston jail was 26 miles, putting the entire farm at risk if both men were not at home on those days that one of them made that long journey.
[01:09:24] There are no other primary sources placing the Wildes family and the Jacobs family close in proximity during their lifetimes. Therefore, John Wildes probably first set his eyes on Mary Jacobs of Salem when they were visiting their spouses in either Salem or Boston at the jails.
[01:09:47] Here are the reasons why I believe this to be so. After his move from Ipswich to Topsfield as a very young man, John stayed close to home. It seems that only twice he physically appeared at the Salem Court, which was again eight miles south of Topsfield. His other court appearances were at Ipswich, which was about five and a half miles north of Topsfield, and John did not go often. These were mostly cases where he needed to offer witness testimony. Also, Topsfield had its own local economy after 1664, when Francis Peabody erected his gristmill and then a sawmill seven years later. Another much needed addition was that of a blacksmith, who was Samuel Howlett, making it much easier for residents to purchase horseshoes, plows, pots, hinges, and latches locally. So John and his family did not need to travel to Salem for necessary goods. Therefore, he would not have occasion to meet up with the Jacobs family. After briefly looking at all those who were incarcerated with Sarah Wildes, it might make some sense that Mary Jacobs and John Wildes would find comfort in each other, but I will let the listener decide.
[01:11:07] George Jacobs revised his will just prior to his execution, but a good time after Mary would have met John. George's earlier will stipulated that Mary would have the homestead until her death. His later will stated she would have the homestead until she remarried. This meant that when she married John Wildes June 26th, 1693, she moved to Topsfield and lived on Perkins Row.
[01:11:37] John had a companion, and there was now another woman to help take care of Ephraim's ever-growing family. Mary also now had a companion in her new husband and a place to live, but most importantly, they had a shared tragedy that no one else could possibly understand except each other. Thank you.
[01:12:01]
[01:12:09] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:12:11] Josh Hutchinson: And now here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[01:12:14]
[01:12:31] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News.
[01:12:34] The second week of June is a significant time of remembrance for the Salem Witch Trials. This week there will be at least two events honoring two of the women hanged for witchcraft crimes during the trials of 1692, Bridget Bishop and Rebecca Nurse. The first event is for remembering Bridget Bishop. Historians, performers, and others interested in Salem's witchcraft history will meet at the witch trials memorial off of Liberty and Charter Street Saturday, June 10th to remember her, the first of 19 accused witches executed during the Salem witch trials of 1692. She was executed by hanging at Proctor's Ledge on June 10th.
[01:13:08] Dustin Luca of the Salem News writes, quote, "remembering Bridget as a fellow human being is crucial to understanding the madness that ensued." I'm so glad Dustin wrote that important message. Let's take it a step further. Remembering Bridget and the people hanged for witchcraft convictions as fellow human beings is crucial to recognizing the children, women, and men that are attacked in madness today, also fellow human beings. These modern victims are punished as witches, blamed for misfortunes, death, sicknesses, and family disasters. Those hanged for witchcraft in the early years of the American colonies and those vulnerable people who are targets today are our fellow human beings.
[01:13:47] The second event is also on June 10th, the annual gala day at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. It is a Homestead fundraiser, and the theme is 1920s lawn party. The very first gala day and garden party bazaar was held at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in 1912, right after becoming a museum, and they continued to be held annually through the 1920s. It was a way to welcome the community to explore the newly restored historic house and learn about the local history and just enjoy the beautiful grounds and summer day.
[01:14:14] This year, they hope to raise funds to restore and improve the kitchen garden. The deadline to pre-order picnic boxes was June 7th, but you are welcome to bring a picnic lunch. Plan on enjoying vintage entertainment like era music, silent moving pictures in the meeting house, and period style table and lawn games. Explore the historic Nurse Homestead and spend the day.
[01:14:34] You can hear two important researchers speak about the stories of these two women in our previous episodes. Please listen to Marilynne Roach clarify the record on who Bridget Bishop was, and dig into the life of aged accused witch Rebecca Nurse with Dan Gagnon on the episodes called "Marilynne K. Roach on the People of the Salem Witch Trials" and "Rebecca Nurse of Salem with Dan Gagnon."
[01:14:55] On May 25th, 2023, the Connecticut General Assembly passed House Joint Resolution 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. This happened because the majority of the house, 80%, voted yes on May 10th to pass it to the Senate. The Senate voted almost unanimously yes, only one senator voted no, completing the passage of HJ 34. HJ 34 was sponsored and passed by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. Because accused witch innocency matters, Connecticut did not let the votes fall to party differences.
[01:15:29] In another state, a similar exoneration attempt failed just a few weeks before the success of HJ 34. Eunice Cole, also popularly referred to as Goody Cole, was an accused witch that spent time in trial and in jail in Massachusetts. Essentially, the colonial boundary line changing made her a New Hampshire resident, as well. She was up for a posthumous exoneration. Her bill was House Bill 89. New Hampshire House Bill 89 is listed as a democratic partisan bill, but it passed the house with bipartisan support. However, it was killed in the Senate, when the lawmakers voted down party lines. It failed 10 to 14. Eunice Cole was declined exoneration for her witchcraft convictions by four no votes. No, no, no, no. This is disheartening but not shocking.
[01:16:20] Passing HJ 34 seemed like a long shot, but many of us worked hard to keep building up education around the crisis of modern, dangerous witch persecution. We reached the Connecticut lawmakers with the message that witch hunts were wrong and witch hunts must end.
[01:16:34] We commend the New Hampshire lawmakers that voted yes to clear the name of innocent Eunice Cole. They were her voice, just as the state of Massachusetts has recognized some of their witch trial victims as innocent, and 34 indicted accused witches of Connecticut, of which 11 were hanged, have now all had their names cleared. Eunice Cole will be added to the list of children, women and men waiting for a state acknowledgement for their suffering from witchcraft trials past. The American colonies still have many victims who suffered through witch trials waiting for their names to be cleared, and Eunice is just one of them. They need lawmakers to be their voice. They said they were innocent, and the plea went unheard.
[01:17:10] Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast and End Witch Hunts will work for all names to be cleared and for all lawmakers and global leaders to become better educated about witch trials past and present. We will continue to be voices for the innocent harmed by witchcraft accusations. Lawmakers of any party can support legislation that has a real and resounding global impact. They need to be told a yes vote for innocence here saves lives now. Other countries need our leadership. They need to see us taking a deliberate stand for alleged witches in our history with expressed concern for stopping alleged witchcraft violence today.
[01:17:43] Official state acknowledgement of the innocency of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut Colony resounds globally today. It is that important. Please learn more about the ongoing mob witch-hunts that are killing and violently abusing extensive numbers of women, men, and children in dozens of countries now.
[01:18:00] Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast supports the efforts to end modern witch-hunts. You can learn more by visiting our websites and the websites listed in our show notes for more information about country-specific advocacy groups. Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop, merch from our Zazzle shop, or make a financial contribution to our organization. Our links are in the show description.
[01:18:23]
[01:18:39] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah for that enlightening report.
[01:18:43] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:18:45] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:18:49] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[01:18:51] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe in whatever podcast app you choose.
[01:18:56] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:19:00] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, acquaintances and neighbors about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:19:07] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[01:19:12] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:19:15]

June 8, 2023

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Part 5: 1666 to 1691

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Show Notes

This is Part 5 of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast’s Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series. In this episode, we look at eight witchcraft accusations from 1666 through 1691, the period between the Hartford Witch-Hunt of 1662 to 1665 and the Fairfield/Stamford Witch-Hunt of 1692. This was after Governor John Winthrop Jr. came back from England with the colonial charter. You will learn from original records about the intense hunt against Katherine Harrison, the community conflicts she had, the wild allegations against her and how her trial played out .Podcast Cohosts, Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack continue the Connecticut Witch Trial History story with only fact backed, trustworthy research and sources. The lives of these historic individuals have been examined and we share what is known about them, from the historical record. How do we know what we know? We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

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Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Bibliography
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Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut.

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Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Social Media for State Representative Jane Garibay

Transcript

[00:00:00]
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:26] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:27] Josh Hutchinson: This is part five of our Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series.
[00:00:33] Sarah Jack: In this episode, we cover the years 1666 through 1691.
[00:00:38] Josh Hutchinson: The period between the Hartford Witch-Hunt of 1662 to 1665, and the Fairfield-Stamford Witch-Hunt of 1692.
[00:00:47] Sarah Jack: John Winthrop, Jr. was governor through 1679.
[00:00:51] Josh Hutchinson: After he passed, his friend and colleague, the minister Gershom Bulkeley carried on his legacy of moderation in witch trial proceedings by providing advice to magistrates on various cases.
[00:01:05] Sarah Jack: This was a relatively calm period with fewer accusations.
[00:01:09] Josh Hutchinson: Only eight accusations of witchcraft are known to have been made in Connecticut between 1666 and 1691.
[00:01:17] Sarah Jack: These accusations resulted in only two indictments and one conviction.
[00:01:22] Josh Hutchinson: The first accusation in this timeframe was made against William Graves of Stamford in 1667.
[00:01:29] Sarah Jack: The trouble started when William Graves' daughter, Abigail, married Samuel Dibble.
[00:01:34] Josh Hutchinson: William Graves refused to give his daughter her marriage portion of her inheritance.
[00:01:41] Sarah Jack: Samuel Dibble took the matter to court.
[00:01:44] Josh Hutchinson: William Graves told Dibble he would always regret taking the matter to court.
[00:01:49] Sarah Jack: Ann Smith testified that William Graves believed his daughter would die during childbirth.
[00:01:55] Josh Hutchinson: And indicated that he suspected witchcraft.
[00:01:58] Sarah Jack: Though he wouldn't supply a name.
[00:02:00] Josh Hutchinson: He said, quote, "if his daughter died, he would bring out one in this town that he never thought to do and he said that she should not be buried presently, for he would have all the town lay their hands on her."
[00:02:17] Sarah Jack: This was a reference to the belief that the body of a murder or witchcraft victim would react to the touch of the culprit.
[00:02:23] Josh Hutchinson: Mary Scofield testified that William Graves said, "he had counseled his daughter to prepare herself to meet the Lord and said if she was not delivered suddenly she would die."
[00:02:36] Sarah Jack: According to Scofield, Graves went on to say, "though there was one in the town that both I and mind was the worst for him. Yet the whole town shall touch her and then none will take offense."
[00:02:48] Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Steedwell corroborated Ann Smith's and Mary Scofield's testimony.
[00:02:53] Sarah Jack: Midwife Mary Holmes testified that Abigail Graves Dibble had a normal labor, except for two fits of trembling and striving.
[00:03:02] Josh Hutchinson: Mary Scolfield testified that Abigail Graves Dibble's face changed as she delivered her baby.
[00:03:09] Sarah Jack: "One part of her mouth was drawn up and the other down, with her lips turning black, and her eyes staring out in a ghastly manner, and likewise her tongue hanging out and a dumb voice."
[00:03:22] Josh Hutchinson: "And upon this, the child was drawn away up into her body in likeness to the belly of a whale."
[00:03:30] Sarah Jack: "And this continuing for the space of half an hour until the child lay quivering within her body."
[00:03:36] Josh Hutchinson: "And about an hour after, as she apprehended with the pains of death and not by the former course of labor as other women have, the child came trembling into the world."
[00:03:49] Sarah Jack: Thomas Steedwell said he was helping Abigail Graves Dibble in her fits after she gave birth, when "presently falling of them fits into sounding fits with her tongue flaring out of her mouth near a handful long, and about as thick as his wrist and as black as possible might be, and her eyes out of her head in a ghastly manner. And when those fits went off, her tongue went in again, and there was such a smell with her breath that none in the room were able to abide the steam thereof."
[00:04:17] Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Steedwell, Ann Smith, Elizabeth Steedwell, and Zachariah Dibble, brother of Samuel, testified that William Graves said, "my child will die, and I will be hanged for her."
[00:04:30] Sarah Jack: Zachariah Dibble, Ann Hardy, and Sarah Bates repeated the testimony of others about the things William Graves said.
[00:04:37] Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Dibble testified about how he had argued with William Graves about Abigail's portion.
[00:04:45] Sarah Jack: Graves was upset that Dibble never helped him reap.
[00:04:48] Josh Hutchinson: Dibble said he, quote, "got an attachment to try by a course of law for his wife's portion."
[00:04:55] Sarah Jack: William Graves allegedly told him he would, quote, "repent the bringing that attachment as long as I lived."
[00:05:03] Josh Hutchinson: He also threatened that Dibble "shall live never the longer for it."
[00:05:08] Sarah Jack: Two weeks before his daughter's delivery, William Graves went to her house and told her to fit herself to meet the Lord.
[00:05:15] Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Dibble had a warrant issued to order William Graves to appear at Mr. Lane's house to discuss Abigail's marriage portion.
[00:05:25] Sarah Jack: William Graves returned to the Dibble House and said, "my child will die and I shall be hanged for her."
[00:05:30] Josh Hutchinson: This testimony evidently did not lead to further court proceedings.
[00:05:36] Sarah Jack: No indictment or other court documents exist.
[00:05:40] Josh Hutchinson: But this is not the last we'll hear of the Dibbles.
[00:05:43] In 1667, Matthew Griswold of Saybrook filed a defamation suit on behalf of his wife, Anna.
[00:05:54] Sarah Jack: Matthew was a stone cutter by trade, and there is a receipt for payment of a tombstone for Lady Fenwick, wife of Saybrook governor George Fenwick. She died in childbirth.
[00:06:04] Josh Hutchinson: Governor Fenwick bequeathed land east of the Connecticut River to Matthew In 1644. Governor Fenwick sold the colony of Saybrook to Connecticut when he returned to England to fight in Cromwell's forces.
[00:06:18] Sarah Jack: Fenwick was appointed commissioner to the trial of King Charles I.
[00:06:23] Josh Hutchinson: Hannah or Anna Wolcott Griswold was the daughter of a powerful Windsor founder.
[00:06:29] Sarah Jack: Her father was Henry Wolcott. A wealthy, well-connected, significant figure in the American colonies.
[00:06:36] Josh Hutchinson: Because he was a primary funder of the voyage of the Mary and John, he bought himself significant alliances with other powerful men, including Roger Ludlow, Edward Rossiter, and Israel Stoughton.
[00:06:50] Sarah Jack: Henry Wolcott was Windsor's first constable. He was appointed a deputy of the General Court in Hartford and served as a magistrate from 1643 until his death in 1655.
[00:07:01] Josh Hutchinson: According to records, Henry was involved in four witch trials, Mary Johnson, Joan and John Carrington, and Lydia Gilbert. He possibly was also connected to the trials of Goody Bassett, Goody Knapp, and Alice Young.
[00:07:18] Sarah Jack: Hannah was one of few women who held property in her own name. This indicates her familial connections, wealth, and status allowed for this exception.
[00:07:27] Josh Hutchinson: Hannah's accuser was John Tilleston.
[00:07:31] Sarah Jack: He had allegedly called Hannah a witch.
[00:07:34] Josh Hutchinson: Ten years prior, in 1657, Tilleston faced magistrates for "scandalous and reproachful speeches cast upon the elders and others in a public church meeting."
[00:07:48] Sarah Jack: He also later faced prosecution for "abusing his wife on Sabbath day and chaining her leg to the bedpost with a plow chain to keep her within doors."
[00:07:57] Josh Hutchinson: On another occasion, Tilleston was fined for giving a false oath.
[00:08:01] Sarah Jack: Matthew Griswold won the suit, but the court worried how Tilleston would be able to afford to compensate the wealthy Griswolds.
[00:08:09] Josh Hutchinson: Tilleston's first wife was charged with not believing in infant baptism and speaking contemptuously of it.
[00:08:19] Sarah Jack: Which likely indicates that Goody Tilleston and her husband were dissenting Baptists. New Englanders generally associated such faults, insubordination, irreverence, domestic discord, and religious deviance with witchcraft.
[00:08:33] This was the case between the rich and the poor, between status and bad reputation.
[00:08:38] Josh Hutchinson: Next up we have the case of Katherine Harrison of Wethersfield. Katherine Harrison first came to Connecticut in 1651 and settled in Hartford.
[00:08:50] Sarah Jack: She worked as a servant in the household of Captain John Cullick.
[00:08:54] Josh Hutchinson: While there, she developed a reputation as a fortune teller.
[00:08:58] Sarah Jack: She was also considered a notorious liar and a Sabbath breaker.
[00:09:02] Josh Hutchinson: Captain Cullick reportedly fired her for her quote, "evil conversation in Word and deed."
[00:09:09] Sarah Jack: Shortly after being sacked, Katherine moved to Wethersfield by May, 1653.
[00:09:14] Josh Hutchinson: And married wealthy farmer John Harrison.
[00:09:18] Sarah Jack: They had three daughters.
[00:09:19] Josh Hutchinson: Rebecca, Mary and Sarah,
[00:09:22] Sarah Jack: In Wethersfield. John served at times as town crier, fence viewer, surveyor, and constable.
[00:09:30] Josh Hutchinson: He died in 1666, leaving his large estate to his wife and daughters.
[00:09:35] Sarah Jack: His will left 60 pounds to Rebecca and 40 pounds each to Mary and Sarah.
[00:09:41] Josh Hutchinson: Katherine received the bulk of the estate, valued at 789 pounds.
[00:09:46] Sarah Jack: Two years later, Katherine was accused of witchcraft.
[00:09:49] Josh Hutchinson: On May 27th, 1668, the unnamed wife of Jacob Johnson wrote or dictated an account of a time when Katherine Harrison helped Jacob with an illness.
[00:10:02] Sarah Jack: Katherine treated him with, quote, "diet, drink, and plasters."
[00:10:06] Josh Hutchinson: The treatment evidently didn't help, so the Johnsons sent for Captain Atwood to help.
[00:10:12] Sarah Jack: That same night, Goodwife Johnson walked in the door, saw Katherine Harrison standing in front of her husband.
[00:10:19] Josh Hutchinson: While Goodwife Johnson turned around to lock the door, Harrison disappeared.
[00:10:24] Sarah Jack: Afterwards, Jacob Johnson had a bad nose bleed.
[00:10:28] Josh Hutchinson: Forever after, his nose bled when it was quote, "meddled with."
[00:10:32] Sarah Jack: This testimony was sworn in court October 29th, 1668, along with many other depositions.
[00:10:39] Josh Hutchinson: On June 29th, 1668, John Wells testified that seven or eight years earlier, when he was a boy, his mother sent him to fetch the cows.
[00:10:50] Sarah Jack: As he crossed the street, his legs stopped as if they were invisibly bound.
[00:10:54] Josh Hutchinson: He "looked toward the cattle that were in the street by Goodman Not's shop and saw Goodwife Harrison rise from a cow that was none of her own with a pail in her hand and made haste home. And when she was over her own stile, he was loosed."
[00:11:14] Sarah Jack: On July 29th, 1668, Elizabeth Bateman Smith told the court that when she and Katherine Harrison had lived in the home of Captain Cullick, quote, "Katherine was noted by the said Elizabeth and others, the rest of the family, to be a great or notorious liar, a Sabbath breaker, and one that told fortunes."
[00:11:33] Josh Hutchinson: Katherine reportedly forecast that Elizabeth would marry a man named Simon, even though Elizabeth's love interest at the time was William Chapman. Captain Cullick did not approve of the marriage of Elizabeth Bateman and William Chapman.
[00:11:49] Sarah Jack: So Elizabeth wound up marrying Simon Smith.
[00:11:53] Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Waples submitted testimony on August 7th, 1668.
[00:11:59] Sarah Jack: He told the court that Katherine Harrison had said she read Mr. Lilly's book in England.
[00:12:04] Josh Hutchinson: William Lilly was a famed astrologer and author of Christian Astrology and several other books.
[00:12:12] Sarah Jack: He also claimed that before her execution, Rebecca Greensmith had said that Harrison was a witch.
[00:12:18] Josh Hutchinson: On August 8th, 1668, Mary Olcutt testified about Katherine Harrison predicting that Elizabeth Bateman would marry a man named Simon.
[00:12:28] Richard Montague testified on August 13th, 1668.
[00:12:33] Sarah Jack: He said Katherine Harrison retrieved her roaming bees with unnatural speed.
[00:12:38] Josh Hutchinson: On August 13th, 1668, Joseph Dickinson testified that Katherine Harrison made her cattle run home by calling, "hoccanum, hoccanum, come hoccanum."
[00:12:51] Sarah Jack: Dickinson claimed two other men witnessed the cattle run with unnatural speed.
[00:12:57] Josh Hutchinson: On August 13th, John Graves testified that his cattle refused to graze on Harrison Land.
[00:13:06] Sarah Jack: The rope tying his oxen to his cart mysteriously untied, and the oxen ran away with great speed.
[00:13:13] Josh Hutchinson: Also on August 13th, Thomas Bracy testified that he once saw a hay cart approach John Harrison's property.
[00:13:21] Sarah Jack: What was unusual was that Thomas saw a red calf's head atop the hay.
[00:13:26] Josh Hutchinson: When the cart reached the barn, the calf's had vanished and Katherine Harrison appeared.
[00:13:32] Sarah Jack: Young Thomas rushed over and accused Katherine Harrison to her face of being a witch.
[00:13:38] Josh Hutchinson: Katherine allegedly threatened that she would be even with Thomas.
[00:13:43] Sarah Jack: Later, Thomas was reportedly visited by the apparitions of James Wakeley and Katherine Harrison.
[00:13:49] Josh Hutchinson: The two stood at his bedside discussing how to kill him.
[00:13:53] Sarah Jack: Wakeley wanted to, quote, "cut out his throat."
[00:13:56] Josh Hutchinson: Harrison attempted to strangle Thomas.
[00:13:59] Sarah Jack: And, quote, "pulled or pinched him so as if his flesh had been pulled from the bones."
[00:14:04] Josh Hutchinson: Thomas groaned a couple times, and his father came to him and laid his hand on him, at which point Thomas was finally able to speak.
[00:14:13] Sarah Jack: The next day, his parents saw the marks left by the spectral assault.
[00:14:17] Josh Hutchinson: On October 6th, Katherine Harrison filed a list of grievances with the magistrates.
[00:14:23] Sarah Jack: She said neighbors had been vandalizing her crops and assaulting her animals.
[00:14:28] Josh Hutchinson: She had an ox, quote, "spoiled at our stile before our door with blows up on the back and sides so bruised that he was altogether unserviceable."
[00:14:40] Sarah Jack: "A cow spoiled, her back broke and two of her ribs."
[00:14:45] Josh Hutchinson: "A heifer in my barnyard, my earmark of which was cut out and other earmarks set on."
[00:14:50] Sarah Jack: "I had a sow that had young pigs earmarked in the sty after the same manner."
[00:14:57] Josh Hutchinson: "I had a cow at the side of my yard. Her jaw bone broke, and one of her hooves and a hole bored in her side."
[00:15:05] Sarah Jack: "I had a three year old heifer in the meadow, stuck with a knife or some weapon, and wounded to death."
[00:15:11] Josh Hutchinson: "I had a cow in the street, wounded in the bag as she stood before my door in the street."
[00:15:17] Sarah Jack: "I had a cow went out into the woods, came home with ears luged and one of her hind legs cut off."
[00:15:24] Josh Hutchinson: "My corn in my own meadow much damnified with horses. They being staked upon it."
[00:15:30] Sarah Jack: "I had my horse wounded in the night as he was in my pasture no creature save three calves with him."
[00:15:36] Josh Hutchinson: "More I had one two-year-old steer, the back of it broke in the barnyard."
[00:15:42] "More
[00:15:42] Sarah Jack: I had a matter of 30 poles of hops cut and spoiled."
[00:15:46] Josh Hutchinson: " All which things have happened since my husband's death, which was last August was two year."
[00:15:53] Sarah Jack: She named witnesses.
[00:15:55] Josh Hutchinson: On October 12th, Rebecca Smith testified that Jonathan Gilbert's wife loaned Katherine Harrison a hat.
[00:16:03] Sarah Jack: Katherine wanted to buy the hat, but Goodwife Gilbert refused to sell it to her.
[00:16:08] Josh Hutchinson: After Katherine returned the hat, Goodwife Gilbert put it on and was afflicted in the head and shoulders.
[00:16:15] Sarah Jack: When she removed the hat, she was well again.
[00:16:18] Josh Hutchinson: This happened every time she tried to wear the hat.
[00:16:21] Sarah Jack: Eventually, the Gilberts burned the hat.
[00:16:25] Josh Hutchinson: William Warren testified on October 27th that Katherine Harrison was, quote, "a common and professed fortune teller."
[00:16:33] Sarah Jack: On October 29th, Joan Francis testified that in November of 1664, she was lying in bed with her husband and child when the apparition of Katherine Harrison appeared.
[00:16:44] Josh Hutchinson: Joan placed the child between herself and her husband.
[00:16:48] Sarah Jack: That night, the child became ill.
[00:16:50] Josh Hutchinson: And suffered for 20 days before dying.
[00:16:54] Sarah Jack: Joan Francis further said that Harrison's daughter came to ask for her emptying in the summer of 1668.
[00:17:00] Josh Hutchinson: Joan told the girl that she had none and went to brew some beer.
[00:17:05] Sarah Jack: the beer barrel exploded loudly, terrifying the children, and sending hops and head flying down to the end of the hall.
[00:17:11] Josh Hutchinson: On October 29th, Mary Kercum told the court that she and Mrs. Wickham had seen the apparitions of Katherine Harrison and her dog appear in Mrs. Wickham's house in the night.
[00:17:26] Sarah Jack: On October 30th, William Warren said that Katherine told his fortune and those of his master's daughter, Simon Sackett, and Elizabeth Bateman in about 1651.
[00:17:36] Josh Hutchinson: She told fortunes by looking at hands.
[00:17:40] On May 11th, 1669, Katherine Harrison was indicted.
[00:17:46] Indictment reads, "Katherine Harrison, thou standest here indicted by the name of Katherine Harrison of Wethersfield as being guilty of witchcraft. For that thou not having the fear of God before thy eyes has had familiarity with Satan, the grand enemy of God and mankind, and by his help has acted things beyond and besides the ordinary course of nature, and has thereby hurt the bodies of diverse, of the subjects of our sovereign Lord, the king, for which by the law of God and of this corporation, thou oughtest to die. What sayest thou for thyself, guilty or not guilty?
[00:18:27] May 11th, 1669."
[00:18:29] Sarah Jack: The prisoner returned not guilty and referred herself to a trial by the jury present.
[00:18:35] Josh Hutchinson: On May 25th, Samuel Martin Sr. testified that Katherine Harrison had predicted the deaths of Josiah Willard and Samuel Hale Sr.
[00:18:45] Sarah Jack: Also on May 25th, 1669, Mary Hale testified that on the 29th of November, 1668, she was lying in bed when something heavy fell on her legs.
[00:18:56] Josh Hutchinson: The heavy object turned out to be a dog-like creature with a head like Katherine Harrison's.
[00:19:03] Sarah Jack: The creature walked around the room and disappeared.
[00:19:07] Josh Hutchinson: But returned a week later.
[00:19:09] Sarah Jack: It crawled up her legs onto her belly
[00:19:12] Josh Hutchinson: She reached up to feel it
[00:19:14] Sarah Jack: And felt a human face.
[00:19:16] Josh Hutchinson: Presently then she had a great blow on her fingers, which pained her two days after.
[00:19:22] Sarah Jack: While the beast was present, Mary was unable to call out to her parents.
[00:19:27] Josh Hutchinson: They finally heard her when the thing disappeared again.
[00:19:30] Sarah Jack: Unfortunately for Mary, this was not her last encounter with this creature.
[00:19:35] Josh Hutchinson: It returned December 19th and spoke to her.
[00:19:40] Sarah Jack: " You said that I would not come again, but are you not afraid of me?"
[00:19:45] Josh Hutchinson: Mary said, "no."
[00:19:48] Sarah Jack: The voice replied, " I will make you afraid before I have done with you."
[00:19:53] Josh Hutchinson: " And then presently, Mary was crushed and oppressed very much. Then Mary called often to her father and mother, they lying very near."
[00:20:03] Sarah Jack: Then the voice said, "so you do call. They shall not hear till I am gone... You said that I preserved my cart to carry me to the gallows, but I will make it a death cart to you."
[00:20:14] Josh Hutchinson: "Mary replied, she feared her not, because God had kept her and would keep her still."
[00:20:21] Sarah Jack: The voice said she had a commission to kill her.
[00:20:24] Josh Hutchinson: Mary asked, "who gave you the commission?"
[00:20:28] Sarah Jack: The voice replied, "God gave me the commission."
[00:20:31] Josh Hutchinson: Mary replied, "the devil is a liar from the beginning, for God will not give commission to murder. Therefore, it must be from the devil."
[00:20:40] Sarah Jack: "Then Mary was again pressed very much."
[00:20:44] Josh Hutchinson: Then the voice said, "you will make known these things abroad when I am gone. But if you will promise me to keep these aforesaid matters secret, I will come no more to afflict you."
[00:20:57] Sarah Jack: Mary replied, "I will tell it abroad."
[00:21:00] Josh Hutchinson: On May 25th, 1669, the jury could not reach a verdict.
[00:21:07] Sarah Jack: The magistrates ordered Katherine Harrison to remain in jail until the October session of the Court of Assistants.
[00:21:13] Josh Hutchinson: The magistrates posed four questions to a group of ministers.
[00:21:17] Sarah Jack: One. Whether a plurality of witnesses be necessary legally to evidence one and the same individual fact.
[00:21:26] Josh Hutchinson: Two. Whether the preternatural apparition of a person legally proved be a demonstration of familiarity with the devil.
[00:21:34] Sarah Jack: Three. Whether a vicious person's foretelling some future event or revealing of a secret be a demonstration of familiarity with the devil.
[00:21:43] Josh Hutchinson: Four. Whether harm inflicted by a person's specter or apparition, if legally proven, was proof of diabolism.
[00:21:52] Sarah Jack: May 26th, 1669. Samuel Hurlbut and Alexander Rony testified that Josiah Gilbert denied being Katherine Harrison's cousin and said that he only knew her as, quote, "one that followed the army in England."
[00:22:07] Josh Hutchinson: This may have been an implication that Harrison had been a sex worker in England.
[00:22:12] Sarah Jack: In undated testimony, Eleazer Kinnerly testified that his late wife, Mary Robbins Kinnerly, had complained that her mother had been killed by witchcraft.
[00:22:24] Josh Hutchinson: Mary once spoke with Katherine Harrison about the death of her father, John Robbins, and Katherine said, "when your father was killed," implying that she knew Mr. Robbins did not die a natural death.
[00:22:38] Sarah Jack: Alice, the wife of James Wakeley also submitted undated testimony. She reported that when Mrs. Robbins was ill, her body was stiff as a board.
[00:22:47] Josh Hutchinson: But when she died, her body became extraordinarily limber.
[00:22:52] On October 12th, 1669, the jury found Katherine Harrison guilty and the court ordered her to compensate the witnesses who had traveled from Wethersfield to Hartford to testify.
[00:23:05] Sarah Jack: Marshall Gilbert acted as Harrison's attorney in requesting that those who owed money to Harrison should appear before the assistants to settle their debts. The court granted this motion.
[00:23:15] Josh Hutchinson: Daniel Garrett was awarded 12 shillings for attending Katherine Harrison at the special court.
[00:23:22] Sarah Jack: On October 20th, the group of ministers at last returned their answers to the four questions, which had been submitted by the magistrate.
[00:23:29] Josh Hutchinson: "To the first question, whether a plurality of witnesses be necessary legally to evidence one and the same individual fact, we answer that if the proof of the fact do depend wholly upon testimony, there is then a necessity of a plurality of witnesses to testify to one and the same individual fact, and without such a plurality, there can be no legal evidence of it.
[00:23:56] John 8: 17, the testimony of two men is true. That is legally true or the truth of order, and this chapter alleges to vindicate the sufficiency of the testimony given to prove that individual truth that he himself was the Messiah or light of the world. Verse 12. Matthew 26: 59 to 60."
[00:24:21] Sarah Jack: "To the second question, whether the preternatural apparitions of a person legally proved be a demonstration of familiarity with the devil? We answer that it is not the pleasure of the most high to suffer the wicked one to make an undistinguishable representation of any innocent person in a way of doing mischief before a plurality of witnesses. The reason is because this would utterly evacuate all human testimony. No man could testify that he saw this person do this or that thing, or it might be said that it was the devil in his shape."
[00:24:51] Josh Hutchinson: "To the third and fourth questions together, whether a vicious persons foretelling some future event or revealing of a secret be a demonstration of familiarity with the devil. We say this much, that those things, whether past, present, or to come, which are indeed secret, that is cannot be known by human skill and arts or strength of reason arguing from the course of nature, nor are made known by divine revelation either mediate or immediate, not by information from man must needs to be known, if at all, by information from the devil. And hence the communication of such things in way of divination. The person pretending the certain knowledge of them seems to us to argue familiarity with the devil in as much as such a person doth, thereby declare his receiving of the devil's testimony and yield up himself as the devil's instrument to communicate the same to others."
[00:25:55] Sarah Jack: Katherine Harrison remained in jail while the magistrates considered the minister's words.
[00:25:59] Josh Hutchinson: On May 30th, 1670, the court finally rejected the guilty verdict and released Katherine Harrison upon payment of fees and agreement to leave Wethersfield.
[00:26:12] Sarah Jack: In June, Katherine moved to Westchester, New York, now Westchester Square in the Bronx.
[00:26:17] Josh Hutchinson: Her oldest daughter, Rebecca, had married a man named Josiah Hunt from Westchester.
[00:26:24] Sarah Jack: By July 7th, Josiah's father, Thomas Hunt Sr., had gathered signatures a petition to remove Harrison from town.
[00:26:32] Josh Hutchinson: Notice she moved in June, and this guy's got a petition ready on July 7th. He's, "lady, you're outta here."
[00:26:41] Governor Francis Lovelace initially granted their request and ordered Harrison to move.
[00:26:47] Sarah Jack: However, Harrison refused to leave.
[00:26:51] Josh Hutchinson: Instead, she found shelter in the home of Richard Panton.
[00:26:54] Sarah Jack: On August 20th, 1670, Governor Lovelace summoned Panton and Katherine Harrison.
[00:27:01] Josh Hutchinson: Panton and Harrison traveled 14 miles to Fort James to talk with the governor.
[00:27:06] Sarah Jack: After meeting with the pair, Governor Lovelace ordered an inventory of Harrison's estate.
[00:27:12] Josh Hutchinson: He then reversed his decision and permitted Harrison to remain in Westchester, in exchange for an unspecified bond for her good behavior.
[00:27:22] Sarah Jack: In October, the governor released Harrison from her bond.
[00:27:26] Josh Hutchinson: Some records indicate that Katherine Harrison moved on to Long Island.
[00:27:32] Sarah Jack: Others believe she may have died in 1682 in the Dividend community outside Wethersfield, Connecticut. Now Rocky Hill.
[00:27:40] Josh Hutchinson: I just wanna say on these last two theories, we don't have exact records to. Absolutely confirm either of these are just the theories that are out there that some historians have stated.
[00:27:57] Sarah Dibble, sister-in-law of Abigail Graves Dibble, accused her husband of abuse in 1669.
[00:28:06] Sarah Jack: Zachary Dibble claimed the bruises and other marks on her body were the result of her witchcraft.
[00:28:11] Josh Hutchinson: He also claimed, quote, "she had a teat in the secret part of her body that was sometimes bigger and sometimes lesser, but was half a finger long."
[00:28:24] Sarah Jack: No formal complaint of witchcraft was filed.
[00:28:28] Josh Hutchinson: And the court did not proceed against Sarah Dibble.
[00:28:32] Sarah Jack: Instead, they released her from her marriage to Zachary.
[00:28:36] Josh Hutchinson: We want to just tell you for those who are new, witch teats found in the secret parts of their body are often the clitoris. They're talking about her clitoris.
[00:28:53] Sarah Jack: Not a birthmark.
[00:28:54] Josh Hutchinson: As if it's a foreign object attached to her body and not an important component of said body.
[00:29:06] Edward Messenger sued Edward Bartlett in 1673 for saying that Messenger's wife was, quote, "an old witch, or whore."
[00:29:16] Sarah Jack: In 1678, Goodwife Burr of Wethersfield sued for slander.
[00:29:23] Josh Hutchinson: An unidentified suspect was accused of witchcraft in Hartford in 1682.
[00:29:28] Sarah Jack: Next is Goodwife Bowden of New Haven. Sued for slander in 1689 after being called a witch.
[00:29:36] Josh Hutchinson: Unfortunately, not much information is available about these later accusations.
[00:29:41] Sarah Jack: The next accusation was made in 1692.
[00:29:45] Josh Hutchinson: We'll have more on that in the sixth and final episode in this series.
[00:29:49] Sarah Jack: Now here's Mary Bingham with a Minute with Mary.
[00:29:53] Mary Bingham: Alice Young. The following wonderful and thoughtful question was put forth to several people by Sarah Jack, a co-founder of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration project and co-host of this podcast. How are you planning to remember Alice Young on May 26th, this 376th anniversary of her execution? I responded, "I'm going to Windsor that afternoon." Now I ask myself, "why do I wanna go to Windsor?" Now that I am somewhat educated about Alice Young, I want to go and experience the area where she lived to develop a deeper understanding of her life, to stand where she stood to walk, where she walked. To bend and touch the soil where she lived, to connect to the earth where she lived is almost like reaching out and touching her personal history.
[00:30:53] The other reason I wanna go to Windsor is to connect with other co-founders who will be there. This solemn afternoon will be spent with people who, at the center of their hearts and minds desire greatly to exonerate Alice, along with all of the others who were convicted and hanged for the capitol crime of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut, a crime they did not commit.
[00:31:17] This wonderful group of people banded together late spring of 2022 to fulfill the dreams and help with the previous ongoing effort by Tony Griego and Beth Caruso to finally bring justice for the innocent people who lived over 375 years ago. Please visit the Facebook page titled CT Witch Memorial, founded by Beth and Tony established in 2016 to learn of the stories of the victims and to read about how Tony started the exoneration process in the late two thousands before Beth joined him about the year 2015.
[00:32:00] The current co-founders of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project are myself, Sarah Jack, Joshua Hutchinson, author Beth Caruso and Tony Griego. Our powerhouse representatives at the state level are Representative Jane Garibay and Senator Dr. Saud Anwar. We are all of like minds, like hearts, and work 150% so that all of the wrongfully convicted will see justice.
[00:32:29] To find out more about Alice Young, please listen to the episode of this podcast titled Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Part Two, Witchcraft Belief, the Founding of Connecticut, and Alice Young, and also consider reading One of Windsor by Beth Caruso. You won't be disappointed. Thank you.
[00:32:49] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[00:32:52]
[00:33:03] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News.
[00:33:05] We had the privilege of spending the week of May 15th, 2023 with Dr. Leo iWay, director of advocacy for alleged witches of Nigeria for a New England speaking tour. He had the opportunity to share the striking parallels between the historic accused witches and the alleged witches being attacked around the globe today with several audiences, including Connecticut legislators and constituents.
[00:33:26] He told us about recent circumstances of targeting vulnerable members of society with blame and punishment for natural misfortunes. He showed us their faces. He told us their stories. He has let us know how significant it is when local or state governments in the United States make a formal acknowledgement of the wrongs of witchcraft persecutions.
[00:33:46] Therefore, the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project's work for an official state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut colony resonates globally. It is that important. Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast supports the Joint Committee on Judiciary's bill, HJ Number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. We still need your additional efforts as we are waiting for the Senate to take HJ 34 to vote shortly.
[00:34:15] Will you take time today to write a Connecticut senator asking them to recognize the relevance of acknowledging the Connecticut witch trial victims? You can do this whether you are a Connecticut resident or anywhere else in the world. You can do this as any political party member. This is a bipartisan effort. You should do it from right where you are. You can find the information you need to contact a member of the Connecticut State Senate with a letter in the show links, the house has passed the bill. We need the Senate to follow suit. Your message to them gets this done.
[00:34:44] We have a very exciting update out of Stratford, Connecticut due to the thoughtfulness and effort of town historian David Wright. Mayor Laura Hoydick has signed a proclamation declaring May 15th Goody Bassett Day. Goody Bassett's first name is unknown, and she was executed in Stratford in 1651. The Town Council of Stratford will be voting on a resolution acknowledging her innocence next month. Their decision will be heavily influenced by the decision of the Senate on their vote for HJ 34.
[00:35:11] Please send your message of support to the Senate, for Goody Bassett and the other accused witches of Connecticut Colony, who need their good names cleared and for the victims suffering right now, each week from mob witch attacks across the globe.
[00:35:24] Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. To support us purchase books from our bookshop, merch from our Zazzle shop, or make a financial contribution to our organization. Our links are in the show description.
[00:35:35]
[00:35:46] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:35:51] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:35:53] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe in whatever app you use to get your podcasts.
[00:35:58] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com
[00:36:01] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends and family about Thou Shalt Not Suffer.
[00:36:06] Sarah Jack: We want your support for our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:36:13] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:36:17]

May 28, 2023

Before Salem with Richard S. Ross III

Before Salem: Witch Hunting in the Connecticut River Valley, 1647-1663 by Richard S Ross III

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Show Notes

Welcome back friend of the podcast Richard Ross III, author of the Connecticut Witch Trial History book, Before Salem. Richard discusses witch trial cases from 1647-1663 in the Connecticut River Valley before the Salem Witch Trials and how they were influenced by the English Civil War. You will find out how The Witch Finder General impacted witch finding in the American Colonies. Richard portrays his love for the history and for speaking locally about it around Connecticut. We also hear from friend of the podcast, Beth Caruso on why some sites in Connecticut could be the witch hanging locations.

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Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode we speak with Richard S. Ross III, historian and author of Before Salem: Witch Hunting in the Connecticut River Valley, 1647 to 1663. And we'll be talking Connecticut Witch Trials throughout this episode. We begin with a discussion of what led to the witch trials in Connecticut.
Sarah Jack: How the events in the colonies and back in England affected witch-hunting in the [00:01:00] colonies.
Josh Hutchinson: Conflict with the Dutch and Native Americans.
Sarah Jack: The influence of the English Civil War.
Josh Hutchinson: The impact of the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins.
Sarah Jack: What were his witchfinding techniques, and what were other witchfinding techniques that were used in the colonies?
Josh Hutchinson: We'll discuss the supposed diabolical conspiracy to undo the church.
Sarah Jack: And differences between beliefs of common people and upper classes and clergy.
Josh Hutchinson: Cover all that and more.
We also have a special treat for you this week. We have author Beth Caruso returning to the show to discuss the possible location of the witch trial hanging site. And a magnificent tree that [00:02:00] unfortunately no longer lives called the Witch Elm.
Sarah Jack: We'll tell you where you can find a photo of it.
Josh Hutchinson: And we'll have linked to that in the show notes.
Sarah Jack: Now here's Richard Ross III.
Richard Ross: Like, I did a talk at uh, Center Church in Hartford, as an example, and when I finished, uh, a lot of the people were actually descendants of the people in Hartford, because this church is right in Hartford. I think it's the second congregational church. and They were just so enthusiastic, because they didn't know this their their family and their ancestors. I, I enjoy doing and and helping people understand their past better as way of saying it.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We really appreciate what you've done for the Connecticut witch trial history. It's so great to get it out in the open, and we encounter quite a number of descendants.
Richard Ross: Oh, I bet.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a lot working with us on the exoneration project. One of our goals is just to get the education out there, get [00:03:00] the history out there among everybody.
Richard Ross: I'm gonna tell you, I'll tell you something, this is how I got interested in this. I'm not from Connecticut, and so I moved here to take the job at Trinity. And my wife, who has since passed away, unfortunately. But she saw something in the paper, a little article about, Connecticut Witch. It was just a witch's little, and I said, "I never heard of that. What is going on here?" And so then I was able to I was getting ready to teach a course witch trials. I'm put it that way. It wasn't witchcraft, it's about the witches and the trials and what happened. But it was in Salem that I first thought I would talk about with my class.
And it was a seminar, first year seminar for the students. And what happened was, I started off with Salem, because there's plenty of material on Salem, but I started looking into Connecticut, but there wasn't much material in Connecticut. So I started doing research and [00:04:00] started pulling together the material that I could, so that I could give my students, they could do papers on the Connecticut Witch trials, which is what I wanted them to do.
And that's how I got started into all the business of looking at different trials and what happened and trying to do research on the history. And that's how I got started on it.
Josh Hutchinson: We're so glad that you did.
Richard Ross: There's always been this theory, and it may be correct, I don't know, but that the Connecticut fathers, so to speak, didn't really want to talk about it. There wasn't much they could do in Salem, because it was out there. They did something else in the end, they turned around and made a production out of it, so that now Halloween is like the biggest event in Salem, the month of October. But Connecticut's always been pretty quiet about it.
You talk to people in Connecticut, and you talk about witches in Connecticut, and they won't know what you're talking about. They've never heard of it. Recently, of course, we're getting more out there, and the Exoneration Project is helping. The first one, I [00:05:00] guess a few number of years ago, didn't really get out there. There's been a lot more research, let's put it that way, so that people have something to look at and to see what we're talking about.
But it's always been quiet, and it's only been, I would say, I think it was in 1905, as an example, that Trumbull's daughter published that article in the Hartford Courant and actually named Alice Young or Youngs as the first woman executed in New England for witchcraft. So it hasn't been that long. There were articles in the newspapers in the early 1900s. They had discovered some documents that the Wyllys family had held all those years, and those came out, but they, people were aware of it, but only really the genealogists and historians, and that group of people, that really wasn't out there in the public eye. And it really hasn't been until just recently, I guess best way of saying it.
Josh Hutchinson: We'd [00:06:00] like to ask you some questions about your book. You begin with an excellent explanation, giving the background of what was going on in England and New England before the Witch trials. Can you tell us how the wilderness of New England challenged the colonists?
Richard Ross: If you think of the wilderness, like when Christ went out into the wilderness and confronted the devil. That was the, that was the image the way they were living it. It was primarily, I think the Native Americans that they confronted. As they were able to settle at least initially New England because so many of the Native Americans had died from epidemic disease. When they moved in and it wasn't necessarily from the colonists themselves. There were people that were here before the colonists, fur trappers, people that came in, and that disease had already been going in waves like smallpox, things like that.
So when they settled, here they are in the wilderness with wild [00:07:00] animals. It was certainly not anything like the way it was back in England. And so they had to learn a whole new way of life and confront themselves. They had to confront themselves what they were and what it was like living out there. The sun goes down at night, it's pitch black. You hear things there. There are stories that you've heard about from back in England about the demons and witches and things like that. Psychologically it was very disturbing to the people. They just we're not used to it.
The Native Americans, they considered these people to be the devil's minions. They felt that when they came here that they were coming to the Devil's Land, his kingdom, and they were invading his kingdom, and they had to fight back, so to speak. That's another thing.
Sarah Jack: And you mentioned that the population had been reduced due to sickness. Is there other reasons that they were able to acquire and settle into the territory that made things [00:08:00] tenuous between the Native Americans and the colonists?
Richard Ross: One of the things is the colonists had weapons like guns, right? Native Americans didn't have guns. And we know that every time somebody got close, if they tried to sell 'em a gun, they could. We think that's what happened to John Carrington. He got in trouble for, they thought he was trying to sell a gun, and that wasn't probably the reason initially. It might have made him, they might have been suspicious of him. And then other things came into play that finally got him convicted of being a witch and his wife too, which I have no idea why his wife was, but obviously he associated with her. So maybe that's what did it.
Josh Hutchinson: And you noted that the colonists experienced trauma from all the conflict. How did that affect their mindset? The conflict with the Native Americans, the warfare.
Richard Ross: It seemed a lot of the people that were accused of being witches were, somehow or other, they tried to [00:09:00] implicate them with getting involved with the Native Americans. Remember, these people believed that they were living in the end times and that the Native Americans were servants of Satan and that Satan was trying to convert as many of even the colonists to turn away from God, so that there would be fewer people that would be saved, so to speak.
The Native Americans, their religion wasn't Christian. So that they did things that they felt were Deviltry, and even one of the things that comes up sometimes is the idea that, especially with the women, that they were, may have used like Native Americans healing methods, something like that, which I don't believe that these women did, because whatever healing methods they took with them probably came from England, because to get involved with Native Americans healing at all would've been anathema. They really would've been [00:10:00] considered witches because of getting involved in that. I know, for a number of different cases, that there's always somehow a mention of Native Americans. Even the famous case of Elizabeth Seager, the witness claims that she, that she and her friends were dancing around a pot, a kettle, and they could see what they thought were Native Americans involved in it, and there's another case with Mary Staples some kind of like little Native Americans memento of some sort that they, somebody thought they saw her holding. In other words, they tried to connect them with the Native Americans, but they never really convicted the Native Americans of being witches, and they didn't take 'em to court. And the Native Americans were not Christians, they were outside the community, cuz they weren't betraying their belief in God. But the Christians that were in the community, the colonists, if they turned to Satan, they signed a pact with Satan, et cetera. They were turning their back on God and they deserved, they were [00:11:00] witches, because they were, working against God.
Sarah Jack: That's very good distinction. Thank you. Can you explain more about the chiliastic view of the times, what that means?
Richard Ross: You have to remember that in England at the time, I talk about the Civil War in England, about 1642 to about 1649. There was the belief that once they got rid of the king, which they did in 1649, they beheaded him, when Cromwell came to the throne, that he would usher in the end times, the reign of Jesus, and that's what they believed, and they believed it was coming. There was a lot of this belief at that time period, because that's what the puritans believed, that they were getting pretty close to the time when Jesus would reign on this earth. And that's what chiliastic view was.
Josh Hutchinson: And how did that view influence the Witch hunting?
Richard Ross: [00:12:00] If they believed that the end times are coming, as I said before, then they believed that the Devil was trying to turn as many good Christians to his side and away from God as possible. And he was getting really desperate, basically, because the end times are coming. And so he wanted as many souls as he could get. That's pretty crude, but that's probably the way it went. And so this is what they were fighting against, and boy, were they disappointed when Cromwell died and then when Charles II came to the throne, that didn't help either, cuz see, they expected the world to be different, and it wasn't. It went back to the way it had been, but it didn't stop 'em from going after witches. It might have even, it might have even worked the opposite. Let's get rid of these people while we can.
Sarah Jack: And are there other ways that the English Civil War was opening the door to the witch trials? I know you just said that they were thinking let's get rid of them while we can.
Richard Ross: I'll tell you exactly what happened. During the English Civil War, this is the way I look at it, [00:13:00] there were, immediately whenever there's any kind of conflict like that, and it was a civil war. So those are worse than wars against other people, just like our own civil war, how many, over 600,000 people, American soldiers died in our civil war. And it was pretty brutal war. And that's what the Civil War in England was pretty brutal, too. And plus it was, it, God is on our side type of approach, the chiliastic approach there. Basically what happens is there is no real government during this, during the Civil War, because they're fighting with each other pretty much. So that means that the government, the power centers come down to the towns, the locals, and whoever's in charge. And so what happens is, in this particular case, as I said each side, because it's so brutal, they start calling the other side antichrist. They've got witches. That gets really brutal.
And so each side is calling each other that in these names and saying that they've got the antichrist and the devil [00:14:00] on their side. And so now we get Matthew Hopkins, the witchfinder general, and Matthew Hopkins is an East Anglia, he and John Stearne, and there's a couple, there's a midwife. They decide they're going to go from village to village and find witches. And he comes up with a scheme to do this. He has these ideas, which I think actually happened before, but anyway, started using them, floating witches, putting witches in the water, right, poking them, looking for the witch's teat, the devil's mark, making them walk, particularly observing them, looking for familiars. And these things begin to percolate in England for a while, until the government starts to clamp down on it about 1647.
But these ideas find their way over to New England. And the other thing you have to know is that, during the time period in the 1630s and 1640s and even a good part of the, most of the 1650s, [00:15:00] there was no authority from England over here in New England. They weren't interested in the New England colonies very much at all. It isn't until the 1660s when Charles II comes back as king, that he starts to say, "wait a minute. I want to do something about these colonies. They should be obeying English law, et cetera, et cetera. We should tax them." That wasn't being done previously, so they were all pretty much on their own.
So anyway, the trials that they had were local, and as I've said before, one of the problems with Connecticut was that Connecticut was not settled as an appropriate colony. It didn't really get the permission to be a colony until John Winthrop Jr. actually goes over in 1660 to get the charter. And that causes problems, too, when he goes over there. But anyway, my point is that it was pretty neglected area for almost 30 years, as far as England was [00:16:00] concerned.
And so that you had these courts, for example, like the particular court that was set up in Connecticut. And they were using English law. They were trying to use English law, but it wasn't like they were appointed by somebody from England, let's put it that way. They said they established their own courts and that happened, too, in Massachusetts, were a little different. Although during the Salem Witch Trials, the Court of Oyer and Terminer really wasn't a legitimate court. It wasn't until December of 1692 that they actually get a legitimate court. And when they get the legitimate court in 1692, all of a sudden they decide that this hasn't really gone well then. And people that were actually admitted to being witches were actually let go. And the people prior to that, the people that had said they weren't witches were the ones that were hanged.
Sarah Jack: And so you state, and we know that, to this community, witches did exist and they felt that there was biblical [00:17:00] authority and their basic laws were confirming that. Is there anything you can tell us about that to understand their mentality on that?
Richard Ross: Well, they live in a different world than we do. So I try to make that point. We live in a more analytical world, where we can look at things and determine what's real and what isn't. And those days, they just didn't have that ability. It just didn't exist. You don't get that really started until about the time of the, the enlightenment, and plus it was very, it was totally religious. And the religious authorities, if you look at the laws, if you look at the church, even the Westminster Assembly, they admit that there were witches and that there's always been witches, right? We've always heard of witches.
The problem is, and I go into this when I give my talks, is that there's a difference between what people believed, that the lower classes, so to speak, believed about what witches, who the witches were and what [00:18:00] they did. And basically those people believed the witches just did harm, just harm, and so you would pick out one or two, and you would say, "the, this person did this," and if they could figure out a way to prove it, or they would use crowd, go after them and hang them or do whatever they did. That was one thing.
But what we're talking about here is what we call diabolical witchcraft or satanism. Now, this comes about in around the middle of the 15th century, because the church, the Catholic church on the continent, and I'll do this real quick, determines that, the theologians determine that the church is in a lot of trouble in this time period. And so they decide, it can't be us. It's gotta be, it's gotta be Satan. It's gotta be somebody on the outside. It's gotta be the devil. It's causing all the problems that we have, between the Black Death and just all kinds of issues that I go into.
So [00:19:00] what they say is, "okay. So we're talking about a conspiracy now. We're not talking about an individual witch that lives down the end of the town, who sits, is by herself and reads fortunes. We're talking about somebody who's actually signed a compact with the Devil, and there's a conspiracy to undo the church and undo all of God's work." And that's the difference between the what we're talking about here.
And that's why you get a difference, even in New England and England, between what the regular person thought about who a witch was and what the clergy thought a witch was. They thought diabolical witchcraft. The average person thought, "oh, they've harmed me." That's it. They don't get into the devil business as much. It comes later, though. Obviously, it comes down, it spreads, from the upper classes down to the peasants and stuff like that.
So what happens, though, the best part of this is, okay, so on the continent things happen like people are burned as witches, right? [00:20:00] And we know that. But you notice that they don't burn them in England. They hang them. And the reason for this is because on the continent, witchcraft is a heresy. In England it's a felony. In England, you get a trial by jury, and you know you gotta defend yourself, but at least, and you don't get tortured. On the continent, you get tortured. And you have, the trial is a kind of a Roman Inquisitionarial trial where there's three judges, and one of the judges is supposed to help you. And you're probably considered guilty. You have to prove that you're innocent. Whereas in an English court, of course, you were innocent until proven guilty.
So this comes about because of Henry VIII, which is really interesting, cuz people give him such a bad rap. But he probably saved a lot of people from being killed as witches. And basically what he did was parliament, I guess, passed the law that said witchcraft was a felony. Once it became a felony, it meant that, you obviously [00:21:00] got a court trial, and you got the ability to defend yourself and you couldn't be tortured, can't be tortured for a felony.
So these are the kinds of laws that get, then the laws get passed later with Elizabeth and then James I of England. So there are witchcraft laws passed, but at least there is a little bit of defense. There's an ability to limit the number of people they're going to be accused of being witches.
One of the ways they do that is because they don't allow torture. Whereas on the continent, people were naming names constantly, and that's why you had thousands of people supposedly or a whole village wiped out. Whereas in England, the maximum was probably like under Matthew Hopkins, probably maybe a hundred to 200. That's all. And even in New England, even though it's a terrible thing that happened, was still limited to the number of people that were actually tried and convicted of being witches.
Josh Hutchinson: And [00:22:00] in the book you also talk about the ministers in Windsor delivering some sermons where they spoke about the devil and the witches. How did that influence the people's belief in that community in witchcraft?
Richard Ross: They started around, I think 1639, 1640, talking about this, and this is about the time that Alice and her husband John moved and her daughter moved to Windsor. At least that's my approach. Other people have different approaches, but that's the way I look at it.
I talk about something called cunning men and cunning women and cunning men are, it just means they know that they're like white witches. They basically, and I talk about, I go back to England, so I go back and forth because it's important to understand where these people were coming from. So just to say this quickly, in England it was considered quite normal. If you say you lost an object, you might go to your local cunning person [00:23:00] in the village or whatever in community and ask if they knew anything about it. And these people tended to know a lot of things, because a lot of people came to them, and they would do charms and things like that. And one of the things that they did, which was very important, was they would unwitch people. So if somebody felt that they had been cursed and I have evidence of some of this even in New England of unwitching, how people tried to unwitch themselves.
So that's what this person would do. I don't know the that Alice was doing unwitching, but maybe she was a healer. That's the way I look at it. She probably had for some, I don't know where she got it from. I personally think she may, as I said, I'm the one who thinks she came from London, those others don't agree with me. But I, I think that she may have gotten a skillset somewhere, and when she came there, she would help them out, because one of the things they did was they raised cattle. That was the big thing from the people from the the that part of of England.[00:24:00]
Plus I found this out, her husband, this is really weird. Her husband had some kind of like a tuberculosis of the skin and he constantly lost his skin. And, when I saw that, I said, "oh, she's gotta be doing something to help him out." Anyway, so she may have had a skillset that was working fine.
And then when people started dying, obviously sometimes people turn on those kinds of people and go, " wait a, now people are dying. She must be, as I say this a fellow that had a wife and he was in Newbury, I think in Newbury, Massachusetts. And he said, sometimes people questioned about whether my wife was a good witch or a bad witch, and I got it as a quote.
So it's possible that when people started dying, people started looking at it with a jaundice eye and said, and then of course there were issues going on in the church too. That's the other thing. There were a lot of issues that that were causing problems in the church. We don't know exactly what they were, but we know that people were complaining about something. That, that's the kind of thing that [00:25:00] once it gets started, it's hard to it's hard to stop. People just gossip, and it just gets, the ball starts rolling.
There are no records of the trials themselves, that all we have is like depositions and things like that, just like in Salem. She's got that issue with trying to find the witches marks. Or the witches teats as they call 'em. And if they can discover that, and this is what they believe. The demonologists believe that if you can discover that on the person, then you know that a compact was made with the devil and that they are feeding familiars. The witches teat was to feed familiars, and so if you could, and that's what they were looking for.
And we know that they were looking for that in Goody Knapp. Because what happens with Goody Knapp is Goody Knapp gets hanged, right? And her body is thrown in a ditch, is what they did with witches, right? When she was hanged, and her body's thrown in a ditch, Mary Staples gets involved and gets accused of being a witch, [00:26:00] but she goes over there and starts looking for the witch's teats. So we know that must have been an important part of the trial. And one of the other ladies says, "wait a minute. Be careful there. Don't you know or they'll think you're a witch, too, if you say that these," cuz she was going, " there's nothing on her that's any worse than anyone, than me." and that's when the other lady says, "wait a minute, you're gonna get in trouble for this." And so we know that was very important. We don't hear about it that much, but obviously it was important because that Mary was looking for it to say if that was the proof.
And then I guess a woman named O'Dell, she was a midwife. Now the midwifes are different. Midwives actually were very respected. She comes up to her and says, comes up to Mary Staples and said, "she's got 'em, she's got 'em. And just shut up, basically, oh, you're gonna get you something to a lot of trouble." So anyway, that's what happened.
Sarah Jack: Wow, that's a great story. Historical story.
Richard Ross: Lot of interesting things going on, gotta [00:27:00] read these cases as much as really close, some of them, and this is just some of 'em. I try to look at the cases, all the cases, as many cases as I could. These are all cases, many of 'em related to people that actually executed. But I also got involved in a few cases where people weren't necessarily executed, but they were freed, so to speak.
I think you hear about John Winthrop and how he was like an alchemist. And how he helped to get some of these witchcraft cases where it looked like they were gonna be convicted. He got them off, but as long as they behaved themselves. This is a case she didn't hang, she was from New York. And the town, the area she was from wanted to be connected with Connecticut. So cuz they wanted to get a real trial, and they brought her up there, and she was tried and it looked pretty bad for her, and then John Winthrop, Jr. was able to say, " let's let her go and she behaves that'll be fine. If she doesn't behave, we'll bring her back, and then we'll convict her." And you know that, what's interesting about that is this case of [00:28:00] guilty and not guilty, whereas he was looking for a middle way, because she wasn't not guilty, but she wasn't guilty, either, as far as he was concerned.
I'm writing a book on body snatching. And the reason I bring it up is because there's, the Scots, legally they actually have a middle ground where you're not actually guilty and you're not not guilty, but you're in the middle, basically.
And I think that's where he might have got it from, so anyway, but he did that in a number of cases. I think one of the problems he had was he did that in that case I was just telling you about. And I think the people in Hartford during their time period when they had the Hartford Witch Hunt, got really upset that this woman didn't get executed. And so that when he left, that was now their opportunity to go after the real witches that they wanted to get.
Sarah Jack: That's really good information.
Richard Ross: They, they were bitter, bitter. And the other thing I just wanna tell [00:29:00] you quickly about, which I even talked about, but with the Hartford case there was an awful lot of contention and wrangling over the church in Hartford, and that also didn't help, either, with the witch panic.
Josh Hutchinson: Can you tell us a little more about that?
Richard Ross: Basically, when Hooker died, they brought in a couple of ministers that they tried them out. They didn't like 'em. Stone didn't like them at all, particularly the first one. And he wanted to be the chief minister, basically, best I can tell. And then he started to act a what we would call a Presbyterian where you're in charge of the church, whereas Congregationalists didn't believe in that. They believed that the elders were in charge of the church and that the minister was supposed to do their bidding pretty much.
And so there was great conflict between the two of them over almost a ten year period. It was unbelievable. People talked about it all over New England, and actually Wethersfield had its problems, too, [00:30:00] but in 1659, the elders were finally able to withdraw and go up to Hadley, Massachusetts. And they set up their own church up there. But what happened was, of course, it left, all the quality people, if you will, left town and caused all kinds of problems land disputes, and cetera, et cetera, in Hartford itself. Hartford was also suffering all kinds of weather problems, flooding.
And then our friend John Winthrop, Jr. decides he's gonna leave and go over and get a charter, which freaked people out. And then when Charles II came to the throne, that freaked people out. And finally, the Congregationalists felt they were losing out to Presbyterians and Charles was getting ready to allow Catholics, for God's sake, to come into New England.
That was another thing, Quakers. So there was all kinds of problems going on in in Hartford, and in some sense, New England at that time. But Hartford was the place where we had the the actual witch trials themselves that came about as a result of all [00:31:00] these issues. So there's a lot of detail on that, too, that I go into. And there was conflict in the church, too.
The other thing that happened was the thing that most people don't talk about, which I like to talk about, is the fact that one of the young women, Ann Cole, was possessed. She started naming witches and things like that, but she was also supposedly possessed by a demon.
And the ministers of course got together, the four ministers from the different towns Wethersfield, Farmington, and then I think two from Hartford, including Stone. And they decided they were going to interview her, and they weren't casting demons out, but they were certainly looking for information from her, and she gave out the information they wanted. And one of the other things that had to do with this is not everybody left, not everybody could afford to leave to go up to Hadley. And so there was a small group in the church that were working against Stone. And it just so happened that Anne Cole [00:32:00] was the daughter of one of the members of this group.
Josh Hutchinson: You've answered many of our questions. Towards the end of the book, you talk about the case of Katherine Harrison and what was the significance of the final decision in that case?
Richard Ross: Katherine is the one where he goes to the ministers. Basically that's important, because finally they decide that you can't have a an accusation that you saw some kind of devilish activity, unless you have actually two witnesses. And if you can get two witnesses that saw the same exact act, then you'd have a case, at least you could bring it to court. Aside from that, no. They couldn't get a conviction. From that period on, you don't have, the magistrates really don't wanna bring too many witchcraft cases until we finally get up to 1692. And we do get the witchcraft cases, but thankfully, no executions.
Sarah Jack: [00:33:00] Where do you suggest your community, people who are coming to look for history, where can they experience it or learn about it?
Richard Ross: So basically once a year we, I do a a tour called the Connecticut Colony 17th Century Witch Panic. And I put together this pamphlet for them, Ancient Burying Ground. And we usually do that in October. So that's one where I talk about a lot of what happened during the witch panic at that time period. But what we also do is we identify the graves of people who were connected to the witch panic. And of course, no witches are buried there, as I have to tell people all the time, because they didn't do that.
But we do have Hooker and Stone, and some of the more famous names are there. And so I talk about each of the individuals and how they're connected. There's another organization at the Stanley-Whitman House, which is in Farmington, and it's called the Mary Barnes Society.[00:34:00] Their organization is interested in Mary Barnes, who was also hanged with the Greensmiths in 1663, and I guess they have a collection there. I've been there, but I haven't been involved with them. But I do know about them, and I've done talks for them.
And of course there are talks, available people that are doing talks like myself. And there's other, Beth does talks. And recently I went to, although there wasn't really a witch thing, but have you ever heard of The Witch of Blackbird Pond in the book?
Josh Hutchinson: Yes.
Richard Ross: Okay. So they did a ball there for Halloween. It was quite good. And so there's ways to get into it and then of course, to read about it, to get books that, if you're interested in it, get some of these books and read about the work that's been done and find out if there's something that you feel that you can, you see something that maybe you'd like to explore further and maybe do some research on your own. That's always good.
So there are ways of connecting with people and then you [00:35:00] connect with other people and then Beth's got that Connecticut Witchcraft, it's a Facebook and you can, see what's going on and that it's a way of it's a way of connecting with other people that might, that have the same interests as you.
I will say that when I talk to people, so many people just tell me that they're so thankful that somebody actually is, I think I said this earlier, is interested in like their family or it's nice to know that they're related in some way to somebody else that's related to so heck, a lot of people that seem to be related to these witches, accused witches. I'm shocked at how many people, but it's good.
My book is available primarily through like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and stuff like that. And I didn't set the price, unfortunately. But it's got a lot of material in it, and it's I think people live, if they're interested in basically how it's connected with what was going on in England and then basically took off on its own. [00:36:00] You can learn a lot from what I've written, I hope. Anyway, that's what I did it for. I wanted to give people context. One of the things I noticed about a lot of books on witchcraft, on witches and witch trials is they deal with that specifically, whereas what I wanted to do is to look at it and put it into a totality, a context, and then people can understand some of these trials better, I think is what was going on in the world at that time. The real purpose for the book really is to put 'em all into a larger context, and particularly the, obviously the Connecticut Witch Trials.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you.
Richard Ross: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Josh Hutchinson: And now we go to author Beth Caruso, who has an update on a possible location of the Connecticut witch trials hangings in Hartford.
Beth Caruso: Dr. Love was a historian, and he was a reverend as well. So in 1914, [00:37:00] Dr. William DeLoss Love published a history called The Colonial History of Hartford, which focused on how the City of Hartford developed. And on page 2 86 of this book, he talked about a possible witch hanging site. Now Dr. Katherine Hermes, our historian friend, she has said how impressed she was with Dr. Love's references. He literally went to Colonial Land records, and he followed them through time. In one Colonial land record, it said that it was near the hanging site, or it was the property of what the old hanging site was, or gallows.
And [00:38:00] keep in mind, those gallows were used not just for witch trial victims, but the other first hanging victims were mostly Native Americans, they hanged for murder. And also gay people, and they are on the record as being hanged for sodomy. So this is a site that does pertain to which trial victims, but there are also others who were targeted for their skin color, their culture, their sexual preference, as well. So we do need to keep that in mind when we talk about these gallows.
I'm gonna read you the specific site that he is talking about, but before I do that, I do wanna tell you that, we don't absolutely know for certain where the hanging site was a, [00:39:00] and I've heard so much hearsay, but I, there is no direct evidence. One spot that has come up as hearsay is near the Old State House. Apparently at some point in time when they were doing construction in the area, they did find some human remains in the ground near the Old State House. Does that mean that people were hanged there at some point? It's really hard to know. And again, I can't find direct references to that, so I don't even know if that's hearsay or if that's real. I would need to do more research on that.
Another possible hanging site was down by the meadows near the Connecticut River. And I think where that might come from [00:40:00] is there's an old map from the 1630s, and after the Pequot war, near that site, they would this sounds terrible, but they would cut off the heads of the natives that they were conquering and put them on pikes, and they would put those on this land next to the river as a warning. And this was not anything new for the English. At that time in London, near the old London Bridge. Criminals after they were killed, they'd be decapitated and their heads would be on pikes right near the London Bridge as well. So this was part of a criminal thing that they did as a warning to who they considered to be other criminals. So that might be where talk of, a possible other [00:41:00] hanging site comes from because of that.
Another place, at Trinity College, there's a hill and up on that hill, there were gallows there at one point in time, but every historian I have talked to has said that those were gallows from the time of the Revolutionary War, and they did not believe that witch trials were there. I would say the absolute most solid and strongest evidence of where the hanging site was or where the gallows were, would have been a mile from downtown Hartford at the time, Main Street, about a mile out up Albany Avenue, which at that point was a road that went out to cow pasture, and there was supposedly a hill there. And if we know from Salem, it was from the downtown [00:42:00] proper, and it was on a hill where they had a gallows. So going by those things, it seems like it would fit a little better.
But then we have this reference by Dr. Love, who is very specific. And so I'm gonna read you what he wrote, and this all comes from land records. This is page 286 of the Colonial History of Hartford. And he starts out at the beginning of the page talking about Elizabeth Seager and Mary Barnes being indicted. But then he goes down and he says, " it seems probable that the witches were executed outside of the town plot on the road from the cow pasture into the country.[00:43:00] There the gallows of early times were located on March 10th, 1711 to 12, John Read sold to John Olcott, attractive about seven acres bounded south on the highway leading out of Hartford town towards Simsbury, now Albany Avenue. It is described in the deed as near the house lately, built by Joseph Butler near where the gallows used to stand. The place is near enough identified as on the north side of the avenue on the east end of the present Goodwin lot there. A large elm tree on a rise of ground might well memorialize the place where this tragedy of Hartford's early history was [00:44:00] enacted."
Then he goes on to say the usual place of punishment for minor offenses was in the meeting house yard near the church where the stocks, the Hillary and the whipping post. So anyway, this is fairly concrete, I think, because he is looking at very old deeds from the early 1700s. The last of these hangings would've taken place in 1663 for the witch trial victims. But again, keep in mind there were other others who hang there as well. So he wrote this in 1914.
I've known about this a long time. Other people have known about it a long time. And people who know a bit about how Hartford has changed and where this might have been, have [00:45:00] pointed to Albany Avenue about a mile from the old meeting house. But I don't think anybody knew specifically where this was.
And it never dawned on me that this is 1914. There was photography back then. I don't know, I hadn't thought about it. Other people I've talked to hadn't thought about it, until last week when Jen Schloat, your other guest, pointed out to me. We were talking about old articles and perceptions of how the witch had changed to be the old hag to this young, powerful women, coinciding with women gaining independence and freedom during that time.
And so we were going back and forth, and she found this article from 1930, I believe it was May 11th, [00:46:00] 1930, that talked about this old elm tree and the possible sight of the gallows. And in that article was this picture of this huge and beautiful old elm tree, and it was up upon a hill, and I thought, oh my gosh, where is this? Where is this? We should be able to identify this. There was one building in that photograph that looked like it was older than the other buildings there, and it was On Irving and Albany Avenue, and with some research I figured out that was the old Goodwin lot or the old Goodwin Tavern, an inn that this guy, Dr. [00:47:00] Love, or Reverend Love was referring to, it was his lot. Apparently his lot went all the way from a church at Vine Street all the way down to Albany and Garden Streets. So Garden, between Garden and Irving would be the most eastward part of that lot that he talks about and the side of the street is the north side of the street.
And indeed that's where it was. Just having that information that indeed was the Goodwin mansion that was referred to the Goodwin lot or the Goodwin Inn and Tavern, then it was possible to locate other pictures. And in locating other pictures, there were some buildings right behind the tree that were built [00:48:00] in 1927, and a couple of the buildings in those pictures still stand there today.
So because of that, it was possible to identify the specific place where that big old elm tree would've been. And it was so amazing to me to finally figure this out and have it be so specific, because people were talking about this all the time in the 1930s, and why did it just disappear? Why did people not know this anymore?
If you go through newspapers.com, there are several articles about the Goodwin Inn, there's more than one article about this gargantuan elm tree. They decided to take it down in the [00:49:00] 1930s. I thought maybe it was because of Dutch Elm disease, but that's not why they took it down. They took it down because they said the roots, were spreading toward Albany Avenue. There wasn't enough ground for them. And the owners, they wanted to chop it down for "progress," quote, unquote, and then they wanted to grade the lot, which they did to make it level with everything else around it.
So I think part of why people just forgot or stopped talking about this was because the main landmark, what was called the witch elm, was gone. And the other sad part about this, if you look at the original photos, this area was just absolutely beautiful. But of course, that elm was taken down. The other elms nearby probably died from the Dutch Elm Disease, which hit [00:50:00] right around that time.
And then the historic Goodwin Inn. I don't know why anyone would do this. It was such a incredibly beautiful Greek revival building with such history for Hartford. They tore it down in 1956 to make room for a parking lot. How could you do that in the name of progress? It makes no sense to me. But that's what they did. And today it's still a parking lot. So when you go to that area on Albany Avenue today, you're not gonna see these gargantuan trees. You are not going to see this incredibly old, historic building. It's all gone, but we know precisely where that spot is now that Dr. Love referred to now.
Again, I'm gonna quote him there. "A large elm [00:51:00] tree on a rise of ground might well memorialize the place where this tragedy of Hartford's early history was enacted." We don't know for absolute sure that old elm tree was indeed a hanging tree for the gallows, but we do know it was that area. And I looked up other old elm trees to see the size of the trunk. Elm trees, even very old ones, the girth was not huge like a old chestnut tree. The girth was with the oldest trees, maybe six to ten feet. And if you look at that old tree in the photograph, that does match that. It's possible that it was the tree, because everything else was pretty much chopped down. I did find a picture of the Goodwin Inn in 1925, and this is [00:52:00] before the neighborhood behind it was built up. It just looks like fields, and it's pretty much farm fields everywhere with a few of these elm trees.
But the giant elm was one of three trees that was talked about in a special tree book. It's was called Trees of Note in Connecticut by Catherine Matthews. It was published in 1934. There were only three trees that she listed in Hartford that were well known. One, of course, was the Charter Oak. By then, the Charter Oak was gone, but they very carefully saved some saplings from the Charter Oak and strategically planted them in different places, which are still alive today. There was a third one but the second one was this witch [00:53:00] elm. And in the photograph for that book, the elm is, it's, it just looks monstrous. You can also go to ctdigitalarchive.org and see yet another picture of that massive elm tree. And it's facing north, but it's also facing more towards Garden Street, so you can get another perspective.
But in any case, I think this is really important to know. It's not the ideal place for a memorial right now. Right now it's the property of a liquor store in the north end of Hartford, basically. The neighborhood over time has gotten very run down. I know there are projects there to bring the neighborhood up again, but what you see now [00:54:00] is completely different than what in those photographs.
And again, with these landmarks, the Goodwin Inn and the huge elm tree, I think this is why this came out of people's memory, and why they just didn't talk about it for a long time. So thank goodness for newspapers.com.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Beth.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Beth. And we'll have a link to a photograph of the witch Elm in the show description.
Sarah Jack: And now for a Minute with Mary featuring Mary Bingham.
Mary Bingham: Mary Barnes
I have an update on the condition of Mary Barnes, for which she was treated between 1657 and 1659. I first spoke of this in the episode titled "Andy Verzosa on Museums, Mary Barnes and Farmington, Connecticut." John [00:55:00] Winthrop Jr. As an Alchemist who studied Paracelsus, believed that medicines created conditions. For which the body to heal itself. After looking at this journal entry more carefully, I discovered that Mary was treated with at least three medicines, salt, Peter sage, and most likely sugar today.
Salt Peter is known as potassium nitrate and can be used to destroy, preserve and heal. John Winter Jr. Knew that it was a fertilizer food preservative. And an ingredient used to make gun powder. On the other hand, John Winthrop Jr. Could have used Salt Peter to create the condition for the body to heal skin lesions, itchiness, and inflammation.
I don't know why John Winthrop Jr. Would have used Sage as of yet today. However, SAGE is used for headaches, sore throat, and inflammation. [00:56:00] Sugar would have been prescribed to create the condition. For the body to heal wounds. My transcription of this journal entry is far from complete. However, this small bit of knowledge brings us a little closer to knowing more about Mary Barnes.
Mary seemed to have responded favorably to this treatment before having a relapse. Winthrop Jr. Was able to help her both times to heal from a possible uncomfortable skin condition. Stay tuned. I will keep the audience updated as my findings are clarified. Thank you.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Mary.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: And now time for End Witch Hunts News featuring Sarah Jack.
Sarah Jack: On Monday, we visited the Salem Witch Museum and the Salem Witch Trials Memorial with Dr. Leo Igwe, director of Advocacy for Alleged Witches. He communicated with us the striking parallels between the historic accused witches and the alleged witches being [00:57:00] attacked around the globe today. Parallels such as targeting vulnerable members of society with blame and punishment for natural misfortunes that the accused could not possibly have caused. Lives forever altered, alleged witches maimed for life, having to flee their homes, to find safety from the trauma.
Words of innocence quoted from the 17th century witch trial records are chiseled in stone at the Salem witch Memorial, pleas of innocence quoted directly from the Salem Witch Trial victims you may be familiar with. The parallel is that modern day alleged witches are the exact counterpart. They're pleading and holding out their own arm, asking for their innocence to be recognized, pleading, pleading, pleading until they are dead. Tuesday, Mary Bingham, End Witch Hunts board member, took us to Proctor's Ledge. At the Proctor's Ledge Memorial, Dr. Igwe commented on how the sufferings of the 1692 victims ring a bell in his heart, because people today are suffering under very similar conditions. We also visited the locations where sisters [00:58:00] Mary Towne Esty and Rebecca Towne Nurse were arrested and the place where they were executed. These experiences were deeply moving, as we felt like we were touching tragic history. But this tragedy is not gathering dust in books. No, this tragedy has its counterpart across the globe, where men, women, and children are taken from their home and accused of causing harm with witchcraft. In Connecticut, we are waiting for the Senate to vote on the resolution to absolve those accused of witchcraft in the 17th century.
The United States is looked to for models of justice and dignity. Taking action here to absolve witch trial victims resonates in countries with people affected by witch hunts today and among immigrant communities in the United States and other Western nations. People in every continent are likely to be affected by modern witch hunts, because it's a smaller and smaller world due to instant connectivity and various cultures converging. Immigration is bringing beliefs from one part of the world to the rest of the world, therefore the whole world needs leadership standing up for all vulnerable people targeted as witches. [00:59:00] Communities everywhere can be effected by the dangerous and violent scapegoating of misfortune. And so communities everywhere need to take a stand.
Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop, merch from our Zazzle shop, or make a financial contribution to our organization. Our links are in the show description.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Please join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends and family and neighborhood goat about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:00:00]

May 18, 2023

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Part 4: The Hartford Witch-Hunt of 1662-1665

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Show Notes

This is Part 4 of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast’s Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series. In this episode, we look at The Hartford Witch-Hunt of 1662-1665, also popularly labeled The Hartford Witch Panic. This hunt took place while Governor John Winthrop Jr. was away in England obtaining the colonial charter. Afflicted girls Elizabeth Kelly and Ann Cole named witches. Podcast Cohosts, Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack continue the Connecticut Witch Trial History story with only fact backed, trustworthy research and sources. You will hear about the common theories, and which facts are in the primary source records. The lives of these historic individuals have been examined and we share what is known about them, from the historical record. How do we know what we know? We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Links

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Bibliography

Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut.

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Transcript

[00:00:00] 
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:25] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:27] Josh Hutchinson: This is part four of our Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series.
[00:00:31] Sarah Jack: In this episode, we discuss the Hartford Witch-Hunt of 1662 to 1665, commonly referred to as the Hartford Witch Panic.
[00:00:40] Josh Hutchinson: During this witch-hunt, 14 people were accused of witchcraft.
[00:00:44] Sarah Jack: 4 married couples, 5 women, and 1 man.
[00:00:50] Josh Hutchinson: It's notable that Governor John Winthrop Jr. was away negotiating a colonial charter with King Charles II at the onset of the witch-hunt.
[00:01:00] Sarah Jack: However, his replacement, Deputy Governor Major John Mason, is not listed in the court records associated with these cases.
[00:01:08] Josh Hutchinson: There is no indication that he served as a magistrate on any of the witch trials.
[00:01:14] Sarah Jack: His greatest contribution was his lack of action to stop the witch-hunt.
[00:01:19] Josh Hutchinson: Under his watch, four convicted of witchcraft were executed.
[00:01:23] Sarah Jack: Colonial officials listed on the records include magistrates Mr. Allen, Samuel Wyllys, Captain John Talcott, Lieutenant John Allen, Daniel Clark, Mr. Treat, and Mr. Walcott.
[00:01:35] Josh Hutchinson: Physician Bray Rossiter, assisted by Mr. William Pitkins.
[00:01:40] Sarah Jack: Grand jurors were William Wadsworth, Thomas Wells, Benjamin Newberry, Joseph Fitch, William Pitkins, James Steel, William Heyden, John Bissell, Samuel Wells, John Kilburn, Anthony Howkins, and Benedict Alvard.
[00:01:55] Josh Hutchinson: And trial jurors were Edward Griswold, Lieutenant Walter Filer, Ensign Olmsted, Samuel Boreman, Gregory Winterton, John Cowles, Samuel Marshall, Samuel Hale, Nathaniel Willett, John Hart, John Wadsworth, Robert Webster, and John Gilbert.
[00:02:18] Sarah Jack: And ministers Samuel Stone, Samuel Hooker, Joseph Haynes, and John Whiting were witnesses to this possession of Ann Cole.
[00:02:27] 
[00:02:36] Josh Hutchinson: We interrupt your regularly scheduled podcast with a special report.
[00:02:41] Sarah Jack: We have wonderful news.
[00:02:43] Josh Hutchinson: House Joint Resolution 34 Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft convictions in colonial Connecticut has been passed by the Connecticut House of Representatives.
[00:02:53] Sarah Jack: The measure to absolve those accused of witchcraft passed by a margin of 121 to 30. Hooray.
[00:03:04] Josh Hutchinson: HJ 34 now moves on to the Senate for a vote.
[00:03:08] Sarah Jack: Please continue to write to Connecticut senators.
[00:03:12] Josh Hutchinson: We can't assume the measure will pass the Senate.
[00:03:15] Sarah Jack: And we want to make sure it does.
[00:03:17] Josh Hutchinson: We will keep you posted on further developments.
[00:03:20] Sarah Jack: Thank you everyone who's contributed to this effort.
[00:03:23] Josh Hutchinson: Keep up the good work.
[00:03:25] 
[00:03:37] Josh Hutchinson: The two chief accusers were the allegedly bewitched Elizabeth Kelly and the allegedly possessed Ann Cole.
[00:03:45] Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Kelly was the eight-year-old daughter of John and Bethia Kelly of Hartford.
[00:03:51] Josh Hutchinson: Her father turned 59 the year the trouble started.
[00:03:55] Sarah Jack: Her mother was about 23.
[00:03:57] Josh Hutchinson: Some speculate that John Kelly was an alcoholic.
[00:04:00] Sarah Jack: However, this is based upon a single conviction for drunkenness in June of 1661.
[00:04:06] Josh Hutchinson: Bethia Kelly was a daughter of Samuel Wakeman, who died when she was a toddler.
[00:04:13] Sarah Jack: Wakeman left behind 40 pounds for his oldest child, a son, and 20 pounds each for his three daughters.
[00:04:20] Josh Hutchinson: Two years after Wakeman's death, his widow married Nathaniel Willett.
[00:04:25] Sarah Jack: Though Bethia Wakeman Kelly was due her 20 pounds upon her 18th birthday, she had not yet received it as of the events in the story.
[00:04:33] Josh Hutchinson: John Kelly was not a landowner and was valued at 14 pounds, 11 shillings, and nine pence upon his death.
[00:04:42] Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Kelly's aunt, Hannah Wakeman Hackleton, was abandoned by her husband Francis, a debtor whose estate was claimed by Samuel Marshfield, son of Goody Marshfield, who'd been accused of witchcraft up the Connecticut River in Springfield, Massachusetts.
[00:04:57] Josh Hutchinson: Hannah later faced legal challenges and was herself accused of being a witch in New York in 1673.
[00:05:05] Sarah Jack: We'll have more on that later. But first, the story of Elizabeth Kelly's afflictions.
[00:05:09] Josh Hutchinson: On Sunday, March 23rd, 1662, Elizabeth Kelly awoke in good health, as usual.
[00:05:18] Sarah Jack: She spent the morning with her grandmother.
[00:05:20] Josh Hutchinson: But came home before noon, accompanied by the wife of William Ayres.
[00:05:26] Sarah Jack: The visitor ate broth straight from a hot pot and encouraged the girl to do the same.
[00:05:30] Josh Hutchinson: Her parents protested.
[00:05:32] Sarah Jack: But she ate the hot broth anyway.
[00:05:35] Josh Hutchinson: After eating the hot broth, Elizabeth complained of pain in her belly.
[00:05:40] Sarah Jack: Her father medicated her with what he described as a small dose of the powder of angelica root.
[00:05:46] Josh Hutchinson: Does that mean he was a healer?
[00:05:49] Sarah Jack: No, it doesn't mean he was a healer. Families kept medicinal herbs the way we keep certain curatives in our medicine cabinets.
[00:05:56] Josh Hutchinson: The daughter reportedly felt well after she received the herb.
[00:06:01] Sarah Jack: And the family went to afternoon meeting together.
[00:06:05] Josh Hutchinson: All was well when the lights went out.
[00:06:07] Sarah Jack: But three hours later the girl awoke.
[00:06:11] Josh Hutchinson: According to her father, she cried out, "father, father, help me. Goodwife Ayers is upon me. She chokes me. She kneels on my belly. She will break my bowels. She pinches me. She'll make me black and blue. Oh, father, will you not help me?"
[00:06:28] She does seem to experience having a vision of a witch being upon her during her sleep, and people who've reported being hagridden describe seeing just such a sight of a witch on them, and they're unable to move, but they feel pain, and the witch hurts them.
[00:06:57] Sarah Jack: What did her dad do after this complaint?
[00:07:00] Josh Hutchinson: He told her to lie back down and be quiet so she wouldn't wake her mother.
[00:07:04] Sarah Jack: The girl did as she was told.
[00:07:06] Josh Hutchinson: But then she woke up and screamed even louder about Goodwife Ayers afflicting her.
[00:07:11] Sarah Jack: This time, Dad carried Elizabeth away and put her in her mother's bed.
[00:07:16] Josh Hutchinson: The young girl continued complaining about Goody Ayers torturing her.
[00:07:20] Sarah Jack: She said, "Goody Ayers torments me. She pricks me with pins. She will kill me."
[00:07:26] Josh Hutchinson: "Oh, father, set on the great furnace and scald her, get the broad ax and cut off her head."
[00:07:33] Sarah Jack: "If you cannot get a broad ax, get the narrow ax and chop off her head."
[00:07:37] Josh Hutchinson: The parents, quote, "used what physical helps we could obtain and that without delay."
[00:07:45] Sarah Jack: Meaning they likely gave her additional medicinals.
[00:07:48] Josh Hutchinson: Unfortunately, none of these physical helps worked for the girl, and she continued to suffer the next day.
[00:07:55] Sarah Jack: Bethia Kelly reported that she was at home with the wives of Thomas Whaples and Nathaniel Greensmith on Tuesday when Goodwife Ayers came to visit Elizabeth.
[00:08:04] Josh Hutchinson: While Ayers was there, the girl slept peacefully and seemed to be okay.
[00:08:09] Sarah Jack: But that night Elizabeth told her parents Goodwife Ayers had promised to give her fine lace, if she stopped accusing her of witchcraft.
[00:08:16] Josh Hutchinson: She encouraged her father to complain to the magistrates about Goodwife Ayers.
[00:08:21] Sarah Jack: Her condition continued to be poor Wednesday,
[00:08:25] Josh Hutchinson: At some point, she told her parents, "Goodwife Ayers chokes me."
[00:08:30] Sarah Jack: Then she was speechless.
[00:08:33] Josh Hutchinson: Later that night, she passed away.
[00:08:35] Sarah Jack: Was she bewitched to death?
[00:08:37] Josh Hutchinson: Or is there a simpler explanation for her passing?
[00:08:41] Sarah Jack: Her symptoms matched those of poisoning.
[00:08:44] Josh Hutchinson: It is possible that she was, indeed, poisoned, but likely not deliberately.
[00:08:50] Sarah Jack: Remember the angelica root?
[00:08:52] Josh Hutchinson: Her father gave her some to calm her stomach.
[00:08:55] Sarah Jack: But angelica can easily be mistaken for other plants.
[00:08:59] Josh Hutchinson: Poisonous plants.
[00:09:01] Sarah Jack: Including Hemlock.
[00:09:03] Josh Hutchinson: Do you think John Kelly had obtained the powdered root of the wrong plant?
[00:09:08] Sarah Jack: It's plausible.
[00:09:10] Josh Hutchinson: I agree. The symptoms of hemlock poisoning follow the same pattern described by her parents.
[00:09:17] Sarah Jack: According to the National Capital Poison Center, hemlock poisoning in humans, quote, " affects the nervous system and causes tremors, paralysis, and breathing difficulties. Muscle damage and kidney failure may occur in severe cases."
[00:09:31] Josh Hutchinson: The Cleveland Clinic says symptoms include restlessness or confusion, muscle weakness, muscle paralysis, and muscle death.
[00:09:40] Sarah Jack: The muscular paralysis can lead to the loss of speech.
[00:09:44] Josh Hutchinson: This is followed by respiratory failure.
[00:09:47] Sarah Jack: And then death due to a shortage of oxygen.
[00:09:51] Josh Hutchinson: While it would be impossible to diagnose Elizabeth Kelly 361 years after the fact, it does at least seem plausible she may have been poisoned accidentally.
[00:10:02] Sarah Jack: What we do know is that the story didn't end there.
[00:10:05] Josh Hutchinson: Not by a long shot.
[00:10:07] Sarah Jack: Following the death of Elizabeth Kelly, her parents invited the neighbors to come and view the body.
[00:10:13] Josh Hutchinson: They were asked to take notes of what they saw.
[00:10:16] Sarah Jack: After he laid his daughter's body on the form, John Kelly asked Goodwife Ayers to wipe a little something from the girl's mouth.
[00:10:24] Josh Hutchinson: Next, Goodman Kelly asked Goodwife Ayers to roll up Elizabeth's sleeve.
[00:10:29] Sarah Jack: However, the sleeve was too tight.
[00:10:32] Josh Hutchinson: John Kelly tore both of the girls' sleeves and showed the assembled crowd the backs of her arms.
[00:10:39] Sarah Jack: Witnesses later stated the arms were black and blue from elbow to shoulder.
[00:10:43] Josh Hutchinson: They described seeing the appearance of bruising or the marks of a beating.
[00:10:48] Sarah Jack: Now the body was rolled onto its right side, then onto the belly.
[00:10:53] Josh Hutchinson: A noxious odor came from the body, driving some witnesses out of the room.
[00:10:58] Sarah Jack: The body was placed in a coffin, and John called everyone back to the room.
[00:11:02] Josh Hutchinson: He asked the witnesses to look upon the child's face.
[00:11:06] Sarah Jack: A large red spot had appeared on the right cheek.
[00:11:09] Josh Hutchinson: Which happened to be near where Goodwife Ayers stood.
[00:11:13] Sarah Jack: At this time, it was believed that the body of a murder victim would react to the touch of the murderer.
[00:11:18] Josh Hutchinson: And here a large spot indicated that Ayers was the culprit.
[00:11:22] Sarah Jack: Just as the Kellys stated Elizabeth had told them.
[00:11:25] Josh Hutchinson: Now, magistrate Samuel Wyllys ordered an autopsy to be performed by physician Bray Rossiter, with help from Mr. William Pitkins.
[00:11:35] Sarah Jack: Rossiter wrote out his findings.
[00:11:37] Josh Hutchinson: Rossiter and Pitkins swore to the truth of the document before the magistrates on March 31st.
[00:11:45] Sarah Jack: According to Rossiter, he found six particulars preternatural.
[00:11:49] Josh Hutchinson: The body was limber.
[00:11:51] Sarah Jack: The skin inside the abdomen was dark blue, yet no sign of illness was found in the bowels.
[00:11:57] Josh Hutchinson: Blood had pooled in the throat but was not coagulated.
[00:12:01] Sarah Jack: Blood had pooled in the back of the arm.
[00:12:04] Josh Hutchinson: The gallbladder was broken.
[00:12:06] Sarah Jack: The throat was constricted, and a large pea could not be pushed through the opening.
[00:12:11] Josh Hutchinson: Modern historians believe Rossiter mistook signs of decomposition for signs of the preternatural.
[00:12:18] Sarah Jack: Because the autopsy report does not specify the date the body was examined, it is impossible to know how badly the body would've decomposed.
[00:12:26] Josh Hutchinson: The body had been decaying since the 26th.
[00:12:29] Sarah Jack: This autopsy report has been used in more recent times to diagnose Elizabeth Kelly with diseases including bronchopneumonia and diptheria epiglottitis.
[00:12:38] Josh Hutchinson: At this point, it's unclear to us what actually caused the death of Elizabeth Kelly. The one thing that we do know is that it wasn't caused by witchcraft.
[00:12:53] The hemlock theory came about because Sarah and I were researching the uses of angelica root and discovered that it is commonly confused for hemlock and other related plants that are toxic to humans and animals. It's a working theory. We think it's plausible, but there's no real solid evidence. Even though people have tried to diagnose Elizabeth Kelly years after the fact, it's really difficult to say based on Bray Rossiter's autopsy report, what actually happened.
[00:13:38] When Rebecca Greensmith testified against her husband, she alleged several other individuals as a witch, including Goodwife Ayers, whom she claimed was at a party with her in the woods drinking sack.
[00:13:50] Sarah Jack: In this testimony, she named her husband, Nathaniel Greensmith, Goodwife Seager, Goodwife Sanford, Goodwife Ayers, James Wakeley, Peter Grant's wife, Henry Palmer's wife, and Judith Varlet.
[00:14:01] Josh Hutchinson: William and Goodwife Ayers were arrested for witchcraft in 1662.
[00:14:06] Sarah Jack: They fled Hartford when they were accused. 
[00:14:09] Josh Hutchinson: Around the same time that Elizabeth Kelly fell ill, a young woman in Hartford began behaving rather strangely.
[00:14:18] Sarah Jack: The supposedly possessed Ann Cole, the other accuser of the Hartford Witch-Hunt, was probably unmarried, living with her godly father's family, John Cole. It is suggested that she may be in her early twenties.
[00:14:29] Josh Hutchinson: David D. Hall states that the origins of the Hartford witch-hunt can be traced back to her when she began to suffer diabolical possession.
[00:14:37] Sarah Jack: The story of Cole's afflictions came from minister correspondence, one such letter after the fact, at least 20 years.
[00:14:45] Josh Hutchinson: It was a letter from minister John Whiting to minister Increase Mather in Boston.
[00:14:51] Sarah Jack: In that letter, Whiting admits he has lost the notes he took during his observations of Ann, but gave details anyways, two decades later.
[00:15:00] Josh Hutchinson: Because he had lost his Ann Cole notes, he was expecting Increase to get reports from others that he had beckoned to share reports. We have no additional reports today.
[00:15:11] Sarah Jack: The other minister interrogators leading the investigation of this hunt included the elder minister Samuel Stone of Hartford, the young Sam Hooker of Farmington, the young Joseph Haynes, a Presbyterian of Hartford, and the young John Whiting of Hartford.
[00:15:26] Josh Hutchinson: These ministers were not all Congregationalists. Haynes was a Presbyterian minister.
[00:15:33] Sarah Jack: Ann Cole said to have spoken about a company of familiars of the evil one. Although we don't know their names, it is told that she named them. The names must have been lost with the notes.
[00:15:44] Josh Hutchinson: Ann is reported to have said that it was the intention of the familiars and the evil one to stop her from getting married.
[00:15:52] Sarah Jack: To ruin her name.
[00:15:53] Josh Hutchinson: And to afflict her body.
[00:15:56] Sarah Jack: Ann's verbal behavior was troubling to the ministers. She muttered unintelligibly, which we know from several other trials is viewed suspiciously.
[00:16:04] Josh Hutchinson: In this case, it was the accuser muttering and not the accused. Muttering at this time was dangerous, could easily get you accused of speaking curses.
[00:16:20] Sarah Jack: Also to the ministers' dismay, Ann spoke about the witches with a Dutch tone.
[00:16:25] Josh Hutchinson: Reverend Stone described the accent as troubling. He said Ann had not been exposed to the Dutch dialect in a way that she should be able to imitate it.
[00:16:35] Sarah Jack: Stone claimed this was unusual, even though he was aware that Ann gave details with a Dutch tone regarding an unnamed, afflicted girl who is the neighbor of some Dutch.
[00:16:46] Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Stone would likely have known the unnamed girl and would've known that Ann was also familiar with her, and therefore the Dutch accent of her neighbor. He was contriving with artifice to make a case.
[00:17:02] Sarah Jack: The ministers prevaricated that the Dutch tone indicated that the possessing demonic voice within Ann was confirming the accused people were witches.
[00:17:11] Josh Hutchinson: Also, it is reported that several times Ann had violent bodily motions and caused interruptions in church.
[00:17:20] Sarah Jack: Affliction in church were done by Ann and two other afflicted women.
[00:17:24] Josh Hutchinson: The behavior was so upsetting a godly woman is reported to a fainted.
[00:17:31] Sarah Jack: In her fits, Ann named her tormentors as Elizabeth Seager and Rebecca Greensmith. 
[00:17:36] Josh Hutchinson: Ann Cole lived next to Rebecca Greensmith, who was specifically characterized negatively by Reverend Whiting as considerably aged. She was widowed twice, married to Abraham Elson and then Jarvis Mudge.
[00:17:54] The accused witch Elizabeth Seager insisted that Minister Haynes' account of Ann's accusations against her was a great deal of hodgepodge.
[00:18:04] Sarah Jack: Ministers Haynes and waiting took notes from interviewing Ann and confronted Rebecca Greensmith while she was in jail on the charges Ann Cole had reported to them. Rebecca confirmed with a detailed narrative.
[00:18:16] Josh Hutchinson: Later, after the minister interrogation that led to her confession, Rebecca told an unnamed jail visitor essentially that after so much pressure from Whiting, she could have torn him to pieces, that she had to yield from the pressure.
[00:18:32] Sarah Jack: She basically says the quote, but then she says something about she had to confess. She was compelled to confess.
[00:18:42] Josh Hutchinson: " When Mr. Haines began to read, she could have torn him in pieces and was as much resolved as might be to deny her guilt, as she had done before, yet after he had read a while, she was as if her flesh had been pulled from her bones. Such was her expression, and so could not deny any longer."
[00:19:03] Sarah Jack: Whiting confirms to Increase Mather in his 1682 letter that Ann went on to live so successfully, because the witches had been executed or had fled. 
[00:19:13] Josh Hutchinson: According to Whiting, Ann went on to marry, was a godly church woman, and had children of her own. Whatever was really responsible for the afflictions of Elizabeth Kelly and Ann Cole, testimony soon poured in.
[00:19:28] Sarah Jack: Joseph Marsh testified that he was present when Goody Ayers promised Elizabeth Kelly a hoary lace in exchange for the girl's silence.
[00:19:36] Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Burr and his mother testified that Goody Ayers had once told them about a time when she met the devil while she lived in London.
[00:19:45] Sarah Jack: Robert Stern claimed he had seen Elizabeth Singer and three other women in the woods dancing around a kettle with, quote, "two black creatures like two Indians but taller."
[00:19:57] Josh Hutchinson: He claimed to see Rebecca Greensmith among the women, who he knew by their habit or clothes.
[00:20:04] Goodwife Greensmith allegedly cried out, "look who is yonder," and the four women ran away up a hill.
[00:20:12] Sarah Jack: The mysterious black, quote, "things" approached Stern, but he left to go home.
[00:20:17] Josh Hutchinson: Maria Screech testified that Goodwife Steadman had told her that Mr. John Blackleach had bewitched Screech's sow, as he had done several of her own.
[00:20:29] Sarah Jack: Hanna Robbins testified that her father believed Goody Palmer was responsible for his wife's death.
[00:20:35] Josh Hutchinson: She also stated that her sister Mary had complained of witches during her fatal illness.
[00:20:41] Sarah Jack: According to Hanna, Katherine Harrison and Goody Palmer were both present during her mother's final illness.
[00:20:48] Josh Hutchinson: John Robbins warned Palmer away several times, but she continued to, quote, "thrust herself into the company."
[00:20:56] Sarah Jack: Alice Wakeley, wife of James Wakeley, testified that Mrs. Robbin's body was very stiff during her sickness but became very limber once she passed.
[00:21:05] Josh Hutchinson: Andrew Sanford was indicted on June 6th, 1662.
[00:21:10] Sarah Jack: The jury would not agree on a verdict. Some thought he was guilty, others only suspected he was.
[00:21:17] Josh Hutchinson: Andrew was released.
[00:21:20] Sarah Jack: His wife, Mary, was indicted on June 13th, 1662.
[00:21:24] Josh Hutchinson: She was to suffer a different fate than her husband.
[00:21:28] Sarah Jack: The jury found her guilty as charged.
[00:21:30] Josh Hutchinson: She was likely hanged within days of the verdict.
[00:21:34] Sarah Jack: Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith were both indicted on December 30th, 1662.
[00:21:39] Josh Hutchinson: Both were found guilty.
[00:21:42] Sarah Jack: Rebecca had confessed.
[00:21:44] Josh Hutchinson: And she had delated Nathaniel.
[00:21:47] Sarah Jack: Rebecca and Nathaniel were probably hanged together in January 1663.
[00:21:53] Josh Hutchinson: The same court ordered the treasurer to take the estate of William Ayers.
[00:21:57] Sarah Jack: William Ayers had fled the colony.
[00:22:01] Josh Hutchinson: The court gave Ayers' son, John Ayers, to James Ensign to serve as apprentice until he reached the age of 21.
[00:22:10] Sarah Jack: John had to grow up without his parents from the age of about eight or nine.
[00:22:15] Josh Hutchinson: He was released from servitude on March 3rd, 1675.
[00:22:20] Sarah Jack: Next, the court convened on January 6th, 1663 to hear the cases against Mary Barnes and Elizabeth Seager.
[00:22:27] Josh Hutchinson: Mary Barnes pleaded not guilty.
[00:22:30] Sarah Jack: The jury convicted her.
[00:22:33] Josh Hutchinson: Elizabeth Seager also pleaded not guilty.
[00:22:36] Sarah Jack: She was acquitted.
[00:22:38] Josh Hutchinson: The jurors who believed her to be guilty submitted a written statement on January 12th, 1663, explaining why they would've convicted her.
[00:22:48] Sarah Jack: She had been acquainted with people who had recently been accused of witchcraft.
[00:22:52] Josh Hutchinson: Including Mary Sanford and Goodwife Ayers.
[00:22:56] Sarah Jack: One of whom had been executed, the other had escaped.
[00:22:59] Josh Hutchinson: Seager had learned to knit from one of these other women.
[00:23:04] Sarah Jack: Magistrate John Allen pressed Seager on this knitting issue.
[00:23:08] Josh Hutchinson: And Seager eventually admitted she knew the woman better than she'd been leading them to believe.
[00:23:14] Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Seager claimed she hated Goodwife Ayers.
[00:23:17] Josh Hutchinson: But the jury wasn't buying it.
[00:23:19] Sarah Jack: At one point, Goodwife Seager said, "they seek my innocent blood."
[00:23:24] Josh Hutchinson: John Allen asked, "who?"
[00:23:26] Sarah Jack: Seager said, quote, "everybody."
[00:23:30] Josh Hutchinson: When she was told she might be tried by swimming, she replied, "the devil that caused me to come here can keep me up."
[00:23:37] Sarah Jack: The majority of jurors did not believe accusations of flying had been proved legally.
[00:23:42] The same court of January 6th, 1663 decided to sequester escapee James Wakely's estate but allow his wife Alice to maintain the use of the property for the time being.
[00:23:52] Josh Hutchinson: Mary Barnes was hanged on January 25th, 1663.
[00:23:58] Sarah Jack: She was the last person hanged for witchcraft in Connecticut.
[00:24:01] Josh Hutchinson: On March 5th, 1663, the quarterly court held in Hartford awarded jailer Daniel Garrett 21 shillings for keeping Mary Barnes for three weeks.
[00:24:12] Sarah Jack: Thomas Barnes was charged for this expense.
[00:24:15] Josh Hutchinson: Garrett earned six shillings a week plus unspecified fees for keeping the Greensmiths.
[00:24:21] Sarah Jack: The length of their imprisonment is not disclosed in the document.
[00:24:25] Josh Hutchinson: However, it is possible they and Mary Barnes remained jailed until the 25th of January. 
[00:24:32] Sarah Jack: The March 5 court ordered the continuation of the sequestration of James Wakely's estate.
[00:24:37] Josh Hutchinson: Of the six people tried for witchcraft during the Hartford witch-hunt, four were convicted and two were narrowly acquitted.
[00:24:46] Sarah Jack: The hunt entered a new phase following the January 1663 executions,
[00:24:51] Josh Hutchinson: Accusers were no longer actively naming witches.
[00:24:55] Sarah Jack: However the witch-hunt did not entirely die off.
[00:24:59] Josh Hutchinson: And Elizabeth Seager's tribulations were far from over.
[00:25:03] Sarah Jack: She was indicted for three crimes.
[00:25:06] Josh Hutchinson: Witchcraft, blasphemy, and adultery.
[00:25:10] Sarah Jack: She pleaded not guilty.
[00:25:12] Josh Hutchinson: The court acquitted her on the witchcraft and blasphemy charges, but convicted her of adultery on July 2nd, 1663.
[00:25:21] Sarah Jack: And John M. Taylor says that she got everything that was coming to her in the courts.
[00:25:28] Josh Hutchinson: And Moyer says Mary Barnes may have been charged with adultery. That might be what the arrest warrant was issued for in 1649. And it does seem like many of these women had a scandalous, according to their neighbors, past and that there was at least gossip and rumor about their moral turpitude.
[00:25:55] Sarah Jack: Elizabeth was tried again for witchcraft on June 26th, 1665.
[00:26:01] Josh Hutchinson: This time she was convicted.
[00:26:03] Sarah Jack: Mrs. Miggat testified that Elizabeth Seager attempted to recruit her to be a witch.
[00:26:09] Josh Hutchinson: Seager allegedly said, quote, "God was naught. God was naught. It was very good to be a witch."
[00:26:16] Sarah Jack: And ,"she should not need fear going to hell, for she should not burn in the fire."
[00:26:21] Josh Hutchinson: Miggat also claimed Seager once muttered something unintelligible, which caused Miggat to flee in terror.
[00:26:29] Sarah Jack: Mrs. Miggat further stated that, quote, "a little before the flood this spring, Goodwife Seager came into their house, on a moon shining night, and took her by the hand and struck her on the face that she was in bed with her husband, whom she could not wake. And then Goodwife Seager went away, and Mrs. Miggat went to the door, but darst not look out after her.
[00:26:49] Josh Hutchinson: Daniel and Margaret Garrett testified that Goodwife Seager had told them she had sent Satan to tell people she was not a witch.
[00:26:58] Sarah Jack: Goodwife Garrett said she asked Seager why she had "made use of Satan to tell them, why did she not beseech God to tell them she was no witch?"
[00:27:06] Josh Hutchinson: Seager replied that Satan knew she was no witch.
[00:27:10] Sarah Jack: Edward Stebbins, Stephen Hart, Sr., and Josiah Willard testified that Goodwife had used scripture to justify her sending Satan.
[00:27:17] Josh Hutchinson: She had cited Acts chapter 19, verses 13 through 16.
[00:27:22] Sarah Jack: Acts 19:13, King James Bible, "then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus saying, 'we adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth.'"
[00:27:36] Josh Hutchinson: Verse 14, "and there were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew and chief of the priests, which did so."
[00:27:45] Sarah Jack: Verse 15, quote, "and the evil spirit answered and said, 'Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are ye?'"
[00:27:51] Josh Hutchinson: Verse 16, " and the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them and overcame them and prevailed against them so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded."
[00:28:03] Sarah Jack: Seager was saying she had commanded Satan with the authority of Jesus' name to tell her neighbors that he did not know her.
[00:28:10] Josh Hutchinson: He knew she was not one of his own.
[00:28:13] Sarah Jack: According to Goodwife Garrett, William Edwards told Elizabeth Seager that she flew.
[00:28:18] Josh Hutchinson: She "replied that Edwards made her fly."
[00:28:22] Sarah Jack: Goodwife Garrett then told Seager, "you own you did fly."
[00:28:25] Josh Hutchinson: Goodwife Seager replied, "if I did fly, William Edward made me fly."
[00:28:30] Sarah Jack: Goodman Garrett confirmed his wife's testimony.
[00:28:35] Josh Hutchinson: Goodwife Garrett then told a story about a good cheese gone bad.
[00:28:40] Sarah Jack: She said she had once made a most excellent cheese, at a time when Goodwife Seager was husking corn in the Garrett barn.
[00:28:48] Josh Hutchinson: Garrett asked her husband to bring her the special cheese.
[00:28:51] Sarah Jack: When she got the cheese, one side was filled with maggots.
[00:28:55] Josh Hutchinson: Garrett cut off the bad part and threw it in the fire.
[00:28:59] Sarah Jack: At that moment, Elizabeth Seager cried out in pain so loudly that Garrett heard her from the house.
[00:29:05] Josh Hutchinson: Seager then came into the home crying of pain.
[00:29:09] Sarah Jack: She sat wringing her body and crying out, "what do I ail? What do I ail?"
[00:29:14] Josh Hutchinson: Goodman Garrett again confirmed his wife's testimony.
[00:29:18] Sarah Jack: This is another instance of the folk belief that witches reacted when objects they'd bewitched were burned.
[00:29:24] Josh Hutchinson: Goodwife Watson said that when she told Elizabeth Seager that Ann Cole's mother wanted to see her, Seager replied that she knew Ann was crying out against her.
[00:29:35] Sarah Jack: Seager said, "they missed their mark. They aimed at me. Why do they not lay hold of others as well as me? Why do they lay hold of the chief actor herself?"
[00:29:44] Josh Hutchinson: Watson replied, "if you know others to be chief, why do you not discover them?"
[00:29:49] Sarah Jack: Seager said she would in due time.
[00:29:52] Josh Hutchinson: On July 8th, 1665, governor John Winthrop Jr. met with magistrates to discuss the cases of Hannah Wakeman Hackleton and Elizabeth Seager, who had both been convicted of felonies and faced the death penalty.
[00:30:07] Sarah Jack: "The Governor declared that it was his desire that the matter might be respited to a further consideration for advice in those matters that were to him so obscure and ambiguous and the issue is deferred."
[00:30:18] Josh Hutchinson: On May 18th, 1666, Elizabeth Seager was finally released from imprisonment.
[00:30:24] Sarah Jack: At a special session, the Court of Assistants declared that the jury's guilty verdict did, quote, "not legally answer the indictment."
[00:30:31] Josh Hutchinson: In addition to the trials of six witchcraft suspects, eight other individuals were caught up in the web of accusations.
[00:30:40] Sarah Jack: Some moved before being arrested, others managed to escape, and one couple may have sued their accusers to escape prosecution.
[00:30:48] Josh Hutchinson: According to Increase Mather, who wrote of the incident in his 1684 book, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, a man and woman named by Ann Cole were forced to undergo the swimming test.
[00:31:02] Sarah Jack: The two had their hands and feet bound and were thrown in the water.
[00:31:07] Josh Hutchinson: Rather than sink, as an innocent person would do, each of these victims floated "after the manner of a buoy, part under, part above the water."
[00:31:17] Sarah Jack: A witness volunteered to be the Guinea pig in an experiment to see if an innocent person would also float like a buoy.
[00:31:24] Josh Hutchinson: After being "gently laid on the water, he immediately sunk right down."
[00:31:30] Sarah Jack: Mather went on to write that the swimming test was not admitted as legal evidence.
[00:31:35] Josh Hutchinson: And they were not, quote, "proceeded against on any other account."
[00:31:40] Sarah Jack: Mather ends by saying the couple, quote, "very fairly, took their flight, not having been seen in that part of the world since."
[00:31:47] Josh Hutchinson: This last comment leads to theories that the mystery couple was the Ayers, who escaped.
[00:31:53] Sarah Jack: The other couples involved were the Sanfords, Greensmiths, and Blackleaches, and none of them took flight.
[00:32:00] Josh Hutchinson: No recorded indictments exist to show that the Blackleaches were ever proceeded against. However, they did not need to flee in order to escape trial.
[00:32:10] Sarah Jack: Mr. John Blackleach was a prominent figure in the community
[00:32:14] Josh Hutchinson: When John died in 1683, his estate was valued at 374 pounds.
[00:32:20] Sarah Jack: And he had likely already given portions to his adult children.
[00:32:24] Josh Hutchinson: Judith Varlet, a Dutch woman, was another person arrested for witchcraft in 1662.
[00:32:30] Sarah Jack: She was released when Connecticut officials received a letter from her brother-in-law, who happened to be New Netherlands Governor Peter Stuyvesant.
[00:32:38] Josh Hutchinson: Judith moved to New Netherlands after she was freed.
[00:32:42] Sarah Jack: Later she married Nicholas Bayard and lived on High Street in Manhattan.
[00:32:46] Josh Hutchinson: Another accused person, James Wakeley, escaped to Rhode Island.
[00:32:52] Sarah Jack: He left behind his wife Alice and his children.
[00:32:55] Josh Hutchinson: His estate was sequestered, but his wife was allowed to continue to use it.
[00:33:00] Sarah Jack: He came back to Connecticut in 1665.
[00:33:03] Josh Hutchinson: But was met by renewed allegations of witchcraft.
[00:33:07] Sarah Jack: He turned around and returned to Rhode Island.
[00:33:10] Josh Hutchinson: As we mentioned last week, Henry Palmer and his wife also fled the Hartford Witch-Hunt.
[00:33:16] Sarah Jack: They likely settled in Rhode Island, where Henry Palmer successfully sued Stephen Sebeere for calling his wife a witch in 1673.
[00:33:24] Josh Hutchinson: No indictment is known to have been issued in the case of Peter Grant's wife.
[00:33:28] There's more to the Ann Cole story. In April 1664, her family was visited by great tragedy, and old friends paid her a visit, according to Increase Mather, in his book, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, Wherein an Account is Given of Many Remarkable and Very Memorable Events, Which Have Happened this Last Age, Especially in New England.
[00:34:05] Mather writes:
[00:34:08] " On the 28th of April A.D. 1664, a company of the neighbors being met together at the house of Henry Conliff in Northampton in New England to spend a few hours in Christian conferences and in prayer, there happened a storm of thunder and rain. And as the good man of the house was at prayer, there came a ball of lightning in at the roof of the house, which set the thatch on fire, grated on the timber, pierced through the chamber floor. No breach being made on the boards. Only one of the joices somewhat raised. 
[00:34:45] Matthew Cole, who was son-in-law to the sad Conliff, was struck stone dead as he was leaning over table and joining with the rest in prayer. He did not stir nor groan after he was smitten, but continued standing as before, bearing upon the table. There was no visible impression on his body or clothes. Only the sole of one of his shoes was rent from the upper leather. 
[00:35:12] There were about 12 persons in the room. None else received any harm. Only one woman who is still living was struck upon the head, which occasioned some deafness ever since. The fire on the house was quenched by the seasonable help of neighbors."
[00:35:30] And Mather also writes, " for I am informed that when Matthew Cole was killed with the lightning at Northampton, the demon which disturbed his sister Ann Cole, forty miles distant in Hartford, spoke of it, intimating their concurrence in that terrible accident."
[00:35:51] Sarah Jack: And so ends the story of the Hartford witch-hunt. 
[00:35:53] Here's Mary With a Minute With Mary. 
[00:35:57] Mary Bingham: Goody Bassett.
[00:36:00] Goody is short for goodwife. This term referred to a married woman of middle to lower class in colonial times, and it was often how women were referred to in the court records. Goody Bassett was one of those women. The only reason historians know of her existence is because Goody was most likely hanged for a crime she did not commit, witchcraft. 
[00:36:25] Historians only know that fact based on one surviving colonial court record, which stated, and I quote, "the governor, Mr. Cullick, and Mr. Clarke are desired to go down to Stratford to keep court upon the trial of Goody Bassett for her life." End quote. That's it. One court record. Nothing else exists, of which we know.
[00:36:50] I understand the patriarchal society of the time. However, my heart today remains baffled that the court clerk did not identify Goody by her given name. She was a unique person who lived and breathed and led a meaningful life. Goody was loved by her family. She was a wife and a daughter to people who cared about her.
[00:37:14] Guess what? There are people who still care about Goody. We are the army of activists, historians, and descendants, and politicians who are working tirelessly to overturn the convictions of Goody and all of those falsely convicted of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut. We care. My goal and the goal of my colleagues, Sarah Jack, Joshua Hutchinson, Beth Caruso, Tony Griego, State Representative Jane Garibay and State Senator Dr. Saud Anwar, is to find out Goody Bassett's given name to her at birth so that she can one day be identified as a person in her own right. Not only that, but we plan to identify all of the Goodys who have yet to be properly identified with their given names.
[00:38:07] Thank you.
[00:38:09] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary
[00:38:12] Josh Hutchinson: And now here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[00:38:17] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News.
[00:38:19] Actual witch Hunts are occurring weekly. Witch hunts are still targeted blame and punishment toward vulnerable people for misunderstood circumstances. Here's a headline from Ghana, Mother of Seven and Elderly Man Lynched on Witchcraft Suspicion in Zakpalsi. It does not get easier to tell you about these individuals and what happens to them. It's horrific. Here's the report. 
[00:38:43] "On Sunday, May 7th, 2023, in the farming community of Zakpalsi located in the Mion District of the Northern Region, Ghana, two individuals were allegedly lynched on suspicion of practicing witchcraft. The victims were identified as Imoro Safura, a middle-aged mother of seven believed to be in her forties, and Mbaa Chirfo, a man in his early sixties.
[00:39:04] According to reports from sources within the Zakpalsi community, Imoro Safura sought refuge at at the forecourt of the Zakpalsi Chief palace, but she was chased down and lynched there. Mbaa Chirfo, on the other hand, was killed at his residence. The community members accused both individuals of allegedly causing sickness for a woman by employing the services of a soothsayer. In response to the accusations, the youth of the community organized themselves and launched an attack on the two victims, leading to their tragic deaths. It is worth noting that both of the victims denied the allegations."
[00:39:40] What were you doing on Sunday, May 7th? I was meeting with Dr. Leo Igwe for the first time in person. He is visiting the United States and doing talks on humanism, religious freedom, and witch hunts. He happened to kick it off in Denver, where I am. That was a great surprise. It was an exciting moment for me to get to meet Leo face-to-face and connect with him about all that is going on in our world around witch phobia. Next week, co-host Josh Hutchinson, myself, and Dr. Igwe will be visiting witch trial historical sites in the Salem and Hartford area.
[00:40:08] Leo will be giving talks about his work with alleged witch victims like Imoro and Mbaa. When he is on the ground in Nigeria, he intercedes on their behalf with support from NGOs and Advocacy for Alleged Witches. He negotiates for local government services and safety through the authorities, if the victim is lucky enough to reach protection. Imoro was not. Did you catch that she fled to the community leader and was still lynched there by the angry youth?
[00:40:33] Dr. Leo personally checks on attack victims, goes to them, connects with them, and makes sure they know that they are not alone. He does this for the survivors. Just a glance at the weekly news reveals that many are murdered and do not get a chance to start over or to meet Leo. You can have the opportunity to meet this great advocate. Please come see us May 16th through the 18th at one of his talks.
[00:40:53] Power structures around religion, familial status, age, gender, and falsely-attributed causes of misfortune universally contribute to circumstances like these and fuel witch hunts past and present. You can learn more about the past and modern stories of the people harmed by this merciless conduct in any of our expert-filled episodes. Join us every week to hear the latest important conversation. The accusation details from witch trial primary sources are jaw dropping. The news of current attack victims across the globe is jaw dropping. We ask, why do we hunt witches? How do we hunt witches? How do we stop hunting witches? Messaging that clarifies how power structures around religion, familial status, age, gender, and falsely-attributed causes of misfortune universally contribute to the circumstances of witch hunts past and present.
[00:41:40] Share the attack news. Share a podcast episode. Read a book. Write a post or blog. Write to a politician or diplomat. Donate money to the organizations that are creating projects that intervene in the modern communities where witch Hunts thrive. You can financially support the production of the podcast.
[00:41:56] This is the month that the Salem, Massachusetts area and Hartford and Farmington, Connecticut are getting a rare and important visit from Dr. Leo Igwe, director of the Advocacy for Alleged Witches nonprofit organization. It is an incredible honor for Josh and myself to organize a week of speaking engagements during his speaking tour in the United States and to accompany him as he speaks in places of historical significance to early American colony witch trial history. You can follow Dr. Leo Igwe on Twitter @leoigwe to see how he is advocating on the ground in the victim communities in real time as these individuals are experiencing being accused and hunted. 
[00:42:30] The first event at the Salem Witch Museum is virtual, but Dr. Igwe will be with us in Salem touring the historic sites guided by a local seasoned in the history, Mary Bingham. Tuesday, May 16th, 2023 is your chance to experience a very special evening of in-person conversation with Leo at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers. Please see the Facebook event for details. Isn't this a great week? Make sure you mark your calendars. 
[00:42:53] Next, you can enjoy an in-person speaking event with Dr. Igwe at Central Connecticut State University on Wednesday, May 17th at 6:00 PM. While in the Hartford area, Leo will be touring known witch trial historic sites with author Beth Caruso. On Thursday afternoon, May 18th at 4:00 PM, Leo will be presenting at the Stanley-Whitman House living history center in Farmington, Connecticut. Look for Facebook events for all of these occasions posted by our social media. Come hear Leo. Invite your friends and family. See you there. 
[00:43:21] Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop, merch from our zazzle shop, or make a financial contribution to our organization. Our links are in the show description. 
[00:43:32] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:43:35] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:43:36] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:43:41] Sarah Jack: Join us again next week.
[00:43:43] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:43:46] Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:43:49] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, acquaintances, neighbors, and anyone you meet about the show.
[00:43:56] Sarah Jack: Please support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn how.
[00:44:02] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:44:05]

May 11, 2023

Andy Verzosa on Museums, Mary Barnes, and Farmington, Connecticut

Stanley-Whitman House Museum

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Show Notes

Welcome back friend of the podcast Andy Verzosa, Executive Director of the Stanley-Whitman House in Farmington, CT. The Stanley-Whitman House is an award-winning living history museum and home of the Mary Barnes Society, which honors Farmington’s only witch trial victim. Andy discusses all the wonderful people that have come together over the years to make the history come alive, including witch trial history. He explains how prosopography enriches the understanding of time periods. Enjoy this welcoming and reflective episode that paints the picture of how Connecticut is working to understand and honor the history of its land.

Links

Documentary:”Why Witch Hunts Are Not Just A Dark Chapter From the Past”

The International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Other Harmful Practices

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Transcript

[00:00:00]
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:26] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we talk to you Andy Verzosa, executive director of the Stanley-Whitman House in Farmington, Connecticut.
[00:00:35] Sarah Jack: The Stanley-Whitman House is an award-winning living history museum and home of the Mary Barnes Society, which honors Farmington's only witch trial victim. The society holds an annual Mary Barnes Day on January 25th, the anniversary of her hanging.
[00:00:51] Josh Hutchinson: The House recently received two Awards of Merit from the Connecticut League of Historical Organizations.
[00:00:57] Sarah Jack: One award was for their book, Memento Mori: Remembered Death.
[00:01:02] Josh Hutchinson: The other was for their play, The Last Night, which tells the story of witch trial victims Rebecca Greensmith, Nathaniel Greensmith, and Mary Barnes.
[00:01:11] Sarah Jack: Today you're gonna hear us talk about all the pieces that come together.
[00:01:15] Josh Hutchinson: Andy Verzosa tells us about all the wonderful people that have come together over the years to make the history come alive, including witch trial history.
[00:01:24] Sarah Jack: You'll learn how prosopography enriches the understanding of time periods.
[00:01:29] Josh Hutchinson: Andy talks to us about operating a museum and running their many programs.
[00:01:36] Sarah Jack: You'll hear a little bit from behind the scenes on what it takes to make these programs come alive.
[00:01:45] Josh Hutchinson: Talk about the importance of visiting local museums.
[00:01:50] Sarah Jack: They have wonderful art installations that you'll hear about.
[00:01:53] Josh Hutchinson: And you'll learn about witch trial victim Mary Barnes, and we'll learn about her connection to the Memento Mori Cemetery, which the Stanley-Whitman House operates.
[00:02:08] Sarah Jack: They support the exoneration. Hear a local's perspective.
[00:02:13] Josh Hutchinson: The board presented the Judiciary Committee with written testimony in support of House Joint Resolution 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut, and we'll learn why Andy is excited about exoneration.
[00:02:35] Sarah Jack: You'll walk away from this episode feeling the importance of history and motivated to find out what's available in your community.
[00:02:45] Andy Verzosa is the executive director of the Stanley-Whitman House, a museum and living history center that collects, preserves, and interprets the history and culture of Farmington, Connecticut. His background in the arts blends into his passion for creating touchable history. Stanley-Whitman House teaches through the collection, preservation, research, and dynamic interpretation of history and culture. Programs, events, classes, and exhibits encourage visitors of all ages to immerse themselves in history by doing, acting, questioning, and engaging in colonial life and the ideas that form the foundation of that culture.
[00:03:19] Andy Verzosa: It's hard to get people's attention. There's so much competition for news and good news. And as the quality of news is complex, what you get and when you get it, and particularly around something about witches. When people think about witches, they think of Salem, they think of Bewitched, they think of different things through popular culture and Hollywood.
[00:03:46] But what I found when I started my job in 2018, I had no idea about the Connecticut witch panics and trials in Connecticut. None at all. I was familiar with the Salem Witch Trials and what happened there, mostly because there was actually Reverend Burroughs, who lived in Maine, actually in, in my town, Portland, Maine, which was called Falmouth at that time. And it had been, this is like the late 1600s. The Wabanaki Confederacy had wiped out the settlement there in Casco, which would be what is today Portland, Maine, and he went to a southern part of what we call Maine today, and to a place called Wells. And while he was there, he was apprehended, taken without much notice, any preparation. And by the end of that summer that year, he was executed. So I knew a little bit about that, because he was a reverend and he was a male, and I of course knew about Salem through popular culture.
[00:04:53] I had no idea when I moved to Connecticut that there were witch trials ,that there were people that were accused, indicted, and hanged , 11 people that we know of. Over 40 people were accused and some didn't lose their lives, but their, maybe their livelihoods were damaged. And we know the damage that has done. And it's certainly what I've read since.
[00:05:18] And part of what is great about the exoneration perspective, exoneration of those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut is this intergenerational trauma, the legacy of this, the way that we think about things, the way that we use words. All these things are gonna maybe be reconsidered and changed in a good way, so there's a reckoning, which I really excited to be a small part of through the work that I do at Stanley-Whitman House.
[00:05:46] Sarah Jack: Can you tell us about the history of the Stanley-Whitman House and your role?
[00:05:53] Andy Verzosa: I'm the executive director at Stanley-Whitman House. It's a small museum, and we have a program there where we do living history. We give house tours. We have school children come in and have field trips come in and homeschool students come in. We have scouts that come in for different programs. They may even do a project at the house to earn, like an Eagle Scout award, things like that. So we're really very engaged in part of the community. When people think about Stanley-Whitman house, they think about maybe when they were in school, they went there on a field trip, and now their children are going there on a field trip kind of place.
[00:06:34] And we sometimes have legacy folks come. In fact, we have someone on our board, our board chair, her husband's grandmother was one of the early caretaker-directors. So in exchange for being able to live at the Stanley-Whitman house, which was then called the Farmington Museum, she was able to live there, but she was obligated to keep it open certain times of the week and for certain hours of the day.
[00:06:58] It's a 1720s building. It's a living history center, and we have public spaces where we have folks do research. We will offer hearth-cooking, for example. We have gardens. The gardens have been, probably, during covid, one of the saving features of our being able to stay open, because we had what I call a museum without walls. We were able to do programs and have people visit us and still go to work every day, because we could do concerts outside, we could do our foodways programs partially outside. I did an artist intervention program in our gardens and we use our cemetery, our Memento Mori Cemetery, which has a connection to Mary Barnes, which I can get into as well. But we would give tours there. We would do gravestone cleaning workshops.
[00:07:53] So we really do quite a bit of showing people what colonial life was like, through things like plants and food, through the trades. We also will have people come in to give talks and do programs. And again, through Covid, during the last 3 years, we've been using online programs. So I never knew how to do a Zoom until Covid. I never did panels until I worked with Virginia Wolf, Beth Caruso, and Tony Griego in 2021, when I was doing a series of online panels with them, each featuring what they did and then having a group panel in observance of Mary Barnes Day.
[00:08:40] As you know, recently, we just did The Last Night, a play that I commissioned and produced through the museum. I hired Virginia Wolf and Debra Walsh to come in and write a play about the last night that Mary Barnes and Rebecca Greensmith had. And we did both a live performance, and we recorded and then put together on January 25th the actual commemoration date 360 years of their hanging. We had that online, which was very well attended.
[00:09:18] I'm chief cook and bottle washer at the museum, so there's no production team. I'm doing the production, as you probably well know, doing what you guys are doing.
[00:09:25] I am the happy beneficiary, the recipient of wonderful research by my predecessor, Lisa Johnson. And Lisa has been with the museum for over 20 years. She started out as a volunteer, was on their board, but then had become the director of Stanley-Whitman House for 20 years. One of the things that she was interested in, and I will point out, is that since like 1999 she had a group that she led that did research about a woman named Mary Barnes.
[00:10:05] I've seen video where she mentions how she found it curious by reading a passage in Christopher Bickford's Farmington book, which is like Farmington 101, a mention about Mary Barnes. And it was a curious mention, and it really precipitated her looking into who this woman was that was accused, indicted and hanged. And one of the last people to be hanged in Connecticut. I have actually two documents which we're gonna scan, and I just gotta make sure that everything's done, and we have to make sure the citations are in the documents here.
[00:10:40] So before I release things, I like to make sure those things are done cuz like we like to know where things come from, right? We wanna credit people properly. And so I may just not have found that, but I have found these papers, and one is called "In a Preternatural Way: the Witchcraft Trial of Mary Barnes." This was presumably finished October 28th, 1999. And then the other is "The Witchcraft Trial of Mary Barnes Part Two." And that was finished dated October 2000. And she gives credit to her volunteers and staff, those that helped her do the research.
[00:11:15] For example, I like mentioning people's names, because it takes a village, right? So there's one woman named Joanne Silverio. She was an admin at the museum. Another woman was Betty Kelly, who was a longtime volunteer at the museum. She actually recently passed. But she was researching records at the church, First Church of Christ Congregational in town, and she worked with an investigative reporter who volunteered, Lisa Backus, who would dig into different archives. And then she mentions some other resources.
[00:11:47] But why I mentioned those people is that our museum, what I think is a great legacy and a great feature of our museum is that I have volunteer researchers today who come in every Wednesday, once a week. They come in the morning. They stay until mid afternoon. And they research things that I ask them to look into or things of their own interest. And it has resulted in much like these early papers that Lisa led. We did last year a book on the Momento Mori Cemetery, where we did 23 vignettes of people buried, out of the 800-odd graves that we know of people buried there.
[00:12:25] We were able to publish this book featuring 23 of those folks, and then we did what was called the Journal of Farmington History. So they're topics that my researchers are interested in. And so I provide the vessel for them to present it, to publish their works, which is I think a great thing to do in the area of public history.
[00:12:46] For me, Stanley-Whitman House was an early proponent of the witchcraft research. In, I believe 2009, got a grant and Lisa Johnson, my predecessor, was part of a co-director, a person who led an effort to go to different repositories where they thought different primary resources might be or secondary resources. And they put that all together. They got a grant from the Connecticut Humanities, and they put that together, and they activated a whole group of people in the museum world and in these historic house museums and the Connecticut State Library.
[00:13:26] And so that got attention. And then in this early time of activity around this work around Connecticut witch trials and panics, Lisa put together plays, right? So some of them were literally having volunteers, and they called them the Roundabout Players, who would act different roles. And so one of those actors, one of those volunteer actors happened to be Virginia Wolf. So early on in the two thousands, mid to late two thousands, she's portraying Mary Barnes. And other people in the community are playing other roles in the trial. Cause we know that the trial records were there, and they were able to create a play from that by reenacting that trial.
[00:14:21] You know that's a lot of activity, believe it or not, when you're trying to run a museum and doing that research, activating volunteers to do the research and to do the acting as part of the Roundabout Players. And Lisa went to other places and presented her papers, that, that were put together from the researcher's efforts. So she was able to talk about Mary Barnes, and she was able to do that by, focusing the research on, predominantly, Thomas Barnes, cuz there was more information known about him, for example.
[00:14:54] So that word prosopography, putting together information about someone that there's no information about directly, but building that, the facts, the information around someone to get a an idea of what that person was like, how they lived, who they lived with, what they believed in, what other people did around them. There's a lot of information that you can surmise, right? So I love that. And I love that we do that at our museum.
[00:15:21] One of our volunteers, her name is Sherra Palmer. She's been a long time volunteer. She actually was at the museum before Lisa was there, volunteering. And she calls what she does collecting crumbs. And eventually they aggregate, and they make a piece of cake. And I love that metaphor. And when Sherra, who still comes to the museum with her research team, Betty Coykendall and Kate Lindsay Rogers.
[00:15:49] Sherra will come in, and she'll have books. She'll like a little cardboard box full of papers and notebooks and post-its and books. And sometimes the books look like a porcupine of post-its, interleaved with all these post-its and slips of paper, and I'll ask her about something and she'll come in the next week, and she'll have pulled out a hard file or a book or bringing in a magazine.
[00:16:11] And she just is a wonderful resource. And because her hands have been in it for so many years, we're talking decades, and she's such a great human, right. She synthesizes this information and she has great recall. She's just a great resource for me and the museum, helping with these projects.
[00:16:32] Our other researcher, Betty Coykendall, she's was the town historian. And by the way, Lisa Johnson is now the town historian since she's retired from the museum. But as town historian, she knows where to get things, and she's meticulous in her gathering of facts and ordering things and putting them all together and really ferreting out information. It's fascinating to watch these women work together. And then Kate, who works with them, she has more facility of going online and researching things online. And also she was an a teacher, she was an English teacher, so she was able to, use those skills to synthesize the information, to put it together so that we could start creating drafts, say for example, before the Momento Mori book or for the Farmington Journal of History.
[00:17:19] I love my volunteer researchers, and I love our docents and our actors, who come in, and when we have school children come in, and we're trying to teach about, say the Revolutionary War, we have our actors portray living people that actually lived in Farmington and maybe people who lived in the house. We have programs where annually we have what's called Candlelight Tours. So we have the Ghost Walk Tours in the cemetery, and we have people that portray actual people. And we research those roles, and we try to make it right size for the audience that we have, and people wear the right costumes, and we try to use things from the time period. If it's a soldier that is talking about the Revolutionary Wars, a militiaman, they'll be dressed that way and have all the accoutrements. It's authentic.
[00:18:14] I'll just tell you one, one quick thing about our docents and volunteer actors. We just did a presentation at our library for Farmington Public Schools for our Revolutionary War program. And so I had an intern, Nicole Moulton. I had her start out in the very beginning of her internship research colonial toys, put together a list, and get everything that you can, all the information that you can find, and let's put it together. And so eventually several pages became one hot sheet of several games. And then I said, "what we're gonna do is we're gonna use this information, and it's gonna be part of a demonstration at a family night for the social studies program. And so you are gonna give that presentation, and we're going to have our folks there demonstrate and interact with the students, cuz every kid loves games." And from Jacob's Ladder to tops to a variety of other toys, we were able to engage students.
[00:19:14] And at the same time we had another person, I actually had our interns and staff put together a play around a skit called Telling the Bees, which is a tradition that these Englishmen have brought over with them to the colonies. And you probably recall that when Queen Elizabeth had passed, the royal beekeeper went and told the bees that she had passed. So it's this tradition that was brought here. And actually Solomon Whitman, who lived in the museum, in our historic house, he, in his old age, part of his contribution to the family, to keeping the farm going was that he took care of the bees. So our skit was to have his daughter-in-law, Lois Dickerman Whitman, tell the students and their families about the passing of Solomon Whitman. We had the bee skep, she was in the clothing, and she did the whole skit.
[00:20:11] And then of course, we went into the demonstration of games with Nicole. And that was really well done by our volunteer, Anne Meo. So, it takes a lot of effort to do all these things. If you're a painter, right, you've gotta have all the different paints and all the different medium and all the different surfaces to paint on. And in order to get something done, you just have to have all your options, and then you have to have skilled people to do all the work. And so that's my job is to, behind the scenes, pinch and prod people to do the work.
[00:20:40] Sarah Jack: I love hearing about this. It's one thing to have historic volumes on a shelf that people could come check out and read, but then they're just there, and they may get read, they may not.
[00:20:54] Andy Verzosa: Usually books just stay on a shelf, unless you create an activity. Every intern kind of does the same thing in the first week that all the other interns do. I send them down to the library and organize the books. And then I'll say, "what did you see in the different sections?" Because we'll have things about colonial life. The Tunxis, which just to give a an acknowledgement here, is that Farmington is actually the homeland of the Tunxis people since time immemorial. By going down to the library, I'm able to introduce topics like indigenous peoples, the puritans, the way they lived, about witchcraft. I can talk about enslaved peoples. I can talk about the Revolutionary War. I can talk about our cemetery. I can talk about so many different things just through the library, but I do it by throwing them into it, and I have them write lists and have them focus on an area. And I do try to size them up to see what they might be interested in.
[00:21:50] And then, of course, we do have, apart from our library, we have an archive. So sometimes I'll have people work in a certain area of interest or where I think they might be good or where I need someone to do work, and I'll have them work on, say, gathering information about plants, things like that. Or through letters and journals and daybooks, we can get a lot of information. And I'll have them go through the process of transcribing something and having that experience and having them discover on their own, "hey, there's someone here called Sarah Indian. Why would they call someone Sarah Indian?" And then go through that whole background of how people were recorded that were indigenous, and the things that they did, and the things that they traded with the person who kept that daybook, things like that.
[00:22:37] It's great. I love being able to turn people on to history in that way. And it's really, right now I just have the best bunch of volunteers and interns. I just, they're just, they make my going to work every day a pleasure. I love going to work. I love my job.
[00:22:57] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it shows. And it's really interesting that you're talking about the research because we just released an episode with Margo Burns, a Salem historian, and she helped put together the Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, which is 980 legal documents about the trials, but she's working on a biography of Chief Justice William Stoughton of the court that sat at Salem, and none of his papers have been found. His letters, his records of keeping his land, all that's missing. So she's doing that prosopography you talked about, the approach of looking at his friends, acquaintances, neighbors and going, she traveled to Oxford, England, where he stayed for a decade, and she's looking at other people's journals and documents, trying to find out what did they write about this man.
[00:24:07] Andy Verzosa: It's fascinating. In a way, the work that is done in a place like Stanley-Whitman house when research is being done about a topic and learning about people, particularly about Mary Barnes. There wasn't a lot of information other than the really the trial transcript. There was no information about why she was accused and who, what her accuser said. That information is not available.
[00:24:34] Looking at her relationships with other people, right? Those relationships with the Baileys, for example, who she knew earlier in her life and so places that she lived and things that she might have been involved with in a good or bad way. Relationships to people, places, and things. It's so powerful.
[00:24:54] Again, research is critical. And of course we're talking about people like my predecessor Lisa Johnson. They were very passionate. They were dedicated, right? We have our Wednesday volunteer group, we have our interns, those are people that are, they're committed. They're already doing the work, but getting people to think beyond the surface and really look at the issues about like, why someone would be accused and how that dynamic would happen. And then, the brutal consequences. And putting yourself back in that timeframe, because you can't think the way that we do today. We have to think about, put ourself back in that place, in those circumstances. But still, today, history does repeat itself, as with what you guys do. And I wanted to ask you like, how does that work? How do you internationally speak to people in Africa about witches there? How does that work? You've got some reach.
[00:25:48] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We had zoom calls with a couple individuals running organizations who are trying to stop the witch-hunting that's still going on today in those countries. And right now we're just trying to amplify their voice, give them our podcast as a platform and through our social media, echo what they're saying, because they're the ones who live with it. They know what's going on, and they're able to think like the people that are involved, because they're so intimately connected to it. We just want to take what they say and repeat it.
[00:26:32] Andy Verzosa: So what you do and what I do is kindred. So we create the space for people's truth, for their, the story to be told. And I think it's so wonderful what you guys do. It's powerful. Just what happened in the last 48 hours with the news cycles that are going on, and especially what's at play here this year with Jane Garibay and the legislation that's gonna be proposed for the exoneration of Connecticut witches, those accused.
[00:27:02] And I think that's that momentum is building, and it's so fascinating. I'm in awe of how quickly it's coming together, but not surprised, cuz when I think of someone like Beth Caruso who's just, she's just synthesized with the information and such an advocate, right? And she's, of course , a writer in her own right with the books she's written. But being such a great advocate and a great spokesperson, a great person to, incredible person to talk about this. And she's a great listener. I had occasion over the last couple weeks to catch up with her, and of course she went to the play The Last Night, performance or the live stage reading.
[00:27:41] My job is to kinda keep the doors of the museum open, provide that opportunity for engagement to do the good work, to allow people to do the research, to be able to share information to preserve, of course, the collection and the archive and the library and all that.
[00:27:56] Like I said, I didn't know anything about the Connecticut, witch panic and trials. I started my job five years ago. It'll be five years, February 15th, that I'd been there. And I remember like early on, within a few months I got an email asking me, even though I was new, to go to Bridgeport, to attend a commemoration and a dedication of a memorial for Goody Knapp, and I said, "gee I, I'll do it." And I instantly emailed Lisa Johnson, said, "gee, I asked to do this." She wasn't available to do it, and she filled me in and shared some words that I could share there. And that was being thrown in cold, and that was my introduction to Connecticut Witch trials in 2018.
[00:28:44] And then of course, I think the most significant engagement for me getting my hands into it, so to speak, was in Covid, putting together the panels and working with Beth Caruso, Tony Griego, and Virginia Wolf. And then I've done other things too, where I've brought in Richard Ross to talk about the New England witchcraft panics and have him present his perspective.
[00:29:10] And last year actually had Ellen Evert Hopman ,who's a writer. She is a druid, but she came, and she talked about witches and plants, right? So we, I pretty much worked with her to present four different online panels, moderated panels. I asked Virginia to be the moderator, and I did the back end of keeping the webinar going, and of course doing all the things from the museum to promote it and had Ellen talk about plants on the different Celtic Irish festival days, Imbolc, which is, I guess now, right? And Beltane and Lughnasadh and Samhain. And it was books that she had written that corresponded to those festival days.
[00:29:58] It was wonderful, because when you think about, it was an indirect way of acknowledging cunning folk, people that, you know, before there were really doctors, right? That people were close to the land, close to plants, close to natural things to help them cure their ills and their sicknesses.
[00:30:18] And the colonies, when folks came here we know that they brought some things with them, but they were also introduced to a lot of things that were native or indigenous to this place. And who did that introduction? So I'm learning now that there was an exchange between native and non-native people. And what was that like? And it's also mentioned, and it's alluded to in the play of Rebecca Greensmith talks about, "how do you think I made the stout?" It was from plants that she was introduced to by a native people. So I love that awareness, because when you think about what that time was like in the mid-1600s here in Connecticut Colony, in a place like Farmington what was going on? What was shared? What was that exchange? There's not much written about that, but something must have happened, because we know that people were using certain plants over time that were from here, not plants that they brought from home. So I thought that was an interesting thing to be aware of.
[00:31:28] Josh Hutchinson: You're bringing the history to life at the center and in the conversation, how people lived back then, because we live totally different today, most of us, away from the plants and away from the land, and it's really insightful to see how things were in the 17th century, helps you get a foothold in understanding the witch trials. And the plays that you're doing that bring it to life for people are, it's such a wonderful way to do that, because people in Connecticut don't understand that they had witch trials, and you bring it to 'em in an entertaining way.
[00:32:15] Andy Verzosa: And it's digestible, right? And I think selfishly I want to know, and I don't know. So I get to work with people who do know, and I get to bring them in. Or I have people that are interested too, and I get to, say for instance a direct or assign them to do things for the general good of whatever project we're working on.
[00:32:37] I must have been a general or a marshal back in the day, my other life, something. But it's just, I think that's what I'm good at is putting that all together. But I have to say, we have this one gentleman, Dennis Picard, he's a historic interpreter. I first met him early on, and he was doing our Maple Day program. So in New England it's a time honored tradition of tapping trees to get sap to evaporate, to make maple syrup or maple sugar. And I took it for granted, that it was just a New England thing.
[00:33:06] It's big in Maine. Everyone loves maple syrup and all that. But I learned so much more about. One thought was that indigenous people showed people how to make it right, and then it was adopted very quickly, cause making maple syrup or maple sugar was not something that was done in Europe necessarily. And so it was one of the sweeteners here. Of course there was cane sugars, but that was made somewhere else brought up. But this was something that even Benjamin Franklin could get behind, right? And let's say you could do this here, it's cheaper. You're supporting the local economy. There's a lot written about his interest in maple syrup, sugars.
[00:33:50] But Dennis, I engaged him to start doing our hearth cooking programs, and it became a monthly thing. And so it was more than just demonstrating how to make food or do things. You had a fire and or even how to a light a fire was really all the stories that come with it that he knew. And he's been doing this a long time. So I love that, being able to bring someone in like that.
[00:34:16] Another person I brought in and this really relates to again, the time of Covid, and we're coming up on the anniversary of John Jennison's passing last year. I think he died on February 4th. He was actually an intern of mine years ago at a business that I had, and he had some success in New York as a comic book illustrator. And he was an impresario who did all these things around Comic-Con and things that young people do that I don't do, but I was aware that I knew he was really talented and a great artist, draftsman, and so I knew him.
[00:34:52] We've been keeping in touch, and I was at Stanley-Whitman, and I was really trying to figure out how can I engage or get people of a certain age interested in making maple syrup or about Mary Barnes or telling the bees, any of these things that I thought were worth sharing with other people that would give people an idea about colonial life and different aspects of it? And he and I worked on, I would come up with the ideas and the stories and work on the copy, and he would illustrate an eight and a half by eleven history graphic.
[00:35:32] But one of the things that we did is we did one about the hanging of Mary Barnes, and we used a tree as a central figure to help divide up the different areas where we could have the different other images, where we could show the people that were at the trial. We could show Mary Barnes with a head down. We do use a noose in that. And we're able to give a very simple, abbreviated, what comics do in those little strips, and it's presented in such a way that it's eye-catching, and it's very quick. And John did that for us. And I'm always trying to think of different ways to get people to get interested.
[00:36:11] Sarah Jack: Thanks for sharing about John.
[00:36:14] Andy Verzosa: Yeah. He's a wonderful, dear friend, and I miss him.
[00:36:19] Sarah Jack: I'm glad that you had that special project together and that becomes part of the living history that you're able to share.
[00:36:28] Andy Verzosa: I love artists, because they approach the world in a different way than, say, someone who's really involved with words and research, right? Sometimes, reading a lot of information, very dense information could be hard and off-putting. People learn in different ways. And so providing people to access things that are important, concepts, ideas, et cetera, I found that having an artist come in and doing what they do through their medium is a great way to do that. As simple as, I've done a couple of exhibits at Stanley-Whitman House. We did an exhibit called Capitol America. And two photographers, Robert Lisak and David Ottenstein, went around the country, and they had been doing this for several years, taking photographs of the different state capitol buildings inside and outside. Every one of those buildings tell a story about how those states came into being. And oftentimes it was a rough and turbulent and violent coming into being, and contentious, a lot of, a lot going on. And through photography, they're able to capture the space, the things that are there that tell the story through either sculpture or murals, et cetera. The way the buildings are sited. So they're really great photographers and an artistic way, but also capturing some of that didactic information that you want, you might help you understand the significance of a place or a building or of a people. And so we did that, and I had seen their work, and it was after January 6th, if that date resonates with you. And I thought, gee, this is an important body of work to see now in this context. And so we did that at Stanley-Whitman house. It was written up in the National Review, which is an international publication. It's available to search online, and you can find it.
[00:38:20] But that was important, because it gave people pause to think about the significance of these places. And it was through art, and I thought that was very effective for a place like Stanley-Whitman house, because it brought in contemporary works and living artists into a historic place that you wouldn't think you'd see work like that. And the contrast and the juxtaposition was really powerful. And then of course getting the review was very powerful too, that discourse that happens, and we had a lot of visitors for that.
[00:38:50] We have an exhibit being installed by Lucinda Bliss, and I met her years ago, and we had kept in touch, and through Covid. I invited her to come to our museum, cuz I would have people come for visits, social distancing and doing all that, of course. And introducing them to our archive and collection and to the house and to the cemetery. And one of the reasons why I invited Lucinda is because she, in her practice and the work that she does that I knew of is that she would become familiar with the place, and she would, she was, she's a runner, so she runs races and marathons and things, and part of what she does is she runs and becomes familiar with that place and creates these maps. They're visual maps and of the experience of learning the land as she's running it.
[00:39:44] And I introduced her to Stanley-Whitman house and found out that she was actually a descendant of some of the early proprietors of Farmington, more than a few. And so that created this opportunity for her to do a reckoning of her own, cuz as during Covid there were other things that were going on that gave people pause, and there was that space to do that for her. And she looked at her genealogy, her lineage, and what her ancestors, the impact that they had in their lives on a developing nation, ultimately.
[00:40:23] She's also a descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and we happen to have a collection of letters sent by Julian Hawthorne, his son, to a woman who was associated with the house, with the Whitman family of a few years love affair. So that was clandestine. It was quiet and secret. And so that was powerful for her to know of them and look at them, be able to read them, hold them in her hands.
[00:40:47] But her focus was really on other things about who is on the land, who controls the land. I'll leave you with that. I don't wanna give away her exhibit.
[00:40:58] Sarah Jack: You know, I'm listening to so much of what you're sharing and describing, and one of the things that you mentioned was with the hearth cooking and how it brings some of the stories forward. And then also when you've talked about the research and these art projects and how stories are coming forward, and they're paralleling with modern lessons. It's so important that everything that's coming out in those stories is acknowledged and embraced, so that it can be recognized as these are all facets of what have made the nation who we are, the state of Connecticut who we are, who the people in the 17th century were, who we've come now to be. And I then I think of that concern of, "oh, if If the witches are talked about, if we start talking about this ugly thing, what, is it just gonna be a stain?" but it, it actually isn't. It's part of these other pieces. And do you think that Connecticut and other societies and museums and libraries can learn from your example, or maybe even what they're already doing, but see that, "hey, there is room for this history that makes us uncomfortable, because more things come out of it that are good?"
[00:42:26] Andy Verzosa: When I was a kid, we were a military family, and oftentimes my father wasn't around, and it was just at the time, really, my mom and my brother. I had younger brothers, but they were much younger, but my mom and my brother, and we would go to the library. And it was this incredible space with this incredible benefit of being able to check out books. So I would check out the max number of books, my brother would check out his max number, and my mother would do hers. And by the end of it, before the next visit, we had gone through all those books, right? And we were able to have our own interior engagement with the material that we're reading, right?
[00:43:09] And then we were able to talk about it. What'd you think? Or play act something from a book that we really liked, right? And we did this. And I think what libraries and museums and places where you can learn are important is that it's that civic space, and we get to learn about storytelling, and we get to learn about other people, and we can do this in a safe way.
[00:43:38] And it's very powerful, and you get to look at the universality of what it is to be a human, the humanity, right? And so I look at, I'm a, as you probably can tell right now, I'm a generalist. I like taking a little here and a little there and this, but I do a little structure.
[00:43:56] So I do, I live near a museum. I live by the New Britain Museum of American Art. It's like a city block away from me. I can't picture not living in a town without a museum, right? And sometimes I just go there just so I can breathe air, feel the space, experience the light, and then look at something that someone made, someone's interpretation of something and go there, leave this dimension and go to that dimension.
[00:44:22] And so I think places like Stanley-Whitman House are important, because you're giving yourself permission, time, and space to put yourself into a place where, what was it like to live in colonial America or revolutionary wartime America. What was it like to be a woman during those times? What was your role? What were the things that you did? What did you do when you were a child? There were enslaved people. What did they do? I didn't know there were enslaved peoples in Connecticut. Oh, there was a woman that was hanged because people thought she was a witch. All these things you get to experience, hopefully with a great interpretation, either through a great program, exhibit, or tour.
[00:45:03] So I think these places are really important, and I think that the work that, that folks do in the heritage, history, arts, performing arts centers are really important. It's important, because history does repeat itself, unfortunately.
[00:45:20] And sometimes people have to sort it out. They have to figure it out, and they sometimes you see things that are so horrific, and sometimes you just have to see that there's a way out or there's an alternative or there's a solution or that people still carried on, right? And that things, bad things do happen and that you could be prepared for them or you may not be prepared for them, but you get to learn through people's lives, through that are recorded, that are celebrated, that are, maybe people talk about a really bad person. You still gotta hear that ,story too.
[00:45:59] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's such an important point that you need to learn those stories, because something like that is happening now or will happen in the future, and it's good to be ready and know that they got out of that. So how do we move forward? You need to look at the past in order to get there.
[00:46:21] Andy Verzosa: Gotta do it critically, right? You have to be able to, to have the example and then have the experience of putting it together and then to be able to step back. One of the things about The Last Night, I didn't get too deep into being making sure that everything was factually correct or they got all the facts in, right, because I knew it was gonna be an artistic interpretation. This, it was gonna be Ginny's and Debra's, the magic that they would create together, what was gonna be important was. Of performance and the elements that were ring true, in a wonderfully crafted performance. And you didn't have to pack everything in there.
[00:46:59] Just like a painting, if you try to pack every single thing in a painting, you might just end up with a big mess. But sometimes simple, spare, thought out, well-crafted is what's needed. And less is more, and I think that's what I'm excited about the next play that I commission or the next volunteer that I work with on a project that they want to do, or work with the next intern and teaching them something, or teaching, having them get involved with how to write a label copy for an exhibit.
[00:47:31] Like I said, I think the most important thing I think for people to do is to at least try, expose themselves, take themselves out of their comfort zone. They don't have to hurl themselves into anything, but, just step outside of their comfort zone and check things out, and then be able to learn to see, learn to listen, learn, learn to tell, storytelling's so important, and I don't know about you. I might be really giving you a lot of information about how old I am, but I remember one of the things that we had to do is write an autobiography in English class. I don't know about you guys, but, and it was like, oh, what am I gonna write about myself? And but, and how do you do that? And I think that's a great exercise. Unfortunately, as you get older, things happen and you might be part of writing someone's obituary and that's pulling out those highlights, those things that are important in that person's life, a loved one's life. And that's something that I think is an important thing to be able to do, unfortunately. But also to be able to put together your thoughts around an issue, a cause, something that you believe in, other than just saying, "I believe in that. This is the way it should be." Just being so black and white, there's a lot of gray, right? There's a lot to think about. And things change when other facts are presented right? Or other situations happen, so everything's not always what it seems sometimes. And I think that's the wonderful thing about interpreting history, too, is that it's always changing. It's very dynamic.
[00:49:04] Sarah Jack: How does your internship program work? When is the opportunity for people to apply for something like that?
[00:49:10] Andy Verzosa: So we're a small museum. I lovingly say it's a boutique museum, which means that it's really small. And I tailor the experience to everyone that comes through the door. So I try never to turn anyone away, and I try to work with people, where they're at. So we have, for example, the last couple years, especially, we've had people come in through our programs.
[00:49:33] So they might do a gravestone cleaning workshop or a foodways program. Or they might come in on a field trip or, say, one of their classes at the local university might come in, and they meet me, and they have a house tour by one of the staff or the volunteers, or they have some engagement, and they're obviously, they are predisposed, because they're there for a reason.
[00:49:58] But then we try to figure out why they're there and what might keep them there. And cuz we want people to come back. We want you to become a member, we want you to come to other programs, and that's our mission. We're there to serve the public in that way.
[00:50:12] So I do a lot of listening and seeing where people are at, and with young people who are doing a formal internship program, I will figure out what the area of study is, how many hours they have to complete, what the goal is. Some people have capstone programs. Sometimes we have grad students. We have mostly undergrads. We have high school students that come in and for as much as you think that, oh, this is great, we're gonna have an intern, they're gonna do all this stuff for me, it's a lot of work for me, cuz I put a lot into it, right? It's reciprocal in that way, and I really enjoy it.
[00:50:47] For example, I have one person, and she'll be in tomorrow. I won't say her name, I don't wanna embarrass her, but she's new. And I said, "hey, I need to know who all the different people were that were accused of being a witch in Connecticut. I know where I could find that myself, but I had her do it and put it together for herself in her own spreadsheet. And then I kind of add columns, like, oh, check this out, or add this and I build on that. And then only if she's interested in going. And so then, then I start getting into things where I don't have the information readily available ,and I have her start putting together information that I can start synthesizing in other projects, like for a skit, or I'd like to do a website about the Connecticut Witch trials. Which would be, I already registered the domain name. It's called Connecticut Witch Trails. So think of where I was from in Portland, Maine, we had what was called the First Friday Art Walk. And we used social media and websites and a printed brochure, where you could go visit different galleries and see the different exhibits or the different museums for exhibitions, et cetera, or different arts happenings. And it was quite a thing, the First Friday Art Walk in Portland.
[00:52:01] And so what I thought was we could do something around the different communities where people were accused and where activity was happening and have those communities tell their story, but link into the website, but we would provide the armature and the structure, and that's what we did before. The other thing is I'm part of the Connecticut Historic Gardens. So we're a 16 member group. And so we do that by having all of our individual pages. But what we do is we have what's called Connecticut Historic Gardens Day. So Connecticut Witch Trails could have a day, maybe it's Mary Barnes Day, maybe it's another day, maybe it's another thing to work around.
[00:52:46] But it would be a great place for the public to go into and say, "oh, I think I'm gonna go for this for here, or I'm gonna go to three different sites in this community and learn more about what I'm interested in." So that's loosely what I'm hoping to do. And then the other part of it is to work with other sites, perhaps your podcast, to have links, reciprocal links. Websites aren't as nimble and dynamic as say social media sites in some ways, but the thing I like about websites is you can have sections where it's like a bibliography, it's just cited sources in certain categories, and it's a little more static and it's, you can go there and get more information, say about any aspect of the Connecticut witch panics and trials. That would be that. And then eventually, I would do this. And it would be maybe spun off or part of a member group thing. But I start it at the Stanley-Whitman House, cuz it would be easier to do, and I could supervise it and get it off the ground, but I ideally it would be a autonomous, standalone kind of project.
[00:53:53] In my spare time.
[00:53:55] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we definitely want to see that. And we were very happy a couple weeks ago, we spoke with a representative and a senator in Connecticut, and they both spoke about how they'd like to see a trail system put in place, where you can visit all the witch trial locations, the different towns people were from, the museums, the libraries, the societies, and learn as you go along. And it might involve riding a bike or hiking part of it, or just driving place to place, but however it ends up in its ultimate shape, I think it's such a beautiful way for people to learn, to get on the ground in the locations and experience them with all your senses.
[00:54:52] Andy Verzosa: Absolutely. And don't overlook the online component, being able to go to a website and, do that. A lot of people can't travel and probably couldn't do that, but they can travel online, right, 24/7, the beauty of the internet, and I think especially for those people that are looking at their ancestry, their genealogy, and where they're looking at aspects of the witch panic and trials that they really want to zero in on. There's so much still probably out there. And it's just in terms of it could be another play written, it could be another book written, it, and it could be inspired by what has happened in Colonial Connecticut, and and then going into these archives. Not everything's digitized. Not everything has been discovered. Who knows what's in someone's attic that maybe there's sadly a 12th person? We don't know. So I think having a place to go to start that journey of discovery would be important to do. And certainly, if someone has more energy than I do and better ideas of how to do it I'll give them the domain name, but just, wink, wink.
[00:56:05] It's, I think it's just important to have a place to go to find these things, initially. It's hard to get into museums, even our museum, we're not open every day. We're only open so many hours a day. You can't just go into our archives unaccompanied. You have to have someone, a staff person with you going through things because these documents that we have, these early documents are fragile. So accessibility is probably best digitally online. So having a a portal to at least find out where those repositories are for information or other people who are doing things would be a good thing.
[00:56:41] I don't know of a place right now, do you, where people can go?
[00:56:46] Josh Hutchinson: There's no central place for Connecticut Witch Trial history. You go, you look at the state library, you look at you know where they have the Wyllys papers and the Matthew Grant diary, and there's volumes of old Connecticut colonial records that you can find transcriptions of, but you have to do it yourself, you have to go and dig into all those things.
[00:57:14] Andy Verzosa: In a perfect world, something like the Connecticut Digital Archive would have all that information there, but then, you could link it to a website where it's all organized.
[00:57:24] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. They have some things like that for Salem, where there's a documentary archive that the University of Virginia put together, and then the Salem Witch Museum has these digital tours where you can pick a town that you wanna see the sites, and they have photographs and blurbs about what happened there, why it's significant in the Witch trials.
[00:57:52] And yeah, I can definitely see having one webpage where you can get all of that.
[00:57:58] Andy Verzosa: Yeah, I think it's a great way to encourage continued scholarship, more artistic interpretation or historic interpretation. I think that would be really important. I know that the Tony Griego's Connecticut Witch Project on Facebook was a somewhat of a clearing house of things. But I don't know about you, but Facebook has lost its allure for me. I still have an account, but I, I don't go to it, probably. I don't keep up with that on a significant basis, but I think a website might be more to my liking to to visit to find things. But yeah, all these efforts to make the hidden visible is so important.
[00:58:38] Sarah Jack: I'm hoping if the exoneration moves forward and occurs, can it remove some of the hesitancy that is there, the stigma that's there to feel more comfortable, Hey, let's learn more. Let's do research. Let's collaborate, let's make it living. That's what I really hope that one of the positive effects of the exoneration would be.
[00:59:02] They're not just a spectacle, we're not just trying to get a look at a sideshow. They're these lives and when the history is uncovered, you see that, and I hope to get over that stigma about that little piece of history.
[00:59:17] Andy Verzosa: You certainly, when I think about Salem, I kind of cringe a little bit, because it's more spectacle and it's other than what I would hope for what would be done around the Connecticut itch trials and panics, to look at it more, I hate saying more seriously, but to do it in such a way that has this integrity, so that people can approach it and get beyond the gimmicky things.
[00:59:45] And really look, it's, I don't know if you guys, you both must have done genealogy because of how you got to where you are. But, one of the things about genealogy for me was just to figure out who I was, wh who was I in the, the universe and in relation to things, right? And it was something that you do for me, I believe, you do in your early adulthood. I did it mostly to figure out about my father, who I had lost when I was a young boy. And to figure out like you. As I became a man what, who was he as a man, right? And trying to figure that out. And then then thinking about naturally my grandparents and then other people, and geez, how did people come to this country?
[01:00:29] And just knowing those things, knowing their stories was so important to me. And going back further and further, putting myself in their place as immigrants that moved here, and what their lives were like. And the things that they may have celebrated and the things that they were, the good things as well as the not so good things about their lives. And so I think that that's important.
[01:00:55] Sarah Jack: Yeah. And I think because the climate right now is you have this history, but then you have this modern crisis in some of the world where women and children are being attacked as witches. There's this understanding that needs to happen and it's not just, okay now we're on Connecticut over here and we're gonna pull this history out and let's try to keep it from, being a fascination.
[01:01:22] It's bigger than that, and there's so many of us who are looking at the history in a scholarly way, teaching how to understand records, how to, when you're doing your ancestry work, how do you collect the story out of the primary sources so you know what happened. I feel like there's so much potential for the highlighting of this history to be done, tastefully and educationally.
[01:01:55] Andy Verzosa: Sure, the art and the science of it. History is really a science. When you think about it and you know how that all comes together is important for people to know that if anyone can get the benefit of a really sustained, sincere effort, right? And they can do it in many different ways.
[01:02:18] There are a lot of different ways to get information and to understand things. And I think again, through Stanley-Whitman House, through the programs we do. Our events or a commission play, a history graphic a straight symposium, lecture published materials that's important and allowing people to have that experience.
[01:02:37] Not everybody is gonna be able to have the time or the resources, necessarily. And some people don't have, they're afraid that they may not have the the abilities for whatever reasons to engage in looking into something or they don't, geez, I don't want look into the witch trials cuz it it's too heavy. Or geez, I gotta know all this stuff or. So I think being able to make it digestible, not in a, a trivial way, but you still gotta, you gotta meet people where they're at and you gotta have people that are skilled in being able to do that. You and you certainly, when you're talking about history, aspects of history with children, it's different than if you are with adults, right?
[01:03:23] Doing it, and history is hard. Some things are really hard, and, but being able to do it in a way You gotta be brave, you gotta be courageous, you gotta persevere, you gotta have all those kind of things, soft things, that skills that you gotta have to be able to be a good mentor, a good teacher, a good collaborator. Like you guys are great collaborators. Like you guys I'm sure your journeys to get to where you are here tonight is pretty amazing. And I gotta ask you, it must be pretty fulfilling. And if I were to ask you guys, like, how fulfilling is it for you to be doing this?
[01:04:00] Sarah Jack: It's incredible. It's been incredible.
[01:04:03] Josh Hutchinson: It's life changing. It's so, so amazing. Every day you wake up, you've gotta do X, Y, and Z and get to look forward to tomorrow and what's gonna happen.
[01:04:18] Andy Verzosa: And you don't have to do it alone.
[01:04:21] Josh Hutchinson: We have a whole group that we do it with.
[01:04:24] Andy Verzosa: And they'll find you. You just do the good work and they'll find you. It attracts people. Doing good work attracts people. That's the kind of spiritual axiom here. When you do good things, you attract good people and people that will help you along the way. You don't have to have all the answers or have it all figured out or get down so far. You can just do what's right in front of you.
[01:04:46] And I think that's really a life lesson for people, and when you talk about the Connecticut Witch trials, when you talk about witch, people persecuted for witchcraft,, there's a lot of aspects, certainly colonial, there's misogyny, right?
[01:05:01] There's a whole bunch of things that are going on there. And there are gonna be people that are gonna break that down in those areas of expertise, and it's gonna be that's what keeps it exciting for me, is I just keep on learning. And I don't have to do it. I'm not being tested the next day. Like I said, you don't have to do it alone. You can do it in company with other people, or you could do it totally off on your own and, and I think for the Exoneration project what I hope is that yes, I hope that the legislation goes through and that happens. But I think and I think you already know this, and I think you may have already alluded to it, or just that the way that you're approaching it it's an ongoing thing. It's gonna take you other places.
[01:05:42] I'll share with you, there was I was very fortunate to be able to participate with the Upstander project. It's about indigenous people. It's they've done, what they do every year, it's called the Upstander Academy. And you just go and you just learn about, what happened to people's here and on, on the land that we're on, and and just the whole different perspective, the view from the land as opposed to the view from the boat, right? So it's this thing about the settler mentality and the indigenous perspective. And it's fascinating. And so for me it's another, it's not separate, it's actually still part of the same of what I'm doing with, what we're talking about here tonight, and it's really looking at setting the record straight, reconciling, and doing it in a way that, we don't have to take on the sins of our ancestors necessarily, right? We can get right size with things and then do the next best thing, do the right thing.
[01:06:42] It's those actions, that commitment that I'm excited about and that you guys are excited about.
[01:06:49] Sarah Jack: That passion we have, and you have, that's one of the things that brought us together. I remember, when I, we were prepping for The Last Night episode. And I'm looking at our email communication and I'm like, I don't know enough of where this came from and why is this reading happening and what is this Stanley-Whitman House? And part of that's because I'm not there in your community directly. And I'm just so glad I picked up the phone and talked to you and started learning all of these amazing things that you're doing and, the mentoring you do. So I'm just so grateful. Thanks for having that first conversation with me and the several others we've had. Those have been really important.
[01:07:34] Andy Verzosa: And then think about the land that you're on and whose homeland is, and you're a guest on the land, and think about what does that mean being a guest on the land. And think about the history that preceded the history that you're talking about, and in colonial times more that obscure, invisible history wasn't just about the Connecticut witches, it was also some of what was happening with indigenous people. And that interaction, I'm learning about those things, and I'm hungry for it, so I look it up, I try to create space for that.
[01:08:04] And so I would encourage you to do the same. This and you'll see the universality of some of the issues are parallel, right? The other, the scapegoating, the erasure, the, silencing, all those types of things, and who wrote history? People in power, but sometimes they're so good at their recording of history that they record things that kind of, probably they don't realize, but give you a lot more information about what's not being written about, right? In the absence of something, sometimes you get a good picture of something. So it's pretty, pretty exciting. So I would encourage you even, wherever you are, that's the great thing about figuring out where you are and what your story is.
[01:08:50] Sarah Jack: That's awesome. Thank you Andy. How can your community and others support the Stanley-Whitman House?
[01:08:57] Andy Verzosa: Of course becoming a member is important, contributing to the annual fund. Thinking about places like Stanley-Whitman House and your community and what you can do as a volunteer, because that in kind giving of your time and your expertise, it has an equal, if not greater value sometimes than money. Of course we wanna raise money to keep the lights on, keep the heat on, but we also, we, we're a small museum. I'm the only full-time person there, and I dare say I wear a lot of hats, right? Chief cook and bottle washer. I have people, if they just come in on a Monday afternoon when I'm by myself trying to do a bunch of stuff helping me to put together a list of vendors so that I can get estimates sometimes is better use of my time to do other things and have a volunteer help organize that information for me.
[01:09:53] So giving of yourself in more than a monetary way, but, in a thoughtful, generous way of your time, and the things that you might be good at. You might be a good person with keeping the books. You might be able to weed in the garden or serve on the board. It's still, the thing about the non-profit history, art industry is that we do depend on a lot of volunteers, volunteerism, and it's a time-honored thing. That's how I got into the field actually, was I didn't grow up to be, I wasn't born museum director. I actually came through the back door. I went to art school. I basically served, I owned an art gallery, served on many different boards and committees, volunteering, and got to know a lot about nonprofit museums, nonprofit activities and in terms of governance and engagement and all of that. When it came time for me to join my husband down here in Connecticut I was I had the opportunity to go back to Maine for a year to run a museum as an interim director. And then when I came down, because of that experience and my prior volunteer experience, I saw positions open down here, applied for them. One of the positions that I took was the Stanley-Whitman House. So I didn't have years of experience in that way, but I had, I think I had what they wanted, or at least, I fit the bill at that time.
[01:11:19] And some people study and have a master's and higher degrees. And I don't, I have my undergraduate degree from art school and years of experience running a business and serving on boards and, I'm running a small museum in Connecticut, which is, for me. I just love my job. I love going there every day.
[01:11:39] Josh Hutchinson: Here's the latest Minute with Mary featuring our friend, Mary Bingham.
[01:11:45] Mary Bingham: One of the best resources to recently be digitized and become available online are the medical records of John Winthrop Jr. These papers were only available on microfilm at the Massachusetts Historical Society when I began to take trips to Boston to view them beginning in January of this past year. They were a difficult challenge to read because the ink and the smudges could not be extracted from the original page when creating the microfilm.
[01:12:17] And the fact that Winthrop Junior's handwriting was atrocious did not help matters. The digitizing process cleaned each page that was scanned to better satisfaction, making the papers much easier to read, so to speak. These papers are so important to anyone studying history, because these records state the names of his patients and the town in Connecticut where they were treated.
[01:12:43] One of his patients was Mary Barnes, who was treated by Winthrop Jr on April 7th, 1659. Why? I don't know the answer to that question just yet. Aside from transcribing his writing, I intend to decipher the alchemical symbols, denoting how she was treated. Then make my best educated guess as to why she was treated.
[01:13:08] And this will take time, but what can be gleaned from this primary source is that John Winthrop, Jr. knew Mary Barnes, as he did several others wrongfully convicted and hanged for witchcraft while he was away. Imagine the frustration and anger he felt towards those responsible for the deaths of the innocent victims he knew personally.
[01:13:33] Thank you.
[01:13:35] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:13:37] Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[01:13:40] Sarah Jack: End witch hunts.
[01:13:42] Witch hunts are targeted blame and punishment toward vulnerable people, alleged witches. Power structures around religion, familial status, age, gender, and falsely-attributed causes of misfortune universally contribute to the circumstances of witch hunts past and present. In the last 12 months, Josh Hutchinson and I, along with Mary Bingham, Beth Caruso and Tony Griego have developed our individual witch-hunt causes into collaborative efforts that have stretched and evolved our work elucidating the matter of witch blame and fear. In 2022, the End Witch Hunts movement was founded, End Witch Hunts project Thou Shall Not Suffer podcast was launched, and another End Witch Hunts project, the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project brought a witchcraft crime exoneration bill to the Connecticut General Assembly with the partnership of Representative Jane Garibay, Senator Saud Anwar, and the support of many Connecticut legislators who recognize the relevance of standing against witchcraft Hunts.
[01:14:38] Many historians, descendants, and supporters have worked and sacrificed their time, shared their knowledge, and amplified their voices to grow End Witch Hunts movement and projects. We have produced weekly thought-provoking podcast episodes, educating about the many layers of witch hunts in history and the nuances fueling witch hunts harming innocent people right now, today. You can learn more about the past and modern stories of the people harmed by this merciless conduct in any of our expert-filled episodes. Join us every week to hear the latest important conversation.
[01:15:08] The accusation details from witch trial primary sources are jaw dropping. The news of current attack victims across the globe is jaw dropping. We ask, why do we hunt witches? How do we hunt witches? How do we stop hunting witches?
[01:15:21] Messaging that clarifies how power structures around religion, familial status, age, gender, and falsely-attributed causes of misfortune universally contribute to the circumstances of witch hunts past and present. Share the attack news. Share a podcast episode. Read a book. Write a post or blog. Write to a politician or diplomat. Donate money to the organizations that are creating projects that intervene in the modern communities where witch hunts thrive. You can financially support the production of the podcast. The United Nations Human Rights Council has acknowledged this global crisis and beckons us all to take additional action.
[01:15:56] Awareness of the violent, modern witch hunts against alleged witches is increasing across the world. International media organizations, governments, and individuals want it to stop, are taking action, and are educating about it. We are all stakeholders in efforts to stop these witch attack and abuse crimes against women and children. Educate yourself more. Now you are aware of this modern horror. What will you do?
[01:16:20] We have links in our show notes to a new YouTube documentary, Why Witch Hunts are Not Just a Dark Chapter from the Past with journalist Karin Helmstaedt, featuring important interviews with several experts, including Advocacy for Alleged Witches advocate Dr. Leo Igwe, Witches of Scotland advocate Dr. Zoe Venditozzi, modern attack victims, and witch trial historians. Please see the show description for the link to watch it.
[01:16:42] This week, why don't you check out the International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices organization? It was formed in 2022, just like us, to connect the different groups and initiatives working on this issue across the globe. It seeks to raise awareness about the human rights abuses taking place as a result of beliefs in witchcraft or sorcery and encourages action by states and individuals to end them. The International Network aims to raise support for the United Nations Human Rights Council's Resolution on the Elimination of Harmful Practices Related to Accusations of Witchcraft and Ritual Attacks. Their website is in the episode description. Go visit them.
[01:17:19] This month, the Salem, Massachusetts area and Hartford and Farmington, Connecticut are getting a rare and important visit from Dr. Leo Igwe, director of the Advocacy for Alleged Witches nonprofit organization. It is an incredible honor for Josh and I to organize a week of speaking engagements during his speaking tour in the United States and to accompany him as he speaks in places of historical significance to early American colony witch trial history. You can follow Dr. Leo Igwe on Twitter @leoigwe to see how he's advocating on the ground in the victim communities in real time as these individuals are experiencing being accused and hunted.
[01:17:56] The first event at the Salem Witch Museum is virtual, but Dr. Igwe will be with us in Salem touring the historic sites, guided by a local seasoned in the history, Mary Bingham. Tuesday, May 16 is your chance to experience a very special evening of in-person conversation with Leo at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers. Please see the Facebook event for details. Isn't this a great week? Make sure you mark your calendars.
[01:18:19] Next, you can join an in-person speaking event with Dr. Igwe at Central Connecticut State University on Wednesday, May 17. While in the Hartford area, Leo will be touring known witch trial historic sites with author Beth Caruso. On Thursday afternoon, Leo will be presenting at the Stanley-Whitman House living history center in Farmington, Connecticut. Look for Facebook events for all of these occasions posted by our social media. Come hear Leo. Invite your friends and family. See you there.
[01:18:46] Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop, merch from our Zazzle shop, or make a financial contribution to our organization. Our links are in the show description.
[01:18:58] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[01:19:00] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:19:01] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:19:05] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[01:19:07] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:19:10] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:19:13] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[01:19:16] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[01:19:22] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:19:25]

May 3, 2023

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Part 3: 1648-1661

Documentary:”Why Witch Hunts Are Not Just A Dark Chapter From the Past”

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Show Notes

This is Part 3 of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast’s Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series. In this episode, we discuss the years 1648-1661 and continue to explore the individual lives of Connecticut’s known witch trial victims with only fact backed, trustworthy research and sources. You will hear about the common theories, and which facts are in the primary source records. The lives of these historic individuals have been examined with proper genealogical protocols for identifying and confirming family lines, parentage and marital connections by consulting historian research and available primary source material. Take in this informative New England colonial history conversation with your cohosts and accused witch descendants, writer and podcast producer, Joshua Hutchinson and End Witch Hunts President and people connector extraordinaire, Sarah Jack. Enjoy the new segment, “Minute with Mary” by Mary Bingham, accused witch descendant, writer and researcher. How do we know what we know? We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Links

Two Buried Alive over Alleged Witchcraft

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Bibliography

March 29,, 2023 Discussion Panel with State Representative Jane Garibay on Bill HJ #34, A Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut.

Press Conference on Legislative Bill H.J. No. 34, March 8, 2023

Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Transcript

[00:00:21] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:27] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: This is part three of our Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series.
[00:00:32] Sarah Jack: In this episode, we're going to cover witchcraft accusations in Connecticut during the period from 1648 through 1661.
[00:00:40] Josh Hutchinson: Between those years, at least 16 people were accused of witchcraft in the Connecticut and New Haven colonies.
[00:00:48] Sarah Jack: We say, "at least," because the records are incomplete.
[00:00:51] Josh Hutchinson: Six people were executed in Connecticut Colony between 1648 and 1654.
[00:00:57] Sarah Jack: As we discuss these cases, we'll cover the role of John Winthrop, Jr. and like-minded colonial leaders in subduing the urge to dispatch those believed by some to have used magic for sinister purposes.
[00:01:09] Josh Hutchinson: Winthrop himself was an alchemical physician and a student of natural magic.
[00:01:15] Sarah Jack: Like many, he believed that the devil could help people cause harm.
[00:01:19] Josh Hutchinson: However, he believed all magic originated from nature.
[00:01:23] The beliefs weren't as black and white as a lot of people, including historians tend to portray them. It wasn't just like a black and white issue. Magic and puritanism weren't entirely incompatible.
[00:01:42] Sarah Jack: Before we begin, we want to warn you that the stories you'll hear from us may be different than the way you've heard them before.
[00:01:50] Josh Hutchinson: For generations, historians and genealogists have attempted to flesh out the details of the trial participants' lives. Over time, our understanding of the Connecticut Witch Trials has developed, as more has been uncovered, and many inaccuracies have been found in these early volumes.
[00:02:16] Sarah Jack: In our narrative, we will tell you the prevailing theories.
[00:02:19] Josh Hutchinson: We will also share our reasons for doubting some of these claims.
[00:02:24] The sources we rely upon for the facts we can know are the court records of the witchcraft cases themselves.
[00:02:31] Sarah Jack: And the other original 17th century documents that can reliably be linked to those involved.
[00:02:37] Josh Hutchinson: We begin with the 1648 case of Mary Johnson.
[00:02:41] Sarah Jack: Mary lived in Wethersfield and was most likely a servant.
[00:02:45] Josh Hutchinson: You may know of Wethersfield from reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare.
[00:02:50] Sarah Jack: While that book is entirely fiction, eight real-life Wethersfield residents are known to have been accused of witchcraft in the 17th century.
[00:02:58] Josh Hutchinson: In 1646, Mary Johnson was convicted of theft.
[00:03:04] Sarah Jack: To punish her, the court ordered she be whipped immediately in Hartford and a month later in Wethersfield.
[00:03:10] Josh Hutchinson: Sadly, this was not the end of her troubles.
[00:03:13] Sarah Jack: On December 7th, 1648, she was convicted of witchcraft.
[00:03:17] Josh Hutchinson: The jury found her guilty because she confessed.
[00:03:21] Sarah Jack: Cotton Mather later wrote that she was pressured to confess by Samuel Stone, a minister.
[00:03:27] Josh Hutchinson: Mather published his story about Mary more than 40 years after her execution.
[00:03:33] Sarah Jack: He claimed she confessed not only to witchcraft but also to murdering a child.
[00:03:37] Josh Hutchinson: And to, quote, "uncleanness with men and devils."
[00:03:42] Sarah Jack: According to Mather, Mary said that she was unhappy with the work her employer assigned her.
[00:03:48] Josh Hutchinson: So she asked a devil to help.
[00:03:51] Sarah Jack: And it did sweep the hearth and drive hogs out of her boss's field.
[00:03:55] Josh Hutchinson: Mather also wrote that she had a conversion experience in jail.
[00:04:00] Sarah Jack: And she, quote, "went out of the world with many hopes of mercy through the merit of Jesus Christ."
[00:04:05] Josh Hutchinson: She, and I quote again from Mather, "died in a frame extremely to the satisfaction of them that were spectators of it." She went out humble and repentant.
[00:04:18] Sarah Jack: Executions were public events.
[00:04:21] Josh Hutchinson: Large crowds came out to witness what happened to those who had committed felonies.
[00:04:26] Sarah Jack: Parents brought their children for an educational experience.
[00:04:30] Josh Hutchinson: Now we'd like to clear up some longtime confusion about Mary Johnson.
[00:04:35] Sarah Jack: In 1885, Charles Herbert Levermore wrote that Mary Johnson's execution was delayed due to pregnancy.
[00:04:42] Josh Hutchinson: He added that her child was later given to the son of the jail keeper.
[00:04:47] Sarah Jack: This information was repeated in an essay by Charles Dudley Warner in 1886.
[00:04:52] Josh Hutchinson: And has continued to be handed down from one historian to another ever since.
[00:04:58] Sarah Jack: This was included in one of the most significant works on witchcraft accusations in Connecticut, John M. Taylor's 1908 book, The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut, 1647 to 1697.
[00:05:10] Josh Hutchinson: The pregnancy and the transfer of the child have even been reported as fact in works published this decade, and the tale is often retold on the internet.
[00:05:19] Sarah Jack: Unfortunately, the story is associated with the wrong woman.
[00:05:24] Josh Hutchinson: In a 1974 essay, William K. Holdsworth writes that the confusion came about because two Johnsons were convicted of crimes in Connecticut within a relatively short time.
[00:05:36] Sarah Jack: As Holdsworth points out, the original records do not state anything about a delay in Mary Johnson's execution.
[00:05:43] Josh Hutchinson: Or that she was pregnant.
[00:05:45] Sarah Jack: Cotton Mather also did not include an account of pregnancy or a delay in his telling of Mary Johnson's trial.
[00:05:52] Josh Hutchinson: One Goodwife Elizabeth Johnson of Fairfield was convicted of a crime in May 1650.
[00:05:59] Sarah Jack: Several clues are contained within that last sentence.
[00:06:03] Josh Hutchinson: The Johnson in this second trial was called Goodwife, making it clear that she was married.
[00:06:08] Sarah Jack: In fact, the records state that she was the wife of Peter Johnson.
[00:06:12] Josh Hutchinson: The name of the woman in this case is given as Elizabeth rather than Mary.
[00:06:17] Sarah Jack: This Elizabeth Johnson was from Fairfield, not Wethersfield, where Mary lived.
[00:06:22] Josh Hutchinson: Even by modern roads, these two towns are separated by 56 miles.
[00:06:26] Sarah Jack: In addition, this Johnson was convicted in May 1650, whereas Mary Johnson was convicted in December 1648.
[00:06:34] Josh Hutchinson: And most likely was hanged within days of her conviction, though the record of her conviction does not explicitly state this.
[00:06:41] Sarah Jack: Our conclusion is that this is a tale of two different women.
[00:06:46] Josh Hutchinson: In summary, Mary Johnson was not pregnant when she was tried and did not leave a baby for the jailer. Elizabeth Johnson did. In addition, we do not know what crime Elizabeth Johnson was tried for. It is theorized that she may have been tried for adultery, because there is a reference to a Thomas Newton paying out of his account for the upkeep of the child, which was born to Elizabeth while she was in jail for 24 weeks.
[00:07:29] Please see the links in our show notes and bibliography to view the records firsthand.
[00:07:34] Sarah Jack: Goodwife Palmer of Wethersfield was accused of witchcraft in 1648 by John Robbins.
[00:07:41] Josh Hutchinson: A December 7th, 1648 court record states that "the court frees Henry Palmer from his recognizance for his wive's appearing at the last particular court to answer the complaint of Mr. Robbins as also remit the miscarriage of his wife therein, hoping it will be a warning to her and others for the future."
[00:08:03] Sarah Jack: Unfortunately, the court order for recognizance is not included in the Records of the Particular Court which exist today.
[00:08:11] Josh Hutchinson: Though this record does not specify why the recognizance was ordered, it is believed to have been due to a complaint of witchcraft.
[00:08:20] Sarah Jack: This belief is predicated on events which followed many years later.
[00:08:25] Josh Hutchinson: In Detestable and Wicked Arts, historian Paul B. Moyer states that suspicions of witchcraft may have been voiced about Goodwife Palmer in the 1650s, but no legal action was taken.
[00:08:37] Sarah Jack: In Entertaining Satan, John Demos proposes the name Katherine for Henry Palmer's wife, but we have not located a source to verify this.
[00:08:45] Josh Hutchinson: Moyer also suggests that the 1648 case against Henry Palmer's wife may have been related to the case that same year of Mary Johnson, who was also from Wethersfield.
[00:08:56] Sarah Jack: Johnson was convicted the day that Palmer was freed from his recognizance for his wife.
[00:09:02] Josh Hutchinson: Further evidence is needed to prove the connection.
[00:09:06] At the same court session that Johnson is convicted, Palmer is freed from this recognizance, which is the bond that he posted for his wife's good behavior. And so the supposition is that Palmer and Johnson were both accused of witchcraft, possibly by John Robbins, at the same time, but only Mary Johnson was convicted, and Palmer wasn't actually tried.
[00:09:41] When you look at the record of it, there's a line that is Mary Johnson is indicted, and then there's a line about something else, and then there's a line about this complaint of Mr. Robbins. And it's referring back to a previous court session that we don't have a record of, unfortunately.
[00:09:59] So it's another one of those why, what was the complaint of Mr. Robbins? Then you look later, and Mr. Robbins is complaining later about Palmer being a Witch. So you're thinking that, oh, because later on he's, "oh she's a witch," that he complained about Palmer in 1648 of witchcraft. It's just the timing of it. They're from the same town, they're both in court the same day, one's convicted of witchcraft, one's saying that this guy complained of her about something that required her husband to post a bond for good behavior. So what could that be? And there's only a few things it could be.
[00:10:48] Sarah Jack: And we know from other trials that the behavior is a huge deal when it comes to alleging that someone's a witch.
[00:10:56] Josh Hutchinson: They tell them in other cases to be on your best behavior and don't go around offending your neighbors, because of course they're gonna think you're a witch, and we're gonna bring you back to court.
[00:11:09] They might have been accused together, and then, for whatever reason, Palmer gets off, and Johnson doesn't, maybe because of their status in the community.
[00:11:21] Henry Palmer's wife was accused of witchcraft by Rebecca Greensmith and the Robbins family during the Hartford Witch Trials of 1662 to 1663.
[00:11:32] Sarah Jack: Goodwife Palmer did not stick around for the Hartford Witch-Hunt. Instead, she and Henry likely left Connecticut for Rhode Island in 1662.
[00:11:41] Josh Hutchinson: Goodwife Palmer was once again accused of witchcraft in Connecticut in 1667, but was not in that colony any longer.
[00:11:50] Sarah Jack: A Goodwife Palmer was later accused in Rhode Island in 1672 by Steven Sebeere, who was ordered to apologize to a Henry Palmer for calling his wife a witch.
[00:11:59] Josh Hutchinson: We'll have more about Goodwife Palmer in part four of this series, when we discuss the Hartford Witch Trials of 1662 to 1663.
[00:12:08] Sarah Jack: Now we're gonna speak to you about the first New England couple to be accused of witchcraft together.
[00:12:13] Josh Hutchinson: Records show that Joan and John Carrington, also of Wethersfield, were indicted on witchcraft charges in 1651.
[00:12:21] Sarah Jack: A John Carrington came to New England in 1635 with a Mary Carrington.
[00:12:26] Josh Hutchinson: Both were recorded as being 33 years old when they arrived. Names like John and Mary were very common in 17th century New England, and it is quite possible that multiple Carrington families came to New England around the same time, as I've seen with my own ancestors. That has happened with so many of my lines. There have been people with the same name or very similar names that get confused with each other.
[00:13:00] Sarah Jack: A John Carrington bought land in Wethersfield in 1643.
[00:13:04] Josh Hutchinson: Many presume John had a son, also named John, who was an original proprietor of Farmington, Connecticut, who later settled Mattattuck, now Waterbury.
[00:13:16] Sarah Jack: Others believe the second John had a sister, Rebecca, who married Abraham Andrews of Farmington, who also moved to Mattattuck.
[00:13:23] Josh Hutchinson: However, no evidence has been shown to connect John Carrington of Wethersfield to either the John who came over with Mary or the John who lived in Farmington and Mattattuk.
[00:13:34] Sarah Jack: Therefore, because we do not have records, we cannot say that the John Carrington charged with witchcraft had children with either Mary or Joan.
[00:13:43] Josh Hutchinson: What we can say is that John Carrington of Wethersfield was a carpenter, as recorded in the indictment for witchcraft.
[00:13:51] Sarah Jack: In March 1650, he was convicted of selling a gun to a Native American and was fined 10 pounds.
[00:13:57] Josh Hutchinson: A John Carrington's estate was valued at only 23 pounds and 11 shillings in 1653, with an associated debt of a little over 10 pounds, leaving 13 pounds, one shilling, and six pence. No heir is named in the record summarized in Charles William Manwaring's A Digest of the Early Connecticut Probate Records.
[00:14:22] Sarah Jack: The 1651 witchcraft indictments accused Joan and John of entertaining familiarity with the devil and using his help to perform works above the course of nature.
[00:14:32] Josh Hutchinson: The Carringtons were convicted on March 6th, 1651.
[00:14:36] Sarah Jack: The indictment specified the death sentence as the appropriate penalty.
[00:14:40] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "according to the law of God and of the established law of this commonwealth, thou deserveth to die."
[00:14:47] Sarah Jack: As we read in part two of the series, the sentence of death was ordered for all convicted of witchcraft.
[00:14:52] Josh Hutchinson: As it says in the King James version of the Bible, "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
[00:14:59] Sarah Jack: The couple was most likely hanged together in Hartford very soon after their convictions.
[00:15:03] Josh Hutchinson: We believe they were hanged and were one of only two couples hanged together for witchcraft in British North America.
[00:15:11] Sarah Jack: As we'll cover in the next episode in the series, Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith were the other couple hanged together.
[00:15:18] Josh Hutchinson: Now, the Salem magistrates did condemn both Elizabeth and John Proctor.
[00:15:24] Sarah Jack: However, Elizabeth's hanging was delayed due to pregnancy, and she was reprieved by the governor in 1693.
[00:15:30] Josh Hutchinson: Martha and Giles Cory were also victims of the Salem Witch Trials together, who were a married couple. However, Giles refused to stand trial and was pressed to death rather than hanged.
[00:15:42] Sarah Jack: Next we have the case of Goodwife Bassett of Fairfield.
[00:15:46] Josh Hutchinson: We only know about her witchcraft accusation through one brief court record and a 1654 defamation suit filed by Mary Staples against colonial leader Roger Ludlow.
[00:15:58] Sarah Jack: The court record states that the governor and two other men were to go to Stratford for "the trial of Goody Bassett for her life."
[00:16:05] Josh Hutchinson: This entry was dated May 15th, 1651.
[00:16:09] Sarah Jack: We next hear of Bassett in the Staples case, in which a witness testified that "Goodwife Bassett, when she was condemned, said there was another witch in Fairfield that held her head full high."
[00:16:19] Josh Hutchinson: While Goodwife Bassett's given and maiden names are not known, she may have been the wife of Thomas Bassett. We've also seen a book theorizing that she was the wife of a Robert Bassett.
[00:16:34] Sarah Jack: Thomas Bassett arrived in the colonies in 1635 and first made his home in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
[00:16:41] Josh Hutchinson: It was there that he likely first encountered Thomas Thornton, a man we spoke of in the last episode in the series.
[00:16:50] Sarah Jack: If you recall, Thornton was a tanner who resided next to Alice Young in Windsor, Connecticut in the 1640s.
[00:16:57] Josh Hutchinson: He lost four children to the epidemic which may have been the cause of the accusations against Alice.
[00:17:03] Sarah Jack: But the Thorntons and the Youngs were just some of the many Dorchester, Massachusetts settlers who made the move to Windsor.
[00:17:09] Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Bassett also relocated to Windsor and lived there at the same time as the Thorntons and the Youngs.
[00:17:16] Sarah Jack: It was in 1650 that Thomas Bassett relocated to Stratford.
[00:17:20] Josh Hutchinson: That same year, John Young and the Thorntons also moved from Windsor to Stratford.
[00:17:25] Sarah Jack: Thomas Thornton was elected Stratford's deputy to the Connecticut General Court in 1651, the very year Goodwife Bassett hanged.
[00:17:34] Josh Hutchinson: As noted in "Between God and Satan" by Beth Caruso and Dr. Katherine Hermes, Thornton was in proximity to several witch trials.
[00:17:42] Sarah Jack: His exact role in any of these trials is not yet known.
[00:17:47] Josh Hutchinson: As mentioned previously on the show, the Stratford Historical Society is hosting several events in April and May to honor Goodwife Bassett's memory.
[00:17:56] Sarah Jack: The society is leading commemorative walks retracing Goodwife Bassett's last steps on May 3rd and 10th at 7:00 PM. These feature historical commentary by the town historian, David Wright.
[00:18:07] Josh Hutchinson: The inaugural Goody Bassett Ball will take place on Saturday, May 20th at 6:00 PM.
[00:18:12] Sarah Jack: More information can be found on the society's webpage. in easthampton
[00:18:17] Josh Hutchinson: Following the Bassett hanging, Goodwife Knapp of Fairfield was also charged with witchcraft.
[00:18:23] Sarah Jack: She hanged in 1653.
[00:18:26] Josh Hutchinson: Again, we know about her case through the Staples defamation suit.
[00:18:30] Sarah Jack: Unfortunately, the testimony in that case refers to her only as Goody Knapp.
[00:18:35] Josh Hutchinson: We do not know her given or maiden names.
[00:18:38] Sarah Jack: We do not know the identity of her husband.
[00:18:41] Josh Hutchinson: We hope records with this information will be located one day.
[00:18:45] Sarah Jack: In 2019, a memorial plaque was placed in the Black Rock community in Bridgeport, Connecticut in Goodwife Knapp's honor.
[00:18:52] Josh Hutchinson: The court record for Mary Staples' defamation suit against Roger Ludlow indicates that Ludlow had accused Staples, because she, quote, "had laid herself under a new suspicion of being a witch, that she had caused Knapp's wife to be new searched after she was hanged. And when she saw the teats said, if they were the marks of a Witch, then she was one, or she had such marks."
[00:19:16] Sarah Jack: Document also reports that according to Mary Staples, Roger Ludlow had said that Knapp had told him Staples was a witch.
[00:19:24] Josh Hutchinson: However, Thomas Lyon told the court he was watching goody Knapp when five women came in and asked her to confess. Knapp responded that she was not a witch and she would not name Mary Staples as a witch.
[00:19:39] Sarah Jack: One Hester Ward claimed that Goody Knapp had told her that Mary Staples had admitted to receiving two little things brighter than the light of day from a Native American.
[00:19:48] Josh Hutchinson: She purportedly called the mystery items, quote, "Indian gods."
[00:19:53] Sarah Jack: Goodwife Sherwood questioned Knapp about the objects.
[00:19:57] Josh Hutchinson: According to Sherwood, Knapp denied ever saying that anyone in town had taken the shiny objects from the Native American.
[00:20:06] In other words, Knapp was saying that she never accused Goody Staples of taking the shiny objects that were known as "Indian gods."
[00:20:20] Knapp time and again we're seeing denied that Staples had anything to do with witchcraft, and this is another denial of that. So that's the significance of that statement. Staples is saying that Knapp isn't a witch and Knapp, according to all these witnesses, repeatedly said that I'm not calling Staples a witch because she isn't one. I'm not one. She's not one.
[00:20:48] Sarah Jack: Ultimately, Roger Ludlow was found to have defamed Staples and was ordered to pay Thomas Staples 15 pounds for falsely accusing his wife of witchcraft and for court costs.
[00:20:58] Josh Hutchinson: Roger Ludlow was a colonial official. He had written the laws of Connecticut.
[00:21:05] Sarah Jack: So isn't that interesting that he was found to have defamed?
[00:21:09] Josh Hutchinson: They're basically saying that you lied, that you called her something, and you couldn't prove that she was a witch.
[00:21:16] In 1653, the same year that Knapp was executed, Mrs. Elizabeth Godman of New Haven went to court to complain about several people, who she said had called her a Witch.
[00:21:27] Sarah Jack: That's interesting.
[00:21:30] Josh Hutchinson: This is a defamation that backfires.
[00:21:32] Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Godman struck terror in the hearts of her supposed victims, causing one to sweat profusely and another to faint.
[00:21:41] Josh Hutchinson: And this is just saying that because they believed so strongly that she was a witch, they had these visceral physical reactions when they crossed her and she reacted to them with either a stare or some words. One person said that she sweated so much in her bed after having a dream about Knapp, that she woke up and it was like she was floating on water. And another person, Stephen Goodyear, actually said that Knapp gave him a dirty look and he swooned.
[00:22:23] Sarah Jack: When you consider their belief and fear of witches, and then here is the embodiment of one interacting directly with them, you can feel their terror and understand these reactions.
[00:22:41] Josh Hutchinson: And psychological terror does produce known chemical reactions within the body that can elevate the heart rate, cause you to sweat, cause you to breathe differently, cause you to faint. This is all part of your fight or flight response or freeze.
[00:23:02] Sarah Jack: Yeah, it is.
[00:23:04] Josh Hutchinson: And so if you really believe in your heart and in your mind that somebody is a witch and they're capable of harming you, you can actually, in essence, harm yourself just through your body's reactions to your psychological state.
[00:23:24] Sarah Jack: And so that is what would be happening today in these communities, where they believe this alleged witch is causing death and sickness and misfortune. They are having these type of responses in their bodies and minds.
[00:23:46] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, we see this happening around the world today. We see it throughout the history of witch trials in a lot of the testimony. It's possible that it happened with the afflicted persons in Salem and with other afflicted persons that they became, they were so distressed that they became physically ill and psychologically traumatized.
[00:24:13] Sarah Jack: And then imagine if you are actually ill and then psychologically traumatized from your fear of who is causing your illness.
[00:24:22] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, that just compounds it and that can lead your health to really deteriorate rapidly.
[00:24:30] Sarah Jack: And you know who comes to mind with me on that is Timothy Swan in North Andover.
[00:24:35] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, that's a good one. I was thinking of, one we'll talk about later is Betty Howell, who is supposedly afflicted. She starts having some kind of fits, and then she just becomes really ill and rapidly deteriorates and passes, because she's in such a panic that whatever physically might have been going on with her, just that mental fear gets added to that.
[00:25:08] Sarah Jack: That's such a good use of the word panic in these situations. The panic is in the accusers. It's interesting.
[00:25:16] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's in the supposedly bewitched people. They're panicking in their own selves about being terrorized by this witch, thinking that, "oh, she's gonna kill me." And then it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, "that witch is gonna kill me," and then you get really sick and you die. There's clinical cases of people having heart attacks and different reactions to intense fright.
[00:25:48] Not fearing witches is good for all of us, so we want to remove the witch fear and show people that there's other reasons why misfortune happens. You've got to remove the layer of mystery and give explanations why things happen when they do.
[00:26:12] New Haven's leading minister, John Davenport, quote, had occasion to speak of witches and showed that a froward discontent frame of spirit was a subject fit for the devil to work upon in that way." As a result, Goodwife Larrimore considered Godman to have the appearance of such a person.
[00:26:34] Sarah Jack: Mrs. Atwater allegedly claimed Godman was married to a manitou named Hobbamock, a giant stone spirit known to the Quinnipiac.
[00:26:42] Josh Hutchinson: A common motif is expressed in many of the testimonies against Elizabeth Godman. When someone refused to sell, barter, or give anything to her, misfortune followed, and we see that again in witch trial after witch trial, in Salem with Sarah Good, Samuel Parris refuses to give her anything.
[00:27:05] She goes away muttering something. They believe then that she cursed them in spite where really it's their guilt for not giving her what she wanted.
[00:27:18] Sarah Jack: Godman was a widow who lived with Stephen Goodyear.
[00:27:21] Josh Hutchinson: He was the deputy governor of the New Haven Colony.
[00:27:24] Sarah Jack: The magistrates questioned Godman and the people she complained about.
[00:27:28] Josh Hutchinson: Godman was accused of afflicting people and animals following quarrels.
[00:27:34] Sarah Jack: She was also supposed to have laid upon a bed, quote, "as if somebody was sucking her."
[00:27:39] Josh Hutchinson: This was another reference to the belief that witches had teets from which they fed devils and familiars or imps.
[00:27:46] Sarah Jack: Godman supposedly also talked to herself.
[00:27:49] Josh Hutchinson: And I just wanna point out, that's another common thing. As we just mentioned, the case of Sarah Good, she went away muttering something to herself, and people believed that she was muttering curses. It was considered aberrant behavior to talk to herself in public. And people are like, "that's odd. She must be up to something."
[00:28:14] And Godman knew what others did and said when she was not there.
[00:28:19] Sarah Jack: Godman's defamation claim was rejected.
[00:28:23] Josh Hutchinson: However, she did not face trial for witchcraft.
[00:28:27] Sarah Jack: Nicholas Augur, a New Haven physician, consulted John Winthrop, Jr. about the mysterious afflictions of three women.
[00:28:34] Josh Hutchinson: Historian Walter Woodward writes that Winthrop's diagnosis likely saved Godman's life.
[00:28:40] Sarah Jack: However, most of the correspondence between Augur and Winthrop is missing, so we don't know precisely what effect Winthrop's response may have had on the case.
[00:28:50] Josh Hutchinson: In any event, the court ordered Godman to "look after her carriage hereafter."
[00:28:57] Sarah Jack: And to "not go in an offensive way to folks houses in a railing manner, as it seems she hath done, but that she keep her place and meddle with her own business."
[00:29:07] Josh Hutchinson: The magistrates warned her that she now was considered suspicious and would be brought back to court if additional evidence was brought in against her to show that she was a witch.
[00:29:19] Sarah Jack: Even though she's the one that walked in first.
[00:29:21] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. She's, " hey, these people are pointing fingers at me. I'm gonna point back at them." And they're like, the court's like, "well, we think they have a point."
[00:29:30] Sarah Jack: Godman was indeed called back to court on August 7th, 1655.
[00:29:37] Josh Hutchinson: She was again accused of causing a series of strange events and bewitching animals.
[00:29:43] Sarah Jack: On this occasion, she was jailed.
[00:29:45] Josh Hutchinson: Considering her to be in poor health, the court released her into the custody of Thomas Johnson on September 4th and warned her to return to court in October.
[00:29:55] Sarah Jack: At an October 17 court session, Godman was ordered to pay 50 pounds bond to ensure her good behavior and warned she would be jailed again if she gave cause.
[00:30:05] Josh Hutchinson: She was warned that she "must forebear from going from house to house to give offense and carry it orderly in the family where she is."
[00:30:15] Sarah Jack: Her bond was paid out of her estate on January 1st, 1656.
[00:30:20] Josh Hutchinson: Elizabeth Godman died in 1660.
[00:30:23] Sarah Jack: When she died. Her estate was valued at 200 pounds.
[00:30:26] Josh Hutchinson: In 1654, the same year as the Staples lawsuit, Lydia Gilbert of Windsor was accused of practicing witchcraft.
[00:30:35] Sarah Jack: She was indicted on November 28th for allegedly bewitching Thomas Allyn's gun.
[00:30:41] Josh Hutchinson: Which had misfired during a militia exercise three years earlier.
[00:30:46] Sarah Jack: And killed Henry Stiles.
[00:30:48] Josh Hutchinson: Allyn had already been convicted of homicide by misadventure and paid a fine.
[00:30:54] Sarah Jack: It is unknown why Gilbert was accused three years after the fact.
[00:30:58] Josh Hutchinson: Not much is known for certain about Lydia Gilbert. The indictment against her does not specify a husband or even refer to Gilbert as Goodwife.
[00:31:09] Sarah Jack: All evidence we have seen to link Lydia and Thomas has been circumstantial and based upon Thomas's business relationship with Henry Stiles.
[00:31:16] Josh Hutchinson: We do know that Stiles and Allyn had some previous business relationship and that Gilbert had business relationships with the other two, but this is with Thomas Gilbert, and I haven't seen the name Lydia in any court records other than the one brief record about her trial.
[00:31:42] There was a Lydia Bliss in jail with a Thomas Gilbert.
[00:31:47] In 1643, the court ordered a Thomas Gilbert and a Lydia Bliss jailed, along with George Gibbs and James Hullet. I don't know if we know what offense they were in there for. So we're just saying like these two people knew each other before. They had some kind of prior relationship, and her name's Lydia. And like we said before, these are inferences, and there's not a marriage record that says Thomas Gilbert, Jr. of Windsor married Lydia Bliss, daughter of such and such, so you go through a chain of inferences to get there.
[00:32:34] Henry Stiles may have roomed at one Thomas Gilbert's house, and Lydia may have been his wife, his daughter, his sister, or another relative.
[00:32:46] Sarah Jack: One thing we can say for sure is that Gilbert was convicted.
[00:32:50] Josh Hutchinson: The court record of her case makes this quite clear.
[00:32:54] Sarah Jack: She was likely executed.
[00:32:57] Josh Hutchinson: Like many of the victims, no record of an execution exists today.
[00:33:01] Sarah Jack: However, like the others, she disappears from the record after the conviction and is therefore presumed to have been hanged as the law specified.
[00:33:10] It really goes to show that the same processes you use when you're doing work in your family tree, connecting one generation to the next by a reliable record is the same process that needs to be done when you're connecting individuals in a history research to their spouses and to their children. If you can't, that's the equivalent of a brick wall in your tree .
[00:33:39] Josh Hutchinson: A lot of times, we rely upon the work that someone else has done before us, when we should be verifying their information from primary sources and making those connections ourselves.
[00:33:59] Sarah Jack: You wouldn't just take somebody's branch from their tree and graft it into yours without looking at how the record matches your family line. And with these individuals, we need to see how is the record putting the story together, and if the record's not there, you can't put the story together. That part of the story can't go together.
[00:34:22] Josh Hutchinson: Be careful not to leap to conclusions.
[00:34:26] Sarah Jack: But just like when you're working on your family tree, you can have a working branch where it's an open research, you can continue to do that. You can consider things a possibility, but that's all that it is until you know.
[00:34:44] Goodwife and Nicholas Bailey were the next couple to be accused of witchcraft.
[00:34:49] Josh Hutchinson: They were brought to court for other things on July 3rd, 1655.
[00:34:54] Sarah Jack: Impudent and notorious lying.
[00:34:56] Josh Hutchinson: Endeavoring to make discord among neighbors.
[00:35:00] Sarah Jack: And filthy and unclean speeches.
[00:35:03] Josh Hutchinson: In court, quote, "sundry passages taken in writing were read, which being duly considered, doth render them both, but especially the woman, very suspicious in point of witchcraft. But for matters of that nature, the court intends not to proceed at this time."
[00:35:21] Sarah Jack: They were ordered out of town.
[00:35:24] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "betwixt this court and the next court they must consider of a way how to remove themselves to some other place or give sufficient security to the court's satisfaction for their good behavior and pay the fine for lying, which is 10 shillings."
[00:35:41] Sarah Jack: However, the couple delayed moving.
[00:35:43] Josh Hutchinson: They came back to court August 7th, 1655.
[00:35:47] Sarah Jack: The court granted a delay until the middle of April of 1656, but only if they paid 40 pound security that they would leave plus 50 pounds bond for good behavior and attended every monthly court session during the delay.
[00:36:00] Josh Hutchinson: On September 4th, 1655, the court told them to come back to the next session on the first Tuesday of October and an additional session the third Wednesday of October.
[00:36:13] Sarah Jack: They returned to court October 2nd, 1655.
[00:36:17] Josh Hutchinson: And were told they would be excused from future court appearances, if they removed before the third Wednesday of that month.
[00:36:24] Sarah Jack: The records end there, so it is believed that the Baileys did indeed leave the colony.
[00:36:30] Josh Hutchinson: Walter Woodward writes that John Winthrop, Jr. likely had a role in the decision to exile rather than execute the Baileys.
[00:36:38] William Meaker filed a slander suit in 1657 against Thomas Mullener, who he said accused him of bewitching some pigs.
[00:36:47] Sarah Jack: The two had shared some time in court the previous year.
[00:36:51] Josh Hutchinson: On that occasion, Mullener was on trial for allegedly stealing swine from another neighbor.
[00:36:56] Sarah Jack: And Meaker testified against him.
[00:36:59] Josh Hutchinson: Later the two had an argument.
[00:37:01] Sarah Jack: Meaker claimed that Mullener had broken his fence.
[00:37:04] Josh Hutchinson: And Mullener believed Meaker got his revenge by casting a spell on his pigs.
[00:37:10] Sarah Jack: Mullener lost the slander suit and was ordered to apologize to Meaker and to post a 50 pound bond for his good behavior.
[00:37:16] Josh Hutchinson: The next to be accused was Elizabeth Garlick of Easthampton on Long Island.
[00:37:23] Sarah Jack: At this time, Easthampton was part of Connecticut.
[00:37:26] Josh Hutchinson: Garlick was tried in 1658.
[00:37:29] Sarah Jack: This was the first witchcraft case John Winthrop, Jr. worked on in an official capacity.
[00:37:35] Josh Hutchinson: Now serving as governor of Connecticut Colony, he presided over the court.
[00:37:40] Sarah Jack: Before Garlick's trial, Connecticut had tried seven people for witchcraft. All had been convicted and executed.
[00:37:47] Josh Hutchinson: As Chief Magistrate, Winthrop had considerable influence over the proceedings.
[00:37:52] Sarah Jack: His presence at the least brought balance to the court.
[00:37:56] Josh Hutchinson: Of the seven magistrates on the court, four had previously been involved in multiple witchcraft cases resulting in conviction.
[00:38:05] Sarah Jack: Garlick was the wife of Joseph or Joshua Garlick.
[00:38:09] Josh Hutchinson: Joseph or Joshua was a business intermediary between John Winthrop, Jr. and Lion Gardiner on at least two occasions when Winthrop was living in Saybrook.
[00:38:21] Sarah Jack: The Garlicks perhaps lived on Gardiner's Island from 1650 or earlier until he relocated to Easthampton on Long Island in 1653.
[00:38:30] Josh Hutchinson: In Easthampton, Garlick acquired nearly a hundred acres over time and owned livestock.
[00:38:37] Sarah Jack: Godbeer says Garlick was a healer in The Devil's Dominion.
[00:38:41] Josh Hutchinson: Godbeer bases this on a deposition of a woman named Goodwife Bishop, who went to Elizabeth Garlick and obtained an herb called dockweed that had some medicinal purposes. However, every woman at the time, especially every wife and mother, was the nurse of their household and had common herbs on hand for treating illnesses.
[00:39:15] So we don't know if that meant that she was a professional healer or not. We're looking into the records in more detail to see. And there are a lot of implications in this label as healer, as it's popularly believed that healers and even midwives were common targets of witchcraft accusations.
[00:39:46] Scott R. Ferrara and John Demos have written that Garlick's maiden name was probably Blanchard.
[00:39:53] Sarah Jack: And Demos notes that her possible father may have been a French Huguenot.
[00:39:58] Josh Hutchinson: Nine accusers testified at Elizabeth Garlick's trial.
[00:40:02] Sarah Jack: Garlick was accused of bewitching Elizabeth Howell to death. Howell was the daughter of prominent citizen Lion Gardiner and the wife of Arthur Howell, whose father was the leading citizen of Southhampton.
[00:40:13] Josh Hutchinson: Garlick was also accused of killing a man, an African American child, two infants, and some piglets.
[00:40:22] Sarah Jack: Further, one Goody Edwards claimed Garlick had caused her daughter's breast milk to dry up.
[00:40:28] Josh Hutchinson: Garlick was also accused of bewitching an ox and a sow.
[00:40:31] Sarah Jack: It's so many wild accusations. That's so many accusations. It reminds me of Rebecca Nurse.
[00:40:39] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. All of the Salem people, it was just neighbors coming in saying, "oh, we, you know, disagreed about this or that, and then she railed at me, and then the next day my horse fell over."
[00:40:51] Sarah Jack: A Goodwife Hand claimed that when she learned of her sow's affliction neighbors burned its tail, upon which Elizabeth Garlick came in.
[00:40:59] Josh Hutchinson: This is significant, because it was believed, and we see this in several witch trials, and we'd covered it in a previous episode, that burning a bewitched object returned the curse to the witch.
[00:41:17] Elizabeth Garlick was acquitted, but her husband had to post 30 pounds bond for his wife's good behavior and to appear at the next court session in Easthampton.
[00:41:29] Sarah Jack: Governor Winthrop Jr. wrote to Easthampton to tell the people there to "carry neighborly and peaceably without just offense to Joshua Garlick and his wife." He also told the Garlicks to do the same toward the others in town.
[00:41:41] Josh Hutchinson: The Garlicks lived to old age. The town record of Goodman Garlick's death in 1700, estimated his age at about a hundred years.
[00:41:49] Sarah Jack: Elizabeth's death is not recorded, but a later estimate says one of the Garlicks lived to be 105 and the other 110. Demos estimates these figures were exaggerated by a decade.
[00:42:00] Next, an unknown resident of Saybrook was accused of witchcraft.
[00:42:05] Josh Hutchinson: Court record states, "Mr. Wyllys is requested to go down to Saybrook to assist the major in examining the suspicions about witchery and to act therein as may be requisite. June 15th, 1659."
[00:42:21] Sarah Jack: The major mentioned here was John Mason, a leading figure in Connecticut Colony's early history.
[00:42:28] Josh Hutchinson: Mr. Wyllys was Samuel Wyllys, who left behind a collection of documents known as the Wyllys Papers.
[00:42:35] Sarah Jack: These papers do include records of witch trials but do not include this incident.
[00:42:40] Josh Hutchinson: The person or persons suspected of witchery are unnamed in the record that we do have, and no indictment exists from this time period to show that the case ever reached a grand jury or a trial jury.
[00:42:53] Margaret and Nicholas Jennings of Saybrook were the next couple to be accused of witchcraft.
[00:42:59] Sarah Jack: So it is interesting that the unknown Saybrook was before a known Saybrook.
[00:43:04] Josh Hutchinson: But there's a two year gap. So I've seen some writers tie the two incidents together and say that Margaret and Nicholas Jennings were suspected in 1659 and indicted in 1661, but again, you're missing a link to say that the 1661 case had to do with the 1659 suspicions of witchery.
[00:43:33] Sarah Jack: But in any case, there were suspicions going on in the community there.
[00:43:38] Josh Hutchinson: There were. Something was going on and people were suspicious at the time of witchcraft.
[00:43:44] Sarah Jack: In 1643, they were convicted for running away from indentured servitude, theft, and fornication, whipped and ordered by the court to marry each other.
[00:43:53] Margaret and Nicholas were indicted for suspected witchcraft on September 5th, 1661.
[00:43:59] Josh Hutchinson: They were accused of bewitching to death the wife of Reinold Marvin and the child of Baalshassar de Wolfe.
[00:44:07] Sarah Jack: They were acquitted on October 9th, 1661.
[00:44:11] Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "respecting Nicholas Jennings the jury return that the major part find him guilty of the indictment. The rest strongly suspect it that he is guilty."
[00:44:22] Sarah Jack: Quote, "respecting Margaret Jennings the jury return that some of them find her guilty the rest strongly suspect her to be guilty of the indictment."
[00:44:31] Josh Hutchinson: But because the jury did not agree in full on either indictment, the couple were released from jail and left the colony.
[00:44:43] Sarah Jack: It's interesting to me that there could be like some, she's guilty and others strongly suspect. It relates to the seven indicators of someone being a witch, and then after that there were things that strongly caused suspicion but don't necessarily prove. It's interesting me that there's this gray area like that.
[00:45:08] Josh Hutchinson: There's a difference between suspicion and evidence. There are things that lead you to question a suspect. And then there are things that lead you to indict the suspect. And then there are stronger things needed to convict the suspect. And this is a sign, I think also of the changing times, possibly because of Winthrop's influence in the area. Between 1655 and 1661, no one's convicted.
[00:45:44] You start having these suspicions, and they're saying that there isn't quite enough evidence here, where before it was a slam dunk for the prosecution. Seven of the first seven people in Connecticut Colony, at least, were convicted. So they had a perfect record going for a while.
[00:46:08] And now Mary Bingham is here with Minute With Mary.
[00:46:13] Mary Bingham: I cannot comprehend the intense anxiety I would experience if someone falsely accused me of a crime I did not commit. Then to realize if I were found guilty, I could be executed. This was a painful reality of three of my ancestors in 1692, Susannah Martin, Sarah Wilds, and Mary Esty. From the time they were arrested at their homes, their journey became a living hell. After intense interrogation from the magistrates at the meeting house, coupled with noisy bystanders, they faced screaming accusers. Their accusers stated out loud that the specters of my ancestors and their familiars were allegedly flying about the room.
[00:47:03] Once the interrogation was over for each woman, they traveled by cart to the jail, which was small and overcrowded. Besides humans, other roommates would be lice, mice, rats, and other vermin. The stench of sickness fills the dark interior where all of the accused for witchcraft were shackled. Puritans believe the shackles prevented the specters of the accused for witchcraft to go forth from their personal bodies to afflict harm on other people.
[00:47:36] Then came the days of the execution. About one week after the guilty verdict was handed down for each woman, my ancestors would've been placed on a cart and traveled with the high sheriff, George Corwin, to Proctor's Ledge. The streets were lined with people, as the cart traveled the long mile from the jail to the execution site, which included an incline to the final destination. How my grandmothers remain steadfast to the truth of their innocence to the end as they faced the cruelest form of death continues to be an inspiration to me. Thank you.
[00:48:17] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[00:48:19] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[00:48:22] Sarah Jack: Awareness of the violent modern witch hunts against alleged witches is increasing across the world. International media, organizations, governments, and individuals want it to stop and are taking action and are educating about it. The United Nations Human Rights Council is acknowledging the crisis and urging additional efforts by affected states and by all stakeholders.
[00:48:44] We are all stakeholders in efforts to stop these witch attacks and abuse crimes against women and children. When you see it in the news, read about it and share it. Educate yourself and others. We have links in our show notes to a new YouTube documentary called "Why Witch Hunts are Not Just a Dark Chapter from the Past" with journalist Karin Helmstaedt featuring important interviews with several experts, including Advocacy for Alleged Witches advocate, Dr. Leo Igwe. Witches of Scotland advocate, Dr. Zoe Venditozzi, modern attack victims, and witch trial historians. Please see the show description for the link to watch it.
[00:49:18] Historically, people have been blamed for using witchcraft to manipulate weather to cause harm. King James VI of Scotland is infamously known to have done this. This mentality persists to this day. This week, at least two reports of witch attacks related to blaming a person for weather-related misfortune have been reported. One example is the misfortune of lightning strikes. The Nigeria Lightning Safety and Research Center reported that two innocent lives were taken due to false accusations of causing lightning strikes. I'm sorry to report that enraged youths buried the accused alive, and they perished. The Nigeria Lightning Safety and Research Center states, quote, " as a lightning safety organization, we condemn the tragic event and urge everyone to take lightning safety seriously." Thank you, Nigeria Lightning Safety and Research Center for standing with the victims and for urgently educating about the science of lightning and effectuating crucial safety education. Links to news articles reporting these weather-blaming circumstances are in the show description.
[00:50:16] Next month, the Salem, Massachusetts area and Hartford and Farmington, Connecticut are getting a rare visit from Dr. Leo Igwe, director of the Advocacy for Alleged Witches nonprofit organization. It is an incredible honor for us to organize a week of speaking engagements during his May speaking tour in the United States and to accompany him as he speaks in places of historical significance to early American colony witch trial history.
[00:50:38] Witch persecutions and trials are ongoing incidents in Africa and on other continents, reportedly occurring in at least 60 nations around the world. Witchcraft accusation is still a form of death sentence. Across continents, thousands, mainly women and elderly persons are accused, tried, attacked, killed, imprisoned, or banished every year. You can follow Dr. Leo Igwe on Twitter @leoigwe to see how he's advocating on the ground in the victim communities in real time as these individuals are experiencing being accused and hunted.
[00:51:07] This first event at the Salem Witch Museum is virtual, but Dr. Igwe will be with us in Salem touring the historic sites, guided by a local seasoned in the history, Mary Bingham. Tuesday, May 16 is your chance to experience a very special evening of in-person conversation with Leo at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers. Please see the Facebook event for details. Isn't this a great week? Make sure you mark your calendars.
[00:51:29] Next, you can en enjoy an in-person speaking event with Dr. Igwe at Central Connecticut State University on Wednesday, May 17th at 6:00 PM. While in the Hartford area, Leo will be touring known witch trial historic sites with author Beth Caruso. On Thursday afternoon, May 18th, Leo will be presenting at the Stanley-Whitman House living history center in Farmington, Connecticut. Look for Facebook events for all these occasions posted by our social media.
[00:51:53] Would you like to know more about Leo? You are in luck, because we have a great podcast episode for you to listen to. For more info on Leo, listen to the episode "Witchcraft Accusations in Nigeria with Dr. Leo Igwe." Come hear Leo. Invite your friends and family. See you there.
[00:52:08] Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop or merch from our Zazzle shop. Our links are in the show description.
[00:52:16] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:52:20] What did you learn today, Sarah?
[00:52:23] Sarah Jack: Looking at the case of Palmer, it's just another reminder that this was ongoing. It was always ongoing, specifically for some individuals, but just that the court was always hearing these accusations of witchcraft. It takes away from the excuse of hysteria.
[00:52:44] Josh Hutchinson: That's a wonderful point that people had these long running suspicions of particular neighbors. It wasn't all in a moment of panic. There was a whole chain of events. And when we talked to Malcolm Gaskill in episode 5, he talked about how there was often a decades long history of suspicion before anybody actually went to the court. There was just one last thing that pushed things to that point, that took it into a legal process rather than an informal just suspicion, gossip among neighbors.
[00:53:30] There's also the fact that the suspicion would follow a person, even when they moved to a different colony, that neighbors there had presumably heard about her past word of mouth or through letters. " Hey, this Palmer family just moved here." And somebody's " oh, really? Them? She's a witch."
[00:53:54] So there's that.
[00:53:56] Sarah Jack: Yeah. And I wonder how the people that were fearing the witches, like what was that like for them seeing these women walking around free that they knew were witches?
[00:54:10] Josh Hutchinson: Exactly. Gaskill was talking about as a practical matter, you would try to avoid those people and not cross them.
[00:54:19] Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:54:23] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:54:25] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:54:28] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:54:31] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[00:54:34] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:54:39] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

April 26, 2023

Connecticut Witch Trial Victim Exoneration Testimony with William and Jennifer Schloat

The Colonial History of Hartford, by Rev. William DeLoss Love

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Show Notes

Meet fourth grade student William and his mother Jennifer Schloat, Connecticut residents and Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project Members. William testified at the Joint Committee on Judiciary’s hearing on Bill 34 “Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut” on March 1, 2023. Hear William’s apropos call to action through his hearing testimony. Reflect on why this young generation is ready to confront historical wrongs. Jennifer, a middle school Literature and ELA teacher, reads her inspiring hearing testimony and discusses recognizing how people from the past suffered due to unfair societal punishments, like witch trials, will move our society toward furthering social justice for all. You will also hear some of the other hearing testimonies read by other project members who testified at the March 1, 2023 hearing. We think you will be stirred to take additional action in supporting this movement to bring justice to the unjustly convicted accused witches of Colonial Connecticut. Please use the link below to write to legislators asking them to vote yes.

Links

Ancient Elm Holds Memory of Witch Hangings, Hartford Courant May 11, 1930

March 29,, 2023 Discussion Panel with State Representative Jane Garibay on Bill HJ #34, A Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut.

Press Conference on Legislative Bill H.J. No. 34, March 8, 2023

Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Transcript

[00:00:00]
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:25] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:26] Josh Hutchinson: Today's guests are a fourth grade student who testified before the Connecticut General Assembly Judiciary Committee about the Connecticut witch trial exoneration resolution and his mother. William and Jennifer Schloat.
[00:00:44] Sarah Jack: March 1 sure seems like it was so long ago.
[00:00:49] Josh Hutchinson: It really does, and it was seven weeks ago. And so much has happened since then.
[00:00:59] Sarah Jack: So much has happened, but talking about it, hearing Jennifer speak about the experience made it then seem like it was yesterday.
[00:01:07] Josh Hutchinson: Yes. Brought all those memories right back fresh to mind.
[00:01:13] Sarah Jack: I'm so happy that we captured this conversation because it is powerful.
[00:01:18] Josh Hutchinson: It truly is. Jennifer is an inspirational speaker, and so is her young son, William. In March, we visited Connecticut to advocate for House Joint Resolution 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut.
[00:01:36] Sarah Jack: I was able to speak to the judiciary committee about the importance of exonerating Connecticut's witch trial victims.
[00:01:43] Josh Hutchinson: Many other people also spoke on behalf of the witch trial victims.
[00:01:48] Sarah Jack: And there are wonderful, submitted written testimonies that are available online. Please take the time to read those. We will have the link to that in our show notes.
[00:02:00] Josh Hutchinson: The testimony came in from all over Connecticut and beyond.
[00:02:06] The resolution has since been passed by the Judiciary Committee.
[00:02:11] Sarah Jack: It has also cleared the Legislative Commissioner's Office, the Office of Financial Analysis, and the Office of Legislative Research.
[00:02:20] Josh Hutchinson: The Office of Financial Analysis declared that there is no fiscal impact, as this is a resolution and does not cost the state money.
[00:02:33] Most recently the resolution was added to the House calendar.
[00:02:38] Sarah Jack: And we hope to see it reach the Senate calendar next.
[00:02:43] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, we're anticipating a vote any week now, any day now. While in Connecticut, Sarah and I finally met the other members of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project in person, including Mary Bingham, Beth Caruso, Tony Griego, Dr. Kathy Hermes, Representative Jane Garibay, Senator Saud Anwar, Andy Verzosa, the Schloats, Sue Bailey, Catherine, and Christina Carmon.
[00:03:16] Sarah Jack: We had already been working together for a long time, and so it was like a reunion more than an introduction.
[00:03:26] Josh Hutchinson: We've been on this since May 26, 2022, Sarah and I have. Others have been involved much longer. Tony's been involved since back in 2005, and it was a great privilege and honor to meet him and Beth Caruso, who joined his cause in 2016. And so many other people have been involved in the project, and new people came in to testify at the judiciary hearing.
[00:04:00] Sarah Jack: Yeah. The committee was given so much great testimony, full of history and reasons to be looking at exoneration for accused witches.
[00:04:16] Josh Hutchinson: And we want to thank everybody who submitted written testimony or came in to speak in person.
[00:04:25] Sarah Jack: I believe if you're listening and you're just not sure, you will hear a reason from William or Jennifer that convinces you today.
[00:04:36] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, so please vote yes on HJ 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut.
[00:04:49] Sarah Jack: We would like to introduce our guest, William and Jennifer Schloat. Jennifer studied United States history as an undergraduate at SUNY Purchase College. She studied history on the graduate level at Central Connecticut State University. She worked in the education departments at several history museums, including the John Jay Homestead State historic site in Katonah, New York, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Jennifer has also worked as a middle school social studies teacher. For the past seven years, Jennifer has been the literature and English Language Arts teacher for the middle school students at the St. Gabriel School in Windsor, Connecticut.
[00:05:27] Josh Hutchinson: William Schloat has attended St. Gabriel School in Windsor, Connecticut and is currently in the fourth grade. His interests include US history, geography, science, and math.
[00:05:41] William Schloat: I am William Schloat from Avon, Connecticut. I am nine years old, and I am a student at St. Gabriel School in Windsor. I am here to ask you to vote yes on HJ number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut.
[00:06:02] I believe that we should help one another, especially people who are being persecuted. We should protect people who do not have the power to defend themselves. If I had a time machine, I would travel back to Hartford in the 1600s to help the people who were being accused of witchcraft. I would especially try to rescue the young children whose mothers were being called witches.
[00:06:27] Now, I will tell you just about five of the many children who became orphans when powerful people in Connecticut executed their mothers. Let us take a few minutes to imagine how terrifying it must have been for those children to hear people say that their mothers were witches.
[00:06:46] In 1648 in Hartford, a baby boy named Benjamin Newton was born in jail. His mother, Mary Johnson, was imprisoned, waiting to be executed for witchcraft. Soon after he was born, baby Benjamin became an orphan when his mother was taken away to be hanged. The colony of Connecticut gave newborn Benjamin to Nathaniel Rescew, the son of the prison keeper. Nathaniel was paid 15 pounds to take care of baby Benjamin. 15 pounds in 1648 is about equal to $3,000 in today's money. When young Benjamin was old enough to start doing work, he became an indentured servant to the prison keeper's son. When Benjamin was 21 years old, he was finally free from being kept as a servant.
[00:07:38] In 1663 in Farmington, Connecticut, the four young children of Mary Barnes experienced the destruction of their family life. The youngest daughter, Hannah Barnes, was six years old when her mother was taken away to Hartford to be hanged. Just a few weeks later, their father, Thomas Barnes, decided to get married again, this time to the daughter of a neighbor. When Thomas made this decision, he also agreed to send two of his four grieving children away. He sent his 12 year old daughter, Sarah, and his 11-year-old son, Joseph, to work as servants in the home of someone else. Sadly, his youngest child, Hannah, died at age seven, less than a year after her mother was executed.
[00:08:27] These poor children did not have any control over the frightening and unjust things that were happening to them. As a proud citizen of the state of Connecticut and the United States of America, I hope that in 2023 I have more power than those abused children had in colonial Connecticut. Thank you for listening.
[00:08:47] Sarah Jack: William, what was surprising about the experience when you were at the hearing?
[00:08:55] William Schloat: I would say the most surprising thing out of all the surprising things was that News Channel Eight and NBC Connecticut quietly whispered to me and my mother, like they whispered to us to come outside, and they interviewed both of us. That was really surprising. I would say that was like the most surprising thing and one of the only surprising things.
[00:09:24] Sarah Jack: Do you remember what you said to them?
[00:09:27] William Schloat: I remember when Kathryn Hauser from News Channel Eight asked me, like, why are you doing this? I said my teacher had recently told me, she is my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Schuler, had told me a Martin Luther King quote. We were like learning about Martin Luther King. And I said, "as Martin Luther King said, 'injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"
[00:09:53] Jennifer Schloat: So I think we both thought that we might be interviewed by the press afterwards. But William and I were both surprised, as William mentioned, that it was during the hearings they motioned for him to come out and they, all, the members of the press were very nice, and they expressed that they were surprised that someone William's age, a nine-year-old, had taken an interest in this and was there.
[00:10:19] And so we kind of anticipated that he might talk to the press afterwards, but they seemed to be very interested in his testimony. And then he was on both of the local news channels that night. William, we saw you on News Channel Eight.
[00:10:34] William Schloat: We had to keep flipping back and forth and we did it at the, just the right time because, and they were both gonna talk about it at the same time, so we just flipped back and forth.
[00:10:46] Jennifer Schloat: We don't always watch the evening news. We're more readers, but we did as William said. We went on to News Channel Eight. We went on to NBC Connecticut, and the footage of all of the testimony was just a few minutes apart. And William made it onto both spots. And I think it really, it resonated with people that someone his age thought this was important. So I'm glad he, I'm glad he was willing to do it, that he wanted to do it.
[00:11:12] Josh Hutchinson: Why is it important to acknowledge the suffering of the families of the victims?
[00:11:19] William Schloat: So I think it's important, because it's, they suffered, too. They carried on the pain with them. Like all the kids might have like had their reputation ruined, because their mothers were accused of witchcraft. So it was like the kids were upset. And they were also like, oh no, everyone probably doesn't like me. It was probably like a hard time for them dealing to know that people didn't like their mothers, and they probably then changed their opinion on them. So it was like we should acknowledge them, and we should also be like, we shouldn't feel bad for just those. We should feel bad for those, cuz they had to live a similar suffering.
[00:11:59] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, William, for talking to us today. And now Jennifer Schloat will read the testimony she presented to the joint committee on judiciary.
[00:12:11] Jennifer Schloat: I am Jennifer Lawton Schloat. I live in Avon with my husband, my daughter, and my son. For seven years, I've been a middle school teacher and ELA teacher. And before that, I taught US history. And before that, I spent two decades working at various history museums in Massachusetts and New York. It's clear to me that the study of history is essential in a participatory democracy.
[00:12:38] There's much wisdom to be gained in the careful examination of our nation's past, including the colonial era prior to 1776. It's also clear to me that words are very powerful. We are fortunate that many of the written legal records of colonial Connecticut have been preserved.
[00:12:58] My training as a student of history illuminates every aspect of my life, including my current work as a teacher of literature. Many of us think about our colonial past each year, especially at Thanksgiving. After that November weekend of feasting, I always return to my middle school classroom aware that my students will be distracted and possibly anxious during the holiday season. With that in mind, I reserve those weeks of school in December as a special time with my students to explore "A Christmas Carol," Charles Dickens' perpetually relevant masterpiece.
[00:13:37] I mentioned this now because of the way that story ends. After Ebenezer Scrooge's journey through time, he has transformed and vows to honor the spirits of the past, the present, and the future. That story of the mutually redeeming friendship of Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley suggests that a happy and fulfilled life is possible, if we give equal and constant attention to the people of the past, the people of the present, and the people of the future. So I think we can try to achieve that in our own lives.
[00:14:11] It is tempting to dismiss what happened here in Connecticut in the 17th century as the distant past and not relevant to our present and future. We may be afraid to associate ourselves with the injustices of the Connecticut Witch Panic, the shameful persecutions, and the terrorizing executions. Nevertheless, I know that we can bravely face what happened here. Let's allow our knowledge of the long dead magistrates of colonial Connecticut to haunt us long enough so that we are able to give voice to deep remorse on their behalf. We can do this for their victims and for the children of their victims.
[00:14:51] In a way, all of us here are descendants of both the wrongfully executed, quote, "witches," unquote, and the people who persecuted them. We are heirs to their terrible mistakes, their traumas, their triumphs, and their physical space. Let us acknowledge the injustice and then grieve the lives lost to, and the lives destroyed by, the Connecticut Witch Panic.
[00:15:15] We, the living, can continue the unfinished work of the good people of the past and be inspired by the great moments in our history when the American ideals of equality and inalienable human rights prevailed over ignorance and hatred.
[00:15:30] Your work here in the Connecticut legislature is seen by the students of today. It will also be preserved for future generations. When they look back, let them see that you stood against injustice in exonerating the colonial people who were unjustly labeled as witches. Therefore, I ask you to vote yes on HJ Number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut.
[00:15:58] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Jennifer, for your testimony. Now, can you tell us about your experience with the hearing?
[00:16:04] Jennifer Schloat: It's really an interesting process to have to try to put everything you wanna say in three minutes. And it took me a while just to think about that, because so many powerful speakers I already knew had testimony prepared. And so that's when I came to the decision that I should speak as a literature teacher.
[00:16:25] That's what I'm currently doing. I've also taught history. My teacher certification is for history, but I work at a Catholic school, and they let, they're a little more permissive in what they let a person teach. And so I am qualified to teach literature, as well, even though my certification is history, and the two are intermingled in so many ways.
[00:16:49] And I've strongly feel that there's so much wisdom to be gained by studying both things, by studying all kinds of literature and by studying all areas of history. And so that's why I brought up something that was fictional. Charles Dickens was basing his work on terrible things that he saw happening in the middle of the 19th century in London with poverty-stricken people not being recognized in the way they should be or cared for. And by the end of the story, he's showing that if you care about people in the past, the present and the future, and your own, past, present and future, you're a happier person for it.
[00:17:30] We should look at it this way, as well, we should worry about and be concerned about and interested in our own past, our parents past, our great grandparents past, our past as a state and the time before we were state. We were still the entity that we now call the state of Connecticut. It was the colony of Connecticut. And I feel if we turn our backs on that, we're missing out on a lot of potential wisdom that could be gained.
[00:18:01] And I'm surprised that there were a few legislators who seem so resistant to getting involved with this. It's really perplexing. I wish I could have asked them questions. For example, do they celebrate people of the past that they admire, right? I've lived in New York or New England my whole life, so I've lived in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and I always hear local political leaders celebrating our colonial ancestors' Thanksgiving.
[00:18:33] And that's lovely. That's fine. There's plenty there that's positive. If we're allowed to do that, then we have to also give weight to the mistakes and even the really egregious ones, even the really shameful things that not everyone, but some of these people did. So there needs to be some balance.
[00:18:54] It's very dangerous when history becomes something that's only used selectively, don't you think? There's that old saying that the victors, usually the victors in war, are the ones who control history. They write history. They determine what's gonna make it into a textbook. And of course that's true. And that's something we have to be wary of. And I guess it's the same thing with the victors in a legal trial, right? So the colonial magistrates clearly got their way when they executed these people, when these people were found guilty of some strange thing that clearly they couldn't have done.
[00:19:31] And so somehow it's their statues that are so often on display, and it's because it's shameful, I think a lot of the history has just been ignored and not made it into the history books. And so we're not looking at it, because the history is very often controlled by the people who are victorious.
[00:19:52] We know better than that now. We know that we have to look at everyone's history. So I think that these people should be proud to associate themselves with something where we're showing an acknowledgement that we've progressed as a people.
[00:20:08] And so I, if I were a member of the legislature, and I don't think political party has anything to do with any of this, I think that if I were a member of the legislature, I'd be eager to learn from the local historians, eager to hear from the descendants, excited that people are taking an interest in colonial Connecticut history, excited that people are coming to them offering them this wonderful opportunity, and just do it. So it's good, positive, and uplifting publicity for them that they're making themselves part of this movement for justice.
[00:20:43] It's very surprising that anyone would be hesitant. So I wanna do whatever I can to help encourage them to see that there's only good that can come from this. I can't see how anyone could see any harm in this. It's very surprising to me that anyone resisted it. Did you feel that way, Sarah, that day? I was taken aback. Were you taken aback when some of the legislators were pushing back against us like?
[00:21:09] Sarah Jack: Yes. I was surprised. It was a really new experience for me. So I'd never gone to testify for a bill. I hadn't spent a lot of time listening to other people do so. So I was so surprised at not just the pushback, but the lack of interest in what the testimonies were saying, that some of the politicians weren't interested in the content of the speech or what is it they're telling me? And as you saw, the questions didn't relate to what was being spoken to . It took my breath away. It really did. And even I was one of the very last who testified for HJ 34, and I still was surprised when they confronted me with such silly comments and didn't want to let me say what I was saying. And I was wondering, did William pick up on it? Did he pick up on the negativity?
[00:22:13] Jennifer Schloat: Yes, he did. And that was the one area that I thought I didn't prepare him properly for, cuz I wasn't anticipating that this was gonna be as negative as some of them made it. So he did say to me afterwards, he because I think of, I'm trying to remember the nice lady's name. The first person who testified in support of the exoneration, I forget her name, but she was attacked right away. And it was like they were belittling it.
[00:22:42] And so William was worried at that point. He was writing to me on a little notepad, saying, "are they gonna do that to me?" And I said, "they might." And they didn't. They were very polite to William, but he was taken aback that there would be pushback on this.
[00:23:00] One of the things, the vibes that I picked up on, and it's continuing to happen after the hearings, is that some people are equating this with fictitious witches. Now every area of life has a fictional version of it, right? They're fictitious stories about senators, they're fictitious stories about anyone, any kind, any category of person.
[00:23:26] But I guess to some people who don't study colonial history or European history from way before then, some people aren't aware, as I would hope they would be, that this was a real thing. I know that most people have at least heard of Salem, and that was so dramatic by the large number of people being executed and found guilty over a short period of time, but I would hope that people would've been taught in history class that wasn't the first incident of that.
[00:23:56] Anyway, there were people at the hearings. One of the senators brought up a book, The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I dunno if you've read it. I've read it. And Elizabeth George Speare wrote it in the middle of the 20th century, and it won all sorts of awards. And it's a lovely book, and I've even read it with some of my middle schoolers over the years. But when we've done that, I've brought in experts, including Beth Caruso, our local expert on Alice Young of Windsor to, from the beginning, give them the real history of witchcraft persecutions in Connecticut and compare it to what the book says.
[00:24:36] The book takes place in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Nobody gets executed in it. There is intolerance. There is ignorance shown in the book, and there's persecution of an old woman who's a Quaker, and does talk about her having been branded earlier, before the start of the story. We know that she and her husband were mistreated by the Puritans and were branded, because they were Quakers and not Puritans.
[00:25:05] It's written for children, maybe between fourth grade and eighth grade. And it's a lovely book, but it doesn't really show the horrifying truths of what really happened here in Connecticut. I was surprised that I kept hearing that book brought up. Then after the hearings.
[00:25:25] So the hearings were March 1st, right?
[00:25:27] So it was about, I'm trying to remember the exact date, but it was sometime later in March, a very well written article came out in the Hartford Courant, in the opinion section. I don't know if you've read it. It was written by a man named Adam Daniels. I have not had an opportunity to speak to him directly yet, but he lives in our area, and he wrote a very eloquent letter reacting to our hearing, and specifically he talks about my son's testimony. Without saying William's name, he talks about thing that William said about having a time machine.
[00:26:03] And Adam Daniels' point was that there are people alive today who are in prison who shouldn't be there, and if we're gonna talk about exonerating people, we should be talking about those people instead. And anyway, when we read the article, on the one hand, we agreed with Adam Daniels about the injustices that he was talking about. And we felt very strongly in solidarity with him, but we were upset because, of course, he hadn't had an opportunity to speak to me or to William or to the rest of us, and there was a misunderstanding. He didn't know that we care about all of these issues. And I think very importantly, and this is not Adam Daniel's fault, I think it's a whole systemic problem. I don't think that he saw a connection between what happened to these people in colonial Connecticut and what's happening today to all sorts of people all over the world, including here in America.
[00:27:10] I think that exonerating anyone who has been unjustly punished, whether there's someone from the past or someone in the present, I think it's all interrelated. And I think William, by quoting Dr. King, showed that. Dr. King has passed down to us his wisdom, and, thankfully, William's teacher explained it beautifully to my son, and William immediately saw the connection. He knows that even though this happened in the 1600s, it happened here. It happened in Connecticut. It was wrong, and if we are willing to live up to that, to acknowledge that, and to say this was wrong, we wanna clear the good names of these people. Then that will set a good precedent.
[00:27:57] I will go back and testify at any hearing and anything that William wants to testify to and write articles about people currently today who need to be defended. But it's all interconnected, and I don't think we have to choose to only focus on one thing. And that's what, unfortunately, Adam Daniels didn't realize is that William cares about all these things.
[00:28:22] They didn't question William too much at the hearing. So no one in the press, none of the legislators asked William, is this the most important thing or the only important thing in your life? Or if you hypothetically did have a time machine, is this the only thing you would do with your time machine?
[00:28:39] And obviously it's not. It's one of the important things that he would want to do. I think that was a surprise to me is that some people are belittling this issue because it happened hundreds of years ago, and they don't feel the connection to the past. And I think that's our fault as a society, and as a teacher I'm fighting that all the time. I think that we need to be in touch with our past and to see that it's connected to our present.
[00:29:09] But yeah, I couldn't believe the pushback, and I love talking about works of literature and how they're connected to reality, but I think they were using literature against us, people bringing up Harry Potter and the Witch Blackbird Pond and not realizing our point, and I think that point is that this had nothing to do with that more positive, fictional world of witchcraft and people having magical powers and stuff. I think it's pretty clear from the historical record these were not people, these 11 people who were killed in Connecticut, they weren't going around saying that they were witches and that they were casting magical spells on people. It's not connected to that. So yeah, I was surprised. Have you heard from any of the legislators, cuz I got a few nice emails from the ones who supported us. Did you get any feedback from them? Sarah, have you heard from anyone?
[00:30:10] Sarah Jack: I haven't heard from anybody specifically. There are legislators that are sharing our podcast posts and our collaboration project posts on social media.
[00:30:24] Jennifer Schloat: Good. Yeah, cuz I do wanna acknowledge there are those who immediately saw the importance of what we were doing and have been very supportive. And I guess because William was a pleasant surprise to them, I did get a number of positive emails from the legislators, who were happy that he testified. And I was very pleased to see that many of our Connecticut representatives supported a nine-year-old being there to testify.
[00:30:55] There were even a few people who, not in the legislator, but just people at work and people I know in my personal life, who said, "oh wow. They let him testify." And that was interesting to me, cuz I hadn't really thought about it ahead of time. Is there an age restriction? I do watch a lot of government news. And ever since I was like a teenager, I've been really into watching C-Span and seeing the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and their hearings. And I have seen children testify in all sorts of hearings. So I guess I just assumed that children did this all the time. So I wasn't surprised that he was allowed to, but then I realized, okay, maybe this isn't as typical as I had hoped it was. And I'm so happy that the people responded positively to that. I hope that maybe it encourages more young people to avail themselves of this opportunity, so that they can have a voice.
[00:32:01] Josh Hutchinson: They might have been, as I was, just surprised by how mature his testimony was and how well he spoke it. And for a nine year old, you must be very proud of him. And what he said was brilliant.
[00:32:17] Jennifer Schloat: Yeah. I work with sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, so my youngest students are about two years older than William, and it's just the same as with adults. Some of my students are like a lot of adults. They are very reluctant to speak in public. It's an acquired skill, and not everyone's comfortable with it. And then I have a lot of students who jump at the opportunity to get up and to a podium or stand at a microphone and speak.
[00:32:48] And because I'm an ELA teacher, part of my job is to encourage everyone to do this. And the number one thing I've learned from teaching middle school students to write speeches and deliver speeches and then my work earlier in my adult life. When I was working at museums, one of my jobs was to train tour guides. So I had to train people of all ages how to give a tour of a museum. There are two things. One is the more knowledge you have about the topic that you're speaking about, the more comfortable you will be as a speaker. And secondly, and this is I think very important with William, is if you believe in the cause, if you have a strong, positive conviction that what you're doing is important or necessary and good, then the eloquence will flow from that. So even more important than practicing ahead of time is just like knowing your subject well before you start speaking.
[00:33:52] That's one, and two is to believe in what you're saying. So I think that's where I came up with the idea of William should testify is he naturally was just taking an interest in this whole project. When I was doing a little bit more research on it, he was saying, "what are you researching, Mom?" And I was explaining it to him, and he, in particular, was concerned about the fact that these women, a lot of the women and the men who were executed had young children. And that's when I realized, okay, someone really needs to hone in on that area of this, and then it became clear to me that maybe he'd be the best person to talk about it.
[00:34:35] And then another young person who spoke at the hearings, Catherine Carmon, she's a ninth grader now, but she was my student for three years in middle school. And she was one of the good, excellent speakers amongst my students. And she always gravitated to topics in middle school that had to do with women's rights and with combating misogyny in all areas of our lives.
[00:35:02] And when I was listening to Representative Garibay talk about this issue, when I was talking about all of this to my friend Beth Caruso, and they were telling me about the piece of this, the misogyny piece, I thought, oh my goodness, I know a young lady who will, who'd want to know about this. I got Catherine Carmon and Beth Caruso together, and immediately Beth Caruso said, "oh, this is a young woman who would be a very powerful speaker." And so I was delighted that she had a chance to speak, as well. It should happen more than it does, though.
[00:35:37] Sarah Jack: Yeah, and I was thinking the surprise that some observers had at the students having something to say about the matter. It's not just you wanted to give William an experience at a hearing, and you gave him some information to say. He had something to speak to, and this particular bill is something that affects all the generations.
[00:36:04] Jennifer Schloat: So if for example, he knows, William knows that today there are people who are incarcerated, lots of people, our country incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world. He hears me talk about this cause I'm very into social justice, and he knows that some of these people have children, and we've talked about this, so he does connect it to today. And I think he's onto a very important truth when he says these people were executed and that, in and of itself, is terrorizing, and, quite frankly, barbaric, but their children had the rest of their lives ahead of them. And what ongoing impact did this have? I have all these questions, and William and I have been discussing the questions. Were these children forbidden to ever mention their mother's names again? Do we know?
[00:37:02] The examples that William shared, the children of Mary Barnes and the one child of Mary Johnson, it seems like their whole social status changed dramatically as soon as their mothers were imprisoned and then executed, in that they had to go be indentured servants. So that right there is changing maybe the rest of their lives, what's gonna happen to them going forward.
[00:37:28] But psychologically what did this do to these kids? I've known mothers who've become sick. I've had friends who've battled cancer, for example, and these friends of mine who have had health scares, when they have young children, that's like the first and biggest worry for them is, "oh my goodness, I have to stay healthy. I have to stay alive. I have to be here, because I have young children that I have a responsibility towards." So that's where my mind goes.
[00:38:01] I have two children. I can't even imagine the fear and the distress, not for myself, but for the children that I'm leaving behind. It doesn't sound like, at least the stories that we were able to find some evidence on, it doesn't sound like there was much concern about the children. It sounds like it just immediately wrecked the children's lives.
[00:38:24] Yeah, I think this is a hugely important issue, and it's not the only time and the only place in history where it happened. When someone's parents are the victims of any kind of hatred or persecution, then the children are impacted, as well.
[00:38:40] And wasn't Alice Young's daughter? Yeah, Beth Caruso taught me about this, that the daughter of Alice Young went on to be accused of witchcraft herself. She wasn't executed, but she, by being the daughter of an executed witch, she then had the same thing brought against her. So I think it's very relevant, and I'm thrilled that we have some young people who are learning about it.
[00:39:06] Josh Hutchinson: And we've got some cases where there were three generations of people accused of witchcraft. And it's just mind-boggling how long that carried on down the generations, even into the 18th century, people being accused of witchcraft, and you're getting up to around the Revolution time, and there was a woman accused of witchcraft around the time they signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.
[00:39:37] Jennifer Schloat: Wow. I have to read about I have to read about her.
[00:39:40] Wow.
[00:39:41] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, hers was a case of mob justice, if you can call that justice. It was mob violence against her, and it was either the day of the signing or the day after, might have been.
[00:39:55] Jennifer Schloat: Wow. I will research that some more. I wanna read up on that. So yeah, vigilante so-called justice is something that isn't, in my strong opinion, because I believe in government, and that's why governments are instituted among people, so that we can have justice and human rights protected, and the whole history of vigilante justice in America is counter to everything that's in the Declaration of Independence. And we keep being reminded of this when we read later on the Gettysburg Address and, later on, Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. They all are referring back to each other and how we need governments, and we need to fulfill the promise of all people being created equal.
[00:40:41] But also that's why we have governments to protect human rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. And so when you have vigilante justice, which we see in the case you just mentioned and then we see with all the Jim Crow period after the Civil War, leading up to the Civil Rights Movement, which is an ongoing civil rights movement.
[00:41:04] The battle is against vigilante justice a lot of the time, mob violence, and of course then the systemic injustices written into laws. And that's part of my point with getting the exoneration done is when you have governments, you always have to be watchful that we don't permit things that are counter to our values as Americans, the sanctity and the protection of human liberty and human rights. We have to make sure that things that are against that, that are opposing that, don't creep into our laws.
[00:41:39] And there's a lot of good in the people from the colonial period and a lot of things about their laws that we should respect and admire. This thing with the witch, the part in the colonial laws where, they say, "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." And the idea that could be a capital offense, that's a huge issue. That's a huge problem. And we need to acknowledge that, study it, and move on.
[00:42:09] And I don't wanna get hyper-religious here, cuz you don't have to be from any particular religion or even be part of an organized religion or believe in an afterlife to care about these things. But I am pretty sure that many of the members of the current Connecticut state government attend some kind of house of worship and identify with some major religion. And if they do, if the they are part of a church or some other religion, they probably believe in an afterlife. And if they do, if they believe that the soul continues after death, then let's think about that. Let's think about these people who are executed are watching us, right, from heaven, and the colonial magistrates are watching us. And so if that's true and if these people believe that's true, then let's help them out. Let's clear their good name, right?
[00:43:10] And if I were the magistrate, if I were the bad guy, the villain in this story, the person who had done this wrong thing and then there were people, also in Connecticut government today, I would be grateful to them for doing this for me, for exonerating the people. That's something I probably wouldn't have said during testimony, cuz they want church and state to be separated and, the theocratic system of government was part of the problem in colonial times, but, let's be realistic, a lot of people are very religious. I work in a Catholic school, so religion is part of my life, and I think it matters that we own up to our own bad things that we've done and also, when we can, express remorse for something bad that our group of people has done. So that's another thing with history.
[00:44:04] I am more comfortable apologizing for and accepting responsibility for and speaking out for things that were wrong that my group has done. So if America has done something wrong or my ancestors or my church, I think that's my first job before I go and attack some other country or some other religion or some other group of people about what they did that was wrong.
[00:44:34] We have to look at all of history. What I compare it to is if they're children on a playground and they're fighting, and they're being unkind to each other, and some are my children and some are someone else's children, as a mother, I'm gonna go to my child and tell them that they have to apologize and that they have to stop whatever the unkind thing they're doing. I'm not gonna first chastise the other person's kids. So I feel like we here in Connecticut need to take responsibility for this, and by the way, the 1600s was not that long ago. If you're a student of history, this is actually not that long ago. So the fact that it hasn't been done yet is not a reason not to do it immediately. So yeah I really hope that this is done this year, and that we can move forward.
[00:45:25] Can we talk a little bit about the possibility of us finding the location of where the executions took place, because that just happened?
[00:45:34] We found there's an elm tree that used to stand in what several earlier historical sources say was the place where some of these people were executed in Hartford. I would love it. I would love to be part of seeing that maybe some plaque or something goes up in that space. It seems like it's a commercial space now, but that shouldn't prevent us from getting something placed there.
[00:46:01] Josh Hutchinson: We're absolutely encouraging the state to have some kind of memorial. And after the exoneration is passed, that's the next step we see is there needs to be something done by the state where people, you know, descendants right now don't have any place to go to remember these people. We don't know where they're buried. There's three locations where they might have been hanged, but the Albany Avenue seems the most likely. And we definitely wanna see some tribute.
[00:46:34] Jennifer Schloat: Because I used to live in Salem, Massachusetts. I only lived there for a year when I was working at the Peabody Essex Museum, and so I did give tours that taught school children about the actual trials and everything. And so I've been to all the sites in Salem and the Salem area, and a lot of attention has been given to that history. And I would love to see something comparable develop here in Connecticut. So yeah I hope that we can get that going. That will be great. But William and I wanna go get in the car and find that spot.
[00:47:08] Yesterday, we visited the graveyard in Farmington that's on, the graveyard is land that Mary Barnes' husband, Thomas Barnes, donated to Farmington. And there's so many beautiful, fancy tombstones of so many people, and obviously none of them are people who were executed for witchcraft. And it is just heartbreaking that the husband of this woman who was executed donated land for other people to be buried. But as far as we know, she's not buried there.
[00:47:42] We were looking next door. There's a beautiful house, it's newly built, that's standing where their house apparently was. The Barnes property was adjacent to this beautiful graveyard. So we were walking around, and no one was there yesterday. So we were just trying to turn our minds back to that time period.
[00:48:03] Farmington's such a beautiful town, and it would be nice to see maybe some roads named after Mary Barnes, something, and of course they are doing a lot, the Stanley-Whitman House and the Mary Barnes Society and everything. But I'd like to see more. All of that whole area is in a beautiful part of Farmington that's mostly Miss Porter's School, which is a really a wonderful all girls high school in Farmington. And so I've been thinking also maybe some of the Ms. Porter students would take an interest in this part of a women's history in Farmington.
[00:48:40] There's a lot that we can continue doing with this. And I think there are many young people who, if they knew about it, would be just as excited to learn about it and talk about it as William and Catherine were. So I think those two are an example of, I work a lot with young children, as you know, and I think that William and Catherine, they are very good at speaking in public, but there are a lot of young people who feel as strongly as they do. Those two have a lot of poise, but I don't want anyone to think that there aren't dozens and dozens of children just like them that I've met who also care about these issues, and that's something that I think was true in colonial times.
[00:49:24] And there's a little bit of truth to this now, although things are getting better. People often assume that young people don't care about important things, and that's not true. Or, conversely, and I've had to deal with this, they think that when a young person is standing up for something that's important, they assume that some adult is manipulating them or in influencing them. And that is actually very insulting to the children and to the adults who care about them. So I think we need to be mindful of that. That's not usually the case, actually. It's not that it's impossible, but adults can be manipulated, too. Children are not the only people who can be manipulated, and children really do have minds of their own.
[00:50:12] For example, when William quoted Dr. King, I was so impressed, because even though I've studied Dr. King for decades, that quote from Dr. King had not popped immediately into my head, nor had I made that connection in any conversation with William, so when William was being interviewed by News Channel Eight and NBC Connecticut, and he quoted Dr. King, I said, "where did he get that from? I didn't give him that quote." And I asked him later and he said, "oh yeah, my school teacher, we were talking about it in February, and she was saying we have to connect all injustices, and this is what one of the things that Dr. King taught us."
[00:50:52] His teacher was just doing a good job teaching history, and he made that connection himself. Yeah, I think that the adults need to wake up and realize that the children have something to say. And I have never met a young person who finds any of this boring. If history is taught in a straightforward way with the truth being told, they do find it interesting, and everyone has their own area of history that they find particularly fascinating.
[00:51:25] I wish we could've brought more children into the hearing that day, actually. Maybe those representatives would've seen, and another thing, and I don't wanna be jaded, but they're not old enough to vote yet. So maybe, that's something that has prevented people from listening to the voices of children.
[00:51:43] Sarah Jack: But they need to be thinking about how fast time passes and terms pass and people like to be reelected.
[00:51:51] Jennifer Schloat: Yeah. In fact, William did fire off a bunch of emails after his testimony to local legislators saying, I hope you heard my testimony, not just to the people who were in the hearing room, but other members of the Connecticut legislature saying, I'm William Schloat. I testified, and he mentioned his age, and he said, but I have a 22-year-old-sister and two parents, and they all vote. He knows how it works, and so he mentioned he lives in a household with three adults that he can influence.
[00:52:25] Josh Hutchinson: He'll be voting soon enough himself, and Catherine will be voting right around the corner. So yeah, while those guys are probably still in office, she'll be able to vote.
[00:52:37] Jennifer Schloat: Exactly. When I've taught history, and even now when I'm teaching literature, some of the literature we read are speeches given by political leaders and civil rights leaders. And I've been studying with my students. Early in Dr. King's career as a civil rights leader, there was something called the Children's March. A lot of historians considered a tipping point in the civil rights history of this nation when a lot of Americans who were accustomed to seeing adults fighting for civil rights, seeing them on the news, had kind of grown maybe complacent or just weary of hearing about this, when they saw on the news, I believe it was in Selma, Alabama. When they saw children marching, and it was hundreds of children, they realized, "oh wow, they're young children," mostly African American children in this case. And they were led by Dr. King marching for their civil rights. They wanted the schools to be integrated, and they wanted to end segregation in the southern states. And a lot of northern people suddenly became interested in what was happening in the South in the early 1960s because of seeing little children involved. And so sometimes it's a wakeup call for people. Some of the most heroic people, some of the bravest people are little, young children.
[00:54:04] If a child is interested in something, and they wanna speak out about it, we have to give them that opportunity to use their voice. So yeah it's very important. A participatory democracy is something that I strongly believe in.
[00:54:20] There's something in our culture right now, and it reminds me of the 1600s in Connecticut, where people are encouraged to be quiet. Have that whole idea, and again, I think of Thanksgiving where, oh, don't talk about politics, it's rude. You're having a family gathering for Thanksgiving. Don't talk about politics. You don't wanna have an argument with someone. And that's unamerican, if you think about it, right? We shouldn't be afraid to discuss political issues. Politics shouldn't be a dirty word. It's participating in our civil life.
[00:54:56] So if more kids realized that it was a proud thing and it's a patriotic thing, and you can go and speak to your senator, you can write to her, him, you can speak at a hearing, you can attend a rally or a march, you can speak on a podcast, you can write a letter for a newspaper. If more children were encouraged to do this and it was given a positive connotation, cuz right now there's this, I think it's very false, but it's nevertheless something that some people are promoting that it's somehow impolite to talk about politics or that it's embarrassing or too divisive, then it's discouraging people. I don't feel it needs to be that way, and I hope we can move away from that.
[00:55:45] I certainly don't think things like this should be along party lines. Even if there are party lines, it shouldn't stop us from going to whatever the other party is and helping them see that we have more in common than maybe they thought we had.
[00:56:00] As a teacher and as a parent, I think this study of history is intertwined with this whole idea of people, young people, learning to speak up, learning to put their ideas in writing and speaking in public or writing letters. They need to have the history, in order to know how to make their point in a strong way.
[00:56:26] We are in a time in history and it, these times have come before, where people are being told to not look at the past. And there's all sorts of people fighting about what should and shouldn't be taught in history. And so I think, yeah, it's a little scary to me. I think that this might be falling under that category, and it shouldn't be. We have evidence, right? As long as we have evidence that these things really happened, then we have to look at it. We're forced to look at it.
[00:56:57] Sarah Jack: Is there anything else that you wanted to make sure you said today?
[00:57:03] Jennifer Schloat: The whole point about some of these people, we don't know where they were buried. That really connects to the whole idea of some people have statues and some people don't. It's a really important thing that we remember everyone from the past. And, when, as I said, when William and I were walking around that graveyard yesterday realizing that it's unlikely that poor Mary Barnes is buried there. Or for that matter, Mary Barnes' little daughter that William mentioned in his testimony, Hannah Barnes. I can't find any record of where this child was buried.
[00:57:39] Maybe I will be able to find something, but we haven't yet. But she died shortly after her mother was killed, and there may be a connection there. The psychological trauma of your mother dying could affect your health.
[00:57:52] It is really upsetting to me, and I would like to find out if there's any way that we could discover where any of these people might have been buried. And or just acknowledge the fact that we don't know, and this is true all throughout history. Enslaved people were not given proper burials and, again, anyone who's been executed. There's also just a lack of respect for the human remains of anyone who's not considered important, and so I think that's another reason to exonerate these people and get their names on the historical record, because their names are not written in stone in graveyards right now. And so we need to clear their good name on the record.
[00:58:35] And that was another thing that impressed William, and I think you alluded to it earlier, when he realized that his testimony, even though it was a mere three minutes, is now part of the permanent historical record, that it's entered into the congressional record for Connecticut. There's a YouTube of everyone's testimony. That's exciting to know that in the future, long after we're all gone, if someone is still caring to research what happened to these people, they're these names, you know the name of Mary Barnes and her children, the name of Mary Johnson and her son Benjamin.
[00:59:12] They're now associated with William's testimony and oh, someone was standing up for them. Good. So that's something that get all these people's names. And didn't Catherine read all the names of the convicted witches in her testimony? Catherine Carmon, I believe she read their names out. This is so essential.
[00:59:33] And just one other little thing, and that is, I think it's psychologically healing for us to face the bad stuff from the past. And we know that, anyone who knows anything about psychotherapy or psychology, knows that one way to heal yourself is if you forgive people who have wronged you, and you forgive yourself for anything that you feel ashamed of and, but that you also own up to anything wrong that you have done.
[01:00:03] And so even though we didn't do this directly, right? We're not the colonial magistrates who did this. It still could heal us as a society to own up to the bad things that our state, our state when it was a colony, our country, our culture, our people have done.
[01:00:22] And that was one of the things that hit William. He's really into genealogy at this phase. And we've recently done hours and hours of work. We got our DNA tested through ancestry.com, and he's researching all of his ancestors. And we found out that my seven times great-grandfather, and that would be William's eight times great-grandfather, was a man named Joseph Ballard, and he is one of the Witch accusers associated with the Salem Witchcraft Trials. So that's an ancestor of ours, distant ancestor, but a direct ancestor who was part of the problem, who accused people.
[01:01:04] And then we did find, William just was reading about this last week, Martha Carrier, who's one of the women who was executed in Salem is our first cousin 10 times removed, but the first cousin is very significant. And then I'm pretty sure. And I'm gonna do more genealogical research so I can be definitively certain. Rebecca Greensmith is probably my my nine times great grand aunt, so if that's true, I'm connected to one of the Connecticut people, and then the Barnes name, the Barnes last name is in our family tree, but we're pretty sure we're not directly related to the Farmington Barnes family, but we might be, there's kind of conflicting clues out there.
[01:01:51] So it's in our tree, it's in our family tree. The good guys and the bad guys, the villains and the victims, they're all there, and so it's immediately relevant in that research, as well.
[01:02:05] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I'm also a first cousin of Martha Carrier through the Dane family and the Ingalls.
[01:02:15] Jennifer Schloat: Yeah, the Ingalls. I was about to say, I'm actually looking at Ancestry right now. We have Ingalls, so we're related then in some way. Yeah, so it was actually the Ingalls name that was my first clue that I might be related to her. Once you start with the whole Mayflower ancestry, there's all sorts of interesting things that come from that. And so William recently found out that through my husband, through his dad, he's related to Francis Cooke, who is a Mayflower person. And then through me it's the Brewsters, the Whites, and the Hopkins' on the Mayflower. So there's all that.
[01:02:51] We feel like we have to speak out as some of the original English settlers of New England. We have a responsibility to say something about the way these people what these people did.
[01:03:04] And then I've only learned from your podcast. Your podcast has taught me so much. I did. I have to confess that I was completely ignorant that there were still people in countries, in other parts of the world, that were still being executed for or found guilty of witchcraft. I had no idea until this year, and Beth Caruso told me to listen to your podcast. I had no idea about that. I don't think many people are aware that this is still an issue, like specifically this thing is still happening.
[01:03:38] Josh Hutchinson: And if you want to hear more about that, we'll be out in Salem and in Connecticut in May with Dr. Leo Igwe, and he's the Nigerian activist who speaks about the witchcraft accusations there. And he'll be speaking at the Stanley-Whitman House.
[01:03:58] Jennifer Schloat: You really educated a lot of people by sharing that, cuz then of course I shared it with my students, and most people that I've spoken to didn't know but when they found out were very upset to hear that's still happening.
[01:04:11] Josh Hutchinson: And we were blown away by the statistics. There was a recent UN report, I don't know if you heard about this part, where in between 2009 and 2019, there were something like 20,000 cases of witchcraft persecution against adults.
[01:04:32] It's even worse with children being accused of witchcraft. There's hundreds of thousands of accusations against children every year just in Africa alone.
[01:04:44] Jennifer Schloat: I need to read even more. Do you know why specifically children, why it would be more?
[01:04:50] Josh Hutchinson: In some places, these militias that are battling in some of these nations, they send children ahead of them in the line of combat, because they believe that they have magical powers to stop bullets.
[01:05:08] Jennifer Schloat: Oh my goodness.
[01:05:10] Josh Hutchinson: terrifying, and it's very real, and you can observe it today. Leo often shares images of the victims after they've been attacked, and it's brutal. It's horrifying, and it needs to stop.
[01:05:26] Jennifer Schloat: So I think that there's so many different areas of our present life that this is relevant to. And so obviously in other countries and then in our own country, so we don't have witch executions anymore, but that isn't to say that we don't have groups of people who are marginalized or ignored.
[01:05:51] And again, looking at the children of the Connecticut witch trial victims, we can maybe then think about the children in our own society today who are suffering because their parents are suffering. And that's so important for us to remember, as well. But everything is connected and just, as a teacher, by the way, there is no area of knowledge that is not important. I feel specifically passionate about the history of our own country, but every area of knowledge is important. And there is sometimes a focus today, that I think is malignant, on we should only teach children what they need to know to earn money. And that's a terrifying idea. It's really very scary.
[01:06:42] And the other thing we have to think about, cuz it's true in science, but it's also true in history. Sometimes when we go and start to study the past, we may have something specific we're looking for, and then we find something different. In other words, I might go and do more research on the Barnes family or on my own ancestry or on colonial Connecticut witchcraft persecutions and learn more but also find stuff that I didn't know about and uncover a whole new area. And so we have to keep our minds open to new discoveries.
[01:07:20] And that was kind of the worry I had when I heard some of the people during the hearing speaking in reaction. It was like they weren't familiar with this information, therefore they weren't willing to hear it, because it was new information. It is like there was no room left in their brain for it or something. That, you know, as someone who's loved history, the study of history my whole life. That's really dreadful.
[01:07:49] And that was one last point I wanted to make before we go. One of the ways that I became familiar with Connecticut's witchcraft mania, basically, was I took a graduate course in history at Central Connecticut State University with Dr. Katherine Hermes was the professor, and it was on colonial New England. And even though I had studied this period before as an undergraduate in New York State, I barely knew just the tip of the iceberg about there's so much to learn about colonial New England.
[01:08:26] And she had us all do a research project that was the most unique thing that I had ever been asked to do in college. It was probably the most valuable thing I learned in graduate school. She had us do something called a prosopography. I had never even heard of this before, but it's basically the study of groups of people and what they all have in common. And usually prosopography, when it's done with history, these are people that we don't know a lot about. So it's not like you do a prosopography of the American presidents. You would do prosopography of servants or something like that, a group of people who are in some way marginalized and we don't have a lot of records on them.
[01:09:13] So anyway, each student had their own area of research, and it was all focusing on local Connecticut history, and a lot of them were focusing on servants and on African-Americans and on women. Dr. Hermes was very kind. She let me do something a little odd or a little bit different.
[01:09:31] I wanted to do the outcasts, the people who were somehow socially unacceptable in some way in the Farmington area. And so she gave me a little bit of latitude letting me do like a hundred years, sometime in the 1600s to sometime in the 1700s. And I did a paper, research paper, that Mary Barnes ended up being one of the people in the group, but also a hermit who lived on a mountain who I've written a, my master's thesis was actually about him. And I included a whole bunch of people who were just vagrants or wanderers who got run out of town or warned out of town, because they didn't belong there. These were all white people, and they were all people who, in one way or another got in trouble with the law in Farmington, and they were not all witches. Mary Barnes was labeled as a witch. But what they had in common is they just weren't behaving and conforming to what was expected of them. Anyway, this was a wonderful research project that I was asked to do, and I learned a lot from it, and I learned a lot of things that I hadn't expected to learn.
[01:10:50] And one of the things I learned is that sometimes when we go back and look into the past and we find someone behaving in a way that we don't expect them to behave, we miscategorize them. And so I found that some of the people in my prosopography had been mislabeled in later years. Like people looking at them from the 1800s or from the 20th century said, "oh, that hermit or that vagrant person, they must have been a Native American or they must have been an African American." And in every case I made sure, I tried to stick to only white people because my prosopography would not really be a true prosopography if I chose people from multiple races. But what, I guess what I'm saying is these were people who were behaving in such a way that their race got changed by the people looking back at them. In other words, white people couldn't possibly behave this way, therefore they're not white. And of course they were white.
[01:11:55] So to me, this taught me a lot about racism and it taught me a lot about labeling people. And it's just fascinating. So I think we need to keep doing this. We need to keep studying the past and figuring out why people are mistreated and why people are marginalized and give voice to those people as much as we can. Thank you so much for letting me visit with you on this podcast.
[01:12:21] Josh Hutchinson: And here's Connecticut Witch trial Exoneration Project co-founder Mary Bingham with Minute with Mary.
[01:12:31] Mary Bingham: Why do I care about my ancestors who have been dead for centuries because their legacy lives on in me? If not for the decisions my ancestors made years ago, I would not be alive today. My research is not a hobby. It is a special calling to tell as many of their stories as possible with my voice, my heart, and with conviction.
[01:13:00] The stories of all our ancestors are important because their individual stories personalize history. As a teen, I sat through very boring history classes, Paul Revere and the Midnight Ride, Yon City. Fast forward 30 years, I discovered that one of my ancestors answered the Lexington alarm 248 years ago.
[01:13:28] It was game on. I wanted to know more about what happened and how he was involved. 35 year old Jacob Peaty was a Topsfield farmer and member of the local militia company headed by Captain Steven Perkins, another one of my ancestors. At 10:00 AM April 19th, 1775, the post rider arrived and news spread like wildfire.
[01:13:56] Jacob left so fast that his work in the field was left Unat. He took necessities previously packed, mounted his horse and rode probably fast and hard, the 30 miles to Lexington, not knowing if he would ever return home. Who knows? He probably did not have the chance to kiss his wife. Sarah, goodbye. Jacob thankfully returned home about two days later.
[01:14:24] The sense of duty he possessed passed through nine generations to my father, whose own sense of duty, provided well for my mother, my siblings, and myself, as well as for our local community. I wonder what my legacy will. I've never married, nor do I have children who will tell my story when I'm gone. How will I be remembered?
[01:14:51] I hope to be remembered for keeping our family history alive for the next generations of nieces and nephews. My grandmother always encouraged me to ask questions. I now implore the next generation to engage in thoughtful conversations with members of my generation as we not only tell our stories, but the stories of our relatives of long ago.
[01:15:16] Thank you.
[01:15:18] Josh Hutchinson: know.
[01:15:19] Sarah Jack: you, Mary.
[01:15:20] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Mary.
[01:15:23] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[01:15:25] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[01:15:28] Sarah Jack: We have a resolution update. This week, it has been marked as "ready for action by the House" on the House calendar. Keep writing Connecticut legislators. Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz supports the passing of the resolution. She told McClatchy News in the latest article, "some of the people who participated in the trials actually became leaders of our state," adding, "who was in charge really doesn't matter. We should just take responsibility and tell the world what really happened because we all know." She reminds us that there are other reasons to pass the resolution that could have implications for the modern world. She said, "there are still some countries that have these witchcraft laws on the books, so we should take leadership and hopefully those countries change their laws."
[01:16:10] Thank you for standing with the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, Lieutenant Governor. Thank you for helping us end witch hunts. Listeners, let's keep up this incredible momentum. Go to our episode description for a link with information on writing to Connecticut legislators asking for their support.
[01:16:25] Next month, the Salem, Massachusetts area and Hartford and Farmington, Connecticut are getting a rare visit from Dr. Leo Igwe, director of the Advocacy for Alleged Witches nonprofit organization. It is an incredible honor for us to organize a week of speaking engagements during his May speaking tour in the United States and to accompany him as he speaks in places of historical significance to early American colony witch trial history.
[01:16:48] Witch persecutions and trials are ongoing incidents in Africa and other nations, reportedly at least 60. Witchcraft accusation is still a form of death sentence. Across the continent, thousands, mainly women and elderly persons are accused, tried, attacked, killed, imprisoned, or banished every year.
[01:17:04] You can follow Dr. Leo Igwe on Twitter to see how he's advocating on the ground in the victim communities in real time, as these individuals are experiencing being accused and hunted. The first event, Monday, May 15, at the Salem Witch Museum is virtual, but Dr. Igwe will be with us in Salem touring the historic sites, guided by a local seasoned in the history, Mary Bingham. Tuesday, May 16th is your chance to experience a very special evening of in-person conversation with Leo at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers, Massachusetts. Please see the Facebook event for details. Isn't this a great week? Make sure you mark your calendars.
[01:17:41] Next, you can enjoy an in-person speaking event with Dr. Igwe at Central Connecticut State University on Wednesday, May 17 at 6:00 PM. While in the Hartford area, Leo will be touring known Witch trial historic sites with author Beth Caruso. But wait, there is more. On Thursday afternoon, May 18 at 4:00 PM, Leo will be presenting at the Stanley-Whitman House living history center in Farmington, Connecticut. Look for Facebook events for all of these occasions posted by our social media.
[01:18:06] Would you like to know more about Leo? You are in luck, because we have a great podcast episode for you to listen to. For more on Leo, listen to episode Witchcraft Accusations in Nigeria with Dr. Leo Igwe. Come hear Leo. Invite your friends and family. See you there. Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop or merch from our Zazzle shop. Our links are in the show description.
[01:18:30] Many well-written, informed testimonies were submitted for the Joint Committee on Judiciary's hearing of Bill HJ 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut on March 1st, 2023. We hope you enjoyed hearing William and Jennifer Schloat read theirs. And here are more from Josh Hutchinson, Sarah Jack, Beth Caruso, and Tony Grego.
[01:18:51] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[01:18:53] Today I'd like to talk to you about witch hunts happening in our world now. United Nations Human Rights Council recently assembled in Geneva, Switzerland to discuss the crisis of harmful practices related to witchcraft accusations and ritual abuse. In many nations, literal witch hunts continue to plague society with banishments, violence, torture, and death directed at innocent people accused of an impossible crimes. These accusations and extrajudicial punishments are often directed at vulnerable people, notably elderly women, children, the disabled, and those with albinism. Each year, thousands of people are targeted. They live in nations around the world, on every populated continent. If they're lucky enough to survive, they face an uncertain future. From roaming village to village, to being placed in prison or so-called witch camps for their own safety, their lives are never their own.
[01:19:53] By exonerating those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut, you send a powerful message that witch-hunting will not be tolerated. By exonerating the accused, you join with other nations, including Scotland and Spain, in Confronting the past and righting wrongs. By exonerating the accused, you make a clear statement condemning witch-hunting, which will resonate with leaders in nations affected by witchcraft-accusation-related violence today.
[01:20:19] Let's stand together against witch-hunting. Make that strong statement. Clear the names of those accused of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut, and let the world know you oppose witch-hunting in the strongest terms.
[01:20:32] Sarah Jack: I'm speaking to ask the Connecticut General Assembly to vote yes on HJ 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. My ancestor, Winifred Benham, was one of over 45 people accused of witchcraft crimes in Connecticut. In 1697, she and her daughter, Winifred Benham, Jr., were the last two arrested and indicted. Despite their innocence, their unduly tarnished reputations forced them to leave their lives in Wallingford by uprooting to New York. Researching the Connecticut witch trial history informed me of her innocence and that she needed a voice today to address the life-changing and devastating historical wrong she experienced. There is complete certainty that she was not guilty of supernatural crime. She was an ordinary woman, a wife and mother who fell victim to the irrational witchcraft fear that was prevalent in the colonies during those times and is still prevalent in many places in the world.
[01:21:27] This yes vote is powerful, because it recognizes her innocence and signifies that vulnerable community members should not be treated unjustly due to perceived differences. It is time to write these wrongs and exonerate those who were executed or subjected to other severe consequences of witchcraft accusations.
[01:21:47] Thank you for your time and thoughtful consideration.
[01:21:50] Beth Caruso: My name is Beth Caruso of Windsor. I support House Joint Resolution 34. Having done extensive research and writing about the Connecticut Witch Trials, I must speak on behalf of the victims of those trials. Numerous citizens became targets of unjust witchcraft accusations and were indicted, convicted, and hanged for strange events beyond their control.
[01:22:19] Most of their contemporaries believed that they had a pact with the devil and intended to do harm to their communities. Alice Young, mother of a single child, was the first condemned as a witch, when an epidemic took the lives of children. Four of them were her next door neighbors. Lydia Gilbert was also accused of bewitching a gun three years after it discharged and killed Henry Stiles. Both women were hanged as witches. There were many others who died or suffered.
[01:22:55] Although convicted, Elizabeth Seager, a Hartford resident, and Katherine Harrison, a rare female landowner, were saved from death by Governor John Winthrop, Jr. Unlike most people of his time, the esteemed alchemical physician saw that the accused were not witches. He not only refused to carry out convictions, he helped to change the rules of those convictions so that justice might prevail. Before Winthrop, seven people died for witchcraft crimes. After he became Governor, witch-hunting slowed and deaths stopped, until he left to secure Connecticut's charter in England. While away, four more died during the Hartford Witch Panic under the watch of Major John Mason.
[01:23:49] In the end, Winthrop saved many lives years before the infamous Salem Witch Trials. If Governor Winthrop, your predecessor in Connecticut governance, could recognize the accused victim's innocence in the 1600s, why shouldn't you also acknowledge it by exonerating them and continuing Winthrop's legacy? And if we proudly claim Winthrop as one of our own in Connecticut history, why should we not embrace these victims as part of our history, too, and recognize the wrongs done to them for their descendants as well as for ourselves? Thank you for your consideration.
[01:24:39] Tony Griego: My name is Anthony Griego. I am a retired sergeant from the New Haven Police Department with almost 32 years of service and also an honorably discharged veteran of United States Army, 1961 to 1964. I am also one of the co-founders of our Connecticut Witch Memorial Facebook page, whose goal is to educate the general public about our Connecticut colony witch hunts.
[01:25:11] Connecticut was the first colony to start hanging people for witchcraft in 1647, a crime that disappeared from Connecticut law books by 1750. 9 women and 2 men, husbands, were hanged for this crime. 23 more suffered through witch trials whose guilty verdict could end in a hanging. Several children became orphans with the loss of a parent or both.
[01:25:44] Today in our modern world, such trials and executions are still taking place in other countries. Today we can follow other New England states that have made amends for colonial witch hunts. We can also send a clear message that witch hunts are wrong and always were. Knowing that we have made amends for errors of the past is a step towards teaching a younger generation how we have learned to be a better nation.
[01:26:18] We ask that you vote in favor of resolution number 34. Thank you.
[01:26:24] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:26:30] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[01:26:32] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:26:35] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:26:38] Josh Hutchinson: Tell your friends and family about the show.
[01:26:41] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit EndWitchHunts.Org to learn more.
[01:26:46] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:26:50]

April 19, 2023

Connecticut Witch Trials 101, Part 2: Witchcraft Belief, the Founding of Connecticut, and Alice Young

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Show Notes

This is Part 2 of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast’s Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series. Part 2 covers witchcraft beliefs, the founding of Connecticut and Alice Young. Your cohosts and accused witch descendants, writer and podcast producer, Joshua Hutchinson and End Witch Hunts President and people connector extraordinaire, Sarah Jack are back to delve into the history. The story of Connecticut’s settlement, witchcraft belief and known witch trial victims is fact backed with trustworthy research and sources. Take advantage of the expansive bibliography, and do some educational reading. Dig into the research with us. This series has been created with thoughtful inquiry and consideration of historian expertise, historic record and available archived material. How do we know what we know? We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Transcript

[00:00:00]
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:26] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: We hope you enjoy part two of our Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series.
[00:00:33] Sarah Jack: This week we'll discuss witchcraft belief in New England, give an overview of the founding of Connecticut and the founding of the town of Windsor, before we move on to the trial and execution of Alice Young, who is believed to be the first person hanged for witchcraft in New England.
[00:00:49] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we'll dispel some common misconceptions. First of all, every person executed for witchcraft in New England was hanged, not burned.
[00:01:00] Sarah Jack: Nobody was burned for witchcraft here, but they were in other places in Europe. Do people assume it because of the media they've seen? Do people just equate burning and witches?
[00:01:11] Josh Hutchinson: It would seem to have been influenced by transatlantic communication and immigrants with memories of the burning times in their countries.
[00:01:20] Sarah Jack: Do people visualize burning a witch is destroying a witch versus an execution? I feel like if you're thinking about witches being burned, then you're also thinking more of the murderous mob style.
[00:01:31] Josh Hutchinson: That's another part of the lore.
[00:01:32] Sarah Jack: I think the more people recognize New England was hanging, then they're thinking about, oh, it's an execution. There was a trial. What was that trial like?
[00:01:42] We are really excited for you to hear this episode.
[00:01:45] Josh Hutchinson: We sure are.
[00:01:46] Sarah Jack: Before we introduce Alice Young, we'd like to set the stage for you by providing a little background on witchcraft belief in early New England and the settling of Connecticut.
[00:01:58] Josh Hutchinson: In evaluating witchcraft belief in early modern New England, it is important to note that ministers and the educated elite held different views than most of the public. Many beliefs overlapped, but those who claimed to be victimized by witchcraft focused on human agency in magical practice, while the clergy largely focused on Satan as the source of the witch's power.
[00:02:22] Sarah Jack: In popular belief, a witch was a person who used magic for sinister purposes.
[00:02:28] Josh Hutchinson: A witch was a person who was believed to have the skill to manipulate occult forces in order to perform maleficium, which is the act of causing harm supernaturally.
[00:02:40] Sarah Jack: Women were believed to be more sinful and more evil than men and more vulnerable to becoming witches. The reasoning included the belief that women's bodies weren't as strong as men's, and, therefore, the devil could more readily access women's souls.
[00:02:53] Josh Hutchinson: Of the 49 people known to have been accused of witchcraft in Connecticut between 1647 and 1742, 36 were women, 11 were men, and two were unidentified. Further, seven of the men accused were married to women who were accused first. Only four of the 49 were men who were not married to female witchcraft suspects.
[00:03:19] Sarah Jack: Four. That's a small number.
[00:03:22] Witches were said to have teats, where imps or animal familiars suckled. These were often hidden in their secret parts.
[00:03:30] Josh Hutchinson: The witch was the embodiment of the corrupted woman. Rather than celebrate and encourage fertility, she actively worked against it. Rather than be the perfect helpmate to her husband, she chose to be a handmaiden to the devil himself.
[00:03:45] Sarah Jack: The witch attempted to invert the power structure, diverting authority from man to woman. She was not a housewife. She was a force of her own.
[00:03:53] Josh Hutchinson: Maleficium most commonly involved employing magic to injure, sicken, or kill a person or domestic animal. However, targets of maleficium also included ships, homes, and crops.
[00:04:06] Sarah Jack: Image magic involved the use of the likeness of a person to injure them. Poppets were commonly believed to be used for this purpose and could be made of common materials like cloth, rags, wax, or birch bark. These images would then be harmed by hand, needle, water, or fire.
[00:04:23] Josh Hutchinson: To recruit people, Satan and his devils often first appeared to targets in the guise of animals.
[00:04:31] Sarah Jack: Outside of Salem, most Witch trial witnesses did not mention the devil. However, as shown in those Salem cases and a handful of others, people believe that witches covenanted with him directly and signed his book in blood.
[00:04:45] Josh Hutchinson: And signed his book. Sometimes in blood, sometimes in ink, sometimes in just, they would say it was red like blood. Sometimes they would say they actually cut their finger and signed it with their own blood. They actually put that detail in some of the Salem testimony. And his book was always changing color, shape, size, and material. You pay attention to those testimonies, they're always inconsistent. Sometimes his book was a piece of like just a sheet of birch bark that people had etched their names into.
[00:05:26] Sarah Jack: These women in the devil's book, you know they're putting their name in it and, of course the counterpart, the Book of Life, which you don't put your own name in, your name's put into it.
[00:05:37] I just think it's interesting that they are fantasizing that these women are signing their name into a book for the devil. Cause I was like, what is the significance of him having names in a book.
[00:05:51] Josh Hutchinson: It's inversion of the covenant, basically, and inversion of God's grace. You don't put your own name in the book of life, but you do put it in the devil's book. It's all about rebellion. Mid to late middle ages, they just were focused on witchcraft as an act of rebellion against God. And then they got into the Satan's Pact thing.
[00:06:22] Witches often gathered in groups, as seen in the Hartford Witch Panic and the Salem Witch Hunt.
[00:06:29] Sarah Jack: How many people were meeting with Reverend Burroughs at the witch Sabbath described in the Salem Witch trials?
[00:06:34] Josh Hutchinson: Dozens?
[00:06:36] Sarah Jack: It was a huge amount.
[00:06:39] Josh Hutchinson: They might have had hundreds at some of their things. There was definitely dozens, and they were coming from Connecticut. In Salem, they definitely were intimately aware of what had happened in Connecticut, and they were saying that whiches were coming from Connecticut to Salem Village.
[00:07:04] Sarah Jack: At Hartford, the supposed witch meeting may have been a harmless Christmas celebration, which was interpreted as a witches' Sabbath. During the Salem Witch hunt, these sabbaths were recounted in vivid detail by the afflicted persons and the confessors.
[00:07:19] Josh Hutchinson: In the early modern mind, two worlds coexisted on earth, the visible world and the invisible world. The boundaries between these worlds were porous, and creatures from the invisible world often visited the visible world. Likewise, people learned in magic could tap into powers from the invisible world to manipulate the visible.
[00:07:44] Sarah Jack: As Dr. Kathy Hermes explained, New England was viewed as the battleground between God and Satan, where the English attempted to establish Christ's church, and the devil attempted to pull it down.
[00:07:55] Josh Hutchinson: While witchcraft was reviled, not all magic was frowned upon by the people at large. Acceptable occult practices included protective magic, countermagic, and healing magic.
[00:08:09] Sarah Jack: New Englanders commonly hid objects and symbols in their homes to ward off witches and evil spirits.
[00:08:16] Josh Hutchinson: As Dr. Emerson Baker explained in episode 25, garlands and wreaths were hung on doors and windows as barriers to evil.
[00:08:26] Sarah Jack: Not just decor. Horseshoes and other iron objects were also nailed over doorways or secreted in walls to prevent spirits from entering.
[00:08:35] Josh Hutchinson: Symbols were etched near entries and exits to catch demons. Chimneys and wells were protected in such fashion, because evil spirits frequently used those openings to gain access to homes.
[00:08:49] Sarah Jack: Countermagic involved various methods of detecting and harming witches. Bewitched objects and the hair, nails, and urine of bewitched persons were burned to destroy the evil magic or transfer it back to the witch.
[00:09:03] Josh Hutchinson: When animals were believed to be victims of maleficium, body parts like ears and tails were burned. Ouch. Poor animals.
[00:09:13] Sarah Jack: Healing magic was a dangerous line of work. Those with the power to heal were believed to also have the power to harm.
[00:09:21] Josh Hutchinson: Contrary to popular belief, midwives were seldom targets of witchcraft accusations. However, there are recorded instances of women who provided healing services being accused.
[00:09:34] Sarah Jack: Other magical enterprises also put people at risk of accusation. Methods of divination are reported in several cases, and a few of those tried for witchcraft openly engaged in fortune telling.
[00:09:46] Josh Hutchinson: The fortune telling they were doing wasn't communing with spirits. It was palmistry, reading people. Marilynne told us Samuel Wardwell would look at somebody's hand and then tell their fortune, and other people were like, turning the sieve and scissors or doing the Bible and key thing to tell fortunes. There were these different divination methods and the Venus Glass, stuff like that were all divination, but there was an action involved and you're interpreting the results.
[00:10:25] The fortune telling that's getting messages from the other side is through mediums, which are a more recent invention. That came out of the spiritualist movement of the 19th century. They had those kinds of visions, but that wasn't them accusing the witches of doing that. That was the afflicted people saying, "I have spectral vision, and these specters of deceased people appeared to me." It was the bewitched people who were the mediums, if you think about it.
[00:11:04] While ministers and the educated elite believed in witches as much as the average layperson, the clergy emphasized the diabolical pact they believed was the source of the witch's power.
[00:11:17] Sarah Jack: For clergymen, all magic came from the devil. Countermagic was a form of going to the devil for help against the devil.
[00:11:25] Josh Hutchinson: However, the clergy accepted, or at least turned a blind eye to, certain occult practices performed by the educated elite, including alchemy and astrology.
[00:11:37] Sarah Jack: Witchcraft became a capital crime in England in 1542, and an enhanced Witchcraft Act was passed in 1604, which made it a felony to compact with the devil or have familiarity with evil spirits.
[00:11:49] And now Minute with Mary. Mary Bingham has more details on the standards of evidence for witchcraft trials.
[00:11:55] Mary Bingham: The earliest laws and orders of the General Court of Connecticut, the Code of 1650, and the Book of General Laws and Liberties Concerning the Inhabitants of Massachusetts, both state the following. Anyone convicted of witchcraft will be put to death. In criminal cases, the court was to rely on the testimony of two eye witnesses against the person who was accused. However, this was not always done in the cases of witchcraft, particularly in the colony of Connecticut. That is, until the case against Katherine Harrison of Wethersfield in 1669. Katherine was accused, tried. She was held in jail as she awaited a new trial. Governor John Winthrop, Jr. had Katherine released from jail and placed her under house arrest. Angry residents petitioned the court, ordering her immediate return to prison. Instead, Governor Winthrop and the magistrates drafted a letter to Gershom Bulkeley and other area ministers for advisement. Gershom on behalf of the ministers advised that spectral evidence was enough to indict, but not enough to convict a person.
[00:13:24] Furthermore, because the ministers believed that the devil could disguise himself as an innocent person, afflict harm to others and their environment, the two person testimony was now to be strictly enforced going forward. Two people would need to testify to the same event, at the same time, in the same place.
[00:13:48] Had this rule been enforced in the witchcraft cases between 1647 through 1663, the following people may not have been hanged: Alice Young, Mary Johnson, John Carrington, Joan Carrington, Goodwife Bassett, Goodwife Knapp, Lydia Gilbert, Mary Stanford, Rebecca Greensmith, Nathaniel Greensmith, and Mary Barnes.
[00:14:19] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[00:14:21] Josh Hutchinson: Many factors contributed to witchcraft accusations.
[00:14:25] Sarah Jack: Economics.
[00:14:27] Josh Hutchinson: Psychology.
[00:14:28] Sarah Jack: Fear of warfare.
[00:14:30] Josh Hutchinson: Religious beliefs.
[00:14:31] Sarah Jack: Gender roles.
[00:14:33] Josh Hutchinson: Authorities interested in suppressing deviant behavior.
[00:14:37] Sarah Jack: And most importantly the social history which is revealed in the records.
[00:14:41] Josh Hutchinson: A history of neighborly quarrels was at the heart of many cases.
[00:14:45] The English Civil War produced the witchfinders Matthew Hopkins and John Stearns. They stepped in to fill a power vacuum when the central authority lost power over individual towns and districts. The local authorities were all too happy to step in and govern themselves. And Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witchfinder General, and his assistant John Stearns, went through the countryside in East Anglia, exploiting that power vacuum by going from town to town to hunt witches and get paid by the town per witch that they found.
[00:15:21] And Matthew Hopkins and John Stearns developed witch-finding techniques, which at the least pushed the limits of the law in England against torture by employing techniques such as watching and walking, which kept people awake for sometimes days on end, in order to pressure them and put on psychological torture as well as physical deprivation to get confessions.
[00:15:44] Hopkins and Stearns both wrote books about their witch-finding methods and cases, and those books made it over from England to New England, which we know because they were cited in one of the early cases where the officials said they were employing the Witch finding techniques coming out of England, referencing the Matthew Hopkins techniques. Specifically, the officials in New England were watching, which is keeping an observation on a person you're keeping awake. You've got people rotating in around the clock, keeping this person from falling asleep, in order to watch 24 hours a day to see if imps or familiars come to suckle the witch's teats.
[00:16:29] So that's what they have. They have these peeping toms, these little pervos sitting there keeping a woman on a three-legged stool or something all day and night, just watching for imps and familiars to come and give suck. And in some cases the watchers claim to actually see this. Sometimes they reference things like bugs that came into the room or mice that came into the room.
[00:16:52] But they assume that those are familiars because they're in Witch finding mode and they find witches. And so some of these methods were actually used in New England, and therefore Hopkins' Witch Hunt was influential. And you look at the timing of when Hopkins was active in the mid 1640s and the timing of the first witchcraft case in New England, which was 1647, the trial of Alice Young. Timing wise, you could see the transmission of this information from England. All these books are being written about the various English Witch trials, and they're coming over to America and letters. People coming over are spreading the word, "oh, there's all these Witch trials going on in England," and so New England thinks it's happening there, it's probably happening here because we are God's chosen ones.
[00:17:52] As we know from talking to Mary W. Craig about Scotland, the holier you are, the more the devil's going to attack you. And that's a theory at the time that was also prevalent in England and New England. That's why New Englanders thought they were in the battleground between God and Satan. That's where Satan's gonna be the most active, and he is gonna employ the most witches because they were establishing a new, pure Christian church.
[00:18:23] And now we'd like to talk to you about the settling of Connecticut. Following the establishment of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, multiple nations and colonies vied for control of what is now the state of Connecticut, though indigenous peoples already held that area.
[00:18:39] Sarah Jack: The Dutch were the first Europeans to claim land in Connecticut when they established a trading post known as the House of Good Hope in what is now Hartford in 1633.
[00:18:52] Josh Hutchinson: Over that same year, a group of English from the Plymouth Colony followed and established a trading post of their own in the area which is now Windsor.
[00:19:03] Sarah Jack: It's of value to remember that through this claiming and establishing there was conflict happening, attacks, they were attacking each other.
[00:19:16] Josh Hutchinson: In the early 1630s, some of the Native American leaders went to John Winthrop in Massachusetts to try to get him to come and help them fight the Pequot Nation. And John Winthrop wasn't interested at the time in doing that, but they went to Edward Winslow in Plymouth and he was interested, so he sent, this guy, a military leader, Matthew Holmes over to form the trading post.
[00:19:56] And I think that's of value to know that there's all this conflict going on and this is the background of, which trials are suddenly happening in the 1640s, but there's always this conflict and tension there and threats and actual combat.
[00:20:17] Sarah Jack: In 1635, settlers from Dorchester in the Massachusetts Bay migrated to the vicinity of the Plymouth trading post.
[00:20:26] Josh Hutchinson: Around the same time, a group of English migrants came to the same spot, armed with a document called the Warwick Patent, which does not exist today.
[00:20:36] Sarah Jack: The document was reportedly issued by the Earl Warwick in 1631 and entitled the patentees to a 120-mile band of land, stretching all the way from the western border of Rhode Island to the Pacific Ocean.
[00:20:50] Josh Hutchinson: Which is why Connecticut had land in Ohio territory given as a Western Reserve. It was based off the Warwick patent. After America had become an independent nation and Connecticut was a state and the nation's expanding to the west they're still like, but the Warwick patent, and so they actually gave them this chunk of Ohio.
[00:21:18] Today we only have John Winthrop, Jr.'s 1662 copy of the patent, which he used in negotiating a charter for Connecticut from King Charles II.
[00:21:29] Sarah Jack: The community these groups established was initially called Dorchester but soon renamed Windsor.
[00:21:35] Josh Hutchinson: Nearly simultaneously to the development of Windsor, communities were established in Wethersfield, Saybrook, and Hartford.
[00:21:43] Sarah Jack: In 1636, the settlements of Hartford, Windsor and Wethersfield came together to form the colony of Connecticut. Saybrook retained its independence as a separate colony.
[00:21:54] Josh Hutchinson: In 1637, a devastating war was waged by the English colonists against the Pequot Nation.
[00:22:02] Sarah Jack: The following year, more English colonists arrived creating the New Haven Colony.
[00:22:07] Josh Hutchinson: In 1639, Connecticut Colony adopted the fundamental orders, which framed its government.
[00:22:14] Sarah Jack: In 1642, Connecticut banned witchcraft. This law was based upon the laws of England and Massachusetts Bay, as well as biblical injunctions in Exodus 22:18, Leviticus 20:27, and Deuteronomy 18:10-11.
[00:22:30] Josh Hutchinson: Exodus 22:18. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
[00:22:35] Sarah Jack: Leviticus 20:27: "A man also or woman, that hath a familiar spirit or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death. They shall stone them with stones. Their blood shall be upon them."
[00:22:46] Josh Hutchinson: Deuteronomy 18:10-11. "There shall not be found among you anyone that maketh his son or daughter to pass through the fire or that useth divination or an observer of times, or an enchanter or a witch, or a charmer or a consulter with familiar spirits or a wizard or a necromancer.
[00:23:10] Sarah Jack: The Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641 stated, "if any man or woman be a witch (that is hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit), they shall be put to death."
[00:23:21] Josh Hutchinson: In 1644, Connecticut and Saybrook united.
[00:23:25] Sarah Jack: In 1646, John Winthrop, Jr. founded the Pequot Colony, which was later renamed New London, intending it to be a center of alchemical study.
[00:23:34] Josh Hutchinson: In 1650 Connecticut codified its laws.
[00:23:38] Sarah Jack: The code is written by Roger Ludlow, the colony's only lawyer, and possible author of the Fundamental Orders, who was later sued for defamation by Thomas Staples, a husband of Mary Staples. In the Staples suit, it came out that Ludlow had pressured Goody Knapp to confess. As a result of the defamation action, Ludlow was ordered to pay the Staples' 15 pounds for calling Mary a witch.
[00:24:01] Josh Hutchinson: In 1662, John Winthrop, Jr. received a charter from King Charles II, which unified the New Haven and Connecticut colonies, and set the boundaries of Connecticut to include everything from the Narragansett Bay in the East west to the Pacific Ocean. North-south, the colony ran from the border with Massachusetts down to the Atlantic coast and included most of Long Island.
[00:24:27] Sarah Jack: However, Connecticut lost some of its territory in 1664 when the Duke of York was granted a patent, including what is now the state of New York.
[00:24:36] Josh Hutchinson: A 1664 agreement between John Winthrop Jr. and Governor Roger Williams of Rhode Island gave the latter colony control of all lands west of the Narragansett Bay and east of the Pawcatuck River.
[00:24:52] Sarah Jack: Additionally, the boundary of Massachusetts had been surveyed incorrectly in 1642, and was set seven to eight miles south of its proper place.
[00:25:01] Josh Hutchinson: Now that we've covered the background, let's get to the story of the first victim, Alice Young.
[00:25:10] Nothing is firmly known about Alice Young's life before her hanging.
[00:25:14] Sarah Jack: The first evidence of any Youngs in Connecticut are records showing that John Young had purchased land in Windsor by 1640.
[00:25:22] Josh Hutchinson: We know John was Alice's husband, because Thomas Thornton wrote to John Winthrop Jr. About John Young's illness, and Winthrop wrote on the back of the letter that "his wife was hanged for a witch at conecticut."
[00:25:36] Sarah Jack: John Young was a carpenter who lived in the Backer Row section of Windsor next door to the Thorntons.
[00:25:42] Josh Hutchinson: John and Alice had one known child.
[00:25:45] Sarah Jack: A daughter also named Alice.
[00:25:48] Josh Hutchinson: Not much is known of the Young's lives in Windsor, but we can give you some background on what Alice's life may have been like as a Puritan wife and mother.
[00:25:57] Sarah Jack: Married women of non-elite status were known by the title Goodwife.
[00:26:01] Josh Hutchinson: A woman was a man's helpmate.
[00:26:04] Sarah Jack: Her daily work involved caring for children, tending livestock, gardening, brewing, making clothes, cooking, cleaning, washing, and having babies.
[00:26:13] Josh Hutchinson: As deputy husbands, women sometimes also shared in their husbands' work duties.
[00:26:18] Sarah Jack: We know some things about Alice Young's neighbors on Backer Row.
[00:26:22] Josh Hutchinson: Thomas Thornton was a tanner.
[00:26:24] Sarah Jack: He married Anne Tinker in London in 1633.
[00:26:27] Josh Hutchinson: They lived among Anne's siblings, as several Tinker families settled in Windsor, most living on Backer Row.
[00:26:36] Sarah Jack: John Young purchased his land from William Hubbard, husband of Anne's sister Ellen Tinker.
[00:26:42] Josh Hutchinson: Thomas and Anne Thornton had six children at the time of Alice Young's trial.
[00:26:48] Sarah Jack: Priscilla, Thomas, Anne, Samuel, Mary, and Timothy.
[00:26:52] Josh Hutchinson: An epidemic, perhaps influenza, ravaged the Connecticut River Valley in 1647, beginning in the spring.
[00:27:00] Sarah Jack: Thomas Thornton lost four children to the epidemic, Priscilla, Thomas, Anne, and Samuel.
[00:27:05] Josh Hutchinson: Priscilla died bravely, and her story was later preserved for posterity by Cotton Mather.
[00:27:11] Sarah Jack: Historians theorize that Alice Young was blamed for starting the epidemic through witchcraft.
[00:27:16] Josh Hutchinson: There are no records of Alice Young's trial, but a typical New England witch trial involved the following phases:
[00:27:25] 1.) misfortune.
[00:27:26] Sarah Jack: Number two, identification of the culprit.
[00:27:30] Josh Hutchinson: A complaint filed with the magistrates.
[00:27:33] Sarah Jack: A warrant for apprehension.
[00:27:36] Josh Hutchinson: The arrest of the suspect.
[00:27:38] Sarah Jack: And the examination with questions from the magistrate, intense physical examination by a jury of women, and possibly swim test to see if the suspect sank or floated. Sinking was a sign of innocence, while floating suggested guilt.
[00:27:58] Josh Hutchinson: Following the examination, the suspect was usually jailed, unless the magistrates thought there wasn't evidence to proceed with an investigation.
[00:28:11] Sarah Jack: Testimonies were gathered.
[00:28:14] Josh Hutchinson: An indictment was written.
[00:28:16] Sarah Jack: The grand jury reviewed the indictment. If they returned the verdict ignoramus, there is insufficient evidence, and the suspect is released. If they return the indictment billa vera, true bill, they find there is enough evidence for trial.
[00:28:31] Josh Hutchinson: Then the petty jury heard the evidence.
[00:28:35] Sarah Jack: They hear the evidence and deliver the verdict. If acquitted, the suspect is released only after paying jail fees. And we know of instances where some people perished, unable to pay those jail fees.
[00:28:47] Josh Hutchinson: Due to the terribly unsanitary conditions in the jails.
[00:28:53] Sarah Jack: If convicted. The sentence is announced.
[00:28:56] Josh Hutchinson: Following a guilty verdict, the justices either issue a death warrant or appeal to a higher court for a ruling on the case.
[00:29:05] Sarah Jack: If there was no appeal or the appeal is rejected, the suspect is led from the jail to the place designated for hanging. In Connecticut's case, we do not know the site of the Hartford witchcraft executions.
[00:29:16] Josh Hutchinson: The bound prisoner is then carried up a ladder by the executioner, who places the rope about the neck and pushes the convict off the ladder.
[00:29:26] Sarah Jack: The prisoner, hung from either a tree or a gallows, chokes out slowly. This could take 10 minutes or more, but usually the convict passed out and didn't have to experience the agony of a slow, ignoble death.
[00:29:38] Josh Hutchinson: The whereabouts of the bodies of those hanged for witchcraft are unknown.
[00:29:44] Sarah Jack: Why is that?
[00:29:46] Josh Hutchinson: The bodies of witches as rebels against God could not be placed among the Elect, the saints in a church cemetery. No respect whatsoever was afforded a witch.
[00:30:08] Sarah Jack: And some of them were excommunicated from the church before their execution.
[00:30:14] Josh Hutchinson: The first execution took place somewhere in Hartford. We don't know where.
[00:30:20] Sarah Jack: The old meetinghouse was located where the Old State House stands today. The hangings may have taken place on Meetinghouse Green or at another location in Hartford.
[00:30:32] We do not know where Alice's body was laid to rest.
[00:30:35] Josh Hutchinson: Tradition tells us some of the Salem victims were secretly retrieved and buried by family. However, we do not have even this much to go on regarding Connecticut's witch trial victims.
[00:30:47] Sarah Jack: After the hanging, the residents of Backer Row dispersed to other communities in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
[00:30:54] Josh Hutchinson: John Young survived the epidemic and relocated to Stratford, where he acquired land in 1652.
[00:31:02] Sarah Jack: He suffered from an illness, which impacted his skin and also caused John to lose hair and nails.
[00:31:07] Josh Hutchinson: John Young died in April 1661, and nobody ever claimed his property.
[00:31:13] Sarah Jack: The first record of Alice Young Jr. after her mother's hanging was for her marriage to Simon Beamon in Windsor in 1654.
[00:31:21] Josh Hutchinson: Interestingly, Simon Beamon had testified against two people accused of witchcraft in Springfield, Mary Lewis Parsons and her husband, Hugh Parsons.
[00:31:33] Sarah Jack: Alice Young Beamon and Simon Beamon resided in Springfield, Massachusetts. They raised a sizable family there.
[00:31:41] Josh Hutchinson: In 1677, Thomas Beamon, son of Alice Young Beamon and Simon Beamon sued a man for defaming him and his mother.
[00:31:50] Sarah Jack: The man allegedly said, "his mother was a witch and he looked like one."
[00:31:55] Josh Hutchinson: There's a lot of speculation about who Alice Young may have been and where she may have been born, and where she may have married John, whether she was a healer. None of this has been confirmed.
[00:32:09] Alice, like the rest of Connecticut's witch trial victims, has not been exonerated and still remains guilty as charged on the books.
[00:32:22] Now, here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[00:32:26] Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunt News.
[00:32:29] Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast is a project of End Witch Hunts movement. End Witch Hunts is a non-profit organization working to educate you about witch trial history and working to motivate you to advocate for modern alleged witches. You'll not find our message sensational or amusing, confusing, or muddied.
[00:32:45] Today, I want you to think about the phrase "additional efforts." Remember when the Connecticut witch trial history was minimized and overlooked, not widely known as a significant part of witch hunt history. Bringing Connecticut to the forefront of which trial conversation took additional efforts, efforts by dozens of individuals over several decades. But in the most recent years, the culmination of those efforts created a new wave of results, and now Connecticut witch trial victims are known.
[00:33:10] Now, we must all work with additional efforts to include the modern witch hunt horror, and witchcraft misconceptions in the everyday witchcraft conversations. Only additional efforts will integrate the modern witch hunt crisis and witch phobia into social justice action. The communities clutched by this behavior need to be acknowledged and supported.
[00:33:28] The United Nations Council for Human Rights is sending the message that we must all begin to address what is happening by making additional efforts. This last month, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported the severity of human rights violations and abuses rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks cause adverse human rights impacts on persons in vulnerable situations and the factors that affect their vulnerability. They have concluded that additional efforts, including more comprehensive data gathering and further research are needed to develop a greater understanding of the various aspects of this complex problem. It recommends a number of actions, such as developing comprehensive frameworks for prevention.
[00:34:11] The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recommends that states undertake action. South Africa, a nation that has been working toward the elimination of witchcraft attacks with overall success is still working to completely eliminate attacks and stop pagan discrimination. Damon Leff, friend of the podcast from episode 14, has dedicated his professional and personal efforts to legal reform action to stop all witchcraft discrimination. He has recently published a response to the Pan-African Parliament's own Guidelines on Accusations of Witchcraft and Ritual Attacks Towards Eliminating Harmful Practices and Other Human Rights Violations.
[00:34:47] He writes:
[00:34:48] "In July 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council draft Resolution 47, titled "Elimination of Harmful Practices Related to Accusations of Witchcraft and Ritual Attacks," called a Member States to condemn harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks that result in human rights violations to ensure effective protection of all persons in vulnerable situations likely to be subjected to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, and to promote bilateral, regional, and international initiatives in collaboration with relevant regional and international organizations, aimed at achieving an end to witchcraft accusations and consequent human rights abuses."
[00:35:25] He clarifies that: "The victims of witch-hunts are usually not Pagans, Witches, or practicing any spiritual practice typically considered Pagan."
[00:35:33] " Significantly, Resolution 47 emphasized that states "should carefully distinguish between harmful practices amounting to human rights violations related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks and the lawful and legitimate exercise of different kinds of religion or beliefs, in order to preserve the right to freely manifest a religion or a belief, individually or in a community with others, including for persons belonging to religious minorities.'"
[00:35:58] " In March 2023, the Pan-African Parliament released its own Guidelines on Accusations of Witchcraft and Ritual Attacks: Towards Eliminating Harmful Practices and Other Human Rights Violations. The 2023 document defines witchcraft in context, identifies two broad classifications of harmful practices related to the manifestation of belief in witchcraft; witchcraft accusations and ritual attacks, and other recommendations on both legal and non-legal measures the Member States could adopt to combat ongoing human rights violations. The Pan-African Parliament also draws appropriate attention to the need to balance competing rights in order to avoid criminalizing freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and culture."
[00:36:35] The guidelines highlight concerns for legal enforcement against human rights abuses and non-lingual and community-based intervention.
[00:36:43] " The Pan-African Parliament guidelines appear comprehensive in attempting to deal with the accusations of witchcraft and related harmful cultural practices on the African continent. The Pan-African Parliament concludes its report by encouraging the international community to continue to advocate for the victims and to advance the discourse on witchcraft, both generally and in relation to harmful religious and cultural practices."
[00:37:04] Thank you, Damon Leff, for your initiatives, and we will continue to amplify your efforts and message. By listening to what I'm sharing here about South Africa, you are enlightening your mind on modern witchcraft nuances and currents in your world. Modern witch-hunt advocates are very pleased with drafts of both the UN HRC resolution and the African Union guidelines. It will be up to all nations and states to implement the guidelines. Every state is in its own stage of confronting their witch-hunt complexities and need our support.
[00:37:32] How can you be a part of these important additional efforts? Write our world leaders. Write your community leaders. Please see show notes for writing to the South African Minister of Justice and the South African Law Reform Commission to encourage robust action on their intentional guidelines.
[00:37:47] The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, an organized collaboration of diverse collaborators, has been working for an official state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut Colony. We support the Joint Committee on judiciary bills HJ Number 34, "Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut." We still need your additional efforts. Will you take time today to write a house representative and a senator asking them to recognize the relevance of exonerating Connecticut witch trial victims? You can do this whether you are a Connecticut resident or anywhere else in the world. You can do this as any political party member. This is a bipartisan effort. You should do it from right where you are. You can find the information you need to contact a legislator with a letter in the show links.
[00:38:29] Today, we got the update that the house has calendared the bill. We need the Senate to follow suit, and we need both floors to vote yes to bill HJ Number 34. Your message to them gets this done. You can follow our progress by joining our Discord community or Facebook groups. Links to all these informative opportunities are listed in the episode description.
[00:38:48] I would like information from on the ground in India. Advocates with information and education about which accusations in India, I want to hear from you. Please reach out through our websites or social media and tell me the nuances of what's happening and what can be done.
[00:39:02] Please support End Witch Hunts with your donations or purchases of educational witch trial books and merchandise. You can shop our mech at zazzle.com/store/EndWitchHunts or zazzle.com/store/thoushaltnotsuffer and shop our books at bookshop.org/EndWitchHunts. We want you as a super listener. You can support Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast production by super listening with your monthly monetary support. See episode description for links to these support opportunities.
[00:39:31] We thank you for standing with us and helping us to create a world that is safe from witchcraft accusations.
[00:39:36] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:39:39] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:39:39] What did we learn today, Josh?
[00:39:43] Josh Hutchinson: We learned about witchcraft belief in early New England, the founding of Connecticut, the founding of the town of Windsor, and of course about Alice Young.
[00:39:54] Sarah Jack: I noticed there was a lot of conflict.
[00:39:57] Josh Hutchinson: Yes. Tons of it. And one observation I've made is that it only takes a few minutes to tell the whole story of Alice Young's life.
[00:40:09] Sarah Jack: But we're gonna spend more than a few minutes looking for more information on these victims.
[00:40:15] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:40:20] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:40:22] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:40:25] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:40:27] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[00:40:30] Sarah Jack: Please support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:40:35] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:40:38]

April 13, 2023

Marilynne K Roach on the People of the Salem Witch-Hunt

Records of the Salem Witch Hunt by Bernard Rosenthal

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Show Notes

Esteemed historian and author Marilynne K. Roach (The Salem Witch Trials, Six Women of Salem) gives us a focused conversation on four individuals of the Salem Witch Trials: Reverend John Hale, Samuel Wardwell, Bridget Bishop and Rebecca Nurse. She also gives us an inside scoop on the 2022 Elizabeth Johnson Jr. exoneration hearing. Get a glimpse of what her next book, Six Men of Salem has in store. Enjoy the return of “Minute with Mary” by Mary Bingham, accused witch descendant, writer and researcher. Be sure to listen all the way through the episode to hear about the opportunities to hear Dr, Leo Igwe of Advocacy for Alleged Witches during his May 2023 New England speaking tour.

Links

The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-By-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege by Marilynne K. Roach

Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials by Marilynne K. Roach

Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Transcript

[00:00:00]
[00:00:20] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to this episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:27] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: We're joined in this episode by acclaimed Salem Witch Trials historian and author Marilynne K. Roach. We'll be talking about two women and two men involved in the Salem Witch Trials: Bridget Bishop, Rebecca Nurse John Hale, and Samuel Wardwell.
[00:00:47] Sarah Jack: Marilynne compiled all the biographies in Records of the Salem Witch Hunt.
[00:00:51] Josh Hutchinson: She wrote Six Women of Salem, and now she's working on Six Men of Salem.
[00:00:58] You're welcome. It's my pleasure.
[00:01:02] Sarah Jack: I'm pleased to introduce Marilynne K. Roach, author of the Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege, Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials, who is currently working on Six Men of Salem.
[00:01:21] Josh Hutchinson: You compiled the biographical notes for Records of the Salem Witch Hunt. Did that prepare you for writing your biographies in Six Women of Salem?
[00:01:30] Marilynne K. Roach: I would imagine that working on the biographies would've helped, cuz I knew more about where you can look. Genealogy books were great, if something existed for that particular person, and old town histories, as well as standard histories of the witch trials, the base, the contemporary sources.
[00:01:51] Of course that always helps, but for obscure characters, a lot of it can be luck, but just trying to look at everything you can get your hands on or over the internet or library archives when you can. That seems to be the way to find things. I think serendipity is the word that refers to find things, but you just have to keep digging.
[00:02:18] Sarah Jack: What's the difference between writing history and writing biographies?
[00:02:24] Marilynne K. Roach: A narrower focus on biographies. Well, history is the big concept, also, but it's human history, and individual humans are making it. One really leads into the other. And I think of myself as a storyteller, wanting to tell a good story, witch trials are, but getting the facts correct, being accurate, and trying to understand it in context, and then explaining it, presenting it in context, because the events of 1692 didn't take place in a vacuum in their own time. And it certainly didn't take place in a 20th or now 21st century mindset, either.
[00:03:11] So yes, you have to think about a big picture, but if it's a particular individual, also focusing it more narrowly on that first. But there's an amazing amount of connections that you could find, where if you find out who else is in the room when things happen or who they're related to or if they had a quarrel with a particular neighbor, which suddenly makes sense of a name that might show up in the testimony or some other paperwork, wills are good, deeds. But just look at everything you can. It's my advice.
[00:03:53] Josh Hutchinson: With biographies, once you've collected all the sources that are available, how do you fill in gaps? Do you just look at other people's lives?
[00:04:06] Marilynne K. Roach: The lives of the people that your subject interact with, yeah, you need that. But finding all the information, I only wish. There's always something that's missed, something you don't know about the archive, you can't get. As I write, I find, and I'm all reminded by seeing my agent, that there is something that's not explained, that there's a hole in the story, and you have to go looking in that direction and hope, hope that you find something and then backtrack and put it in, put the information in. And does it affect the other events that you've already found out about? Does it put them in a new light? It just makes it a little more interesting or complete lot there? There's really no end to it, but try to get as much as I can about people. Of course, as soon as a manuscript, let's say a publisher takes it, and they're gonna print it, and they've wrenched it out of my hands, then something always turns up. But not necessarily anything huge.
[00:05:13] Sarah Jack: Why is it important to think of the historical figures as individual people rather than statistics, stereotypes, or symbols?
[00:05:22] Marilynne K. Roach: The Salem Witch Trials particularly and history in general tend to be stock characters or two dimensional stereotypes, as you said and not for real people at all. There's just here's an example of someone who lived 2, 300 years ago. They didn't have a lot advantages. Some people it seems nowadays can't really get over the fact that people had to live differently because just because of the technology. To the point where people say things almost they weren't very smart, then they had to watch TV by candlelight because there was no electricity.
[00:06:02] And also, information turns up as various people look into an era or a personal topic so that more information does become available, and the more real a particular person will seem, and they were individuals. Assuming I'm remembered 300 years from now, I hope the book's still in print, but not necessarily. I am a person, and I would like my individuality. Not that I broadcast that. I'm always talking about some other character.
[00:06:39] Too many historical characters generally, and the Witch trials specifically, which has a lot of urban legend attached to it. The characters seem to be not real people. They're symbols of something else. They're symbols of something we don't approve of or just of the past, which is a really foreign country to most people. None of us have been there personally, but I don't think there's a great knowledge of what other eras were like, and they're all slightly different.
[00:07:13] They are individuals, and they were actual people then. If we can find out what they were like, we'd have a better understanding of what they went through and what their resources were and what they had to face.
[00:07:28] Josh Hutchinson: With the past being a foreign country, as you described, how do you get inside historical figures' heads?
[00:07:37] Marilynne K. Roach: I try to get inside my subjects by trying to find out about not just their lives, but the culture and what their particular place within it was. In my other book, Six Women of Salem, I prefaced the, and the chapters were fiction, identifiable, fictional episodes, in italics. Oh, I'm not lying about anything. This is make believe, but I believe it's based on as much as I could find. So I'm trying to get in the heads, but there's no guarantees. I don't want people to assume I'm either lying about it or believe the whole thing. With the book I'm currently working on about Six Men of Salem, a lot of that was done during Covid when I was quarantined with all six men. It seemed like ghosts, and their opinions, and I had to get down to work and go out and do things. So it made me get down to work, but it also focused me on thinking about them as I tried to do with the six women in the first book. But yes I'm still haunted by them, and I only hope I get what they might have been thinking generally accurate to their personalities. Otherwise, I could be haunted, even.
[00:09:07] Sarah Jack: When you consider what the other people in their era were saying about them and then what we can say about them now, they're not gonna haunt that. They're gonna celebrate that.
[00:09:19] Marilynne K. Roach: I hope so. You could read somebody's testimony about their terrible neighbor, and we read it, and she seems perfectly innocent, so I'm assuming the transcription of whatever they said was accurate, but the viewpoint totally different.
[00:09:36] Sarah Jack: How can we look at what an individual's perspective is versus what their experience is? For example, on the way to the gallows, they were experiencing something going there, but their perspective of what's happening to them, are those two important dynamics?
[00:10:00] Marilynne K. Roach: They're facing death. They know it's unfair. Sometimes family was in the crowd waiting to see them off, who was sympathetic to them, and they got to say a heartfelt goodbye. That was allowed. They were allowed to speak at the gallows to give last words, and that you often described as very affecting, and it moved some people to. But there's other people there who still believe that they're guilty as charged, that the person about to be hanged is guilty as charged, and they're not being sympathetic about it. I don't know which side had the more population in the crowd, probably the people who didn't like them. So I try to imagine what that would like.
[00:10:48] And besides the fact that this is gonna hurt, it's a considered a shameful death to be hanged. It's embarrassing. Certainly it hurts, it's death for crying out loud. But they're also gonna have to face God and answer their lives, which is why the people wouldn't lie and say that they were guilty. They weren't going to have that stain on their soul if they could possibly help. And they stood fast and spoke the truth to the crowd, and only some people were listening.
[00:11:20] But more and more as the summer went on, I guess I tried to put myself in their place and what would I experience? But, that's really the guesswork, because my life has been different than theirs.
[00:11:33] Josh Hutchinson: We'd like to talk about John Hale now, and how was he involved with the trials?
[00:11:41] Marilynne K. Roach: Reverend John Hale was the minister in Beverly, which is across the estuary from Salem. His house still stands, by the way. Some of his parishioners were accused by neighbors, and he was, I guess you get a summons to come to court as a witness. He did relate what the various feelings feelings of neighbors had been about those individuals.
[00:12:08] He doesn't come out and say they're witches or that he thinks they're guilty, but he's relating these suspicious events, and some of them were suspicious, and their general character in the neighborhood, but he believed that the afflictions on the supposed bewitched was real longer than others did. There's a mention in Thomas Brattle's letter explaining why things were going wrong, why he thought the court is proceeding wrong, and he said, by this time it's fall, " only Paris, Noyes, and Hale still believe that this is witchcraft." And Samuel Parris's daughter and niece have been the first to be afflicted, so he is worried sick kids in the family.
[00:12:56] Reverend Noyes is one of the ministers in Salem, which is where all the turmoil trials is going on and then Hale across the river in Beverly. You could get there in a few hours on horseback. I find him sympathetic, Hale, because although he believes that's what's going on for longer than he should have, he does come to his senses.
[00:13:22] He seems like an otherwise nice person. And after the trials are over, his congregation still thinks highly of him. They're not cutting off his pay as in some, as with Samuel Parris. They were ongoing problems with his congregation. But Hale didn't have those problems, and he wrote a book afterwards. That helps. We have his words. He wrote about witchcraft, turned out to be mistaken that they relied too much on ancient, as in pre-Christian even, opinions about what a witch was and how you identified them and later in the Christian Europe as assumptions that turn out not to be true. They're not really in scripture, but, and they really don't add up in retrospect, because 19 people have been hanged at this point and others have died by other means like disease. But I found him a sympathetic character, and he's on both sides. He's not actually an accuser. He believes them, he's on the side of the court and then it, in the end, he realizes he was so tragically wrong. The accusations get too close to home with his own family, which helps.
[00:14:48] He seems to have doubts, and every time throughout the course of the months that were consumed by this, people were confessing out of fear and the desire to live a little longer, but then someone would confess and say, "no, I really did that." And he believed them, too. Hale was caught between different information and too long trusted the wrong facts and opinions, but I think he came around, and it was too late, as you could see, to help the people who had died.
[00:15:24] Sarah Jack: I really like that you point out how his congregation was still supporting him at the end, because you definitely see how it was part of their church culture to often be in conflict with their minister.
[00:15:42] Marilynne K. Roach: It was a lot as conflict. Sometimes it stereotypes. The ministers were authoritarian, and people had to do what they said. They weren't even getting paid much of the time. Not that they wanted to be rich from being a minister in a small, rural town. But you did have to support your family.
[00:16:00] And there were conflicts. People had opinions. They spoke up, and they criticized. There was a lot of that in Salem Village, where the whole panic began, but not so much in Beverly, where Hale was the minister.
[00:16:16] Sarah Jack: And can you tell us a little bit about his family.
[00:16:19] Marilynne K. Roach: He was married to his second wife at the time of the trials. First one having died. And let's see, when his first wife was alive, the maid servant, hired girl, was stealing from them. They didn't realize that she's pretty clever about it. And the one of the neighbors was in on it and her family. They began to notice things missing.
[00:16:48] But the maid servant at least threatened Hale's daughter that she could raise the devil and that the neighbor was a witch, who would come and hurt her if she told her parents what was happening. And so, after the thefts were discovered, the maid servant, they never knew where she went. She just left.
[00:17:10] But the daughter didn't tell her father how afraid she had been until after all this was over, and he finds it out when his daughter's dead practically. That was sad. But she dies. There's a son from the first marriage, who's still alive, and he remarries some years later, and his children from that marriage, and his wife is, the second wife is going to have another baby, when somebody in the neighborhood accuses her of sending her specter to afflict them. This is at the very end of things of the panic.
[00:17:52] It's also getting into winter, and I think people's heads were cooling after the summer of everybody suspecting everybody else. But that's giving away the plot. But I mean, it's right in the history. He realizes his doubts before were what he should have been paying attention to.
[00:18:11] He wrote Modest Enquiry about in 1697, which was after the public fast that Massachusetts ordered, which is a church service. Everybody goes to their respective meeting house, and there's a religious service where people apologize to God and the community, for whatever's been going wrong, that has made life more difficult.
[00:18:35] The witch trial fiasco was one of the problems, not quite mentioned in the order for the fast, but everybody knows that's what it's about, along with other things like, oh, generally bad behavior, fractious youth and, therefore, there's international problems, because life is out of joint. But everybody knows this is about the witch trials. That was the occasion when the former high court Judge Samuel Sewall, who was on the court of Oyer and Terminer, made a personal apology in his congregation, which people noticed, cuz I guess he was the only one who stood up. But after that, Hale is thinking about what actually happened, and he begins to write the book. Let's see. I may have gotten this from Sewall's diary because he traveled to Salem now and then on court business or just cause he had relatives there, and he was talking with Hale, who mentions maybe we're writing a book. So it's 1697 when he does, but it didn't get published until after he died. So it was like 1701 that it came out, and it was not a huge seller, as I said. People get sick of the whole subject. Let's get beyond that and deal with the current topics and so forth, so on.
[00:20:02] A lot of people would really have forgotten it. Didn't wanna be reminded that they had been that wrong about so many things. But Massachusetts did finally make reparations to the survivors. Not everyone who was found guilty was hanged, because the panic ended before that happened. And also there were reparations to the families of people who didn't survive.
[00:20:31] And beginning in the early 18th century, some of the people who had been found guilty but managed to survive petitioned to have their names cleared. So just in case everything went wrong again, the death sentence would be not be reinstated, and that started them. But in 1711, the attainder, that is the guilty verdict, was reversed for the people who had petitioned for it.
[00:20:57] But not everybody got into the petitions, so actual exonerations continued and the last person was cleared by name last July, in 2022. So it took a while, but at least on paper they're clear, which was interesting to hear about and be a small part of writing letters to your legislature. But this is part of the actual paperwork of the trials. And I get the result in an email, not pen and ink with a quill, but the process had gone on through all that, those changes in history, and the history was completed in my own time.
[00:21:44] Sarah Jack: Thanks for sharing your experience.
[00:21:47] Marilynne K. Roach: It was a little thrilled when that finally happened, a lot of people who had worked on that and really worked on it.
[00:21:55] Sarah Jack: I'm so glad you got to be a part of that.
[00:21:57] Marilynne K. Roach: Middle school teacher in North Andover and her class were the driving forces behind it, in the civic class, to get justice for Elizabeth Johnson. And there was a hearing some while ago with the judicial committee in Massachusetts considered the question, and along with a whole list of other judicial questions about people who needed exoneration now, while they were still alive or other legal matters. And I was able to get a slot to speak a few words, strict time limit on it, in favor of Elizabeth Johnson, and I did it by Zoom. It helped to clear and then it went through other hoops and other commitments that other people were working on.
[00:22:49] Sarah Jack: Can you give us an idea of what you said for her during your testimony?
[00:22:54] Marilynne K. Roach: She survived, and she petitions to have her name cleared and she's left out of the names in the reversal of detainer and writes to. the General Court of Massachusetts, asking them to insert her name, and she never hears back from them again. So I told them that General Court, through the committee, that she had made this petition, and 300 years later we hoped that you finally do it.
[00:23:25] I quoted her words, because she was saying she was innocent, but a lot of people worked on that, and there's a documentary being made about process with the historians and the school kids and teacher. And it took years. It took less time for the state to declare the official dinosaur and the official cookie. But this is more important. Chocolate chip.
[00:23:53] Sarah Jack: Right now there's a bill proposed for the exoneration of the accused witches from Connecticut Colony.
[00:24:04] I descend from one of the accused, but she was not executed. Her name was Winifred Benham, and she was accused in 1697, so she was at the very tail end of Connecticut's trials, and she was the daughter of Mary Hale, who was accused in Boston.
[00:24:27] I feel very excited to be able to speak as a descendant. You were able to quote Elizabeth Johnson. We don't have a lot of that from Connecticut, because their records just are not with us. But we still have all of these other women, like Elizabeth Johnson Jr.
[00:24:49] They're an example that these women in this era that experienced this, they said they were innocent, and they asked to have their names cleared. But for the Connecticut victims, we have to say this for them, cuz, if they got a chance, we don't know what their words were, but I believe that they begged as well to be recognized as innocent.
[00:25:12] Marilynne K. Roach: In the eyes of the world, as well as in the eyes of God.
[00:25:16] Sarah Jack: We're excited for that. And it could all happen really fast, so we're on the brink of it. We're on the brink of it.
[00:25:26] Marilynne K. Roach: I look forward
[00:25:27] News at 11.
[00:25:30] Film at 11. Oh, that would be exciting.
[00:25:34] Sarah Jack: Thanks for all that great information on John Hale.
[00:25:36] Josh Hutchinson: And now it's time for your favorite segment. That's right, Minute with Mary. And here's Mary Louise Bingham to tell us more about Reverend John Hale and some of the lives that he touched.
[00:25:51] Mary Bingham: Reverend John Hale, the longtime minister at Beverly, Massachusetts, offered testimony at several trials for witchcraft in 1692 at Salem. Two testimonies of which are often spoken are those testimonies against Sarah Bishop and Dorcas Hoar, both who either lived near Beverly or in the town itself. However, he was also summoned to testify at my ancestor's trial on the 2nd of July, 1692. That was the trial of Sarah Wildes.
[00:26:29] Reverend Hale told the court about 1677 his member, Mary Herrick, brought her aging mother, Mary Reddington, to him for spiritual counsel at his home. Mary Reddington lived at Topsfield next door to Sarah and John Wilds. Mary did not like Sarah for reasons of which we can only speculate today.
[00:26:54] Could it be that Sarah had a supposed unsavory past and was now the stepmother to Mary's nieces and nephews? After all, Mary's sister, Priscilla was the first wife to John Wildes. Could it also be that John married Sarah only seven months after Priscilla died? We cannot be sure. However, according to Reverend Hale, Mary Reddington spoke of so many stories as to how Sarah afflicted or bewitched her, that he could not recount all of them.
[00:27:31] Mary, however, does tell Reverend Hale, her beloved nephew, John Wildes, Jr. did feel sorry for her. This signified to Mary that her nephew believed his stepmother was a witch.
[00:27:45] Reverend Hale continued by saying that on a separate occasion in 1672, he was invited to travel to Ipswich to pray and advise for Jonathan Wildes, Sarah's other stepson. Jonathan was possibly living with his uncle on East Street and seemed to be exhibiting strange behavior. Some neighbors thought he was strange. Others thought he was possessed, while others thought he was just a faker. After Mary Reddington's visit to him in 1677, Reverend Hale now believed that Jonathan was bewitched. Imagine if such hearsay was not acceptable as part of the court proceedings during Sarah's trial.
[00:28:34] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Mary, for those fascinating insights.
[00:28:39] Sarah Jack: Should we talk about Samuel Wardwell?
[00:28:41] Marilynne K. Roach: Samuel Wardwell was a farmer and a carpenter, but in the spare time, he was also a fortune teller, which was the problem. I think he could probably read people very well, but he would tell fortunes, and he was much addicted to it, said a neighbor who had to testify. He'd look at their hand, and he'd ponder and think about it and then come out with some kind of fortune.
[00:29:08] And enough of it came true that he had a reputation, but the orthodox line was, humans cannot do that. God's not going to tell you the future. So where is your information coming from, if not the devil? And if not deliberately palling around with satanic forces, certainly being sucked into it by buy some fast-talking devil, who you didn't realize was doing that until it's too late, and you were in their clutches. So he's known as a fortune teller. You're really not supposed to do that. It was like the end of August that he's finally named. He lives in Andover, which is north of Salem. And more people were accused in Andover than in Salem. In July, the infection of paranoia or bewitchment spreads to other communities, notably Andover.
[00:30:07] So he's named, and he is arrested on the 1st of September. Not all of the paperwork is there, but he and his wife and two eldest daughters are all arrested, and they all confess, but there's a lot of confession by then, especially among Andover, but he retracts his confession. They were led to believe, or they were just scared, said anything. At least bought them time, because if you confessed, you were held as a co-conspirator to testify against the rest of gang, which some of them acted as if they thought that they would be. That they wouldn't be killed if they turned state's evidence, but that would not have been the case. Eventually, as happened with some of the confessors, eventually they were tried and found guilty, because the confession was believed when the retraction was not.
[00:31:09] Some of the women in Andover who were questioned on a particular occasion that submitted a statement later when things were turning around and said that they didn't know what they said when they were being questioned at the hearing. They were just so frightened that they just agreed with whatever the magistrates were asking them. And they tended to lean towards really leading questions in those days, that occasion. So they just agreed with what they were being accused of to make the questions stop. Or they didn't remember what they'd said at all.
[00:31:43] One of the women said that, remember the name of the monarchs at the beginning of the whatever the clerk said. And after that they really could not remember what it said, but apparently they had confessed, and now they're going through tortures of conscience, because they've lied before God and the community and said that they were in Satan's grasp.
[00:32:04] And some of them would wonder, were they, had I really done this and not remembered it, had I really sold out to the devil? They came around to remembering that they had not. But Samuel Wardwell, did deny his confession. Some people were in jail for months, and then they tried. And the longer you were in jail, if you could stand the lack of sanitation, the better chance you had surviving for this panic to be over.
[00:32:32] But he's arrested the beginning of September. He's tried couple weeks later, where he denies his confession. He took it back. He said, "I did say those things in the written confession, but it's all false." But now the magistrates don't believe that. They believe what he said earlier. And he's tried and he's executed on the 22nd of September. So it took 22 days for the whole process, whereas his wife and the two girls held to the con fession. The wife did her, but they're not tried until the following year, January.
[00:33:11] Trials started up again, but we're not supposed to use spectral evidence. They eventually survive all this, and his wife, Sarah, is one of the first to petition to have her name cleared, so she survived. But course Samuel, he's in, I feel sorry for him. And I like the idea of fortune telling, even though it's a risky thing to try, but he's, things just don't work out for him. He keeps trying.
[00:33:41] Sarah Jack: He confided that he was afraid he would be named. Was he already worried if perhaps he had made some compact with the devil?
[00:33:53] Marilynne K. Roach: I'm not sure if he worried that he had himself compacted with the devil, but people certainly knew he was a fortune teller. He didn't seem to hide it. And that was, that prospect more and more dangerous. So he probably heard that the people were bandying his name around, as he told his brother-in-law. But after he revealed those suspicions of fears of what people might say about him, it seemed, I don't know if it made it worse, or if it was just going get bad anyway. Cause he was a known fortune teller.
[00:34:31]
[00:34:31] He did not get a premonition that he should get out of town now, but it takes money to successfully get away very far. Some people did escape, but they tended to have more money.
[00:34:46] Abigail Hobbs confessed fairly early on. Abigail Hobbs had been rather strange girl before all this panic started. But she had confessed cause she, "oh, I was out talking to devil last night." Sort of a joke. They took it seriously after things started getting really dicey.
[00:35:06] So she was witness against the other supposed witches. She'd seen so and so's spirit at such and such a witch meeting. So she was quite willing to testify against other people. But even that, eventually she was tried and found guilty, it's just that hangings were put on hold in October, so until they could get advice from England as how to proceed with the mess. And so she survives by default, even though she confessed, accused others, and was found guilty. But her name's included. She doesn't seem to have deserved it. On the other hand, she really wasn't a witch, just an inconvenient person to have around.
[00:35:56] Sarah Jack: Let's talk about Bridget. Why was she the first to be tried and executed?
[00:36:01] Marilynne K. Roach: Because she was a likely suspect, having been suspected before. She's a feisty character, but not a witch. I like her feistiness, as people tend to do now. They didn't appreciate it so much then. She had been accused of witchcraft, and the case went to the upper court . There's not enough of the paperwork left. There are only some depositions, as far as I know, by Juan, spelled, w o n n. And he says that he saw her spirit in the chicken house, and she's stealing eggs, and there was a black cat bothering people at night, while they were trying to sleep, but there really was no cat, so it was sent by Bridget Bishop.
[00:36:53] There's not a lot of specific details about the earlier case. But she had been suspected and the case referred to the upper court, which would've tried all capital cases, but then she's alive, so apparently the case was either dismissed or she was found not guilty.
[00:37:10] But neighbors remember that sort of thing. And she had had various disagreements, arguments with neighbors over boundary lines, chickens getting into the garden, a pig going amuck, and various neighborhood things. So she was probably a more likely suspect first, which she was hanged by herself, having been found guilty that was that case. Later executions, it was a group of people who had been hanged. Course of a few weeks, but after that first hanging in June, just Bridget had died at this point, one of the judges on the Oyer and Terminer Court quit, Nathaniel Saltonstall. He didn't like the overuse of spectral evidence where the supposed victims of witchcraft can see the forms, the apparitions, like a ghost, only from a living person coming at them.
[00:38:16] Only the victim can see this, not the other people in the world, they say. So he didn't think that was ironclad evidence, causing the court and Governor Phips to consult with experts on spiritual matters, the Boston-area ministers. And their answer was, you can't trust spectral evidence. It could be the devil's delusion which After the trials were all over, they realized, "we were deluded. The devil deluded us." But they ended this letter of advice by saying, "we trust your best good judgment to use proper scriptoral things.
[00:39:06] And witchcraft is illegal in England, too. And all the precautions, you know, the whole several paragraphs of precautions were pretty much ignored. And they continued with the other cases for that summer. Nobody who was tried in the summer of 1692 was found innocent. They were all found guilty. When the court convened in January 1693, it's now the Superior Court, because Massachusetts had just received a new charter to make its government legal. They did not have as much self-government as before, because the governor had to be appointed by the king, for one thing, but they had to reconsider all their laws and make sure they didn't conflict with the English code, witchcraft being illegal in England, too. Because of the way the trials had been going so wrong, the legislature established a permanent court for the capital cases and upper court, it's now a regular superior court, and also would not allow spectral evidence to be used against anyone.
[00:40:23] Those two things together, the people who were tried the following winter and the next spring, only three were found guilty, and those three were reprieved and eventually exonerated, they survived. During the summer of 1692, just the feeling was so out of hand that nobody had a chance, unless they could stay in jail for a good long time. Some of the women who were going to have babies but were condemned as witches got to wait until after they gave birth, and by then the panic was over and they got to survive and go home.
[00:41:03] Sarah Jack: There's so many layers to what was happening.
[00:41:07] Marilynne K. Roach: Stories within stories. It's not a simple story, good guys, bad guys, no.
[00:41:13] Sarah Jack: Is there anything that we need to set the record straight on around Bridget Bishop?
[00:41:19] Marilynne K. Roach: Well, her court papers were at an early date filed with another Goodwife Bishop's court papers so that they were assumed to be one person. This Bridget Bishop who lives in the middle of Salem and this Sarah Bishop who lived in the Danvers- Beverly line north of that in farming country. They're both married to men named Edward Bishop, which also makes it difficult. So Sarah and Edward Bishop ran an unlicensed, rowdy tavern. That story gets attached to Bridget, whose spector is identified by a few people as wearing a red petty coat or red bodice, which wasn't that unusual a color, if you could afford a good quality of dye. It's not considered too fancy necessarily, but the red petticoat, the tavern get put together, and she's running some dive somewhere in a lot of fiction, but yes, they're confused.
[00:42:34] Interesting character. Her second marriage before Edward was to an abusive husband, and she hit him back, and they both had to stand on the stalk, actually stand on in public as an apology for that sort of, which happened on Sunday.
[00:42:54] A genealogist figured her first husband was somebody Wasselbee, and if he didn't die just before, or on the voyage, shortly after they landed, because she gives birth in Boston to a child, who died. And there had been a child back in England who had died, also.
[00:43:19] She, at least a widow here in New England for a year before she marries Thomas Oliver. She supported herself somehow and moved to Salem and as her life there, which was apparently rocky. They do have a child, who's an adult, married woman in 1692. By then Bridget's Oliver has died.
[00:43:44] And she Bridget's married to one of the many Edward Bishops around, not necessarily related to the other Edward Bishops, but maybe someday someone will figure that out. So she's had an interesting life, and hard.
[00:43:59] Sarah Jack: She had child loss along with spouse loss. Would've that been looked at as just an experience many of the women were having, or would've that added to this list of negative things about her in people's eyes.
[00:44:17] Marilynne K. Roach: Sometimes the families where there had been a number of dead children blame the neighbors witching them too. Some other hard times that she had had to deal with, which maybe made her look cranky sometimes, I can identify. Not well, that's not my experience, but I can identify with her crankiness, but not the same reason. The crankiness seems to be standing up for her rights.
[00:44:47] Arguing with the neighbor whose chicken or Bridget's chickens got into the neighbor's garden and scratched it up, and she had words with the neighbor. But yes, she stood up for herself. Who owned the pig that was in contention? Was it hers? Should her husband have gone and sold it without asking.
[00:45:12] Josh Hutchinson: You've mentioned some trouble with her marriage to Thomas Oliver. What do we know about her relationships with him and with Edward?
[00:45:22] Marilynne K. Roach: They do have the child together, and that child survives. She grows up, but he hit her, and she hit him back. They both complained to neighbors at different times about being bruised by the other person. So she fought back. When they apparently did something in public, yelling at each other in public on a Sabbath, and they were both on the stand out in public with the crime on their hat or something. Be it stand out in public to the gaze of the populous or be fined. Thomas's grown daughter paid the fine for him and left stepmother to stand on the pillory, to the public gaze. So I guess she wasn't on the best of terms with her stepchildren, so it was odd, like Edward sounds not abusive, but on the other hand, he never shows up to speak on her behalf.
[00:46:33] Nobody speaks on her behalf. It's bad. It's, it's an interesting character. You hardly know he was still around, except she's identified as Edward Bishop's wife, something. And he shows up when Oliver's estate is settled after Bridget's death. He's living in the house that he built on the Oliver land that Bridget was given permission to use for the rest of her life, even though she was widowed, it didn't immediately pass to Oliver's heirs, interestingly enough.
[00:47:10] So he's in on the deeds and he's with probate, and the daughter inheritance, something like that. He certainly did not come to the and demand that his wife be perceived as an innocent person. John Proctor did that. He got arrested too. So there's that.
[00:47:33] Sarah Jack: Nobody was speaking up for her, but men were talking about dreaming about her, they were speaking about her. Why were they dreaming about her? Why were they complaining about that?
[00:47:46] Marilynne K. Roach: Pretty obviously dreams that certain men in the neighborhood had had. Either they found her threatening or alluring and therefore a threat. It's not my fault I had thoughts about her. Certainly it's all her doing in their minds, perhaps. She's identified by her clothing. They're obviously afraid of one reason or another. And the description of not being able to breathe, because she's pressing down on them in the night, supposedly, does match sleep disorder, which I think it's traditionally called the hag, where somebody dreams there's a witch on them trying to stop their breath, or sounds like those old legends of cats sitting on somebody's chest and sucking their breath out.
[00:48:42] They phrased their dreams in that manner, I think. Maybe she's so defiant. She's got fan base now. That is where you wanna be a fly on the wall.
[00:49:00] Josh Hutchinson: And you mentioned that she had a daughter who survived. What happened with her?
[00:49:07] Marilynne K. Roach: She's grown up and married a Christian, their first name. She's married to a fisherman. And they have a daughter. And the daughter's daughter was a school teacher in early 19th century Salem, taught all little kids to learn to read.
[00:49:25] She does have descendants, so they would just, I don't know how they got along with the neighbors, but after a few generations, they trusted to send their kids there to learn to read. And then they'd been, you know, the apology, reversal of attainder, and so forth. Or that generation just thought, we have come so far in this, these modern times, that would be like during the China trade years, but there were quite a few children in like the fourth generation.
[00:50:09] Rebecca Nurse was quite a different character and it didn't help her that she had a good reputation generally, and people spoke up for her. She had a, an extended family around her. Lots of kids. They're married, they have kids and the neighbors, the children to pull, testify for at least on paper, don't know if they called it to court. They get petitions signed.
[00:50:36] Lots of people signed the petition, which could be risky. By signing a petition, it might seem that then you, too, were backing a witch, if she's found guilty. But a lot of people stood up for her, and it still didn't do anything in the law. Whereas Bridget had a quarrelsome reputation, probably justified, she had reason to quarrel, but she's hanged, Rebecca's hanged. It was very dangerous.
[00:51:08] Sarah Jack: How do we know that Rebecca was so pious? Her contrast was so different to Bishop's.
[00:51:14] Marilynne K. Roach: Rebecca was a full member of the Church of Salem Town, lives in Salem Village, before the Village had its own parish. Her family supported her and a lot of neighbors did think highly of of her. I would say the level of support that she had indicated what people thought of her.
[00:51:38] And she was found not guilty, actually, the first part of her trial, which caused the afflicted witnesses, first those victims, to writhe in extreme pain and cry out that they were being hurt. If she's not actually indicted for that, at least, is a reason why the uh, chief justice had the jury reconsider some evidence that hadn't been emphasized before, where she had actually made the remark when certain confessed witches had been led into the court to testify.
[00:52:23] But she commented to whoever, "why are you bringing them in? They're one of us." Meaning us accused. The jury reconsidered whether she meant one of us confessed witches. She hadn't confessed, but was she witch? So the jury sent out. They come back and they ask, "what exactly did you mean by that statement?" And she doesn't say anything. She doesn't, so they figure, alright, she's guilty, they pronounce her guilty, and that's that. Then somebody tells Rebecca what had just happened and she realizes she hadn't heard the question from jury foreman. She's hard of hearing, considered elderly in her time, exhausted by all this and she lost her chance to speak up, presumably, would've helped. And might even have turned the tide of the trials, if somebody had actually been found not guilty at this point, but guilty. And that's how the court proceeds. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but almost.
[00:53:42] Josh Hutchinson: She was nearly reprieved, wasn't she?
[00:53:47] Marilynne K. Roach: Yes. After the verdict comes down, then her family and supporters get depositions together and the petition and get it as far as Governor Phips, who does issue a reprieve, and we don't have the paperwork, but he, he did. And that caused such reactions of agony, presumably they believed it themselves, such a reaction from her supposed victims, that some gentlemen of Salem, not named but maybe the magistrates, persuaded the governor to rescind it, and she's back on the list. That was an up and down, up and down. Hopes dashed. Hopes revived. Quite a rollercoaster there.
[00:54:40] Josh Hutchinson: She has quite a number of descendants. Sarah's one. She and I are both descended from Mary Esty, and we know there's a very active Towne Cousin Association and of course there's the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. So she has quite more of a legacy than many of the other persons that were accused.
[00:55:04] Marilynne K. Roach: And lots of descendants. I've met many of them. The fact that the farm, or most of it is there, and the house, it helps make it more real if you can go to a place where things happen. And the Towne Family Association website and all that. I did give a talk on Six Women of Salem to one of the reunions several years ago.
[00:55:33] Josh Hutchinson: Do you wanna tell us anything about your new book you're working on?
[00:55:38] Marilynne K. Roach: I've my fingers is crossed. Makes you want to work a little magic spell to attract publishers, but you know, one mustn't do that. There's still a lot of work to do on it, but just proceeding chronologically, we've reached September. I need to fill in some blanks to explain things better or just blanks that, explain something more that's been lost, and the six guys are all very real. Some, realer than others. There's more information on some than on others, but there's that they were chosen as these six women were chosen because there is some biographical information. Just the trials where there might be a few papers to somebody about being arrested and jail bill or something, but what did they say?
[00:56:41] What were the neighbors saying about, and before all this blew up and the panic started getting out of hand, what did they, what were they doing the rest of their lives? Does it show up in town records? Especially for the men who had a wider world to move around in. Military stuff going on.
[00:57:02] The problems with French Canada, the French King, the English Glorious Revolution over there. What's going on in New York? What's going on in the wilds of Maine, practically coast, not a lot of hinterland for the English yet, but the indigenous people, the French allying, the economic situation. I had to try and find out something about all that, but it all touches the story, and I hope I know enough to at least make it logical.
[00:57:39] Sarah Jack: It's gonna be great. It's gonna be really important. Thanks for taking it on.
[00:57:45] Marilynne K. Roach: It's fascinating. It's whole bunch of rabbit holes, but they're all interesting. I hope they approve. Maybe sometimes a writer is more accurate than the subject would like that to be, depending what you're saying. But there can be surprises, too of it. Hathorne for example, was praised for his mercy at one point, not by the accused witches, but you'll see when it happens.
[00:58:17] Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with another important update.
[00:58:20] Sarah Jack: This is End Witch Hunts News.
[00:58:22] I am so excited to announce an incredible east coast speaking tour week that we get to assist with Dr. Leo Igwe, the director of the Advocacy for Alleged Witches nonprofit organization will be in the area. Myself and Josh Hutchinson are Salem Witch Trial descendants and co-founders of End Witch Hunts Movement, our parent organization. It is an incredible honor for us to organize a week of these speaking engagements during his May speaking tour in the United States and to accompany him as he speaks in both the Salem, Massachusetts area and in the Hartford, Connecticut area. Both places of historical significance to Early American Colony Witch Trials History.
[00:59:01] We would like to thank friends of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, Rachel Christ-Doane and the Salem Witch Museum, for hosting a virtual presentation of Leo Igwe on Monday, May 15th. Please go to their Facebook event to RSVP.
[00:59:15] Witch persecutions and trials are ongoing incidents in Africa and other nations, reportedly at least 60. Witchcraft accusation is still a form of death sentence. Across the continent, thousands, mainly women and elderly persons or children are accused, tried, attacked, killed, imprisoned, or banished every year.
[00:59:37] Join the Salem Witch Trial Museum on May 15th for a fascinating virtual lecture given by Dr. Leo Igwe. In his presentation, he will use several cases to illustrate the range of Witch persecutions, and why this early modern phenomenon persists in contemporary Africa. The Zoom link will be shared on their event page 24 hours prior to the event. This first event at the Salem Witch Museum is virtual, but Dr. Leo Igwe will be with us in Salem, touring the historic sites guided by a local seasoned in the history, End Witch Hunts board of directors member, and Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast host of "Minute with Mary," Mary Bingham.
[01:00:15] Tuesday, May 16th is your chance to experience a very special evening of in-person conversation with Leo at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers. Please see the Facebook event for details. Thank you to Dan Gagnon and the homestead director and board members for hosting us.
[01:00:33] Isn't this a great week? Make sure you mark your calendars.
[01:00:37] Next you can enjoy an in-person speaking event with Dr. Igwe at Central Connecticut State University on Wednesday, May 17th. Thank you for hosting, Dr. Kathy Hermes, Connecticut Explored Magazine, and the University Library. While in the Hartford area, Leo will be touring known witch trial historic sites with author and co-founder of the Connecticut Witch Memorial Facebook page, and End Witch Hunts board of directors member Beth Caruso.
[01:01:01] But wait, there is more. On Thursday afternoon, May 18th, Leo will be presenting at the Stanley-Whitman House living history center in Farmington, Connecticut. This is hosted by friend of the podcast, Andy Verzosa. I want to break off to congratulate Andy and the Stanley-Whitman House. They have been selected by the award committee of the Connecticut League of History Organizations to be awarded, not one but two 2023 Awards of Merit. The first award is for the museum's book, Memento Mori: Remembered Death, and the second award is for their commissioned play, The Last Night.
[01:01:35] And last but not least, you can support the Stratford Historic Society by attending their inaugural Goody Bassett Ball on May 20th. This is not a speaking engagement for Leo, but Sarah, Josh, and Leo and other members of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project will be in attendance. And we would love to talk to you about the history, the podcast, and how the speaking tour went.
[01:01:56] Thank you to all these witch hunt and witch trial advocates and leaders of witch trial history for your thoughtful collaborations and for giving Leo a platform to amplify his message. We want to see you there, listeners. Please come hear the talk and shake hands with us. This is a very important and special opportunity that is history in the making.
[01:02:14] This is my first time to the historic sites of my ancestors, Rebecca Nurse and Mary Esty. This is Leo's first in-person interactions with historic witch trial communities in New England. Come join us and make this a week that magnifies the importance of witch hunt education and action against it. Look for Facebook events for all these occasions posted by our social media.
[01:02:37] Would you like to know more about Leo or any of these event hosts? You are in luck, because we have some great podcast episodes for you to listen to. For more on Leo, listen to episode, "Witchcraft Accusations in Nigeria with Dr. Leo Igwe." And to learn more about Beth Caruso and Dr. Kathy Hermes, listen to episode, "Between God and Satan." And to learn more about Dan Gagnon, listen to the episode "Rebecca Nurse of Salem." And to learn more about Andy Verzosa and The Last Night play, listen to episode, "Introducing The Last Night, a Connecticut Witch Trials Play" and keep your eyes open, because another episode with Andy Verzosa will be publishing in the next few weeks.
[01:03:16] Get involved by visiting endwitchhunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop or merch from our Zazzle shop. Our links are in the show description. Come hear Leo. Invite your friends and family. See you there.
[01:03:31] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that information. We'll be sure to head out and attend these events.
[01:03:40] Sarah Jack: Meet you there.
[01:03:41] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shall Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:03:46] Sarah Jack: Join us next week for our next round of Connecticut Witch Trials 101.
[01:03:52] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:03:56] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:03:59] Josh Hutchinson: Tell all your friends, family, acquaintances, neighbors, and pets about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:04:07] Sarah Jack: Keep supporting our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org again.
[01:04:14] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:04:17]

April 6, 2023

Connecticut Witch Trials 101, Part 1

Connecticut Witch Trials 101 Bibliography

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Show Notes

This is Part 1 of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast’s Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series. Take in this informative New England colonial history conversation with your cohosts and accused witch descendants, writer and podcast producer, Joshua Hutchinson and End Witch Hunts President and people connector extraordinaire, Sarah Jack. Enjoy the new segment, “Minute with Mary” by Mary Bingham, accused witch descendant, writer and researcher. This episode begins the story of Connecticut’s known witch trial victims with only fact backed, trustworthy research and sources. Take advantage of the expansive bibliography, and do some educational reading. Dig into the research with us. This series has been created with thoughtful inquiry and consideration of historian expertise, historic record and available archived material. How do we know what we know? We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Links

March 29,, 2023 Discussion Panel with State Representative Jane Garibay on Bill HJ #34, A Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut.

Press Conference on Legislative Bill H.J. No. 34, March 8, 2023

Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: This is part one of our Connecticut Witch Trials 101 series.
Sarah Jack: This series will serve as an introduction to witch-hunting in Connecticut.
Josh Hutchinson: Enjoy.
Sarah Jack: You're gonna learn and be informed on the history.
Josh Hutchinson: Witch trials in Connecticut occurred between 1647 and 1697.
Sarah Jack: 45 individuals were accused.
Josh Hutchinson: 34 were indicted.
Sarah Jack: 11 executed.
Josh Hutchinson: The first execution occurred [00:01:00] May 26th, 1647 when Alice Young of Windsor was hanged in Hartford.
Sarah Jack: Mary Barnes was the last to be hanged, January 25th, 1663.
Josh Hutchinson: Though the last execution occurred in 1663, they still had trials until 1697.
Sarah Jack: The last indicted and arrested were mother and daughter Winifred Benham, Sr. And 13 year old Winifred Benham, Jr.
Josh Hutchinson: We'll bring you more on all of these individuals as the series goes on.
We've carefully researched these episodes and going to share with you now the sources that we've been using in compiling this information. The Devil In the Shape of A Woman by Carol F. Karlsen. Entertaining Satan by John [00:02:00] Demos. The Devil's Dominion by Richard Godbeer. Witchcraft Myths in American Culture by Marion Gibson. Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England by David D. Hall. Before Salem by Richard S. Ross III. Detestable and Wicked Arts by Paul B. Moyer. Escaping Salem by Richard Godbeer. Prospero's America by Walter Woodward. Records of the Particular Court of Connecticut, 1639 to 1663. The Samuel Wyllys Papers. The Matthew Grant Diary. John Winthrop, Sr's Journals, Volume One. John Winthrop Sr's Journal, Volume Two. "Between God and Satan," an article by Dr. Katherine Hermes and Beth [00:03:00] Caruso. John Winthrop, Jr's Medical Records. We'll have links to all of these in the show description.
Sarah Jack: The facts that we talk about are from the primary sources.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes. In each segment we'll be presenting to you how we know what we know.
Sarah Jack: A primary source is a record or writing from the era giving us details of the events.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, we'll be sharing a number of primary and secondary sources for you to do your own research, if you want to carry things further from what you hear in these episodes. We do recommend all of these books that we're using.
Sarah Jack: These authors analyze primary sources and interpreted what was happening in [00:04:00] these colonies based on those, but it is young research, and there's limited information. Maybe more information will reveal itself. That's what my hope is, that we find more records, that when you or any one of us take another look at some of these records, maybe we see it, maybe we see something that wasn't noticed before.
Josh Hutchinson: Do we want to give all the victims a name and the story that they deserve?
Sarah Jack: We're still searching for the names of many of the women like Goody Bassett. We wanna find your name. We can track her story, but we don't know her first name. We don't know her maiden name. We want to know.
Josh Hutchinson: In between 1647 and 1663, 15 people were hanged for witchcraft in just Massachusetts and Connecticut alone.
Sarah Jack: That's a really important fact. [00:05:00] 15.
Josh Hutchinson: 15, and 11 of them were hanged in Connecticut. So Connecticut was the deadliest state for witchcraft accusations.
I want to emphasize that there were a lot of victims, especially and say that there's, this is substantive, this is meaty. There were a lot of people, and we're gonna talk more about each one as time goes on. So don't worry that we're only giving your ancestor a brief gloss over. We will bring more detail to them. You don't have to remember every fact that you hear tonight. The transcript is available now, and we will be also converting this episode into a blog post. So you'll have [00:06:00] access to the names again, and then we'll speak to them more over the next two months.
And now we'd like to read for you a document called Grounds for Examination of a Witch believed to have been written by Connecticut Deputy Governor William Jones.
Grounds for Examination of a Witch.
Number one, notorious defamation by the common report of the people a ground of suspicion.
Sarah Jack: Second ground for strict examination. If a fellow witch gave testimony on his examination or death that such a person is a witch, but this is not sufficient for conviction or condemnation.
Josh Hutchinson: Three, if after cursing there follows death or at least mischief to the party.
Sarah Jack: If after quarreling or threatening, a present [00:07:00] mischief doth follow, for the party's devilishly disposed after cursing do use threatenings, and that also is a great presumption against them.
Josh Hutchinson: If the party suspected be the son or daughter, the servant or familiar friend, near neighbors, or old companion of a known or convicted witch, this also is a presumption, for witchcraft is an art that may be learned and conveyed from man to man, and oft it falleth out that a witch dying leaveth some of the aforesaid heirs of her witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: Six, if the party suspected have the devil's mark, for its thought when the devil maketh this covenant with them, he always leaves his mark behind him to know them for his own. That is, if no evident reason in nature can be given for such mark.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:08:00] Seven. Lastly, if the party examined be unconstant and contrary to himself in his answers this much for examination which usually is by question and sometimes by torture upon [strong and great presumption].
The first person known to have been tried for witchcraft in Connecticut was Alice Young. We know this from three sources, John Winthrop, Sr's journals, Matthew Grant's Diary, and John Winthrop, Jr's medical papers.
John Winthrop Sr. wrote that "one blank of Windsor arraigned and executed at Hartford for a Witch."
Matthew Grant in his diary wrote, "May 26th, 47, Alice Young was Hanged."
Winthrop Jr. wrote on the back of a medical record of John Young, [00:09:00] "his wife was hanged for witch at Connecticut."
One theory of why Alice was accused was this epidemic that went through Windsor in 47.
Sarah Jack: Since those entries are all we have to go on.
Josh Hutchinson: Those entries, and then looking at the records from Windsor, you can see that a lot of people died that year from some epidemic.
Several Windsor residents were killed in the epidemic, including children of many prominent citizens.
Sarah Jack: One who died was Priscilla Thornton.
Josh Hutchinson: She was the daughter of a tanner named Thomas Thornton, who lived next door to John and Alice Young.
Sarah Jack: After this life changing event the community [00:10:00] went through, he became a minister.
Josh Hutchinson: Cotton Mather later published Thomas Thornton's account of Priscilla's death. First published it in his appendix for a reprinting of James Janeway's, A Token for Children of New England in 1700, and then again in his own book, Magnolia Christi Americana.
From 1648 through 1654, another six individuals were executed for witchcraft in Connecticut. They were Mary Johnson, Goodwife Bassett, Joan and John Carrington, Goodwife Knapp, and Lydia Gilbert.
Mary Johnson of Wethersfield was a servant who was accused of witchcraft in 1648 and was pressured by Reverend Samuel Stone to confess. [00:11:00] When she eventually did, she said that she was discontented and asked a devil to come and do chores for her. This devil cleared her hearth and drove hogs out of her master's field. Johnson also confessed to murdering a child and to "uncleanness" with men and devils. She was not known to have any heirs when the accusation was lodged and is not known to have been pregnant. She was convicted December 7th, 1648, and hanged in Hartford shortly after.
Sarah Jack: And Cotton Mather gave us some of this information in his account, Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions in 1689.
Josh Hutchinson: The reality of the situation is we don't have much to go on other than [00:12:00] Cotton Mather. There's a court record that says, "the jury finds the bill of indictment against Mary Johnson that by her own confession she is guilty of familiarity with the devil. December 7th, 1648," one thing from Connecticut Colonial Records, what Cotton said, and then something in the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society.
And we'll have links to where you can find all of those online in the show notes.
Sarah Jack: Now we're gonna talk about the first couple that was arrested and hanged, Joan and John Carrington of Weathersfield.
Josh Hutchinson: John Carrington came to Boston in 1635 with his wife, Mary. Both were said to be 33 years old. They're next heard from in Wethersfield in 1643.
Little is actually known about the trial. The [00:13:00] indictment only states that the Carringtons had entertained familiarity with Satan, the great enemy of God and mankind, and by his help done works above the course of nature.
Sarah Jack: It's in March of 1651 that he's convicted for works above the course of nature.
Josh Hutchinson: This indictment's also in the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society. " A particular court in Hartford upon the trial of John Carrington and his wife 20th February, 1650 [which translates to 1651] Magistrates, Edward Hopkins, Esquire, Governor John Haynes, Esquire. Deputy Mr. Wells, Mr. Wolcott, Mr. Webster, Mr. Cullick, Mr. Clarke.
John Carrington thou art [00:14:00] indicted by the name of John Carrington of Wethersfield carpenter, that not having the fear of God before thine eyes thou hast entertained familiarity with Satan the great enemy of God and mankind and by his help hast done works above the course of nature for which both according to the law of God and of the established law of this Commonwealth Dow deserves to die.
The jury finds this indictment against John Carrington, March 6th, 1650/51.
Joan Carrington thou art indicted by the name of Joan Carrington the wife of John Carrington that not having the fear of God before thine eyes thou hast entertained familiarity with Satan the great enemy of God and mankind and by his help hast done works above the course of nature for which both according to the laws of God and the established law of this commonwealth thou deservest to die.[00:15:00]
The jury finds this indictment against Joan Carrington March 6, 1650/51."
So that's how we know he's a carpenter.
Sarah Jack: From what we can know by record, John likely had a son, John, with his first wife Mary. We learn about that in Entertaining Satan. Joan had no sons.
Josh Hutchinson: Goodwife Bassett of Stratford was tried and executed in 1651. We know a little about her, but we don't know her first name.
Sarah Jack: Earlier we talked about the definite connection that Thomas Thornton's family were neighbors of the John Young family, but there's also a possible connection to Bassett and her husband. Thomas arrived in Boston on the ship Christian in 1635. They settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts while Thomas Thornton lived there. [00:16:00] Then the Bassetts lived in Windsor at the same time as the Thorntons. In 1650, Thomas Thornton moved his family to Stratford, so did the Bassetts. Thornton was elected Stratford's deputy to the General Court in 1651, the year Bassett was hanged.
Josh Hutchinson: We know about Goody Bassett's execution largely through a subsequent lawsuit, where Mary Staples claimed to have been defamed as a witch through a chain of events that began with the execution of Goody Bassett and led to the execution of Goody Knapp and the suspicion of Mary Staples.
And this is not the last that we'll hear about Goody Knapp or Mary Staples.
Sarah Jack: We have some specific statements on trial record. "The governor, Mr. Cullick, and Mr. Clarke are desired to go down to Stratford to keep court [00:17:00] upon the trial of Goody Bassett for her life. And if the governor cannot go, then Mr. Wells is to go in his room. May 15th, 1651." In the Mary Staples defamation suit, Lucy Pell's testimony says, "Goodwife Bassett, when she was condemned, said there was another Witch in Fairfield that held her head full high." You can find out more about Goody Bassett and her connection with Thornton in "Between God and Satan" by friends of the show Dr. Katherine Hermes and Beth Caruso.
Josh Hutchinson: Nobody has pinpointed Goodwife Bassett's first name.
Sarah Jack: Here's a little more on Goody Knapp of Fairfield. Was her head held high?
She was executed in 1653. The information found is in this Mary Staples defamation suit.
Josh Hutchinson: The reason Mary Staples herself was accused of witchcraft was that following the execution [00:18:00] of Goodwife Knapp, Staples disputed the presence of teats on Goodwife Knapp's body. Roger Ludlow then claimed that Goodwife Knapp had told him that Mary Staples was a witch before she had been killed. The evidence indicates that Knapp actually remained silent throughout the proceedings, despite the pressure to confess and name names.
Sarah Jack: We know about this due to the New Haven Town Records.
Josh Hutchinson: Lydia Gilbert of Windsor was executed in 1654.
Sarah Jack: She was blamed for the misfiring of a gun during a militia exercise, which killed Henry Stiles.
Josh Hutchinson: She was indicted three years after the fatal accident.
Sarah Jack: That indictment was November 25th, 1654.
Josh Hutchinson: How do we know what we know about Lydia Gilbert? [00:19:00] We've read of her in several books. And those books trace their information to the Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society and The History of Ancient Windsor by Henry R. Stiles. We'll have links to those.
Sarah Jack: And she, along with Alice Young, have a memorial brick in Windsor.
Josh Hutchinson: A simple brick donated by a public citizen in a space where you can purchase memorial bricks. Nothing official, no details available for anyone stepping over her brick. She needs more. They all do.
Following the first seven accusations and executions for witchcraft in Connecticut and New Haven colonies, John [00:20:00] Winthrop Jr. started to become involved in witchcraft trials in the mid 1650s and prevented executions from happening until he left to get the charter for the colony of Connecticut from the government in London.
So the years 1655 to 1661 are relatively peaceful years in the annals of witch-hunting in Connecticut. John was the son of Massachusetts, governor John Winthrop Sr., The famous immigrant who wrote about the City on the Hill.
Sarah Jack: His expertise was in medicine, alchemy, science, and skepticism.
Josh Hutchinson: He practiced what was considered to be Christian alchemy, believing that the [00:21:00] two sets of beliefs were not at odds with each other but actually complimentary.
Sarah Jack: He was first involved in a witchcraft case in 1655.
Josh Hutchinson: Once he got involved, there were no more executions for a while.
Sarah Jack: But there were still accusations and trials.
Josh Hutchinson: Elizabeth Godman of New Haven was brought to court on witchcraft accusations in 1653 and 1655, but was not executed. In 1653, the court told her to behave herself and mind her own business. In 1655, she was examined August 7th, released from jail September 4th, but ordered to return to court in October, which she did on October 17th. Again she was warned to behave, and this time she was ordered to pay a 50 pound [00:22:00] bond for her good behavior, which she paid on January 1, 1656.
Sarah Jack: John Winthrop, Jr. may have had influence over this case. A man wrote to Winthrop Junior about efforts to identify the disease affecting Mary Bishop, Elizabeth Brewster, and Margaret Lamberton.
Josh Hutchinson: Goodwife Bailey and Nicholas Bailey of New Haven were banished for witchcraft in 1655. They were told to leave on July 3rd, but they dragged their feet and got called to court again August 7th, September 4th and October 2nd. The first two of those dates, August 7th and September 4th, they were in court with Elizabeth Godman. After the last of their courtroom visits, they moved from the New Haven colony to the Connecticut [00:23:00] colony.
Sarah Jack: John Winthrop, Jr. was the governor of Connecticut Colony from 1657 to 1658 and 1659 through 1676.
Josh Hutchinson: William Meaker of New Haven sued Thomas Mulliner for slander in 1657 and won. Meaker was accused of the witching Mulliner's hogs.
Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Garlick accused East Hampton 1658. Winthrop's first official witch trial role. Garlick was accused of bewitching Betty Howell to death. Betty was daughter of Lion Gardiner, leading citizen of the town. In May 1658, Elizabeth Garlick was the first person acquitted of witchcraft in Connecticut.
Josh Hutchinson: In 1659, an unknown person of Saybrook was indicted for witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: Goodwife Palmer, likely [00:24:00] Katherine Palmer, of Wethersfield found herself in court and in accusations on several dates. She was first arrested for witchcraft in 1648, following a complaint by John Robbins.
Josh Hutchinson: In 1648, John Robbins complained about her for some reason, and she went to court. In 1660, the Robbins family got sick, actually late 1659 into early 1660. Mrs. Robbins, their son, and then John Robbins all died in a few months. And John had allegedly, according to their daughter, written out a complaint against Katherine Palmer outlining his suspicions of her before he died. So this is a second time that he's [00:25:00] accusing her of causing their problems. But the daughter admitted that the note that he wrote could not be found.
It came back up in 1662, because Rebecca Greensmith said, "oh yeah, Goody Palmer is one of these people that attends Christmas parties with us." So after 1662, she leaves to Newport, Rhode Island with her husband Henry. Most likely they did. In 1667 in Connecticut, there was another complaint against her for witchcraft along with Katherine Harrison, but she was in Rhode Island, so nothing happened to her, Palmer that is. And then in 1672 in Newport, Rhode Island that Henry Palmer, who may be the same [00:26:00] Henry Palmer sued someone for defamation against his wife.
Sarah Jack: And would Katherine Palmer and Katherine Harrison have known each other?
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, they were both seen at the bedside of John Robbins in 1660. So Katherine Harrison, she apparently was also suspected for some years before her husband died and they came after her.
Sarah Jack: Katherine Palmer's story here is intriguing. Harrison's is one of the other ones that has lots of animosity in it.
So we had a few years of acquittals and then in 1661, Winthrop Junior left for London in the summer to obtain the charter for Connecticut Colony.
Josh Hutchinson: Margaret [00:27:00] Jennings and Nicholas Jennings of Saybrook were accused the same year that Winthrop left. They had initially been examined in June 1659 but were not indicted until September 5th, 1661, after Winthrop had left. Fortunately, the jury that delivered a verdict on October 9th was undecided, and the Jennings were freed.
How do we know what we know about all these things? We have medical records, journals, court records, and a hundred plus years of secondary writings.
While Winthrop Jr. was in London attempting to acquire a new charter to make the colony of Connecticut official, the Hartford Witch Panic broke out. Captain [00:28:00] John Mason stood in as governor while Winthrop was away, and with Mason serving in that role, there were 13 trials, two certain executions, two probable executions, and about half a dozen escapes, in the years 1662 to 1665.
Sarah Jack: Elizabeth Kelly, eight years old, accused Goody Ayers. Then William Ayers then accused Rebecca Greensmith.
Josh Hutchinson: Elizabeth Kelly was a young girl who took mysteriously ill and eventually succumbed to her condition. An autopsy was ordered. With the leading medical expert, Winthrop Jr., out of the colony, a physician named Bray Rossiter was called in to perform the autopsy on the body of Elizabeth Kelly. He arrived several [00:29:00] days after her death, examined her body at the graveside, and declared that she had been killed using supernatural means. But what he really found and describes in the autopsy were common signs of decomposition.
Sarah Jack: Ann Cole, referred to as a young woman and as being diabolically possessed, named Elizabeth Seager and Rebecca Greensmith as her tormentors.
Josh Hutchinson: One important question that we'll seek to answer in a future episode is, was Ann Cole possessed or was she bewitched? There's important difference between the two relating to accusations of witchcraft. Was it diabolical possession or was there one of Satan's human servants [00:30:00] behind her pains?
During the Hartford Witch Panic, Mary and Andrew Sanford were also accused of witchcraft. Mary was tried with her husband on June 6th, 1662. The jury was undecided about both cases. On June 13th, Mary was indicted individually and was convicted and executed.
Sarah Jack: Andrew is acquitted and freed.
Josh Hutchinson: While Mary stands trial again and is hanged.
Where's the justice in that one?
She would've tempted him into witchcraft somehow using her diabolical powers, because of course she's the woman, the woman's the weaker vessel.
Sarah Jack: Now we're to the second couple that was indicted and executed, Rebecca Greensmith and Nathaniel [00:31:00] Greensmith. Rebecca accused her husband Nathaniel in her confession.
Josh Hutchinson: One of the things that she confessed to was having an illegitimate Christmas party. Christmas was outlawed by the Puritans, who did not fancy any holidays except for what was directly ordered by the Bible. And Christmas was seen as just an excuse for frivolity that had nothing to do with serving and worshiping God.
Now, Rebecca, when she confessed, she did give a guest list of attendees at this Christmas party, which we'll have more about in an upcoming episode focused on the Hartford Witch Panic. The guest list included Elizabeth Seager, Mary Sanford, Judith Ayers, James Wakeley, Goodwife [00:32:00] Grant, Goodwife Palmer, and Judith Varlet.
Judith Varlet was the daughter of a Captain Casper Varlet, who, before the English took Connecticut, had like a trading post outside of where, what became Hartford. And so he was pretty high ranking guy and stayed there after the English came, but the English were so scared of the Dutch, that may have influenced what happens to his daughter Judith after he died. They accused her, but she was the sister-in-law of that Governor Peter Stuyvesant, and she married his nephew.
Sarah Jack: Elizabeth and John Blackleach were an accused couple. John was once brought to court for his [00:33:00] contemptuous expressions against several persons in authority.
John was a well-to-do merchant. He was the constable for Hartford's North Side. They had 11 children. John sued his accusers for slander.
Josh Hutchinson: The couple were both accused of bewitching a sow, but they fought back against their accusers by suing them for slander, and so their case was basically neutralized. He was a very wealthy man and powerful, and not somebody to trifle with.
Sarah Jack: Is he the same John Blackleach, accuser of Katherine Harrison?
Josh Hutchinson: He went to Hadley or wrote to someone in Hadley and got them to testify against Katherine Harrison, because they had formerly lived in Wethersfield. These people that he [00:34:00] contacts in Hadley had moved. So he's getting them to testify.
Sarah Jack: It's very fortunate that so many from that party were able to escape execution.
Josh Hutchinson: And unfortunately, Mary Barnes was not one of those people.
Sarah Jack: She was the last person executed for witchcraft in Connecticut on January 25th, 1663.
Josh Hutchinson: Elizabeth Seager was acquitted of witchcraft twice in 1663, in January and in June.
Sarah Jack: She was convicted at the third trial on June 26th, 1665.
Josh Hutchinson: Governor Winthrop Jr. asked the court to delay the sentencing.
Sarah Jack: In 1666, the verdict was overturned.
Josh Hutchinson: You've heard her on the show before. Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project co-founder Mary Louise Bingham [00:35:00] is joining us today to share with you a new weekly segment, Minute with Mary. And now here she is with a report on the Sanford family and John Winthrop Jr.
Sarah Jack: Mary has been a great part of this team, because she is able to actively look at these stories, search records, and collect information on these specific individuals, what we can find. She's the one who knows what we know.
Josh Hutchinson: Mary goes back to the primary sources and often uses sources that aren't cited in the major books about the Connecticut Witch Trials or New England witch trials in general, and brings us some wonderful information. You're going to really enjoy what she has to share about John Winthrop, Jr. and these patients [00:36:00] that he was treating.
Sarah Jack: And I would like to note, you've heard us ask for letters to legislators on behalf of the exoneration efforts. Mary was the first. She's the first one that reached out to the legislators by letters.
Josh Hutchinson: Without further ado, here's Mary.
Mary Bingham: Mary Sanford was about 33 years old when she first received medical treatment from John Winthrop, Jr. in early March of 1656/57. After having the opportunity to decipher this document, which does not exist in its entirety on microfilm, this document is at the Massachusetts Historical Society and is part of John Winthrop, Jr's Medical Journals, I discovered that Mary was treated with rock salt, iron ore, and saltpeter. Mary's condition was extremely painful and too graphic to [00:37:00] detail here. However, his treatment with at least these three medicines would probably have cleansed her internally, easing a nasty skin condition while reducing inflammation.
John Winthrop Jr. also treated at least four of the five Sanford children between January 1656 and 57 and April of 1659. These records prove that Governor Winthrop knew this family intimately. We can only imagine the anguish he felt upon his return to Connecticut after receiving the charter from London to find that Mary was hanged for the capital crime of witchcraft and that her husband Andrew was indicted and this was the crime that they did not commit. The other reason that this document is so important is that [00:38:00] it is the only document in existence that actually lists the ages of all five of the Sanford children. So it says that Andrew, their eldest son, was born about 1643. Mary was born about 1646. And Elizabeth was born about 1648. Elizabeth is the one we don't know whether or not he treated, because she died young. So there's gonna be more research done on her. And then there was Ezekiel, who was born about 1656. And then Thomas, their youngest, was born about 1658.
And no doubt that Andrew and Mary, the two oldest children, would have remembered this traumatic event in their lives. And we don't know about Ezekiel or Thomas, [00:39:00] how it may have affected them, because sadly they would not have remembered their mother, which is just so incredibly sad to me and also the fact that Mary was hanged left this household without a woman. And it was a detriment to the family. They needed the woman in the house to be able to survive, which is why he had to remarry rather quickly. That was a detriment to their family to be left without someone to run the household.
Josh Hutchinson: Trials continued to be held after the Hartford Witch Panic. Between 1666 and 1691, several were tried.
Sarah Jack: The trials went on.
Josh Hutchinson: The trials did go on in spite of the return of John Winthrop, Jr. People were taken to court, people were accused. There were informal accusations that [00:40:00] led to slander suits. There were also very formal accusations that led to condemnation, and one person was in fact convicted in this period.
In 1667, William Graves of Stanford was indicted, but not convicted.
Sarah Jack: One of the ways that accused witches sought justice for themselves was by filing slander and defamation suits. Hannah Griswold of Saybrook did so in 1667.
Josh Hutchinson: Katherine Harrison of Wethersfield was accused of witchcraft in 1668. She was possibly the daughter or niece of the executed Lydia Gilbert, possibly related, in her own words, as a cousin [00:41:00] of John, Jonathan, and Josiah Gilbert. Her case is often cited as a landmark in New England legal history.
In future episodes, we will discuss the legal ramifications. She was convicted in 1668, but released in 1669 after a committee of ministers was requested to review the case and come up with their advice, and they decided that there was not sufficient evidence against her, because testimony was allowed to come in from single witnesses, not the two witnesses required by biblical law.
Sarah Jack: In Stanford in 1669, we had a spousal quarrel. [00:42:00] Sarah Dibble accused her husband Zachary of abuse. He in turn accused her of witchcraft. The court rejected his claim.
Josh Hutchinson: In 1673, Edward Messenger sued Edward Bartlett for defaming his wife, possibly named Katherine. Bartlett had said Messenger's wife was an old witch or whore or words to the same purpose, and that comes straight from Connecticut Colonial Private Records, County Court Records, and that's as much as we know.
Sarah Jack: In 1692, we have Katherine Branch having fits. She was a servant in the home of Mr. Daniel and Mrs. Abigail Wescot, whose daughter Joanna had fits years earlier. Sarah Bates was [00:43:00] the midwife practicing medicine. The Wescots consulted her about Katherine Branch.
Josh Hutchinson: In Katherine Branch's fits, she was frequently requested to name her tormentors, and she did name several women, beginning with Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough Elizabeth Clawson and her husband, Stephen, lived in Stamford near the Wescots, who had previously suspected her of bewitching their daughter, Joanna, after an argument over the weight of some flax.
Sarah Jack: Mercy Disborough and her husband lived in Compo, within the boundaries of Fairfield.
Josh Hutchinson: Both women were subjected to the water test, also known as the swimming test, to see if they would sink and prove their innocence or float and prove their guilt. Both evidently floated. Clawson was described as floating like a cork [00:44:00] in the water, being buoyant, and she would not sink even after a bystander pushed her underwater, she bobbed back up to the surface.
Sarah Jack: What an experience. Clawson and Disborough were tried together on September 14th, 1692.
Josh Hutchinson: The jury was undecided, so the magistrates decided to consult ministers and then reconvene court in October.
Sarah Jack: The ministers found cause to believe in the women's innocence. The swimming test is unlawful and sinful. And when you read The Grounds of Examining a Witch, the commentary following the stated grounds does refer to water testing as a bad practice. The minister said that supposed Witch marks must be examined by able physicians. In [00:45:00] other cases you hear of women examining women for the witches marks. The ministers believed that Kate Branch could possibly have been counterfeiting her fits, and they also believed that it's hard to attribute strange accidents to these two accused women.
Josh Hutchinson: This time around, Clawson was acquitted but Disborough was convicted and sentenced to hang.
Sarah Jack: In 1693, Mercy Disborough was reprieved by the magistrates, because the jury had been altered between the September and October court sessions, with a new man taking the place of one who was away in New York. "One man altered the jury is altered."
Josh Hutchinson: Goodwife Miller had brothers on the other side of the border in New York, and she ran away to them.
Sarah Jack: Next Mary Staples had her charges dropped. Her daughter, Mary Harvey, had her charges dropped. And her [00:46:00] granddaughter, Hannah Harvey, had her charges dropped.
Josh Hutchinson: Hugh Crosia of Fairfield was accused in 1693, but the grand jury refused to indict him.
And now we turn our attention to the final two trials, those of Winifred Benham Senior in Winifred Benham Jr. in 1697.
Sarah Jack: These final trials are my family connection.
Josh Hutchinson: Winifred King Benham, Sr., was the first to have been accused out of this pair. She was first accused in 1692, brought back in 1693, and then brought back a third time in 1697
Sarah Jack: Her mother was Mary King Hale, an accused witch in Boston.
Josh Hutchinson: Winifred Benham Jr. ,who was 13 years old in 1697, was also accused.[00:47:00]
Winfred Benham, Sr.'s mother and daughter were both accused of witchcraft, as well as she, making three generations of women to face these charges.
Sarah Jack: They survived. They uprooted from the town they helped found, Wallingford, Connecticut, and fled to Staten Island. Right now in the town of Wallingford, there's no plaque or recognition of her or her daughter, but you can find them on a beer label.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, they do still have a legacy and are remembered, but only vaguely by residents of their town of Wallingford. You can go to town and get a beer called The Witch of Wallingford Ale.
Even though the final trial occurred in 1697, there were still accusations made in the 18th century.[00:48:00]
Sarah Jack: Sarah Clother and Goodwife Brown accused by Bethia Taylor of Colchester, 1713.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah Spencer was accused by Elizabeth Ackley in 1724. In that case, the court considered subjecting Ackley to a sanity test.
Sarah Jack: There is a record showing that an Elizabeth Gould of Guilford sued Benjamin Chittenden for defamation, being accused as a witch in 1742.
Josh Hutchinson: 1742. That's 95 years after the first trial for witchcraft. Connecticut still had these accusations going on, people willing to go to court over them.
In 1750, when Connecticut's laws were reconstituted, the act [00:49:00] prohibiting witchcraft was dropped and not rewritten.
Sarah Jack: The length is a century, but there's so little detail, a hundred years of lives navigating these accusations and these misfortunes and these devastations and these trials.
Josh Hutchinson: We've brought to you today the names of 49 individuals who were accused of witchcraft, and those are just the ones that we know about. We know that we're missing many records from many of these trials and accusations. We're hoping that records will continue to be found as discoveries are continuing to be made here in the 21st century.
Sarah Jack: I think it really speaks to that whole thought of hysteria. Are we gonna say that this colony was in a state of hysteria off and on constantly for a hundred years? [00:50:00] Or was this a mentality and a behavior and the results?
It really puts the Salem notoriety in perspective. Some of this overlaps. It just shows a continuation of people getting pulled in and accused of covenanting with the devil, over and over.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and if you were to remove the Salem Witch Trials from the equation, Connecticut had far more witchcraft accusations, trials, and executions than any other colony, including Massachusetts. Connecticut from 1647 to 1663 was by far the deadliest colony for witchcraft accusations, and it's really thanks to people like [00:51:00] Reverend Gershom Bulkeley and Governor John Winthrop, Jr., who made efforts to bring the witch trials to a stop, bring the killings to a stop.
Sarah Jack: When you think back to that era, this was like everyday life. This was happening annually. Your neighbor, your relative, somebody you knew, maybe you're in court accusing. It was just a commonplace behavior, and yet we're just starting to understand what it was all about. What was the crime? Who was accused? Why were they accused? Who was all involved? How were they executed? It's just amazing to me that it was woven so much into the fabric of the history and we're just now getting a look at it.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and it's easy to [00:52:00] dismiss witch trials as early modern superstition. It's harder to confront the actual facts of the witch trials, why they happened and what happened in them, which is far more complicated, and which we'll be covering as we have in previous episodes. We'll continue to cover that in depth in this 101 series and other future episodes.
Sarah Jack: Take a look at the bibliography now. Order some of these books, and start reading. You'll have a lot to think about, and you'll have a better concept and be ready to have conversations with your circle of influence.

Josh Hutchinson: And now, we'd like to talk to you about the efforts to clear the names of those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut. Exoneration efforts began back [00:53:00] in 2005, when state historian Walter Woodward gave a presentation about the Connecticut Witch Trials. A number of people in the audience banded together to press for getting their names cleared.
After the group that formed in 2005 began to operate, friend of the show Tony Griego was involved and wrote to the government in England to the Queen asking her to pardon those who were convicted of witchcraft and executed in Connecticut, as Connecticut was a British colony at the time. The Queen's office explained that they couldn't grant pardons, because they would need to reopen all the cases, and there just aren't enough [00:54:00] details existing in court records of those cases to do that. So the group connected with the Connecticut General Assembly and was able to get a resolution proposed in 2008. Unfortunately, this resolution to exonerate those accused, not pardon, but exonerate those accused, did not make it out of committee in 2008. It was brought up again the following year and again did not get out of committee.
Sarah Jack: Time passed. Tony did not forget. Descendants did not forget. In 2016, Beth Caruso was doing an author talk on her book One of Windsor. Tony went to meet her and they decided to collaborate and renew [00:55:00] efforts to educate on the witch trials and to find a path to memorialization and clearing their names. They created the CT Witch Memorial Facebook page, where they have reported their research findings and commemorated what they know of those who were the victims.
Josh Hutchinson: In 2017, the CT Witch Memorial group proposed a resolution in the town of Windsor to exonerate Alice Young and Lydia Gilbert, the two victims from Windsor, who were hanged. That resolution passed the Town Council by a vote of nine to zero, unanimously, and was quickly signed by the mayor into law. And you can see a copy of it at the Windsor Town Hall and another copy at the [00:56:00] Windsor Historical Society. And we'll also share that image on our social media.
Sarah Jack: By the 375th anniversary of Alice Young's execution, which was May 26th, 2022, many individuals were asking and looking for the leadership of the state of Connecticut to start acknowledging this history, acknowledging Alice. The exoneration efforts of Elizabeth Johnson Jr. pushed it to a friendly boil, and several people came together to create the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project. It was formed when state representative Jane Garibay got involved. She and Beth Caruso had previously looked at when would be a good time to [00:57:00] propose an acknowledgement bill. With all of these pieces coming together, it was decided that this was the year, and the resolution was written and proposed in the winter session.
Josh Hutchinson: The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project was co-founded by Mary-Louise Bingham, Sarah Jack, Tony Griego, Beth Caruso, and Josh Hutchinson, but has been contributed to by dozens of descendants, as well as others interested in seeing justice for these victims, including historians.
2023 has been an exciting year for the exoneration effort. In January, State Representative Jane Garibay and State Senator Saud Anwar both [00:58:00] proposed legislation in the House and the Senate at the General Assembly. The legislation was then referred to the Judiciary Committee, who wrote up the bill. The Judiciary Committee reviewed the bill, decided to take action on it, held a hearing on March 1st, where our own Sarah Jack and Beth Caruso and Tony Griego testified, along with others. There were many wonderful speakers that day.
Sarah Jack: Those testimonies were full of great historical information and insights as to why an exoneration was relevant and needed.
Josh Hutchinson: We believe that the hearing did sway some of the members of the Judiciary Committee to, drumroll, please.
Thank you, Sarah. [00:59:00] Today the Judiciary Committee passed the resolution. It passed by a vote of 28 to 9, so there was widespread, bipartisan support for the resolution, which now will make its way onto the House and Senate calendars to get the full assembly's vote, which we're hoping will happen in April, possibly early May. Then the next step and final step in the process is for the governor to sign the bill, and we're hoping that does happen in May and that we all get to be there and celebrate.
Sarah Jack: If you have written a legislator, we thank you. If you've intended to, you still have the chance. We still need all of them to give us yes votes. House, Senate, we need it.
Josh Hutchinson: And now here's [01:00:00] Sarah with another edition of End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News.
Here is your Connecticut Witch Trial exoneration bill update. Thank you for learning about the women of American Colony Witch trials. This Women's History month, we saw history made with the proposed resolution, HJ number 34. The Connecticut Legislature's Joint Committee on Judiciary heard testimony regarding the Joint Committee's proposed Bill HJ 34 Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut, and they have passed the resolution out of committee with bipartisan support. It was a 28 to 9 vote. This resolution identifies the specific individuals that were formally indicted for witchcraft crimes. This resolution identifies the individuals known to be executed for witchcraft crimes. Every person named in this resolution is historically recorded as being labeled a witch.
The women tried in the colonial trials then proclaimed their own innocence, and the men did not listen. In fact, the men [01:01:00] insisted they confess to witchcraft. Understandably and unfortunately, some had their antagonized spirits broke and confessed to covenanting with the devil. Some even accused other men and women of covenanting with the devil.
We want to clarify a few things. After someone who is a witch trial victim has been ostracized, it takes a family three to four generations to recover, and so the generational impact to the witch trial victim families carried on beyond the Revolution era.
The relevance of historic witch trials can be seen when you consider the modern alleged witch attacks and the societal othering we witness. Today, more than 60 nations are having crisis level witch attacks.
The Connecticut accused witches were accused of signing a compact with the devil. Their charges had nothing to do with modern paganism. Because compacting with the devil is not possible, we know those accused were innocent.
Descendants seeking exoneration have come together in collaboration to tell the stories of their accused ancestors despite coming from different backgrounds, with different belief systems and political [01:02:00] leanings, this should not be a one-party bill.
Granting exoneration does not mean other pressing issues are responded to less. Let's not avoid facing historical wrongs any longer. Correcting the historical record, like exonerating innocent victims of witch trials is the right thing to do. Today, I heard Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz state that she would like to see this and the other historical wrongs made right. She's willing to take the time to make things right.
What we want is collaboration, not a pardon, an exoneration, because they were innocent. No reparations.
We want the next steps after this to be memorials, educational programs, and Connecticut's recognition in this unique history.
This Women's History Month, we have proclaimed their innocence, but has this message found a more receptive audience? Overall, that appears to be the case. We are encouraged to see legislators vote on the proposed bill, we are having record podcast episode downloads, and we are seeing the known facts reported more accurately by the media and likewise the public.
On Monday, March 27th, the [01:03:00] Joint Committee on Judiciary passed HJ number 34 Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. We thank the committee for coming together and taking the step. HJ 34 is a resolution to clear the names of the innocent Witch trial victims for descendants and everyone and anyone who cares about injustice now.
The resolution has been submitted to the Legislative Commissioner's Office, and we anticipate the House and Senate will soon add the resolution to their calendars. We encourage the General Assembly to vote yes, and we urge Governor Lamont to sign.
Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz is working with State Representative Jane Garibay and Senator Saud Anwar to raise awareness to the importance of voting on and passing this bill in the General Assembly. We must keep communicating. Will you take time today to write to a member of the House and Senate asking them to recognize the relevance of exonerating Connecticut Witch Trial victims? You can do this whether you are a Connecticut resident or anywhere else in the world. You should do it from right where you are.
Now is the time and place to stand for acknowledging that women were not [01:04:00] and are not capable of harming others with diabolical or maleficent powers. The victims we wish to exonerate are known to be innocent. The victims of today that we wish to protect are known to be innocent. You can find the information you need to contact a legislator with a letter in the show links.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project strongly urges the General assembly to hear the voices of the witch trial victims being amplified by the community today. They were not witches. We hope you'll pass this legislation without delay.
Our project is offering several ways for the exoneration supporters to plug in and participate or learn about the exoneration and history. Links to all these informative opportunities are listed in the episode description.
Use your social power to help Alice Young, America's first executed witch, finally be acknowledged. Support the descendants by acknowledging and sharing their ancestors' stories. Contribute to making historical wrongs right. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and amplify the message. Please follow our project on social media @ctwitchhunt on [01:05:00] Twitter and visit our website at ConnecticutWitchTrials.org.
We thank you for standing with us and helping us create a world that is safe from witchcraft accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that important update about what's going on with the exoneration effort.
Sarah Jack: What did you learn?
Josh Hutchinson: What did I learn from this episode? That researching a bunch requires a lot of effort and looking through every available book and getting back to the primary source documents to confirm that the authors of the generally accepted books are on the right track with what their analysis is of those past events. You need to get to the source. As Margo Burns would [01:06:00] say, "how do we know what we know?" We need to know at all times how we know what we know about the historic past and not just replace knowledge with conjecture.
Sarah Jack: Conjecture is something that seems to shroud witch trial knowledge and stories, and we have lots of sources to look at, and it's never a waste of time to take another look and just see it for yourself. They're available, and we need to look. New eyes, new times, new information, new records. It brings us back to the historic record and focusing on that.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, we're very much motivated by getting to the true facts. At the heart of any [01:07:00] proper analysis of these events, you have to know the truth. Otherwise, your analysis is gonna be flawed.
Sarah Jack: And one of the truths that we know is how these victims were targeted and are innocent of these crimes. And evaluating that and talking about that is relevant because of what is still happening in our world today in over 60 nations, where women and children are being accused of causing misfortune through supernatural means.
Josh Hutchinson: Still today, between the years 2009 and 2019, according to a very recent United Nations report, at least 20,000 incidents of witch hunting were reported in those 60 nations. And [01:08:00] also, the even more widespread problem has to do with accusations against children. According to the available data, every year, hundreds of thousands of children are abused, subjected to physical, emotional abuse based on the belief that they are actually practicing witches, children, young kids. It's shocking and appalling that this continues to happen, and we vow to throw everything we have at the problem and press for additional efforts to be made to end these violent mob attacks on persons accused of witchcraft.
[01:09:00] Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week for an expert interview.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe to Thou Shalt Not Suffer wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast is a project of the organization End Witch Hunts. Please support us by going to EndWitchHunts.org.
Josh Hutchinson: Please support the efforts for Connecticut Witch Trial victim exoneration by going to ConnecticutWitchTrials.org.
Sarah Jack: Get involved by visiting EndWitchHunts.org. To support us, purchase books from our bookshop or merch from our Zazzle shop. Our links are in the show description.
Josh Hutchinson: Continue to follow us on social media, on Twitter, @ctwitchhunt and @thoupodcast.
Sarah Jack: Share us with your circle of influence.
Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell all your friends, family, [01:10:00] acquaintances, neighbors, and childhood friends about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

March 30, 2023

Goody Bassett, Accused Witch of Stratford, Connecticut

Goody Bassett Inaugural Ball Tickets

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Show Notes

Goody Bassett, Stratford Connecticut’s local accused witch legend is now being acknowledged as her true self and reintroduced to us by the research and presentations of both Stratford Connecticut town historian, and Stratford Historical Society’s Vice President David Wright and author Richard Ross III. The community is hopeful that the Town Council will accept their proposed resolution to clear the good names of accused witches of Stratford: Goody Bassett and Hugh Croscia. Gail Liscio, President of the Stratford Historical Society shares about their upcoming events highlighting local witch trial history.Don’t miss these specially curated educational, memorializing and celebrating events this Spring offered by the Stratford Historical Society: Goody Bassett’s Last Mile History Walk, Connecticut Witch Trial History Presentation at Stratford Town Hall by Richard Ross III, and the Inaugural Goody Bassett Ball Society Fundraiser.

Upcoming Stratford Historical Society Witch Trial Events

“Before Salem” book, by Author Richard Ross III

Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project Website

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to a bonus episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today we talk with Gail Liscio and David Wright of the Stratford Historical Society, as well as author Richard Ross. We'll be talking about events coming up in remembrance of Goody Bassett, there will be a talk, a walk, and a ball.
Sarah Jack: In this [00:01:00] bonus, you get to hear how Goody Bassett, Stratford, Connecticut's local accused Witch, who was legend, is now being acknowledged as her true self and reintroduced to us by the research and presentations of Stratford Connecticut's town historian, David Wright, and author Richard Ross III.
Josh Hutchinson: We'll give you all the details about the events, when, where, how.
Sarah Jack: You've heard of Windsor clearing the names of Alice Young and Lydia Gilbert. But now the Historical Society in Stratford and the community is asking the Town Council of Stratford to accept their proposed resolution to clear the good names of accused witches, Goody Bassett, and Hugh Crosia.
Welcome guests Gail Liscio, David Wright, and Richard Ross III.
First we would just like you to go through and introduce yourselves and tell us your connection to the Stratford Historical [00:02:00] Society or community.
Gail Liscio: I'll go first. My name is Gail Liscio, and I've been the proud president for the past five years. Stratford is pretty much my hometown, so I'm very proud to have reached this pinnacle in my older years. Yeah, the society is definitely a challenge. We're really very dedicated and very proud to be the forefront of the history of the town of Stratford.
As David will tell you, when I turn it over to him, he has been my right hand man. He's also my vice president, and he really brings so much to the society. I could never do anything without him and the other people that we have on the board. We're very blessed to have the board that we have at this time.
So that being said, Dave, you wanna add anything.
David Wright: Thank you Gail. My name's David Wright. I'm vice president of the Historical Society, and I am the historian for the Town of Stratford. I've been associated with the Historical [00:03:00] Society for about the last 10 years, and I'm also the newsletter editor for the Society. I think it's up to you now, Dick.
Richard Ross: My name is Dick Ross. I go under, of course, my, real name, which is Richard S. Ross, and I go under the third because it's somewhat of a common name in it. I noticed when I first put my first book out that it was getting confused with my son and a whole bunch of other people. So that's why I have added the third on there.
Just to briefly tell you, I have um, this is my first book. It's called Contagion in Prussia in 1831. And it's a book basically about epidemic disease. And I came out in 2015 and, I'm, it's a very interesting, good book and it's done very well.
And my second book is this book called Before Salem: Witch Hunting in the Connecticut River Valley, 1647 to 1663. And, to tell people it's non-fiction, obviously. I'm a historian. I have a PhD and an [00:04:00] MLS. I was the head librarian at Trinity College from about 2000 to 2015, I believe. I never can get my dates straight, but anyway, I do in history though. And I've been obviously I retired and I've been doing some, a lot of, I do a lot of talks and, gotten involved in a couple of historical societies, and every year it seems like people are more interested in the witchcraft business and witch trials, et cetera. So I'm very happy about that, and I like to go out, and I particularly like to go to libraries because I have an MLS I told you. And I like to talk to people there, but I also do historical societies, so that's about what's going on.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much. Now we'd like to hear some more about the historical society. What can you tell us about that, Gail?
Gail Liscio: 2025 is our a hundred year anniversary. We have a lot of things planned for the celebration right now. We have begun charging [00:05:00] Goody Bassett with our first ever inaugural ball, which we always heard the legends of Goody Bassett and whatnot. They were mostly legends. Now, David has informed us that there's been so much more information that has come to the fore in the past 10 years that makes her more of a reality than a legend.
But we're really looking forward to it. It's going to be May 20th. I'm sure you've heard, you know, us mention that we've done very well already with solicitations from town people to sponsor. We're really psyched. That's about the only word I can use. We're really excited about this. We really are optimistic for the coming few years until we get to our hundredth anniversary.
Sarah Jack: We're really excited for the resurgence you guys are experiencing, too. David, it sounds like you brought some of the story to light and the intersection of lore and the history is really interesting and important. How did you gain your understanding of [00:06:00] her?
David Wright: Well, Goody Bassett, it's been in our history since the first histories of Stratford were written. And if you go back through time, it's the one consistent story that's told throughout our history, and interestingly enough, the home that really began the society formally, the society was formed to preserve the Captain David Judson house, which is located on Academy Hill Road in Stratford. And interestingly enough that home was more than, well, the home one of the walls of the home was the original home wall of William Judson, who was one of the original settlers of Stratford. And his home, as you look at the map of the original settlement of Stratford, was probably one of the homes Goody Bassett would've passed by as she was on her way to the gallows.
So we have a special connection to her, because she's been part of our history for [00:07:00] so long, and we always considered Goody Bassett a foregone fact in town until sometime, it appears in about the 1970s, when she became more of a legend. Now with the work that Mr. Ross has done and Beth Caruso has done, they've connected a lot of the dots for us.
So there's a man by the name of Thomas Thornton, who was one of Goody Bassett's neighbors in Windsor. Another one of her neighbors was John Young. And interestingly enough, all three of those people ended up in Stratford. 1650, Goody Bassett and her husband came to town, and 1651, Thomas Thornton and John Young came to town. We always knew that, but we didn't realize the connection. And what Beth Caruso has done in her latest article in the Connecticut History Review is really tie those three individuals together, [00:08:00] and It's an interesting thing, because not only was Thomas Thornton around and more than likely involved in the hanging of Alice Young in Windsor, he suddenly appears, and Goody Bassett was an associate of Alice Young and probably was guilty by a association. He suddenly appears in 1651 in Stratford, and then after Goody is hanged, he suddenly appears in Fairfield in 1653 at the hanging of Goody Knapp. So Beth has done a fabulous job of tying it together.
It's not that we didn't know about Goody, it's just that we passed through a period of time where there was so little indicating her actual personage and the reality of Goody Bassett that a lot of the people, I think, in town just assumed that it was one of those fun stories from our history with really no significant foundation to it. So as we've been able to [00:09:00] learn more and as people like Mr. Ross and Beth Caruso have been able to tie things together, it's pretty obvious that we're talking about a very unfortunate woman with a very unfortunate set of associations, one of them being Thomas Thornton, and they all seem to come together for us in 2023, which really made it a watershed opportunity for us to talk a lot about Goody Bassett and to make our attempt in town to exonerate her from the charge of witchcraft in the town. And then hopefully we're able to celebrate that exoneration in May ,which is on roughly the day that Goody Bassett was hanged in 1651.
Josh Hutchinson: It's wonderful. We're really happy that you're doing this. It's exciting for us to see others in Connecticut bringing [00:10:00] this history to light and we appreciate that. Is there anything else anyone would like us to know about the life of Goody Bassett?
David Wright: Unfortunately, we know precious little about her. We only have some evidence from New Haven and some evidence from Goody Knapp's trial in Fairfield that really add to what we know about Goody Bassett. But of course, formally, all we really have is the passage from from Connecticut history where it says the lieutenant governor and two of his associates went down to hold trial in Stratford.
And without the other circumstantial evidence that has been uncovered related to the witch trial in New Haven and the witch trial in Fairfield, it would be very difficult for us to even be able to prove that Goody Bassett had actually been hanged. So it's just [00:11:00] really this year that everything's come together for us.
But it doesn't give us a lot of information about who Goody Bassett was or where she came from. We don't find anything in the records of Windsor that talks about her, at least not that I've seen. And we don't have anything in the town of Stratford that really talks about her. So I wish we knew more. I wish more was written. I think Beth Caruso has done a fabulous job of explaining to us why we don't know more, but it's just unfortunate. And so we have to fill in the blanks with other associated pieces of information that we can bring together and put some meaning to her life and how she ended up being accused of witchcraft.
I don't know if you'd like to add anything, Dick, to that. You're certainly much more knowledgeable than I on this topic.
Richard Ross: Yeah, I haven't seen Beth's article yet, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and get hold of it to read it because I like, obviously I need to look at the [00:12:00] sources. And it sounds pretty legitimate from what you're saying. The one thing that I noticed when I was doing my research was that I'm, I believe, and I've seen other reference to it, that she was married to Thomas Bassett and he had come over on the the ship, the Christian, and he was a carpenter. And he's, and I believe he's the one that married the Goody, whatever her first name was, we don't know. Maybe there's more in Beth's article.
I haven't, as I said, I haven't seen it, but the thing that's interesting to me was interesting to me was that so Alice is hanged, as we know, Goody gets accused of being a witch through probably association in some way. Lydia Gilbert, who gets hanged in 1654, was also from Windsor, and I believe was also had some kind of connection with Young and I don't think Bassett, but she might have. Cuz I think Bassett left in 1640, 1641. But Lydia was in jail in 1642 with the guy that she [00:13:00] eventually married. And then Mrs. Marshfield or Goodwoman Marshfield who left and went up to Springfield and was accused of being a witch, too, up there. She never got hanged or anything like that, but she was accused by another woman who ended up actually being tried for being a witch. So anyway, but to me it's, there's some kind of they, all of 'em probably represented, just to say this, and I could be wrong, but I, they seemed to have represented, for example, Mrs. Marshfield husband was really, he lost a lot of money. He caused a lot of problem, economic problems in the town of Windsor and deserted his family. And obviously she had gone down in status, cuz she had, must have had pretty good status when she first came over from from England in the west country.
So I think all four women had some sort of lower status in the community than the other people, many of the other people that lived in the town of Windsor, because a lot of the other people in the town of Windsor were, from what I could tell, [00:14:00] pretty well off when they came over, and they knew each other. They were like yeoman class, et cetera, et cetera. If you lost status at that time, it meant that you obviously didn't have the favorability of God, let's put it that way.
Sarah Jack: And then are you also acknowledging Hugh Crosia?
David Wright: How we found that was I think there's a book called Connecticut Witch Trials that, that appeared in the book was written, I'd have to check in the thirties, but Hugh is Stratford's other Witch. He was actually accused in what is today's Bridgeport, but he was tried and found essentially innocent by ignoramus, or they returned to a verdict of ignoramus, which meant that they didn't have enough evidence to convict him.
He was never hanged. He, I'm sure, had to leave the community or experienced a lot of distress continuing to live in the area. But we also had the benefit of it being 1692. [00:15:00] And because Governor Winthrop had largely put an end to witch hanging when he returned from England in 1663, Hugh, while accused, the charges were dropped against him.
We're including him in at least the resolution that we're presenting to the town council. Since we're talking about Goody Bassett, it seems good to just remove the curse of witchcraft everywhere that we know that it existed in the town. And Hugh just happens to be one of the unfortunate people that got swept into that. We know a little more about Hugh than we do Goody Bassett, not a lot about his life, but there is significantly more written about him in the trial, and so we can substantiate his charge of witchcraft and a little bit about the court proceedings a whole lot better than we can with Goody Bassett.
Josh Hutchinson: Great. What can you tell us about the events that you have planned?
David Wright: [00:16:00] We have the honor and privilege of having Dick Ross come to town on the 27th of April, he's going to do a presentation that I'm not sure what Dick's calling, but for marketing purposes, we're calling it Before Salem, a little bit of a takeoff on his book. I had the privilege of being able to hear Mr. Ross in Naugatuck back in 2019, and since everything else was coming together for this year, I thought it'd be really nice to have an expert come to town and talk about the Connecticut witch trials in general. It seemed to make more sense to have all of the witch trials brought together for people to think about why we got there, how we got there.
And I think it puts a little more meaning to what we're talking about as it relates to Goody Bassett since we don't have a whole heck of a lot of information about her. We're. In the process of creating a resolution that we want to [00:17:00] present to the Stratford Town Council. I don't know what the council's reception is going to be. I'm hoping that with the activity in the state legislature and what the Connecticut Witch Exoneration Project is attempting, that maybe that will motivate them a little more. We're going to, of course, let them know that Windsor has already done this. We've patterned our resolution after Windsor's and we'll be submitting it to them in the month of March, just as soon as we can finish crafting it.
And then in May and early May, the 3rd and the 10th, we're going to do a couple of walks attempting we, we can't do it with anything but speculation, and some of the streets don't even exist in exactly the same places as they did in 1651. We have a really good map of the settlement of Stratford that was done in about 1660.[00:18:00]
And so we're going to try and use that to retrace the likely path that she would take. And what I've done is looked at the shortest path from what would've been the original congregational church at that time to Gallows Brook, and I think taking her there, they probably would've chosen the shortest path possible to get there. So I'm, of course, taking a great deal of liberty at trying to retrace that path based on the fact, particularly, that some of the streets aren't even on that original map that we'll probably be walking on. But I'm gonna attempt to come as close as I possibly can. And we know who lived in all of those homes and some of the people who would've been living in those homes would've been the original founders, and they would've been very powerful men in town.
And I think what I want to do as part of the walk is talk about who those people were, because Goody wouldn't have found her way [00:19:00] to the gallows without the complicity of a number of the more powerful men in town. And so I think it will be helpful to talk about some of those people that were living in town and describe when they came to town and where their homes were. And we're gonna talk a lot about Adam Blakeman, who really led the first 47 settlers to the town of Stratford in 1639.
Then as part of our gala on May 20th, we're hopeful that Mayor Hoydick is going to read a proclamation, which will essentially proclaim Goody Bassett Day and explain that the town of Stratford, as she currently governs it, is doing what they can to absolve Goody from the charge of witchcraft that was brought against her. So we've got a pretty full next couple of months. We're looking forward to it. I'm really [00:20:00] hoping that we'll have a really good turnout at Mr. Ross's presentation. We're hoping that you can help us with that.
The walks, certainly anybody is going to be welcome to attend. So we'll certainly let everyone know if the demand continues and people want to have additional walks, I'll be happy to figure out what we're gonna do with those. But I wanted to have them before the gala and when things wrap up for us. So that's why they're planned when they're planned, and we'll see what happens.
Gail Liscio: We're really looking forward to any help we can as far as, you know, promoting the ticket sales for the actual ball. It is a fundraiser, emphasis on fund F U N D, and we just need as much participation. I love the idea of exoneration, but we just need live bodies there at the bash as well to just celebrate and bring us back into the forefront of the town of Stratford. David, it's been [00:21:00] great with the walks. People love them. He's a great orator, but as far as anything else goes, whatever help we can glean from anyone, more than grateful. So I thank you very much.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome. And how can people purchase tickets to the events?
Gail Liscio: They will be on sale starting March 15th. They will be on Facebook, and what we can do is we can send you the link, whatever you need, and quite frankly, word of mouth helps. Anybody who wants to purchase a ticket can also call the society and leave a message. We will be glad to call each and every person back.
We're just really pushing this to be a real knockdown, drag out event for the town. It's gonna be a lot of fun. We've gone to great lengths to promote it. We've gone to great lengths to have a fabulous menu, great entertainment. So I hope to see you all there. That's about all I can say. It's gonna be really wonderful and I thank everyone for helping.
Sarah Jack: It's very exciting. [00:22:00] Is the gala located at your facility?
Gail Liscio: What it is it's located at Vazzano's Four Seasons. That's one of the biggest facilities we have in Stratford. In fact, at one time, it was an old, small grand union supermarket, but it's since been converted over the years to a beautiful venue for weddings, bridal showers, anything of that nature. I really think that the town uses them quite frequently, because it holds up to 400 people, which is a real great event site.
Other than that, we're just counting down the days until we get everything rocking and rolling, and we'll take it from there. I can't wait to meet Mr. Ross though, that I really wanna grill him on a few things.
Josh Hutchinson: David, you also spoke or wrote to us about a marker, historic marker for Goody Bassett. What would that look like?
David Wright: We're working on that with Mayor Hoydick. I'm not sure how that will come together exactly, and the reason is because the marker that we're looking at will be [00:23:00] something modeled after the marker that was put in place in Bridgeport at the Burroughs Community Center for Goody Knapp a few years ago.
And we'd like to do a similar thing, but we have a large forest in the north end of town that has some very large rocks. And it was originally a quarry actually. And one of the markers at the place we'll be beginning the Goody Bassett Last Mile walks was actually brought from Roosevelt Forest. It's called the Mac's Harbor Marker. And we'd like to do something like that. We like to place it in the center of West Broad Street. It will probably be very near where I 95 crosses West Broad, which won't be far enough north by probably a hundred yards to where Gallows Brook would've run. But we have to work with the property that we have at this time, and if we were to put [00:24:00] the the marker where we think the gallows were, that goody was hanged from, it would be right in the middle of Metro North Railroad tracks. And we were thinking they probably wouldn't approve of that. We're moving it a little further south, on West Broad, there's a strip of land that the town owns.
The mayor has certainly been supportive of that, but now we're going to have to find a stone of the right dimensions and get it transported down to that location. So I just don't know that we can do all of that before May 20th, but that doesn't mean we're not going to try.
The mayor's time is not open to us whenever we need her, so we kinda have to work around her schedule and the scheduling that she can give to us. So she's supportive. I've had the conversation with her already. And so just as soon as we can put that marker in place, it will be placed. But that may take a while. I probably started talking to the mayor about this four or [00:25:00] five years ago, but it just, time passes much too quickly in some cases.
Sarah Jack: And thank you both for all the information. I'm really excited for your community. They're very fortunate to have you guys working on this project, and I think it's gonna be fruitful and wonderful.
Josh Hutchinson: This has been Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. You'll find dates and links to all the events in the show description.
Sarah Jack: Join us again Thursday.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends and family and anyone else who may be interested.
Sarah Jack: You can support our efforts at endwitchhunts.org.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:26:00]

March 20, 2023

Finding Your Salem Witch Trial Ancestors with David Allen Lambert

AmericanAncestors.org

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Show Notes

Take in this informative research conversation with author David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and Stoughton, MA town historian. This is a family research tip-packed episode with laughs and heartfelt dialogue about our family histories. Thoughtful reflection about descending from ancestors involved in the Salem Witchcraft Trials pulls us into an instructive talk on utilizing American Ancestors resources and expansive archives. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

“A Guide to Massachusetts Cemeteries” by David Allen Lambert

Vita Brevis Blog Posts by Author David Allen Lambert

“Bewitched” blog post by David Allen Lambert

Support our show, buy “Records of the Salem Witch Hunt” through this link.

University of VA, Salem Witch Trials Documents and Transcriptions

Press Conference on Legislative Bill H.J. No. 34, March 8, 2023

Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut

Purchase a Witch Trial White Rose Memorial Button

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Social Media for State Representative Jane Garibay

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we speak with the chief genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, David Allen Lambert. We're going to talk with him about verifying your descent from those accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Hunt, and you can apply these same tools, many of the tips that he gives us, to genealogy in general. It'll help you [00:01:00] become a better family history researcher.
Sarah Jack: You are gonna find this conversation very motivating. You're gonna wanna open those projects back up right now and start working and using his tips.
Josh Hutchinson: His advice to you and to us is so good, it makes me want to write books about my family history right now. I wanted to immediately get on the websites and do all the things.
Sarah Jack: When you hear David talk about American Ancestors and the genealogical society, you realize what a supportive community is available with a vast amount of resources.
Josh Hutchinson: We have a fun chat. Serious advice is given [00:02:00] out. You'll want to take notes while you're listening to this one and follow the steps that he provides to confirm that you have one of these ancestors in your tree. Or if you're just starting to look at your tree and investigate who your ancestors were, he gives pointers on how you can link them to a historical event like the Salem Witch trials.
Sarah Jack: He refers to many important, available collections and databases. So you wanna take note of those.
Josh Hutchinson: Or if you're unable to take notes right now, just download the episode and listen to it again. You'll have a good time both times.
Sarah Jack: Have your friend listen to it and make them take notes for you.
Josh Hutchinson: Or pull up the transcript at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
And David also shares about his [00:03:00] own personal family connections to the witch trials and has many interesting stories to tell us.
Sarah Jack: It really shows how when you get to looking more specifically at the lives of some of these ancestors, how meaningful it can be and personal. Those personal connections are right there and you can hear that come out of David's discussion and why his connections are so meaningful to him. And he talks about where they were from and some of the things going on in their lives. And it's very interesting.
Josh Hutchinson: And you'll learn from him many ways that you can investigate the story of your ancestor and get to know them on a more personal level than you have before. If you implement David's [00:04:00] techniques and take advantage of the resources and databases that he points us all to, you will experience a new level of genealogy.
David Allen Lambert has 30 years of experience at New England Historic Genealogical Society, and yet is fresh and young and motivated by what he does, enjoys his job. You'll get a real good sense of how much he loves what he does.
Sarah Jack: And that really adds a richness to their offerings.
Josh Hutchinson: And we chat about how much things have changed in genealogy in the past 30 years, going from microfiche to internet databases and DNA, and then he gives so much good information in the show about the resources, how many there are. It's mind boggling. So much [00:05:00] information that is available now that you used to have to go do a lot of traveling and spend an extensive hours of time navigating through microfiche and old papers. And now it's available with a mouse and a keyboard from the comfort of your own home. It just, I remember going to the Family History Center in town and going to town, public libraries and historical societies and looking through collections manually. And you can still do that. There's a lot of extra records at NEHGS in Boston. It's well worth a visit, and you'll discover so much.
It's great to learn the individual stories of your ancestors and try [00:06:00] and put yourself in their place for a little while. I wanted to say getting into the heads of our ancestors whichever side they were on is so important to help us understand why witch trials took place, so we get an insight into our own behaviors and thoughts and how we treat people today. Just talking about ancestors, it reminds, you know, how instead of just putting the names in the blanks on the tree, you wanna learn the stories of the individual people and like you're learning the stories. You get into their head a little bit, and it gives you a good insight. You start thinking, why did they accuse people of this? And then you're like do I behave like that? Do I think like that? And it gives you really good, [00:07:00] valuable insight and education. And that's part of our mission, I think, to help people get to that point. So I think this episode, learning about your family history is a really good way to get connected to the history and to try to understand both sides of it. They are witches, they aren't witches.
Sarah Jack: And now you get to enjoy our guest, David Allen Lambert, chief genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, Massachusetts. We talk about verifying descent from those accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Hunt. Learn about the broad scope of membership benefits, the vast and unique record collection at American Ancestors, and the professional genealogical assistance available to members.
David Allen Lambert: You guys have done some really wonderful interviews. I'm really honored to be part of this, [00:08:00] actually. One of the ironic twists of this is because my seventh-great grandmother was Ann Sewall Longfellow, the sister of Judge Samuel Sewell. He was in Boston and had his minister read his apology, and every year for the rest of his life, until 1730, he had a day of fasting and prayer, but I can tell you, our town's namesake, Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, didn't seem to shed a tear that we know of. It's remiss to me why he would've not had any reason not to. But then he followed a major political career, and he died in 1701.
So maybe if he lived past, he was about 70 years old when he died. Maybe he would've later in life decided that it was wrongdoings. But in 1727, 25 years after he died, they named my community where I live after him. There's some talk that maybe have been honor of him or his father, Israel Stoughton, who actually had a mill in Dorchester on the Neponset River. And so what was the south [00:09:00] precinct of Dorchester became my hometown, Stoughton. And I'm the town historian there, but my main job is chief genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society. And I've been here, this year will be 30 years. I started when I was two.
I started doing genealogy when I was seven. So there's some, great interest. I've always had. I I've always known through family stories of our connection with the witchcraft trials through Sewall. And then with my own research learning further information about Mary Perkins Bradbury, one of the fortunate to almost meet the gallows in September of 92. And she made it clear, and we don't really know if she was they bribed the jailer or her husband bribed a jailer, but she got out of there and they, we believe escaped to what is now Northern Maine or lived pretty much, we know by 1695 when her husband died, Thomas, I leaves in his will, care for my wife, so she wasn't out living in the woods still. And by then, of course it had died down by a couple of [00:10:00] years.
Sewall is somebody I've always admired. I thought, for one, the book he wrote early on, The Selling of Joseph, which is almost like an abolitionist movement, a century and a half before there really was an abolitionist movement.
And then, of course, with having that connection with the witchcraft trials with Mary Perkins Bradbury, and ironically my wife and I share some colonial New England ancestors, and the only accused witch she has is Mary Perkins Bradbury, so my two daughters have her twice. She's my 10th great-grandmother. However, Sewall was the older brother of my seventh great-grandmother. My generations are a little askew. Where some people would be their 10th or 12th great-grandparents in that generation, sometimes it's my fifth and seventh. My, in fact, my, one of my fifth great-grandfathers who I still have autosomal DNA for, was born in 1678. I still, he's my fifth great-grandfather. He had a child in the 1730s with his younger wife who had the [00:11:00] last child was my ancestor, their last child was my ancestor. So it's fascinating.
Sarah Jack: That's super fascinating.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's really close relationship for that period of time.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah, to think that I have DNA alive that was actually around during the witchcraft trials is kinda scary in a little bit.
Sarah Jack: Wow. That is fascinating.
Josh Hutchinson: Really fascinating.
David Allen Lambert: I can tell you a little bit about what I do, just to give you a little background myself. So I'm the chief genealogist for the American Ancestors, the New England Historic Geological Society in Boston. We're the oldest genealogical organization in the nation, for that matter, really in the world. Europeans really didn't have a need to research their ancestors and create a library, cuz well, there most cases, they were still there. When we were created in 1845, there was a need of preserving the past of New England, getting those stories. And of course, we're American Ancestors now. So we far exceed the collection of books we started with. Our website, American [00:12:00] Ancestors, has 1.4 billion searchable records, and that's at americanancestors.org. And you can even sign up as a guest member. You don't have to be a paid member right off. We have, let's see, a quarter of a million books, local history and genealogies.
We have in our manuscript collection over 28 million manuscripts, including a letter from September 20th, 1692 between Cotton Mather and Stephen Sewell that discusses the witchcraft trials, which I'm hoping will get linked on the Salem Witch Documentary Archives down in Virginia, cuz it's, we have it on our DLA, our digital library archive. I'd be glad to share you a link to see that.
And of course one of the things that we continue to do is help people with their genealogy, no matter where in the world they come from. But I have a special place in my heart when I run across people who have someone who is accused of witchcraft. And I even still have a warm place in my heart for those descendants of the accusers. I've met a few [00:13:00] Putnams, and I don't have any anger towards them. You can't be responsible for what your ancestors do. And then when I tell them I live in a town that's named for the judge, so I guess it balances out.
Josh Hutchinson: My grandfather is from Danvers, so I have quite a lot of ties to all sides of the witch trials from Salem Village. My Hutchinsons were involved on both sides of the trials.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah, I'm an Ingersoll, and I have the next generation of my immigrant, they were accusers. There's distant connections in my family with other people that were accusers. I did the honor of doing the genealogy of a few notable people. I did genealogy via NEHGS for David McCullough, Michael Dukakis, Ken Burns, and the one I did recently a few years back was for Nathaniel Philbrook. And he thanked me for the work I did, and I said, "I'm just returning a favor." And he said, "what do you mean?" And so, "one of your ancestors signed the petition to [00:14:00] save my ancestor Mary Perkins Bradbury's life. I'm just returning the favor. So thank you for what your ancestor did." So that was fun.
Sarah Jack: That's
cool.
Josh Hutchinson: That's, .
It sounds like you have a very, I don't know, cool seems the best word for it. A cool job.
David Allen Lambert: It really is. I think it doesn't have any element of getting boring because every question's different. What I do now, a combination of lecturing. I travel around the country representing NEHGS. There's a big conference coming up in the beginning of March called Roots Tech in Salt Lake City, and the last one before Covid drew 27,000 people there. And now of course it's even a bigger audience, because of the virtual aspect.
I had the honor of writing 11 books, a few through NEHGS, and authoring a variety of different honorary genealogies for people that have been our keynote speakers over the past 30 years. It's really rewarding because in some cases you're connecting a person not with [00:15:00] just their distant ancestor from 300 plus years ago, but maybe it's finding what happened to their grandmother that disappeared or reconnecting people by using DNA and finding cousins that are still in Europe that survived the Holocaust.
So we have a strong element of a global outreach for genealogy that tries to serve all people, and the building's expanding. A lot of places are going forward with, just being a website per se, not to name any in particular. We actually purchased the building next door. in March, we will be closing the building at the end of the month for probably the remainder of the year it seems. But we're gonna be expanding our footprint on Newbury Street in Boston, where we're located, and putting in a new discovery center, which is actually going to introduce genealogy on a global level for the person who just walks in off the street, wants to know a little bit more.
And then, of course, we have the resources and the staff to take you on a global trip back, or if we don't have the resources, we'll tell you how to find them.[00:16:00]
Sarah Jack: What an exciting project.
David Allen Lambert: I wanna commend both of you for all the efforts you're doing to help with the exoneration of the Connecticut witches, I must say that I was one of the people who signed the thousand name petition, because I think that's wonderful. That's wonderful. My fingers and toes crossed for you. I think, I can't imagine there would be any instance where there would not be a hundred percent approval of that.
It's interesting with the last recognized Salem accused was finally just last year by the efforts of school children. And then I find out indirectly, she's a distant cousin of mine through a shared ancestor. One of my New England ancestors, Edmund Ingalls of Lynn, had quite a few family members that were tied into that.
And even with the Bradburys, there always seems to be some sort of riff, if you will, where like the Carr family had issues with my family in Salisbury, George Carr's house lot, I mean, and then of course the [00:17:00] spectral evidence is just a wonderful thing anyways, to read some of the nonsense that people are being accused of. And we think about it now and how we would not even think twice something that's just ridiculous. But the idea that my ancestor becomes a blue boar and rushes out at George Carr's horse and then disappears into thin air, it's like you would think that people were, I don't know. I would've thought more well adjusted in realizing what's rational and what's not.
And I don't know what your personal take on how the hysteria got started, but I always like to say it's a bunch of teenagers that got caught up in a lie. And and then fingers are pointed towards we need more people. There must be more. And then they're just naming people. They don't even have any common sense of, oh, it must be this person. It must be that person. And it truly a hysteria. And we're just so lucky that it didn't go on for longer. Look at what happened in Germany or in Scotland. It's un unthinkable that if that went on for another [00:18:00] decade, how many hundreds of people could have been executed or jailed? The ideas that infants died in jail, that had been born. I know I'm putting a toddler on trial. it's, but and in 300 years people look at us and think that we're archaic.
Sarah Jack: So we wanted to talk just a little bit about your webinar that you have done around Salem descendants and so what historical background on Salem Witch Trials should a family history researcher know?
David Allen Lambert: As we know about the witchcraft trials, you don't necessarily have to be from Salem Town or Salem Village. And you could have been like my ancestor from Salisbury, Massachusetts up in Essex County. You could have been from Boston, Middlesex County, like the Toothakers are over in Reading. You really were part of the New England community, and your ancestors were alive in 1692, they would've known this was going on. This would've been the talk in the church. So your [00:19:00] connection may not be going online to, say, Salem's Witchcraft Trial Documentary Archives, and finding out your ancestor was an accuser or accused for that matter. You probably had somebody who was alive that knew this. This was front page news. We didn't have a newspaper then. But we had the word of mouth.
The way to look into your genealogy, obviously you wanna start with yourself anyways, but if you know that fast forward, you have 17th century ancestors, a lot of these vital records are already published and online on American Ancestors. We have for at least Essex County and other counties, all of the pre 1850 birth, marriages and deaths, searchable, right online. We also have periodicals like the 19th century Journal of the Essex Antiquarian, the 20th century the Essex Society of Genealogists up in Lynnfield, Mass. published The Essex Genealogist. We have that online and that has plenty of articles about various witchcraft related families, accusers, accused, et cetera.
But one of the best pieces of academic scholarship was done by the late David L. Green, and [00:20:00] he was the editor of The American Genealogist. And what he did was start to do the families of the witches that had been accused and basically took their ancestry back to try to find if they could find a baptism in England or a marriage or find that voyage that came over. My ,ancestor Mary Perkins Bradbury, her family arrive early into the 1630s and then settle up in Ipswich, originally.
And so looking for that type of detail, but now with the sense of the internet, we can pretty much Google a name and then put the word witchcraft after it, yup, here's your link. But it does take federal research, because unfortunately there's a lot of trees out there online where people make leaps of faith, if you will, that ancestor was this person or that person. And it turns out that it's not them at all. The worst one I ever saw was somebody had an online tree of their ancestor who died in 1802 was an [00:21:00] accused witch of Salem. And I said, "that math doesn't work at all. Did you mean 1702?" And no, the person was born in 1755 and was born 60 years or so after the trials, approximately. You have to be careful with online trees. I'm one of the people that feels that if you are gonna see something online, I wanna click on a link, see the original document, and be a hundred percent certain that all t's are crossed and i's are dotted, that I'm looking at the genuine article.
There's, there's a lot of leaps of faith being done in research online now. So when I gave my lecture, the witchcraft presentation, which is back in October, I also created a 10 page syllabus that we sold at that time. And what I decided to do is put together all the material that is in print on specific accused witches. That way you could look person by person, see what was available, see what the best scholarship. I There are some things that were done in the 19th century which are still nice to have. Samuel Gardner Drake wrote an [00:22:00] account, I think back in the 1860s, which is interesting. I Of course, stuff that Sidney Perley does is tremendous, and of course has led us to know now where the gallows were with the ledges.
So gathering up material that is already in print but also looking at new scholarship. I know that there's a new book that was just recently done on Rebecca Nurse, so we're still learning. Turning those pages of the documents are giving a fresh approach. And I think it's important. in respect to your topic on the Connecticut hysteria, I wish there was equally that much amount of scholarship written up about them.
I've been to Williamsburg, Virginia, where they do a presentation of Colonial Williamsburg called "Cry Witch" about the accused witch in colonial Williamsburg. And at the end of it, they, " do you judge her guilty or innocent?" And they don't know what happened to her, cuz they don't have the surviving court records to know that if she was executed or set free.
So there, there's a lot of gray area in research, and one of the [00:23:00] fascinating elements that a people are doing now are reconnecting other family members and having reunions of descendants and whatnot. I The Associated Daughters of American Witches, of course, are taking Connecticut, as well. And the same thing with Salem. And you're really having a good chance of combining efforts, if you will, to get more research done.
Josh Hutchinson: We see a lot of groups online about that, and sometimes they have those in-person reunions, like the the Towne cousins do reunions every year, and we are both Towne cousins, Sarah and I.
David Allen Lambert: Oh, okay. We were all in the same mix back in the day, weren't we?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, exactly.
David Allen Lambert: And it's ironic to think that the people that our ancestors lived next to, went to church, sat in the same pew with, would turn on you just like that. For what gain? Correct me if I'm wrong, were any of the accusers given a financial kickback, compensation of any sort? I know ultimately there was thought about land, but I can't [00:24:00] recall seeing anything where would be of any, maybe they thought they were saving their soul . I don't quite understand it.
Sarah Jack: Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Sarah Jack: We actually have some interviews coming up soon that we'll be answering some of those questions. We just had a really good chat with a historian yesterday on some of that.
David Allen Lambert: Oh, excellent.
Josh Hutchinson: So if someone is looking at their family tree and trying to determine if they're related to one of the accused, what's their first step? How should they get started doing that?
David Allen Lambert: Again, it's looking at where geographically you're placing your ancestors. I'm not saying that there weren't accused, there weren't in Southern New Hampshire and what's now Southern Maine, but again, Essex County, Middlesex County seem to be the hotbed of where the accused and the accusers are from. You don't have to do anything more than familiarize yourself with those that were part of those lists. And again, the Documentary Archives with Virginia edu on [00:25:00] the Salem Witchcraft Trials is a great place to start, cuz you have all the cross reference to the names, et cetera.
When you look at the records, you may not find a published genealogy that gives extraordinary detail as to the person's life. A lot of early genealogies were just names and dates, children, names, dates, and children. It's more of the modern sense of genealogies probably done within the last, let's say 75 years, that people have dug a little deeper, start looking at court records and saying, "oh, wait a second. This person was an accuser during the witchcraft trials. And he may have just been at one of the trials, but it's still an important fact." So you may have to stumble across it. So I would say the first thing, Josh, would be to have people make a list of their 17th century ancestors that were in Essex County, Massachusetts, and then kind of spiral out from there. That would probably be the best opening part of the research.
Josh Hutchinson: What is your connection to Samuel Sewell?[00:26:00]
David Allen Lambert: And of course, Samuel Sewell is the older brother of my seventh great-grandmother, Ann Sewell Longfellow. She married William Longfellow, and they are actually the immigrant ancestors of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. So they're the Longfellows all come from William Longfellow ,who came from a town near Leeds in England, and he unfortunately perished. The interesting thing about Sewall, he doesn't speak very highly of Longfellow. I'm not sure if he calls him a drunkard, but pretty short of that. But then in 1690, his brother-in-law perishes when the Phips expedition to Canada the ship went down in the St. Lawrence, and a lot of men from Newbury and Dorchester perished.
And I joined the Colonial War Society under William Longfellow. And then, of course, in his diary, he laments his poor brother. And at that point in time, their son, my ancestor, Stephen Longfellow, was only four or five years old. And with Longfellow's poetry, you hear [00:27:00] of the courtship of Miles Standish. And that's on his mother's side of the family. There are some historians will debate this. Some say it's a blacksmith in Cambridge. But Longfellow's son, Stephen Longfellow, he actually was the village blacksmith in West Newbury, Massachusetts in the 17th century. And in the Longfellow Mansion in Cambridge, they have Stephen's account book. So he had some influence. So I think he did one poem for his mother's side, one for his father's. Again, other people will debate that, cuz we don't have a clear answer to that. But I like to think that blacksmith, and his house is still standing.
And he definitely would've known his Uncle Samuel Sewell and that Stephen was my sixth great-grandfather. And my fifth great-grandmother, Anna Longfellow Poor would've been about 14 when her Great Uncle Samuel Sewall died. And her son went off to fight in the American Revolution, Captain Jonathan Poor, [00:28:00] and my grandmother knew his grandson. It's a really closer connection to history, if we really stop and think of the older generations that we have.
Sarah Jack: I really love the way your organization has the documents and the support to help people stitch that stuff together and see all the dimensions.
David Allen Lambert: There is, and the nice thing about our website is besides being able to just plug in a name, I like to use the the advice of looking at what categories in the databases that we have. And that's just on americanancestors.org. You come into our facility, and we have a quarter of a million books over an eight story research facility. The seventh floor is nothing but published genealogies. The fifth floor is nothing but local history for U.S. and Canada. The first floor is all international. You could get lost here for a week or two, if you've just started in your genealogy. And I can tell you that I still find things, and I've been a member since I was 17 years old, when I [00:29:00] first came in back in the late eighties.
And it, it is mind blowing to think that some people say they're done with their genealogy. I always say, come on in. I bet I can find something new. Cuz just using the FAN approach and using that with the Salem Witchcraft Trials, how, what are the connections? You have family obviously, so you might wanna see the siblings and are they related to someone who was accused, because all the girls are gonna have different married names, so you should be looking for them, as well. Then you have associates. Did somebody they went to church with get accused. And then they have their neighbors that could have been an accuser or an accused. And how that changed the dynamic of their own community. I know that we spoke before our call, and I wanted to share one connection with Mary Towne Esty. Mary Towne Esty had a son, Jacob, and he actually left the Topsfield area, and he went to the south precinct of Dorchester. And before he died, the town that he settled in became named for the man that put his mother to death, Stoughton. Is [00:30:00] that not a terrible irony?
Sarah Jack: It is. Yeah. Yeah. You just can't get away from some things.
David Allen Lambert: No, you were, like I say, in this case, he moved. I'm not sure, I'm sure that there was probably some connection for generations. I can tell you, and I have no problem with sharing this story. When I was about eight or nine years old, I bought a Ouija board and at a yard sale, thought it was cool. My friends had one, and I brought it home. And we weren't very overly religious. I was raised Congregational, some things don't change in nearly 300 plus years, right? And my mother looked at using that, and she picked it up and took it away and threw it away. And she goes, "our family doesn't use those." And I never really asked her. My mother's been gone for 25 years now, and I often think cuz she knew of the story, of our connection with the witchcraft trials. Even then, it had been passed down in somewhat that probably you didn't want to get caught with [00:31:00] something like that.
Or it could have just been my mother didn't like Ouija boards. It's set a precedent in my mind and thinking to myself, I said, "how many generations of my Bradbury's were, oh, your mother was her. Huh? Your grandmother was, oh, you're one of them." And that must have been went on until the Revolution era, if not longer in some cases, especially in small towns. I know that there's still people when you say that you're a Putnam and you're from Danvers, oh, you're one of them, but it's ,of course, that referring to an accuser. But if I had to pick any judge to be related to by an uncle, I think Sewall was the one I'd want to be connected to.
Sarah Jack: What kind of responses do your visitors and researchers have when they are surprised by a connection to Salem?
David Allen Lambert: Some of them are shocked because they're like, "oh, I love going there. I must have some connection in my family to Essex County or to Salem." And then when you find out they actually have somebody that was [00:32:00] accused or executed or was an accuser, when they find out they have an accuser, I mean, it's not with everybody, but there's some remorse. They're like, "do we have involvement in doing that?" And it's, you think of just other parts of history where a person's ancestor was on the wrong side, if you will, that you almost hold blame for something you know, your parent may have done. But this is for your great-great-great grandparents. And I think that it shows that the human spirit and people have this remorse after that many years. So that is something. So then they wanna learn more about who did their ancestor accuse, what's their story? And I think that is part of what Sewall did for his apology. I think being repentant in the respect of knowing what harm your own ancestor did is probably a good way of moving forward with some sort of healing.
When they find out that their ancestor was an accused witch, they're like, they want to know locations, they want to know where [00:33:00] the trials were. Some of them were held in the Boston Jail, and the Boston Jail is not very far from government center in downtown Boston. The ironic twist on that, if you've ever stood at where the Boston Jail is, it was later the building for the Boston School Department, and kids will sometimes associate being in jail with school. This jail was also used for pirates. William Kidd was held there later, before he was transported to London and executed. It has a plaque on it. But I always bring tell people that you don't have to go very far. Others will want to go to where they're buried. And I say unbeknownst to us, we just know of, perhaps, where Rebecca Nurse or her family, secreted her body back and buried her at the homestead. We really don't know of the others. I think there's speculation that was it that Giles Corey maybe buried on the Nurse property? There was one of the male accused.
Josh Hutchinson: George Jacobs.
David Allen Lambert: Jacobs. Yeah. And then there's the macabre. I, I remember [00:34:00] years ago where people were, " should I name my child after somebody who was involved in the witchcraft trials? Oh my gosh. I named my daughter Ann. It's one Ann Putnam." I don't think that there's a generality with that, but people may be naming their child in honor of someone who was accused and maybe giving them the middle name as their surname or something like that. Like by naming somebody Mary Bradbury Johnson or whatever. That's, that I think is touching.
The other thing with research, I think people have a tendency fixate on now they have this connection, so going to where the thanks to Emerson Baker and, the late Sydney Pearl for writing it down to begin with. Where, where the ledges are, where the gallows were in that, the lovely memorial that they've erected. And even before then, the benches were nice, by the cemetery right there. But people will misinterpret that as that's where they're buried. I'm like, no, those are just memorial benches actually.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, that's [00:35:00] good to clarify that.
David Allen Lambert: People are apt to want to download all the documents and they can get their hands on their ancestor. And then then it becomes really, truly job security when people are trying to suffer reading the 17th century court script. And I can turn and actually read it for them, but then I have to say in most cases it's already been transcribed. Cuz that ominous tome that I own that has all the documentary records from the witchcraft trial that I call that one a toe breaker. But that's, it's a great book. And that's one of the ones in my syllabus.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I've got that one beside me. And we had the privilege of speaking with Margo Burns recently, who did quite a lot of that transcription work.
David Allen Lambert: I'm looking forward to meeting with her about William Stoughton very shortly. I have mixed feelings about the gentleman myself. We've actually had people in Stoughton want to consider renaming the town over the years, and our town is about to have, its tercentary. We'll be 300 years old on the 22nd [00:36:00] of December, 2026. And it'll be interesting to see what we do with regard to William Stoughton. As town historian and on the 300th committee, I can tell you that much his memory will not be heralded. But if Margo or anyone writes a book, I know that we'll definitely want to be involved with helping out with whatever we can telling about the connection with our town.
Josh Hutchinson: Margo actually explained some of his good side, as well, that he donated quite a lot of money to charities, and a charity of his, fund he established, recently helped some people with the Covid recession. Town actually paid out a fund that he had donated 300 plus years ago.
David Allen Lambert: And of course, the Stoughton Hall at Harvard University. The original one was barracks for the Revolutionary War soldiers. And the one that's here now, I think is from 1805, but it's still called Stoughton Hall and Harvard University.
[00:37:00] The sad thing about Stoughton is that we don't know a lot about him, from the point of fact that his diary, if he kept one, doesn't exist. Many of his papers don't exist. For that matter, much of his library doesn't exist. So unlike a lot of people, where their collections, like the Sewall diaries are at the Mass Historical Society, and I'm an elected fellow of the Mass Historical Society. And I was viewing the original pages of the Sewall diary, even though it's been published for years. And just going to the entries where he talks about, I visited my sister Ann to, I'm like, wow, he just, he could have just been right there writing it right beside me. So yeah, so for Stoughton, we don't have a lot of those documents. I'm lucky myself as a collector. I have one or two documents that he signed. It's interesting, his wax seal was a black swan on some things, which is interesting, because the Associated Daughters of Colonial Witches uses a swan on the logo.
Sarah Jack: They do. Yeah. Was that incidental?
David Allen Lambert: The [00:38:00] story of Stoughton is an intriguing one, and I wish Margo luck. I, 30 years ago started to gather up stuff with the idea that I thought I would write something. But it's just, it's piecemeal, and with history, when you only have certain things, you have to leap to conclusion. But I understand that she has been over to England and may have found some things on his early ecclesiastical training. I said, I think he originally wanted to be a minister.
Josh Hutchinson: She told us she went to Oxford and did some research in basically an old castle there and had a great time doing that. On the research side of things, we wanted to talk about how do people firm up their branches and know that they've got true connections? How do people, say you're getting information from your aunt or your third cousin, how do you know, confirm that's accurate information?
David Allen Lambert: Yeah, and this is true with every aspect of genealogy. So you could create a genealogy chart. [00:39:00] Some people call them pedigree charts. And you put your lineage down. It's one thing to fill in the blanks. It's one thing to have the solid evidence. Primary sources say for the 17th century, right through the 19th century, practically about the same.
So you're gonna have your birth records, your marriage records, your death records are gonna be recorded on the town level. Some vital records like marriages and births in Essex County were recorded in the quarterly court in Salem. So you may find some vital records there, but for the most part, for prior to 1850, if we're using Massachusetts as the baseline here, they're all in print, for the most part. Starting in 1841, Massachusetts becomes the earliest state in the union to record birth, marriages, and deaths, getting returns from the town and city clerks. So we're lucky we have that checks and balances system. 1841, right down through 1920, you can search on American Ancestors every birth, marriage, and death besides the records early on.
The other thing that people want to do to find connection, when you [00:40:00] can't find a birth, is maybe find the church record. The christening record of a child would name his parents or her parents. A marriage record in a church won't necessarily name who the parents are, but a witness might be a clue, because maybe it's the father or maybe it's the mother or a married sister, who is identified as one of the children of their ancestor.
The burial records can give you some clues, obviously to where they're buried, and maybe it's the placement of that gravestone in the cemetery that groups a family together.
Probate's really a, a true cement though, Josh, because that's going to name in the probate record I leave to my daughter, Sarah, now the wife of John Taylor, so that helps. Deeds too, because you could sell a piece of property for a dollar or a pound and have it, or simply love and affection to I give to my child. So these are the main things, vital [00:41:00] records, church records, probates, and deeds, just count on one hand, let alone court records with depositions.
There's a really untapped collection that I use all the time, and it is on familysearch.org. It's the Mass Archives Collection, and this is 328 volumes that are now digitized. There is a card index, and it is petitions and letters to the governor, muster rolls. 328 volumes, and they go from 1629 to 1783 I and most genealogists I know that are researching that era have never even heard of that collection. Like for instance, volume 135 of the Mass Archives Collection is where most of the witchcraft trial documents are housed in. And in fact, you'll find them on the Salem site, as well. But familysearch.org is free, and you can register for an account there. And if you just search under records for the Secretary of State's [00:42:00] office of the Massachusetts State Archives, you'll find the Mass Archives collection pretty fairly simple.
And it's great. And again, that's gonna be a document that may say, I was there when my father died, and on his deposition, he recounted the following. And that shows you a relationship. And of course, we have that wonderful thing called DNA now, which we can use as a clue in some cases.
Josh Hutchinson: We wanted to ask about the DNA. We know that it's, you can now link it to your tree on americanancestors.org. Can you tell us about what resources are available once you've linked your DNA to your family tree?
David Allen Lambert: Sure. We have some applications under American AncesTrees, as it's called, that will allow you to see how your results pan out. So that's a tremendous added advantage. The other thing that we have on American Ancestors, is we have people like Melanie McComb, who I work with, and she is well versed in genetic [00:43:00] genealogy.
Autosomal DNA is what you typically test. Most people will test that with ancestry.com or 23andme or a variety of different other, MyHeritage. That really only goes back to your fifth great grandparents. And like I say with mine, I have that one exception of somebody born in 1678, but if you're trying to get back to the earlier generations, it's something that our grandparents and our great-grandparents probably should have done. Of course, the technology wasn't there.
Where the DNA is helping out, I think people for the accused of the witchcraft trials or accusers or whatnot is the Y-DNA, because that's the direct male line. So if your Hutchinson line, you'll have the same Y-DNA signature as your immigrant ancestor and even thousands of years, even before surnames. And that's where the strength of trying to connect links back, because if you knew that, say for instance, if using this as an example, if Giles Corey was [00:44:00] the only one that had this particular Y-DNA and a proven line to Giles Corey, what his Y-DNA is may help somebody who's a Corey in South Carolina, who suspects that they may be related to him based upon that haplogroup.
And there's a whole plethora of study projects on Y-DNA. Mitochondrial is useful, too, not to discount what our mothers give to us. And ladies, of course, have the mitochondrial DNA they can test, whereas men only have the Y-DNA and the mitochondrial. Mitochondrial will be your daughter's daughter, so you'd have to find a daughter of Mary Perkins Bradbury, daughter of that person, all the way down to a living male or daughter to test that back. Where the surnames change every generation, it makes it a little bit more difficult, but it's still a valuable tool.
Sarah Jack: What kind of organizing do you guys recommend for people? You've got the pedigree stuff people are building out, they're trying to gather records, they're trying to connect to [00:45:00] cousins, they're trying to learn about locations. Is there multiple things you have to do to organize?
David Allen Lambert: Well, it really depends what the end result is gonna be. I give a lecture called "What Time is it on Your Genealogical Clock?," because I think as genealogists, we gather, it's going to the grocery store for 30 years but never going to the checkout counter. Essentially, you get all this material ,and what happens is that people just don't publish it, don't distribute it, and then when they pass away, there are kids that are not interested, that don't know what to do with it. And I have too many horror stories where I can tell you bags upon bags of things are just thrown out. But we have also become the repository, if you will, for a lot of these genealogists works since the 1840s, that they never did do a book or they never decided how exactly they wanted to put it out.
So I always say just like anything in life, create a plan. First off, what you want to have done with it. Are you gonna create a website? Are you going to create something you [00:46:00] wanna self-publish? We have an NEHGS, for those that have the budget for what's called the Newbury Street Press, and where we take and put together the entire book. Now that does cost a quarter of million dollars, but we do have people that produce these books and we've, over the past, nearly 25 or more years.
But you can self-publish by getting your genealogy program that you buy and just print out the copies and then just put on the title page, "this is the 2023 edition." Make it a PDF and send it to other cousins. Create a tree on AncesTrees. Create a tree on ancestry.com, Family Search, and just organize it.
And then what people will do is that they occasionally, all right, what is the next step? What's right for me? A lot of times they'll have consultations with myself or my colleague Melanie McComb. They'll come in and talk to a genealogist in the library, who's on the desk and say," I really don't know what, what I should do with this". And we will help guide people to, what should [00:47:00] be the final deposition of the paperwork they have. And sometimes our archivist may suggest another repository, because it may not fit the scope of what we have.
We had somebody one time that had clipped out obituaries for generations out of newspapers in the town, but we determined that it would've been better to give it to the local historical society. The other thing is work in a group. I think just any project, it's better with more than one person. And if you can involve a child and nephew or a niece or a cousin or better yet, find out somebody who's also working on the same ancestor, combined efforts, that's a checks and balances. You're checking in with the other person. You have that end results. And of course NEHGS with a quarter of a million books, we're always welcome any new book that's being produced, so if you create something, and it doesn't have to be ready for a Pulitzer Prize. My only suggestion is if you're gonna state something in your genealogy or your work, try to put the citation to where it comes from .
That even goes true with [00:48:00] family stories. People say I never was able to solve this mystery in my family. It's only a family story. Great. Write the story out in the genealogy and footnote it and say when you heard that story from your grandmother or your grandfather on the porch in Stoughton, Massachusetts in 1975. And then ask your other cousins that they've heard another version of it. And I always say there's a pound of truth, even in all the different ounces of fact and fiction that may be there. There's gotta be some story to it.
My grandmother told me it when I was a child, when I was seven, that my great-grandfather was on a whaling ship. That's a great story, but how do you prove it? I tracked down the whaling ship log and found his name on it in 1871, and then 20 years later, somebody found the log book for the ship, and there's his name right in it.
You never can give up. I think genealogy is like wet cement. It's never completely dry, solid. And there's always gonna be new material that's being found. What [00:49:00] people find now in their DNA to find that maybe their paternity or great-great-great grandfather isn't who they think it is, because DNA's disproved. And now you have to open up that can of worms in your research. And then when you write something down, like I say, if you want to do a second version or an addendum, go for it. There. There's no rules. But getting it out and getting it finished is a good thing. So if you set aside, I'm gonna get this done by the end of 2023 or by the end of 2024 or maybe five years down the road, but set yourself a goal and stick to it. And we're here at American Ancestors to help in case you need any guidance or just a nudge in the right direction.
Sarah Jack: Is it by appointment only. How far ahead does somebody need to plan to come visit you guys?
David Allen Lambert: If they're just coming in to do research and use the library, we're open Tuesday through Saturday, so Tuesdays we're open nine to one. That's our early day. Wednesday through Saturday, we're open nine to five. That being said, on March [00:50:00] 24th, we will be closed for the rest of the year, because of renovations and construction of a new building next door attached to what we have.
It's $20 a day to use the library if you're not a member. Membership ,you can do a three month membership, or you can join for a year for $99.95. And then, of course, when you're home, you have access to all of the databases that we have on American Ancestors. And we even have external databases, including Early American Newspapers, so every newspaper that was published between, I mean, there's one issue of Boston's Public Occurrences from 1690. Then you have to fast forward to the Boston Newsletter in 1704. So I always say 1690, 1704. All those early papers are searchable right through about the 1830s, and that's part of your, what you get for this subscription. And then, of course, if you're in the library, and you want to meet with one of us, the people are on the reference desk are always available there. We do paid consultations for members for 150 an hour. We book them usually four to six weeks out, but we [00:51:00] can also do them through Zoom or through a telephone call, whatever medium works best for you, and we can help people with that as well.
Josh Hutchinson: That's excellent. You have so many resources available. It's hard to grasp almost.
David Allen Lambert: It really depends on the avenue that you're going in. There are people that have ancestors involved in the witchcraft trials that live in Canada now, because two generations or so afterwards, they become planters, or three generations afterwards, they become loyalists, and they go up to Canada, and their families are still up there. So I have people that are Canadian that come down and say, "I'm related to a Salem Witch, really?" And then, of course, now they have to figure in time how they're gonna get the Salem up from, "can you walk from Boston to Salem?" I'm like, "not really, but you can take the train." I always advise people don't go to Salem during Halloween. And for just not a principle. I don't know. Personally, I try to avoid it during Halloween. I just think that isn't the best way I'm gonna remember my ancestors.
Josh Hutchinson: I've been there in October, and I remember walking into [00:52:00] the Old Burying Point, and there was like a carnival set up next to it. So people were eating funnel cake, walking through the cemetery, just walking off the path and everywhere, and that really got to me.
David Allen Lambert: I think that people are entertained by history, and then some of us respect history and try to preserve it and tell the story and get the word out. I've always think of us as historians, as sentinels of their past. We're keeping their memory alive. They have no voice anymore, so we have to apply it for them. And yeah, I don't think I approve of funnel cake or cotton candy or balloons running through a cemetery, especially in Salem, or any place for that matter.
Josh Hutchinson: I know now they control the cemetery in October. They limit how many people can be in there so they can keep an eye and make sure people stay on the paths and behave themselves. So [00:53:00] it's improved since the last time I was there.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah, I've had a great love for cemeteries. One of the books I've published for NEHGS is called A Guide to Massachusetts Cemeteries. It started as a Rolodex when I worked at the Mass State Archives right outta high school, cuz nobody knew where all the cemeteries were in Boston, or for Salem for that matter, and how to get in contact, what was in print. So I created this book. Now it's even an app that you can have on your Kindle, but it gives every cemetery, when it was created, the alias names and anything that's been published on, it's for every town in Massachusetts. So that I have a great love for cemeteries.
Sarah Jack: That's a fascinating project that you did. That was one of your first projects maybe.
David Allen Lambert: The day after I turned 18, I went to work as an intern at the Mass State Archives, and I was hired as a genealogist to work in the reference desk. And what I did basically in my free time is people would ask about Granary Burying Ground or King's Chapel Burying Ground. I'd say, all right, where is that? [00:54:00] So I'd take the yellow pages out and look for the phone for the addresses. There was no guide to cemeteries. There wasn't a Findagrave or Billion Graves back then. And then I went to NEHGS, and we have thousands of gravestone inscriptions, and what's, why those are so valuable, a lot of those are done in the 19th century when the stone was still upright and legible. So we have these transcriptions. The DAR library in Washington also has thousands of transcriptions. So I linked all of those in the published vital records in Massachusetts, there's usually a code if they got the information from a gravestone. So here's a book done in 1902. You can't read the stone anymore, but it tells you the location from that inscription. So I linked all of those.
So it was a real labor of love. It went from being a Rolodex to a 300-page-plus book. So and I'm still finding stuff on it ,which is amazing, Sarah. It's people say, "oh, there's a graveyard out in the back woods with about four gravestones. Do you know about that one?" No. But I do now. So it's still a work in progress after 20 [00:55:00] years
Josh Hutchinson: That's a remarkable resource.
David Allen Lambert: Thank you. Yeah. It's a pleasure to work on.
Josh Hutchinson: And you mentioned earlier you're also involved with the Extreme Genes Podcast and radio show. How does that show help family researchers?
David Allen Lambert: Well, we mix a little bit of sometimes black sheep in your family history makes an interesting, old, crazy Uncle Charlie that everybody used to talk about at the Thanksgiving dinner table. How do you find out why he was so crazy? It's interesting. We have a variety of topics everywhere from DNA to having guests like Henry Louis Gates on this show, leaders in the genealogical field, CeCe Moore, who's a genetic genealogist, a good personal friend of ours, is on there.
We highlight what's new in genealogy news. So what I give every week, including when I tape today, is what's called Family Histoire News, and essentially talking about what's new in the industry, what's going on, like upcoming conferences, and I help him find guests. So [00:56:00] like the two fine people I'm talking to right now that we want to talk about what you're doing, because we have to have the audience of genealogists because, genealogists, not everybody's on Twitter, on Facebook, but we're on radio, we're on 60 radio stations nationwide, and on our podcast download now we're on iHeartRadio, YouTube, Spotify, and we get on an average 20,000 to 50,000 downloads a month.
And he's been out for eight years sponsored by ancestry.com, but we're not, the mouthpiece of Ancestry, obviously, but they're one of the sponsors. But it's a lot of fun. We make it fun. I, one of the things I like to highlight are the unusual stories in genealogy or in history that will parallel or some centenarian that just passed is the last of the Dambusters from World War II that helped destroy the German dams, which were an integral part of the war effort. He just died at 101 years old, and thinking, does somebody have a [00:57:00] connection with that?
It started when I was on the show, it was Fisher thought I had a pretty good dynamic with him, and he calls me his brother from another mother. And I was telling em about friends I've had. I was lucky to be friends with over 25 years with the last passenger of the Titanic. I met her when I was a teenager, and she used to send my children Christmas gifts every year, so we fondly recalled our Auntie Millvina. She was eight weeks old when she was on the Titanic, but I knew the last first class passenger, unlike Kate Winslet's character in Titanic. There was a woman who lived to be 101 in Massachusetts. Her name was Marjorie Robe, and I remember talking with her on the phone about, were they playing "Nearer my God to Thee" on the boats and her and her stories and all that.
So I've always had a connection with trying to find something as far back as I possibly can. I mean, I remember writing to Spanish American War veterans and widows of Civil War veterans when I was a kid, silent movie actresses. I sat with Carla Lemley, whose uncle started [00:58:00] Universal Studios, when she was like 103 years old. She was in Phantom of the Opera in 1925 as the prima ballerina and was delivered the first speaking lines in a horror movie, 1931 Dracula. She is sitting in her house in Hollywood she owns since 1937, reciting her lines from all these movies as and wearing a, like a Chinese dressing gown, and we're eating Chinese food. I knew her niece, and it was great. I love touching history. I used to be a Civil War reenactor, because I wanted to know that next step to what the past was like.
Sarah Jack: I love that you just said touching history, because it is, and there's so many ways that people can, and they need to be brave and do it, reach out and get started.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah. And then with genealogy, I think that, even if you sit down and somebody listens to this, and we got one person who calls up their grandmother or their mother and say, "hey, what was your grandparents' [00:59:00] name?" I mean, if you ask your grandmother who her grandparents are, you now have your great-great-grandparents.
And it's so easy, especially with younger folks or people that are fortunate to have their parents and grandparents or even great-grandparents alive, to just get started. Don't put it off, because if you put it off, they may not be there. And there are so many great stories that you can ask people. When you're doing genealogy, one of the big key questions, I always say, ask your parents how they met. Ask your grandparents how they met. You won't find that on any record. It won't be on the marriage record, won't be on the marriage license. Might have been written up in a newspaper article on their 50th wedding anniversary, but probably not. Adding the human element, and I think that's what we search for as genealogists and family historians, is we pour over these records.
The unfortunate ancestors we have that were accused and executed during the witchcraft trials, but we have their depositions, we have their words. They're more than just a name and a date. They're, they actually come alive. And it's to, to me it's so personal when you can see a [01:00:00] deposition or you can see, either pro or con against somebody, that this is their words, this is their thought process. This is what they believed in. And they're just more than a piece of paper or a gravestone.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. Specifically, Rebecca Nurse, my ninth great grandmother, she said that the world would know of her innocence. And when I read that, I just, I'm like, they do.
David Allen Lambert: Have you been to her homestead?
Sarah Jack: I have not had the opportunity yet, but it won't be long. I'm gonna make it happen.
David Allen Lambert: It will be amazing. And I only have the connection by association, having someone in the trials, and it was moving for me. To think that you're in the home of somebody who was basically dragged out of bed and brought into trial on a cart. The whole story is just is amazing. But when you can have those touch points in history where you can physically see a building or be at a graveyard or now, like I say at the gallows. I think [01:01:00] that's really important cuz it's more than just reading something. So I look forward to hearing your reaction when you actually go there.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I hope I get to see that, because the Rebecca Nurse Homestead is actually what got me started in both genealogy and witch trial research, because I visited, I was fortunate to be able to visit when I was in high school, up there looking around at colleges and went there with my father and my brothers and we learned that our family was connected to the witch trials. And that got me hungry to do more research. And it was just a really powerful experience to actually be present where somebody accused had been.
David Allen Lambert: And that's usually the reaction that people get, Josh. And obviously it's the same with you, Sarah. It's like you find that you have that connection. It's like [01:02:00] a yearning. I like to attribute genealogy as a very thick book that we know the first couple of chapters cuz we know that generation, but somebody's tore all of those pages out. I like to think of places like NEHGS where I work in Boston. We have those pages, and they do all fit in there. It's just a matter of doing the work to put it back together again. We're only trying to relearn what wasn't told to us and what's been lost to us. And I can almost see where in some cases where people may not want to remember having somebody accused in the witchcraft trials because the pain and just a disassociation.
I Look at Mary Towne Esty's son going to what became Stoughton. I mean, it's, starting anew, and we don't talk about the past. I hear that all the time from people. I said did your grandfather ever tell Oh, nope. They never, they said, leave the past. In the past. We don't talk about things. We talk about now. Live in the present. And that's why a lot of this history has been lost, I think, to people. [01:03:00]
Sarah Jack: Yeah. There always seems to be somebody in a generation that really wants to dig back and find out about their family, but things are lost forever.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah. Photographs specifically. And I think David McCullough, when I had the honor of work on his genealogy, he gave a presentation to us and he said, if you want to be remembered in the 22nd century, keep a journal. Think of what we're doing, Sarah. We have, everything is, a cell phone right here, we have our photos on it, we have our correspondence, we have our text. What do we print out? How many people go and print off on a quarterly basis or a yearly basis, more than maybe a handful if any of their photographs? They put 'em on Facebook, they put 'em on Twitter, on Flickr, whatever, in Instagram. They don't print out something that's going to be there for the next generation.
We don't send postcards anymore. In fact, you go to [01:04:00] most places now, you won't find a postcard. When I was in Disney World, I thought, it'll be fun. I'll send a postcard. There aren't any postcards at Disney World. You can't buy them. There are places that we would look at, alright, we're gonna get a letter when somebody had a baby born. And now we're getting, a Facebook update with a picture. Those important events should be printed out and saved. We're really not leaving much to the 22nd century in this century. There's almost gonna be a real void of information. So like I always tell people, if you want a New Year's resolution, leave the future a picture of yourself. Write down what you do. Talk about yourself. It's not vanity. It's leaving a chapter of history.
Sarah Jack: Wow. What a really important point.
David Allen Lambert: Could you imagine if we had diaries of all those people that were involved in the witchcraft trials, how the story, and think about that. How many voices do we really have from the trials that are day by day? It's Sewall's diary, and when I was turning the pages [01:05:00] reading September of 1692, I just was like, this page is as old as what he's writing about. And I'm like, I'm turning this page. And it was one thing to read it. I have the published version of his diaries, but it was one thing to see the original. And that's, I think, again, just touching history and learning about it.
Josh Hutchinson: That has to be a remarkable experience to know somebody wrote that 330 years ago, and that's amazing to connect with that.
David Allen Lambert: I mean, and that's true with probate records. You could go to the Mass State Archives and ask to see, you have to make an arrangement, but the original probate record can be taken out, and you can look through the handwritten last will and testament of an ancestor. You can go to the cemetery and see the gravestone and read that faded epitaph at the bottom that meant something to the family.
May it be biblical or just, some verse. You can sometimes stand in the doorway of your ancestor's home or the cellar hole where they [01:06:00] stood. It gives you a closer connection. I always say genealogy field trips are important. We're doing a trip to Scotland in June, and one of the things I plan on doing is reading up more on the Scottish witchcraft trials and trying to visit some of the sites that are around Edinburgh that occurred. And it just fascinates me. And again, I don't have a connection with it. In fact, I have very little Scottish heritage. My wife is a quarter Scottish, and I often think the records only go back for the most part in Scotland in, for genealogical purposes into the 1600s, sometimes if you're lucky with the church. So she could have easily had ancestors who were executed during the witchcraft trial by historians that went on in Scotland, or for those matter in Germany or something like that. And the ancestors will never know or connect to just because there's no records between that point in history and when the records start being recorded.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We learned from Mary W. Craig when we spoke with her about the Scottish Witch [01:07:00] trials that a lot of the people who are descendants of the accused and executed have no idea about it because the future generations felt such shame at their ancestors being executed. They basically erased them from the family tree.
David Allen Lambert: Yeah. And that's, I think that kinda hearkens back to New England through the Victorian era. People just didn't wanna mention it because, oh, your ancestor was accused as a witch. From being teased in the schoolyard to maybe being refused employment or maybe not given that bank loan or whatever you might need. It's funny to think what may have been the trickle down for how many generations that stigma was still there. Even if, for those who weren't executed, the ones who were just accused, the humiliation of the whole thing and public scrutiny.
Sarah Jack: In the countries that we've been talking to, [01:08:00] Nigeria, South Africa, where people are experiencing accusations, family have to try to leave and find another community that doesn't know what happened to try to reestablish themselves, that the shame does follow. It's interesting how many parallels there are, but witch hunting, whether 300 years ago or this week, it has a lot of the same harmful elements.
David Allen Lambert: Are they using spectral evidence, as well? I mean, is that where the most of the accusations are coming from? Claiming somebody got sick or an animal died based upon what somebody may have done?
Josh Hutchinson: It's mostly illness and death that they attribute to extraordinary causes rather than a cause that's known to them. And it's generally, it's mob violence. It's they [01:09:00] go to a diviner or someone and have them name the witch, they call it witch finding. And so once the witch is named, they just gather their acquaintances and go over there and execute them.
David Allen Lambert: Wow not even with a trial.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. No trials. It's just mob violence, brutality, torture. If you're lucky, you just get chased outta town or you run to the police, and the police lock you up for your own safety.
David Allen Lambert: Wow. We really haven't come very far, Josh, in 300 plus years have we as a society in the world.
Josh Hutchinson: No, no. And we see parallels in America and Europe and everywhere in the world, that same mentality of treating people who we think are different from us poorly.[01:10:00]
Here's Sarah with another important update.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts News.
Here's an update on the Connecticut witch trial exoneration bill, HJ Number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. There are currently 23 bipartisan Connecticut legislators who are supporting the exoneration by co-sponsoring the bill.
The bill must be voted on in the Joint Committee on Judiciary. Please continue to write Connecticut legislators of all political parties, asking them to sponsor the bill and vote Yes. Please go to our show description for the link for the March 8th press conference held by Senator Saud Anwar and State Representative Jane Garibay. Please listen to the statement of support by Connecticut's Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz. Take time to understand what historian Dr. Kathy Hermes states at this conference. Share the bold words that author Beth Caruso, student Catherine Carmon, and descendant Sue Bailey arm us with. Arm yourself with the facts of history, and find yourself a [01:11:00] platform to work with us and share the message.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, an organized collaboration of diverse collaborators, has been working for an official state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut colony. We support the Joint Committee on Judiciary's bill, HJ number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. Will you take time today to write a member of the judiciary committee asking them to recognize the relevance of exonerating Connecticut witch trial victims? You can do this whether you are a Connecticut resident or anywhere else in the world, you should do it from right where you are. You can find the information you need to contact a committee member with a letter in the show links.
You can follow our progress by joining our Discord community or Facebook groups. Links to all these informative opportunities are listed in the episode description. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our project on social media @ctwitchhunt and visit our website [01:12:00] at ConnecticutWitchTrials.org.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is a project of End Witch Hunts movement. End Witch Hunts is a nonprofit organization founded to educate about witch trial history and advocate for alleged witches. Please support us with your donations or purchases of educational witch trial books and merchandise. You can order a white rose exoneration supporter pin in our merch shop at zazzle.com/store/endwitchhunts, shop our other Zazzle store, zazzle.com/store/thoushaltnotsuffer, and shop our books at bookshop.org/endwitchhunts. We want you as a super listener. You can help keep Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast in production by super listening with your monthly monetary support. See episode description for links to these support opportunities. We thank you for standing with us and helping us create a world that is safe from witchcraft accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you Sarah for that update on the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration [01:13:00] Project.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us again next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, associates, and neighbors.
Sarah Jack: Please support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

March 16, 2023

Women and Witch Trials with Ann Little

https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2045153.rss

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Show Notes

To honor Women’s History Month and March 8, International Women’s Day we have created a special episode with Colorado State University’s Dr. Ann Little who specializes in the history of colonial America, with special emphasis on the history of women, gender and sexuality. She is a professor, author and expert consultant for Who Do You Think You Are? We discuss past and persisting mentalities toward and in women including their fertility and sexuality power in society. What is the impact of this narrative on historic witch trials and in modern attitudes influencing women’s rights?

Links

Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, Lyndal Roper

The Devil in the Shape of a Women: Witchcraft in Colonial New England, Carol F. Karlsen

The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege

Press Conference on H.J. No. 34, March 8, 2023

Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut

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Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Fact Sheet for Connecticut Witch Trial History

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0023 Ann Little Download

March 9, 2023

Representative Jane Garibay on Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Legislation

Connecticut State Representative Jane Garibay

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Show Notes

Connecticut State Representative Jane Garibay of the 60th district, Windsor and Windsor Locks talks about the process for proposing an exoneration bill. We talk about the reasons and relevance behind House Joint Resolution #34: Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. Hear how this state exoneration of witch trial victims would open the door to creating memorial monuments and educational activities for the community and descendants.

Links

Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Accused of Witchcraft in New York by Scott Ferrara

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to another outstanding episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today's guest has recently appeared in the New York Times, Associated Press, and basically all the things. We'll be talking to Representative Jane Garibay of Connecticut's 60th district, representing Windsor and Windsor Locks in the Connecticut General Assembly. We'll be discussing a resolution to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut, House Joint Resolution [00:01:00] Number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut.
Sarah Jack: We've really enjoyed working with Representative Jane Garibay, and we're really anticipating making this episode, and it was great.
Josh Hutchinson: We had a wonderful chat with her, including how she became involved in exoneration legislation, where she learned about the need for exoneration, and what she's learned about the Connecticut Witch Trials.
Sarah Jack: She is a major part of how the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project came together, and this personal and engaging conversation tells a story of how she got involved in the exoneration, why she supports it. We talk about what's next for the resolution, and you can [00:02:00] learn about how you can help.
Josh Hutchinson: And we also talk about what comes after the exoneration, some plans for memorializing the victims of the Connecticut Witch Trials.
Sarah Jack: It's my pleasure to introduce state representative Jane Garibay, who was recently reelected to the 60th district, representing Windsor and Windsor Locks. She's a lifelong resident of Windsor, serving as the executive director of the Windsor Chamber of Commerce from 1999 to 2018, she worked for the Town of Windsor in the recreation department and is now executive director of the First Town Downtown in Windsor.
Jane has been an active volunteer for most of her life. She has an educational background, having taught English as a second language in Mexico and Spanish at St. Gabriel School in Windsor. She's the president and founder of the Windsor Education Foundation and served as the president of the Windsor School Board. Be sure to visit her biography page on her website to see all the important ways she has served the community and been [00:03:00] recognized. This web link will be in the show description.
Jane Garibay: I represent the 60th district, which is Windsor and Windsor Locks. We have Alice Young, who was a Windsor resident when she was accused, convicted, and executed for witchcraft. She was the first. So we do have that long history in Windsor.
Sarah Jack: And how did you get involved in witch trial exoneration legislation?
Jane Garibay: We did do the exoneration here in Windsor for our two that were convicted, and there was a resolution, and I know Beth very well and her connection, and I've read parts of her book. But it was mostly just more, probably started about a year ago, people reaching out to me and me becoming more aware and understanding the generations down and what this meant to their family members and learning more about what really happened way back then. And I think at the time [00:04:00] it was actually Windsor was called Dorchester at the beginning, and it was like 20-something towns were part of this Dorchester, part of Windsor. And then things have changed. And I think that's why there's a lot of mix there.
Josh Hutchinson: Why do you support exoneration?
Jane Garibay: It hit me one day that there is a parallel to what happened in the 1600s with the witchcraft to what is being challenged today in women's rights. I think it's just being aware, I started thinking about what if you are a little bit different? What if you don't dress the norm? What if you're a strong woman, and you're determined and know what you want? Or just different things? And I saw that parallel, and as I learned about how their families have suffered through the generations, it just became very important. To me, it's a small thing to do that can make a lot of people feel better and happier. So [00:05:00] it seems simple.
Sarah Jack: Simple but so powerful. And I know so many of us are appreciative and excited and those reasons that you mentioned, the parallels are, it's so great, because it'll keep some of those conversations going in a positive direction. Are there any other modern issues that relate to it for you?
Jane Garibay: So I think we're always in flux in the way that people are treated. We gain ground in some areas and then, some years later then we're backtracking again with others. And it's really about, the United States has all always been about it, supposedly is live and let live. Respect, if I'm not hurting anyone, I should be able to live the way that I wanna live, whichever way that may be.
And I believe each of us either has a religion, there's many different religions. In my own mind, it's always the same God. It's just different ways of getting there in [00:06:00] some way, shape, or form. And we have to respect each other and not impose what my personal experience is, that we have to respect each other. So I think bringing the past and trying to make it, we can't change what happened, but we can make it right in the books. That goes a big way about saying today, if you're a single woman, you choose not to get married. Or maybe you like to wear a flannel shirt and jeans, whatever that is to someone else. That we have to respect people, because we can fall back into some old patterns.
Josh Hutchinson: The exoneration is about making a statement. What does it take to get a bill passed?
Jane Garibay: A lot. It really does, because that's why you build relationships in the House. To me, most politicians, legislators, senators are very hard workers and well-meaning, and you have to build those [00:07:00] relationships, because you need it to pass in the house. You need to pass in the senate, and then you need the governor to sign it. So all three branches have to be working together. I had a bill last year that made it through the house that died in the senate. It's hard, and you have to be on top of it. As you know, for nine months we've been doing a lot of work. And putting, getting the bill, working on people, and we've gotten tons of support, like with Senator Anwar coming on board and feeling passionate about this topic, too. So it takes a lot of connecting. It takes talking to people, it takes emailing. So our first step it will be is to have judiciary have a hearing. That's our biggest hope. Get the hearing. Once we have the hearing, it's having people testify or show up in a larger group, even if everyone doesn't speak, to show we support this. It takes everyone reaching out to their legislators within the state and saying, "I want you to pass this bill. This is important to me." [00:08:00] So as we've been working on that for nine months now, and I think we're in a good place right now, I am hoping judiciary will give us a hearing, which will be a major step, because over 5,000 bills are proposed, 5,000, and maybe 2 to 500 will be passed. And a lot of them are good bills. There's some, depending on your opinion, you might not think are so important. Just some might not think this one's important, but it's important to someone and just takes fighting for your bill. It's great, because now you have someone both in the house and the Senate that feel passionate about it, so it gives us strength. Sometimes things happen for a reason.
Sarah Jack: Absolutely. And when we were all having that conversation this week, you could really see that, how it was bringing this new spark and there was more ideas and just strengthening the collaboration. So that was exciting.
Jane Garibay: It is exciting.
Josh Hutchinson: I'm also very excited that he's on board, [00:09:00] and you've got a road into the senate. Seems more likely that they'll get on board. We saw that they posted on their social medias about this last week, and that was a great step forward.
Jane Garibay: Absolutely. The House is a little bit easier, I feel, because we're 151. There's 98 on my Dems team. So you can lose a few and still have the majority vote. In the Senate if even though the Dems have the majority or like that. Although, and something like this, I think it's bipartisan. I don't think it's gonna be a partisan vote, but there, you can't lose as many votes, cause there's fewer people.
Sarah Jack: Which is all the more reason for people to be contacting their representatives and senators.
Jane Garibay: And to write, it can be only three lines. It's better not to do a template. Some issues come before that every email, it's exactly the same. And I still answer 'em, [00:10:00] but it's not the same when someone sends me a heartfelt three or four lines about why this is important to them. It engages me more as a legislator, right? In the past two months, I've gotten three very long letters about why this is important to them. One was from Granby, Connecticut. The other two were different parts of the country.
And I'll never look at Halloween the same, by the way. The event in Windsor, I started it like 20 years ago. It's called Nightmare on Broad Street. And the event will, I just won't see it the same. I don't like, like now I think of all the like Hocus Pocus and the witch movies and whatever. Even though these people weren't really witches, just the idea of it, it's just different now for me.
Josh Hutchinson: The associating one with the other is not accurate and demeaning to the people who were not witches.
Jane Garibay: It's about being accused of something they didn't do ,really. Do you know what? But it's, yeah, it is to [00:11:00] separate the two.
Josh Hutchinson: And you've raised a good point that this should not be a partisan issue. This should be just a simple, an injustice was done, justice should be done to fix that kind of a thing.
Jane Garibay: Yes, absolutely. And it doesn't cost money. Usually that's where our divide comes down a lot, more conservative financially, a little bit freer or whatever. This doesn't cost money. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't hurt anyone. It just gives peace to the family. And I know what the Judiciary Committee is looking for, because how do they process this? Because it was the commonwealth at the time. It wasn't the state of Connecticut, so it's finding the way, the tool to do it, and it's basically just saying, "we're sorry this happened." It's recognizing it and it's saying, "these people were innocent." Even if there weren't a way to pardon them, this isn't a pardon because they didn't do anything. They weren't, [00:12:00] they didn't do anything. This is saying, "this never should have happened."
And every day I learn new things. Like I didn't realize, while Governor Winthrop was in England, I understand that James Mason was in charge. And we've had a lot of controversy about that in Windsor, because we have the James Mason statue that we got from Mystic. And we've had an outcry, and they're trying to find it a home, maybe in a museum, but not out on our Palisado Green. And now that I know he was in charge when all this was happening, and just by default, it's his fault, in a way, because he was the leader at the time. He could've stopped it.
Josh Hutchinson: Conflicts with the whole heritage of Alice Young and Lydia Gilbert being Windsorites.
Jane Garibay: And I've come to admire, I still don't know a ton, but Governor Winthrop was a hero in this, [00:13:00] being an alchemist. I understand that once he arrived back from England, no one else was executed. There were people that were convicted, but he was able to stay, and we could have lost a lot more lives. It could have really have kept going.
Sarah Jack: On the judiciary committee, how do they process those proposed bills?
Jane Garibay: So they work with O L M, Office of Legislative Management. Some of the members, the chair, Steve Stafstrom, is a lawyer, and he is really good at what he does. So they have a, it's not like me going in and having no clue how I would write this or do this, and it seems so easy. I wanna just go out and say, "hey, this is wrong." But there has to be statutory language, and so they all work. It takes quite a bit for all our bills to be written up. The legislators, we come up with the idea and a basic thought or concept, but then we work with staff to put that into legal means so that, [00:14:00] afterwards, someone can't say that wasn't really done, or, blah, blah, blah. It's put through in legal verbiage that can stick.
Sarah Jack: Thanks for explaining that.
Jane Garibay: Hey, it's been a learning curve for all. It really is. So much goes into a bill, from first you do a screening, so the bills will go in front that's been put in. It'll go to screening in judiciary, which is made up of senate and house members. And the screening committee is usually the chairs and it might have the ranking members, depending. And so they screen all the bills, and they decide whether something goes forward.
If you move it out, then language starts. We start having the proposed language, what is it gonna look like, et cetera. Then again, it's up to the chairs if there's a hearing. So then there's a hearing, and that's your next step.
And then whether it hits the floor or not, everybody's lobbying and working, even after the hearing to try [00:15:00] to get their bills heard, and the chairs have a lot to say, but not the total say. It depends, again, if this isn't controversial, and it's controversial, there's a lot of, it's a whole different story in the way they negotiate what bills they do. This is pretty bipartisan, I feel, and I don't think it'll have that same difficulty.
Josh Hutchinson: And then if it goes to the floor, then it's open for debate before a vote?
Jane Garibay: It's open to debate for floor. I believe it will come out of the House. I think it'll be Representative Stafstrom, who does have a woman that was executed in Stamford, his town, and he's pretty passionate, and we sent him Beth's books and different things. So he's really been reading up on it and everything, and he is a great person to take it to the floor.
So then if we have, which I expect, a positive [00:16:00] vote, then it gets sent over to the Senate. Then they go through the same thing over there, gets passed there, and then they will send it on the governor to sign.
Sarah Jack: At what point would they be considered exonerated? Would it be once it's passed both sides, or is it when the governor signs?
Jane Garibay: The governor, we would choose, usually you choose, like when we did the PFAS bill in Windsor, we had the PFAS bill from the airport and was the center of bringing the attention to that chemical. And the governor came to Windsor by the Farmington River and signed the bill there. They'll choose a place for a bill signing, whether it's the State House, where people were executed, or maybe it's in Stamford. There's a monument there.
Josh Hutchinson: So with it being a resolution, is it effective basically once the governor signs?
Jane Garibay: Once the governor signs it, I believe, I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I believe that's[00:17:00] most bills will say when it takes place, because if it's a new law that is gonna cost money or give revenues, they usually say as of July 1st or something. But I don't think this bill is that, so I think it would be immediate upon his signature.
Josh Hutchinson: That would be a very significant moment then.
Jane Garibay: So we still have a ways to go, right? We still, we have a road, but the road looks plowed, right? It looks a clean road.
Sarah Jack: That's a great analogy. This nine months has been so informative and exciting and a nail biter, too, cuz you just, there's all these little steps in the learning along the way, but it's been such a pleasant experience. And I think that the story getting talked about, the history being discussed and more known, that's already a win there.
Jane Garibay: It's hard, because you've waited all these years, after one failed attempt, and the thoughts, and all the [00:18:00] work you guys have put in over these years. But I guess it's what they say, the patience has paid off.
Josh Hutchinson: Tony's really the long hauler. He's been doing this since 2005, so he's been at it for about 18 years now, and he's really been very patient and stuck with it.
Sarah Jack: And it's been really fun to see his enthusiasm about what's happening right now. He feels like the story's being heard and this excellent effort has been made. It's been so satisfying.
Jane Garibay: And if I understood correctly with Senator Anwar, his constituent that reached out to him is from one of the families that was part of the accusation and how that he felt that pain of what his ancestors have done, which I found really interesting to know, to sit here and discover that your great grandfather was part of this [00:19:00] and to feel that pain. So I thought that was interesting. So not only does the exoneration help those of those that were executed, I know if it were me, I would feel like awful that my family was involved in something. So it'll find peace for everyone.
Josh Hutchinson: That's a very good, important side of the story to be told, how it affects the descendants on the other side. I have ancestors on both sides of Salem Witch Trials, ancestors who were accusers and ancestors who were victims and jury members and everybody else, related to quite a few people involved and in very different ways. So I try to get some perspective on what each of them was thinking at the time and what they were feeling, and the fear of witchcraft was so real to them at the time. It was [00:20:00] the way that we feel about potential for violence. It was very real, but it's challenging to deal with as a descendant, to think about yeah, my ancestor, I have one that accused another ancestor of mine, and it's, I'm related to both of them. I know that what was done was wrong, and I do feel bad about that, but, at the same time that, that was generations ago. So I don't think that anybody living today should feel the blame or shame for that.
Jane Garibay: But doesn't it make you feel better that you've been part of making this happen?
And there's parallels, too. Look how fearful we are of certain nationalities, ethnic backgrounds or how fearful we are of someone who's different. And that's why we have to continue to be [00:21:00] inclusive and understanding and respectful of each other, and that we're all very different, right? We all have different backgrounds.
And again unless someone is hurting someone else, I have to respect their religion, the way they dress, if it's lgbtq, whatever that is, to respect and not judge. Because you can execute with words, too. It's not the same as taking a life, but you can execute. You can hurt someone with the words you've talked to them, the deed you do to them.
We saw that the other day, with the Tennessee. There is a huge parallel, and I truly believe it's important to understand our history to know how we move forward. If we don't look back at how we got to where we are today and some of the strides and builds on those strides, I don't mean to be so philosophical, but, you know, it's really important to understand others and respect them.
Sarah Jack: And understanding as much of the full history that we can is key to that, not just these [00:22:00] selections. And if somebody who feels bad about what their ancestors have done is willing to bring something to light, to correct a wrong, it's a signal to the rest of us, that we can make brave steps like that to get a good look at the stories.
And one of the things that I think about sometimes, these panics came out of, here you had neighbors and community members suffering for different reasons and they weren't able to come together to rise through them without blaming each other, and I think our fears today can cause the same thing if, you know, if you were afraid of our neighbor who is different, or our coworker who is different, that could stop something really important from happening. So we need to get to know people and learn about them and diffuse those fears.
Jane Garibay: And one of the hardest [00:23:00] thing I think is for all of us, even for myself, is standing up for something you believe in or against something that you think is wrong. It's not an easy thing to do it. You know, we all wanna be part of the group. We all want, you know, we're human, and we build community.
And even today, you can see it in just everyday life sometimes, you know, the bully on the playground or adults. And it's standing up to that type of behavior. And again, I believe in a kind way, right? Because if you take the other way, then you're being just as bad. And then there is the generational trauma, which a lot of people laugh at when I use that word. I'm lucky because I have a daughter who works in that type of psychology and instances with students, et cetera.
But it reminds me my great grandfather was a harness maker. And he was at the table with his six kids, and he was drunk at dinnertime, and he was playing [00:24:00] Russian roulette with his pistol. He ended up shooting himself and dying in front of his children. And it's just weird. We didn't talk about a lot, but my grandfather never drank. You never saw him with a drink. My mother never drank. We didn't talk about it. We didn't know why. And I rarely do, I have like on the holiday or whatever. So that had followed my family without talking about it. I'm not saying it's in the genes or not in the genes, but just knowing that history and that example of behavior. So that has gone down through the generations with those that are descendants of those that were executed, right? And whether it's through lore or the storytelling through the family, cause storytelling is history, right? It's what happened.
And to live just with that awfulness about. People need to stop and think. Especially the couple. It was a husband and wife. And if there were children, they were given to neighboring farms. If it was just the woman, [00:25:00] he was left without the person to take care of the kids. Just a woman who had material things, they wanted it. So a lot of times, they were accused of witchcraft so that she didn't have those things. So they were stripped of everything. They were stripped of their property, their dignity. The whole family just suffered, there goes the husband of so-and-so and the children. It left a mark forever.
Josh Hutchinson: Alice Young's daughter, Alice Young Beamon, was accused of witchcraft. She moved away to Springfield, Massachusetts, and it followed her. Somebody slandered her son, saying that he and his mother were witches, and they had to file a suit against that for defamation, because it just followed for three generations, and Sarah has an ancestor, Winifred Benham Sr., who was accused along with her daughter, and her [00:26:00] mother, Mary Hale, had been accused before her, so that was another case of three generations that followed.
Jane Garibay: Yeah. It's crazy, isn't it? It's just like unthinkable. You think how their lives, and at the same time, the people that were accusing really believed what they were thinking. I think some was planned out, some took advantage of using it to get what they wanted. But a lot of them, they really, truly believe that they caused the plague, and it was easy to get them riled up. And I see that in today's world, that sometimes you have a someone that gets people riled up, and they believe something that they want them to believe, and it's not really true, and I'm not talking about the large politics, just around town or whatever, those things happen.
Josh Hutchinson: On the topic of generational trauma, there's also the experience that descendants have when they learn of their ancestors' stories. And all of, you know, the [00:27:00] feelings you have to sort through because just knowing that your innocent ancestor suffered that way.
Jane Garibay: I know. I try not to think about it, because it keeps you up at night. If you think about how, just the whole thing, it was awful. And for their family members to be watching that. It's incomprehensible.
I did watch in Scotland, the prime minister that gave the great speech, and they exonerated 2,000, over 2,000. I was like shocked. But I guess Europe was a lot worse before it made it here, and here it just somehow, it got stopped before it turned into the same situation, right? With so many.
Josh Hutchinson: We were fortunate that we had strong ties with England, where things were a little calmer. Scotland was, I think by population, per capita, they had one of the highest rates of [00:28:00] executions of witches, and it was grizzly.
Jane Garibay: Now did this happen to all countries through Europe? Do you think, did it happen in Spain, for example?
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, it definitely happened in Spain. Last year, Catalonia actually pardoned something around 700 individuals who were persecuted there. And that's just one Spanish state. It happened in most of their states, and France was big. Italy had some. Germany, it was terrible. Germany was like Scotland. They had about 25,000 executions in the Holy Roman Empire. Half of all of the executions happened in Germany.
Jane Garibay: I wish common sense had set in, though, to understand if they really had been, there had been something in witchcraft or whatever, they would've probably been able to zap 'em or do [00:29:00] something to save themselves. They wouldn't have gotten that far. My husband's family's from Spain, Spain and Mexico, and I know on our next trip we're gonna look into the subject of the witchcraft and what happened there. And his family was from the north, San Sebastian. And now they're in Madrid. And he has family in Mexico, too.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I've a lot of family from Germany and Scotland, and it got pretty bad in Scandinavia, too, and I have Scandinavian ancestors. I might find more ancestors that were involved, as I do my research.
Sarah Jack: What kind of education needs to happen around the witch trials?
Jane Garibay: So we touched on it a little bit the other night, when we all met. I just want things to be tastefully done, but it has to be tastefully. In my mind, I can see in Connecticut, a trail, but it's to honor and visit, not to capitalize on, not to make money on. It's to [00:30:00] bring awareness and education. And like Stamford already has a beautiful monument, so doing something like that, and each town and being part of tourism to educate, not tourism to make money, if that makes sense.
Sensationalized, I don't wanna sensationalize it.
Josh Hutchinson: I know there's a fear of becoming another Witch City, and we don't want to see that happen.
Jane Garibay: No, I agree. I just remember going to Salem and the little plays and the different things, and part of it was educational, but part of it was a little bit more sensationalism. Like you didn't know how much was theater and how much was real facts. So I would think that whatever Connecticut did or your group, which would probably be a big part of it, I'll compare it to a wine trail. You go to each one, you learn about the wine, you taste it, and you do, but you don't get into [00:31:00] sensationalism. Do you know what I mean? So this would be going to each site and learning and doing that.
Sarah Jack: It would be so purposeful, meaningful, and it'd be the opposite of that generational trauma ripple. It would be a ripple of understanding that would start spreading through the community and to those who are coming to look. So I love the idea. One of the things that I thought about as a descendant, not in the area, way back nine months ago or even further back, what would I want? And I really wanted to see how are the local neighborhoods and the communities able to talk about their victim who suffered there? And it's already happening in several of the little communities. So I'm really excited to see that develop more across Connecticut, and then to connect them into a trail would really be meaningful.
Jane Garibay: [00:32:00] I know we have in our town hall, and when I was growing up, I didn't know who she was, but we have an Alice Young conference room. It has her name outside it, and it's a small meeting room. But I would say that 99% of the people in our town probably don't know who Alice Young was. And we don't hear of the other one that was from Windsor, also. So I think that's a big part of the education of physical place that people, because these are different from Salem, I understand, cause we don't have the records Salem has. It's hard to piece the history together, and a lot of work has been done to dig and find that. But we do know about their lives a lot. So to talk about Alice Young, who was she and have a monument, a physical place that you can go to. I think also there should be one main one at the State House, where they were executed. That could be the start point almost, if you wanted to get the major and then have the trail to the other one, and we can move it into the bike trail realm, too, seriously.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:33:00] That would be so amazing to see. Just ride from town to town and learn and pay your respects.
Jane Garibay: So in Spain, I went on the Camino de Santiago, which is from actually Paris over the French Alps, but there's the Camino from Portugal, the Spanish way, and the French Way. We only did 150 miles on bike. But that's what I think, because you have some pathways, but then you come out into little towns, and you're on the roads. Everyone's very respectful, cause they're used to it. And they're marked, and you follow that way, and then you get into the woods, and then you're back onto a town or a city. And so to match it with something like that, I think would be incredible. I would love to do it that way myself.
Josh Hutchinson: I'd like to do that. I like to ride a bike and hike, and that would be so fun but so educational, and it's a way that you can honor them and pay your [00:34:00] respects, because we don't know where any of them are buried. So there's no place right now that descendants can go other than Goody Knapp has that plaque. And Alice Young, and I think Mary Sanford have bricks in plazas.
Jane Garibay: We need something more, because that's what memorials are. That's what cemeteries are. I know I go to visit. I know they're not there in our veteran cemetery, my mom and my dad, but there are days that I have to go and just sit there. And it's a place that you can just feel closer to them, I think, and talk. So it would be the same for this. And if you believe in a spiritual world, wouldn't it be nice that Alice Young could see that people were honoring her?
Sarah Jack: That's beautiful.
Jane Garibay: That somehow they would know that and give them peace, too, right, their spirit.
Josh Hutchinson: That would be so [00:35:00] touching and beautiful, and they're great places you can stop and contemplate what actions our other ancestors took against them, really learn what motivated them, what motivates us today, and spend some time thinking about what we need to be doing today to prevent these things from happening.
Jane Garibay: Right. And hopefully people look at that. I know I would look at that and say, "oh my God, that really happened. I am gonna do whatever is in my power to not let that be in my life and to be like that." The more people that learn that, so that we don't have a reoccurrence of any way, shape, or form of what was happening then here, right? We know there's pockets around the world, hate and not accepting people who are different. I also learn every day. My niece, Jenny, lives with us. She's 43 and she has Down [00:36:00] syndrome, and her parents both died of cancer. So she came to live with us. And at first my husband didn't believe me, but when you go places, people stare. And if you know anyone with Down syndrome, they're the sweetest, nicest, not a mean bone in their body. So what we do now, if we find someone staring, I'll just say to Jenny, "see that woman over there. She thinks you're gorgeous." So what does Jenny do? She starts posing. But we have to teach tolerance every one of us in our lives, the little ways that we can do with it and to ourselves to accept others that are different than ourselves.
Sarah Jack: I feel like your trail idea in involving the museums and the libraries, so if they see the camaraderie in that the state or the communities are standing together, and we're all saying, "hey, we're going to elevate this history in a non sensational way," maybe their hesitancy to have a bulkier program [00:37:00] or to talk about it more openly, maybe that'll diminish a little bit. And then if we are talking about it, it then helps fight against the othering mentality. It all does work together.
Jane Garibay: And I believe it will, and I think, what's that type of, and I'll call it leadership, the way that's moved forward, I think people look to be kind, they look for a gentler world. And I think having a venue to be able to be that way, to say, "come on, all of us, let's do this." I think the goodness spreads, right? This will be one way that goodness spreads. It'll be something that came out of a horrific situation, and we can move forward in a kinder, gentler nation, right?
Sarah Jack: That would be so good for all of us.
Jane Garibay: At one of my elementary schools on Friday, she won the Greater Hartford Essay Contest about Martin Luther King, [00:38:00] and she was a third grader. And so I went to it, and she read what she wrote, and what she did was, she talked about what her dreams were moving forward. And I get the chills, and where no child is made fun of, but what her dreams were, and it just meant so much. So I think by doing all the work that all of you have done is going to benefit all of us in a tremendous way. I really do. It's a very positive energy thing. And even when I hear from a constituent, something awful that happened to 'em, I didn't cause it, but I can look at them and say, "I hear you, and I feel bad that you had to go through that. No one should have to go through that." Right? So I think as people, that's what we have to do. Some people say, "well, I wasn't involved in that. I didn't cause it." No, but you can still have empathy for people and be sorry that it happened to them and say it was wrong.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah and I were talking the other day, and it dawned on [00:39:00] me that The Crucible just turned 70. It's been out for 70 years as this allegory for how we treat others, and I was wondering how have we grown? Have we grown since The Crucible or are we still having these severe problems with us labeling the Other?
Jane Garibay: I ask myself the question sometime, if I were confronted, and I saw something that was wrong, would I be able to stand up to it? I mean, that is a question we should all ask ourselves so that we're aware. It's kind of the nature of humanity to have the two sides, and it's a constant struggle.
I see it in the work I do with chair of aging and nursing homes and how elderly are treated, things that if you had asked me 10 years ago, I was not aware of either about that, cause I wasn't involved in it. But people that have had an [00:40:00] elderly person and some of the choices and what we're trying to do. And Connecticut is a pretty progressive state, so when I see things happen here, I think that there worse somewhere else, right. So I think in some ways we've gotten better. Kindness, goodness can never let its guard down, doing the right thing, all those things that I try to live by, and I think about. You can never let your guard down, because it's human nature, unfortunately, that some people don't believe that same way and can be more hurtful. I don't know if it's genetic. I don't know if they had bad experiences, whatever it was, and sometimes I find when you show kindness to someone like that that has more difficulty, sometimes they respond, right? So I think we have to constantly be fighting for that goodness and kindness. We can't just take it for granted.
Sarah Jack: This has been wonderful, Jane, you've really hit on a lot of things we wanted to chat with you about, and your meaningful [00:41:00] conversation is valued. Thank you.
Jane Garibay: Just being true. You know, I usually talk from the heart.
Josh Hutchinson: It feels that way, very much. And you've made a lot of powerful remarks.
Jane Garibay: It can bring me to tears when I think about all this, you know? I'm sure as you, you know it, and that you have to keep your faith and your kindness and goodness and constantly fight not to be brought down.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah and I were talking the other day, we were thinking how the overall trend has been positive, and we've made progress in so many areas, but then there's a setback and you've gotta just keep pushing forward and wait for that rebound and the further progress, and I think we'll continue that way.
Jane Garibay: I'm very hopeful that this will do well. I think the atmosphere is different from, what was it, [00:42:00] 2008? When I talked with the senator, put it this way, no one's laughed at me in front of me, where he got a lot of pushback. And so I think it's a different type of climate now. And I've had a lot of legislators say once the bill is out there, once it's done and out there, that they will support it, they will go on and co-sponsor and fate as it is. If we had anyone, Senator Anwar is a very gentle soul, and he's a very kind, good person, you know, a doctor, but he is special. He is specially kind and good in how fate, whatever you wanna call it, has brought him in to be with us.
Josh Hutchinson: Right.
Sarah Jack: There are situations in life where it can be too late to make something right for somebody specific. We can't make this right for Alice. We can't change how it unfolded for her. But especially when you have people [00:43:00] saying, "hey, I want this made right," and there is an avenue to find a way to make things right, that we should all answer, "yes, let's do it." Because then that goodness and the kindness and the diminishing the fear of others can be worked on.
Jane Garibay: And I feel that in my town a lot. We were the first town to declare racism a health emergency, lots of different things. People thinking of all people. Um, A core group that is very thoughtful. And part of it is we're such a diverse community here, and I'm talking older, young, you know, by age, by sex, by nationality, race, a lot of times that brings out a lot of good.
Josh Hutchinson: When people do push back on the bill, what are some of the reasons they're giving?
Jane Garibay: I think people's initial reaction, some people, but it's been few. It really [00:44:00] has not been like it was in 2008. They kind of see it as frivolous. I have another bill that, kind of my rescue dog and in talking to our animal caucus that I put through a bill to name the rescue animal, the state animal, and people were just like, "are you kidding?" They couldn't see the bigger picture of talking about rescue animals. We had 28 Guinea pigs dropped off at our dog pound in the middle of winter in a cage, so it just brings awareness to it. So I think most people are like, "what's important to me may not be important to you, but I can support what you wanna do, even though it doesn't really affect me, and you can support my." We each come from a different place. And I think that's the response I've had from Representative Stafstrom, from leadership, and from most. People are, "oh, I wanna sign on to that." Especially when you [00:45:00] make the comparison today with women's rights. And understanding it. And I could go into another whole couple hours about that, but we won't tonight, another day, another conversation.
Josh Hutchinson: That brings up another question. How significant is it that this resolution was brought forth by a woman?
Jane Garibay: I don't know, I don't think I thought about that. I mean, I didn't think of me as a woman being the one to do it. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do. I had the connection with Beth and Mary, I think she's the one that reached out and she reached out to a lot of people, but I was the one that answered the call. I think she reached out to quite a few, and from what I understand, I was the only one that answered her. And, but I immediately thought from what I read her letter and talking to Beth and knowing what Beth had gone through in Windsor, I thought, this is the time. It's now. Like, Sometimes you just feel that it's the time that something's right? Now's the time. [00:46:00] 20 years from now, it might not be, and maybe it wasn't ready 20 years ago, you know, people weren't ready for it. But I believe now is the time, and I've had a lot of support from fellow legislators, and we'll see that when they sign on, once the bill is out and registered, co-sponsor it.
Sarah Jack: That's exciting.
Jane Garibay: It is exciting.
Sarah Jack: I think there's significance that you, yourself, a woman could do something like this for a historical wrong against many women, but it's also significant that it can be anybody working together for them now, cuz in the 17th century it couldn't have just been women stopping it, and certainly there wouldn't have been men and women working together to stop it.
Jane Garibay: Well, even 30, 40 years ago, I know one of my predecessors that held my seat years ago said there were a few women in the legislature at that time. And I know that leadership[00:47:00] works hard, and it's excited to have a diverse population in the House, because we women bring on different perspectives, you we have a lot of younger that are probably 30, 35 years old. I'm not gonna say where, how many moons I've been through, but, you know, a little bit older. But we all work together and bring different perspectives. And whether we're of color, we're white, all different, and we come from all different backgrounds. That's what enriches the law making, cuz we all talk together, et cetera. And that's why you campaign for your bills, because that way you get to explain it and talk about it and build that excitement.
Josh Hutchinson: It's significant that we've come at least that far in diversifying and getting over our othering of each other so that people can work together in legislature.
Jane Garibay: And believe it or not, we do work together most of the time. I think they calculated that most bills are [00:48:00] bipartisan, 75 to 80%. And you only hear about those big, the few stances on a couple. But on most things we can work together. I'm excited to be chair of aging, because we work together. It is very bipartisan. You're working to keep our elderly safe and cared for, so since my time, anyways, it was last year and year so far I feel bipartisan support for moving our laws and policies forward, and I believe the same will be with the exoneration bill.
Josh Hutchinson: Okay.
Jane Garibay: And just looking for a few things like I was talking that we need to name the people. It can't just be a general exoneration. We need to name them. So we're keeping our thumb on some of those facts, and we'll see what they come out with finally. And even then, when a bill is heard, an amendment can be made. You know, I don't know what it's gonna look like, but we can all, it can always, if something is missing, you can make an amendment to the bill. And there are bills that sometimes pass with [00:49:00] just a basic bill, and then the next year something's put in to add to it. I'm hoping this bill comes out pretty much what we have envisioned or you have envisioned, because this is your bill, this isn't my bill or Saud Anwar's bill. We're just your vehicle. This is your bill. We're just the tools, vehicle to get it done.
Sarah Jack: When the team worked on the writing of the resolution, there was so much research and conversation about it, so that we were hitting the things that were important.
Jane Garibay: So we'll wait. They have all that material, the judiciary, so we're hoping, and the good thing is because it didn't matter whether it was me or whether it was Senator Anwar. In the end, both the Senate and the House are part of the Judiciary Committee, and it will come out as a Judiciary bill. It won't be my bill or his bill. It'll come out as a Judiciary bill. [00:50:00] And in the end, for anything like this, at least I believe, you know, I can be proud that I had a part in something, but I want the vehicle that's gonna give it most chance for success of passing. That's what we want. And then I'll love to work with you afterwards on the trail, and that can be very, very exciting.
Sarah Jack: That'll be a really fun part.
Jane Garibay: You know, and get representatives from each town and yes, that will be very rewarding to be able to put it out and to do, and we'll have to have opening day all on our bikes on the trail.
Sarah Jack: Oh, that would be so great.
Jane Garibay: I have an electric bike, so I've got it easy. I had never used one until we did the Spain Camino.
Josh Hutchinson: That's a good way to take in the sites.
Jane Garibay: I just wanna go leisurely. And we stop along the way, and we do weekends, or we'll stop at lunch at a restaurant. It is a lot of fun. So I see that when visiting [00:51:00] these historic monuments and taking the time and maybe staying overnight, because if you're doing that whole going down to Stamford, it's gonna be a long ride.
Josh Hutchinson: That could have a positive impact for the communities all along the way, local businesses.
Jane Garibay: Absolutely. I know we're working on ours, cause Hartford comes into Windsor, and now they're trying to bring it down towards the center, where there won't be a trail along the river, but you would come out into the town. I don't think we'll have an exact bike trail, but then you get on Palisado Avenue, the historic district, it's pretty wide. So there could be a designated, which is different than a bike trail, cuz we have the room for that. And then you hit Windsor Locks, and there's the canal trail they have that goes all the way up to Suffield. What are the other towns that had people executed?
Josh Hutchinson: Farmington, Fairfield, [00:52:00] Wethersfield, Stratford, Stamford, Wallingford, of course, had accused.
Jane Garibay: So it's all over the state?
Josh Hutchinson: it was all over the place, all up the Connecticut River and then all along the coast. But the education is a really important piece for us. We see that as really being one way exoneration is significant in itself is to educate people that these things have happened, people have these tendencies, what can we learn, and how do we move forward?
Jane Garibay: And so when I talk about the bike, it's just making it fun so people wanna go and do it.
Sarah Jack: Families look for meaningful activities that can be educational when they're traveling or locally, but so do businesses and corporate teams, great team [00:53:00] building, plus a human rights advocacy component to it. It's pretty great.
Jane Garibay: Well, when we traveled with my three kids when they were younger, we would go down to Pennsylvania, different places. We had a camper at one point, but we in the morning would be each go to the museum or a library or to visit something historic, et cetera. And then in the afternoon, it would be at the hotel, in the pool, and the kind, you know, the fun. So they thought it was great fun to do that. and it is one, you know, it's the best way to get people to get out. And our museums that were free this summer in Connecticut for families, I know our museums, they were subsidized by the state to be able to do that. And they had huge showing. Families used it.
So it was great, because Connecticut tends to have very expensive fees to get into places. It's not like Europe where, you know, it's a couple bucks, and you're in. Here, it's $25 [00:54:00] for an aquarium, or it's very expensive.
Josh Hutchinson: Even if people go out for the recreation and the health parts of it, that's a win. And if they get educated by accident, they're still getting educated by stopping to take a break at the plaque, you know, they see and read about what's happened and they'll learn.
Jane Garibay: The one in Spain, which I just love, and I have the sign downstairs. There's, it's a conch shell is the emblem. So that's where you see on coast that directs you with the little, yellow arrow, which way you have to go, et cetera. and there's a passport. So as you're traveling, you get stamps. There's a bar made out of beer bottles. Believe it or not, everything is a beer bottle. And so you go in there, and you check it out and again, you're being educated on certain things, but it's all made fun.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:55:00] It's part of a experience.
Jane Garibay: Even though the topic isn't execution. But it's fun learning and understanding. At least it's for me.
Josh Hutchinson: The Camino's on my list of things to do one day. I hiked a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail one year, and that was the experience of a lifetime doing that, so well, I'm looking for more once in a lifetime experiences. I want them, you know, four or five times instead.
Jane Garibay: Right? I wanna do it again, the Camino. We wanna make it two times in a lifetime because, and we've traveled pretty, you know, we've been to China and India and, you know, most European countries, just so many places. But the Camino was a special place. I can't explain it. And I had all my friends from Windsor paint rocks and write "from Windsor." So all [00:56:00] along the Camino, I would leave their rock and take a picture and send it to 'em, and they would say, "from Windsor, Connecticut." So those are the experiences that I really enjoy.
Josh Hutchinson: I could talk about trails probably for days, because it's such a powerful experience to do something like that. And you meet people all walks of life.
Jane Garibay: That is a good match for exoneration trail.
Josh Hutchinson: It's such a beautiful idea. We want to see every one of the communities that was involved do something to honor victims and have places where people can go and pay their respects and learn the facts, and that ties it all together so neatly.
Sarah Jack: Jane, is there anything else that you would like to specifically say about this experience or what you're doing or just anything else?
Jane Garibay: [00:57:00] I think I'm fortunate to have become involved in this and meet all of you. It's very emotional and to know what this means to people that in some way I can help to heal. This whole experience reminds me of kindness, hope, acceptance, and so many things that we get so busy in life. I mean, I always try to remember those things, but something like this just really is very powerful, right. And working together for a common goal, to help lots of people, right? Just everyone that's been affected by this. So I feel very fortunate to be involved to work on your bill. I don't wanna forget that it is your bill. I am just the vehicle.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much for working with us. It's a real treat and just watching you do your work. We know that you take this seriously, and that you're very busy behind the scenes doing a lot for [00:58:00] this. So we really appreciate that.
Jane Garibay: Our work isn't finished. We're like in the last lap here, right? We just gotta get that finish line together.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, exactly. But we appreciate you continuing patiently, persistently and just following through all the way to the end.
Jane Garibay: Thank you for letting me be part of this.
Josh Hutchinson: Absolutely. You've been the perfect representative to take this up.
Jane Garibay: And now we have Senator Anwar, so, you know, it all works out well.
Josh Hutchinson: And we appreciate everything that Matthew has done. We know he's done a lot of work back there.
Jane Garibay: Incredibly, because it's above and beyond for him. Do you know what I mean? He's the head of staff for the majority leader, but he's always been helpful. And when I went to him with this idea, he was on board right away, from the beginning, you know, as was the speaker and a ton of people. [00:59:00] So it's gonna be good.
Sarah Jack: Thank you very much, Matthew Brokman and Jane Garibay and Saud Anwar. Just the flexibility to accommodate, to respond to questions, to inform us. When Josh and I talked about how to thank you, we had so many points, so many facets of it. We just appreciate all the details.
Jane Garibay: So we're mutually appreciative.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for taking the time out to speak with us today. It's, I think this will be a very important to understand this issue.
Jane Garibay: Thank you for having me. We're passionate about it, so it was really very easy.
Josh Hutchinson: Your remarks were incredible. You're really very good at expressing your passion.
Jane Garibay: Because it is a passion, right? I think that's the easy part. When it's not, it's different.
Josh Hutchinson: It wasn't forced. It was [01:00:00] very real.
Jane Garibay: Your passion is contagious, seriously, and Beth's passion. It was just very easy to get involved with this and to see the need and the right of the issue.
Sarah Jack: We want you to hear the proposed resolution.
Resolved by this assembly:
Whereas,
The courts in the early colonies of Connecticut and New Haven indicted at least 34 women and men for the alleged crime of witchcraft and convicted 12 of them, executing 11, and it is now accepted by the historical profession and society as a whole that all the accused were innocent of such charges.
And whereas,
Legal procedures differed at the time, and many practices of the court would no longer meet modern standards of proof, so that the miscarriage of justice was facilitated by such procedures.
And whereas,
The status of women was radically different than it is today, and misogyny played a large part in the trials and in denying defendants their rights and dignity. [01:01:00]
Whereas,
Community strife and panic combined with overwhelming fear and superstition led to these accusations of alleged witchcraft and the subsequent suffering of those accused.
Now therefore, be it resolved,
That all of the formally convicted and executed are exonerated of all alleged crimes relating to the charges of witchcraft. The legislature proclaims the innocence of the following convicted and executed people: Alice Young in 1647, Mary Johnson in 1648, Joan Carrington in 1651, John Carrington in 1651, Goodwife Bassett in 1651, Goodwife Knapp in 1653, Lydia Gilbert in 1654, Mary Sanford in 1662, Nathaniel Greensmith in 1663, Rebecca Greensmith in 1663, and Mary Barnes in 1663, and one Elizabeth Seager, convicted and reprieved in 1665.
Be it further resolved,
That those who were indicted, forced to flee, banished, or even [01:02:00] acquitted, continued to live with their reputations destroyed and their family names tarnished will have their reputations restored and no longer have disgrace attached to their names, now being in good standing in Connecticut. The following indicted who were not convicted but still suffered greatly after indictments were: Goodwife Bailey in 1655, Nicholas Bailey in 1655, Elizabeth Godman in 1655, Elizabeth Garlick in 1658, unknown person in Saybrook in 1659, Margaret Jennings 1661, Nicholas Jennings in 1661, Judith Varlet 1662, Andrew Sanford in 1662, William Ayers in 1662, Judith Ayers in 1662, James Wakeley in 1662, Katherine Harrison in 1668 and 1669, William Graves in 1667, Elizabeth Clawson in 1692, Hugh Crosia in 1692, Mercy Disborrough in 1692, [01:03:00] Mary Harvey in 1692, Hannah Harvey in 1692, Mary Staples in 1692, Winifred Benham in 1697, and Winifred Benham Jr. in 1697.
Be it further resolved,
That the state of Connecticut apologizes to the descendants of all those who are indicted, convicted, and executed and for the harm done to the accused person's posterity to the present day and acknowledges the trauma and shame that wrongfully continued to affect the families of the accused.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us as you always do next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell your friends, family, acquaintances, and neighbors about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great [01:04:00] today and a beautiful tomorrow.

February 23, 2023

New York Witch Trials: Accused of Witchcraft in New York with Scott R Ferrara

You’ve heard about the Salem Witch Trials, but what about New York Witch Trials? Anthropologist and Archeologist Scott Ferrara introduces stories and folklore of witchcraft accusations that impacted diverse peoples in the colony of New York in the 17th century. We get to dig into some individual histories and discuss details about early accused witches who faced their community outsiders.

We connect the dark past of witch hunts to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

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Transcript

[00:00:00]

Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we speak with Scott R. Ferrara, author of Accused of Witchcraft in New York, which discusses witchcraft accusations involving the various cultures in what is now the state of New York.
Sarah Jack: We had a great conversation with Scott. We got to talk about some topics that are not often in witch trial discussions, including intersecting cultures in New York, the Native American witchcraft [00:01:00] beliefs and their responses to colonization and colonists who came into their worlds. And we got to talk about some of the ways that the accused witch history and the New York folklore blend together.
Josh Hutchinson: We got to learn about how the native cultures of what is now the state of New York were effected by colonization, how their witchcraft beliefs developed in response to European intrusion. We got to learn some of the key differences in how the Dutch and the English applied witchcraft law, and also, we learned about the similarities in their cultural [00:02:00] witchcraft beliefs.
Sarah Jack: One of the things we put the microscope on is some of the spectral stories that the accusers were telling and the specific occurrence of being hagridden.
Josh Hutchinson: We learned about apotropaic symbols in homes, which were used as protections against witchcraft and malevolent spirits, learned why they stuffed certain things into their walls and how they thought they could prevent a witch from coming in the door.
Sarah Jack: They weren't even sure they could keep warriors and soldiers out of their homes, but they took all this care to get this protection.
Josh Hutchinson: It was just part of their natural world. Scott explained some of that, how it was just part of life, part of their [00:03:00] understanding of how things worked, that witchcraft was a real and present danger. Just like today we have alarms, camera systems, locks on our doors, they carved symbols into walls and hung things over their doors to prevent witches and bad spirits from getting inside. And that was both the Dutch and the English that were doing that.
Sarah Jack: Scott's perspective is really great. I enjoyed hearing how Scott has used witchcraft fear to draw people to the material culture and how it all intersects and tells more of a story.
Josh Hutchinson: And it was fascinating, between the interview and reading Scott's upcoming book, to learn how very different [00:04:00] New York was from the New England colonies when it came to witchcraft accusations and trials. One thing I found interesting about reading Scott's book was following the lives of the Connecticut accused once they crossed colonial lines. It's a very fascinating field of study in itself. Like, what happened to them after they escaped or left after their trial and relocated.
Sarah Jack: And what's so great about it is some of them, we have such limited information about their Connecticut life and trial. We have this extension of their life. We have some of that information.
And here is Josh's history segment.
Josh Hutchinson: In this week's history segment, I'd like to cover some individuals accused of witchcraft in Connecticut [00:05:00] who later became New York residents.
Elizabeth Garlick of East Hampton was accused in 1658. At the time, East Hampton was part of Connecticut. It did become part of New York later on. Elizabeth was tried May 5th, 1658. Fortunately for her magistrate, John Winthrop, Jr. Was on the case in his first witchcraft trial, she was indicted but neither convicted nor acquitted. Instead, her husband was ordered to pay a large bond to assure the court of his wife's good behavior and that she should appear in court periodically. Elizabeth is said to have lived another 42 years after her trial to the age of about 100 years and died in around 1700. [00:06:00] Her resting place is unknown.
Judith Varlet and Goodwife Ayers were both accused in 1662, during the Hartford Witch Panic. Ayers and her husband William escaped to New York. Varlet was saved by the intervention of New York Governor Petrus Stuyvesant and also escaped to that colony, where she married Nicholas Bayard and settled on High Street in Manhattan.
Katherine Harrison was a wealthy widow of Wethersfield, Connecticut. She was accused of witchcraft in April 1668 and acquitted in October, but she was again indicted on May 25th, 1669. At that point, magistrates asked several questions of a group of ministers led by Gershom Bulkeley. A second trial was held October 12th [00:07:00] without word yet from the ministers. Harrison was found guilty and condemned to die. Fortunately for her, the ministers did answer on October 20th and ruled that multiple witnesses were needed to each alleged incident. So the spectral evidence used against her was ruled out and she was reprieved but told to leave Connecticut.
She relocated to Westchester, New York, which is now Westchester Square in the Bronx. A group of people there were unhappy to have an alleged witch in their presence and petitioned the governor to have her removed from town. The governor listened to this petition and issued an order for her to leave. However, she refused. The governor then ordered her to appear before him, where she pled her case. Governor allowed her to [00:08:00] remain in the town, but she could not escape the gossip and ill treatment, so she ultimately left the town and may have moved to Long Island.
Goodwife Miller, whose first name is unknown, was accused of witchcraft in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1692. Upon hearing of the accusations she fled to nearby Bedford, New York and Connecticut authorities were unable to extradite her.
You've heard us talk about Winifred King Benham and her daughter Winifred Benham Jr. before. What you might not know is that Winifred King Benham's mother, Mary King Hale, was accused of witchcraft in Boston before Winifred was accused herself in Connecticut. Winifred King married Joseph Benham of Wallingford, Connecticut and settled there. On November 2nd, 1692, Winifred [00:09:00] was examined on suspicion of witchcraft. At that time, the court dismissed the case, due to insufficient evidence. However, five years later, on August 31st, 1697, Winifred King Benham was accused of witchcraft once again, along with her daughter Winifred, Jr. They were both acquitted October 7th and fled Connecticut, probably living on Staten Island.
Sarah Jack: Thanks for giving us some details on that history, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome.
Sarah Jack: I'm so happy to introduce Scott R. Ferrara, an archeologist and anthropologist, the author of Accused of Witchcraft in New York.
Scott Ferrara: I've been studying the 17th century in the northeast United States for a while now, particularly in my studies for school, graduate studies in archeology. And I think anyone could really be [00:10:00] drawn into witchcraft. It's interesting. It's cool.
I particularly study past plant use, paleoethnobotany, the study of how people have used plants in the past. And I think there's this perception of witchcraft is particularly in Europe as herbs and potions and things like that. And every now and then I would come across accounts in 17th century New England and the Northeast here pertaining to herbalism and herbal remedies. Only a few circumstances intersect with accounts of witchcraft. And I, I thought that was pretty interesting, and it caught my eye.
And when talking about plants and botany with most people you tend to lose their attention, but when you start talking about things like, you know, um, witchcraft and what we perceive today as the supernatural, people tend to perk up. They tend to get pretty interested in the subject and start listening a little bit more closely. I have found talking about witchcraft, particularly, is a great way to get people interested [00:11:00] in the history of a region, particularly the 17th century and get them to retain information and concepts and understanding of past human behavior and how people understood their world during these really early time periods, at least for European settlers in the Americas. Which is of course not the only worldview that we're talking about when we talk about the 17th century. We also have here in the Americas during the 17th century, it's multiple European empires are here, but also many Native American tribes who are already here and already had their own perceptions of witchcraft, and not really witchcraft, but religions that sometimes attributed bad things to malevolent forces, and then also religions that came here with enslaved African people.
It's all interconnected. It's all entangled. And I just found it very interesting. One strand of study that I particularly study [00:12:00] is colonialism in the northeast United States. And when we're looking at colonialism, we're looking at all of these different demographics and people who are here and how they're entangled. It's not really discussed so much how this relates to witchcraft and spiritual beliefs. So I thought it would be interesting to dive into that and look at not only European settlers but how Native Americans and enslaved African people were all dealing with these type of witchcraft beliefs.
Sarah Jack: What was the witchcraft situation in New York before the arrival of the Europeans?
Scott Ferrara: Before the arrival of Europeans we had within the bordered area of New York as we understand it today, New York state that is, we had the Algonquin language group of Native Americans, consisting of many tribes, particularly in coastal New York, areas like Long Island. And then upstate New York, we had the Haudenosaunee, also sometimes referred to as the Iroquois. And with these different groups, and of course the [00:13:00] tribes that compose them, their religions sometimes attributed malevolent events or harmful events to different supernatural or rather otherworldly deities and spirits. But nothing as specific as the way we understand witchcraft and European contexts. That's not until Europeans arrive in the 17th century or rather when we have these waves of European settlers arriving. That's really when we get to see this rise in what we understand as witchcraft.
I typically subscribe to one researcher, Amanda Porterfield's, categorization of how Native Americans adopted witchcraft beliefs. There's four categories that Amanda Porterfield covers really or how she breaks down different types of reactions to European witchcraft. And we can actually see these in New York state, particularly how witchcraft presents itself among Native American groups in New York. I'll just briefly [00:14:00] go some of this criteria.
First, we have the identification of the Christian God as actually the Devil and Christians as witches. Native Americans seeing these travelers, seeing these settlers coming to their homeland and spreading things like conflict, disease, war and perceiving European settlers as evil forces.
We see this in the early 1640s with French Jesuits, these Jesuit missionaries in upstate New York, coming to spread Christianity to the Mohawk people, right. And what happens is, these missionaries, they inadvertently spread disease, and when they arrive at one village, they spread their Christianity and then leave to the next village. But once they leave, disease ravages the people in that village, and [00:15:00] many people die, and word spreads that the missionaries aren't here to help them, but rather to hurt them. And they are now perceived as evil.
We also have Native Americans who are identifying themselves as witches. This is a strategy, really, to frighten missionaries. With dwindling numbers, population numbers, Native Americans, due to conflict and disease sometimes retaliation by physical violence is not always a potential strategy anymore, so a way to express aggression and resistance is by sometimes scaring European settlers by identifying themselves as witches.
We also have some Native American groups accepting rather Christian ideas that at least some native religious practices were forms of devil worship. This is not really a complete abandonment of pre-contact native views but rather another [00:16:00] way that witchcraft presents itself among Native American groups is this of full acceptance of Christian ideas that at least some native religious practices were forms of devil worship. This represents really a complete abandonment of pre-contact religious practices, complete acceptance of converted Native Americans to Christian worldviews.
And then we also have Native Americans who resisted conversion to Christianity but desired cultural reform. They didn't really believe that their own practices were devil worship, but they wanted some kind of cultural reform. And they could achieve this by accepting Christian worldviews that witches existed and possibly they could enact a cultural reform by accepting Christian worldviews and gaining support by European colonial authorities. This we see also in Long Island, in particular Sachem Poggatacut and Sachem Wyandanch on [00:17:00] the eastern end of Long Island. They're accused of witchcraft in the mid 1600s. And this is largely a tactic by New England tribal leaders who are trying to gain support by New England colonial authorities to help in taking over the political authority of Long Island Native American leadership. So the these Native American tribal leaders in New England were really trying to gain support by their colonial European authority partners to really gain that power over Long Island native groups. That's really how it unfolds with native groups with witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: Were there significant differences in witchcraft belief between, say, the Iroquois and the Algonquin peoples?
Scott Ferrara: Not so much. With Algonquin Native American groups or, rather, tribes, there's really not a [00:18:00] ton of evidence for really witchcraft belief among Native American groups on or rather within New York. With Native American groups upstate, like the Haudenosaunee, we do see evidence of witchcraft fear. But it's a difficult question, because in the 17th century witchcraft was really a European invention, a European belief system. So to attribute that to Native American groups, it's a slippery slope. It's a difficult thing to compare. It's not until the 18th century and the 19th century with more and more native Americans converting to Christianity, that we start to see a very clear and familiar belief and fear of witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: That's such a great explanation. That reminds me of what we're learning about the European colonization of Africa, that there wasn't really a thing that you would call a witch or witchcraft. There [00:19:00] were various magical practices among the groups there, but Christianity and Islam and other foreign religions really introduced the concept of the witch.
Scott Ferrara: I think that's really interesting, because if we consider pretty much every culture that I know of has some kind of witchcraft belief or rather belief of interaction with an other otherworldly presence, right, maybe fear of supernatural forces or even ways of divining the future.
This is just common kind of cultural behaviors that we see a lot, even for people in the 17th century. If we're talking about European settlers, witchcraft wasn't a something that was a superstition. It was part of the natural world. It was something that was really common that people had to interact with and deal with on a pretty common basis. Witches existed, and they could cause you harm. And it wasn't superstition, [00:20:00] it was part of their life. With other cultures, this not only is applicable, but it actually presents in different ways, even though it's very similar beliefs.
Sarah Jack: One of the things that I've learned over these episodes and all the reading and studying is the distinction between the malevolent forces and the diabolical fear. The religion and culture really informed that for people. It did for myself. I really see the before contact and the after contact and how those views collide and then what we have here today in the world with everything. To me, it's two very big concepts that are similar but very different with the definitions and the understanding and the origins. Why is it important to understand that different cultures had different motivations for accusations?
Scott Ferrara: One [00:21:00] large part about understanding this is that our view of, say the 17th and 18th centuries in in North America, or particularly what I study in New York, is that we tend to think of these time periods as mostly European settlers here creating a society, creating a culture, right, creating the United States. But this isn't the full story. We have Native Americans and enslaved Africans, who are all part of the story, all deeply entangled.
So, seeing belief systems purely through the lens of European communities and or, rather, Euro-American communities, it's, it is problematic. We're focusing on just one demographic of a lot of people who were settling here. And also I should say, too, I'm not a historian. I'm a anthropologist, so I tend to look at things through mostly past human behavior. Of course, the [00:22:00] particularities of history and lived experiences of very specific people and how events unfolded, that all is very important. That all matters, but I tend to examine the past through anthropological patterns and patterns of behavior. So by looking at these different demographics of people living here, all entangled together in these communities, we can not only gain an understanding of what is causing witchcraft accusations but how it informs our understanding of past human behavior.
Josh Hutchinson: We find that field of study very interesting, because learning about what motivated the people in the past, we can get a lens into what motivates us now and why do we still have the same tendencies as them. It's because humans are humans, but learning about why [00:23:00] they made the witchcraft accusations then helps us understand witchcraft accusations and other forms of witch-hunt-type fear that we have now. So I think that's really important to know about.
Scott Ferrara: I think with the way we understand the past, there's still a lot we have yet to fully understand. The approach that I take to do so is through anthropological archeology, because with the historical record, we don't always get a full picture of what's happening. If we're talking about issues like gender with women in the past who are the majority of people accused of witchcraft in European-American communities, we really don't understand a lot of lived experiences just from the historical record. We find more evidence and more data [00:24:00] to understand these lived experiences through things like artifacts and the material culture that we uncover.
If we are discussing New York, in particular, particularly the Dutch communities of early New Netherland, which became New York, we see that the Dutch, for the most part, at least in court records and these colonial documents of the Dutch who are here, these Dutch settlers, they're not really trying each other for witchcraft. There's a ton of historical analyses done on why that is, different philosophical leanings of Dutch magistrates and skepticism. But it doesn't really shine through in the archeological evidence of of the Dutch past.
So we have Dutch settlers here in New York, who if you were to examine the historical record, you see very little evidence of witchcraft beliefs, but if you look [00:25:00] at the archeological record, the archeological past, different artifacts and markings in these 17th century Dutch American homes of New Netherland. These items may be carvings within households, maybe different apotropaic items, these items that are intended to protect the dweller of these homes from any supernatural evils or evil forces that could harm them spiritually and physically.
So we have evidence of these beliefs among Dutch people but not within Dutch colonial records. So there's a distinction. We can see what's happening in the historical record, and we can see where people's minds are but not always where everyone's mind is. We see Dutch and English magistrates, how they're thinking. And sometimes also why people are suing each other and what are the different causes [00:26:00] for different community litigations, but not always the full picture.
Josh Hutchinson: We're very interested in the differences between the Dutch and the English and why it was witchcraft accusations were so prevalent among the English, but not the Dutch.
Scott Ferrara: There are lots of different thoughts on this. There are some historians who have credited this with Dutch Magistrates really subscribing to Erasmian philosophy, this type of skepticism of supernatural forces or really the ability that a person could actually sign a compact with the devil and wreak havoc. We also have a standardization of how legal education is taught to the Dutch judiciary. Also a demand for really strong empirical proof for any criminal case and this resistance of pursuing any [00:27:00] accusations of witchcraft.
It starts in the Dutch fatherland, in the Netherlands, and carries over to to New Netherland, later New York. And we don't really see people being accused of witchcraft here. Even after the English arrest control of new Netherland and change it to New York in the mid 1600s, we still have a very strong Dutch influence in the region. So even then, when Euro-American settlers are accused of witchcraft, it really doesn't lead anywhere. Those cases are acquitted. Those magistrates are now tasked with both appeasing the local community members, who are quite upset about a harmful event that occurred and this accused witch but also having some rationality within the situation and finding common ground where they can, they don't have to actually sentence a person to death for this crime, for witchcraft, but also appease these local community members.
Sarah Jack: And what would've [00:28:00] been similar between English and Dutch witchcraft beliefs? Did anything stick out?
Scott Ferrara: We have a lot of these different apotropaic items, these items that are intended to protect the dwellers of a household from spiritual attacks. And there's a lot of different ways people can do this. We have, for one, leather boots that are found in the walls of historic structures today. These were a form of protection. Horseshoes, everyone knows about horseshoes over the threshold of a door to protect the dweller from spiritual attack. Dried feline corpses, so deceased cats were placed in the walls, mummified naturally, and this presented itself in historic structures that we find today in the archeological record. And it was almost used as a minor sacrifice. You had these cats, which are home protectors from things like rodents and pests. So it was believed that the spirit of that cat would [00:29:00] protect the residents after death from supernatural nuisances. So placing a dried feline corpse in the wall was another form of spiritual protection. Different markings on the beams, exposed beams of structures, known as witches marks, were thought to protect the residents of witch spirits, spectral occurrences. There's a few more different strategies that people could take to really protect themselves.
Josh Hutchinson: That's really intriguing. That's the first time I've heard an explanation for why they had the cats in the walls. I had seen that they'd done that, but I didn't realize it was the cat's spirit protecting against other spiritual forces.
Scott Ferrara: There's quite a number of ways that people could protect themselves, which is pretty interesting, too, because if you look in the historical record, different accounts, whether you have the witch cakes in Salem or there was some [00:30:00] kind of witch jar.
With Winifred King Benham 's mother, different ways to get back at witches, to protect yourself or to identify witches. And it's interesting that those occurrences aren't examined with the same scrutiny as an accused witch. But I think this just goes to show that with different divination practices, they're not always seen as malevolent. They're actually quite accepted, not only in 17th century, your American cultures, but throughout the world, even today.
Josh Hutchinson: It's a fascinating area of study. How was the devil involved in European witchcraft?
Scott Ferrara: There are two forms of witchcraft that we examine in the historical record, right. There's this malevolent form, malefic ium, or rather harmful magic, that witches can exert to harm people. And then also diabolical, which really deals with the nature of how a witch gains this power within this Christian worldview. So within[00:31:00] the legal system of how we actually prosecute witches in the 17th century, you really need to make that connection that the accused witch had some kind of interaction or some kind of deal with the Devil. If that evidence isn't there, it's very hard to convict.
If we look at Goodwife Elizabeth Garlic k in Easthampton, she's accused of the death of the 16 year old daughter of one of the wealthiest landowners, one of the most prominent settlers in that region, Lion Gardiner. Even though she's accused, they have a hard time connecting what happened to a compact with the Christian Devil or Satan, leads to her acquittal. If there's not that clear connection with signing your name in the Devil's book or meeting with the Devil, then most certainly it'll lead to an acquittal, at least in the European or English legal system.
Sarah Jack: And were there sinister entities involved in Native American witchcraft?
Scott Ferrara: [00:32:00] A lot of what qualifies as witchcraft with Native American belief systems draws on public health and epidemiology, right. We have a lot of these Native American causes for believing someone to be spiritually harmful. Boils down to just death from disease, maybe medical condition that has spread. There's this medical reasoning for the accusation from Native American people to accuse someone of witchcraft. This happens not only in the 17th century but also in the 18th century.
We have instances where Native Americans are accusing either Europeans or other Native Americans of witchcraft, because of the spread of disease and death. Now, granted, this use of the term witchcraft is also very tricky because in the historical record, we're not observing Native Americans using this term of witchcraft. We're seeing Euro-American observers translating [00:33:00] what's happening as witchcraft. So, it's a very tricky ground when you're looking at all these different kind of this cross-cultural phenomenon of witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: And I was thinking how you mentioned some of the tribes viewed the Christian God as sinister, because of the disease and the death that was showing up. So that would be sinister.
Scott Ferrara: The first people that are actually accused and executed for what we're translating as witchcraft in New York State are those French Jesuit missionaries in upstate New York. And they are both accused and executed because of this threat, this spread of disease among Mohawk villages that is attributed to them by Mohawk people.
Josh Hutchinson: I found that part very interesting in the book. And I wanna change subjects for a moment if we [00:34:00] can and talk about family history, because I understand you have a connection, and I found a new connection in your book. I'm descended from Captain John Seamans, who was one of the grand jurors for the Halls. And I found that really fascinating, because that particular branch of my family, I hadn't had any connections with witchcraft before. And so that was really interesting to me. And what is your connection to witch trials?
Scott Ferrara: Before I answer that, I want to say with Captain John Seamans, it's a very ubiquitous name on Long Island. We have Seaman's Neck Road. A few different roads and place names named after him. I visited his grave site in, it's in Wantagh a town on Long Island here. We have a lot of different Native American place names. And a few towns over from where I'm located at there's this town of Wantagh, that's where he's buried. But it's a private cemetery. It's hard to get access [00:35:00] to. But you could see his, if you're squinting real hard. You can make out the tombstones. You can try to identify where he is.
But yeah with my own family history, on my father's mother, my grandmother on my father's side, we have a family named the Lyon, L Y O N, the Lyons. Doing my own genealogical research, I traced this back to, I think it was Fairfield, Connecticut. I guess my, I don't know, 9th or 10th back family members were involved in the trials of Goodwife Staples and Goodwife Knapp, I believe it was. And not a really involved relationship there.
My ancestor provided testimony, pretty much, I think it was Goodwife Staples, it was who said the deal was, your soul will be saved if you confess to more witches. And at first, she obviously, she wasn't a witch, and no one was who was accused, so she didn't confess or name other people. [00:36:00] And then before she was about to be executed, she attempted to name more people. And I guess one of my ancestors gave, I'm not really too sure of the details, it's not very well written, but pretty much said that she shouldn't name anyone else, because she's just trying to save herself in this moment and don't throw other people under the bus at this moment. So not really a large part in what was happening, but it was just interesting to see a family connection there to this area of study, which I hadn't found, I hadn't known about this until I started developing my interests in this subject.
Josh Hutchinson: We came into this subject because of our family connections, so we went the other way and found out about the connections and then got deeply interested in the subject.
Sarah Jack: My ancestor, Winifred Benham, discovering her story in what [00:37:00] little bit I could find is what pushed me out of my Salem research and interest and helped me to see, "hey, there's a much bigger picture we get to look at." And I love that your coverage of her family really gives a lot of detail and some really great sources. And it's really great that you have those all together for the descendants. And I love comparing the colonies and how they were different and that family had trial experience in Massachusetts Colony as well as Connecticut. And then they find their safe haven in New York. It crosses through all of those territories and what was going on. So I find that really interesting.
Scott Ferrara: A big part of what with my research and my book project, one thing that mattered a lot to me was providing as many sources, at least, to the primary source documents, right, to the original documents as I [00:38:00] possibly could, just because I think that's what really matters the most. I tried my hardest to really piece together what logically and chronologically made sense for interpreting their stories and interpreting what exactly happened with these events.
But there's not really a lot of details of people's lives back then, particularly women. It was three generations of the Benham family. It was her mother, Winifred King Benham, and then also her daughter. And the only time really we see women in the historical record is when you know they're being sued or some kind of legal issue, and you don't really get the full picture. So by providing all of these primary source documents where I'm getting this from, not only can you see how I'm interpreting the order of events, if you, the reader, want to go look at those, you can do your own research and interpretations of what's happening in the past, right.
I think that's what kind of really matters. But, yeah, they actually have really interesting story, the Benhams. That's the only really location I haven't been able to make it to, where Winifred, Sr. settled down in Staten [00:39:00] Island. That's still on my list of places to visit.
Sarah Jack: I would love to do that one day, too.
Josh Hutchinson: We're hoping to get to a few of these places this year, so hopefully we get out there.
Sarah Jack: I like that what can be known, you talked about, cuz one of the things that when I mean it's going to change because more information is getting talked about and is available, but when I first started looking at Winifred Sr.'s story, first, she's just folklore for Wallingford, but then there's this is she in the, buried in the cemetery there? Is she not? And Tony Griego, one of our advocates with the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, he went and did investigation there to find out, what do we know? And yes, there are Benhams there, but that's all we know. But you were able to pull up records showing children being born in New York or living in New York, getting married in New York. So it added to that story. It pulled some [00:40:00] facts out of the folklore.
Scott Ferrara: And I think that's a really interesting point you brought up, is these people who are accused of witchcraft, where are they today? A lot of the places that I've visited, uh, people that were accused of witchcraft, either in New York or outside of New York, and decamped here or rather fled here and started new life here in New York. Where are all their grave sites? It's very rare that we see them. That's on my agenda for kind of future research, looking more deeply into the heritage of witchcraft and where all of these different grave markers are. Is it something that's too embarrassing for a community, so the grave marker is removed? Or what exactly is happening there? Because it's very rare. One gravestone that I actually did find was in Salem, New York. There was a woman accused of witchcraft, there, a mother, and her gravestone, along with her husband and the rest of her family, they're, it's still there in, in Salem, New York, which I found pretty cool, but actually pretty rare.
Sarah Jack: That would be significant. I [00:41:00] know out of all of the hundreds of accused colonial American colony victims, we surmise where they were. We think they're on family land, but there is not, you can't walk up and say, here's so-and-so resting.
Scott Ferrara: I think Rebecca Nurse, right. I think her grave site is marked.
Sarah Jack: It's presumed. There's a monument.
Josh Hutchinson: People believe that we know where Rebecca Nurse is buried based on the family history of it, and there is that memorial there, and there's still a little cemetery there.
Sarah Jack: I think when I say, "presumed," I'm saying at the death, the burial wasn't marked and preserved until now.
Josh Hutchinson: And the family had to take the body away and bury it on their own land. They never got buried in cemeteries, as far as we know, because that [00:42:00] was just frowned upon.
Scott Ferrara: It's very interesting, exactly what happened. And I that's a large part of what made the project in Salem so important where I think it was what Marilynne K. Roach and I believe Emerson Baker might have been on that project, too, when they identified the the ledge where all those victims were executed. So just identifying both places and names is very important to understanding the past and preserving the past.
Josh Hutchinson: That's so important to understand the past. We want to understand the individual lives and the individual cases, what actually happened with these people and tell the stories of the people, which is interesting in your book, how you broke it down by individual person to give them an opportunity for their story to be told.
Scott Ferrara: That made the most sense to me, to break it down chronologically and like these little biographical narratives of each person in chronological order. To make [00:43:00] sense of how, not only who's being accused and what little we can find of their life story, but also observing how culture and the legal system is changing in New York. And also, by seeing these different individual accounts, we can also maybe draw out different reasons for why people are being accused within these different cultures. It made the most sense to approach it that way, especially for a public audience.
Josh Hutchinson: I'm very interested in the sleep paralysis aspect of the accusations, because I've personally experienced sleep paralysis, and I've been what you described as hagridden, basically. But could you explain for our audience what it means to be hagridden?
Scott Ferrara: Things like sleep paralysis, being hagridden, right. This actually occurs quite often in witchcraft accusations. It relates to [00:44:00] spectral appearances, being paralyzed in the state between being awake and dreaming, where a lot of your biases towards fears in your life can present itself. So for people like Hannah Travally in Southampton, that's just one example. We also see this with Katherine Harrison. There's instances of accusers seeing these accused individuals, these accused witches in their rooms, bothering them at night. With Hannah Travally for example, in Southampton out on Long Island, her accuser sees her tormenting him by sitting on his roof at night and pretty much tormenting him. With Katherine Harrison, several accusers are seeing her at night. There's actually a very fascinating dialogue between her familiar spirit and one of her victims or rather suspected or alleged victims, I should say, which is very interesting in itself too.
A lot of these primary [00:45:00] source documents, once you start reading into them ,particularly with these sleep paralysis demons, these spectral appearances, when you start reading the primary source accounts, they almost read like screenplays, these dialogues between the familiar spirit or the spectral appearance of the accused witch and the victim. Very fascinating, but , I think it's what brings the genre, if we're gonna see the historical record as almost like a genre, it's what makes it into a horror genre. It's where we get really vivid imagery of these familiar spirits and almost demons that are plaguing witchcraft victims.
Sarah Jack: It really sounds like in these instances there's just such a physical component to it, like the weight of the visiting specter. And the one narrative, the alleged victim was identifying the specter by touching the face in the dark. That just really was horrible to me.
Scott Ferrara: With Katherine Harrison, right, her image appears [00:46:00] several times in testimonies against her We have her head on a dog's body that's tormenting her victims. We also see another testimony where a red calf traveling on a cart transforms into her head right at a certain distance, and all these weird kind of transformations. I think that's also interesting in itself too. This idea linking witchcraft to therianthropic instances, where like humans are transmutating into animals. See this time and time again, not only in testimonies against accused witches, but also the folklore. That was a big decision for my research, grouping in the folklore account of Aunty Greenleaf, New York folklore about a witch into the factual people accused, because with Goody Greenleaf story of animal kind of tormenting or being present when bad things occur, when crops fail and people get sick, [00:47:00] and then being chased down and turning back into a human is not only present in New York folklore, but in so many different folklores is in native American groups upstate New York, even in European, ancient Greek mythology. It's a very interesting concept.
Sarah Jack: It's interesting to me how the harm and the damage that can happen in the spectral phase then might have physical evidence, like in the folklore, the bullets, but maybe in a real life accusation case, there's bruising or an ailment they're complaining of.
Scott Ferrara: With that physical evidence, that's what kind of makes me lean more towards medical explanations of witchcraft accusations, because with the Benham, we see one of their victims who had died had red spots, and some testimony say that Winifred and her daughter Winifred Jr. both had these red spots that dissipated. With Goodwife Ayers and Elizabeth Kelly, they shared a [00:48:00] bowl of warm broth and with Elizabeth Kelly, it was the first autopsy in American history, by a physician named Brian Rossiter, who he actually misattributed the natural process of decomposition of a human body towards witchcraft causes. But one interesting fact to pull out of that was he noticed different red spots that Goodwife Ayers also had. There's also Native American examples of this, too, in the 18th century. This physical evidence is pretty interesting towards understanding witchcraft accusations as like this broader human behavior, and you know how to frame it within a pattern of broader human behavior in the past.
Josh Hutchinson: I found in your descriptions, what you pulled from the court records of the symptoms that the people were reporting are very similar in the Connecticut and New York cases. They're very similar to Salem. They're reporting the pinching and the bruising and the choking and the pressure on [00:49:00] the chest. They're all common across so many different witch trials that we've read about.
Scott Ferrara: I think that really speaks to, besides the bruising, the sleep paralysis and things like that really attest to the psychological state of people back then. Things like I know Mary Beth Norton dives a little bit into conflict with indigenous groups, but, that could be one part of it, but just the trauma of everyday life, losing children, losing family members ,spread of disease, changing political environments. A lot of the stress, and I think any witchcraft scholar can tell you that these instances of witchcraft really appear when there are conditions of societal stress and trauma. Seeing these instances of sleep paralysis and night terrors really, I think, give you a, an insight of what it was like to live back then, at least for some people who were experiencing that anxiety, that stress, that trauma that people just had to work through on a daily basis.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:50:00] I find for me the sleep paralysis is especially interesting, because I've been there. I went through a period of a couple years where that was happening to me fairly regularly, and one of the first times, I wake up, and I can't move at all, and I'm still in a dream state, and so I feel the pressure on my chest, like somebody's on me, and my brain just attributes that to a person being there and fills in the gaps, I guess.
Scott Ferrara: It's very difficult to diagnose people in the past with medical conditions that we experience today. You don't wanna attribute something that's not, a medical condition that's not, hasn't been, diagnosed from a physician. But, still, these accounts and these stories and testimonies, they are so familiar to what we experience today that it's [00:51:00] almost, you read these stories and you're like, wow. I. If not yourself and someone else, who's experienced these things.
Sarah Jack: I really enjoyed your intro talking about your grandfather, so I think that was really a special way to open your book. And I also like that you want people to use the documents as a springboard to do more research for themselves and your encouragement to check out historical sites that are available. I think that's really important.
Scott Ferrara: I do this professionally, so it's sometimes pretty sad when you go to historical societies, museums, and it's just ghost towns in there, you know. You have maybe one historian just sitting quietly by themselves, just clocking into work on a, once or twice a week and just spending time in silence and not a lot of people taking advantage of of these resources we have in our communities. We have town historians, village historians, [00:52:00] historical museums, and they're all available to you. You can pop in whenever you want and learn about your own region and your own story. For the most part, it's free.
Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with an important update on witch-hunts happening now.
Sarah Jack: Here's your Connecticut witch trial exoneration weekly legislation news. The history of Connecticut Witch Trials is a story that has been introduced and embraced in different communities throughout the state over the last few decades through research, books, lectures, and remembrance events. Some specific localized efforts to research and memorialize individual victims have been done at the local level in Farmington and Stratford. The current and past director of the Stanley Whitman House has flavored their public history, education, and program offerings with the elements of local history. This includes uncovering witch trial victim stories and other people's and event stories that combined into the unique local recipe formed by their lives on the land and in the colony.
Thank you to all volunteers and staff that have prioritized these [00:53:00] stories. In a few episodes, you will get to hear more of this inspirational, landmark and program from our return guest, Andy Verzosa. We also see the community of Stratford memorializing. Stratford Historical Society has made plans for their community to learn and celebrate the life of their local accused witch victim, Goody Bassett, with a presentation by local historian Richard Ross at Town Hall. There are plans for Stratford Mayor Laura Hoydick to give a ceremonial proclamation of innocence and for the town council to vote on a resolution absolving victims Goody Bassett and Hugh Croatia of the guilt of colonial witchcraft crimes. Sign up for Thou Shalt Not Suffer episode downloads, because we are bringing a feature episode on Goody Bassett shortly.
Many women are listed in colonial court records as Goody. This is not a first name. This is an omission of what would've been her personal identity. Her first name was known, but the first name of a wife was not legally significant in the court in colonial America. She was supposed to be remembered with dignity. Whenever the name of a historical woman comes up as [00:54:00] Goody, think about her. Think about her lost name. When you are doing research and writing, keep your eye peeled and be thoughtful. If you identify a first name, it is significant to include her first name in your record so that the Goody becomes insignificant and she is more known. The first names of these women may not be lost forever, and their story certainly is being preserved by our writing and nvoices.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is an organized collaboration of advocates working for an official state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut Colony. We support the Joint Committee on Judiciary's Bill HJ number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. It is being sponsored by the following Connecticut legislators: state Representative Jane Garibay, Senator Saud Anwar, State Senator Eleni Kavros-DeGraw, State Representative Aimee Berger-Giravalo, and State Representative Mary Welander. Please support this bill by sponsoring it, if you are a [00:55:00] Connecticut state legislator.
Will you take time today to write a member of the judiciary committee asking them to recognize the relevance of exonerating Connecticut witch trial victims? You can do this whether you are a Connecticut resident or anywhere else in the world. You should do it from right where you are. Now is the time and place to stand for acknowledging that women were not and are not capable of harming others with diabolical or maleficent powers. The victims we wish to exonerate are known to be innocent. The victims of today that we wish to protect are known to be innocent. You can find the information you need to contact a committee member with a letter in the show links. To learn more about attacks on alleged witches today, please see our link to Advocacy for Alleged Witches.
This resolution will be an example to others working to recognize and address historic wrongs. Connecticut is taking a stand against injustice. By acknowledging the mistakes of the past, we educate the public that similar actions are not acceptable today. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project strongly urges the general [00:56:00] assembly to hear the voices of the witch trial victims being amplified by the community today. They were not witches. We hope you'll pass this legislation without delay.
Our project is offering several ways for exoneration supporters to plug in and participate or learn about the exoneration and history. Please download our robust lineup of episodes featuring witch trial descendants, education about hanged witch Alice Young and other victims and Connecticut Colony's Governor John Winthrop Jr.'s positive influence against convicting witches. You can go to our project website for an informative and easy to understand fact sheet of the Connecticut Colony witch trial victims, places, and dates. You can follow along by joining our Discord community or Facebook groups. Links to all these informative opportunities are listed in the episode description.
Use your social power to help Alice Young, America's first executed witch finally be acknowledged. Support the descendants by acknowledging and sharing their ancestors' stories. Remember the victims in modern day facing the same unfair and [00:57:00] dangerous situations. Take time to listen to episode 16, "Witchcraft Accusations in Nigeria with Dr. Leo Igwe." Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. Would you like to host a stop and Leo Igwe's upcoming US speaking tour? Please contact us today.
The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our project on social media @ctwitchhunt and visit our website at ConnecticutWitchTrials.org. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is a project of End Witch Hunts movement. End Witch Hunts is a nonprofit organization founded to educate about Witch trial history and advocate for alleged witches. Please support us with your donations or purchases of educational Witch trial books and merchandise. You can shop our merch at zazzle.com/store/EndWitchHunts and zazzle.com/store/thoushaltnotsuffer and shop our books at bookshop.org/EndWitchHunts. We want you as a super listener. [00:58:00] You can help keep Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast in production by super listening with your monthly monetary support. See episode description for links to these support opportunities. We thank you for standing with us and helping us create a world that is safe from witchcraft accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that enlightening news segment.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us like you always do next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit our website, thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends and family.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for supporting our efforts at End Witch Hunts. If you'd like to donate, please visit our website at endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:59:00]

February 16, 2023

Between God and Satan with Beth Caruso and Katherine Hermes

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Show Notes

Jump into an informative discussion about revealing research of the Connecticut and Massachusetts witch hunt with Beth Caruso and Katherine Hermes, authors of the article “Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693 which was published in the Fall 2022 issue of Connecticut History Review.

Beth Caruso, a Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast listener favorite, is the author of the books One of Windsor and The Salty Rose, and Cofounder of the CT Witch Memorial and Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project.

Dr. Katherine Hermes, J.D., Ph.D., is professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, co-host of Grating the Nutmeg podcast, and publisher of Connecticut Explored, the premier magazine of Connecticut History. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

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Between God and Satan Journal Publication

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University of VA, Salem Witch Trials Documents and Transcriptions

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Transcript

Sarah Jack: Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I’m Sarah Jack.

Josh Hutchinson: And I’m Josh Hutchinson.

Sarah Jack: Today’s guests are Beth Caruso and Katherine Hermes, authors of the article ” Between God and Satan,” which was published in the fall 2022 Issue of Connecticut History Review. It brings the witch trial bystander Thomas Thornton into focus. Although Thomas Thornton could be considered a possible bystander to New England witchcraft trials, he was a neighbor [00:01:00] of Alice Young, the first accused witch of the American colonies executed, in Connecticut Colony in the Backer Row neighborhood in Windsor, Connecticut, where he also lived.

Josh Hutchinson: He was also present at many other Witch trials, in the same place at the same time, including the Salem Witch trials towards the end of his life. So he’s the one person who connects the first witchcraft execution in New England to the last.

Sarah Jack: And this very researched and informative article is available for you to read and to continue research.

Josh Hutchinson: You’ll enjoy the conversation we have today and learn more about [00:02:00] Thomas Thornton later.

We have so much good content coming to you in this 2023.

Sarah Jack: It’s very exciting to be able to bring so many great conversations. It’s really setting the stage for a great year of content.

Josh Hutchinson: We’re having a wonderfully busy and productive year. We’ve got a lot going on with End Witch Hunts and with the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project. Legislation is on the table to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut, and we couldn’t be more excited about that.

Sarah Jack: I’m very excited. I’m personally excited as I descend from one of the accused victims of Connecticut, Winifred Benham, Sr. of Wallingford, and not just because of my connection to her, but [00:03:00] having my interest in the American colony witch trials has encompassed Connecticut, and there’s dozens of accused from that colony that are gonna have the opportunity to no longer be looked at as guilty.

Josh Hutchinson: And whether you’re a descendant of one of the accused or you’re just interested in seeing justice for the victims of the witch trials, please join us on our Discord server to learn how you can help get that legislation passed. We’ll have a link in the show notes.

Sarah Jack: If you are even a little bit interested in volunteering or finding a way to participate in this exoneration project, we want you. Anybody who’s interested, there’s room for you to join us.

Josh Hutchinson: We’re coming from across the country to direct our [00:04:00] message at Connecticut that we believe this legislation is important and that they should pass it and clear these names.

Sarah Jack: We believed that a collaboration would be important to fulfill this project, and it is. It’s a huge collaboration. There’s lots of Connecticut residents that want this, but we’re able to support them, and everybody’s doing it for these victims and coming together to correct a historical wrong.

Josh Hutchinson: And we’re looking to send a message about the other witch hunts going on in our world right now. We think that the legislature of Connecticut and the governor can make a powerful statement that we will not tolerate witch hunts.

Sarah Jack: When our country has completely stood against this horrible history, [00:05:00] it is a statement to the rest of the world that it needs to stop, that it was never okay, that it isn’t an acceptable behavior now.

Josh Hutchinson: As we speak, volunteers are mailing letters and sending emails to legislators in Connecticut, and there will be a hearing of the judiciary committee in February or March, we don’t have the date yet, but we’re looking for volunteers to come there and just be part of a show of strength and support for this legislation. If you’re interested in doing either of those things, again, please follow the link in the show description to our Discord server.

Sarah Jack: Thank you for joining us and for making our efforts stronger.

Josh Hutchinson: Yes, thank you. And we want to announce that we have a new [00:06:00] Zazzle store for End Witch Hunts and a Zazzle store for Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. So if you’re interested in showing your support of witch hunt victims from around the world, those in Connecticut, or you want to buy merch from the show, please head on over to our Zazzle stores, follow the links in the show description.

For additional news on what’s going on with the exoneration effort, visit Connecticutwitchtrials.org or join our Discord server.

And now I present to you a summary of the life of Thomas Thornton, the subject of today’s episode.

Thomas Thornton was a tanner who came from near London to Dorchester, Massachusetts, and then settled in Windsor, Connecticut by 1638. In 1647, there was a spate of child deaths and an outbreak [00:07:00] of influenza in Windsor, where Thomas Thornton was still living. Four of his six children died at that time. His neighbor, Alice Young, was hanged as a witch in Hartford in that same year. After that, Thomas relocated his family to Stratford, Connecticut, where Goody Bassett was tried for witchcraft in 1651 and executed. Her trial and execution led in turn to the trial and execution of Goody Knapp of Fairfield, whose trial and execution led to an accusation against Mary Staples of New Haven.

Thomas Thornton later became a minister and preached in Ireland for a time before King Charles II was restored to the throne, and Thornton was ejected as a Non-conformist. He returned to New England and settled in the Plymouth Colony in the town of Yarmouth, where he was the minister for many years. On March 6th, 1677, Thomas Thornton wrote a [00:08:00] letter to Increased Mather, which is significant because that was the same day that Mary Ingram was tried for witchcraft in Plymouth. Katherine Hermes and Beth Caruso believe that Thomas Thornton sent that letter from Plymouth on the date of Mary Ingham’s trial.

Thomas Thornton was connected to many important figures in politics, religion, and witch trials. He communicated with Connecticut Governor John Winthrop, Jr., the Mathers, including Increase and Cotton, the Cottons, John Sr. And John Jr., and witch trial Judge Samuel Sewell.

In 1692, Thomas Thornton moved to Boston, where he became a member of the Mathers’ Church. He was present at Margaret Rule’s bedside while she was dealing with her affliction, possible diabolical possession, as believed by many at the time. Later on, when Thornton was on his deathbed, which trial Judge Samuel Sewell kept [00:09:00] vigil.

Thomas Thornton had many links to Witch trials, from the first witchcraft execution in the colonies, that of Alice Young in 1647, to the last witchcraft execution in the colonies, which was in Salem in 1692. He was connected to key players involved in these trials.

Sarah Jack: Thank you for that summary, Josh.

Josh Hutchinson: You’re welcome.

Sarah Jack: And I’m excited to introduce Beth Caruso and Katherine Hermes, authors of the article “Between God and Satan,” which was published in the fall 2022 issue of Connecticut History Review. Beth Caruso is the author of One of Windsor and The Salty Rose

Dr. Katherine Hermes, JD, PhD, is professor of history at Central Connecticut State University. She’s co-host of Grating The Nutmeg podcast and publisher of Connecticut Explored, the premier magazine of Connecticut history.

Josh Hutchinson: What can you [00:10:00] tell us about the meaning behind the title of your manuscript published in Connecticut History Review called “Between God and Satan?”

Kathy Hermes: So the title really comes from a number of sermons that talked about the fact that New England was part of the battleground between God and Satan. Cotton Mather, in particular, was famous for holding this view, but many other ministers in New England believe that because it was this godly mission that the devil took a special interest in undermining that mission.

Beth Caruso: I think in the article, that title also refers to children as being vulnerable in a space where they are vulnerable to influences by Satan, they are vulnerable to being bewitched or falling to evil. And at that [00:11:00] time, it’s the parents’ duty and responsibility and the church’s responsibility to raise them and instill the proper morals, because they’re not truly grounded in those morals at that point in time.

Sarah Jack: Who was Thomas Thornton before his exposure to witchcraft accusations?

Beth Caruso: Thomas Thornton was a tradesman, basically. He came to New England from an area outside of London, and he first settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts. And after that he settled with many others from Dorchester in Windsor, Connecticut. He had several properties in Windsor. His home lot was on Backer Row. He also had properties which were farm lots and wood lots, and also [00:12:00] probably a place where he did his tannery business, which was in the Palisade on the Farmington. We have to remember tannery can be a little stinky and needs water, but the property record for him as a home lot is on Backer Row. And his wife was Ann Tinker, who was one of several sisters who also landed in Windsor on Backer Row.

Josh Hutchinson: What was Thornton’s first experience with witchcraft?

Beth Caruso: We know in 1647 there was an epidemic that came through Windsor, and at the very same time, Thornton’s neighbor, Alice Young, was hanged for witchcraft. It just so happened that Thornton had six children, [00:13:00] possibly five. His youngest we’re not sure if he was born in Windsor during the epidemic or shortly after. But we found out through research that four of those children, three definitively died. And the fourth, because the records for him stop at the same time Alice Young was hanged. So we don’t know for sure if he had any other exposure to witch trials before that, but that incident on Backer Row was so tragic and so influential in his life that he went from being a tanner to a minister in just a short time.

I just wanna say as far as Thornton, he wasn’t [00:14:00] initially the focus. The focus was Alice Young, and there was so little information about her. There’s only three direct records about her. One was, “one of Windsor hanged as a witch in Hartford.” That was by Winthrop Sr. There was another notation by Winthrop Jr. in a disease about John Young. On the back it said, “his wife was hanged as a witch in Hartford.” And then the very last one was on the inside cover of the Matthew Grant diary, which said, “Alice Young was hanged on May the 26th, 1647.” So this whole investigation into Thomas Thornton really started out as a investigation [00:15:00] into what happened to Alice Young.

And I thought, why not investigate her neighborhood, the people where she lived? And it was in doing that that Thomas Thornton showed up, and the interesting facts about Thornton just really stood out so much. It was still difficult to find information about Alice Young, although through Thomas Thornton, we know much, much more now.

But when I was working on this for information about my book, One of Windsor, and then later to try and write a article about Alice, Kathy was mentoring me and I had tried a couple times to put out an article, but I said, “I want your honest feedback. What do you think?” [00:16:00] And, in discussing this, we realized that Thomas Thornton was really the person that we needed to focus on, because of all his connections from this first witch panic on Backer Row to what we found out later on, information where he was involved, at least on the periphery, in other witch trials, including Salem.

In investigating Thomas Thornton, the things that really jumped off the page right from the get-go were that I saw that he had a daughter, Priscilla, who died in 1647, and Cotton Mather wrote a testament to her piety. He was giving examples of children [00:17:00] who were pious, and I was amazed. I thought, “how in the world does Thomas Thornton, this tanner person, later become a minister? And Cotton Mather writes about his daughter, and his daughter is one of the ones that died in 1647 on Backer Row.” And in this description of Priscilla and her piety, there are also things about brushes with the devil and wanting to do a day of humiliation with fellow children that needed to become more good and righteous.

I thought, “that’s strange.” And then the other thing that stood out too is he’s at the bedside of Margaret Rule, which is someone who’s bewitched during that whole same Salem period in Boston. And finally, you know what really blew my mind was [00:18:00] here’s this guy, he’s dying, he lives a very old age, and Samuel Sewall, a judge during the Salem Witch trials, is at his bedside doing vigil with him. So all these things about Thornton really stood out.

Kathy Hermes: Yeah. Thornton had an extraordinary life, and we didn’t know anything about really his time in Ireland. There are big gaps in the biographical information about Thomas Thornton that I think we finally closed by finding the letter from Reverend Hook in New Haven to Cromwell saying that Thomas Thornton would be coming over to Ireland and was joining the recruits for the ministry. Finding a little documentary evidence of his time in Ireland about where he served at several garrisons, like six Mile Bridge and in Limerick and so on. And then realizing that [00:19:00] his time was coterminous with that of the Mathers themselves, that Samuel, Nathaniel, and Increase Mather were all in Dublin at that time, under the tutelage of a man named Samuel Winter. And, even though my dissertation work was on religion and law in colonial New England in the 17th century, I really hadn’t studied the input of Irish ministers or ministers who were in Ireland. Many of them were actually from England who were in Ireland. And so I hadn’t really heard of Samuel Winter, even though he had connections with the Reverend John Cotton of Boston and then, later on, the Mathers. Winter turned out to be a very fascinating character, who I think was probably greatly influential on all of the ministers who were later ejected from Ireland when the interregnum ended and King Charles II was restored to the throne of England.

Sarah Jack: [00:20:00] What else would you like us to know about Alice Young?

Beth Caruso: Alice Young was in the middle of all these Tinker sisters on Backer Row, so I thought she possibly could be related to them or maybe her husband was related to them. It was not just because of her placement on Backer Row. It was also that after this witch trial in 1647, everyone left Backer Row fairly quickly, except for one woman, Rhodie Tinker, who was then widowed and was waiting to remarry. And those days you certainly didn’t wanna be connected to a witch, a defined witch in your society, because that could come down on you later on that connection.

So I found it [00:21:00] interesting how all these people from the same family, they all left, and we know Thomas Thornton and his wife left, as well after their children died. You find them pretty early on in Stratford, and that’s the same place where John Young ends up going. His daughter ends up staying in Windsor, because we know that Alice Young had one daughter, Alice Jr., and we do know that she stayed in Windsor, because the marriage record we found is that she married Simon Beamon in Windsor before they went to Springfield together. But Backer Row during that time, there were a lot of children living there. And unfortunately, during the epidemic, there were, like I said before, four of the Thornton’s children who died, but [00:22:00] another household right up the way, there was another child who died, Sarah Sension. I thought it was interesting because piecing together the ages of the children, that there were a lot of young girls right around menarche age. Priscilla was 11 years old when she died. Her sibling Ann was nine when she died. These would’ve been the playmates of Alice Young’s daughter right next door. And then Sarah Sension, she was right around that age. Rhodie Tinker Hobbs Taylor, she had two daughters from her first marriage, and we think they probably would’ve been right around that age, too. So what’s interesting when we’re looking at this case and we’re piecing things together, is the amount of young girls. This [00:23:00] element that you see later in Salem, but also this element of illness connected to a witch panic during the Hartford Witch Panic. It all started with a young girl on her deathbed who was sick.

Josh Hutchinson: That’s a very interesting connection. So many witch trials, you have the childhood illness, and a lot of it revolves around young girls. Why do you think that might be the case?

Beth Caruso: The Puritans thought of women as the weaker sex than men. They certainly weren’t the only religion to do that or the only religious sects to do that, but in so many of these witch trials, it’s a young girl right around the age of menarche who’s bewitched. I mentioned Thomas Thornton at the bedside of Margaret Rule. She’s another young girl of that age. So [00:24:00] the young girls, they’re weak, because they’re susceptible to being bewitched.

You don’t really see that with the young boys. At least I can’t recall seeing that. It’s the adult women who tend to be accused of witchcraft. The majority of people accused were female, and they were supposed to be the weaker sex, because they were more susceptible to the devil, as well, not with the outcome of bewitchment, but with the outcome of being actual witches and signing a pact with the devil. So it was interesting to see some of those elements that pop up again and again on Backer Row.

Kathy Hermes: I kinda look at it maybe a little differently. The Puritans believed in a morphology of conversion. They really saw [00:25:00] life in terms of stages. And it’s a little like Eric Erikson’s terrible twos and so on. Where they thought the children were born really in a state of depravity without salvation, they had to be baptized as infants, and that would help as a converting ordinance.

But they would have to go through a stage of preparation, where they learned moral behavior, and these things had kind of age ranges attached to them. They weren’t hard and fast. Normally, in the teenage years people would experience, if they were going to experience it, saving grace, what they call justification. And so that conversion experience that people often expected in the teenage years was a time of great spiritual crisis. And it was often preceded by what was called a period of humiliation.

I think of it as most of us can relate to this, right? That when you’re, like in middle school or [00:26:00] whatever, you just feel like awful about yourself, and through your teenage years you’re struggling, and then you come out of them. And often you have some period of realizing you’re not so bad after all. The same kind of transformation took place with a religious understanding that, and I think that, in particular, first of all, women were more often converts. They were more likely to experience justification.

That period of crisis also is a period where they might realize that they aren’t justified, and they realize they are in fact damned. And it’s really these two things that puritans struggle with. Am I saved, am I damned? We have examples of women, for example, killing their infant children or trying to, because they can’t take the tension of not knowing whether they’re saved or damned. I see that context as well.

Sarah Jack: That’s a really great [00:27:00] layer. And Priscilla was facing this health crisis, as well as the spiritual transformation crisis at the same time, and she made statements about that.

Kathy Hermes: She’s a little bit young for a conversion experience, but sometimes the very pious have them a little earlier, or mature 11 year olds might have them sooner. And she’s on her deathbed, and it’s a critical moment.

Josh Hutchinson: What was the significance of Priscilla’s story on how she faced death and the spiritual statement she made in the story of Thomas Thornton and witchcraft?

Kathy Hermes: So Priscilla died in 1647, as we’ve said, and the story was recorded later on by Cotton Mather around 1698, published in 1700. My assumption is, and this is an inference, is that Thomas Thornton was telling that story, [00:28:00] because there’s so many details that are quite precise. And so I think he’s committing this story to memory and sharing it with people as he goes through life, because it dovetails with this critical moment of the accused witch being executed and being his neighbor. And he’s got this godly child who’s really saved from the snares of the devil, and when he finally recounts this to Cotton Mather, or when Mather writes it down, right in the late 17th century, by then mentioning witchcraft is off the table, right?

And by 1698, no one wants to talk about witchcraft anymore. And I think elements of the story are divorced from that. It’s more about her conversion. But we have another instance where that story is mentioned, or at least we believe it’s [00:29:00] the one referred to by Nathaniel Mather when he writes to his brother Increase and says, why didn’t you tell the story of the girl in Connecticut? And we thought about could this be a different girl? Could this be Mary Johnson, for example, who was executed in Weathersfield? And Johnson was a woman. She already had a child. She was not a girl. And Mather doesn’t mention an execution. “She died for the same crime,” he says, and with a conversion, a genuine conversion. And I think that what Mather’s talking about here is an earlier version of the story, in which the witchcraft was probably mentioned along with the conversion.

We were trying to piece together a kind of oral history of this narrative. So what you find in the Magnalia where Cotton Mather published it, or in the catechism that he published that was written first by a guy named Janeway. There’s no [00:30:00] mention of the witch element, but I think it’s there, I think it’s implicit in the story. She talks very much about wanting to save the other children, as Beth mentioned. And she talks about needing a day of humiliation and prayer.

Beth Caruso: I printed off what he wrote about her. And there are several references to good and evil, brushes with evil, needing to be pious and get, and this is a direct quote, “get power against their sinful natures.” And even on her deathbed, she says she was thanking her superiors and the direct quote is, “twas because they had curbed her and restrained her from sinful vanities.”

And she said, “were I now to choose my company, it should be among the people of God.” [00:31:00] There’s so many interesting polarities within that description. The other reason why, and this isn’t directly said that this is Thornton, but Cotton Mather also writes in “Enchantments Encountered,” a chapter in Wonders of the Invisible World. He mentions this, and Kathy and I believe Cotton Mather, in this, is referring to Thornton. He said, “we have been advised by credible Christians still alive that a malefactor accused of witchcraft as well as murder and executed in this place,” meaning the colonies, “more than 40 years ago, did then give notice of a horrible plot against the country by witchcraft. And the foundation of witchcraft then laid, which if it were not [00:32:00] seasonably discovered, would probably blow up and pull down all the churches in the country.” And again, this also ties into what Kathy was describing as the space between good and evil, between God and Satan.

Sarah Jack: Do you think that Priscilla could have been Alice’s accuser?

Kathy Hermes: I think it’s possible. It’s interesting that Thornton remains close to John Young. Whatever happened there on Backer Row, Thornton didn’t distance himself from John Young in any intentional way. So it’s hard to say if his daughter had been the accuser, there might have been more distance between the men, but it doesn’t appear that John Young came to his wife’s defense. So it’s also possible John Young thought the same thing. I think it’s just too speculative to know, but of course it’s possible.

Sarah Jack: And Thornton was looking out for Young’s health.[00:33:00]

Beth Caruso: We do think that they maintained a relationship, because in one of the references to Alice Young being a witch and connected to John Young that I mentioned in the beginning is a description of John Young’s disease. There is no signature on that as to who the author was, but this would’ve been somebody at the bedside of John Young describing his disease. Kathy had found a letter from Thomas Thornton to Increase Mather. And so we had his handwriting.

Kathy Hermes: Beth and I went to the Massachusetts Historical Society to look at some documents, and in particular John Winthrop Jr’s papers, because that’s where this account of John Young’s disease was. And it was considered an anonymous account. We then, from the Boston Public Library, [00:34:00] got a copy of the letter that Thomas Thornton wrote to Increase Mather. And as I was looking at the two, I thought this handwriting looks the same. And it’s pretty distinctive, because it’s more in the Elizabethan style than in the later style of handwriting that even John Winthrop himself had or someone of Thomas Thornton’s age. It’s a little bit like seeing the cursive of your grandmother, right, rather than the handwriting of, if you wrote like your grandmother, instead of someone now.

And so Beth actually did the close up comparison. She focused in on some letters, and it was pretty clear once we put the letters side by side that this was the same handwriting. And these letters provide important clues for a number of reasons, not only that Thornton wrote about this disease, but that he was in [00:35:00] communication with important people, John Winthrop Jr., Increase Mather. We don’t have many things written in Thomas Thornton’s hand. These are the two things that survive, that we know of.

Beth Caruso: And just the fact that he’s at the bedside, and he’s writing about the disease, and he sends it to Winthrop, Jr., tells us that he still has a relationship with John Young. At the time, John Winthrop Jr., he was physician to most of Connecticut, but obviously he couldn’t always be there in person to cover all that territory. So people would be at the bedside of a sick person. They would write a description of the disease and then send it to Winthrop. So we were extremely excited to make this discovery, because it did fit in with the order of where they both were at the time. It [00:36:00] reflects on their continuing relationship, but it’s also extremely exciting for the possibility of more things showing up later that may give light to more layers and more information about the witch trials in New England. This was a snippet that he had written about John Young, which he hadn’t signed. There are many other documents out there that have no signatures. His signature is very distinctive. We know he’s all over the place, as far as which trials in New England. So we’re hopeful that maybe more documents of his will show up now that there are two good examples of his handwriting.

Kathy Hermes: I’ll also say [00:37:00] about the letter, it goes into graphic detail about Young’s disease. And if Young had this in Windsor, it might have contributed to some of the feelings about Alice Young, because his skin is peeling off, and it’s in striations, and it’s a very gruesome illness. And he seemed to have experienced it while in Stratford where Thornton writes the letter, right?

He is experiencing it in Stratford, where there’s also, at the very same time witchcraft accusations going on, and this is total speculation, that this disease pops up during times of witchcraft. Cuz actually when John Young died in his final illness, we don’t know if he had this disease, but it seems like it, and that too is simultaneous with some witchcraft accusations, I think, in Hartford.

Beth Caruso: It’s Goody Bassett at the time and then Goody Knapp. [00:38:00] So there were the two hangings in the south, and Goody Bassett had been from Windsor. Thomas Thornton and John Young would have known her. She came there probably after both of them, but we just don’t know any details about that case.

But then there’s the Goody Knapp case, which is right nearby in 1653, and it was late 1653 that Thornton joined the ranks in Ireland, but by this time he had gained some clout. He was a deputy in the legislature for Stratford. If we can find some more documents, or if other researchers could really look through some of these documents from that era, from other eras connected to witch trials to see are there testimonies, are there other descriptions that are unsigned with [00:39:00] this unique handwriting, then maybe we can learn a little more. Because, unfortunately, no trial records are left for Alice Young. I don’t know if they’ll ever show up. As for so many others in Connecticut, including Goody Knapp and Goody Bassett in the South, I did just hear that the Winthrop Jr. medical records are going to go online probably this summer, and they haven’t been thus far. Because also of his atrocious handwriting, I think there are probably a lot of incredible little chunks of history that we would wanna know more about in those records, as well.

The other part of John Young’s disease that’s really interesting is that in the probate records, John Young was noted to have a disease for seven [00:40:00] months before he actually died. Yet he did not leave a will, so his property was left unclaimed in Stratford for seven years. Alice Young Junior never claimed it.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you both for such great answers. It’s been wonderful, and I’m excited to hear that Winthrop Jr.’s papers are coming online. That’s really big. And we have a friend going off to read some Winthrop papers right now, and she testified to the quality of the handwriting or lack of quality to the handwriting.

Beth Caruso: She’s the one who told me she had talked to them at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and they expect his works to be online by the summer, hopefully.

Josh Hutchinson: That’s exciting. And It’s [00:41:00] very interesting to me how Thornton shows up in all these places where witchcraft accusations are happening. He’s in Windsor for Alice Young. He’s in Stratford for Bassett and Knapp, and later on, he’s possibly connected to some others as well. Is that correct, with his time in the Plymouth Colony?

Kathy Hermes: I think it’s interesting that he went from Ireland to Plymouth, avoiding the witchcraft trials in Hartford, right? He diverts himself from there and goes to Massachusetts, and Plymouth Colony was the only colony among the orthodox colonies, we’re excluding Rhode Island here, to not have any witchcraft accusations until the one in 1677 that involved Mary Ingham, and we think he was there because of the letter to Increase Mather right at that time, [00:42:00] dated March 1st.

There’s a lacuna, a hole in the manuscript, that leaves some letters blank, and then ends with M O U T H, where it was sent from. And of course, the editors of the Mather papers assumed Yarmouth because that’s where Thomas Thornton lived and ministered from, but we believe it was Plymouth. Now again, no proof of that except that Thornton would almost certainly have had to be at that court day. It’s a court day where three native men were accused of murder and where Mary Ingham’s accused of witchcraft and where money is going to be distributed. A collection was taken up in Ireland to help people who suffered in King Philip’s War in 1676, and so that money’s going to be distributed in Plymouth Colony in the towns where Thornton [00:43:00] lived and near where Thornton lived. And so this is the guy who would clearly meet all three criteria, for taking care of the funds, having witchcraft expertise, and having experience with native men because he ministered to a praying town, Mattakeeset.

Again, speculative. It makes me think about many years ago when I was in graduate school we were all pointed to a book by Robin Winks, The Historian as Detective. And every time we present this article or talk about this, historians always say to us, “it’s really circumstantial evidence.” And yet most criminal cases are made on circumstantial evidence. The number of coincidences just can’t be accounted for any other way. And, of course, sometimes you’re wrong when you do something on circumstantial evidence, but I feel like here we’ve tried to be good detectives. We’ve tried to look at things objectively and see where there might be other possible [00:44:00] answers.

Sometimes there aren’t, but I think here the letter coming from Plymouth makes much more sense, and he also would’ve had a way for that letter to be delivered to Increase Mather, if he was in Plymouth rather than in Yarmouth. That letter’s, I think, critical to placing him at the trial of Mary Ingham.

Beth Caruso: And the other interesting thing about Thornton is he was one of the few ministers who was interested in the Halfway Covenant, which allowed for children to be baptized.

Kathy Hermes: I’ll say a little bit more about the Halfway Covenant. Children were not being baptized, because their parents had not become full members of congregations. Now, in order to become a member of a congregation to be in the church, a person had to be [00:45:00] baptized and had to have the experience of justification, which allowed the person then to take communion, right? And that created a full membership in the church. Full members had their children baptized.

Those children of the second generation wanted to baptize their own children, but many of them had not yet had the conversion experience or the justification experience. And so some churches adopted the Halfway Covenant, something championed by Increase Mather. No other churches in Plymouth Colony adopted the Halfway Covenant, except for Thomas Thornton’s church. So this, too, was a critical thing. He’s got this very close relationship with Increase Mather that I think shaped his theological views in many ways. And he was distinctive in that with respect to the adoption of the [00:46:00] Halfway Covenant.

Josh Hutchinson: And he was very interested, Thornton, in infant baptism, wasn’t he?

Kathy Hermes: Yes. There was a baptism controversy in the 1640s that eventually is resolved with the Cambridge Platform. And the minister in Windsor was away for a time that summer in 1647, in Boston discussing baptism. So this is an issue of critical concern. When he went to Ireland, he was exposed to a number of sermons and debates about infant baptism because in the Cromwellian period, the Anabaptists as they were called, or the Antipedobaptists, believed in adult baptism, not infant baptism.

And Thornton would’ve come into contact with that controversy in Ireland. It was a big thing at the time, during the Cromwellian period. [00:47:00] And then when he got back to Plymouth, they’re faced with this crisis in the 1660s of people not converting. So it would’ve been right on his doorstep. He would’ve been in the midst of that everywhere he went.

Beth Caruso: With his experience with the four tragic deaths of his children during this flu epidemic in Windsor, one could speculate about how it might have been an influence for him to see that children could die early and could die under horrible circumstances, influenced by the devil in some way, and how it would be important for children to have some kind of protection that baptism might afford them.

Sarah Jack: I’m really seeing how you have these network of ministers, these controversial spiritual things. You have the development of these [00:48:00] colonies and law. It’s all really interesting.

Kathy Hermes: The reform congregationalists, the people we call Puritans, they were really trying to dive into a kind of primitive theology, to get back to the earliest days of the Christian Church, and they wanted to be very pure about it. And the reason the Halfway Covenant, something like the Halfway Covenant, was so controversial is that some Congregationalists thought that it was getting away from the pure church, right? That it was a compromise done for social reasons, rather than for sound theological reasons. But for people who were worried about the souls of children, the Halfway Covenant allowed for, as Beth said, some protection for the children. It was considered a saving ordinance. Most Congregationalists also believed in the perseverance of the saints, that [00:49:00] is that salvation would persist in families, right? Not always, but for the most part that godly families produced godly children. And so this was a way to continue the perseverance of the saints. They really had a long-term vision in mind. They thought that they were near the end times and were interested in converting native people. Some of the English people were even what they called philosemites and believed that native people were members of a lost tribe of Israel. And so this was part of the conversion of the Jews that had to take place before the Millennium. So there are many, many complicated ideas that go into these saving ordinances like baptism.

Josh Hutchinson: We’ve talked about a lot of Thornton’s connections to witchcraft. After [00:50:00] Yarmouth, he moved to Boston and joined the Mathers’ church in the year that the Salem Witch Trials were happening. Do you think that Thornton’s views on witchcraft could have influenced the Mathers to any degree?

Beth Caruso: At this point in time, we really don’t know if he was a shadow influencer, because he certainly is in line with the thinking of theirs, coupled with his early experience. What we need is more information about what his actual views were, and that is why we are so excited to put forth this research in hopes that other researchers will get ahold of it, and it will open many more doors and that we can find more documentation about Thornton or more works that he’s written, more sermons, [00:51:00] things like that. I think there’s more to discover before we can fully answer that question.

Kathy Hermes: Yeah, I think that’s true. I do think that the Mathers were quite well educated and Thornton was not, and so he would probably have deferred to them in theological matters, at the same time that his direct experience would have been of interest to them, but how they influenced one another, we can’t say, and I think this is important. Something we came to late in writing the article was to discuss Thornton’s position as a bystander. In Holocaust studies, they talk a lot about bystanders, because bystanders are, by the mere fact that they’re there, influencing what’s going on, right? But often in ways that are intangible. We didn’t write this in the article, but it’s what we both thought of as the Forrest Gump effect, right? What [00:52:00] effect does somebody being there all the time at all these situations have in the history of the way in which these things develop? And Thornton was not a theologian. The Mathers were theologians, but by virtue of his being present at so many things and having so much direct experience, it’s unlikely he stood mute and neutral.

And what I would like to see, if I can make a plug for it to some listener, is a master’s thesis that uses maybe distant reading techniques on the writings of the ejected ministers from Ireland who wind up in the Boston area, James Allen and Bailey and some of these other folks, Thomas Walley, who was in Barnstable near Thomas Thornton. I think if you took that kind of literary approach to their writings, you might be able to find ideas that [00:53:00] connected them all. And you might be able then to determine some of the influence that these collective ideas had on the Mathers, because the Mathers were themselves in Ireland. They weren’t part of the ejected ministers, but they were there at the same time the ejected ministers were. So I think that’s actually a very promising kind of area of scholarship.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you so much for that plug. We think that’s important for the story to be continued. And for the research done.

We know that the spectral evidence was accepted early on in Connecticut, and then John Winthrop Jr. basically rejected it, but then it turns back up in Salem, and we’re wondering where that influence came from, that spectral evidence. Is there any, are there ideas out there of how spectral evidence came back at Salem?

Kathy Hermes: So there were only two witchcraft cases in [00:54:00] Ireland at the time that Thornton was there. And we don’t know, again, because of the fire, I think they don’t have any records of what went on. But typically Ireland was not a place that accepted the idea of specters. And what’s interesting is that I think some of the ejected ministers question the acceptance of specters in Boston. What Thornton’s view was, we don’t know. It was always a debatable thing about whether you could trust a specter. The idea that specters existed was accepted, but what to do with the presence of a specter and any information one received from the specter was the matter of debate.

Josh Hutchinson: And Cotton in his Wonders of the Invisible World seems to defend spectral evidence, [00:55:00] while Increase in Cases of Conscience says that the Devil can appear as an angel of light. And that was a big turning point in Salem rejecting the spectral evidence. But I find it interesting also that John Winthrop Jr. rejected it and then his son, Waitstill, is one of the judges at Salem. And it’s all kinds of weird connections with the spectral evidence.

Kathy Hermes: With any Puritan debate, they picked these things to death, and they loved argument. And I know that often, particularly when witchcraft trials come up, people tend to think of the Puritans as irrational and unscientific, and really nothing could be further from the truth. Cotton Mather himself was quite interested in Isaac Newton’s discoveries and things like that. They thought of themselves as rational, and they were trying to work through supernatural experiences, which [00:56:00] they believed in rational ways. And sometimes that doesn’t make sense to us in the 21st century, but I think that’s why you have these debates among people who are even very close. And obviously no two people were closer than Increase and Cotton Mather, who shared a congregation and a family linkage.

Sarah Jack: Is there anything else about Thomas Thornton’s connection to Salem?

Kathy Hermes: Beth did talk about Margaret Rule, but maybe a little clearer explanation of that incidence. Margaret Rule suffered from what appeared to be a demonic possession or a diabolical possession, which was a bit different from some other types of possessions. And many people were called to her bedside. Again this is a point where we’re in contradiction to some other historians, but we believe the Thomas Thornton who signed the evidence about Margaret Rule was Reverend Thomas [00:57:00] Thornton.

But Samuel Drake, who was one of the early publishers of documents on this case, suggested that it was a bricklayer named Thomas Thornton. And it doesn’t make sense that the bricklayer would be there . But that incidence of Rule being possessed, she levitated during the viewing and all of these men witnessed it. This was a scene that must have conjured up memories of Priscilla. And it may be again, something that shapes that final story of Priscilla, as it goes through its various oral iterations in this, because Margaret Rule is really the last case in Massachusetts where the supernatural is front and center, as far as I know, and no witchcraft accusation results from it. They’re done with that.

Beth and I debated a lot about whether Thornton [00:58:00] was a believer in witchcraft and how zealous he was in terms of rooting out witchcraft. And I think both of us feel like, and again, this is a feeling, it’s speculation, nothing definitive, that he probably had a somewhat nuanced view of it that might account for the acquittal of Mary Ingham. That there were certain tests that were applied in figuring out who in fact was a witch, according to their own ideas. Had Thornton had a vehement reaction against Mary Ingham’s acquittal, we might have seen some evidence of that, since he did write to Increase Mather on that day.

Beth Caruso: The thing is, Thomas Thornton had a very long life, so he may have started thinking about witchcraft and rooting out witchcraft crimes in one way, and [00:59:00] that may have evolved to be in a different place. Again, it’s very hard for us to know, because he never directly says how he feels about witchcraft. It’s all very circumstantial of him showing up at these different places and the whole trajectory, starting out with this personal tragedy, and then having very strong connections later on to people who were connected to the Salem trials. The biggest clue we can get to Thomas Thornton as a person and his personality is probably in his sermon that Sewall wrote down, and in it the king has taken over again, and he doesn’t seem like a bitter person. He seems [01:00:00] like a kind and loving person. He says, “have nothing but love for the king in your heart.” And of course, the king has just taken over again, and Puritans are probably not liking that so much. They’d rather have Cromwell in there. But he’s taking a charitable approach.

You can often at least tease out a little bit of someone’s personality through their letters and the way they word things. He seems like a fairly humble person. He doesn’t seem aggressive or bitter or anything like that. So combined with his showing up at these different witch trial scenes and eras, it’s difficult to know. I hope a researcher’s out there. I hope you’re listening. This is something that [01:01:00] is an invitation for you to explore.

And I, in my heart of hearts, I do really think that there are more documents that will be discovered of Thomas Thornton, and people may have those documents already, but he just hasn’t been on the radar, because, quite frankly, no one has ever connected the Thomas Thornton who’s in Salem as a minister, hobnobbing with Judge Sewell and the Mathers, with the humble tradesman in Windsor, who tragically loses all these children in 1647. Our article is the bridge between these two Thomas Thorntons, which even, you know, some descendants in the past writing about him never connected. So we hope that now that he’s on the radar with this [01:02:00] article, that there will be more discoveries and they will shed a lot more light on the New England Witch trials and about him and his attitude toward all of this.

Sarah Jack: How do people access the article?

Kathy Hermes: The article will be in the Connecticut History Review, which is published by the University of Illinois Press. So copies can be ordered through the Association for the Study of Connecticut History, A S C H, the ASH organization. And you can subscribe to Connecticut History Review. It’s the only scholarly journal for the history of Connecticut.

Josh Hutchinson: Now here’s Sarah with information on the efforts to exonerate the accused on the efforts to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut.

Sarah Jack: Here is Connecticut witch trial exoneration legislation news. The first [01:03:00] community led remembrance day for all Connecticut Witch trial victims was on an anniversary of Alice Young’s execution, May 26th, 2007. It was held at South Green in Hartford. Tony Griego, police officer and co-founder of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project and other commemorations, memorialized the executed witch trial victims with 12 white roses, one for each of the 11 victims hanged and one for all the children Orphaned. He would like a white rose on a permanent stone memorial in Hartford.

Tony’s exoneration efforts with several descendants followed. Attempts were first launched in 2008 and 2009. These unsuccessful efforts stirred minds and produced important witch trial history, exoneration, and permanent memorial site conversations.

In the beginning of 2016, the Connecticut Witch Memorial Facebook page and effort was formed to reach the masses when Beth Caruso joined up with the education and advocacy endeavors of Tony Griego. The social media and storytelling project allowed for victim stories to be told, [01:04:00] events to be shared, and updates to be given on efforts and calls for action to be amplified. They have connected descendants and others with a common interest in witch trial justice. Next, the CT Witch Memorial team went town to town, looking for local communities to remember and acknowledge the witch trial victims from their history.

Out of this effort, a collaboration with the First Church of Windsor, and Windsor Town Council, a resolution passed nine to zero on February 6th, 2017, recognizing the town’s two victims, Alice Young and Lydia Gilbert. Stay tuned next week to hear about more localized efforts to memorialize individual victims at the local community level.

Today, the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is an organized collaboration of these founding advocates and many other diverse collaborators working for an official state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut colony. We are also seeking [01:05:00] out all local communities to continue recognizing their local accused witches. We are all coming together, along with the state representative Jane Garibay and senator Saud Anwar, to support the proposed exoneration legislation, the Joint Committee on Judiciary’s bill, HJ Number 34, Resolution Concerning Certain Witchcraft Convictions in Colonial Connecticut. This proposal could bring a public hearing shortly.

This resolution will be an example to others working to recognize and address historic wrongs. Connecticut is taking a stand against injustice. By acknowledging the mistakes of the past, we educate the public that similar actions are not acceptable today. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project strongly urges the General assembly to hear the voices of the witch trial victims being amplified by the community today. They were not witches. We hope you will pass this legislation without delay. Our project is offering several ways for exoneration supporters to plug in and participate or learn about the exoneration [01:06:00] and history. Please download our robust lineup of episodes featuring witch trial descendants, education about hanged witch Alice Young and other victims, and Connecticut Colony’s governor John Winthrop, Jr.’s positive influence against convicting Witches.

You can go to our project website for an informative and easy to understand fact sheet of the Connecticut Colony witch trial victims, places, and dates. You can follow along by joining our Discord community or Facebook groups. Links to all these informative opportunities are listed in the episode description.

Use your social power to help Alice Young, America’s first executed witch, finally be acknowledged. Support the descendants by acknowledging and sharing their ancestor’s stories. Remember the victims in modern day facing the same unfair and dangerous situations. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and to stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our projects on social media @ctwitchhunts and visit our website at ConnecticutWitchTrials.org. [01:07:00]

The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is a project of End Witch Hunts movement. End Witch Hunts is a nonprofit organization founded to educate about witch trial history and advocate for alleged witches. Please support us with your donations or purchases of educational Witch trial books and merchandise. You can shop our merch at zazzle.com/store/endwitchhunts or zazzle.com/store/thoushaltnotsuffer. And shop our books at bookshop.org/endwitchhunts. We want you as a Super Listener. You can help keep Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast in production by super listening with your monthly monetary support. See episode description for links to these support opportunities. We thank you for standing with us and helping us create a world that is safe from witchcraft accusations.

Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that important update. And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not [01:08:00] Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.

Sarah Jack: Join us next week.

Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.

Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com and our Zazzle store.

Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell all your friends and encourage them to listen to the show and buy our merch.

Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch-hunts. If you’d like to learn more or make a donation, visit endwitchhunts.org.

Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

February 9, 2023

How Do We Know What We Know? Salem Witch-Hunt Primary Sources with Margo Burns, Part 2

The Untold Story of Dorothy Good: A Tragic Life After the Salem Witch Trials

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Show Notes

Part 2 of our enjoyable Margo Burns Witch Trial talk series brings more fun and informative conversation. This information-packed two part series, includes background on her research and editing of the book Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Be sure to catch both talks! Discover how we know what we know from the study of historical records. We have some laughs and heartfelt conversation about some of her new project discoveries on Chief Magistrate William Stoughton of the Salem Witch Trials. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Links

Support our show, buy “Records of the Salem Witch Hunt” through this link.

University of VA, Salem Witch Trials Documents and Transcriptions

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Social Media for State Representative Jane Garibay

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today, we feature part two of our interview with Margo Burns, associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt.
Sarah Jack: In our conversation, you'll hear how Margo is not done researching and investigating. She has an exciting project that she is working on, the biography of William Stoughton. She even traveled across the sea to look at his handwriting.
Josh Hutchinson: She tells some wonderful stories from her research and what [00:01:00] she's been able to uncover, what she still looking for, and what she wishes still existed that unfortunately has been lost. We talked about Robert Calef's More Wonders of the Invisible World and whether or not his records can be trusted and how historians use those documents in Records of the Salem Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: And what is it like to do one of these biographies on a main character from the Salem Witch-Hunt. We heard a little bit from Dan Gagnon on what it's like. His project's complete Margo's in the trenches with it right now, and it's very interesting.
Josh Hutchinson: And similar to Rebecca Nurse, William Stoughton didn't leave a lot of documents behind.[00:02:00] Nobody knows where his records are, if they're still in existence at all. Unlike the Mathers, where you have volumes and volumes of their diaries and their correspondence to anyone whoever wrote them a letter, you just don't have the papers there to analyze Stoughton's life. So Margo is having to use a tangential approach, I would say, where she's coming in at it sideways, looking at all of his associates to find out what they ever wrote about Stoughton and looking through other people's correspondence to see what was said about his life at the time. And she's traveled back to [00:03:00] Oxford in England to have a look at where he studied and see if he left anything behind there.
We also talk about Stoughton's other side. We know him as the villain of the Salem Witch Trials, but he did have a philanthropical side, where he did bequeath sums of money to charitable causes. So you get to learn more about that, and you get to hear all of Margo's great stories about chasing down the shadowy figure.
And we talked to her about the records that we know are missing and what could be missing, because Governor Thomas Hutchinson wrote a history of Massachusetts Bay [00:04:00] in the 18th century and included references and transcripts. He said he had the documents, the primary source documents from the Salem Witch Trials and copied them into his history, but those documents are missing, and it's believed that they disappeared in the Stamp Act Riot, when patriots stormed his house and went through all his things and threw everything out into the streets.
But how do you know what's missing? I wanna know how do we know what we don't know? So we ask both questions, how do we know what we know, and how do we know what we don't know?
Sarah Jack: Now, one thing we know is that Dorothy Good's name was not Dorcas.
Josh Hutchinson: And we know that because Margo got on the case [00:05:00] and corrected the transcription of the records about Dorothy Good, not Dorcas. There was a transcription error long ago, and people have been using the same transcription for decades and repeating the name Dorcas, until Margo came along and discovered that her real name was Dorothy.
Sarah Jack: And you'll hear Margo talk about the handwriting analysis, and it's a science, and she applied it.
Josh Hutchinson: We'll have a link in the show notes to a talk given by Salem Witch, museum Education Director Rachel Christ-Doane about Dorothy Good and what we know about her life after the trials.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Margo.
Thank you, Rachel.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, thank you Margo and Rachel for [00:06:00] setting the record straight on little Dorothy Good, the four year old child who was chained up in the prison.
We talk to Margo again and get some good stories, and it's awesome, and you're gonna love it, and it's fantastic.
Sarah Jack: And now here's some great history from Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: William Stoughton was the chief justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer that met in Salem to try those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts in 1692. Still, no biography has yet been written about him. What we do know about Stoughton is that he was born in 1631 or 1632, the son of Elizabeth Knight and Israel Stoughton. William's family migrated to Dorchester, Massachusetts shortly after his birth in England. William graduated from Harvard College in 1650 and Oxford University [00:07:00] in 1652. He began his working life as a minister and preached in Oxford until 1660, when King Charles II was restored to the throne.
In 1662, Stoughton returned to Dorchester and began a career as a merchant. He was first elected to the General Court in 1671 and went on to hold many significant posts in the militia, judiciary, legislative, and executive branches of the Bay Colony's government. In May 1692, Stoughton was appointed Lieutenant Governor and named Chief Justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. He presided over the trials and executions in 1692 and then served as chief justice of the new Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, signing more death warrants, which fortunately were not carried out, as Governor Phips granted a reprieve. As Deputy Governor, [00:08:00] Stoughton led the colony from the death of Governor Phips in 1695 until his own death in 1701.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for that great history, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome.
Sarah Jack: Is everybody ready for part two? Here's Margo Burns, historian, associate editor, and project manager of Records of the Salem Witch Hunt.
Josh Hutchinson: Yay. Applause.
Margo Burns: William Stoughton is responsible for just about everything. I will give some of that credit, if it's credit, to Hathorne and Corwin, the two initial magistrates who were interrogating people, because they just accepted every, single accusation, and they kept everybody in jail and just went forward. But when we finally get to the trials, William Stoughton is in charge of everything. He set down the rules. He was making sure everything went correctly, if I put it that way. So when Rebecca Nurse was [00:09:00] found not guilty, he sent the jury back to reconsider, twice. Twice! And even though it turns out that she hadn't heard a question the second time, and she couldn't answer, and that was, of course, if you get asked a question and you don't have a reply, that's tantamount to saying, "you got me."
And that's what ended up happening, but you can imagine the chaos in that courtroom when she was found not guilty. And she didn't hear. Now a lot of people say, "oh, she was deaf." I challenge just about anybody to hear over what ruckus had to have been happening in that room. And later on, we have the account of the grand jury foreman and we have her account that, no, that wasn't what it was. And they appealed. They appealed. But we have a thing in Calef saying that the governor was ready to do it, but then a gentleman of Salem talked him out of it. Stoughton was in charge. He got it exactly. Now he wasn't a gentleman of Salem. We don't know who that was that got the governor's ear [00:10:00] and said, "nah, you shouldn't do that." A lot of us speculate. We try and figure out who it could have been, but we don't know.
Sarah Jack: I've been wondering why Robert Calef's reports are given so much weight.
Margo Burns: He published them. That's the thing. You find out more about people if they left a paper trail. And he also, he and Cotton Mather were at it all the time. They were just public foes writing things about each other. So this just sorta fit right in. And Calef had access to some documents and accounts that nobody else had. We don't have a hard copy of John Alden's description of what happened to him. We only have it through Calef. And we do try and keep track of what Calef says, not just because he hated Cotton Mather, but he does have some accounts from other people. So when we have this document, as put into Calef, that is Rebecca Nurse saying this is what happened, and we have other pieces that he [00:11:00] puts into it. That's not necessarily him, but that's him picking and choosing. The joy of being an editor, you get to pick and choose what pieces you'll put in, but, generally speaking, people have found his sources credible. And also, when you leave paper trail, you're the one that people are interested in.
And there's an explanation why the Salem Village cases are more interesting to people than the Andover cases. Well, not if you're from Andover, they're more important. But part of that is the vivid descriptions from those interrogations that were done by Samuel Parris. We like vivid. We wanna see the paper trail. And when we get to Andover and just have all these things that say, "after several questions purpounded and negative answers given, she confessed." So those start sounding the same, and we're not as interested in those. So that's why the interest in the Salem Village accounts hold people. When you have a paper trail, [00:12:00] that's what you look at.
And, in my research in Stoughton, I tell people a little joke, and it goes like this. There's somebody, one o'clock in the morning, crawling around on the sidewalk underneath the streetlight.
And police car stops by to say, "excuse me, what's going on here?"
And the guy says, " I dropped my wallet. I'm looking for it."
And police officer has a nice big flashlight, looking around and going, "dude, it's not here. If you dropped your wallet here, I'd find it. Are you sure you dropped it here?"
And the guy said, "no, I dropped it in that dark alley back there."
And the officer says, "okay, what are you doing looking for here?"
And the guy said, "the light's better."
And that's what a lot of history ends up being. We have a lot of interest in Samuel Sewall, because he kept a diary. He had letters, he had ledgers, he had all sorts of stuff. He had ancestors. People are really interested in his stuff, and is he necessarily the right person that you want to say, put everything on for being a witch judge?
We also have conversion [00:13:00] narratives. That was a big thing, when you wanna become a covenanted member in a church. And Thomas Shepard wrote them all down in Cambridge, so that we have these incredible records. But was that really emblematic, or was that just, we have this, so we can talk about it? We know about a whole lot of people's lives, and are they necessarily the right people for us to be investigating and extrapolating from?
So when I decided, what can I do? I've read everything. I've read everything, and I'm going, what do I add to this? We've done Records of the Salem Witch Hunt. That's great. People are using it. That's great. But what do I get to do? What am I gonna do? And I looked for, I looked down the dark alley. I said, "what's down the dark alley, and who do we wanna know more about?" Yeah. There's this wonderful play recently on, on Nathaniel Saltonstall, then what his role was in these, but the key person is William Stoughton. He's the one who's in charge of things.
So I said, you know what, [00:14:00] I'm gonna go down that dark alley, and I've had to bring a little flashlight and tweezers to find things. And there's a reason why nobody has written about him before. There isn't a cache of documents. He did not leave a paper trail. So we get little teeny pieces about it, and people make up stuff about him.
Go, "oh, he must have hated women." "He was not married." "Oh, maybe he was gay." All these things to explain why he did what he did to convict and execute all these people. But there's really not much information. There's not much more than what you can find in Sibley's history of Harvard Graduates.
And most times when people talk about 'em, that's all they can cite. They don't have more. I decided I would keep hunting. Now when I say this, there's no cache of papers, that doesn't mean there never was one. There had to have been a cache of papers. Just his library alone, his library, he donated the bulk of it to his niece's husband, John Danforth, who was the minister in Dorchester, and his law books he gave to John [00:15:00] Temple, who was the husband of another one of his nieces.
So there were books. There were books out there. I've only been able to locate seven. Seven books from his library. That just amazes me. And somebody recently said, "oh, I found three more for you. There's a fellow who's written this book. He found them in his attic when he was a kid, and he's written a book about it." I said, "great, that's wonderful." And then I read the book and went, "oh, nope, I already knew about those three. They went up for auction in 2015." So that's a lot of stuff that I can't find.
Somebody said, "oh it'll turn up," and I'm going, "that scale." We don't have letters, we don't have anything personal. We don't have ledgers. He got his money from land. You have to keep track of that stuff. Where is it? He also had a silver ink stand. They called it a standish. And in his will, he gave that to John Danforth as well. And that doesn't exist. I've talked to all the leading colonial silver people, the curators at the Met and Yale, [00:16:00] and a silver ink stand is very rare. So if that survived, we'd know about it. We would know about it. So where did it go? For something like that, you have to have catastrophe. Otherwise it's little pieces missing here and there. But that's a lot of stuff, a lot.
And I've been looking at the family houses, and his particular mansion house in Dorchester went down through his nephew, William Taylor, who also became lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. But it went down through the Taylor family, and I found records of it to 1752, when it was in a probate record, a little map. But by 1831, the maps of Dorchester, which label all the different buildings in it, there's no building there. So maybe something happened there. But then again, he gave his books to a different person. So maybe something happened to one of those houses.
But then I came across this little fact. [00:17:00] In 1764, Harvard's library burned to the ground and nothing was salvageable, nothing. The only books from their library that exist are ones that were already checked out. So I don't have evidence for this yet. I'm looking for it, but I think on the scale of the loss of primary sources and the paper trail, that there's so much missing, a catastrophe that size.
It could have been that the family gave his papers and all of his things to Harvard for safekeeping. I'm looking for anything. I'm looking for other catastrophic events. Did the Danforth house burn down or things like that, because fires happened? But I haven't found anything. That's the only working theory I have, and I have to call it a working theory, because I don't have any primary sources. How do I know this?
This one is one of those times where you have to say, "are these two things connected?" That book that came out recently that had the three books, the fellow, [00:18:00] he made a couple of these leaps. Anytime you have two pieces of things and you, two pieces of evidence, and you're trying to figure out how they're connected, and I'm making a, I'm making a leap saying it could have all burned up in the Harvard fire. He would find things and make leaps, but his tended to be more, I don't wanna say "woo," but they're, "ooh." For instance, these books that he'd found also had John Danforth's name in them. He didn't know that Stoughton had willed these books to John Danforth. And he made a conclusion that Stoughton was a mentor to John Danforth, who was a generation younger. And although true, he didn't, he missed the part where John Danforth is married to his niece. So that explains something. But later on, he said, "in a truly bizarre instance or something, John Danforth is buried in the same tomb as Stoughton." And I'm thinking that's not bizarre. It was the family tomb. So sometimes when you take two [00:19:00] pieces of evidence and try and find what connects them, you can make leaps that sometimes just show you don't know all the details. So in this case, the relationship he had with John Danforth has so many other layers. It isn't just a mentor and a young man.
But for me, my leap is what happened to all those papers, and does it have anything to do with that catastrophic fire at Harvard? Now by 1810, another descendant from the Cooper line gave Harvard the portrait that we have of Stoughton, so I know that the family felt that stuff about him belonged at Harvard. It was a different line, and you're down several generations, but that sense that his stuff belongs at Harvard. He paid to have a building made. It was Stoughton Hall. And when that fell apart, they built another Stoughton Hall. So Harvard feels very strongly about what a benefactor he was. And [00:20:00] Harvard is justifiably proud of having him.
So can I make that connection that his stuff all burned up in the fire? I wish I had some evidence to prove that, but something catastrophic had to have happened. He was well-read. He was known as being a scholar. Very intelligent. Where'd it all, where'd it all go?
And maybe that's just my silver bullet, and I'm trying to find other things that could explain it. But right now that's my working theory. I just wish I had more concrete evidence of it.
I have a great deal of fun doing the research. Recently, I was in Oxford, cuz he spent a decade of his life in England, when he was in his twenties. And I got to do some of my research, literally, in a medieval tower, a stone, medieval tower, because the records from the time he was there are still held in this medieval tower. I think that was the most exciting research [00:21:00] location that I've ever been in. I was so psyched to be in this space, but I was more psyched to look at these records that were held there. So I wasn't really looking around a whole lot. I'm going, "oh my God, look at this."
And just, it wasn't in itself really interesting. It's just so granular. How much was his charge for that particular week in that particular term of that particular year? How much was he charged for his extra food, things like that? Because you got. It came with the commons, but if you wanted more food than that, you would be charged for it if there were any other fees.
So there's these gigantic 17th century spreadsheets, essentially, that I'm picking through, and there's so many details. As I said, I do this research with tweezers, but there I was, in a medieval tower with stone walls three feet thick. You had to go up this stone, circular staircase to get up to this place. The [00:22:00] archivist was very kind, and he said they had talked about taking these records out of this place, because it's a stone, medieval tower. But the argument had been that they had survived intact for all these centuries, so why move them? I'm going, "okay, it's okay by me to go up in, in this muniment tower at New College."
My focus was more on what was actually there, but I came away from it going, "wait a minute, where was I just now?" I was in a room that, that he had spent time in. It was really one of those evocative moments to just find a place, like when I saw Samuel Parris's handwriting, writing down the account of the interrogation of Rebecca Nurse, he was part of her being executed, but going to Oxford and being in this really incredible room that he had spent time in. It was really moving, [00:23:00] but I was concentrating on what I was finding, and yeah, I have a story to tell about him at Oxford.
Josh Hutchinson: And you don't get those opportunities to go in medieval buildings in America.
Margo Burns: England has some really cool stuff. One of my challenges being at Oxford was it's all old, but how old is it? And in looking around New College, there's a big yard they go into, and on two sides, there's three stories of rooms where people would stay. But in his era there was only two stories, so trying to pick apart the things that weren't there when he was there versus the stuff that was there. Which is why, being in the muniment tower, it's going, "he was definitely here. He walked on these stairs, this little spiral staircase made of stone." That was there. It's interesting work. It's interesting work to do.
Josh Hutchinson: It sounds like you've been at it for a little [00:24:00] while.
Margo Burns: Part of it is I just retired in August, and I've been working on Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. I did that while I was fully employed. I had my summers off, but still I would come home and work on the book. Wasn't popular in my household. "Oh, you're working on the book, okay."
But now that I'm retired, one of the first things I did was decide to take a trip, and one of my locations was to go to Oxford. So I think because I have more time now, and I can have a more constant stream of research from one day to the next, I'm working on Stoughton every day now, which I never could have done while I was working. I'm hoping it goes faster now.
Sarah Jack: But take your time and do it right the way you do it. There's no, there's, yes, time matters, but it's the work that matters.
Margo Burns: And that's the thing about Stoughton. Nobody has done this before. Somebody told me, "oh, you could just write what you know now, and people would buy it." And I go, "yeah, [00:25:00] but there's more." And I haven't been able to plumb all the places that I want to go, found all the things I know I wanna find. I wanna do it right. I definitely do wanna do it right, because nobody has done this before.
And the research is that painstaking. If there's somebody who's writing a dissertation, this is not the topic they're gonna do. If somebody's trying to get out a book regularly on a topic, this is not the topic they would pick, because it's not easy to do and just come up with something, because there isn't a body of work to draw from. So I'm down in the dark alley trying to find all these little things and then make sense of it.
So part of it is, I don't know that I can even start writing it now, because I don't have a sense of everything that I want to know and trying to find all these pieces. But he's a very interesting person. I will say one other thing. It's really weird to be trying to write a biography of a [00:26:00] dead white guy, another dead white guy. Here he is, is not only just a dead white guy. He was one of those Puritans in Massachusetts. Who really wants to read about that? There are lots of people who do wanna read about it, but I also find myself saying, "dead white guy, who's gonna read this? Are my friends gonna read this?"
I have found a whole lot of things about race, class, and gender that play into his story. His investment in the Christianization of the indigenous people alone is worth a great deal of discussion. The fact that he never married and yet had a family full of blood relatives, most of whom were women. He was surrounded by women in his family, and how does that work? How does that work? And then he had slaves, he had African slaves, he owned slaves. Then at one point, performed a marriage between one of his slaves and one of the slaves [00:27:00] in the Danforth family. They're probably all living in one place, but he performed a marriage between two slaves.
Yeah. So there, there are these different things that keep popping up. And then of course, class, he has money and wealth, and anything he wanted to do, he could do because he had class and money and things like that. And how did he deal with people who are not like him? So I'm trying to address some of those things, race, class, and gender, in ways that I hope will be revealing and not just put this down as, you know, dead white guy.
Josh Hutchinson: You said in one of your talks that we've watched that you're having to look at him through other people's lives. You're looking at other people's diaries and correspondence to find out who was the Stoughton character.
Margo Burns: Right? All these parallel narratives, and what are the little points when they touched? Who did he know, and [00:28:00] who do we know for certain he knew that we don't have any other evidence for? So for instance, at Oxford, I look to the list of all the fellows and I know people he had to have known. So I have to look at those parallel lives, the parallel stories, and find those little points when they connect and hope that helps me, because I can find out more in some cases of sending these other parallel lives and just these little sparks along the way.
Josh Hutchinson: I like your analogy about the guy looking for the wallet, because people have been focused on like the Mathers, who are out in the light with their hundreds of books and diaries and letters, but you're looking for that guy who's way back in the alley where barely any light gets.
Margo Burns: And yet, very important to the whole story, there are a lot of different ways that people do history. Sometimes people try and pick somebody who's the every [00:29:00] man or somebody, Martha Ballard, Midwife's Tale. And looking at history through an ordinary human being, to pick one person and see what happened in their lives. That's a particular kind of history to do and it's fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
And I pick a big guy, and that's a fairly standard. You get the biography of some big guy, but I'm really hoping that I can bring some of the qualities of that kind of research into somebody who is not well known. How do you figure out what that person was like, cuz you don't have a whole lot of records about them?
So I'm hoping I can bring that to this story of somebody who is a major figure, even though we don't have a whole lot of information about 'em. I'm having fun. I really have a lot of fun doing this, and I know that the day I sent out the manuscript of records, I had to put it on, burn it to a CD and print out two copies of it to send to Cambridge University Press.
And as that day when it's just like [00:30:00] it's gone. And I was like, "I really liked working on it." That's just it. I really like this work, doing the research and getting to the other end is okay, fly, be free. And that day is far away from me on Stoughton, and I don't wanna rush it, because this is so much fun. This research is a lot of fun and I know nobody else is gonna do it.
Josh Hutchinson: Enjoy it.
Margo Burns: Oh yeah, I will also say one other thing about what I do on my work with Stoughton is that in addition to his life, he has a legacy. I've already mentioned that Harvard has Stoughton Hall, and that's the second Stoughton Hall, that they're very proud of their portrait that they have of him that was donated by the Cooper family.
There's a lot of stuff that has trickled down from his life, and one of the most fascinating ones was recent, and you don't really think about somebody who's died in 1701 having an impact on today. In his will, he [00:31:00] donated money to Dorchester, where he lived, and to the next town over, Milton, which had been part of Dorchester, but had divided in his lifetime. And one of the things he gave was a plot of land to Milton for the support of the poor in the town. And quite often what that would be is if you gave a plot of land, the town or whatever would rent it out to a farmer or something, and the proceeds from those rents would then get used to help support the poor in the town or whatever the thing was, that if he gave something to Harvard and Harvard rented out a pasture, the rents from that would support Harvard.
In this case, it was supposed to be supporting the poor in Milton. And this will from 1701, I guess it was two years ago, at the beginning of the Covid outbreak, a lot of people were having a hard time putting together their budgets and paying their bills. And in Milton, there were more people who appealed to this particular part of Milton [00:32:00] that helped support the poor, and at one point they said, "I wonder if we can get something from that fund." And sure enough, they applied to the select board to see if they could get some of the money from the endowment from that 1701 bequest to help support the people who were struggling financially because of Covid. And sure enough, they issued $85,000 toward that fund to help support people in need in Milton.
Josh Hutchinson: So something good came from Stoughton.
Margo Burns: A lot of things good came from Stoughton, a lot of interesting things, but the whole legacy from him just doesn't correlate with, oh, he was the witchcraft judge. But there's a lot that's come through the years that has been his legacy, and I've got lots of interesting stories about that. It's gonna have to be a whole chapter at the end about these things, because they, in themselves, are interesting. A bequest from his will in 1701 benefited people who were struggling [00:33:00] financially from covid.
Josh Hutchinson: Makes him a really rounded character. Really fascinating person to look at.
Margo Burns: He was a benefactor, and in a way that we can see it today, today, and just, "oh yeah, at Harvard, they built this building and whatever." Now this is real lives, real human beings today. So that part of the book goes beyond his death, but his legacy continues and in a very good way.
Josh Hutchinson: You mentioned what happened with Governor Hutchinson's house, and he was researching his history of Massachusetts. Do we have an idea what Salem-related documents we're missing?
Margo Burns: There are a lot of little things that he's quoting from, and most of them were interrogations. They call 'em examinations. They're interrogations. So they're little, teeny pieces, and some of them were reproduced by an antiquarian named Poole and published in, there were an awful lot of those [00:34:00] really interesting antiquarian groups that published things. So you can find little pieces, and you say well, that came out of a bigger document, and we don't have it. We know it existed, because he quoted from, and I'm, I think it had most, a lot of stuff with the Carrier boys, little, teeny pieces of that, and we really would like to know more of this, but in the Stamp Act Riot, people went through his house and trashed it. There were an awful lot.
He didn't just have Salem stuff. He had other major documents from the founding of Massachusetts, and he brought 'em all home. There's some talk that one of the draft papers, there's actually a footprint on a draft that he had been working on of his history. But things disappear.
There are a lot of things that have just disappeared. For instance, the interrogation of Abigail Hobbs, we don't have that document. We have the text, because in the early part of the 20th century there were a lot of people, libraries and stuff like that, had ways to copy them. They had photostats. People would have an [00:35:00] interesting document. They'd bring it in and say, "hey, do you wanna make a copy of this?" And it would come out with a negative and a positive. So the interrogation of Abigail Hobbs would have the positive photostat of that at the Mass Historical Society.
When we were working on our project, the microfilm for the documents that the Massachusetts State Archives were really bad. Ben had found a grant to digitize everything, but the microfilm for those was one that had been in public use. They couldn't find the master one, so it was already pretty bad.
And also the documents had been silked for preservation, and silking, you take the document and you put a layer of very fine silk on either side, into a hole in a piece of paper. And that way you can see both sides of it when you turn the pages, but it makes it a little murkier. And the microfilm was really pretty bad.
And I'd gone in to the Mass State Archives and got permission, and they brought it out and it was all in one volume as a book, this [00:36:00] big volume, and you turn the pages, and I got permission from them to photograph everything. And I had to have it on a V-shaped support because it wasn't an open flat. And I'd have to angle my camera to take each one. And I took all these pictures, front and back of all these documents. And the silking really is a problem, because it really obscures a lot of detail. But remember, this is a bound thing. Inside the front cover of it, this piece of paper falls out, and it's a negative photo stat.
And I'm going, what is this doing in here? Nobody would've known it was there, except I actually got the book, the bound book of this volume 135 from Mass Archives Collection. And I opened it up and suddenly went, "oh, please let this be something we don't have." And it turned out to be the negative photostat of the photostat that they have at the Mass Historical Society.
So, in the years since then, though, they have taken that bound volume apart and put the individual [00:37:00] pages in archival-quality storage. But having seen this book at one point, it was just like, can't believe this is how it is. But they have since done more to help preserve them. But there was this thing inside the cover.
Josh Hutchinson: Are there certain parts of the trials that we have more documents and parts where we have fewer documents?
Margo Burns: I already mentioned that we have more for the Salem Village stuff than we do from Andover, but we also have several people are executed that we really don't have much information. Margaret Scott, there's very little information about her, and we have two documents in her case that basically have been auctioned off between collectors fairly frequently. It's, "oh, that one just came up for auction again. Okay. It's an indictment." And then there are four documents that were copied and in an 1830, 1840 history of Rowley, where she was from. So there [00:38:00] were some documents in there, maybe four, five, and trying to figure out where those were. And we've got some that were in the collection, the Essex County Court archives, but there were only like a handful of them. And some of them we had to deal with as somebody else had transcribed them.
And we included things like that in Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. We didn't just take the handwritten things. Sometimes there was one and somebody else had transcribed it, and that's the only evidence we had. That's the case in a lot of the Governor Hutchinson pieces. This is all we have, but we know it came from a primary source. So we knew these other pieces that had come. I think there were a total of nine documents, and we'd known some of them only through this history of Rowley.
Fast forward after Records had been published. Matti Peikola, he was one of the ones that we'd started doing the stuff on the handwriting, and then Peter Grund joined in, and we had done all this work on the handwriting. It took three of us, and we [00:39:00] decided we wanted to see if we could identify some of the others, and Peter got a grant, and we were gonna look at other documents from that period by people doing legal stuff to see if we could figure out who some of these other documents were written by. So they came for two weeks, and we did our archive-hopping.
It was just delightful. We would make agreements ahead of time, and people would be ready for us. We went to town halls. We went to all the major archives, and they were staying down in Boston, in the Back Bay, so they were really near the Boston Public Library. They were near the New England Historical Genealogical Society. It was easy to take public transportation out to the Mass State Archives. It was great. It was really great. Oh, and also they were right around the corner from the Mass Historical Society. So they put themselves in a really great place.
So here we are looking at all these things, and at the Boston Public Library in their manuscripts and rare book section, off the top of my head, I don't remember the year, but they had this big card [00:40:00] catalog, literally a physical card catalog. And what we were doing was trying to look for people in the various towns who were where the accused were from. So Peter pulled open one of the drawers, and he is looking for Rowley, and there's a card that says "four documents in the case of Margaret Scott for witchcraft."
And he showed it to me. He said, "what do you think this is?" I said, "oh my God. More documents. That would be great. In the Margaret Scott Case, we don't, we only have a handful. More documents! Ah, too bad we didn't find this earlier." So we put in a call slip, and they brought them out. And turns out these were several other ones that had been in The History of Rowley.
So The History of Rowley had five, and these were four documents, as I remember. And so we already had the texts. So it wasn't anything new. For us, it was exciting, cuz we could look at the handwriting, because we were recognizing handwriting, and we would've put that into [00:41:00] Records of Salem Witch-Hunt. So there they are. There are things hiding in plain sight.
Now, I will say this about the Boston Public Library. They have since closed for a while to completely redo that collection. I think they were horribly embarrassed when that, was it a Dürer and a Rembrandt went missing? It made the front page of the Boston Globe. People lost their jobs over it, that these very valuable things had been missing. And it turns out they had just misshelved them. And I read about that and went, they misshelved the witchcraft papers. Because when we gave the folder back after looking at these fabulous documents and taking pictures and getting all excited having found them, Peter went back a couple of days later to look at them again, cuz they were staying right around the corner, and they couldn't find them. That took a while to get that resolved, and I found a few people to talk to there, and they had found them again. They were in fact misshelved. And then, another year later, two years later, they can't find this Dürer and Rembrandt, and I'm just laughing cause [00:42:00] I'm going, "they misshelved it."
But to their credit, the Boston Public Library has closed that. I don't know if they're open again. I hope so. But they completely redid that archive, and it's a good thing. It's really a good thing, because I can't imagine, if those documents had gone missing and somebody had taken them. And we were also a little wary about that, because that same week, one of those indictments in Margaret Scott's case that would come up periodically at auction, that one sold that week for, I wanna say $30,000. So we were a little concerned that maybe somebody connected the two, but they were just misshelved.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you believe is the next frontier in witch trials research?
Margo Burns: Oh boy. Next Frontier. We've done a whole lot in getting the primary sources, which is great. And I've also seen a lot of the current work to get the cases resolved and to clear the names of so many people, and I think that's great. [00:43:00] But. What do you do after that? Every generation finds this material, and these circumstances have value or resonance for them. It's been very interesting watching these middle school kids in North Andover working on the Elizabeth Johnson Jr. case. It's fabulous, absolutely fabulous.
And then we also see the people in Scotland working for rep. I don't know if, they're probably not doing reparations, but to go back and make amends, and then the cases in Connecticut. I think that I'll give a lot of credit to those middle schoolers in North Andover.
But there's an effort to come to terms with history, the real lives of people, and to admit things went wrong, and how do we address that? And I think that's also something that's happening just now in general, that our culture is really looking at the past and saying, "we made mistakes. What do we do?"
So that's what's going on now. It's admitting fault [00:44:00] from the past and trying to make some kind of reparations. We also see it for slavery in this country. What do we do? It was wrong. And can you make reparations? If so, how do you do it? And is it definitive?
When they started to try and overturn, they weren't overturning the actual convictions in Salem. It was something that they were overturning attainder, reversing the attainder, which is tainting of the blood, stuff like that. So during the lifetimes of a lot of the people who were involved or who were convicted or their families, there was an effort to say, "yeah, we did the wrong thing."
But not everybody came forward. If your family didn't, you'd been executed and nobody in your family came forward, your attainer was never reversed yet to the 1950s. That's when they started going to the courts at that point and say, "we really need to resolve this." But then they said one person's name and others, okay, for sure you got one person's attainder reversed, and then you [00:45:00] have to go forward and say there were others. They're just called others.
And what was the name of the acting governor? Is it Jane Swift? She. Yeah, so people kept pushing. People from Salem were pushing, and on Halloween that year, she issued a pardon or whatever it was, but I was going, "Halloween, great." But they named the others who had been and others. They gave them their names.
And then most recently, this wonderful class in North Andover said, "we don't see that Elizabeth Johnson Jr was included in that." And she was overlooked, and she was overlooked in a few other things. In her lifetime, she did speak up that she was overlooked and forgotten. Now we think we have everybody officially done, at least for Salem.
But there's this sense of looking backwards, and how do you do that? It's really interesting. And I feel sorry for the next class in middle school, cuz they don't have a project that big. They're not gonna have a project that will make it into a documentary and get that much, it'd be helpful.
But what do we do next? And I don't know, cuz right now, [00:46:00] as a culture, we're looking to figure out what we did wrong in the past and how to move forward from there. And that's our lens, that's our our cultural filter of how we're looking at some of these older things to take.
And you also get a lot of people who are just owning them, "this is my ancestor, this is important." You find the Wiccan community owning this abuse of people in the past who happen to have the same word associated with them. Wiccans now are self-defined witches, but they're not like the people who are accused of witchcraft in Salem, and yet they share a word. And I think that the Wiccan community has really come together to try to help mend things. That hasn't been the case in previous generations. What did it mean to other people and then why they looked at it? And I think this is a really good one. That as we try and come up with our past, you really can't move forward unless you know your past.
So I'm curious to see what the next wave will be. We're not, we're still in this wave of really looking at our [00:47:00] past and coming to terms with it and making amends, but what's next? I don't know. But because Salem is so interesting so many people, there will be something else that comes along.
Part of the reason I think that, oh, the stuff on moldy bread and ergot was so enticing was at the time that the first article positing it came out, it was in the middle of when people were coming to grips with the drug culture of the hippie thing. And since LSD is derived from ergot, that just resonated at the time, and it gave an explanation, because people wanna find meaning.
So if you go into the seventies and you see that, it made perfect sense that people would gravitate toward that as some kind of explanation. But right now, we're trying to figure out how do we come to terms what we did wrong? So I don't know what the next, the next one will be. I'm looking forward to it, but we're not through with this wave because we're still coming to terms and making amends. I don't know.
Have the Connecticut cases been resolved yet? Do you know? [00:48:00]
Josh Hutchinson: No, we're hoping they'll be resolved within a few months.
Margo Burns: Yeah, it's now, and do you know if the Scottish ones have been resolved at this point?
Josh Hutchinson: The pardon hasn't gone through the parliament yet. The first Minister did issue an apology. The Kirk did an apology. But the bill is still with the Parliament.
Margo Burns: And isn't that an amazing thing? And part of the reason that the past things for Salem took their time getting through is that the legislatures have lots of things on their minds. They're trying to get stuff for today done. So when somebody brings them a bill to resolve something that happened centuries ago, that sort of gets to the bottom of the pile. But trying to go back in time, the legislatures and the the people who can actually make that happen, it has to be done on their schedule. And sometimes you can really push that for political reasons and they want to get a little a little bang for your buck. They get a political [00:49:00] push to take care of something, but it has to be on a slow newsday.
Josh Hutchinson: They've gotta see what's in it for them.
Margo Burns: Absolutely. I have to say that the work that Tad Baker and Marilynne Roach and Ben Ray and others did for the public installation to identify the actual site of the hangings. The work they did, they really tried to cover every single possibility. They were looking at the primary sources, they were looking at maps, they were looking at everything they possibly could. They had ground penetrating radar. They had all sorts of stuff. They tried to do everything, because they wanted politicians to know that we all agree.
I already knew that was the place, who am I? Yes. Okay. I'm an historian, but I hadn't done, I hadn't dotted all the i's crossed the t's. Those of us who knew. But the whole idea that it was at the top of Gallows Hill or we're going, "no, not really." They did do [00:50:00] diligence, but part of the reason they had to do that is they were gonna get Salem, who owned that piece of land, to actually do something about it and create this. It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful installation.
But if you're gonna get a politician to get on board and do something like that, you know that politician is looking around and goes, "there's not gonna be anybody who says not really." They didn't wanna find that after they've invested all their political power and their, all that stuff, they really wanna make sure that it reflects well on them. And they don't want somebody else to come along and say, "that's just them." That's why that group had to do their due diligence and make sure they'd covered absolutely every possibility. Because a politician was not about to commit to that, if they thought they'd get egg on their face over it.
Josh Hutchinson: And now here I am with an update on the Connecticut Witch trial Exoneration Project.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is a collaborative effort to give voices to those accused of [00:51:00] witchcraft in colonial Connecticut.
Between 1647 and 1697, at least 45 people were accused of witchcraft in the Connecticut and New Haven colonies. 34 people were indicted on formal charges of witchcraft, including 24 women, 6 of their husbands, 3 men charged alone, and 1 unidentified individual. 11 victims are known to have been hanged, 9 women and 2 men. Both men were married to women who were also executed. The accused came from 10 Connecticut towns and 1 Long Island town, which is now part of New York. They came from Fairfield, Farmington, Hartford, New Haven, Saybrook, Stamford, Stratford, Wallingford, Wethersfield, Windsor, and [00:52:00] Easthampton.
The "witches" of the 17th century were not the witches we envision today. They did not wear pointy hats. They did not ride on broomsticks. They did not employ familiars in the forms of animals. They did not covenant with the Devil. In fact, they were not witches at all, by our standards or by the standards of the time.
Those accused of witchcraft were wholly innocent of the charges brought against them. They were ordinary men, women, and children, mostly women of middle age, who were swept up in tides of fear brought on by ordinary human misfortune.
The witchcraft of the early modern period had little in common with the witchcraft of today. It was an entirely malign concept, based on a belief that people could covenant with the devil and gain power to harm others. It was not a peace loving, nature-based form of Paganism. It was entirely malevolent and based [00:53:00] upon the archetype of the anti-woman, the malicious woman whose very soul was set against the virtues of femininity and motherhood commonly expected of women in those times.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project supports the exoneration of those charged with witchcraft in colonial Connecticut, an apology to all accused, memorials to the victims, and education of residents and visitors about the witch trials. The project is a collaboration of people who want to see injustice corrected. It includes dozens of descendants of witch trial victims and other advocates from both in Connecticut and around the nation.
We seek exoneration, because the victims of the witch trials were universally innocent of the impossible crimes with which they were charged. No one covenanted with the Devil. No one manipulated supernatural forces to harm others.
In righting the wrongs of the past, we [00:54:00] recognize our mistakes and enable ourselves to move past them.
Exoneration makes a statement that these actions and actions like them are not acceptable today. Exoneration of Connecticut's witch trial victims will set an example for others on understanding and correcting historic injustices. Exoneration is a stand against the mistreatment of others. Exoneration is a stand against witch hunting in all its forms, including the deadly witchcraft accusations occurring around the world today. Exoneration will resonate in other parts of the world.
The United Nations Human Rights Council will soon assemble in Geneva, Switzerland to discuss the crisis of Harmful Practices Related to Witchcraft Accusations and Ritual Attacks.
In many nations, literal witch hunts continue to plague society with banishments, violence, torture, and death directed at innocent people accused of an [00:55:00] impossible crime. These accusations and extrajudicial punishments are often directed at vulnerable people, notably elderly women, children, the disabled, those with albinism, and indigenous persons.
Each year, thousands of people are targeted. They live in nations around the world on every populated continent. If they are lucky enough to survive, they face an uncertain future. From roaming village to village to being placed in prison or so-called witch camps for their own safety, their lives are never their own.
By exonerating those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut, we send a powerful message that witch-hunting will not be tolerated. By exonerating the accused, we join with other states and nations in confronting the past and righting wrongs. By exonerating the accused, we make a clear statement condemning witch-hunting, which will resonate with leaders in nations affected by witchcraft-accusation-related [00:56:00] violence today.
Let's stand together against witch-hunting. Make that strong statement. Clear the names of those accused of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut and let the world know we oppose witch hunting in the strongest terms. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project strongly urges the General Assembly to pass this exoneration resolution without delay.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for that important news, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome.
And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: You get to join us again next week.
Josh Hutchinson: So subscribe now, and your download will be ready for you when you wake up next Thursday.
Sarah Jack: For lots of great information and episodes, visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, acquaintances, and neighbors about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: the Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Support our [00:57:00] efforts and donate to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:58:00] [00:59:00]

February 2, 2023

How Do We Know What We Know? Salem Witch-Hunt Primary Sources with Margo Burns, Part 1

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Show Notes

Sit back and enjoy the day with Part 1 of our enjoyable Margo Burns Witch Trial talk. In this information-packed episode, she discusses her research and editing of the book Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Discover how we know what we know from the study of historical records. We have some laughs and heartfelt conversation about some of her favorite project discoveries. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

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University of VA, Salem Witch Trials Documents and Transcriptions

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Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Sarah Jack: Welcome to this episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: And I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: Today our guest is Margo Burns, associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch Hunt. She tells us about the project of putting the sources together.
Josh Hutchinson: She does. And you're gonna love this episode so much. She's so entertaining. She's a wonderful storyteller. You're gonna hear stories from her, as well as details about the records, what's in the volume.
Sarah Jack: This was a project that she spent over ten years [00:01:00] in.
Josh Hutchinson: She knows what records still exist and what records we're missing. She knows about the wide variety of records involved and tells us about what can be found in the records.
Sarah Jack: I can't believe we're talking about Margo Burns.
Josh Hutchinson: We're talking about the writer of the Bible for the Salem Witch Trials, the manager who actually physically put it together with her algorithms, and we get to learn about algorithms. We get to learn about her favorite surprise in the records, and that is a really entertaining story. You're gonna really get a kick out of that.
Sarah Jack: Her experiences of going into the archives and evaluating the manuscripts is so fun to hear her talk about that.
Josh Hutchinson: And she'll [00:02:00] tell us all about the massive handwriting analysis project that was associated with identifying who created each of the records.
Sarah Jack: Margo does not hold back on details and experiences from her project years. It was like a firsthand account. There's something special about hearing about the accounts out of the records, about hearing about her accounts, examining the records, because it's Margo Burns, and she was the one right there holding the records, and she does not hold back when she tells us what she read and what she examined.
Josh Hutchinson: She also tells us her Salem Witch trial research origin story and talks about her family connection to the trials.
Sarah Jack: And now enjoy the conversation with Margo Burns, [00:03:00] historian, associate editor, and project manager of Records of the Salem Witch Hunt.
Margo Burns: I have Records of the Salem Witch Hunt, but that came out in 2009, and when it came out, and it's the size of a ream of paper with a hard cover on it, and I confess, I pulled it out of the box. And went, "is that all there is?" It took 12 of us 10 years to produce it, so I had to remind myself it had just been distilled down from all that work we had done, but it still felt small.
Josh Hutchinson: It's not small when you're reading it, though.
Margo Burns: Right? It's condensed. It's just really jam-packed, and, as the project manager, I managed all that stuff that was coming in, so I saw everything. I worked directly with Bernie as we tried to come up with the chronology of how the book was gonna get laid out, how it was gonna get organized. It was a lot of work.
Josh Hutchinson: I imagine. And one thing I picked up on your video in one of your videos that we might [00:04:00] get back to later you said you had four versions of it with, that you made with algorithms and how long did that take to produce them to produce the algorithms and the four versions?
Margo Burns: The algorithms were pretty straightforward, and it was mostly, essentially all the information was in a gigantic database, a relational database. So then I'd have to write something that would say what order things would be in, and I'd set certain variables for everything. So I'd say, okay, let's produce this, and it would make this gigantic net with 970 or whatever many holes in it. And then using features of Microsoft Word, I could take all those individual Word files and then just import them into those holes. So that was easy to just produce a whole version of it. And I printed it out all every one of those times and mailed it to Bernie, so he got to read [00:05:00] through it. I'm really granular and Bernie's very linear, and I think, as a duo, we complimented each other.
Josh Hutchinson: I used do algorithms for work, so that's why I was curious about that.
Margo Burns: Oh, there were all sorts of things, all sorts of weights for things. If you look at a page in there, and you see something that has multiple dates associated with it, the organization chronologically was just, "how do we wanna put these together? If we're gonna do it chronologically, and there are a bunch of things that happen on the same date, and what happens if the second instance from that particular document happens on another date? And how do we organize them according to the names of the people?" There were all these decisions we made all along.
And then those just got kept in the database, and I could write a little thing to say, "okay, let's sort them." And we couldn't really give each one a numeric unique identifier because we were going to put them all in order and they kept changing. So we had [00:06:00] code names for just about every single document based on what archive had them. So the Essex County Court Archives were E C C A, Ecca.
The last iteration of everything, Bernie and I got on Skype, just like a phone call, and it took us two days to go through absolutely every single item in Records to check for all of our dating all the different things that we wanted to do. So on one day, we went from eight in the morning till noon, took an hour for lunch, went one to five, took an hour for dinner, and work six to ten. And the next day, the exact same.
And we went through every single decision that we were making. And if he'd say, "Ooh, I wanna put this in this other place," I'd say, "okay, no, we have to figure out if there's anything else that will be in that kind of category that can get changed." We built ourselves up that we could actually work together that long on Skype.
And it was just [00:07:00] audio. We didn't worry about the video, because we just were talking, and we had the same things on our screens. So that was really, those two days were just, they were a lot of work, but it was just the culmination of everything we had. We finally were organizing the book and that was it.
Josh Hutchinson: I'm so glad you all did that and produced the book that you produced.
Margo Burns: It was really Bernie. Bernie had gotten stung with an incorrect transcription and had written a whole article about it, because apparently there was a date that was wrong, saying that Tituba's grand jury was May whatever in 1692. And he thought, "why would her case be done differently?" And it was a typo, cause hers was done in 1693, the last one in May. And so he'd gotten stung, and he decided that there were enough errors that they should get corrected, and he figured it would be two or three years, and it took us ten.
I keep everything in my head. There are a few of us who know all of those [00:08:00] documents intimately, and also because we were making decisions about them. "What is this document? Who is it about? What's going on?" And so having looked at every single one of those documents that just, it's all inside of me. There are times I forget some things, but I go, "oh yeah, I remember that decision."
For me doing history and doing, especially this subject that has so much popular interest, I always ask, "how do we know what we know?" That's a really important thing for me in this, because there's so many fanciful notions or things that people wanna believe. They wanna believe that the people in Salem were all midwives and there aren't midwives in that group. And they, oh, they had they were nurses and midwives and the men were jealous. It sounds nice, but I always say, "how do we know what we know?" And there's no primary source evidence to that effect.
So that's what history is for me. I was at a, [00:09:00] I'm trying to remember when it was before Records came out, and I was at a a conference, an Omohundro conference, and we were in Quebec City, and it was before the book came out, and Bernie and I were there to talk about how we were working on the book. And Ben Ray and Dick Latner, who's at Tulane, were also on our panel. Bernie and I got up there, and we described what we were doing. I said Thomas Putnam's handwriting was on over 200 of the documents, and the person who was doing comment was John Putnam Demos from Yale, so when he got up, he basically, I felt like I got a little paternalistic pat on the head for telling him something about his ancestor that he didn't know. But then Ben Ray was talking about the geography and the maps, and Dick Latner was talking about the tax rolls, and both of them were challenging what Boyer and Nisenbaum had included in their book and basically saying they got the map wrong. And for the tax rolls, how do you tell [00:10:00] somebody's family's worth is going up or down, if you only use one year? So they basically were taking it apart, and John Demos was very unhappy with them, and he said, "they had a big idea and how dare they criticize Boyer and Nissenbaum."
I'm just new to history, and I'm finding myself going, "if they got the facts wrong, isn't that a big deal?" So I was kind of really into that how do we know what we know, where he was thinking at they made a big change in how history was done. They were looking at the primary sources ,and they were looking at all this stuff, even though they did get some things wrong. For me, it was like, "I'm siding with them."
Josh Hutchinson: We were wondering about that the other day, because Sarah was pointing out in science it's always, "what do we know right now?" Not, "what's the big ideas, and how do we build on those?" It's, "does this change our understanding?"
Margo Burns: And I think John Demos did major things in his heyday, [00:11:00] but it's hard when somebody else comes along and says, "you know what? It's different." But I'm always willing to take more information in, because, as I said, "how do we know what we know?" And I know I probably said I wouldn't talk about this, when it comes to the moldy bread, ergot stuff, that was my operating principle. So many people think it's plausible, means believable, possible, but it's not really possible. And so that's why I made the video that I did that you, you posted, what do we actually know? And I still have people say, "do you believe it?" I said, "it's not about belief it's this is what happened. This is what happened." And nobody has challenged me on any of that, but I think it's a very fun video. I enjoyed making it.
Josh Hutchinson: We enjoyed watching it.
Sarah Jack: You really had me thinking about the science versus the history lens and how, science, we're always looking for the latest discovery, and with history, the latest ideas, and [00:12:00] sometimes discoveries are more challenged, but I guess science that happens, too.
Margo Burns: I think one of the problems comes from the fact that it was a scientist who was doing this, and she was just saying, "are all the pieces there for this to possibly happen?" And if one of them was missing, she would've said, "no." And I can challenge some of those things that she's using as evidence, but she was just saying, "can I rule this out?" And she basically said, "no, we can't rule it out." And then you get the historians, you get the people who really get into this and they go, "ah, she made an argument for this being the case," and she really didn't. So what a scientist will do and what a historian or the public will do with something can be very different.
I really enjoyed talking with her. We emailed back and forth a lot. The interviews I did with her were really eye-opening. So a lot of people who don't approve of the ergot stuff will say, "oh, Linda Caporeal." I had a great time talking to her. And that [00:13:00] she actually said, "I think it's Mary Matossian"
But she gets cited all the time, and then people read it and they feel like, "yes, she's on our side." And it's not about a side, it's about how do we figure out? For me, one is how do we figure out what the causes were? And there are so many of them, but the other part is why does this resonate? And it does.
Josh Hutchinson: I looked at that the latest, the IFL Science article, and I only skimmed it. I didn't read verbatim what they wrote, because it was just a rehashing of this 40-some-year-old argument.
Margo Burns: If you scroll to the bottom of it, I replied. I will sometimes go into the fray, and other times I'll just back right out. But sometimes I poke the bear. I'll poke the bear on the Crucible.
Sarah Jack: It's good to leave those crumbs for the right people who might look at that article.
Margo Burns: It just keeps popping up.
And I'm really glad that the talk has been recorded three times [00:14:00] actually. And if I wanted to do it again in Salem, I know a bunch of people say, "yep, okay, we'll do it." Then when they get into those conversations, they can just go, "okay, I've been here before. Go watch Margo's video."
Josh Hutchinson: Thinking of our questions that we have for you, they're primarily about Records. Could you start with just a bird's eye of what Records is for those people who aren't familiar with it?
Margo Burns: Certainly. Records of the Salem Witch Hunt is a collection of all the primary source records, legal records, primary source legal records of the Salem witchcraft trials. So we won't have Samuel Sewell's diary entries, but it's all the legal records. Most of them are handwritten and they're in 12 different archives. Mostly they're at the Peabody Essex and at the Massachusetts Archive, State Archives.
And we saw just about all of them in person and learned how to read their handwriting. There were over 200 [00:15:00] different handwriting examples throughout all of them. And a lot of documents had multiple people adding to them over a period of days. So we had to start recognizing them so that we could do as accurate transcriptions as possible. And when I say accurate, it isn't just was is this an A or an E?
Couple of things that we corrected were oh, names, dates. Those are really critical when you start doing things in history. You need to get those things correct. Also, there were some words, there was one that historically has been translated as basin, B A S I N and the, like some vision they were offering her this girl a basin. If you think about basin and religion, you start thinking things about baptism. And the thing is that this was, somebody's handwriting, was very kind of crab, wasn't a really polished one. And the more we looked at it, they went, "it's not basin, it's coffin," because you got a B and a K. Which one is it? [00:16:00] You've got an A, so it could be an O and then the middle one if you, it's long. So it could be the long S or an F. And then we ended with the E N. So the first three letters were really challenging and then when we really looked at it, we realized, oh my god, she's being offered a coffin, and you get a completely different sense of what was happening.
When we did these transcriptions, there were a half a dozen linguists, historical linguists from Scandinavia, most of them from Finland. And they have been at the top of their game in historical linguistics, especially with English. They've been doing that for decades and decades. And I had been in a a graduate program at the University of Southern California when we had looked at some of these legal records. And so when I met them on this project, it was like, "oh, I've already read your work before." They're like the top linguists, and they were very precise about getting everything exactly right.
And they really are [00:17:00] good at historical handwriting. And that's just, that's a critical thing when you start reading these because you can make mistakes reading something. And for us, part of our accuracy was to keep track of whose handwriting was on them, because if you've got two or three lines of something, and you find something ambiguous, how do you clarify it?
But if you have a whole page of somebody's handwriting, it's easier to resolve ambiguities. So we started keeping track of handwriting across all these documents. I remember the meeting when Matti Peikola and I looked at each other and said, "is this possible?" And we said, "yes," but it was being done, not necessarily to identify the people, but to increase our accuracy in our transcriptions. So that was part of it. We're really looking at all this handwriting to be able to make those decisions. And by the end, it was just like, we have all this wonderful information. So we decided, we picked about two dozen people whose handwriting appeared a lot, [00:18:00] and we identified them, because one of the things about legal papers is that they keep getting pieces added to them.
So if there's, for instance, on a warrant for somebody's arrest, the magistrates would write it out. It'd be two magistrates. One would write it, usually John Hathorne. And they would give this to the sheriff and say, "tell this person they have to come in, go arrest them and bring them into us." So that's got one date and one person's handwriting, but then at the bottom you find another thing, the return from that officer and in another handwriting saying, "yes, I have apprehended Rebecca Nurse, and I have brought her to you on this day," and it's a different date. So trying to take all these pieces apart and have them be a coherent whole was really a challenge, especially with these smaller things like the officer's return.
Usually there would only be one or two documents with some people's handwriting on it. Another thing that would happen, though, is if we could identify somebody's handwriting, maybe not even them, we could use that as [00:19:00] part of our chronology. When we're trying to figure out when things happened, because that's important, timelines are important. You wanna do history, it's people, it's places, it's dates.
So as we were looking at some of the indictments, we're trying to figure out what day was the grand jury? And if we could find the same handwriting from the foreman of the grand jury on multiple documents that we didn't have any evidence when these other grand jury documents were being done. If we could find the same jury foreman, that gave us a clue as to exactly what the timetable was, because that jury foreman and that jury were hearing specific people's cases.
And that was fantastic when we could figure out that, and we could look at who was in the room. That's really hard to see over history. Some of these documents, you could actually see who was in the room, who was doing the interrogating, who was writing it down. That was really important. And when we look at some of the most important documents, and I'll just say important, because they have so much [00:20:00] content and so much connection for people, the interrogations of the people early on. They're so strong. You hear the voices of people.
One of the other things, too, is when you look at it, you know who wrote it down, because that was Samuel Parris. Now he may not be in the text itself, but he's the guy writing it down. He was in the room. He has an impact on the content of what's in that document, even though you can't see him just reading the text. So these are the kinds of things that we felt were important.
We worked so hard on these things, but the transcriptions themselves, the transcriptions, the number of pairs of eyes that looked at them was phenomenal. Each document was given to a two-person team to do the first rough transcription of, and sometimes they were based on some of the transcriptions that appeared in Boyer and Nissenbaum Salem Witchcraft Papers sometimes, but a [00:21:00] base to go on.
And they would polish it up, and that would be round one, and then it would be round two when those same documents are rearranged. Sometimes trying to put some together that made sense, because the first round we just went after everything scatter. So the second round we organized them a little bit better, and then another two person team would look at the transcription and do a finer job with it.
We thought we'd have two rounds, because we just kept going through and Merja Kytö who is the wrangler of all the, all the linguists over in Finland. She just said, "we have one chance to get it right, so let's do it." And that, that was important.
I'm sure that there's some errors in there. I hope there aren't big ones, but the pairs of eyes that looked at every single thing. So if you look at, two people are looking at the first round, two people are looking at the second round, usually not the same two people. The third round, anybody could have been that. And then also just Bernie and I were working on other [00:22:00] things, so we were looking at these documents again, and it really had to be something radical for us to miss it.
Sarah Jack: I'd love to hear how you jumped on board with this project.
Margo Burns: Oh, good. It's weird. People say, "oh, you have an ancestor." Yes. One of my ancestors is Rebecca nurse, and I think most people when they find I'm interested in this, think that it was because I have an ancestor. I have to say my grandmother who did all the family genealogy, she was interested in the DAR and the Mayflower Society. That's what she was looking for.
And it must have been the early eighties, I knew somebody who was in a performance of The Crucible. He was playing Francis Nurse, and I'd just gotten all this family stuff, and I looked and went, "wait a minute, Francis Nurse, I think that's a real person." And I opened up my grandmother's research, and I'm poking around. I said, "oh, he is." And then it, for the entry on the display, it said, oh, Rebecca Nurse, asterisk. I look at the bottom of the page, asterisk, executed for witchcraft, July [00:23:00] 19th, 1692 in Salem. That was all it was to my grandmother. It was an asterisk. So it was a new thing for me to discover.
Fast forward to the early nineties, and I'd already gotten my master's in linguistics from the University of New Hampshire, and I was pursuing a doctoral degree in linguistics out there. And I was in a seminar on legal language. The professor was very interested in legal language across time, and he had finished all of his research in England and was starting with doing things about legal language in America.
So it was starting, so it was the second half of the 17th century. And so he was handing out at one point just cases for us to look at. And his name's Ed Finnegan, absolutely amazing guy. Here's a murder, here's an infanticide, here's piracy. And said, then I got witchcraft. I got Salem witchcraft trials. And I'm in California, mind you, not here in New England. He said, "I don't know if there's much stuff on this." And I said, "I'll take it. I'll just take that. My great whatever [00:24:00] was executed then." And that's the only real connect that I had toward this path that I went on to join this project. It was just like in the seminar I said, "sure, I'll take that."
Dropped outta my doctoral program and came back to New England. And when I got here I thought, " that was really interesting. Maybe my family would like to have something about that. I should write up." But not one to just go into something lightly, I just read everything I could, everything. And I was reading these things, and I said, " I can't do all of that research. There have to be people out there who have already been interested in their family members."
So this was late 1990s. RootsWeb had LISTSERVs, that tells you exactly how old it is, a LISTSERV. And I made a new one for Salem Witch List, that's all. And I think it, it, at its high point, it had maybe 300 people, and people would put little things out there. Now we have Facebook groups for that. There was [00:25:00] nothing at that time except these LISTSERVs. So I would keep track of who was signing up, and that's when I noticed one day that Bernie Rosenthal had signed up. And I just read his book, and it was like, "oh, this is cool." But, I wrote to him and I said, 'happy to have you here. This is mostly a genealogy thing. I liked your book." And I asked him, " what are you doing now that you've finished this?" And he said he really wanted to correct the errors that he had encountered in the primary sources. That's great.
Fast forward a couple years. I'm finally reading Boyer and Nissenbaum Salem Witchcraft Papers, all of the transcriptions that existed in that three-volume set. And I'm reading along, and at one point, I'm keeping track of things in my head, and I found this document that was testimony against George Burroughs, but it was a month after he'd already been executed. And I'm looking at that and [00:26:00] going, "why would somebody be testifying against him a month after he is already been tried and executed?" So I said, "ah, I wonder if that's one of those errors that Bernie had found." I wrote him an email, and I said, "is this the case? Is this one of the errors that you're gonna be fixing?"
And he wrote back and said, "no. I wrote about that in my book," and I'm thinking, "oh God, now I feel stupid." But it had been a couple of years since I'd read it. And then he said, "there's something else I want to talk to you about, but I feel I don't really like email." He really doesn't, knowing him all these years, he really didn't like email, and would I feel comfortable calling him or him calling me, so he could talk to me about this? And I'm thinking, "what the heck?" So I said, "sure". We got on the phone, and he told me that they'd just gotten this great National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
He and Ben Ray had gotten this together, cuz they both had applied for National Humanities grant. And somebody said, "oh, you guys should get together, cuz you're on the same subject." But they'd gotten it, [00:27:00] and he was about to start into it, and he had a project manager. But his project manager was Joe Flibbert from Salem State, and Joe sadly passed away very suddenly, and he was bereft to lose his friend, but also he was gonna be the project manager. And they'd just gotten this grant, and what do you do? And then out of the blue, I was writing to him about what he was doing and asking a question very specific to what he was doing and why he was doing it. And he decided to invite me to be his project manager. So that took a little bit of doing, because there was grant money and how the grant money was gonna come to me. But before I said yes, I met with him.
And he was at a chess tournament in Vermont, I think it was Stratton Mountain, and he'd driven over from New York. And I drove up there from New Hampshire and met him for the first time. And from the moment he opened a [00:28:00] computer and showed me the digital images of these documents, I was hooked, because I had already had this sense that if you could look at the actual documents, you could identify who was writing them.
And so that sort of carried forward on the whole project, because I thought that was important. Who was writing these things down? Because you put so much more of yourself into these documents than people necessarily know, and just seeing them, it was one of those moments like, I will do anything. I will do anything to be on this project. And so for the first year and a half, I got some of the money, but I didn't do anywhere nearly as much work as I did later on when I was earning nothing.
And Bernie is a fantastic human being. I will have to add that in. He is a professor of English at Binghamton University, head of the English Department. His specialty was Moby Dick and Herman Melville. But he also, more than that, [00:29:00] is really invested in social justice. And that's what caught him to do this, because he was visiting Salem and thinking, "this is really weird. These people were executed wrongly. And yet there's an ice cream stand with a witch on it. There's an image of a witch on the police cars." And so he felt very strongly about that. And so as a literary critic, being somebody interested in texts from English department kind of perspective, he decided to read everything closely.
And that's what his approach to it was. Not a historian, he was a close reader of texts, and my undergraduate degree was in English, so I knew exactly where he was coming from. So even though I didn't major in history or any of that, we had a whole lot in common on how we were approaching the texts.
It was wonderful, because we had Mary Beth Norton being a great supporter. She and Bernie are great friends, and so we had a lot of good historians with us. But I think because our background was in literature and just looking to see [00:30:00] what is in the text without bringing any preconceived notion to it, I think that really benefited everything that we were doing and putting together the book.
It just goes to show you can have all sorts of different people and perspectives and working on the same project, getting them all to integrate and it was a fantastic project to be on. There'll be nothing like that in my lifetime. And it was 10 years. I remember in my household it was just like, "oh, you're working on the book again." Okay. It was all about the book, and it was just like, yep.
One of the things about it is that there are three at the end that were in the Salem Witchcraft Papers by Boyer and Nissenbaum, and we discovered that they had nothing to do with the Salem witchcraft trials. So, we decided we couldn't leave them out, because they were in this other book, and if we left them out, inevitably there was somebody who was going to look very superficially at and compare the two and say, "oh, they forgot these [00:31:00] documents." So we included them with fine transcriptions just to make sure that people didn't think we had missed them. And then we have reasons why we don't think that they were part of the trials.
It was just, it was constant for me. As a matter of fact, we did have more than those entries in our database. We had a lot more things in the database that we had to decide whether they were gonna keep them or not. And I made the case that we needed to include some of the pieces from Deodat Lawson's accounts of the interrogations.
They weren't legal documents, but they were accounts of a legal proceeding. But there were other things that you'll find from Deodat Lawson's text that aren't in the book. And we were making a decision to just deal with the legal aspects of it. So you won't find Parris's sermon, you won't find Deodat Lawson's sermon. You won't find entries by Samuel Sewall in his diary. These were things that we felt were outside of scope of what we were trying to do. We wanted to show how the legal [00:32:00] process worked.
And it's very interesting to me when somebody said, "didn't they do blah, blah?" And I say, "let's go to the documents." And I show people what each little piece means. And it's really interesting, because people still don't quite get how legal proceedings go, and they'll make conclusions about things that really aren't there in the documents.
Here's something. It was not about Salem, but if you watched, Who Do You Think You Are?, there was something this season where one of the celebrities descended from somebody who was accused of witchcraft in Connecticut and in the promos for the show, they zoom in on a document and highlight guilty of the crime of witchcraft, but it turns out that if you thought that she was found guilty and executed and things like that, that's wrong because that's a piece of text from an accusation saying that they thought this woman was guilty of the crime of witchcraft. [00:33:00] She ended up being found not guilty, but you can take text out of context and draw conclusions. So I think that was one of those things for Who Do You Think You Are? where they had a really nice hook, just when you think, ah, she got it and it turns out she was found not guilty.
And Who Do You Think You Are? does great story arcs. And also I give them so much credit. They have the best researchers. They read all the right stuff. They talk to the right people. They ask the right questions. And I've been on the show twice, and I'm really impressed by what they do. And I'm really not impressed by a whole lot of other documentaries.
Watching them work the day before, even the morning before one of the tapings, they said, "if this celebrity asks you a question and it's an unknown, you have to say, 'we don't know,'" because they didn't want anybody making up something. "It could have been this." no. Everything had to be by the primary sources. And yes, there's a story arc for these [00:34:00] things. You get there, but you've been, I've been working with them to figure out what the documents are. They knew what they want the story arc for Scott Foley's ancestor Samuel Wardwell. They knew what the story arc was for Jean Smart and Dorcus Hoar.
And they had come up with a series of primary sources, and I'd worked on them with that. And I had a pile to my left . And I would tell the story based on those primary sources, which was just, that was right up my alley, absolutely right up my alley. And they like to put somebody who really knows what they're talking about to talk to the celebrity, because you don't know what the celebrity's gonna ask, something about their family, you never know. And they needed to make sure they have people who can field those questions and who can also say we don't know confidently. So that was just fabulous, absolutely fabulous.
And, one after another, you show a, a document that's in old handwriting, and they can say, "oh, I can't read that." Immediately we have the transcription to hand out. And I remember watching the one with Melissa Etheridge, she was up [00:35:00] in Quebec, and the records were handwritten in French. So not only could she not read the handwriting, she couldn't even read the French. So they had a translation ready for her. The preparation for that show is just fantastic, and I have nothing but good things to say about how they do it.
And again, it's primary sources. We're gonna tell the story based on the facts. How do we know what we know? When the people go away with something real and concrete, not just some kind of weird story we can tell about their ancestor, we tell them something real.
Sarah Jack: When were the records written?
Margo Burns: The actual handwritten things for the legal process, they were written as the process was going along. So when we get those first accusations in Salem Village, they sat down and started writing these things. The arrest warrants were written as the magistrates were having people arrested. Everything was just written live. So having things [00:36:00] handwritten is just fabulous, because when they did it you know who was there.
And the fact that we have so many, we have so many of the originals is absolutely fantastic. And also it isn't just, "oh, we have the indictments and this record and stuff like that." We actually have records of the bills from the blacksmiths who were making the chains and the handcuffs. That's just an amazing document that we could have that, and I don't know who was responsible for keeping all those together. It may have been that it was organized by Governor Hutchinson. We lost a lot of those documents, probably when his house was ransacked during the Stamp Act Riot, cuz he clearly had access to more documents than have survived.
But the fact that we can have something that small and that, I dunno, I think it's evocative when you can get to that, when it's just, "here's the bill, I made these chains, I fixed this, and here's the bill for it." It takes it to a level that's so much more tangible because [00:37:00] it's easier to think about a chain and an iron handcuff than it is necessarily to understand what an indictment is.
Josh Hutchinson: You mentioned Samuel Parris as one of the writers. Who were some of the others?
Margo Burns: In those first ones, we also have Ezekiel Cheever taking it down. We also have Jonathan Corwin taking things down. But for the interrogations that took place in Salem Village, he was the one who was taking them down. After that, you start getting an assortment of people who would record them.
If you get into the Andover ones, they all sound alike. They all sound alike. They're nothing like the ones that were taken down in Salem Village because Samuel Parris was trying to take things down word for word. The Nurse family kind of challenged him on that later on, but he could do shorthand, and he took these things verbatim as well as he could and then reconstituted it into regular English. So you actually get to hear the [00:38:00] voices of the people professing their innocence. And those are just, those are what get to people and why I think the Salem trials are so evocative and why people get so passionate about them. They see somebody saying, "I am innocent." And we know, we hear that. We read it, and we know that they're gonna die.
When we get to the Andover cases. You, if you read the, what they've done for those, it starts off with, "she was propounded several questions and gave a negative answer." So, sort of like, "are you a Witch?" "No." "And then she confessed to having a thing with the Devil." So it sounds like the whole beginning part when they were saying, making their accusations and they're doing their professions of their innocence, all those things don't matter. So they weren't taken down, and like, "several questions asked, negative answers given, and then she confessed." And that was the important part to the court. So [00:39:00] whoever was doing those, that's the part they were taking down, whereas Samuel Parris was just trying to take down everything.
And if you look at the records of the interrogations in Andover, they all start sounding the same. They're all the same. There may be a little variation in there, but if you look at them compared to the accounts of the interrogations that were done by Samuel Parris in Salem Village, those are all different. Those are really amazing documents, an attempt to capture what people actually said. Whereas in Andover, they were just putting down the stuff that they could use to convict somebody because a confession was basically the gold standard. It is today. A confession is a gold standard, and it's really hard to not convict somebody, if at some point they confess to it.
There's a lot of research that's been done about the roles of false confessions, but clearly the court wanted those confessions cuz then they could convict people more easily. Saul Kassin [00:40:00] at Williams has done a lot of work on false confessions. He just produced a book called Duped, and I was reading some of it, and he said that even in the Salem witchcraft trials, nobody that confessed falsely was executed. So I wrote to him. I said, "oh, I heard you on Hidden Brain the other day, and your book is great, but I gotta tell you, "yes, one of the people who confessed was executed. It was Samuel Wardwell." And he wrote back, said, "that's great to know. I wish I'd known this before." And so he was very gracious about it.
But that's one of the myths that the people who confessed weren't executed, weren't tried. And anytime I bring up Samuel Wardwell, they go, "he recanted his." It doesn't matter if he recanted, because once somebody confesses, that just sticks to you. And he was indicted on that charge, and he was convicted and executed. Those are the kind of details I like.
Sarah Jack: You mentioned the bill of sale from the blacksmith. What other type of records still [00:41:00] exist?
Margo Burns: There are accounts by the jailers saying what the charges were. There's one from John Arnold, one of the jailers. He was in Boston, and it's really interesting because, in addition to the names of the people, he says when they came into his jail and when they left, and then he's charging for their diet, what it costs to feed them. And as a result, we can actually find the individual stories of people. If you're tracing an ancestor or you really wanna know about a particular person, with those documents you can find when they went into jail and when they came out. And you also get who is in the same jail at the same time. Having those different timelines going together. Those documents are really helpful. Who is in the jail at the same time? So those are fabulous.
Josh Hutchinson: Going into this you said earlier that you had already read the Salem Witchcraft Papers. Were you at all surprised by any of the records that you found?
Margo Burns: [00:42:00] Actually, this one that I laughed so hard, I fell off the couch.
Okay. It comes from one of the words in it that I didn't know, and I looked it up, and I fell apart. It's in the case of Elizabeth Howe, and the Cummings family, especially Mary, the wife, really didn't like her. Elizabeth Howe wanted to join the church to become a covenanted member in it, and Mary was just dead set against it. She would invoke something that had happened years before to one of her Perley relatives. There's a family named Perley where somebody accused Elizabeth Howe, and she just never forgot it, even though the accusation went nowhere.
Fast forward. I don't know exactly when it was, but Elizabeth Howe's husband went blind. Before he went blind, so let's say six or seven years before Salem, he went to the neighbors', the Cummings', house and said he wanted to borrow a horse. And neither Mary or her husband, Isaac, he was the deacon, and neither of them were [00:43:00] home, but Isaac Junior was there. And here's this neighbor coming and asking, "can I borrow a horse?"
And as teenagers can be, he said, "we don't have a horse." And you've got Howe saying, "I'm hearing some whinnying in your barn. What do you mean you don't have a horse?" And wise guy that the guy was, he said, "we have a mare. You asked if we had a horse. We have a mare." So he says, "can I borrow your mare?" And the teenager goes, "it's Thursday. Mom and Dad usually take the mare to go visit a relative on Fridays. I'm gonna say, 'no.'" Okay. He goes away.
So on Saturday morning, Mom and Dad have taken the mare on this trip, and Saturday morning they wake up, and the animal is in their yard, not in the pasture, not in the barn, and apparently had very sore gums. It was described as if ridden with a hot bridle. Okay. And they really were trying to figure out what was going on. And it was [00:44:00] Saturday morning, and the deacon had to do something elsewhere. And Mary asked her brother to come over and take a look at the animal, cause apparently he was pretty good with animals.
So he came over, and he's looking and Isaac Sr. said, "I got stuff to do. I leave this with you." And Isaac came back later that night, and his brother-in-law was still there and said, "I've tried everything. I looked to see if maybe it was from bot flies." You know what a bot is? It basically is this, is a little worm, will burrow into the gums and flesh of animals, especially horses and maybe sheep. And it's really gross. And so he said, "I looked to see if the inflamed gums had any evidence of bot flies. And he didn't."
And but then he tells Isaac that, "there's only one thing I can think of. You might not like it." And Isaac said, "what?" He said, "okay, go get a pipe with some tobacco." At this point, Isaac is going, [00:45:00] "I don't know."
Now I have to tell you that this story comes from four accounts. Everything in here is from these sources, one from Isaac Sr., one from Isaac Jr., one from Mary, and one from her brother. He asks him to go and get some tobacco and a pipe. And this point the deacon is going, "I don't like where this is going." And his brother-in-law said, "oh no. This is legal for man or beast." And Isaac is going, "I don't know."
So they bring out the pipe, light the pipe. And then in the records it says, "and they put it under the fundament of the horse." And I'm going, "what the heck's a fundament?" It's the area underneath the tail, for lack of a better word. And they put this lit pipe underneath the tail, in front of the fundament of the horse.
And blue flames shot out of the back of this poor animal and singed the fur. I was just like, "okay." And apparently they did it two or three times. I can't quite tell from the descriptions, but they did it at least twice. [00:46:00] And then Isaac said, "you know what?" It was catching the hay on fire. They were doing it inside. They were doing it inside, and it was catching the hay on fire. Finally, Isaac said, cut" it out. No, no more. I need the barn more than I need this animal. That's enough."
Okay, next morning is Sunday morning, and people are all on their way to the meeting house. And one of the neighbors is passing by and hears this story about this poor animal that was still sick, and he goes in to look at the mare, and they're talking about it, and the neighbor said, " maybe it's bewitched." Therein always lies the tale. He said, "but we can figure it out, if we cut off a piece of the ear and burn it."
Now, this was sympathetic magic that if a witch had somehow bewitched somebody, there would be this invisible effluvia. If you listen to Thomas Brattle's account of it, this invisible effluvia would emanate from their eyes and go into the person or the animal. And if you could [00:47:00] somehow get some of that effluvia, and you could hurt it, you could hurt the witch.
So when we think about the witch cake in Salem, it had the girls' urine. Clearly some of this effluvia could have been in the urine. You also sometimes hear about witch bottles that have hair. It's easier on people to take urine and hair or fingernails, but with animals, they would say, oh, let's cut off the ear. And the idea is if you could hurt it. In this case for the witch cake, the dog biting it, or in this case with an ear, you could set fire to it. It would hurt the witch, and the witch was supposed to come and try and stop this, because they were in pain. That's how it was supposed to work.
So this neighbor is talking to Deacon Cummings about doing this with the ear of the mare, and the deacon, being a deacon, and saying, " it's Sunday, and I don't know about this. This is a little iffy, but if you wanna come back tomorrow, you know you can try it." Right then, the poor animal has been very sick and falls over, [00:48:00] almost on top of them. If they hadn't gotten out the door, this animal would've crushed them. Big horse. Oh, excuse me, mare. And the animal was dead.
Okay, so I'm going okay, "this is interesting." I am still laughing about the fundament stuff, but then I started wondering why was this tale so important that four people, four people would tell the story? And why was this being used as evidence against Elizabeth Howe? Her husband is the only one who appears in it. Why was this being used about against her? And I kept reading 'em and reading 'em, and suddenly I found something in Mary's account. Apparently, when they got to church that day, when they got to the meeting house, word had gotten around and Elizabeth Howe had said something, a really smart remark. She said, "well, of course this happened when you feed an animal brimstone and other combustible things." And I'm thinking, "why would she even say that? Why?" It turns out that to make laxatives, they [00:49:00] were using things like that, oil and brimstone, sulfur, things like that to try and get the stuff going through the animal. It turns out horses can't vomit. That's what colic is. Everything has to go in one direction. So they would try and give the animal a laxative, and it comes out the other end. It's flammable. So she was making this smart remark that of course this happened. What happens when you feed your animal combustibles?
And I think that smart remark and Mary Cummings' existing animosity against Elizabeth Howe combined, so that story of the men in her family being idiots turned into this woman is responsible for what happened. But that particular one about Elizabeth Howe, that sticks with me, Three Stooges meet Joan of Arc, so that's the story that just always gets me.
Josh Hutchinson: That caught my eye, because the Cummings are ancestors of mine and Elizabeth Jackson Howe is [00:50:00] an aunt by marriage. I always thought it was just a really gassy horse and or mare.
Margo Burns: The other part is that in this, the accusations that she had afflicted one of the Perley daughters earlier, it's interesting, because they'd brought in two ministers, Phillips and Payson. And they came over from Rowley to investigate, and they concluded that it was the younger brother egging her on to say, "ooh, Goody Howe is afflicting me."
So they actually got Phillips and Payson to testify on Elizabeth Howe's behalf to say, "no, this really didn't happen. We were there, we made this decision." So to get two really good ministers to show up and testify on her behalf and then that was ignored, that was pretty amazing. And to make it worse, this is something people don't know, Reverend Phillips was at Harvard the same time as William Stoughton, and Reverend Payson was also from Dorchester, where Stoughton [00:51:00] grew up and lived. So they were known people to him. And then they still just ignored it, so that there's a little complication in there.
Josh Hutchinson: For more tales from Margo Burns, tune in to the exciting conclusion next week. Now we go to our own Sarah Jack for another edition of End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: Here is Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Legislation News. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is an organized effort of diverse collaborators working for a state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut Colony. Many advocates have come together, along with State Representative Jane Garibay and Senator Saud Anwar to support proposed exoneration legislation. The 2023 winter session of the Connecticut General Assembly includes the bill [00:52:00] proposals of two exoneration resolutions for innocents accused and tried for witchcraft crimes during the years of 1647 to 1697. Senate Joint Resolution proposed by Senator Saud Anwar, SJ Number 5, "Exonerating the Women and Men Convicted for Witchcraft in Colonial Connecticut" and House Joint Resolution in the General Assembly, proposed by representative Jane Gariaby, HJ Number 21, "Resolution Recognizing the Unfair Treatment of Individuals Accused of Witchcraft During the 17th Century." These proposals could bring a public hearing shortly.
This resolution will be an example to others working to recognize and address historic wrongs. Connecticut is taking a stand against injustice. Connecticut is taking a stand against misogyny. Connecticut is also taking a stand against witch-hunting, which will resonate in parts of the world where witchcraft accusations continue to lead to violence today. By acknowledging the mistakes of the past, we educate the public that similar [00:53:00] actions are not acceptable today. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project strongly urges the General assembly to pass this legislation without delay.
Our project is offering several ways for you to plug in and participate or learn about the exoneration and history. Please download our robust lineup of episodes featuring Witch Trial Descendants, education about hanged witch Alice Young and other victims, and Connecticut Colony's Governor John Winthrop, Jr.'s positive influence against convicting witches. You can go to our project website for an informative and easy to understand fact sheet of the Connecticut Colony witch trial victims, places, and dates.
You can follow along by joining our Discord community or Facebook groups. Please keep your eye on the social media accounts of state Representative Garibay and Senator Anwar for live events and local opportunities to learn more about what's happening and show support for the bills. Links to all these informative opportunities are listed in the episode description.
Use your social power to help Alice Young, America's first executed witch, finally be [00:54:00] acknowledged. Support the descendants by acknowledging and sharing their ancestor's stories. Remember the victims in modern day facing the same unfair and dangerous situations. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our project on social media @CTwitchhunt and visit our website at ConnecticutWitchTrials.org.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is a project of End Witch Hunts Movement. End Witch Hunts is a nonprofit organization founded to educate about witch trial history and advocate for alleged witches. Please support us with your donations or purchases of educational witch trial books and merchandise. Shop our merch at zazzle.com/store/EndWitchHunts or zazzle.com/store/thoushaltnotsuffer, and shop our books at bookshop.org/EndWitchHunts.
We want you as a super listener. You can support Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast production by super [00:55:00] listening with your monthly monetary support. See episode description for links to these support opportunities. We thank you for standing with us and helping us create a world that is safe from witchcraft accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you Sarah for enlightening us.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe to Thou Shalt Not Suffer wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends and family and boss and coworkers about how wonderful Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast is and how groovy it is to listen.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more about our organization.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:56:00]

January 26, 2023

Introducing The Last Night, a Connecticut Witch Trials Play

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Show Notes

We present an interview with writers and actors Debra Walsh and Virginia Wolf about their newly commissioned play The Last Night, which tells the compelling story of the witch panics and trials of 17th-century Connecticut Colony through the portrayal of accused women Mary Barnes and Rebecca Greensmith. We also speak with event host, Andy Verzosa, Executive Director of Farmington Connecticut’s Historic Landmark & Museum, The Stanley Whitman House. Performance is Saturday January 21, 2023, 7:00 PM.
Links:
Tickets for the Last Night staged reading and registration for the video premiere
Mary Barnes Society
Stanley Whitman House
Our theme song is “Epic Inspiration” by Jamendo
thoushaltnotsuffer.com
Twitter @thoupodcast
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Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to a free bonus episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. We'll speak with Virginia Wolf, Debra Walsh and Andy Verzosa about the upcoming play The Last Night. The Last Night was written by and stars Debra Walsh and Virginia Wolf. Debra portrays Rebecca Greensmith and Virginia portrays Mary Barnes, two women executed for witchcraft on January 25th, 1663, at the end of the Hartford Witch Panic. Andy Verzosa is executive director of Stanley-Whitman House a living [00:01:00] history center and museum of colonial life in Connecticut.
A stage reading will be performed at Stanley-Whitman House in Farmington, Connecticut on Saturday, January 21st. 2023 at 7:00 PM. Doors open at six 30. Tickets can be purchased at s-wh.org/Mary-Barnes-Day. The link is in the show description. A free online video showing will be presented on Wednesday, January 25th at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. Information and registration is also available at s-wh.org/Mary-Barnes-Day. And now here are Virginia Wolf, Debra Walsh, and Andy Verzosa.
Virginia Wolf: I'm Virginia Wolf, and I have been working with the Stanley-Whitman House, who's hosting this event, for [00:02:00] years, and actually it was a Stanley-Whitman House that initially introduced me to the history of witchcraft here in Connecticut. I was born in Salem, Massachusetts, so I knew all about that. I had no idea till I came here. And long ago I portrayed Mary Barnes, who I'm portraying for this project, for the Stanley-Whitman House in a play, and that peaked my interest to start looking at all the other stories of the women, and men, but mostly women, who are accused of witchcraft and working with Andy and again Debra, who found her way a differentway, but we've been able to collaborate writing and now performing this short but incredibly compelling play.
Debra Walsh: I'm Debra Walsh. So a few years ago I did an event called the West Hartford Hauntings through the Noah Webster House. It was going through a graveyard, and the main character was Ann Cole. And one night when we were leaving, Rebecca Greensmith's trial was mentioned in this tour. So my friend said, "these people are [00:03:00] real. They really existed." And so that I was, "wow, there's this whole history in my neighborhood and Connecticut history of people who were hanged and executed for witchcraft and were innocent."
When that was over in October, I started to look, research, Rebecca Greensmith, and I got really inspired, and the first person I got in touch with was Ginny. I knew that she'd been doing this work for a while and had seen some of her work online, and I got a grant and did a reading. I wrote a play, we did a reading of The Hanging of Rebecca Greensmith, and I just wanted to keep going. So we met with Andy, and I said, "what about The Last Night? Cause they were in prison together. What did these two women talk about? What was that night like?"
You don't know what you don't know until you [00:04:00] start figuring out what you need to know for this. I think the stories need to be told. I think, especially considering how women have usually ignored historically. And I know there were two men accused, but one of them, Rebecca just gave up, because she, we believe, Ginny and I believe, Rebecca didn't want her daughters at the mercy of him.
So it's getting exciting now.
Virginia Wolf: Many people don't know that Connecticut has a history of witchcraft, witch panics in the 17th century and, in fact, the first person to be hanged for witchcraft, I know you all know, was Alice Young.
And Arthur Miller, God bless him, has made the Salem witchcraft panics the standard by which everything is considered, and people don't even realize that the history, and it's not necessarily a history to be proud of, but it is something that it happened. It was an outcome of the religious beliefs at the time, the patriarchal society of the time, and in [00:05:00] Connecticut, 1663, January 25th was the last, that was the last execution. Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith and Mary Barnes. And remembering that, and this is 30 years before the Salem Witch Trials ever happened, and how Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith were executed, along with Mary Barnes, on January 25th, 1663, 360 years ago. And acknowledging that date is so important so that people are aware that this did happen and that we have, there's a lot of really cool efforts going on in Connecticut in various pockets to reveal this part of history, but the culmination of these panics and the executions. It is a celebration they ended here 30 years before Salem had their famous panic.
Debra Walsh: I think it's, um, significant from an educational point of view, like Covid and learning through Zoom. How do museums get people in to their buildings? [00:06:00] What are the stories we can tell that happened right outside the door of the museum? How do we appeal to younger people? And I think theater can do that by having the education or the story is done theatrically and thoughtfully.
And it, I think it, for me, relates to any time someone is considered the Other. You know, when I think of the immigration crisis, and so maybe it will get us thinking about how do we treat the Other, what do we think about, oh, especially innocent people executed for for these crimes. A hanging, like where is our humanity? And those questions are very important to me as an educator, as a theater educator, and also to stretch out the bonds of theater. What else can theater artists be doing? And like I'm obsessed with Rebecca, you know, her courage and her [00:07:00] loving to make stout and her dancing.
Virginia Wolf: It's been a really wonderful thing to be writing this, because there aren't a lot of records of what happened at the time. There are more records based on Rebecca Greensmith in her trial and what she said. There's really virtually nothing on Mary Barnes. So we work from primary sources to write this, to make as factual as we can but then weaving in informed conjecture, what could have happened, since we don't know what happened. And then the dramatic arc, which we've done the writing, but Andy and our director have really helped with that, so that the story is alive and it's vibrant, but it is based on history, and we are not saying anything false, but we are taking the facts and elaborating them to make them an interesting story.
Debra Walsh: It's really a pleasure for me to be working with a former student of mine. He was my student when he was in high school, who his name is Brian [00:08:00] Swormstedt. He's a writer, filmmaker, a good director, and you need a director. You need this outside ear to help us, because like I got, when you're obsessed with someone, I want everyone to know every little detail that I know, and it's not important to this story. Plus, when you work with such a talented actress as Ginny Wolf, the give and take and going back and forth. I'm an actress. I love it.
Virginia Wolf: Yes. We're, uh, having fun. And it's now that Brian and Andy have both added so much to the script, and I think I put this in an email to them, Debra and I working on this script and knowing these women, have tunnel vision and having an objective vision, which Andy and Brian both, there's too many words in it. It was like, you know what? You're absolutely right. We love every word we put here, but it, so many of 'em are unnecessary. And it's now we're at the point where it's locked in until we decide to make another change. But and we can really focus on our character development [00:09:00] and our relationships.
Debra Walsh: I hounded Andy until he met with me. He came to see The Hanging of Rebecca and said, "maybe we should work together." And yeah, I just kept pounding him because I then learned of the Mary Barnes Society through the Whitman house. And another former student of mine, who's also working on this production said, " why doesn't Connecticut have the attraction like Salem does?" "Why," and I thought, "why can't the Whitman House be the place to go, to learn about the trials, the history, the Puritans?" So I just, I kept hounding him until we met.
Virginia Wolf: I know that the the future of the Whitman house is for another story, but as far as the collaboration, so since Mary Barnes has lived in my soul for 15 years, Debra and I, and we've known each other, but we've never worked together, all of a sudden are writing a script together and have a Google document that we are [00:10:00] writing and editing and sharing ideas and it might not have worked, and it has worked beautifully. I really feel fortunate that I got to work with her, and the writing was the first step, and now the acting is the next step, the really fun step. So it's been a beautiful collaboration.
Andy Verzosa: So it's been exciting. Museums are a place where people can gather and history can be interpreted and presented. And what's exciting about Ginny and Debra is that they are presenting their interpretation of Rebecca Greensmith and Mary Barnes and what their last night would be. So there's so many different ways that you can go about this, and through their informed conjecture, through really it's a a great opportunity to interpret what that might be through our eyes in a contemporary sense with what we know. And then really tackle it and work through it.
So it's been a great opportunity for me, as the director of the museum, to invite two artists to work together. Commissioning a play is a new thing for Stanley-Whitman House. We do living history, but [00:11:00] we've not gone the artistic route and commissioned a play. And then to be able to work with two people who have really owned this internally as actors is really exciting. So they're playwrights, actors. They're doing this project. There's, like I said, a host of ways that you could approach this, and it's exciting to watch it unfold. It's still very much a cake in the oven. It has not been baked and set out on the counter to cool and to be finished off.
Anxious to see what happens on the 21st, of course, because that's where the magic happens. You present the art to an audience, and hopefully it, you have a vessel, in that room, in the Whitman Tavern at Stanley-Whitman House. Something happens and switches on ,and people leave an experience, and it should be transformative.
So I think museums are important for that to happen and to do these types of things. And I do a lot of differentthings where we try to make history come alive and engage people. [00:12:00] And again, I can't say how lucky I feel to work with Ginny and Debra to be able to do this.
So exciting for me to know that there are all these different things that are running right now, cuz this is a, I think, a seminal time, in a way, for reckoning on many different levels for many different things. And I think that's important, and we come to these processes, and we go through them, and then we come together as community. And again, I think museums are a great place for that to happen.
Virginia Wolf: I was first introduced to this 15 years ago, probably, at the Stanley-Whitman House, where Lisa Johnson, the director at the time, was working with the humanities association and Walt Woodward, the state historian, to compile at least a resource book where all of the different information is. The Wyllys papers are at the historic society. Different museums and libraries have pieces. There are books that have been written.
From there, I knew where to go to try to get the information. Once we'd embarked on this, there was about [00:13:00] four months where my dining room table was just covered with all of the books, all of the things I, because I had written a one woman show about the entire witchcraft panic. So I had all the different resource for all the different stories and all of that.
So it is available, but not so much for Mary Barnes. Mary Barnes, there really wasn't, we know she existed. We know she was hanged. There's not much about her trial. We don't know why she was accused. We don't know a lot about her, which is frustrating, freeing as well.
Rebecca Greensmith, she's a huge personality back then, because we do have from those records that one of the magistrates called her a lewd and ignorant woman and aged, although we think she was about, what, 40?
Debra Walsh: It was her former reverend who said that before she came to the colonies.
Virginia Wolf: There are some verbatim records that were taken straight from the trials. And there's a lot of guesswork that goes on, and you have to be very careful as you're reading these books and you're speaking to people that what they're putting forward [00:14:00] as fact actually is fact. And I, for my own family, we have descendants from some of these people who were hanged, and there's family legend that actually is not at all what really happened, but this is what's come down through the years in their family. It was always a struggle to, and it still is to make sure this is not a history lesson based on fact, it's engaging, and it's exciting, but that it does not mislead anyone as to what really happened. Luckily, there were enough records for us to be able to write it, but then leeway for us to, with our informed conjecture, to really make the story compelling.
Andy Verzosa: If I might, at Stanley Women House, we do a lot of living history, and so we're looking at a lot of different people in history and trying to tell their story in a engaging way. For example, we have a Connecticut Open House Day, or a Connecticut Historic Gardens Day, and we might portray people who've lived in the house and who they were and what they did. And we need to do this in a, [00:15:00] not in a wooden way, not in a boring, didactic way. So we really work hard at trying to bring those characters alive.
And oftentimes, even when we've done our books, like we've looked at different people who are buried in our cemetery, and published a book this past year. And Memento Mori Cemetery, and what we've done is oftentimes there's not information about a person directly. We've had to look around that person, the relationships they've had, the places where they lived, the time that they were living, et cetera. Without getting too deep into that it's a word called prosopography. So we're looking all around so that we can get a sense of the whole, so that we can, can inform a lot about that person. So there, there's some conjecture there, right? But it's based on reasonableness and some facts.
And so this is of what I think that Ginny and Debra have certainly done with the Witch panics and trials. There's been a lot of people who've written books. I've done [00:16:00] work. Recently, I've been on a tear reading John Demos, um, a Yale professor, and looking at what he's done, and he really looks at the family in colonial times. So sometimes, as well as the witchcraft panics In Colonial America. So there are a number of ways to do it. It's a whole field of study, so you could just, it's ongoing, right? And that's what I love about my job is that, we try to get people engaged at any level. Certainly Debra and Ginny are coming at it at a much deeper level and as actors and portray portraying these particular characters.
History is important, but there's also that element of humanity that's important. So if think about the humanities and the studies of the humanities and the liberal arts, you're really coming at it very objectively, as much as you can.
Debra Walsh: Thank you for that. I was able to spend time with Beth Caruso and another person who wrote about the history, Richard Ross, and I met someone once, this is an [00:17:00] anecdote. This couple that lives out in Texas had done a lot of, they went to every place where they think somebody might have been hanged around the country and where their bodies were dumped. And anyway, long story short, I heard from someone who said that Rebecca was hanged one mile north of where the Old State House is now. Her back was facing the mansions, and there were mansions, and I thought that was really interesting. So I'm driving, and I get a call from Beth Caruso, who wrote One of Windsor, and she she did the same thing. It's based on Alice Young and using informed conjecture, but she said, "oh my God, they just released this in this journal." A historian found a photographer, who found some ancient papers, and there was a gallow, and it was the exact same words of this woman, one mile directly north of where the Old State House [00:18:00] in Hartford is now, and their backs would've been to the mansions that were there. So I went there. It's now a playground at the Y on Albany Avenue.
So that interested me and other people's takes, like people that I was able to meet and interview. So a lot of the historic, two of them, Richard and Beth said was interesting. It's interesting to see these people brought to life as human beings, like a body telling the story instead of this historical document.
Virginia Wolf: It is important. So many stories, and I think I, I came into this as an actress really, and saying, when I learned about this, there are so many stories. These stories need to be told. And it's really satisfying to be doing it. And I find that I'll take my one woman show to, in which I portray five of the women hanged, and to museums and historical societies and schools where people don't have a clue that this ever happened. [00:19:00] And oh my gosh, what a wonderful feeling to to bring this knowledge out to, to bring out the awareness.
It's terrific.
Debra Walsh: I sat in the audience of Ginny's last show, and the people were just, " this really happened?" Some people who are direct descendants have one, a couple people who were in that audience as well and wanted more information, but just watching the audience taking this in, something that you're not aware of in your state, in your city, in your neighborhood.
Andy Verzosa: I was familiar with the Salem Witch trials, of course, but not about what was happening in Connecticut. And when I started at Stanley-Whitman House, I was aware that there's some activity and that my predecessor, Lisa Johnson, had done a lot of work, but I really hadn't seen anything.
I hadn't seen the play ,or we have a video of the play, and really didn't know until [00:20:00] I got a phone call, early on,, I'd probably been in the job like three months, from Bridgeport, and they were doing a dedication memorial for goodie nap and they said, geez, we know that your predecessor's no longer the director, but could you, as the director of Stanley-Whitman House, come down and offer some words? I obviously reached out to my predecessor, and we connected on that, and I did go down and offered words, not knowing a lot, but being thrown into it. And this is back in, I think 2018 and what I felt when I was there, because it was quite a quite a celebration and a an event, and there were descendants that were there. There were different dignitaries, and of course I met Beth Caruso there and others, and the people who organized it. And I just realized like how important it was, and that gave me a whole new perspective on what I might be able to do through the [00:21:00] museum.
Fast forward to 2023, here we are. And I'm more comfortable in this role now working with Ginny and with Debra, of course. And I'm excited for the play to happen. I'm anxious. I can't wait for it to happen. And I feel like it's really good for the museum to be doing this kind of work going forward and to continue.
We're really looking forward to people doing the online program. We can have hundreds of people on that, where we can only have 40 people at the museum for the live staged reading.
Virginia Wolf: And we'll do a live talk back after each. So Debra and I will be at the museum after the movie, for lack of a better word, and then people will be able to come on, and we'll do a talk back as well, which will be very interesting.
The stage reading will be at the Stanley-Whitman House on Saturday, January 21st. Starts at 7:00, doors open at 6:30, and you can access tickets on the Stanley-Whitman House website. It's limited, very limited seating. It's a small space for the reading, so if you are [00:22:00] interested in attending, and we'll have a live talk back afterwards or the reception. But we are very excited, this is gonna be totally new for me, that we are also filming it and I think the way it's working because of Bryan and Patrick being so well they know how to do this.
The film, I think is gonna be different from the reading, but that will be presented on the anniversary of the hangings on Wednesday, the 25th of January via Zoom. People can sign on for the webinar register, and then I think it'll be up on a YouTube channel for the Stanley-Whitman house in perpetuity.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. Tickets for The Last Night can be purchased at S-WH.org/mary-barnes-day. The link is in the show description.
Have a great today. And a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:23:00] [00:24:00]

January 16, 2023

The Andover Witch Hunt with Richard Hite

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Show Notes

We have the honor of discussing the book In the Shadow of Salem with author and archivist Richard Hite. This episode focuses our witch trial investigation on a distinct element of the Salem Witch-Hunt community story. We check out the neighboring town of Andover to discover what is eyebrow raising about its accusers and accused persons. Hear about large family involvements, shocking confessions and colorful accusations full of spectral claims. We connect past witch trials to today’s witchcraft fear with a discussion answering our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: Today we speak with author and archivist Richard Hite, who's written In the Shadow of Salem: the Andover Witch Hunt of 1692.
Sarah Jack: In the Shadow of Salem takes a focused look at one community that had the most accusations.
Josh Hutchinson: More accusations than Salem and Salem Village combined. And [00:01:00] a ton of confessions.
Sarah Jack: Confessions and wild accusations, full of spectral evidence.
Josh Hutchinson: The confessions featured satanic baptisms, the queen in hell, and one woman said there were 305 witches in the country, so they were looking for them everywhere. Andover wasn't a big town. But they discovered and accused at least 45 people of witchcraft. Most of the accused there confessed to witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: One of the reasons that I think descendants have really gravitated towards this book and they talk about it on social media is because so many names are talked about and placed into the story, and you see where these different [00:02:00] families fit in to what was happening. Richard does a really great job of talking about the area, the territory, where they were living.
Josh Hutchinson: In spite of the scale of the Andover phase of the Salem Witch Hunt, there hasn't been a lot written about it until Richard Hite came along and wrote In the Shadow of Salem, and it really, for the first time, shines the spotlight on this particular village in Essex County, Massachusetts.
He looks at the conclusions other historians have drawn or come to about the Andover phase and evaluates those critically and makes his own determinations based on his research. [00:03:00] And it's very enlightening and enriching and there's so many interesting things about Andover that it's really deserves its own limelight deserves its own book or even. , more can be written about it because there's just so much there and we get to learn quite a lot from our conversation.
Sarah Jack: I was surprised at how many people in these families were involved that, when you're looking at some of the other history of the Salem Witch, yes, Rebecca Nurse and her sisters are in the story. But when you're looking at the Andover phase, you've got mothers and daughters and grandchildren and sons and cousins, and [00:04:00] they're all saying something or accusing or confessing, and it's just there's a lot of voices saying a lot of things.
And if you've read the book, you're just gonna really enjoy the conversation and details that Richard shares with us when we're asking questions than discussing what we read. If you haven't read the book, you're gonna order it right away, cuz you're gonna wanna read what he has to say about these stories that we talk about in the episode.
Josh Hutchinson: We're gonna learn about the Ingalls family and how many of them were accused. Like Sarah said, it wasn't just the immediate family, it was like every branch. There were in-laws that got caught up in it. There were children, grandchildren, so many people involved from the Ingalls family. The [00:05:00] Tyler family was another of the big ones involved. We're gonna learn about those from our conversation with Richard Hite.
Sarah Jack: One of the other things that really jumped out to me is how long it involves some of the conflicts that were between families or neighbors or community members. Anthills became molehills in a lot of situations over the years. When you look at the interactions the Andover community members had with each other, there was years of disagreements or not seeing eye to eye, and it affected how the accusations played out later.
Josh Hutchinson: We're also going to take a look at the proposed conflict between supporters of Minister Francis Dane and supporters of Thomas [00:06:00] Barnard and discuss whether there was a North-South clash in Andover at the time.
We're gonna talk about Francis Dane's granddaughter Elizabeth Johnson Jr., who was just exonerated this past summer by the state of Massachusetts. We'll learn how middle school classes got involved in exonerating Elizabeth Johnson Jr. and really helped push it through. So we'll discuss what middle school was involved, who their teacher was, how Richard was put in contact with that teacher, and how it all unfolded.
We're also going to learn about how Andover got caught up in this whirlwind of accusations, how afflicted girls from Salem Village were invited to Andover, what they did there, and how that really got [00:07:00] the ball rolling on accusation after accusation.
Sarah Jack: All of that information enables you to visualize how much like us they were and sense the whole struggle they were in and just the fear and it's very it just brings it that history to life when you're reading that.
Josh Hutchinson: The book and learning about the different people helps you to realize that they're basically us and we're them, and we have the same fears and desires and everything.
Sarah Jack: And then it also, that dimensional piece that I'm thinking of, it helps you understand some of the Salem Village narrative more ,too, because you had the stuff coming in from Andover impacting. [00:08:00] It broadens the understanding of the scope of the community at large. We get the Salem and Salem Village pieces in our mind, but there was actually all these other communities that were close but larger.
Josh Hutchinson: It shows you the real scale and scope of the witch-hunt.
Sarah Jack: Here's Josh with some history.
Josh Hutchinson: Martha Carrier was born in Andover to Andrew Allen and Faith Ingalls in about 1650. Later on, she moved to Billerica, where she met Thomas Carrier, a.k.a. Thomas Morgan. The two were married in 1674. They returned to Andover and were blamed for a smallpox outbreak in 1690 and warned out of town.[00:09:00] Given the testimony against her, it's possible that she did not have the friendliest demeanor.
A warrant was issued for Martha carrier's arrest on May 28th, 1692.
Under examination, Mary Lacey, Jr. claimed that Martha carrier was the queen in Hell and that she initiated others into her coven, and she participated in Satanic Baptisms. Sometimes these occurred in her own well. Other times they occurred in places. She was reported to have participated in several broom flights.
Martha was tried, convicted, and condemned, and four of her children were also accused. Those were Andrew Carrier, Richard [00:10:00] Carrier, Sarah Carrier, and Thomas Carrier Jr. Martha Was hanged on August 19th, 1692.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for sharing that history with us, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome. And now, before we go to Richard Hite, we'll hear a word from Virginia Wolf and Debra Walsh about their play, The Last Night.
Virginia Wolf: Many people don't know that Connecticut has a history of witchcraft witch panics in the 17th century. In fact the first person to be hanged for witchcraft was Alice Young. Arthur Miller, God bless him, has made the Salem witchcraft panics the standard by which everything is considered and people don't even realize that the history, and it's not necessarily a history to be proud of, but it is something that it happened. It was an outcome of the religious beliefs at the time, the patriarchal society of the [00:11:00] time, and in Connecticut, 1663, January 25th was the last execution, Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith and Mary Barnes. And this is 30 years before the Salem Witch trials ever happened and how. And acknowledging that date is so important so that people are aware that this did happen.
Debra Walsh: How do museums get people in to their buildings? What are the stories we can tell that happened right outside the door of the museum? How do we appeal to younger people? And I think theater can do that by having the education or the story is done theatrically and thoughtfully.
I think it for me relates to any time someone is considered the Other. When I think of the immigration crisis, and so maybe it will get us thinking about how do we treat the Other, what do we, what do we [00:12:00] think about, oh, especially innocent people executed for these crimes. A hanging? Like where is our humanity? And those questions are very important to me as an educator, as a theater educator, and also to stretch out the bonds of theater. What else can theater artists be doing?
Virginia Wolf: It's been a really wonderful thing to be writing this because aren't a lot of records of what happened at the time. There are more records based on Rebecca Greensmith in her trial and what she said. There's really virtually nothing on Mary Barnes. So we work from primary sources to write this, to make, as factual as we can, but then weaving in informed conjecture what could have happened, since we don't know what happened. And then the dramatic arc, which we've done the writing, but Andy and our director have really helped with that, so that the story is alive and it's vibrant, but it is based on history, and we are not saying [00:13:00] anything false, but we are taking the facts and elaborating them to make them an interesting story.
Josh Hutchinson: A stage reading of The Last Night will be performed at the Stanley-Whitman House at 37 High Street in Farmington, Connecticut on January 21st at 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM. Tickets are $20 for members, $25 for non-members and can be purchased at s-wh.org. The video premiere is January 25th at 7:00 PM online for free. You can register at the Stanley-Whitman House website. Again, that's s-wh.org, and we will include the link in the show description. Thank you.
Sarah Jack: I'm excited to introduce Richard Hite, state records [00:14:00] coordinator at Rhode Island State Archive and author of In The Shadow of Salem: the Andover Witch Hunt of 1692.
Josh Hutchinson: I wondered if you might take just a minute or two to summarize the Andover phase of the Salem Witch Hunt.
Richard Hite: It starts in the middle of July of 1692. Now one person from Andover had already been arrested by that point. That was Martha Carrier. She had somehow caught the attention of the uh, afflicted people in Salem Village, probably because uh, her own and her family's reputation was not the greatest. They'd been blamed for starting a smallpox epidemic in Andover a couple of years earlier.
But in mid-July, accusations had actually ground to a halt for about six weeks, because the court of Oyer and Terminer had been put in place and was [00:15:00] trying the people who had already been arrested. There were a little over 60 at that point.
But there was a woman in Andover who was gravely ill, Elizabeth Phelps Ballard. Her husband took the unprecedented step of inviting two of the afflicted girls from Salem Village to Andover to determine whether or not she was bewitched. Apparently, it wasn't his own idea. Some others had put the idea in his head, but of course, once they came, obviously they concluded that she was, in fact, bewitched. The person they initially named was a widow named Ann Foster, who was quite frail and who had experienced several tragedies in recent years, worst of which was the murder of her daughter by the daughter's husband three years earlier.
Ann Foster was arrested and questioned over a period of four days. For two days, she resisted [00:16:00] admitting guilt, but finally on the third day, her will cracked and she confessed. But as I said, there were a little over 60 people who had been arrested at that point. In her confession, she indicated that there were 305 witches throughout the region, so that throws a scare into everybody.
They go from thinking, yeah, it was very possible at that point that there could have been no more accusations. They may have just gone ahead and tried the ones who had already been arrested, but then all of a sudden you've got people thinking that only 20% of the people who were witches had been arrested. So that starts a whole new round of arrests.
As had been the case in Salem Village but became even more pronounced in Andover, once one family member was arrested, more others were vulnerable. The next two to be arrested were um, both Ann Foster's own daughter and granddaughter, both of [00:17:00] whom were named Mary Lacey. Both of them also confessed under pressure, but the younger Mary Lacey added a new wrinkle and um, implicated Martha Carrier, and she designated Martha Carrier as the future queen in hell, so to speak.
Martha Carrier has not only been accused of witchcraft, she's expected to be the queen of hell. Well, she's likely a recruiter of new witches based on that. Who's she gonna recruit? Her neighbors in Andover. Before the whole thing was over in Andover, 45 people from that one town were accused. Now I should stress what was then Andover included at that time what's today North Andover, at least part of Lawrence, and part of the town of Middleton.
But then also in Martha Carrier's own extended family, one of her sisters was accused, four of her five children, two nieces, and then it extended even further to [00:18:00] cousins and the cousins of children. Ultimately, 17 members of Martha Carrier's extended family were accused of witchcraft, which was more than any other family throughout the region. The 45 from Andover, who were accused, that was more than any other town, including Salem Village, where it all started.
Salem Village, which is today Danvers, had only 26 accused, the town of Salem 12. So that's those two places combined at fewer than Andover. A distinct feature in Andover was that very early on, people began confessing, and that was apparently because a rumor had spread in Andover that if one confessed, one would ultimately be exonerated or their life would be spared, at the very least. That is the way it turned out. It was never the intention of the court. People who confessed were being [00:19:00] kept alive longer, in order to provide evidence against others.
Now, initially, the ones primarily testifying against suspects from Andover were some of the same afflicted people, mostly teenage girls from Salem Village. But after the first month, the core of afflicted girls started forming in Andover, and some of them were coming out and testifying against suspects. A real turning point, I think, came on the 10th of September, when suddenly they began bringing confessors to trial. There were so many confessors by that time, they didn't need them all anymore to provide evidence.
A few were brought to trial and convicted and sentenced to death just like the others. The last round of hangings, there were eight people hanged on September 22nd. Those who had confessed were not hanged at that time. It was not unusual for someone who confessed to a capital crime to be given [00:20:00] additional time to prepare their souls, so to speak, for the afterlife.
And before any of the confessors got around to being executed, they got around to introducing any of the confessors, executing them, Governor Phipps suspended all further legal actions, which gave them a reprieve. But the fact that confessors were being sentenced to death scared the life outta any, any number of people in Andover who had actually encouraged loved ones to confess, believing their lives would be spared. So a series of petitions began circulating in Andover, which were ultimately signed by 72 people in town. A large number of them were family members of those who had been accused, but not entirely.
And then um, of course, Thomas Brattle, a Boston merchant, wrote a letter criticizing the trials, Increase Mather, a minister in [00:21:00] Boston, wrote a detailed critique of the process, and then a new court was constituted that had much stricter standards for conviction. It started trying people in January of 1693. Of the 52 came before the court, all but three were either acquitted or had the charges dropped. Three more were convicted, sentenced to death, all either from Andover or had ties to Andover. They and the previous confessors were slated for execution on February 1st, of 1693, but Governor Phipps intervened again, not pardoning them, but reprieving them, and because the prosecutor had said there was really no more evidence against those people than there were against the ones who had been acquitted. And while they were not at that time pardoned, they began trying more people. No one else was convicted, and, essentially, people [00:22:00] were just eventually let out, and they could pay their expenses and no one else was executed. .
Sarah Jack: I was curious about your research and archiving and what started your journey into that and what that's like for you or anything that would be important for us to know about it.
Richard Hite: I've been in the archives profession since the late 1980s and have been working for the Rhode Island State Archive since 2003. I had not lived in this region of the country prior to that, but I've had a very long-time interest in the witchcraft trials. I did two term papers on them when I was at graduate school, and then of course, moving to this region gave me easier access to material on the witch-hunt than I'd ever had.
And reading nearly all the major publications on the whole event, I came to realize that very little had been written about Andover, despite the fact that [00:23:00] it obviously had a major role in the whole thing, but previous authors seemed to just treat it as just a practically meaningless extension of what had happened in Salem Village and the town of Salem. But I thought with 45 people having accused there, that it seemed that there was a separate story to be told about it. And the more I researched it, the more I realized that there definitely was. The research into the transcribed documents of the witch-hunt, which were compiled in 2010 by a team of editors led by Bernard Rosenthal, and I should add, Margo Burns played a major role in it, was really a major source for me. But one of the things I should point out, though, that it's very much worthwhile to mention, mention that the path I expected to follow, what I thought happened in Andover turned out not [00:24:00] to really be the case at all.
There's a very well-known work on the Witch Hunt in Salem Village from the mid 1970s by historians Paul Boyer and Steven Nisenbaum. They talk about a factionalism that formed in Salem Village over the uh, minister in town with a significant faction supporting him and a significant faction opposing him. And they stress how it tended to break down on regional lines, with people more in the east end of the village, who were near the Salem town, tending to oppose it, further west in the more rural isolated area, tending to support him. I already knew that Andover had been semi-formally divided into north and south ends by that time, not not into separate towns, although the border is fairly close to what now separates North Andover from Andover. There were two ministers in what was then Andover, Francis Dane and Thomas [00:25:00] Barnard. I was expecting to find some kind of a north-south divide in Andover between accusers and accused.
And it's well known that Francis Dane was an opponent of the witch-hunt from the beginning. And some writers had hinted that Thomas Barnard, who was actually the younger of the two, had offered his support to the process. But I didn't find anything like that. In terms of the north and south ends, of the 45 accused, there were 24 from the north end and 21 from the south end, so practically an even split. And people involved in accusations in one way or another, 12 from the north end, 11 from the south end. Again, a practically an even split.
And although Thomas Barnard's attitude toward the witch-hunt was not as vocal as Francis Dane's, he signed the petitions just like Francis Dane and everyone else defending the suspects. So he didn't [00:26:00] support it anymore than Francis Dane did. I think in part, it may have been because the minister in Salem Village, Samuel Parris, played such a major role there, had just made historians may have just generally thought for it to take off in Andover like it did, at least one of the ministers had to be leading the charge, so to speak. That wasn't the case at all. I did research the lives of people involved in the witch hunt afterward, and there were people who strongly supported Barnard in the first decade of the next century, who had close family members accused of witchcraft, and two of 'em were even the sons of Samuel Wardwell, who had been hanged for witchcraft. And I just can't believe that those people would've supported Reverend Barnard if he had been a major booster of the witch-hunt. It just doesn't make sense.
Josh Hutchinson: Certainly different in Salem Village with Parris.
Richard Hite: [00:27:00] Definitely. And it just seemed more in Andover to break down along family lines, particularly among the accused. I already mentioned Martha Carrier's extended family. Her maternal grandparents were Edmund and Anne Ingalls of Lynn, Massachusetts. Of course, they were long dead by the time of the witch-hunt. But altogether they had 17 descendants accused. No other family was that heavily persecuted.
The Tyler family, in and around Andover, they had 10 members accused. Now, unlike the extended Ingalls clan, they also had some accusers, as well, within the family. But those in the family who were accusers were not accusing their own family members, with the exception of a stepdaughter of Moses Tyler named Martha Sprague. It seems to me that her accusations against some of his family may have been a reflection of a negative attitude she held [00:28:00] toward him, and there was just a way of lashing out at his family.
And I should clarify something I said. There were 45 accused from Andover, and that's correct. There were an additional 18 from surrounding communities who people from Andover played a role in accusing. So based on that, I would actually say that the Andover phase resulted in 63 accusations, and 27 out of 63 came from those two extended family groups. So not quite half, but nonetheless a significant portion.
But there were other families who had several members accused, the Barker family, for instance, they had four who were accused. You add those four in, that's 31. And then there were a few others who had at least multiple members accused as well.
Sarah Jack: And was there anything else contributing to that number of accusations other than [00:29:00] thinking, oh, confession is going to save me? What else would've contributed to that many accusations?
I
Richard Hite: think it was just that once things took off there and got some of the locals believing in, and of course again, the accusation of Martha Carrier as Queen of Hell, giving the idea that she's one of the ring leaders of the whole episode, shifted a focus to Andover in that way. Now the people who were confessing, I should point out, were not generally accusing new people. They were just offering evidence against others who had already been accused. It was just something like in Salem Village. Once it got started, it just got out of control in Andover, as well.
And yes, the fact that people were confessing was giving added credence to it in the minds of the accusers. William Barker, for example, [00:30:00] gave probably one of the more detailed confessions of the whole thing. He described how the Devil was involved. The Devil and his followers had a conspiracy to bring down the Church and the region. He went on to say that the witches were much vexed, as he put it, at the judges and the afflicted, because they were interfering with their plans. And he specifically said, to his knowledge, not a single innocent person had been accused. That was exactly what the judges and the accusers wanted to hear. And he probably said that thinking it would get him off the hook. As it worked out, it did. But again, that was just a coincidence of timing. Had governor Phipps not suspended legal actions when he did in October, some of those who had confessed but then subsequently been convicted would probably have been executed before the month was over.
I think it's worth pointing it out that [00:31:00] earlier in New England witch trials, people who confessed were in fact executed.
Josh Hutchinson: So the thing then about having their lives spared if they confessed, that was just a baseless rumor?
Richard Hite: Early on, those who were confessed, there were only a handful of those prior to Andover, but they were not being brought to trial. And so that probably just contributed to the rumor, because those who were being brought to trial were not confessing and had not confessed previously. But confessions throughout really helped spread the whole thing.
At the very beginning of the whole event, there were three accused, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the Reverend Parris's slave, Tituba, from Salem Village. Previous witch trials throughout the region, it usually would be only one or two, maybe three people accused. Those people might be convicted, might not, [00:32:00] but Tituba not only confessed, she claimed to have put her mark in a book that listed nine other names. So that gave a hint to the prosecutors. We don't have everybody.
And then by the time they had arrested about seven, six or seven more, this teenage girl from Topsfield, Abigail Hobbs, also confesses. Now she doesn't provide numbers. But yeah, Tituba said she had only signed the book a few weeks before. Abigail Hobbs said that she had given her soul to the devil three or four years earlier. So now that's telling them that this has been going on a while.
It's one of the most frustrating things about reading the whole episode is realizing how many times it reached a point where it could have died down, and then something else, usually another accusation followed by a [00:33:00] confession, suddenly starts at getting out of control again.
Sarah Jack: Why would've she and some of the other confessors said that they had been working with the devil for so many years?
Richard Hite: In the case of Tituba, is really hard to fathom why she confessed. There's a legend that her master, the Minister Samuel Parris, whipped it out of her, but I don't buy that, and I'll tell you why I don't. Because she was questioned in court over a period of two days. The first day she refused to confess, and then she spent the next night in jail. Parris wouldn't have had a chance to whip her then.
The way Judge John Hathorne phrased his questions, he was always presuming guilt. In the case of Sarah Good, for example, he did not ask her, "Sarah Good, do you have familiarity with any evil spirits?" He asked, "Sarah Good, what evil spirit have you familiarity [00:34:00] with?" In reading this examination of Tituba, it seems that he tricked her into confessing, cause he would not relent in questioning her about that. And then finally, I think she said something she thought might get her out of trouble, because she did at one point finally admit she had harmed these children through occult means but had recanted and would do so no more. But then that just caused Hathorne to press even further, twisting her words.
Of course, she was in the courtroom with these shrieking afflicted girls. I think she just cracked under the pressure. Now Abigail Hobbs, she's written about heavily, and Mary Beth Norton's book titled In the Devil's Snare, Mary Beth Norton stresses the importance of Abigail Hobbs' confession. Abigail Hobbs, she was only in her mid teens, apparently quite disturbed. She and her [00:35:00] family had been on the Maine frontier when the wars with the Native Americans broke out. They were essentially back in the Topsfield area as refugees. But Abigail Hobbs had some strange habits. Apparently, she was talked about how she would sleep in the woods at night, would publicly talk about having sold herself body and soul to the Old Boy, which was a way of describing the Devil. My suspicion is that whatever eccentricity she had, she was probably ridiculed to a degree by her peers and maybe had cultivated the reputation of a Witch in a hope of scaring them into leaving her alone. And so again, I can't be sure about that, but that seems as logical a reason as any. I think there were only three more who confessed until the confessions took off in Andover.
Josh Hutchinson: You mentioned earlier that a lot of what happened in Andover took off because of what the [00:36:00] Ballards did. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Richard Hite: Sure. Actually, in a way, it almost starts, I think, with Samuel Wardwell, who ended up being hanged, but see, Samuel Wardwell was well known among the young people in Andover as a fortune teller. And he was well liked by them because of that. My suspicion is, some of Ward well's, things that he told were surprisingly accurate. What I suspect about him is that he had a very keen sense of being able to read people's thoughts by mannerisms, the way they phrased certain things, or by facial expressions.
For instance, he had told one young man named James Bridges that he knew that he was in love with a certain girl in the area. And James Bridges admitted it. Yes he was. And then other things that people believe in 'em strongly enough that can [00:37:00] become self-fulfilling. Well, Samuel Wardwell's wife was Sarah Hooper Wardwell. Her sister Rebecca was married to John Ballard. Now, John Ballard was not the husband of the woman who was sick. John Ballard was the constable of the south end of Andover, and he had already arrested Martha Carrier and taken her to jail in Salem.
Wardwell was getting worried when he heard that Elizabeth Ballard was sick. He thought people were getting suspicious of his being a fortune teller. And so he was afraid he'd be accused of witchcraft. He expressed this to his brother John, he was afraid that John's brother, Joseph, might be blaming him for Elizabeth Ballard's illness. John Ballard then went and said this to Joseph, and that was what put the idea in Joseph Ballard's head that maybe my wife is bewitched. So he sent for these girls from Salem Village,[00:38:00] and of course, they obviously said, yes she was, and Wardwell was not accused immediately, but he was about a month later. And in a sense, expressing his own concerns probably led to him ultimately being accused and executed.
A few days after people began being accused and arrested in Andover, Elizabeth Ballard died. And see, that was a first. None of the afflicted people in Salem Village had died, regardless of what might have been wrong with them or anybody else. But here, for the first time, a supposedly afflicted person had actually died. That was another hint that there were more people at large, and now there was obvious evidence these witches could actually kill.
Sarah Jack: Bringing the afflicted girls in to try to detect some supposed witches was a big deal. It really affected the next[00:39:00] circumstances?
Richard Hite: Yeah. So that was the first place where that had been, where that was done. Gloucester didn't even get involved until very late in the game. Gloucester did have nine people accused. After Andover, Salem Village, and the town of Salem, they were number four, but none of the accusations there really ended up going much of anywhere ,because it started so late in the process.
Josh Hutchinson: You talked about Anne Foster's confession, 305 witches?
Richard Hite: Where she got that number, I have no idea. The only one of the things I find myself thinking about the whole process, both in terms of confessors and accusers, is I really wondered to what extent nightmares played a role in whatever caused this. Because we have to remember that, and even 19th century writers had trouble accepting this, I think because, so many have tried to point to some kind of conspiracy [00:40:00] in this whole thing. We have to remember these people genuinely believed in it. Believing in witchcraft and that witches could bring harm to people that, that era, it was every bit as normal as believing in God is today.
But I think even 19th century writers had a hard time accepting that in some of their writings about it, because you'll run into all kinds of accounts, and I think it's based partly on fiction, that one of the reasons people were accused was because the accusers wanted the land of the people they were accusing. And that's not the case at all, because they wouldn't, it wasn't going to get them any land because it's, again, and I think this was made popular by Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The House of the Seven Gables, because that's the reason that the judge there accuses the victim of witchcraft, is because he wants his land, and he ends up getting it. But in reality, even if someone is hanged for witchcraft in that era, their heirs are still going [00:41:00] to inherit their land. Two of the people who were executed, John Proctor and George Jacobs, neither from Andover, but yeah, they wrote their will while they were in jail awaiting execution, and the terms of their wills were honored.
Sarah Jack: So there, there were nightmares in the surviving testimony. At what point in the Andover phase was that, was it throughout? Did several confessor or accusers talk about nightmares?
Richard Hite: They didn't describe it as such. I can't help but believe that's where some of the testimony came from, was people had dreamed something and dreams and reality became blurred, because they so strongly believed what was happening.
Sarah Jack: So even outside a trial scenario, those individuals would've been considering dreams real experiences?
Richard Hite: It's possible. But some would have. Yes. [00:42:00] Yes. Through much of human history, dreams have often been seen as portents of some sort. And in reality, too, some of the confessors and Ann Foster comes to mind with this, because she had experienced so much tragedy in recent years. She could have come to actually believe she had, without realizing it, become a witch and was being punished for it.
It's just as people who are devoutly religious today might have doubts about, okay, whether their souls have been saved, so to speak, or not. When one so devoutly believes in something such as witchcraft, they may actually come to believe themselves to have become witches.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah and I were talking about the nightmares and dreams thing the other night, and I went through a phase in my life where I had sleep paralysis several times, and it very much resembled to me some of the accuser testimony, especially, [00:43:00] of people coming into your room at night, because you wake up, but you're still in a dream state, so everything feels very real.
Richard Hite: I occasionally had dreams as a child of, and occasionally as an adult, of falling off of something and waking up as I was falling, and it felt as though I landed on my bed. And then other symptoms can manifest themselves, too. If you believe very strongly in witchcraft, and if you think that someone has a poppet that they are using a poppet that they're identifying as you and sticking pins at it, you're probably going to experience some symptoms.
A personal experience, when I've led tours, I have sometimes cited, I grew up in a religious tradition, in which 12 was considered the age of accountability for one's sins, so that, anything you did prior to age 12 was not going to be held against you, [00:44:00] so to speak. But once you're 12, you're responsible for everything. Three weeks after my 12th birthday, I broke out in a severe case of hives. My mother took me to the doctor, and they were assuming I had some sort of allergy. The doctor concluded, I think, because I had probably recently started taking adult aspirin instead of baby aspirin when I needed it, that I was allergic to aspirin. For over three decades, I believed that I was allergic to aspirin. But then, learning some of the potential medical benefits of it, I decided to go to an allergist and undergo what's called a drug challenge. I'm not allergic to aspirin, probably never was. I firmly believe that breaking out in hives was probably a nervous reaction over the idea that I was suddenly responsible for my own sins.
Josh Hutchinson: That's a great example. You talked in the book, this is about the [00:45:00] psychosomatic symptoms that people feel?
Richard Hite: Yes, absolutely. I think that was a major factor. Now, I can't help but think that some of the performances by the afflicted in the courtroom, those probably were to some degree staged, because it wouldn't be the sort of thing that someone could just easily turn on and off. But even if the ones in the courtroom were staged, what happened at home, probably psychosomatic, and by testifying as they did in the courtroom, I'm sure that many of them thought that they were bringing criminals to justice, even if they did exaggerate what was actually happening at that moment.
Sarah Jack: When you talked about Abigail Hobbs and like a perceived purification process, they were maybe exaggerating to help accomplish getting rid of the evil.
Richard Hite: Yes. I, that's what I, but that, that doesn't mean that some of [00:46:00] what they experienced was not real. But again, for psychosomatic reasons.
Josh Hutchinson: I I also wonder when they got into the courtroom and they were facing the people who they believed were witches, could they have had stress reactions then as well?
Richard Hite: That's absolutely a possibility, very much a possibility, because they were deathly afraid of these people, even though, you know, they did not have to be in that person's presence for the person to afflict them according to their belief, to actually be in their presence would be, would've been a frightening experience.
Josh Hutchinson: I wanted to talk some more about Martha Carrier, because she seems to play a very prominent role in the Andover situation. What more can you tell us about her as a person?
Richard Hite: She was she had been born in Andover and grown up there. Then, as a young adult, she, or possibly [00:47:00] even in her late teens, she went to the neighboring town of Billerica and lived with her older sister, who was married to a man from there, and she found her husband there, Thomas Carrier, and they were married. But they were not too secure financially, and in the late 1680s, they were warned out of town. It's not clear why. Now warning someone out of town did not automatically mean you had to leave, but if you were warned out of town, it meant if you fell into difficult financial circumstances, the town had no obligation to help support you.
Martha seems to have been of a bit of a turbulent spirit. She got into a quarrel with a neighbor of hers named Benjamin Abbott, and this was once they moved back to Andover over a property line. And it was after Benjamin Abbott later testified against her, saying that after this quarrel, he had become seriously ill and developed [00:48:00] some type of soar on his foot, which upon being lanced, oozed, as he described it, gallons of corruption. Most bizarrely, he also claimed to have gotten some boils on his manhood, which only left after she was arrested.
Now whether or not she really was as quarrelsome as she's been portrayed or just was very quick to defend her family, who knows? There were things that made people frightened of her. And there was a smallpox epidemic that started Andover shortly after they moved there in 1690, which led to 13 people dying in Andover, and that was apparently known in the region, because one of the young girls who testified against her, who was not from Andover but Salem Village, described an encounter with 13 ghosts, who blamed their deaths on Martha Carrier. [00:49:00] No coincidence, the exact number of people who died in the smallpox epidemic.
Now there are legends about Martha Carrier's husband, which I seriously do not believe are true. The one aspect of it that apparently is true is that he apparently changed his last name for some reason. Their marriage record even describes him as Thomas Morgan alias Carrier. The legend about him is that he had ended up fleeing England, because he was the executioner of King Charles I in 1649. But for one thing, by the time he died in 1735, he would've had to have been well over a hundred years old. His death record actually does say he was 109, but death records at that time with exaggerated ages like that are, weren't unusual in New England, particularly for people who had been born in England and come over.
I have an ancestor myself who's own grave [00:50:00] indicates he died in 1694 at age 97, which would place his birth in 1597, but his baptism in England gives his year of birth as 1611, so he was actually only 83. But even regardless of whether that story about her husband is true or not, if people around thought that it was, that wouldn't have helped the family's reputation.
Sarah Jack: Was that legend, when did it develop? Did it develop during their lifetime or did we hear about it after?
Richard Hite: To my knowledge, it only appears in print in the 1880s with a published history of Andover. Whether it was told verbally during his lifetime or not, no. A couple of historical novels have been written about it as if it was an absolute fact. One of the bad things about historical novels is that so many people are inclined to believe that they are actually [00:51:00] factual, and you know that, but you can take a historical novel and write anything.
He's also said to have been stood well over seven feet tall, for instance. And combination of that and living to be over a hundred years old, even today, extraordinarily tall people have lower life expectancies than the average person, because being that extraordinarily tall is a strain on one's circulatory system. The fact that Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell, who died earlier this year at age 88, the fact that he lived that long is nothing short of miraculous. And Thomas Carrier was said to have lived 20 years longer than he did. So it's just a combination of things that are just really not believable.
Now, I know I've strayed away from Martha herself and talked about her family. Whether she was genuinely just a disagreeable [00:52:00] person, which there's evidence to suggest that she was, her children ended up being accused along with her, and they ended up confessing and implicated their mother in the confessions.
But I'm quite certain if there was a rumor of your life being spared if they did confess, she might very well have told them to implicate her, to save them and probably was willing to die herself, as long as they could be spared.
Josh Hutchinson: Now she had an interesting brother-in-law, Roger Toothaker, right? And he talked about using folk magic to actually kill a witch.
Richard Hite: That's true. He said he had taught his daughter how to do it, and his daughter Martha, who was married to a man named Emerson, ended up being arrested as well. But the way that was supposedly done was, and I don't know how they did this, was to procure the urine of a witchcraft [00:53:00] suspect and boiling it, which would supposedly kill the witch. Now, I don't count Roger Toothaker as among the ones who was as part of the Andover Witch Hunt for the simple reason that he had been arrested, and he died in jail before anybody other than Martha was accused from Andover.
But that's true. Her connection to him probably didn't help her case at all. Ultimately, I think the rest of the family being accused was because of her. But her own dubious reputation and her family's dubious reputation. It wasn't helped by the connection to him by any means.
Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Wardwell and Roger Toothaker both seemed to be comfortable openly talking about magic. And why would they have felt comfortable talking about that openly before the Witch hunt?
Richard Hite: There was certainly folk magic of various types was often practiced, and generally it didn't [00:54:00] really always aros suspicion. And I think, now Roger Toothaker probably thought that, okay, if he used counter magic to kill a witch, that was maybe a positive thing. Obviously he calculated wrong.
But Samuel Wardwell had apparently done this for years without suspicion. And, in times like this, when suddenly all these accusations start happening, people who are known for things like that suddenly fall under suspicion, whereas maybe they didn't before. I think that was why he started becoming nervous that he would fall under suspicion, but by voicing his suspicions to his brother-in-law, John Ballard, it ended up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.
Sarah Jack: And so likewise, Martha Carrier would've been fine being a little bit turbulent, because the accusations hadn't become such a problem. [00:55:00] Cause I was thinking she has this reputation, possibly she wasn't hesitant to be rude.
Richard Hite: She didn't hesitate to speak her mind, but she wasn't worried about witch trial, not until this all came about. I mean there were previous cases, of course, when only one or two people in an area would be accused, and, in fact, there were people who ultimately were accused in Salem who had fallen under suspicion previously. That was not true of Martha Carrier, but there were certainly others, but some previous examinations, not only did the accused person get off the hook, that person could then sue the accuser and in some cases even won the suit.
Susanna Martin of Amesbury was hanging in 1692, but in 1669 in her home community of Amesbury, she had been accused. Not only did the accusation [00:56:00] not go anywhere, but her husband sued the man who accused her and won the suit. But Susanna Martin was another one who didn't hesitate to speak her mind, but not everybody was accused was like that.
Sarah Jack: When she later was accused, her husband was gone, and it was men accusing her. Am I right?
Richard Hite: Men would file the formal complaints, but one mistaken idea about the whole thing, though, is that in general, the widows were more vulnerable in Salem. That was not the case. In fact, of the 19 who were hanged, see it was 14 women and 5 men. 10 of those women had living husbands, only 4 were widows. There were 45 who were accused in Andover, of which 34 were women . Of those 34, only 4 were widows.
[00:57:00] Then of course, I should also point out one thing that was different about Andover was you had a lot of younger people being accused, because among the other, and I should say females, because some of them were girls, of the 30 others, 12 of them had living husbands, and eight of the other 18 were women and girls under the age of 30 who were not yet married. A lot of them, most of them had living fathers. So it's the idea that women who did not have a man to protect them were more vulnerable than others. The statistics don't bear that out.
Josh Hutchinson: It doesn't seem like the men were able to do much to protect them when they did have the men.
Richard Hite: Not in Salem in 1692. And I should say all of Essex County. There really seems to have been very little that they could do. And in fact there were some, a few men who attempted to, who ended up [00:58:00] being accused themselves. John Proctor in Salem Village, along with Giles Corey, both their wives were accused. They ended up being accused themselves.
Andover had a unique situation in that Samuel Wardwell was accused. And then in the wake of that, his wife, one of his daughters, and a stepdaughter were all accused as well. But in that particular case, the accusation started with a male member of the family. And that was that was not the norm. It would usually be a woman who would be accused first. Really the men really could do little protective. Plenty of the men who signed the petitions in Andover starting in October of 1692 were men who had wives or daughters that had been arrested. And you know that by then it did start to have some effect.
In talking about Thomas Carrier's reputation, I've always found it very interesting that he didn't [00:59:00] sign the petitions, and I can't help but wonder if he was not, if he was shrewd enough to know that maybe his signing a petition, because if he had a bad reputation, might have done more harm than good. Now, granted, his wife Martha, had already been executed. But 4 of his children were still in jail under suspicion. It's a little surprising he was not accused himself. Why he wasn't, I don't know.
Josh Hutchinson: You talked about the confession of Abigail Hobbs and how significant that was. And in the book you mentioned that she said that she gave the devil her permission to afflict. Why was that important?
Richard Hite: That was related to spectral evidence. See, one of the real controversies of the whole thing was the use of spectral evidence. The idea that if someone's specter attacked a person, [01:00:00] whether that was acceptable as evidence of guilt or not. And the reason that was controversial was there were those who believed that the devil could not take one's shape to attack a person without that person's consent, but there were others who thought that the devil could take anyone's shape with or without permission. The court initially ultimately decided that it could only be done with the person's consent, so therefore, spectral evidence was considered acceptable.
Now, when the original court was disbanded in October and a new court was created, that new court did not allow that type of evidence. Increase Mather wrote that it was impossible to know that the devil could not take the shape of an innocent person, and also said it was better for 10 witches to go free than for one innocent person to be put to death, so in the following January, when the new court [01:01:00] began trying people, of the 52 people they brought to the court, only three were convicted. And all those three, two of them actually lived in Andover, and the other one had family ties to Andover. But there were unique things about all three of them that made it more likely that they would be convicted.
I can elaborate on that, if you like. One of 'em was, in fact, Samuel Wardwell's widow, Sarah. Her husband had been hanged soon before that. Most of the confessors describe squeezing puppets or cloth or even their own hands and imagining the people they wish to harm. Sarah Wardwell claimed a very shocking thing. She had a child, who was not quite a year old yet at the time. One of the people she was accused of afflicting was Martha Sprague, who was the Tyler's stepdaughter I spoke of earlier. In her confession, she actually described picking up her own child in an attempt to hurt Martha Sprague and [01:02:00] squeezing her own child, effectively using her own child as a weapon of witchcraft, so to speak. That was quite a shocking thing to say.
The other two, Elizabeth Johnson and Mary Post, they were both apparently mentally challenged in some way. Robert Calef, who wrote about the trials three years later, and, of course, people were much less diplomatic then in describing people who were mentally challenged, he described Elizabeth Johnson and Mary Post as two of the most senseless and ignorant creatures who could be found.
Now Elizabeth Johnson was one of the extended Ingalls clan. She was the granddaughter, in fact, of the town minister, Francis Dane, whose late wife had been an Ingalls. Francis Dane, in writing his letter condemning the trials and describing his granddaughter, Elizabeth Johnson, who was in her early twenties, stated that she is but simplish at the best. And it's [01:03:00] noteworthy that Elizabeth Johnson and Mary Post, both of whom went on to live long lives, neither of them ever married, which was obviously unusual in that era. It's evident from the other younger people who were accused that being accused of witchcraft in 1692, that there's no evidence that it really hurt anybody's marriage prospects later. If anything, it probably hurt the marriage prospects of the accusers more. Elizabeth Johnson, being one of the ones who was convicted, she was the one whose conviction actually remained on the books until just this past July, when she was finally exonerated by an action of the Massachusetts General Assembly.
Sarah Jack: We'd love to hear about your noticing that in your research, and you did note it in your book. Tell us about that, and did you expect her to be exonerated already?
Richard Hite: There were so many things I learned in this course of researching the [01:04:00] book. With the exception of Elizabeth Proctor, who was only ended up surviving because she was pregnant, I didn't know that there were people who had actually been convicted but not executed. But one of the things I wanted to research and with Andover was the aftermath of the witch hunt for people involved, both accusers and accused.
And in reading about it, I learned, of course, that there were people who were convicted, but not hanged. And that even as soon as eight years after started petitioning for exoneration. And those who had been convicted and survived, all except Elizabeth Johnson were ultimately exonerated in one way or another by 1711. Elizabeth Johnson did submit a petition for it, but somehow, some way it just never happened. Now, the fact that she was unmarried, apparently mentally challenged in some way, and probably lived out her life in the care of various relatives. Maybe it just wasn't considered as [01:05:00] pressing for her.
But then of course there were some, there were also, because of the efforts of family members, some of those hanged in 1692 were exonerated at that time. Those hanged who had not been exonerated then, one was exonerated in 1957, the rest in 2001. Elizabeth Johnson was probably missed at that time, because she wasn't hanged.
When I realized, okay, this one person has never been exonerated, all the rest have, and I thought maybe the Massachusetts General Assembly should actually address this. But I'm not a resident of Massachusetts. I live in Rhode Island now. Had I been a resident of Massachusetts, I probably would've just reached out to my own senator or representative. So I started asking around at the North Andover Historical Society about it. One of their boards of trustees thought getting this person exonerated would probably be a good eighth grade civics project.
There [01:06:00] was a retired teacher there named Greg Pasco, and he put me in touch with Carrie LaPierre, who teaches at North Andover Middle School. She was certainly willing to get her class interested in undertaking this project just a week before everything shut down in 2020 because of the pandemic. I went up there one day and addressed her class. And of course it ended up taking, I think two, if not three years worth of her classes to finally get it done. But they took the process from there through their own state Senator Diane DiZoglio.
The initial bill was committed to further study, so to speak, early in 2022. But then these two people from California began working on a documentary on it, which got some more attention, although the documentary has not been released in final form yet. And so they ended up just adding it to the budget bill, which was approved by both chambers of the assembly and was signed by the governor [01:07:00] on July 28th this year. Elizabeth Johnson, after nearly 330 years has finally been exonerated, and media, not only all over the country, but it was reported in news media throughout the world. So all kinds of references to it in other languages, countries all over the world.
Sarah Jack: Thanks so much for doing this for her.
Richard Hite: I'm so glad this class undertook it. I give credit where credit is due. I, yes, I discovered that it hadn't been done. I thought it should be. Once I called their attention to, the teacher's attention to it, and her students, and she did the same, they really took it from there. At least two, maybe three years worth of classes worked toward it by collecting signatures, writing their own letters to members of the committee. I wrote letters to the committees myself, how much do they care what a Rhode Island resident has to say about something? It's not like I can vote for or [01:08:00] against any of 'em, but I'm just so glad that a away was found to get around the fact that I don't live in Massachusetts and to get that many people involved, and I'm just so happy for these students. It's going to be something that they'll remember their involvement in. This is gonna be something they'll remember for the rest of their lives, and if it spurs some of them own to take up other worthy causes in the future, so much the better.
Josh Hutchinson: We're actually working on a project to exonerate the accused in the state of Connecticut, and we're hoping to follow suit. There's a middle school class that's interested in doing the same thing.
Richard Hite: Yes, I've been reading about that, and I very much hope that happens. Although of course now everybody associated with the Salem Witch Hunt has been exonerated, but yet there were witchcraft trials earlier in Massachusetts, and with some people convicted and hanged, I don't know if [01:09:00] those people have ever been exonerated or not.
Josh Hutchinson: We've looked at it, and there's no indication that they ever were, those other five individuals from Massachusetts.
Richard Hite: And I don't recall all, I don't recall all their names. I know Alice Jones was the first one was hanged on Boston Common in 1648. The last one was Goody Glover, whose first name, as far as I know, is lost to history in 1688. There was one named Elizabeth Morse in Newbury, who like Elizabeth Johnson was convicted but for some reason never hanged. I also know that a few others were hanged in Massachusetts prior to 1692, but I don't recall their names at the top of my head. The source I know of I can refer to for that is John Demos's work from the early 1970s called Entertaining Satan, because that work is totally focused on the [01:10:00] New England witch trials, apart from the events in Salem.
Josh Hutchinson: That's what we've used primarily to gather the names of the New England accused. And there were a total of five in Massachusetts before Salem and 11 hanged in Connecticut.
Now here's Sarah with an important update.
Sarah Jack: Here is Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration News. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, an organized effort for the state exoneration of the 17th century accused and hanged witches of the Connecticut colony has been led by retired police officer Tony Grego, author Beth Caruso, descendant and advocate Sarah Jack, and advocates Mary Bingham and Joshua Hutchinson.
After years of educating Connecticut residents locally and online, Tony and Beth of the CT Witch Memorial joined up with fellow advocates Sarah, Mary, and Joshua, together with state representative Jane Garibay. The exoneration project now includes [01:11:00] many witch trial victim descendants and other advocates, both in the state of Connecticut and countrywide. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project now brings an exoneration bill to the Judiciary Committee for the 2023 winter session of Connecticut's General Assembly.
Did you know this podcast was born from this exoneration effort? It was initially created as a social and educational tool to amplify and project an overlooked history. This obscure history needed to be offered in a package that educated the state, country, and the world about the known individuals that were executed by a court of law in New England's Connecticut Colony for witchcraft crimes. This colony hanged the first accused witch in the American colonies in 1647. Her name is Alice Young. She had one daughter. Her one daughter, Alice Young Beamon had eight children. She has many, many descendants, but no family association for her descendants. Her story is relatively unknown by even Connecticut residents.
We are now at the [01:12:00] winter session of 2023, getting ready to testify for an exoneration bill, asking for the exoneration of Alice Young, america's first executed witch, along with the other known accused witches of Connecticut colony. Dozens of individuals were accused, outcast from their lives, family and community, or killed by the courts. Those convicted of witchcraft crimes found themselves proven guilty by spectral evidence. It was acceptable to take their lives based on unseen or unexplained misfortune, sickness, and unexplained or sudden deaths of family and neighbors. Now you are aware of the history.
Have you been tuned into our robust lineup of episodes teaching about Alice Young and the other victims, as well as Connecticut Colony's governor, John Winthrop, Jr.'s, influence on the trials? If you haven't, when you download those episodes now, you'll learn so much and be able to share more about the Connecticut witch trial history.
The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is asking the judiciary committee to vote yes on this exoneration bill. The [01:13:00] Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration project is asking you to take action with us by writing letters to the legislature. You can find out more by going to our Discord community through the link in the show notes.
Use your social power to help Alice Young, America's first executed witch, to finally be acknowledged. Support the descendants by acknowledging and sharing their ancestor's stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our project on social media @ctwitchhunt, and visit our website at ConnecticutWitchTrials.org. The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration project is a project of End Witch Hunts movement.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah for educating us on real world events occurring as we speak.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe to Thou Shalt [01:14:00] Not Suffer wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell all your friends and family and colleagues and everybody who you see about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: the Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Continue to support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

January 12, 2023

Rebecca Nurse of Salem with Dan Gagnon

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Show Notes

This is the Rebecca Towne Nurse podcast episode that we have all been waiting for. We discuss the monumental story of her life and the Salem witch trials with historian and Danvers native Dan Gagnon. Learn about the unique layers of this infamous witch hunt from the author of Rebecca’s biography, A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse. We address the importance of victim memorials and exonerations of innocent accused witches. This discussion communicates End Witch Hunts’ message: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Links

Dan Gagnon Website

The Salem Witch Trials: A Day By Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege by Marilynne K. Roach

University of VA, Salem Witch Trials Documents and Transcriptions

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project

Leo Igwe, AfAW

Advocacy Against Witch Hunts, South Africa

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Support the show

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to the latest episode of Thou Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we talk to Dan Gagnon, author of A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse, who happens to be my 10th great-grandaunt.
Sarah Jack: And she is my ninth great-grandmother, a history that I've known since the nineties when I was a high schooler, and this episode was very meaningful to me. Getting to read Dan's [00:01:00] biography on her, and then the conversation that we have about the details of her story is really great.
Josh Hutchinson: I learned about my connections to the Salem Witch trials on my first ever visit to the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, which is one of the places where Dan spends his time as a tour guide, something he first did when he himself was in high school. I was on a high school trip with my family and went to the Rebecca Nurse Homestead and to the replica meeting house. Saw the Rebecca Nurse Memorial and the memorial to those people who signed the petition in defense of her and saw the cemetery where her body's believed to rest and learned that my Hutchinson family was involved in the witch [00:02:00] trials. Later on, I learned that Rebecca Nurse was my grandaunt through her sister, Mary, who also suffered from the Salem Witch Trials and is another of Sarah's grandmothers.
Sarah Jack: She is. She is my ninth great grandmother also. I learned of that connection more recently, in the last five years. Their grandchildren married.
Josh Hutchinson: Ah, also in recent years, I've learned that my ancestor, Joseph Hutchinson, was a friend of the Nurse family, a neighbor to them. He went around with them when they were fighting with the minister after the witch-hunt, because the minister insisted that they still go to his church, though he had done them wrong. My ancestor, Joseph, [00:03:00] accompanied them as a witness to the meetings between Nurse's family and Minister Parris.
One of the things that we learn in Dan's book is just how supportive Rebecca's family was. Her children, her sons and daughters-in-law, they all had her back. Even years after the witch-hunt, they never wavered. They never backed down. They knew she was innocent, and they supported her forever.
Sarah Jack: Dan's biography gives so much details on what life was like for them prior to the witch trials, what roles Francis had in the community, how hardworking they were, what it took for those families in that community to build Salem Village.
Josh Hutchinson: [00:04:00] One of the things Dan does well in the book is to clear up a lot of the misconceptions about why Rebecca was accused. So you'll enjoy reading about that and getting a fuller picture of Rebecca's life, from her baptism in Great Yarmouth, England, right up through the trials and her unfortunate execution. Learn about the support of her descendants and how they've been able to keep her memory alive, as well.
Sarah Jack: What has been done for her, as far as her story being known, is remarkable. What Dan has done for her and her descendants, I greatly appreciate it, and I know many people do. One of the things that Rebecca is recorded as saying is that she would like the world [00:05:00] to know of her innocency, and I see that we do, and I think that is a big deal.
Josh Hutchinson: The memory of her innocency has reached so many people. She's one of the best known of the accused. Rebecca's memory is cherished. She's a beloved figure. She's a hero to many. She stood her ground, never confessed to something that she didn't do, that she couldn't have done.
She was an older woman at the time, and she truly wondered what she had done to bring the accusations upon her herself, what sin there was in her life. That's what kind of person she was. She didn't blame the accusers. She looked inward to try and resolve the issue within [00:06:00] herself but couldn't find what transgression she had done to deserve any of that, and she hadn't. Truth is she hadn't done a single thing to merit any of what was brought upon her.
Sarah Jack: It's quite terrible to read what she went through, starting with the accusations, through the examination and the trial. The biography really gives you an idea of how harmful spectral evidence was to these victims. And with Rebecca's story, it's unbelievable how wild it got, how harmful and evil they portrayed her to be, and she stood there and listened to all of that.
Josh Hutchinson: She stood up for herself. Her family stood up for her. What happened to her was[00:07:00] grievous, was a terrible miscarriage of justice, but she stood her ground and maintained her innocency and wanted future generations, the world, to know that innocent people were being killed at Salem.
And you learn a lot about her life before the trials from Dan's book, she wasn't perfect, but she was pretty great. In the trials themselves, in many of the cases, there were multiple witnesses coming forward saying that they had had arguments with the accused over this and that. But with Rebecca, you get one single instance, and it's a stretch, that she was angry that somebody's pigs had broken into her yard and damaged her [00:08:00] garden, her crops, and that was apparently the one time that she ever got angry that is recorded.
She was a church member for many years. You'll learn about that from Dan. And she truly was astonished when she was accused. And I know her family's minds must have just been blown. Their whole world must have come collapsing around them. Everything that they thought they knew was suddenly flipped on its head, but they never wavered in their loyalty to her. They never questioned her innocence. They always brought forward in many petitions and letters and through their prolonged struggle with the minister after the trials. Reverend Samuel Parris really wanted her family to come to his church even after he had done them such a terrible wrong[00:09:00] by being one of the leaders of the accusers, in general, in starting the Salem Witch Trials. But that's where I learned that my ancestor had got involved and come along with the Nurse family to witness their encounters with the minister post-witch-hunt.
We really enjoyed our conversation with Dan, and we know you will, too.
Sarah Jack: You will probably listen to it at least twice.
Josh Hutchinson: Maybe three times.
Sarah Jack: Maybe.
I'd like to introduce Dan Gagnon, the author of A Salem Witch: the Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse.
Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about the Towne family?
Dan Gagnon: The Towne family is one of these first families here that settled the North Shore of Massachusetts, are are significant in the witch-hunt and significant in really the settling of Massachusetts as a whole. [00:10:00] And currently they have a big organization of descendants, so they're very, a very proud family.
But originally our one who came from England, and we think around 1635, roughly, we don't have the paperwork that we wish that we had to narrow it down further. And they leave England fleeing persecution, strife, and a lot of disputes having to do with their Puritan religion that they do not see eye-to-eye with the established Church of England, which, on the one hand is a religious issue, but after the Reformation, when the King of England separated from the Catholic Church, he put himself in charge of the Church of England. So if you disagree with them, it's also a political issue, which really leads to this persecution.
Sarah Jack: And what do we need to know about the sisters?
Dan Gagnon: So in terms of the witch-hunt in [00:11:00] 1692, there's three women from the Towne family who play key roles. The first is Rebecca Towne, Rebecca Nurse. We have Mary Towne, Mary Easty, and Sarah Towne, who becomes Sarah Cloyce, who has married more than once. So we've Edmunds in there, as well.
And with the three of them, they will settle with their parents and their other siblings in the Northfields of Salem. And really what's interesting, I find, is they seem to have reasonably ordinary lives for these first settlers. There's nothing that leaps out as being bizarre, strange, highly unusual, and I think they're interesting cases, therefore. They seem like three regular people, regular settlers here.
But when the witch-hunt breaks out, Rebecca Nurse is going to be accused and later executed. Mary Easty will be accused and later executed, and Sarah Cloyce will be accused. And really the witch-hunt ends, or at least the court stops [00:12:00] sitting before her time comes. But we have one family that has a lot of suffering in these three women. And of course the suffering affects their families too.
Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about the notion that their mother was an accused witch?
Dan Gagnon: That is an interesting point. So in many things that I've read over the years, there's been this reference to their mother, Joanna Blessing, Joanna Towne, being previously accused of witchcraft, as a way to try to explain then the three sisters being accused of witchcraft.
There is no record that has been found from the time she was allegedly accused a couple decades before the witch-hunt saying that she actually was accused a couple decades before the witch-hunt. Where this comes up is in testimony in 1692. It's mentioned by the [00:13:00] accusers, including Ann Putnam and family, that this is somehow an explanation for their accusation.
One of Ann Putnam's family members tells the court that he had repeated a rumor he had heard about the three Towne sisters' mother, and afterwards his young child begins to be unwell, seriously ill, and he thinks this retribution from these three Towne sisters for spreading this, what he claims is information, but I would think is misinformation. But in his record, he never says what the rumor was. He just says he said something that he knew of their mother, and it's Ann Putnam who, in a different document, says he was referencing the fact that their mother was accused of witchcraft. So she's the one who's, to us, putting together, whether or not we believe her, as to what he probably said. [00:14:00] Both no documentation from the time and knowing the wild and crazy things that Ann Putnam Sr will say throughout the witch-hunt, I would not give that more credibility than any of these other wild accusations, and especially because no one else specifically says that accusation happened. It's a one-off, and it's from someone who we would not consider a very reliable source as to the truth.
Sarah Jack: I'm really excited that you covered a lot, all of this stuff in your book, and I feel like we're in a time right now where all of these pieces that have traveled through the decades, the misconceptions, we're starting to sort through them and be more familiar with who said what in the records. And I feel like your book was so timely, and I'm really glad that we get to talk about the stuff with you today.
I'm gonna move to Reverend Parris. I was wondering why did he feel besieged [00:15:00] by Judases and devils before the hunt, and why did it influence his preaching so much?
Dan Gagnon: Reverend Parris is such a key, interesting figure here, and I would also consider him to be one that's been, I don't know if misunderstood is the term, or that many people have understood him differently. When you see programs on television that might be on the more sensational side. He's the easy person to make the, quote, "bad guy," of this story that people will claim things about him as orchestrating this whole thing from the start, which I do not think there is evidence. Oh, and I think it actually really seems to catch him off guard when his daughter and niece begin to be afflicted and apparently unwell, as it appeared then.
With him feeling besieged, we get this from his collection of sermons, which is a wonderful source that kind of gives us a sense on [00:16:00] what, like in terms of mood, like what the temperature is in the community, what they would've heard each Sunday. He tends to preach darker sermons. This new church has been formally established, and he's trying to get other people to join, to baptize their children. Even if they're attending, they might not be joined as part of the congregation. And I think as other historians have looked at this, there's been this assumption that Reverend Parris was immediately controversial that I don't quite see. I see as time goes on, not everyone is up to date on their ministry taxes to support him and things like that. With prior ministers, that does seem like a sign of discontent. With him, it's not as significant in terms of the numbers of people, and other historians have looked into this, such as like Marilynne Roach, and noting that that's not actually as significant, [00:17:00] given that things like that happened in other communities, people not paying their taxes.
With Reverend Parris, it really appears to be just those last couple months before the witch-hunt when he comes into conflict with the village, really over the ownership of the parsonage is what I saw, reading the documents as the turning point. But prior to that, it does seem as though he's finally brought stability to a congregation that desperately needed some stability after the first few ministers not working out.
And when I mentioned the parsonage, the issue is the ownership, that something's discovered in the village record book that seems to imply the village voted to give the parsonage to Parris after they had signed a contract with him not doing that. And this confusion, this lack of understanding, of how that got in the book as if a town meeting had decided that, but in a New England town meeting, every voter is invited, and of all these [00:18:00] people had never heard of it. You can't have a secret town meeting. So when they get mad and riled up about this in the fall of 1691, it seems righteously so, and that is really the fracture. It it's more of a short term issue, not long term, since he got there in 1689.
Josh Hutchinson: I got the idea from your book that a lot of what we believe about factionalism in Salem Village wasn't really true, particularly about the role of the different village committees. Could you explain what the village committee was and what the other committees were responsible for?
Dan Gagnon: So this theory of factionalism, as put forward around 1970 by Boyer and Nissenbaum, has the village split among, according to the theory, two factions, one in the west, led by the Putnam family, that's more agrarian, more wanting independence for Salem Village, and one in the east, allegedly led by the Porters, who were more tied to [00:19:00] downtown Salem Town at that time. And then there's a claim that this somehow explains the accusations.
The village committee is like the selectmen of a town in New England. It's not a town, so you can't call 'em that. And what they do is they're the executive. In a New England town, the selectmen serve in place of a mayor. You have five people instead of one doing that role.
And their job is to call town meetings in the village. They set the agenda, and they're responsible for making sure that the tax is collected as the executive there. With their role, we've seen in the years before the witch-hunt, different village committees elected, and one will admit from the records, it seems interesting that they don't necessarily all seem to last the same amount of time or have the same length of a term, which I quite [00:20:00] honestly cannot entirely explain. It's not like they're elected every January 1st or something like that. But with the committee, it had been thought previously that right before the witch-hunt, in that fall of 1691, a committee that was, quote, "pro-Parris" was replaced by a committee that was, quote, "anti-Parris" and that was evidence of factionalism.
This doesn't really seem to bear out, in that the evidence used to claim that new committee is anti-Parris comes from after the witch-hunt. They only became anti-Parris because of the witch-hunt. They were not anti-Parris before the witch-hunt. So that is not a good way to characterize them. What we do see is the people chosen are those who are involved in examining the village record book, it [00:21:00] appears those who are the leaders of the group that is suddenly very angry about the parsonage public land being given to a private individual. But, for example, Francis Nurse on the Village Committee had been on one of the committees earlier, a special committee that was assigned to negotiate with Reverend Parris, and that he apparently supports Reverend Parris. Rebecca Nurse's son-in-law, John Tarbell, was on another committee that decides to hire Reverend Parris, and so they seem to be his supporters in 1689. I would not label it as an anti-Parris committee, though afterwards some of them end up being anti-Parris, but they were not at that moment in time.
Sarah Jack: Why wouldn't they give him his pay and his wood so much so that he's preaching about it, disgusted about it, it appears? Why did that happen?
Dan Gagnon: With Parris, once this issue, their dispute about the parsonage land [00:22:00] comes up, we have records in the Village Church record book, and then we have the village, like the village government record book. And the church record book is a better source, in that it's clearly in chronological order, and we understand what develops. But by looking at the two together, as well as a later deposition there, we see Parris being challenged over this alleged vote. Historians have viewed this in different ways, in terms of basically where did it leave off before the witch-hunt started?
I, in my reading of this, by putting documents in the order that logically to me seems to make sense, which is different than how, for example, Boyer and Nissenbaum in about 1970 had looked at this, really shows that [00:23:00] public outcry against Parris leading up to a town meeting in early December 1691. We have a deposition describing this town meeting, and it's signed by all of the people who were on the depositions from years later, but it's signed by the people who are on the Village committee in 1691 except Francis Nurse, because he just had passed away of old age by the time that document was written. So I wouldn't read into that any lack of support. He's simply not there to sign the piece of paper. And what they testified in court years later is that there is this town meeting, Nathaniel Putnam is the moderator, and they're talking about Parris's contract, canceling his contract.
I see that happening that year. It logically fits with the buildup we see at meetings at the church in the Village Church record book, clearly everything escalating and Reverend Parris pointing out he's afraid that the village may be taking a [00:24:00] step like this. We see at that moment, At this town meeting in that early December of 1691, outraged to the point that they invite Reverend Parris to the town meeting. Apparently, he didn't seemingly normally attend town meetings. I He could have, he lived there. But he's not at this town meeting, which is a little interesting. And when this topic of his contract comes up, they send someone to get him, would've been like a couple minutes down the road from the parsonage to the meeting house.
So they get him to come to this town meeting, and with the disputes presented as the moderator of the town meeting, Nathaniel Putnam announces basically that there is no longer a contract between the two, as it had been broken. This is a weird situation to be in, and I've described it before as him being basically like halfway fired.
What it means is his contract's canceled, and he won't get paid. But he still has a job. What [00:25:00] is a job if you're not getting paid? And it's only the core members of the village church that can fire him, and they don't. So he continues as the minister. He continues preaching, but he is outta luck in terms of being compensated that winter.
And here we get in the church book, him writing over and over, "I ask the members for firewood." He's desperate, because in that time, if you suddenly stop getting paid in December, and he doesn't really have a giant farm, he doesn't have a way to support himself, he relied on that salary. That family is in for a pretty horribly tough winter, and without outside help might not have enough food and firewood to make it through. .
Josh Hutchinson: When the witch trials started, his daughter and niece reported that they were afflicted, and then later on other people became afflicted, allegedly. What caused those afflictions?
Dan Gagnon: This here is probably like the million dollar question of [00:26:00] the witch trials, I would say, and it is an important one. It is one that we can answer, at least in part, or mostly. In terms of those who will eventually claim to be afflicted or appear to be afflicted, we're gonna end up with a couple dozen, and each of them is unique as to why they would be doing this.
But to start with the two you mentioned, Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, living in the parsonage with Reverend Parris, Betty's nine, Abigail's eleven, and that winter at the beginning of 1692, they have these fits. They're screaming, yelling, crawling under furniture, walking around on all fours, saying they see these specters, these images, weird shapes, colored animals, very bizarre, and to someone who saw this, presumably really frightening and strange.
With them as the first two, I would think that we have an example of a [00:27:00] psychological cause here, and there's other historians who have written really well on this. I would say that one that I found to be a good, description of this potential would be in Dr. Emerson Baker's book. That to me, I would say, is what I read that got me down this track, as I started to then look into these possibilities, look into these potential instances and disorders that would cause this. That was what first caught my attention. And looking into other examples, cuz there are other examples, even some quite recently, I guess this decade in the 2010s, so almost this decade, within 10 years, we'll say that frightening things like this have happened. And not only have they happened, but they've spread among people, which to me, and I think to most readers, is the part that's scary and confusing. What we see in the Parris household is these two young girls would've seen their parents under a lot of stress, would've [00:28:00] seen the family under stress.
I'm sure that Reverend and Mrs. Parris are constantly talking about," we might not have enough food to last the winter." They're gonna hear this and be worried. And so we could see some sort of manifestation of anxiety that then the two of them in this house in the winter kind of builds and builds. With Abigail Williams being Reverend Parris's, quote "niece," just being some sort of female relative, her background isn't quite as known.
And we will see that with the people who it spreads to next, who live across Salem Village and will be teenage young women, women in their young twenties. Many of them had some sort of traumatic incident in their past that would set them as some prime candidates for post-traumatic stress, which would lead to that maybe next. But Abigail Williams, not really knowing a ton about her background, that could have been the case with her. Why isn't she living with her parents? Why is she living with Reverend Parris? Did something happen to [00:29:00] them? So there's an open-ended possibility, but we don't know. We can't really come to a conclusion there.
With the others, we're gonna see people, some of these young women who had lost parents, had seen them killed, and once they had witnessed, this may have awoken some of that traumatic stress. As it goes on, though, I don't think that explains everything. In part, I said each person is their own case. And I would say as time goes on in Rebecca Nurse's case, as in like the accusations against Nurse, but then especially when we get to that summer, when we get away from the winter into the summer of 1692, there are cases of just fraud, fraud and the way that it's done, it means that somebody has to be lying.
The example I note that I really think is a key moment is with Ann Putnam Jr. After Rebecca Nurse has been arrested, she, according to her uncle, one of the deacons of the church, he [00:30:00] submits records to the court saying that Ann Putnam had chain marks on her, that she had been like whipped by one of these specters, these ghostly images, and he says that she came from the other room, has like marks on her arm, and that he's seen them and there's someone, another adult there as well.
That's not all in your mind then. We have two possibilities. He's lying under oath to the court, I don't think we necessarily have evidence to prove that, or he actually did see rings on her arm and he thinks he's telling the truth, which means that either Ann Putnam Jr or somebody else pressed something to her arm to fool him. But either way it's a lie, and it's fraud. And that's relatively early on.
Sarah Jack: I'm gonna ask about Rebecca getting accused. Can you clear up the misconceptions about why?
Dan Gagnon: I'm happy you phrased it that way, in that she [00:31:00] does not fit the typical mold, and by the typical mold or the attributes that would likely get one accused of a witch. When we describe them, you do have to keep in mind this is the Puritan perspective. This is this is not my categorization.
This is what they viewed at the time would likely get you accused of witchcraft, and many historians have gone through demographics of those accused of witchcraft in colonial New England and I'm sure other witch-hunts as well. But with New England, we have cases that are pretty well documented, really just one century period of time, and so it's really ripe for study and it's wonderful what other previous historians have done. One of the best I think is Carol Karlsen's book, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, describing how this is, of course, primarily a story of women, unfortunately being accused of witchcraft, though with Salem we have both.
Now, Rebecca Nurse is a woman, and that is the only demographic trait about her that would put her in a higher risk [00:32:00] category of being accused of witchcraft. Other things that could do that could be a person who gets into a lot of disputes with their family. We don't have any evidence of this, and out of all the people accused, her family goes the greatest distance to support her. No, that doesn't seem true.
People in general, but especially women who may have had different views and controversies with the local religious authorities, their minister, their congregation. She's a covenant member of the church in Salem. Very few of the people who show up every Sunday attained that status. It's really the highest status a woman could get in the Puritan congregation. And you had to be voted in by the other members who, in the short version, had to believe that you were probably going to heaven. So this is really like the opposite of having controversy or disputes with your church. She is, seems entirely on board and is a high level member.
Other things [00:33:00] could be coming to control land. 17th century New England women couldn't own land, and so how they could come to control land was if their husband died, or especially if their husband died and they didn't have any children. That's not true of Rebecca. Francis nurse is alive. She has eight children, not likely.
Things that Puritans in general look down upon could be those who were less well off, poor. In this point, I really come to Sarah Good, one of the first three women accused, who was not exactly homeless but had lived with various people over the time, had begged for goods and things. She would fall into that category. So we don't really see this fit.
And with the, when I mentioned the coming into land one, there's other things like financial jealousy that could lead one to be accused, whether they were a woman or a man. And we don't see that with the Nurses. Frequently in debt, behind in their taxes, they have what is [00:34:00] really like the world's sweetest deal of a mortgage and still cannot make those small annual payments on time, so they're not a candidate for financial envy.
Josh Hutchinson: Did Topsfield land dispute or her other land dispute about her property have anything to do with her accusation?
Dan Gagnon: The land dispute or land as an issue overall is seemingly one of the oldest theories, one of one of the longest lived. There's different like varieties or iterations of the theory. Some people will ask me, when I do walking tours of sites in Salem Village, "oh, it was all about taking, right? It was all a scheme. The people were accused to steal their farms." And there is no truth to this.
With Nurse specifically, as you ask, there's an instance where the Nurse family gets into a dispute with the Endicott family. These are the descendants of John Endicott, early governor of [00:35:00] Massachusetts. The Endicotts had a large farm, the Orchard Farm, that John Endicott had established. By this point, it's later generations living there, and this dispute actually predates the nurse family. It's the previous owner, Reverend Allen of Boston, who got into this dispute. He gets into this dispute with Zerubbabel Endicott, who's a doctor. We have his journal of recipes for medicine, I guess. It's some weird stuff like cat blood, and it's, there's weird stuff there. But he's a doctor, in theory.
And what happens is Reverend Allen comes to ownership of the Nurse farm right next door to his through a, there's a marriage. Reverend Allen's wife had inherited this land from an Endicott who she'd been married to at first. Then she marries Allen. Tries to transfer the land to them. As I mentioned previously, women couldn't own land, so it couldn't [00:36:00] pass through her hands to another person.
This is complicated. So in the Endicott family, I guess what I mean is they do think they have a strong claim to this. They will try to sue Allen, but then this happens after his wife passed away and it's left to him. But could it be left to him? This is the legal question, and there'll be a lot of disputes there.
Allen will then lease it to another person, Sanford, for a little while, and Sanford basically gives up after a short amount of time, cuz Endicott thinks he owns the whole farm. He comes into an issue with Nathaniel Putnam, who lives to the north of the Nurse family farm. There's a few acres there, and it's a mess.
Next, the Nurse family comes along into what already seems like a complicated situation, and it's safer for them, though, than what happened to Sanford. Allen has given up [00:37:00] on that land, a couple acres of Nathaniel Putnam. He's out of the picture. This is not a problem anymore. And when he will sell this to the Nurse family, a hundred percent mortgaged, but it is a sale, it's not a lease. When he sells it to the Nurse family, he promises in that agreement to defend title of the land. So for Francis Nurse and Rebecca, this is a good deal, really low annual mortgage payments, big farm. They have adult children to help farm this. It's a great opportunity, and if anybody starts complaining about who owns it, that's Allen's problem. It's not their problem.
Now, obviously in a practical matter, it is their problem, but at least not legally. And with these disputes there, there's various iterations that really seem like they're drowning in court cases. There's suits, countersuits. Then somebody wins and the other side doesn't like it, so they [00:38:00] appeal.
One that comes in particular is a trespass suit. The important part is Francis Nurse is sued for trespass in a field that he believes to be his. Okay is he trespassing or not? That depends on who owns the land. And so that's really just a venue to try to reopen this land dispute that had already been settled several times.
It really involves a strip of land with firewood, in particular the border on the Nurse farm and the Endicott farm. But in theory, there's a claim to the whole farm even by the Endicotts. We know that this doesn't lead to the accusation against Nurse, in that Zerubbable, the Endicott who was really getting into this with Allen and Francis Nurse, is not around, that he's died at that point in time. In fact, he had launched an appeal of one of the court cases, and he is too ill to actually make the appeal. And then he had died. So it's a son, Samuel, [00:39:00] who's the Endicott now living next to the nurse family. And when Rebecca Nurse is accused of witchcraft he will defend her. He will sign the petition in support of her. Maybe they weren't best friends, but he believed she was innocent enough that he would look past the fact that maybe their families hadn't been best friends, and he does not accuse her or nobody else. So that, to me, limits that.
It was Nathaniel Putnam. Again, in some strict technical sense, there was still those couple acres at issue that was not Francis's problem, that was Reverend Allen living in Boston. And Nathaniel Putnam also will defend Rebecca Nurse when she's accused of witchcraft. So I can't really see a way that plays in.
Sarah Jack: What effect did the Devil Pact, as a part of the 1604 Witchcraft Act, have on witch-hunting?
Dan Gagnon: Good legal question. I like it. So with the Witchcraft Act of 1604, we get all the way back to England. We get to King James of King James Bible fame, [00:40:00] and oh, as of course, "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" is a quote from the King James Bible. I don't even need to say that. I should know my audience well.
So with this act, there's an idea that the definition of witchcraft has changed at that point. Now, this is before Rebecca Nurse is born. She's not born until 1621. So this is already, will be established by this point in time. This is the law that they appear to be going under in, in 1692.
Previously witchcraft was more difficult to prove. I don't really want to use, I mean that in a legal sense, which we're not actually proving witchcraft here, but legally to prove that one had to have used witchcraft, for example, in an earlier iteration of the law, to actually kill somebody, in order for that to be legally witchcraft. And you had to prove. That's a high bar, and we know it's impossible, but from the beliefs in that day and age, highly unlikely to meet that bar.
And [00:41:00] when King James changes it to making a pact with the Devil, you had to look for kind of secondary evidence. You can't call the Devil to the witness stand. You don't actually have the contract to present to the court. And so they would try to find roundabout, peripheral things that could prove that had happened, which is really loose and not hard evidence. And this change will make it easier to prosecute someone for witchcraft.
King James was really fascinated with this stuff. He writes his book Demonology. He really thinks this is fascinating and goes to great lengths in Scotland, before he becomes King of England, when he is King of Scotland, to crack down on what he seems to believe is real. Like he seems to really believe in the witchcraft and will be involved in torturing people to get confessions and really horrible things. But that change really does open the door to what we see in Salem. And had it not happened, legally, really, [00:42:00] I'm racking my brain to think of any of the accusations that could have fit under previous versions of the law.
I can't in this moment, think of one that they would've had to have been immediately been a murder, and somebody would've been in to it through witchcraft. It could not have started the way that it does in Salem. It could not have continued, and it could not have spread to 200 people. It would've had to been one very specific accusation.
No, the Salem Witch-Hunt really couldn't have happened without this change.
Josh Hutchinson: Another thing that seemed to change with the Salem Witch-Hunt, they didn't require the accusers to post a bond when they made their complaints. Why did they waive the bond?
Dan Gagnon: So typically if one files a complaint against somebody for a capital crime, basically the colony of Massachusetts didn't want frivolous accusations of any large [00:43:00] crime, and so they made you put your money where your mouth is and put out a bond that you would follow through on this charge as that person would be arrested and sent through the court process.
It's not really clear, and I have never found a good explanation of why, and those from the first accusations on, people in Salem Village would go to Salem, meet with the two local magistrates, the local judges, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, whose house still exists as The Witch House in Salem, which is a wonderful 17th century home, and they weren't asked for money. They just filed the complaints. I cannot explain this. It is very unusual. It doesn't fit with what the law appears to be and definitely doesn't fit with prior precedence. But we see in effect, if you can make an accusation no strings attached, that'll lead to a lot more accusations [00:44:00] than you can only make an accusation if you lay out a certain number of pounds as a like surety here. So that will definitely lead to this increasing, which Salem being unique from other witch-hunts in a lot of ways, is really unique with just the sheer number of people accused.
Prior witchcraft accusations were just one people, two people. I will say I listened the other day to both of you talking to Malcolm Gaskill there, and in that, the Springfield, Massachusetts case and thought that was fascinating. But to use that as an example, there's not 200 people accused. It's small scale. Other New England witch-hunts were one or just a few people. Salem getting us to about 200 probably is because it was easier to make an accusation.
So spectral evidence is not hard evidence that can be produced in court. As was mentioned with the question about the 1604 act, when it changes to somebody being able to be accused for having a pact with the Devil, lowering the [00:45:00] threshold of an accusation, and what can you submit as evidence? If you claimed you saw somebody's specter, which would be like the ghostly image of somebody hurting you, the belief is one can only make a specter if they had signed that pact with the devil.
So this spectral evidence is meant to tie them to having made a pact with the devil. The problem is pretty straightforward in that, okay, if I say that I see the specter of somebody and nobody else can see it, you just have to take my word for it. Do you believe me or not? And so it just becomes one person's word against another. You can't prove it, which back to the number of people accused, really makes it easier to accuse people.
And it's hard to refute. If somebody says they see their specter, and it seems like people are believing them, how do [00:46:00] you disprove it? You can't. You can say, " I wasn't there. I was at home." Yeah, okay, but the belief is you can send your specter somewhere you aren't. So even if you have an alibi, it doesn't matter. Alibis don't work. With Nurse, for example, she is home sick in bed. She says she's sick in bed for eight or nine days prior to being accused. People said they'd seen her specter. Nurse has an alibi. She's been home sick. Her family can tell you this. Neighbors can tell you this, but it doesn't matter. Because you can't have an alibi with that. And so it's an accusation that can't be disproved or really refuted. Well, from our point of view, because it shouldn't be believed in the first place. But if it is believed you, you can't get out from under it.
Sarah Jack: And I was thinking as you read through Rebecca's experience, that was, she was everywhere causing harm, and so over and over she was hearing them say, yes, she had the Devil pact, and she was causing harm. That's a gut punch. [00:47:00] Every time every new person had spectral evidence against her, it was that.
Josh Hutchinson: On the subject of taking their word for it, a lot of people whose word they were taking were children. Ordinary for them to take the word of children in court?
Dan Gagnon: No. Now, socially, the Puritans had a different view of children than we do. They, for example, I described some of them as being teenagers. That word didn't exist. It doesn't exist until the mid 20th century. It's one of those 1950s words, "those teenagers," and that whole concept of categorizing people didn't really exist.
And so this, I think, is socially hard for us to kind of put ourselves in their shoes or try, because even basic understandings of like stages of human life and social development aren't really at all understood. With children, if one reads things written by like Cotton [00:48:00] Mather and such, there seems to be this belief that children have been, like less corrupted by the world than adults, which would lead one to maybe actually believe they're more likely to speak the truth.
Now, in the 21st century, we would not necessarily think this, that, there might be like, little white lies all the time with kids. I teach teenagers. I understand this well, so our view on that is different. And in terms of their evidence in court, no, you had to be a certain age, you had to be in your late teens or older to be legally admitted as evidence.
And this is not followed in 1692. Just like we noted about requiring posting of a bond in order to make an accusation, we have another irregularity. With the first accusers, we have Betty Parris who's nine, Abigail Williams, who's eleven, Ann Putnam Jr who is just on the cusp of being a preteen and a [00:49:00] teenager, and we'll have other teenagers or people in the early twenties, but they shouldn't have been allowed to really submit and swear to evidence at trial.
And as part of that, what I note as being important in Nurse's case is when not Ann Putnam Jr., who seems to be the first person to have named Rebecca Nurse, but her mother, Ann Putnam Sr., who is, we believe, in her mid thirties, when she joins the accusation, that makes it different, because there's a full-fledged adult now making the same accusations, and legally that's important. That's also why, in terms of paperwork and sources, the complaints with John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin early on against people in Salem Village, it's not written by Betty Parris. It's not written by Abigail Williams. They're all written by adults. An adult [00:50:00] had to make the accusation. Also, they're all written by their male family members, cuz they're the ones more likely to know how to write. So I, there is like a practical aspect of that. But there is an age aspect ,that no, they didn't have children testifying in capital cases regularly.
Sarah Jack: What is, you mentioned Ann Sr, which has me thinking about the fraud again, the possibility of fraud. And did the accused people claim fraud was happening?
Dan Gagnon: Yes, as time goes on. At first with Rebecca Nurse being accused early on, she doesn't openly say that this is a lie. Which is, in a way, is almost probably smart, because it was so believed by the community that probably would've just soured her public hearing against her. She says it's not true, but she doesn't go to the point of saying they're intentionally, [00:51:00] falsely accusing her. Her words as you go through seem to be more along the lines of, "this is a misunderstanding," not, "why are you doing this to me intentionally?"
As time goes on, more and more of the accusers will be called out for intentional acts. Like at Nurse's trial in June, we have an example of Sarah Bibber, a middle-aged woman, a fully-grown adult, again, to differentiate from some of those younger accusers in, and we discussed a moment ago who, at her trial, at Nurse's trial is present, as seemingly all of her accusers are, except maybe Mrs. Ann Putnam, which is interesting, and Sarah Bibber does, is, everyone in the room sees her point at somewhere in the room and say there's Nurse's [00:52:00] specter. Meanwhile, Rebecca Nurse is up front, and everybody could see where she actually is, but point somewhere and see what she claims is her specter, scream, clutch her leg, and pull out a pin. And she's bleeding, and she says, "Nurse's specter just did that. See, here's the pin, here's the blood that I was just attacked by witchcraft." She's gonna be called out. We know that Rebecca Nurse's daughter-in-law is going to write to the court afterwards. It's a document. It's not addressed to one person in particular. We believe it's sent in with the documents to her appeal, saying, "that wasn't true. I was watching Sarah Bibber, and I saw her pull the pin out of her clothing, stab herself, and then point and say there's a specter, and yell, and that, that's obviously fraud."
There's the infamous incident at Sarah Good's trial at about the same time where somebody comes forward with that part of a knife, claiming that they snapped the knife off from a specter stabbing them, and then someone else says, "oh, that's actually mine. [00:53:00] I broke it the other day," and shows the other half. And I mean of calling somebody out for lying, that is really the most public and prime example of this.
With some of Nurse's defense testimony that her family gathers, they do also approach that line of calling out people as having lied in the past and therefore being untrustworthy. We will see, for example, Abigail Williams will have her credibility, I don't even want to say tested, really destroyed, pointing out incidents where she's lied and been unreliable for like basic facts about her day. And if you can't trust her with those, you can't really trust her with an accusation that could lead to the death penalty. And she won't be used as witnesses in court after that. That's why her, really, her credibility is wrecked.
There'll be others as well [00:54:00] who've been pointed out, as Sarah Bibber and such, as having fits in the past in a way that does make them sound fake and convenient and being really dramatic about things that calls into question, which that example with the pin only builds upon it, and the Nurse family does that well.
That idea that they have defense evidence for Nurse defending her, speaking to her having a good character and being a good person, but also the category of evidence attacking the credibility of her accusers. I mean that this is a modern, like, defense strategy. It's like the textbook example. And they're doing that as, frankly, like amateurs. None of them are lawyers. There are no defense lawyers. So it is impressive how they put this together. And Nurse, because of her family, really has the best defense out of anyone at trial.
Josh Hutchinson: Why did the defense evidence carry less weight than [00:55:00] prosecution evidence?
Dan Gagnon: There's two parts to why the defense evidence carries less weight. The first is, there's just that burden of assumed guilt in the background that by this point, people were convinced, seemingly a majority or a grand part of the locals, that witchcraft was actually happening. And after seeing, like Nurse's first hearing, the behavior of the accusers couldn't be explained another way.
So already you're starting out in a hole, trying to dig yourself out. Second, we have a procedural thing with the prosecution's evidence, according to the rules of trial, at that point in time, Ann Putnam, Jr., I'll just pick as an example, had submitted written evidence. She herself did not write this, her father wrote this. She, we don't think, can write. And was brought forward. Evidence is read in front of the court. She swears an oath saying, yes, those are my words. Yes, this is true. I'm paraphrasing, [00:56:00] but that's the gist of the oath.
With the defense evidence, it could not be sworn. It's not the same status then. The prosecution evidence, someone swore under oath it's real. The defense evidence, eh, some guy just wrote it down on a piece of paper. It's not the same category and can't be, and it can't be just, you're not allowed to do that with defense evidence. It's strange. It's not something that will really continue too much past here.
As to reasons why, it's, in one way, it's often by like legal historians phrased as a way that kind of allowed you to do more for your defense. Like you didn't actually have to worry if you're telling the truth to defend yourself, written in a way that like implies this helps somebody on trial in their defense, maybe in some instances. But for a jury that's following the strict rules, yeah, you're not gonna hold that defense evidence to the same weight, cuz it's not sworn under oath. There's no penalty of perjury. [00:57:00] There's no penalty. They could be saying whatever, and there's no consequence. So that is really just a system stacked against you.
Sarah Jack: That's really clarifying, because as I've been on my journey of coming to understand more of this, the Salem Witch-Hunt, I remember how puzzled I was. These petitions were getting signed, and these people were standing up and standing for these accused, and I just thought, why was it taking so much? And it still didn't, they had to keep trying a new, someone else to back them up. Another plea. And that really speaks to why.
Dan Gagnon: Because otherwise you'd look at it, and in my look at this, they have some pretty great defense evidence. It looks like it's a lopsided case in favor of the defense, but no.
Sarah Jack: What drove your project about Rebecca?
Dan Gagnon: My project about Rebecca has really [00:58:00] early starts. My connection to the story of Rebecca Nurse goes back a lot of years. I grew up right down the road. I live in Danvers, there used to be Salem Village. I'm coming to you live from Salem Village, I suppose that could be the the billing, and being around these historic sites and the monuments.
I played soccer for years at the field behind the Salem Village Witch Trials Memorial. Lost more games than I won, but we played in that field all the time. That's where the Danvers youth soccer plays. So I was just always around these places, and in particular, my first summer job as a teenager was at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, as the guy selling tickets and then eventually the person doing tours as a tour guide. And that kind of is really the start, learning from the wonderful volunteers there. Once I started giving tours, I was trying to read all of these books to make sure I was doing it right, and you never wanted a question that would [00:59:00] stump you as the 15 or 16 year old tour guide that was a wary and happened naturally.
So that was when I first started looking into this, talking with people who came through, hearing the questions that people had. Some who would ask questions that you'd think to yourself, never would've thought of that angle. Also hearing the questions about things that were just debunked myths that somehow lived on.
I know that Margo Burns does such a great talk about why Ergotism doesn't make sense, but if I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me about Ergotism, I would not need to be a public school teacher anymore. That how often that comes up, or the land grab theory, and that showed me that despite this being one of the quintessential events in American history, everybody's heard of the Salem Witch trials, many people through high [01:00:00] school with reading The Crucible, I suppose, is many people's first introduction, but despite this event being so well known, a lot of people actually don't know it. That kind of stuck with me. Another thing that was important, as I went around to other historic sites, visiting other museums on vacation and things like that, is I realized it's really weird that there's no full biography of Rebecca Nurse.
The Nurse Homestead was selling this little pamphlet written by a gentleman, Charles Tapley, a local historian in Danvers, who really just wrote it based on Charles Upham's work in the 19th century, and it's really just about her time in 1692. So it's not a biography. There's nearly nothing about the before, nothing about the after. It's just the actual time of the witch trials.
And as I went to other historic sites, I realized that every museum related to a person, they do sell a biography of that person. God, if you go to Mount Vernon, think about how many biographies of George Washington you could buy. And that makes [01:01:00] sense. That's good. That should be the norm.
With my then look at the witch-hunt I went to college, I went to graduate school. I studied contemporary Europe. It's the formation of the European Union. Not really relevant to this. When I returned home after I completed graduate school, I then turned to this project, in about 2017, and I realized that a biography also gives us a better view, I think, into how people are affected.
When I go around to museums, historical societies and give talks about the book, I always start out with, maybe in a good, Puritan way, my defense of this project, like a minister writing his book. You start with your defense of why you'd be so bold as to do something like write a book about this. And I start that way, because inevitably people would ask, there's a ton of great books about the witch trials. Why one more? And it is a good question. There are excellent ones, amazing ones, but there was no, at this point in [01:02:00] time, there was no standalone full scholarly biography of a victim of the witch-hunt on the market. That is a category that should have been filled. A biography allows us to get to what a tragedy this is.
Many of these other books written about the witch-hunt, especially the more academic ones, the way that I saw it, is they tried to cover too much. This event is too big to actually really understand it, if you try to include all 200 people who are accused. You'll never get to know them. You'll never understand them as a person, understand how an accusation affected them, affected their family. You can't, or at least I can't, keep that many people straight in my mind as I'm reading about it. But if you pick one person, you can tell it as a real narrative of a human life where they start out. In the case of Rebecca Nurse, a life being [01:03:00] fairly ordinary, she lives in a somewhat exceptional time, though, being born in England in chaos, coming to the new world, settling that is an exceptional time. But out of those who make that journey, yeah, the Towne family is reasonably average. It's nothing really exceptional.
And then have a life utterly wrecked and destroyed in the witch-hunt. And then you see, because it's a story about one human being, of course, their immediate family is key to this story, both before but especially after. How can the Nurse family try to go back to normal after people in their town are responsible for killing their mother, or wife, in the case of Francis Nurse? And we see this as a tragedy. It really should be seen as a tragedy, cuz it is. And I really think a biography is the one way you can actually, like get that true emotional understanding of how this ruins people's lives.
Sarah Jack: You definitely were able to convey the [01:04:00] lack of respect and the inhumanity that they were receiving, how she had to stand and she wasn't well, all of the ways the experience in the jail was horrible, what they were witnessing, what they were being told, what they were hearing, the conditions. So you definitely that. Thank you for putting that in there.
Josh Hutchinson: You've heard us talk about the case in Springfield, and we really love these intimate portrayals, where you get a close feeling of what happened to a person. Like you said, the big surveys, it's hard to grasp everything that happened, because there's just so much of it, and every subject has to get glossed over, basically, to fit it all in a book. So we really love that you did this book. What do you want people to take away from their reading experience?
Dan Gagnon: I would start with things that I learned along the way compared to me starting out as a teenager [01:05:00] talking to visitors about the witch-hunt and where I got through this research project to my kind of, new understanding, hopefully better understanding, but new understanding of the event is things start small.
This starts in a very tiny way, and this is true in basically all events in history that what we think of as giant historical events start one thing out of the ordinary, and it goes from there. When I talk about this on my walking tours, that's really how I phrase it. When we're standing at the parsonage site, it's one small thing. One day, two children became unwell, and that's where everything starts. We also see an element of just unfortunate things that happen to people that are not in any way their fault. Like with Nurse, there's nothing that she has done to warrant this. There's nothing that really could have [01:06:00] even set her up for this accusation.
It just happens to her and in a way that you can't anticipate. Maybe it's the history teacher in me, but whenever we study historical events, we already know the ending and we work back from there. But we really need to start at the beginning. That's why the biography narrative, I think, is important, because you need to see how it develops. The causes of things are not necessarily how you'd view it if you start at the end.
The last thing again is just the the fact that this story is about real people is really the big takeaway. That is something to be considered. And the fact that it's about real people who never did anything that they were accused of doing. They are not witches. They did nothing like that. And that it really is innocent people.
Josh Hutchinson: How does this story compare to other witchcraft cases?
Dan Gagnon: [01:07:00] So we have other witchcraft cases in New England. We have other witchcraft cases in Old England, in continental Europe. And the Salem Witch-Hunt is unique in a lot of ways. Is it the worst example of a witch-hunt ever? No. There's examples in Germany of more people being accused, more people being executed, things that lasted even longer.
Those places aren't Witch City, even though Salem is witch city, rightfully or wrongfully, but that is the way that it is labeled and billed. With the Salem Witch-Hunt. It's unique because of so many people. Out of the New England witch-hunts, at least, it's the biggest, up to about 200 people accused is wildly different than the previous ones.
The aspect of how geographically far and [01:08:00] wide it is is interesting. It's not just one town. It starts in Salem Village, now Danvers, and Salem Village does really remain the focal point throughout, but the accusations are far and wide, as far north as Maine with Reverend George Borroughs, as far south as Charlestown, today part of Boston, as far west as the towns of Billerica, Woburn or around there, it's a broad area. We will see, for example, some towns it's just one person or a handful accused there from people in Salem Village, other towns that it's people from that town accusing people from that town, like Andover that actually has the highest number of people accused. That's almost a little like microcosm of the witch-hunt in itself. It's its own category. Richard Hite's book In the Shadow of Salem does an amazing job of looking at the Andover category, cuz it really is its own category.
Other [01:09:00] ways that the Salem Witch-Hunt is unique compared to others is the ending. When you only have one or two people accused of witchcraft, you don't usually have a growing public opposition, because it's over swiftly. When you have 200 people accused, it takes a while to put all these people on trial, naturally, and so what we have here is an example of people really opposing and turning against a witch-hunt. You don't see that in every other instance. The opposition comes from families of the accused most naturally, most obviously. We could have guessed that.
One other thing that I had found that I thought was interesting is really the opposition from the high-level ministers. I think that people's understanding of the witch-hunt doesn't really have them as opponents, but they were opponents of, at least, the process. It's not that they doubted the witches were real. To them, witches were real, but they did not think the court was doing the process the right way. And so they are opponents and critics in that [01:10:00] regard.
And lastly, with the witch hunt, as I mentioned, Salem allegedly being Witch City, it really captures the American imagination in a way that others don't today. A lot of that is thanks to The Crucible, but it did even before then. With Nurse as an example, the idea that she's the first person in North America accused of witchcraft to get a memorial in 1885. Clearly there's something special and unique about this compared to other accusations and witch hunts.
Sarah Jack: I was gonna ask you what does your book do to authenticate Rebecca's fame? But you've really captured that with your answers today. And so I wanna, as one of her descendants, I really wanna thank you for that.
Dan Gagnon: I appreciate it, and I'm happy to be talking to a descendant of Rebecca Nurse. I will say that wherever I have gone, [01:11:00] every time that I have talked, anywhere that I've ever talked, whether it's online or in person, there's always people in the room who are descendants of Rebecca Nurse that turn out. And that is an amazing thing, and I think that also shows how it's important for people as yourself, who do have a connection to people involved in the witch-hunt, or as Josh mentioned, a connection to other people in Salem Village. That kind of makes the story closer to the 21st century, and I am always happy when I talk with people who have that connection.
Josh Hutchinson: Sarah and I are both descendants of Rebecca's sister Mary, so we have that cousin connection between us that we probably wouldn't realize if it was any other great grandparent, we wouldn't have made that connection.
Sarah Jack: When you talked about the double marriage, Elizabeth, she married a Russell, and then the grandchildren of Mary and Rebecca married, and [01:12:00] that's why I connect to both of them. It's the same line that a couple other cousins in the Towne Association connect through, too. So there's a little group of us, maybe a big group.
Dan Gagnon: And there's another example of the significance of the Salem Witch-Hunt, is not just I have met descendants one off, but that there are organizations of descendants, clearly, that there's something really meaningful here, if people are forming organizations.
Sarah Jack: When it came to the exonerations in Massachusetts, it was because people petitioned for them. It would've stayed as it was without people standing up whatever time in history. They did that, and Massachusetts responded to that. And it just, it makes me think of the other descendants that are coming forward out of Connecticut and other trials. And one of the questions why is this relevant? Why is it important? But it's important for many of the things that you pointed out about the meaningfulness of the [01:13:00] story, the connection to the ancestor, and if, you know, nobody stands up and asks it, it won't happen. So I was, that resonated with me too when I was reading that in your book, how people came forward and asked.
Dan Gagnon: And with that, I really think of the scene when they dedicate the Rebecca Nurse Monument in the family cemetery, that you have the minister from the Salem Village Church, who comes out and says, "it is right for us to be reevaluating these things. It is right for us to be remembering these people," countering that claim of why does it matter that apparently exists in 1885 too, not just today. And that he really sets out, it's the Reverend Rice, that this is important to do, and it is just to build this monument. To take this day to remember that because it is important and he connects it to, we learn from it and hope to do better in the future.
Josh Hutchinson: How does this [01:14:00] story relate to the present? Do you see any parallels?
Dan Gagnon: I do. There's writers, filmmakers who have made all sorts of connections to the present, whether the present was 1980 or the present is 2022, depending on when they were writing or making their media. And there's some that are timeless. This idea of a community gripped by fear of something they don't understand is, there's millions of ways that could be relevant to basically every community on earth.
There's things about people assuming something they've been told without critically evaluating it. Witchcraft was part of their worldview, and that was something that they very much took for granted. It's not that we actually would've quite found that in 1692, but it's one of those that hopefully we've progressed past.[01:15:00]
And what we also see at the end I think of is even somewhere where there has been some awful incident where people are to blame. And in this case, meaning the accusers that yeah, a community might take a while, it might take a long while, might need some outside help, but they do need to try to go back to normal afterwards, and that I think is really hard to imagine.
We know it's hard to imagine the idea that people believed in witchcraft. Everybody can think, oh, how could they believe that? But how can you imagine them going back to normal afterwards? And I'm sure around the world there are countless examples of horrible tragedies where somebody is at blame that, through whatever circumstance, have to try to put things back together.
And in Salem Village it takes years. It takes years. [01:16:00] Maybe you could say generations, cuz people weren't really open to talking about this for generations. But it happened. There's a memorial to the victims. There was the memorial to Nurse a while back, and then the memorial in Salem Village in 1992, and then one in, in downtown Salem a couple months later in, in 1992. So it, it's eventually dealt with and recognized, but it really, it can't just be the elephant in the room. It has to be that acknowledged, and the people who are wronged should be remembered.
Sarah Jack: And it's not just moving forward, it's, as you said, dealing with it to move forward. And I think that's kind of what we're finding in Connecticut. They pushed forward, but some of the stuff is bubbling up. People have questions, they wanna know more, they wanna remember their ancestors. They want to have names made good again. So it, there's lessons to be learned for sure. And it is very relatable [01:17:00] to, like you said, horrible situations where there is bad happened, because people did bad things.
Josh Hutchinson: And we have some guests coming up that you might find interesting from other nations, where witch-hunts are still happening. And one of the things we want to talk to them about is how does a community move forward after something like that happens?
And that's something that we can learn a little from Salem and other trials.
Sarah Jack: Modernly this happens, and then you see it in some other cases in New England, where a stigma sticks with a family, and then maybe some new accusations on the new generation come up. In Salem it was that they were able to move on without a new thing erupting. Why is that?
Dan Gagnon: So I think that's another way of getting back to the Salem trials as being unique in that no, there really[01:18:00] couldn't have been future accusations in that community after this, because it was done, and it was really recognized by the majority, not every soul, but the majority of having been wrong and misguided right when it ended.
It doesn't really take time for people to realize it was wrong. They discovered it was wrong, and that's why they put pressure to get the court stopped. That realization comes first. With some of these other witchcraft accusations in New England with only one person, they are in some instances, found guilty and executed, and only later do people begin to think back, maybe that wasn't quite right. Whereas with Salem, it's the belief that wasn't quite right comes first, before the end of the event. And it's interesting in that one would think that there would've been much more immediate sort of coming to [01:19:00] terms with the whole event right away.
It doesn't happen it, there are a couple reasons that the government of Massachusetts really didn't want to get into this. I always roll my eyes when I read the act that eventually clears names and they will go on, and they'll eventually compensate, not as reparations, cuz the government doesn't admit doing anything wrong, but a level of compensation. And in these laws, they're very clear to say, you can't sue us, you can't sue the Commonwealth of Massachusetts over this. And I think that kind of stops, in a way, drags out the coming to terms with it, because that's a shifting of guilt. And so that, that lengthens it.
Sarah Jack: I was just gonna ask you, Dan, if you wanted to say anything else or share anything else before we wrap up.
Dan Gagnon: I think that I would. I would say that one thing about the witch-hunt that I also think is important, and not just with [01:20:00] my prior involvement with the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, but is the idea that so many people also come and visit the actual places where this is involved.
The people I know have gone, they go to the memorials in Salem at Proctor's Ledge in Salem, the one in Salem Village, the Salem Village Memorial in Danvers. They go to the parsonage site where Reverend Parris had lived. That's now an archeological dig. They try to go to these places and try to get a connection that way to the history of the event. And people will even do this, going to places where there isn't necessarily a house. There's people who go up to Topsfield, where some of those people who were accused lived, and some of it's still farmland and just kinda walk around to try to get a feel for the place, a connection to the event, try to remember. If there is a family connection, then trying to make a family connection.
But in the sense that these places can be visited, and I think that is a good way to learn about history. It's going to [01:21:00] those places, I'm a big proponent of you can really get a sense of a place just in a like walk around it. I think of people who walk the Freedom Trail in Boston, which has wonderful historic sites. Yeah. When you're walking along skyscrapers, lose the historic sense, though, as you're going through downtown Boston. Whereas some of the Salem Village sites, you can still feel it. The Nurse Homestead 30-acre farm. It feels like a farm. There's an accurate feel. The parsonage site isolated enough you can kind of get a feel of this place. And of course there are the memorials in downtown Salem that are busier. I would encourage people to do that or really do that with any historical event that interests them, not just this one, but by going to places I think you can learn even more than just reading.
Josh Hutchinson: And now here's Sarah with another edition of End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: Here is End Witch Hunts [01:22:00] World Advocacy News. This week, you listened in on some informative conversation about the memorial projects for Rebecca Towne Nurse and the other executed accused witches of the Salem Witch trials that were organized by their descendants and community. If you have listened through the episode catalog of our podcast, you are now familiar with the enacted exonerations, requested exonerations, memorializations of those accused and executed witches. Descendants, historians, and advocates are telling the stories of the innocent victims from 330 years ago or more. Some victims now have monuments, and all are remembered because we are writing, filming, and talking about what happened. Doesn't it feel like some enduring wrongs are being righted?
The layers of circumstances that created these past witch trial situations are pulling apart under examination. We are pointing out how indoctrination of witch fear and misfortune-blaming were part of the consistent contributors that led to historical [01:23:00] witch-hunts. In many world communities, witch-hunts are past, but as much as this is to be celebrated, we have to stay focused on the witch-hunt dangers many women and children find themselves in today.
This week, Nigerian advocate and activist, Dr. Leo Igwe , wrote an article speaking about the fear and illusion of witchcraft meetings and witchphobia in his community. He's telling us that witchphobia is being perpetuated and disruptive to the end of witch-hunts in Nigeria. This is not a historical reflection.
This thriving fear of harmful witchcraft is the cause of substantial abuse and murder against children and elderly women now. Just like in early modern witch trial history, the educated and powerful are often not intervening, but today, according to the established law, they should intervene to protect the vulnerable alleged witches.
He writes, "like people in western countries, Africans should abandon the illusion that supernatural witchcraft meetings and other occult nocturnal gatherings [01:24:00] take place. They should discard this notion that supposed witches embark on magical flights to a coven where they engage in cannibalism or initiate children and other adults into the witchcraft world. These illusions drive irrational fears and horrific abuses of alleged witches in Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and other African countries."
Does this not sound like an echo of all witch-hunt history? An echo of the Salem Witch trial accusations and charges? Leo states that through socialization or indoctrination, the belief that witches metaphysically convene is pervasive. Remember you just heard in today's episode that alleged witches in Salem were found guilty of magically convening to cause harm.
The witch-hunt mentality is alive, and humanity is still gripped by illusions. Please follow Leo Igwe and read his updates. Hear what he says must be addressed. Stop believing in these illusions. Please reflect and consider his message. Share his message now. [01:25:00] These strongly held fears must be addressed so that they can be stopped immediately.
While we watch and wait, let's support the victims across the world. Use your social power to help them. Support them by acknowledging and sharing their stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunts movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts. And visit our website at endwitchhunts.org
End Witch Hunts movement and Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast support the worldwide movement to recognize and address historical wrongs.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that critical information. We need to learn more about what's going on in the world around us with these ongoing tragedies.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shult Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week for a very important guest from across the [01:26:00] ocean. Damon Leff of South Africa will be talking to us about his years of advocacy and what it's like for the victims experiencing witch-hunts in his country.
Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell everybody you know and everybody you meet about the show.
Sarah Jack: Please support our efforts to end witch-hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

[01:27:00]

December 29, 2022

Scottish Witch Trials with Mary W. Craig

Pre-Order New Book: “Agnes Finnie” by Mary W. Craig

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Show Notes

Take a look with us into Scottish witch trial history, as well as a close look at one particular Scottish witch trial. We discuss important historic details with historian and informative author Mary W. Craig. We are so pleased to get to learn about her new book release “Agnes Finnie the Witch of Potterrow Port” available for pre-order now. Mary fills the conversation with meaningful dialog around our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?, while also sharing valuable insight into the current witch trial pardon efforts in Scotland.

Links:

Mary W. Craig Website

Buy “Borders Witch Hunt” by Mary W. Craig

Apology of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon

Apology of Church of Scotland

Peebles Witch Trials

Witches of Scotland Campaign

RAWS Remembering the Accused Witches of Scotland Organization

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Advocacy Against Witch Hunts, South Africa

Leo Igwe, AfAW

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we talk to Mary W. Craig about Borders Witch Hunt, Scottish Witch Hunts, and her upcoming book, Agnes Finnie: the Witch of Potterow Port.
Sarah Jack: I do think people should read the Borders book before they read the Finnie book. That's what I think.
Josh Hutchinson: I think that's a good idea to get you some good background on Scottish Witch Hunts to read Borders Witch Hunt and learn about the 17th century [00:01:00] witch-hunt in Scotland, why it happened, what happened, why it was so different from English witch-hunts, what they did differently, which was so much. They were brutal. It was not fun and games in Scotland. It was serious, deadly business involving a lot of violence. It was legal to torture in Scotland.
Sarah Jack: You realized it's really incredible that the accused made it to the execution, and I know we saw accused in Salem perish in the prison, but nobody endured the amount of brutal examination that the victims of Scotland endured.[00:02:00]
Josh Hutchinson: In Scotland, they could torture you, in some cases, even if you were eight years old.
Sarah Jack: And the people that were fulfilling the different steps of the trial were getting paid well to do it.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes. We'll learn about brodders today, a. k. a. witch prickers, and what their role was in examining the suspects. We don't get into too much detail about what they did, but you can read all about it in the book, Borders Witch Hunt. She makes the medicine go down, and her approach to the book overall, it's very readable. It's informative. You learn a lot, but you enjoy the reading process of it.
Sarah Jack: We've been realizing the different nuances [00:03:00] of witch hunt management, mechanics, and behavior across the globe. And this was another one of those realizations, cuz we just aren't used to seeing the victims experience what they did here.
Josh Hutchinson: We like to remind people that in England and New England, they almost always hanged people. In Scotland, they did burn the bodies of the victims.
Sarah Jack: Her research was extensive, and her writing on it just perfectly descriptive and informative. And very visual. I felt like I could see it.
Josh Hutchinson: It is very visceral. She really takes you to Scotland, to these small borders communities in Borders Witch Hunt. And then in Agnes Finnie, she's gonna take us to the city of Edinburgh. We're going to learn about a not so great neighborhood called [00:04:00] Potterrow Port, where everyone is unfortunate and has a low income, and we'll learn how little the king cares about these people.
Sarah Jack: So after reading Borders Witch Hunt, we're getting to pull back another layer of the onion into the Scottish experience of witch hunting.
Josh Hutchinson: Her writing about Agnes Finnie, it's an intimate portrait of an individual. You get to see witch hunts through the eyes of one person. You get details on individual lives and individual case. It's not a global survey of witch hunts. It's not one page for each case. It's a whole book for one person's witchcraft trial.
Watch our [00:05:00] social media. We will be posting about this book, because our discussion coming up with Mary Craig is so enlightening, so eye-opening. It's such a pleasure to talk to her. She's one of those people, you feel like you could just talk to her all day about this topic.
Sarah Jack: We definitely could. The time flew by, but the information in the history that we gleaned from the conversation was incredible.
Josh Hutchinson: You'll want to listen to this episode more than once, I guarantee.
Sarah Jack: Borders Witch Hunt. I learned a ton about that. Like the Scotland, the England thing. I really did. I think that will be helpful to listeners. I am so happy to introduce our guest, author Mary W. Craig. We'll be talking about her book Borders Witch Hunt: 17th Century Witchcraft Trials in the Scottish Borders and her [00:06:00] upcoming project, Agnes Finnie: the Witch of Potterrow Port.
Mary W Craig: We've just recently unveiled a memorial to those who were executed in one particular trial in Peebles. We had 24 people executed in one day and then 3 individuals who were found not proven, cuz we have a not proven verdict in Scotland. They were then executed a week later. They were all part of the one trial, so we've just unveiled that memorial, which was really nice. We managed to get a minister to come along and give a little bit of a blessing, as well. So there's been lots of work. We've had an apology from the Church of Scotland over here, and we're working in the Scottish Parliament to have a pardon for all of those convicted under the witchcraft act. Things are going well over here.
Josh Hutchinson: We were gonna start by talking to you about the Peebles Witch Memorial. We saw that on your Twitter that you were there. Did you speak at that event?
Mary W Craig: I did, yes. We had a piper and then Elisa and Simon, who live in Peebles, unveiled memorial. Then I spoke for maybe [00:07:00] about five minutes, and then we had the minister, Tony, came along. He gave a blessing, and then as he read out 27 names, we had some fiddlers playing. And then we went back up to the youth center who very kindly gave us our premises for nothing. And I gave a sort of impromptu lecture about what happened during the trial. And that was really good because we had quite a few youngsters come along. We had two or three under the age of 12, but we had quite a sort of sprinkling of teenagers, which was really good to have the young people there interested. And it's, we're trying to get youngsters interested in history, can sometimes be a bit an, so it was good that they were there. .
Sarah Jack: There's been a little bit of movement with exoneration and talking about that over here in the states, Massachusetts just did an exoneration on their last witch, and that had a lot of teenagers involved, and that was a very important part. And I saw on Twitter that you had tweeted about some younger generation that was taking care of the history and could, could go forward with the history. And I thought, yeah, that's very important.
Mary W Craig: Especially as a lot of [00:08:00] those who were executed as witches were quite young themselves. The stereotype is of the old lady at the end of the village, and no, there were youngsters in the borders. We had people as young as eight and nine being accused of being witches. It mattered. It was young people of the day that were affected as well as everybody else.
Sarah Jack: When you were writing on the witch trials in Peebles, were you anticipating that you would be at a memorial so soon?
Mary W Craig: No. Now I'm gonna have to tell you how old I am. I first wrote about the Peebles Witch Trial back in 2008, and then I wrote again in 2020. So this has been a long haul. We didn't think we'd get an apology from the Church of Scotland. We were very surprised about that. And we were surprised as to how readily the community and people said, "yes, of course there should be a memorial." So it was great that everybody said, "oh, of course we need to talk about that, and we need to address what we've done in the past." So, surprising and very pleasing.
Josh Hutchinson: And why do you think it's [00:09:00] important to have the memorials?
Mary W Craig: I think because Scotland had a very high number of executions. We prosecuted and executed 10 times the number of people that they did in England per head of population. To give you a sort of idea, the numbers, Scotland at that time had a population of just under 1 million, and we executed 4,000 people that we know of. The figure is probably closer to 8,000, but 4,000 are the ones that we can definitively see in the records. Although some of the records say things like some witches, a few witches, we don't know how many that means. But for every individual that's executed, they were somebody's daughter, somebody's son, somebody's mother, somebody's sister.
So it would be the equivalent today of executing 24,000 people in Scotland today. It's a massive thing. It happened for a long time, and even when people weren't being arrested and executed, the Kirk session became almost like a morality police. [00:10:00] Everybody was terrified of witches or of being accused of being a witch or living next door to witch.
The Highlands and Islands were slightly doing better because of their, they had retained the links to Catholicism and the clan system was different up there. But for Lowland Scotland, it was a period of absolute terror, and it's something we have to recognize we got it very wrong, acknowledge what we got wrong, apologize to those who are affected, and learn from it for the future.
So that's why I think the memorials are important to see. We have memorials. Any village in Scotland has a memorial to the Great War. We should never forget the Great War. Unfortunately we did, and we're going into the Second World War. But the idea is to say, to literally put a marker in the ground to say, "we did this, we got it very wrong, we should never do this again. This level of prejudice, this level of othering people and finger pointing and blaming and shaming." And although we don't do that today, if you look at the way again, going back to young people, [00:11:00] the venom that can be on social media that's piling onto somebody and attacking somebody. That sort of mob rule, we have to stop that and we have to use the witch memorials as an example of how bad it can get.
Sarah Jack: That was so true. I'm learning so much about the Scotland trials. I just went through your book this week. And as far as descendants like over here the descendants tend to find each other, talk about it, "is there a memorial, do we need a memorial?" Do the descendants, are they a part of this? Were there descendants at the Peebles memorial? Do you hear from them?
Mary W Craig: No. What tended to happen was, because the terror was so absolute well into the 18th century, anyone who had been the son or the daughter of a witch is never going to admit it. What tended to happen was the second somebody got arrested, the family would absolutely deny any association. You'll get notes in the records of people saying, "oh no, she wasn't really my sister, she was only my half [00:12:00] sister" or, "no, she wasn't my mother, she was my stepmother." So people were so ashamed of what the person had done, because witchcraft was so evil, but obviously terrified that they themselves would get arrested.
Mary W Craig: And so within two or three generations, granny or great granny that was executed as a witch is airbrushed out of the family history. And because, of course, they weren't given Christian burial, because the church did not note their names, there is really not a way for people to go back and decide that was a relative of theirs. It's very difficult for you to trace back. And as I say, we have so many records that just say things like, "a few witches were burned." Partly fear, partly shame, and partly incomplete records. We have very few who can trace a true descent.
Josh Hutchinson: And what was a witch to the Scots in 17th century?
Mary W Craig: Okay, we could be here for some time. In the 16th century, everybody was Christian. There were a [00:13:00] few Jewish people around, but everybody was Christian. Witches were magical practitioners. They were Christians, but they were also able to do magic. So they could talk to the little people. They could talk to the kelpies or the selkies, or they could talk to the man in the black hat, and he would help you find lost property, or you might say a charm when you were trying to help a child become well. So it would be somebody who was a healer who would help you in that way.
They could also lay a spell on you if you were bad to them, but mostly they were thought of as good, and most communities knew of them. When you move into the 17th century after the Reformation and the Church of Scotland is terrified, it's got itself into siege mentality, it's surrounded by Catholics. It's not quite sure what the king's doing down in London, and we've got famine and pestilence and war going on in Scotland, which seems as if the devil is out there, using his handmaiden witches.
Then the [00:14:00] Church of Scotland takes the word "witch" and sticks it very closely, it cleaves it to the devil, because it is unnatural for women to have power. And women who do have power or claim to have power, it can only come from the devil. "Witch" changes, the meaning of the word "witch" changes from meaning being a herbal healer, wise women into this satanic follower of the devil.
We notice in the early part of the century, a lot of people who, when they're first arrested, they'll say, "yes, I'm a witch." Because they don't understand that this has now become a bad thing. By the end of the century, nobody's admitting to being a witch, unless they are kept awake and tortured. So the meaning shifts and changes and moves within that century because the church is obsessed with the devil.
Because we had a form of Calvinism that was so strict, and we had the predestination that God already knew who was damned and who was saved. And if we were God's elect and we were [00:15:00] all saved, then the devil would attack us, and he would attack us using witches. So the meaning changed, just as the meaning has changed now. There are people in Scotland today who call themselves witches today, who have, just as there are half a dozen different definitions of what to be a Christian is, there are half a dozen definitions of what a witch is today, but certainly in the 17th century, it changed from being good and healing to having that diabolical link.
And strangely enough, the people in Scotland were being told this every Sunday you'd go to the kirk on a Sunday and the minister would tell you It's witches. It's witches. It's the devil. It's the devil. And yet communities still use their witches, because what else can you do? You can't afford a doctor. There's not a doctor in your little village. If your child falls ill, or if your hens stop laying, and you think it's old Aggie at the end of the road who's cast a spell, you'll find another witch to take the spell off, because that's the day-to-day life you're living.
Sarah Jack: That's great. What did they believe the [00:16:00] diabolical witches were capable of?
Mary W Craig: Because the Kirk of Scotland were obsessed with the devil, they thought that the devil was going to bring down the new Protestant church. The Reformation happens in Scotland very quickly. In England, it was gradual. They moved from Catholicism to Anglicanism. In Scotland, we were Catholic, and then John Knox arrives and says, "no, we're now all Protestant, and all Catholics are in league with the devil." so the idea was that the devil was going to attack us all and drag us all to hell. And we had to guide against him. We had to guard against him. We had to be constantly on our watch against the devil.
And so witches were people. They were women, predominantly because women were weak and stupid and lascivious and liars and just awful creatures. And our faith was weak because of that. And so we would be easily seduced by the devil. And then we would do his bidding. We would lure men with our sexual wiles. [00:17:00] We would cast spells to make people die. We would make men impotent. It's an awful lot about sex in it with the Church of Scotland. I'm not quite sure what that says about the ministers, but there's a lot to do with sex. We would shrivel men's members, we would make men barren, we would make cattle and horses barren. We would spoil crop. We would just basically bring the whole world to its knees as servants and handmaidens of the devil. And that was why the Kirk was obsessed.
But because of this nonsense about predestination, it meant that even if you were a kirk minister, even if you were a very senior kirk minister in the General Assembly, the Kirk of Scotland, you couldn't know for absolute certainty that you were saved. So you end up in a circular argument, because if I'm the most godly person, then the devil's going to attack me. So if the devil attacks me, that proves I'm the most godly. So if I'm the most godly local [00:18:00] minister and the witches attack me, that proves I'm the most godly. But that means I want there to be witches in my area.
And so it just becomes a circular argument. You end up bringing in the witch prickers and witch brodders that we had here, and they were paid by how many witches they found, so they found lots of witches. And the ministers stood in the pulpit and screamed that this was diabolical and this was the devil and this was awful. But in a way you're saying, " see, it proves I'm a really good minister, because why else would they attack me? Why else would there be witches in my parish?" And once you're in that mindset, it's really difficult to get out of that mindset. Once you're in that circular argument, there's really no way out.
Josh Hutchinson: We read in Borders Witch Hunt about Auld Nick. Who was he?
Mary W Craig: Auld Nick was the devil. Scotland has lots of names for the Devil. He is Auld Nick. He's Auld Horny. He's Auld Jack. He's Black Clootie. [00:19:00] He's Horny Clootie. We have all these different names, and a lot of the names are from way back, from our Pagan ancestors.
There are also lots of places in Scotland named after the Devil. There's the Devil's Beeftub, which is just a very large river valley, but it's a round river valley, so it's the Devil's Beeftub. There's the Devil's Arse, there's the Devil's Bum, there's the Devil's Loo. There's the Devil's Toothpick. Not quite sure about that one.
So there's lots of, so the Devil in a way, the Devil that the church had in mind, who was Satan, who ruled over hell and fire and damnation. He wasn't quite the devil that, in Pagan times, we had believed in, he was a man that you could have a sort of, you can make a deal with the devil. You played the fiddle, you can play dice with the devil, you can play cards with the devil. There was a familiarity there that sort of lingered in folk superstition, even after the Christian Church was established. So again, when the [00:20:00] Church is railing about the Devil, and locally you say, "ah, it's just Auld Nick," that mismatch could mean the difference between life and death.
Sarah Jack: I'm very curious and I found the overlapping of the old and new beliefs quite a big deal.
Mary W Craig: Yeah, because like in all things, what people believe, ordinary people believe and what society deems as acceptable, there's always a lag of several years. I have a friend who's an elder in the Kirk of Scotland, and he still won't walk under a ladder, and he laughs at himself for that superstition. Even though he is a practicing Christian, he still has that superstitious belief, and he knows it's ridiculous, but that's what he grew up with. So these folk beliefs linger on, and I the original meaning the original Pagan meaning has been lost in time.
But you keep all, you'll say, "knock on wood," or you'll touch wood for good luck, or you won't cross a black cat's path or breaking a mirror. All of these superstitions, we've lost the original meaning, but [00:21:00] they're still there. We still all do it.
We still go out at Halloween, we go out guising, you guys go out trick-or-treating, and that's going way back. That's pre-Christian, that's a pre-Christian festival that we all still now. I mean, it's fun, and the kids get sweeties and candy. These superstitious beliefs hang on in there, and while now we smile at them and they're fine, because the Reformation was so recent for the Kirk of Scotland and because they had developed this siege mentality, they couldn't make any allowances for these old beliefs.
So it didn't make sense. So that 50 years previously your grandmother might have said a Catholic prayer as she was soothing an ill child. That was acceptable. Now, Catholicism had been tarred with the brush of being diabolical. It's very difficult to tell somebody they can't do something they've been doing for 50 years with no apparent harm.
Sarah Jack: The people's beliefs were in a transition, but what was acceptable was like a switch.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. If you think about the modern day [00:22:00] laws on things like homosexuality, society had moved on from homosexuality whilst lawmakers had not. Their thinking was about 30 years behind. And social change, same-sex marriages, things like that, the lawmakers are always behind what is the societal movement of what isn't acceptable within a society.
And what we had kept onto our old pagan traditions in Scotland. We still do it today. You still throw coins in a fountain or down a wishing well. That again, it's an old pagan belief. You take metal, which is precious, you put it into water, and water is a gateway into the world of the gods. Pre-Christian, we all do it when we're on holiday. That's part of the fun. We still, you get some people who will still leave out, my grandmother would still leave out cheese and milk for the fairies that were in the wood at the back of her house, and this would be in about 1930. She was still doing that. Admittedly, most of her neighbors thought she was a bit odd, but that belief was was still with her.
Josh Hutchinson: What were [00:23:00] some factors in the high rate of witch trials and executions in Scotland?
Mary W Craig: One of the highest problems was the king. When Elizabeth I dies in 1601, and James VI of Scotland, goes down to England to become James I of Great Britain, he goes to London, cuz that's where the money's to be made, and he takes most of his court away with him. So the senior nobility all go down to London, and it leaves a power vacuum in Scotland. And that's where the Kirk of Scotland just steps into that power vacuum.
The problem was that James VI wanted a uniform faith across the whole of Britain, and he wanted to have the Episcopal faith, or the Anglican Episcopacy faith, simply because England's 10 times bigger than Scotland. It was easier to go with the majority faith. He was in London. He was in an, gonna go with the majority faith. The problem is that had a hierarchy, which included bishops, and the Church of Scotland took one look at that and [00:24:00] said, "that's Catholicism being shoved back." And so instantly they were at loggerheads.
Now, initially, James VI wasn't too stupid, so he just thought, I'll just leave the Scotch alone. His son, Charles I, comes along, wants to do the same thing, but he didn't have the same political nous as his father. So instead of leaving well alone, he decides he wants to impose this Episcopal faith onto Scotland.
At the same time, Charles has fallen out with his English parliamentarians over taxation, and he's causing bother over in Ireland. So basically you end up with the English Civil War or the War of the Three Kingdoms. So you basically got civil war going on. So because you've got a war going on, the Kirk of Scotland turned around and says, "well see, it's the Devil, it must be, because we are all good Calvinist Scots. Why would God inflict a war on us? It must be the Devil. Why is God inflicting famine on us? He wouldn't. It must be the [00:25:00] Devil." So all the external factors are pushing it to being the devil, because that's, that's your only get outta jail free card.
There is no other explanation. It's like in the 1930s in Germany, everything was a fault of the Jews. It didn't matter what, it was the fault of the Jews, because that's what people were being constantly told. It was the same thing up here, because of course, if you start to admit for one second that it might not be the devil, then maybe you have to take responsibility for yourself.
There's also the fact that in Scotland, we do have rotten weather up here. Let's be honest, it is absolutely pelting rain with me. I can see is it today, and it's supposed to be nice today. So we do have rotten weather. So if you have harvest failure and bad weather and war and famine and death, and then the 30 years religious war kicks off in the continent, and there are Catholics across in Ireland, who are coming across into Scotland and going up and causing bother with the Irish clans. The whole world is in chaos. And halfway through the century we [00:26:00] chop the king's head off. Now that's pretty serious. Your king might be mad, and your king might be bad, and your king might be mad and bad, but you don't chop his head off.
And then Scotland, we ended up, Oliver Cromwell comes up and imposed a republic on Scotland. So there were English soldiers based in Scotland. So the Scottish Covenanters say, "our only king is Jesus Christ." So they end up doing a Holy War. So in all of this chaos and confusion that you cannot control as a church, the only thing you can say for certainty is all of this is caused by the devil. And you have to believe that because if you don't, then there's nothing the church can do about the king, there's nothing the church can do about all Oliver Cromwell, they can't control the weather, they can't control the pestilence, they can't control the war in Europe, they can't control the Irish Catholics coming over. Only thing they can do is stick to their certainty, so they develop that siege mentality, and it lasts for a long time. They keep to this belief in the [00:27:00] devil and witches and witchcraft for well over 150 years because to admit anything else, then their house starts to crumble. So that's why they have fixated on that.
Sarah Jack: That was wonderful. Thanks for that very detailed explanation for that.
Mary W Craig: The 17th century was a bad century across Europe because we had the reformation in the previous century, and what you end up with in the 17th century is the counter-reformation, and you end up with the 30 years religious wars. You've got the German states fighting with each other, you've got France and Spain fighting, so there's wars all over the place.
People are jockeying for position in Europe, which is utterly terrifying. So you've got religious uncertainty and war and soldiers and famine and plague and bad weather. And you as an individual have no control. And then you go to the one person who's going to tell you what's what, and it's the minister, and they're telling you what to do.
And as I say, we had Charles I we chop [00:28:00] his head off, we ended up the protectorate. Then Oliver Cromwell dies. His son comes along, we didn't like him, we got rid of him. Charles II comes back, but oh dear, he's married to a Catholic, so we're not quite sure about him. They don't have any children. And then James VII of Scotland, or James II of Britain. We had a lot of Jameses. He comes back. Oh dear, he's a Catholic, so we don't like him, so we bump him. So we end up with Mary and William of Orange coming over from the Netherlands. So for that entire century, there is very little stable government at the time giving us anything, because it's the government that's causing half the bother. Cuz the government, whichever government, is always arguing with the church. So the only stable thing you have in Scotland is the Kirk of Scotland. Everything else is in flux all the time. And as I say, it lasts for that full century.
Josh Hutchinson: Why were women believed more likely to be witches?
Mary W Craig: Oh, there were two or three books. There was one known as the Malleus Maleficarum, [00:29:00] which was written by a chap who may have been under the name Kramer or may have been under the name Institoris. He may or may not have been a Dominican, and he was kicked about the German states in the 16th century.
There was a Witch trial in Speyer in one of the German states, and he had an argument with the bishop Speyer as to how they should conduct this trial. The bishop said, "no, it's my town. We're doing it my way." And the women there were acquitted of witchcraft. And Kramer then said, "you're an idiot. You're wrong. If you'd have done it my way, would've had them executed."
And he wrote this book called Malleus Maleficarum, Hammer of the Witches, in which he basically outlined what a witch is and what you should do about it. So women are weak, lascivious, lying, deceitful, awful creatures, and therefore, we are ready tools of the devil. A man is steadfast in his faith in the Lord. A man is very seldom going to be tempted, but we are gonna be tempted, because, well, we're [00:30:00] useless and weak and awful.
He writes terrible things, like women's bodies are weak, and you can tell they're weak because they're porous. You think, oh, you're a horrible man. They produce milk, they leak, their bodies leak, therefore their faith will leak. He uses analogies like that, a terrible book. Problem is, it was a bestseller. Everybody thought this book was brilliant. Then you come in to the later 16th century, and you've got John Knox, and John Knox writes his book against the, it's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. And he was actually talking about people like Mary Tudor, who he thought was a disgraceful person and should never have been queen, cuz of course she's female, and she's a queen, and she's Catholic.
So he says that power is unnatural to women, and women who have power are in league with the devil. So you've got Institoris saying that we're weak, and our faith is weak, and we're terrible and awful. And then you've got John Knox saying, and any woman that's [00:31:00] got power is coming from the devil. And these books are read by all of the learned men right the way across Europe.
And then James I, James VI of Scotland, James I of England, just before he leaves Scotland, he comes back from Denmark with his wife-to-be in a boat, and a great storm is raised outside North Berwick. And somebody says, "oh, that storm was raised by witchcraft." So there's a huge witchcraft trial. James is involved, he's the king. And because Scotland was a little country, James wanted to be one of the big princes in Europe. Scotland's so little and so poor, he can't really do it with money, but he can do it by learning. So he writes a book called Demonology, all about Witches.
So if the king's writing about it, and John Knox is writing about it, and Kramer's writing about it, these three books do the rounds. And they just become the accepted norm that women are, by their nature, weak and silly and stupid [00:32:00] and, therefore, susceptible to the wiles of the devil. We'll just give in, because we're so hopeless. And in Scotland, about 85% of those who were persecuted as witches were women, about 15% were men.
Sarah Jack: And how were warlocks viewed differently?
Mary W Craig: Warlocks were slightly different, because there were men who followed the devil and became warlocks, but because they were men, they had to be in charge of the women. So you would maybe get three or four women, and the warlock would be in charge of them. So although he was awful and had renounced Christ and made a pact with the devil, he was in charge of the women. So that made sense, because men are supposed to be in charge of women. The reason the church was very upset about warlocks is that also tended to be men who were learned, so men who were themselves ex-ministers.
One of the famous ones is Major Weir in Edinburgh, who was this bowhead saint. And he would [00:33:00] give great sermons in the open air in Edinburgh at the Westport of Edinburgh. And then he actually turned out to have been a warlock all along. When he was executed, he threw his staff into the fire, and apparently it turned and made grimaces and uttered curses as the wood burned.
But yes, so they were very frightened of warlocks because that was just all worry. Even the devil was so powerful. He was now ensnaring men, where his women were just what can you expect? They're women. They're going to be easily ensnared.
Josh Hutchinson: Were the warlocks treated differently in the witch trials than the witches?
Mary W Craig: Yes. Now women couldn't speak in court. You weren't allowed to speak in court if you were a woman. But then one of the proofs of being a witch was to be deleted or named by another witch. So if I'm accused of being a witch, and I say, "I am and so is my sister," and then they bring my sister into court, I have to be able to say in court, "yes, I am naming my sister as a witch." So they changed the law so that [00:34:00] women could speak, but only to delate, to talk about another woman as a witch. But men as warlocks were allowed to speak in court.
And so women would be asked things like, "did you have sex with the devil?" Yet again, we're obsessed with sex. "What was he like?" And all these sorts of questions. And, "what did you do? And how did you serve him? And who was all there with you?" When men were accused of being a warlock, they would be asked, "why did you renounce your baptism? Why did you turn away from Christ? Why did you make a pact with the devil?"
It's almost as if women are just emotional. We don't really care about what they've been up to. But with the men, it was almost as if they were reasoning with them and saying, "do you not understand what you've done here? Come back to Christ. Do you not understand that this is wicked and awful?"
And there would be, the trials of warlocks could sometimes last for two or three days. The trials for women often lasted barely two or three hours. So it was quite different, yes, and a lot of men who were accused were [00:35:00] allowed to escape, shall we say? Or they would be held under house arrest, and they would often kill themselves, because your family could inherit your money, if you kill yourself. If you're executed as a witch or a warlock, your money is forfeit to the Kirk.
And a lot of men could actually challenge the accusation in the first place. If I accuse you of being a witch or a warlock, you would just turn around and say, "how dare you? I'm a man of good standing in this community. That, that Mary's outrageous. She's accused me of being a witch." And I could often be arrested for slander. So a man could often talk the accusation down at that very early stage. So that's why, there are a few, and there are a few men who went to trial and were acquitted, because they either talked themselves out of it, or they got a couple of good lawyers in there to say, "for goodness sake, this is a chap of good standing, and why we're listening to the gossip of women? Of course he's not a warlock." So the acquittal rate for men was a lot higher than women.
We also have in Scotland the not proven verdict, and we still have it in Scots law. Now, not proven doesn't mean you're innocent, [00:36:00] and it doesn't mean you're guilty. It just means that the crown has not proved its case against you. And so there are a few cases of not proven verdicts in witchcraft trials, and that tended to be for men. Men would get a not proven verdict, and if you're not proven, you're not sent to prison, you cannot be punished, because the case against you has not been proven. There are constant arguments under Scots law, whenever anybody's found not proven these days, as to whether or not we should abolish it.
Josh Hutchinson: What was the penalty for witchcraft in Scotland?
Mary W Craig: To be worriet, strangled to death, and then your dead body burnt. If you were extremely lucky, you might, in the earliest part of the century, and in the 16th century, you might get away with being branded, fined, and exiled. Oh, there are very few guilty verdicts that did not end up in an execution. And for women it was always execution after the guilty verdict, every time. Yep. And as I say, in the case of the people's [00:37:00] trial, that was 24 people executed on one day.
And of course, everybody had to come out to watch. The minister wanted everybody to see what happened to witches. The devil didn't come down and save them in the end. The devil was a lying master that if you follow the devil, this is what happens to you.
And oftentimes, if it's in some of the smaller towns, there was no public executioner. So it might be somebody like the local blacksmith, because he was a big strong lad, and he might be the one that had to, often they would put a noose around the neck and slip a little bit of wood in, and they would turn the piece of wood to strangle someone. And that's, you're having to do that face to face with somebody. It takes a long time to strangle somebody. And if it's in a small town, the chances are that blacksmith's gonna know the people that he's executing. So it was traumatic, I would think, for them afterwards to think, especially if there had been any doubt, if perhaps somebody just got caught up in it, a name was uttered, or somebody had fallen out with someone, but that was it. [00:38:00] There was no get out. Once that guilty verdict was in, you were executed, usually within a day or two days.
Sarah Jack: In your book, you noted that the people were not just expected to be there. If you weren't there observing, that was really bad for your reputation.
Mary W Craig: Oh yes. The minister would notice. You had to have a very good reason to not be there and have your children there as well. Why aren't you there? Why aren't you seeing? Because executing a witch was God's work. So, "why are you not there to witness it? Why are you hiding in your house? What have you got to hide? Were you a friend of the Witch? Are you a Witch yourself?" Yes, it would be noted if you didn't, if you didn't turn up, you didn't get there. "Why are you not watching what's going on? Why are you not showing your children, your three and four year old children? Why are you not showing them this gruesome scene to say to them, 'this is what happens?'"
Yes, you had to be there, and ministers would take note of it. And these were the sorts of things that could build to a bad reputation. So that, [00:39:00] 10 years down the line, another accusation is made, and your name might be on the list, and the minister thinks, "oh yeah, they didn't turn up that execution the last time. Yeah. They've not been to the kirk a couple of Sundays in a row without a good reason. Yeah, I'm gonna keep an eye on them." So that bad reputation can follow you about. We have situations where there are people caught up in an accusation, don't make it to court, but then 10 years down the line, the fact that they were previously investigated is brought up as part of the evidence against them.
Josh Hutchinson: And why did they burn the bodies?
Mary W Craig: It was so that there was nothing left, absolutely nothing left, because you had denied your faith, and your faith is everything. You denied that. Then you are nothing. And so the body would be burnt, and it takes a long time to burn the body. It's not like today, if you have somebody who's cremated, it's done very clinically and very safely and very respectfully and, you know, in a[00:40:00] proper sort of manner. If you're talking about Scotland this time of the year, it has rained today all day. Body could take three or four days to burn, and it's burning in a public place. It's maybe burning in the marketplace where you go to buy your bread every morning, and there is a body still burning, still burning. And then, eventually, there's nothing left, or if there is anything left, if there are a pile of ashes left, they're usually thrown into water, and the water will take 'em away. Partly because it's cleansing like a baptism, and partly the fact that it physically takes them away.
Sarah Jack: And where did the methods originate of killing and burning the witch?
Mary W Craig: Initially, if you'd done a terrible crime, if you committed a murder, you'd be executed. And usually people were hanged in Scotland. We didn't tend to burn people alive. They did in some of the Catholic countries, but that was because witchcraft to them was mixed in with heresy and burning alive was a particular punishment for heresy. We tended to hang people. Occasionally you got your head [00:41:00] chopped off, but that was slightly different. That tended to happen up in Highlands a little bit more. But anyway, Lowland Scotland tended to hang people. But because you were then gonna burn the body to get rid of the body as well, because you don't want anything of the Witch left, it was a practical thing.
If you have to build a gallows and then hang somebody, and then take a body down and then put it onto a pyre to burn it, that's a lot more work. And so if you just build a pyre and have a stake and tie someone to the stake, strangle them there and then burn them, it was purely a practical method. In some areas, people were burned inside tar barrels to make sure they couldn't escape at the last minute, although the Church of Scotland didn't quite like that, so that was too much like superstition.
But it was a purely practical reason, especially if you're gonna execute 24 people in one day. That's a lot of gallows to have to construct and then take down, because often witches weren't executed in a local place of execution. So you might have a big town, and you would have a place of execution for those who were guilty of [00:42:00] murder or rape or something horrible like that. Witches weren't executed there, because they weren't even supposed to be executed alongside ordinary criminals. Cause ordinary criminals were bad, but they hadn't denied Christ. So they were separate, even in their execution and even in their death, they were separate.
Sarah Jack: And these witches didn't say they denied Christ. They just had, because they were a witch.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. Oh, all of them were Christian. They were absolutely Christian. And you can hear it if you read through, the best thing I always find with the confessions is to actually read them out loud. And you can hear these women, especially the early part of the century, they're genuinely confused as to what it is they're supposed to have done, because they're not doing anything that their mother and their grandmother didn't do before them.
They went out, and they got herbs to, to help heal a child, and they said a little charm. What had this got to do with the devil? They didn't understand, and [00:43:00] occasionally they might say things like, "I met the man in the black hat." They meant a supernatural creature with a black hat. They did not mean the Devil, and they couldn't, you can hear the fact that it's almost as if the ministers and the interrogators are saying one thing, and the woman is saying another. It's like ships that pass in the night, they're just not understanding.
There are some really poignant ones where people say things like, "can I be a witch and not know it?" They were genuinely confused by what was going on. It was only as the trials continued, and by the time you got to about 1649, then a lot of people are absolutely shutting up and they're saying nothing.
They're saying absolutely nothing because they know that it doesn't matter what they say, it's gonna be turned. Now, the interrogators tended to be the minister and tended to be led by the minister. They would ask what today we would say would be leading questions, but what they would say is they wouldn't say to you, "did you meet the devil?" Cuz you're gonna say no to that. What they'll say is, "when you met the devil, who else was there with you?" [00:44:00] You said, "but I didn't meet the devil." "When you met the man in the black hat, was your sister with you? Was your mother with you? Was your daughter with you?" And so they would ask questions in a way to get the women to incriminate themselves, although they didn't really understand, and as I said, but later in this century, people understood and people were saying nothing. And that's when they start to use things like walking and watching and waking. And keeping people awake for days and days on end to get them into that mindset where they're gonna confess to anything.
Josh Hutchinson: You've talked about several methods that they used to test the witches. Were there others?
Mary W Craig: There were the four proofs. The first proof was having a really bad reputation or a reputation of doing bad things. One was to be called a witch by another confessing witch. One was to confess to being a witch, and that was usually done, they would keep you awake for days on end and be badgering you the whole time, "you're a disgrace to your family. You're a disgrace to your friends." And eventually you give in.
They would hold lighted candles to your feet. They would string you up by your thumbs. They would break [00:45:00] your arms, things like that. They would beat you to make you confess.
The other one was the Devil's mark. Cuz it was thought that the devil laid his hands on you and it's a parody of Christ. And because he was unnatural, he would leave a mark on you that was unnatural. And then a witch pricker or a witch brodder would arrive with a pin maybe about five centimeters long, and he would put that into your shoulders or your neck or your head on say, a mole or a freckle. And if you didn't cry out or it didn't bleed, that proved you had the devil's mark. And of course, acupuncture today, there are points in the body you can put a pin in. Often they would just keep on pricking somebody until they found point that didn't bleed.
You could be called a Witch by another Witch. If you had marks on your body, and that goes back to biblical times where you're talking about people being leprous with sin, and so if you were a sinful person, if you'd gone to the devil, there would be marks on you.
But it was mostly by keeping you awake and constantly talking at you the whole time. That was the main method [00:46:00] that was used against you.
Sarah Jack: It just amazes me that they survived everything to even get to the execution. It just seems like it was so harsh.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. I'm surprised at those who didn't confess, I'm genuinely surprised that those that didn't confess at all. And there were some who absolutely to the end said, "no, I'm not gonna confess." There were a lot of people who confessed and then at trial or just before the trial retracted their confession, and they said, "I confessed because of the torture I was put under."
You weren't allowed to be interrogated if you were under the age of 10, but we know that happened. You weren't allowed to be interrogated if you were what was known as addled in your wits, if you're mentally incompetent. But again, we know that happened. There were people who were put on trial who were quite obviously mentally incapable, and yet the local kirk minister said, "no, I want them sent to trial, and if they're mad, it's their own fault. That's what happens if you [00:47:00] hang about the devil, and anyway, they're probably faking it." And it didn't matter if your family said, " granny's been a bit wandered for years" or even if you had a doctor to say, "this person is mentally incompetent." The kirk minister should, by sheer force of personality, just say, "no, I want them brought to trial." And they were brought to trial.
But as I say, some of the confessions are so poignant. They're sort of little things like, "I left out milk for the fairies." That's it, you're witch. Or, "I was taking care of my neighbor's little boy, and I said a little rhyme over him to help him soothe him to, to sleep," which every mother and father has done that. You sing a little nursery rhyme to help your little one, if you've got a fever. That now becomes a diabolical act. It's so poignant when you read what they're actually accused of doing. But underpinning all of that, as far as the kirk was concerned, was this obsession that they had made a pact with the devil.
Josh Hutchinson: What drew you [00:48:00] to write a book about Agnes Finnie?
Mary W Craig: Oh, I wrote the book about Agnes Finnie, because I've been interested in the Witches and witchcraft for ages and ages, and the reason I'm write, I'm writing the book on Agnes Finnie, is because she doesn't fit the stereotype. She's not a nice, cute little old lady living in a cottage. She's not gathering her to take care of her neighbors. She's a nasty so-and-so. She lives in a tenement slum. She's a shopkeeper selling dodgy goods. She's a money-lender.
And it's very easy to be sympathetic to a sweet, gray-haired old granny who's gathering herbs in the countryside and who is persecuted by the church. And we all think that's terrible and awful and shouldn't have happened. It's much more difficult to be sympathetic to somebody who's not a sympathetic character, but Agnes Finnie, for all she was a nasty piece of work and for all she was quite an unpleasant person, was still deserving of justice. The law should not have treated her the way it did.
[00:49:00] And that's why I wrote about her. And also the fact that she was in the city and the book, just what life was like if you were poor. In the city of Edinburgh at that time, Agnes Finnie, is living in a place called Potterrow Port, which is, it's no longer there, but it's one of the high tenements in Edinburgh. So there's no sanitation, there's no running water, it's dark at night, it's freezing cold. Everybody's drinking as if there's no tomorrow, because the lives are so miserable.
At the same time as Agnes is alive, King Charles I has a camel, which he keeps at Corstorphine, which is the west end of Edinburgh. And this camel goes out for a walk every day, except for a Sunday, cuz it's a good Christian camel, it rests on a Sunday. And you can pay sixpence to go and see the camel. Camel has got a groom, and it's got heated stables, and it's got the best of food, and it's being fed, I dunno, sugar lumps and all sorts. And once a month, the keeper of the royal camel writes a report on how the camel's doing and [00:50:00] sends that to Charles I, and he reads this. He's not getting a report on how the poor people are living in the tenement where Agnes is. He doesn't care about them, who are starving and freezing and drinking alcohol that they've made themselves, because there's nothing else they can do to get through the day.
So that's why I wrote about Agnes, partly to say everybody's deserving of justice, nasty or otherwise, but also the fact that the king cares about his camel, but doesn't care about the poor. This is the century in which witches were living or alleged witches were living.
Sarah Jack: And what was like the population, and how many people were living like Agnes?
Mary W Craig: That's difficult to say, because not everybody was registered. You might get a tenement that had eight alleged houses in it, but you might have people who were so poor that when their husband went to work in the morning, they would get a lodger coming in off the night shift to sleep in their husband's bed. You had people sleeping in the back stairs of [00:51:00] tenements, because that was all they had. That was the problem. Nobody quite knew how many people were there.
The conditions were so bad that 50% of all children never made it to their fifth birthday. You go to Edinburgh today and you've got the amazing guides that'll take you down the old town in Edinburgh, and they talk about gardylooing. It's all done as a joke and a laugh, and everybody laughs about it. They were basically throwing excrement out of windows, and that's how people lived. There was no light. There was no heat. There was lice and fleas and cockroaches and rats. This was the life that King Charles I's subjects were living whilst his camel on the west end of the city is being fed sugar lumps.
Josh Hutchinson: So why did you choose to write a book about one particular individual after the borders witches was many trials and many people, so why focus on just one?
Mary W Craig: I wanted to focus in on one person's life to look at the ordinary life of the person in a bit more detail. And I went [00:52:00] through the records with the National Archives and the National Library in Scotland, and I was fortunate enough to find Agnes Finnie's entire trial records. So that allowed me to look at that in some detail, but also the fact that she lived just at the outbreak of the Scottish Civil War and the chaos and what is sort of throughout that because of the rising tension all the time. And we've got the wars going on in Ukraine and Russia at the moment. There's a war over there, but it's far away. We hear about it on the news, but it doesn't affect us on a daily basis.
The war was right there in Edinburgh. Young men were getting called up. You might just be an ordinary person. All of a sudden your son has to go to fight either for the king or against the king. There were roving gangs around the city, armed men in the city. So there's all sorts of things bubbling up, and the fact that I could focus in on this one individual and see what her life was like and how she starts off just as a shopkeeper, maybe doing a little bit of money-lending, all the way up to the time when [00:53:00] she's arrested, where there are 20 accusations of witchcraft being laid against her by her neighbors.
So I was able to look at it in a lot more sort of microscopic detail of one individual and how that came to pass.
Sarah Jack: I was thinking how you probably just saw her coming, like who she was,, coming together before you because of all of your extensive research and your expertise on all of these things you're talking about. And then you find her and all these records. I'm sure she just jumped right out at you.
Mary W Craig: Yeah. And the fact that she wasn't in a little cottage and she wasn't a sweet little old lady, because that would've been a very different book, because from page one, everybody would've gone, "oh, that's a shame. Poor, sweet, little old lady, what's the big bad church gonna do?" Whereas this is, "okay, Agnes, oh I see. You're like that. Are you?" And that's the challenge. The challenge of this is the reality.
I'm not saying that Agnes was a horrible person, because she was horrible. I'm saying that she wasn't a nice person, [00:54:00] but she wasn't living in a nice time. She was trying to cope the best she could. And of course she had all of the, she's a woman on her own, she's a widow, and women are only supposed to do certain things and act in certain ways. So that drew me to her because, she's trying to struggle through and do the best she can, but because she was that slightly more unpleasant character, she was much more fascinating than a sweet, little old lady.
Sarah Jack: Why was she chosen to be an accused?
Mary W Craig: She was accused, she was finally accused by her neighbors. Her neighbors went to the minister and complained about her. And then when the minister started to investigate, he ended up with these 20 accusations going back years and years.
So there were neighbors saying things like, "I had an argument with her and she made me go lame" or, "I had an argument with her and she blinded my husband." And all of these accusations then start to come out, and Agnes ends up arrested and sent to trial. So it's a sort of accumulation of different things that had happened, [00:55:00] because at one point, she's known in the neighborhood as a witch.
They know she's a witch. There's a couple called the Buchanans, and they go to her when they're little boy is unwell. And you think, why else are they going to the witch? I mean, Agnes is known to be a bad tempered so-and-so. Why are they going to this woman to try and help the little boy?
Because there was nowhere else for them to go. They're poor. They can't afford a doctor. There's no doctor going down to the tenements. The minister from the Kirk doesn't even go down to the tenements. They're basically a little world on their own in a little squallid corner of Edinburgh. They're in the capital city, and yet they're living a miserable life, and they have nothing else to do but go to Agnes. You think why would anybody borrow money from her if she's so horrible? Where else can they go? They can't go to a bank. They haven't got anywhere else to go.
The only person they can go to is Agnes, because they're all living life on the edge. One bad day, you fall over and break your leg. You can't work, you can't pay your rent, you're [00:56:00] put out your house. You try living on the streets in a Scottish winter, you're gonna die. Witch she might have been, bad tempered so-and-so she might have been, but there was nobody else for these people to go until finally they've had enough of her temper. And also finally, the fear of the witch tips the balance against the usefulness that she has, because of the rising tension of the war. And so all these things come together, and eventually they've had enough, and they go to the minister.
Josh Hutchinson: And what was the evidence used against her?
Mary W Craig: The evidence against her was what you and I would probably just think of as the accusation. So somebody would say, "I had an argument with her in the street. She yelled at me, "I'll send you halting hame." And I developed a limp. And as far as the court, as far as the minister was concerned, that was proof positive. And if the minister says so, then the court just agrees. So it was actually just the accusation.
I [00:57:00] think in Agnes's case, because there were so many of these accusations, it just piled up and piled and piled up. But interestingly, the jury took a long time to find her guilty. It took a long time. You'd expect with 20 odd accusations that they would've said guilty straight away. Now, they took a good few weeks to think about it and think about whether or not Agnes was guilty, but I think it was just accumulation. As I say, in the vast majority of witchcraft trials, there was no proof, because how can you prove something like a spell? It's very difficult to prove a spell.
You can say, "we asked Agnes to take care of our little boy, and then our little boy died." But how do you prove that Agnes killed the child? You could say, "Agnes yelled at my father, and then he had a stroke." But how do you actually prove that? Yeah, the link between cause and effect was very tenuous then, but it was enough because you had power from the devil. Then that gave you the power to lame someone [00:58:00] or blind someone.
Sarah Jack: Was Agnes executed?
Mary W Craig: She was, yes. If you're ever in Edinburgh, going up just before you hit the castle esplanade on the right hand side, you'll see the Witches' Well. And that's where the witches were executed in Edinburgh. So yes, she was executed.
Sarah Jack: Was she executed alongside other witches that day?
Mary W Craig: No. She was executed on her own, and interestingly, her daughter was not. And yet within the accusations, the 20 accusations, her daughter was named as a witch as well. And yet she was not executed, which is a curious point.
When I looked at the sort of aftermath of her trial, what was interesting was that the minister, who had never gone near the Potterrow in his time as a minister, nothing was ever said against him. Nobody said to him, "why did you not know about this witch?" Nothing was said. And he thereafter never went down to Potterrow. The local bailey, who was like the police officer for the beat, they said to him, "why did you [00:59:00] never see any of this happening?" Nobody said anything to him, and he just continued to be the police officer on the beat. They didn't do anything. No doctor went down to Potterrow. It was a case of, "we've found your witch, we've executed your witch. Now go back to your slum, because we don't care about you." And that's what happened. They were just left to continue living in the slum. That was a Potterrow.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you want people to take away from your book?
Mary W Craig: To understand that everybody deserves justice no matter what personality they have. Sometimes we should look at the way people live. We think of Edinburgh as the capital city of Scotland and oh, it's wonderful and oh, it's fantastic. It's got its poor areas well, and everywhere does. And to look at the trial and think about the difference, look at what is cause and effect, what is just an accusation, and look at the way the law is used and can be [01:00:00] abused by some people.
Sarah Jack: Will the story of Agnes help the cause of pardoning and memorializing the witch trial victims in Scotland? Is that something you support?
Mary W Craig: I think it might help towards the pardon. The pardon is being run by Claire Madison Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi. And Claire is a KC, she's a King's Counsel. In the appellate court, she deals with appeals and miscarriages of justice. And that's why she's interested in this. And I think looking at the way the law is used and abused and looking at the fact that you have to have proof, proper proof to convict somebody of any crime, and that's what was lacking in the witchcraft trials.
I understand the religious belief in the Devil. I understand the theological knot that the Kirk of Scotland got itself tied into with this Calvinist predestination, but to then take that theological [01:01:00] argument and get the secular authorities and get the law to use it, that was what was wrong. And that's why we need the pardon today.
We don't do exonerations in Scotland, but we need to pardon these women and men for what happened to them under the law and to use it as an example of us always keeping an eye on the law and making sure that the law and the justice system is kept out of the hands of people like the Kirk of Scotland and kept out of the hands of politicians. It should stand alone that if you are accused of something, you go to trial, you have a fair trial. That's, what's it? It's nobody else's business. It's not politicians, not the religious people, nobody else. Let the law be the law, and let faith be faith. So I think that's something that's really important.
And as I say, we have had an apology from the Kirk of Scotland. I think the pardon would be a good idea, because it would again strengthen that. And then what we're looking for is a national [01:02:00] memorial, as well as lots of people are putting up small local memorials. But I think a national memorial. And I personally would also like this part of Scottish history to be taught in our schools. We quite rightly teach the children in Scotland about her our involvement in slave trade. This, to me, stands alongside that. It's a very dark part of our past. It's not something we should be proud of, but it's something we should teach and learn from.
Josh Hutchinson: I agree a hundred percent with what you've said. We're working on exonerating the accused in Connecticut and hopefully memorializing and getting some more education about that. Even though there were much fewer in number than Scotland, we still feel that they're important.
Mary W Craig: Oh yes. One is one too many. Absolutely, yes. Especially when you look at the ages of some of them. Some of these, it was right across the age range, and as I say, every one of them had a family, [01:03:00] had friends, had communities ripped apart by this constant fear, so yeah, absolutely.
Sarah Jack: We really see the parallels in the history in what's happening in Scotland with the pardoning, what needs to happen in the state of Connecticut. It's all part of a very big message, educational message. And thanks for talking about this stuff with us. I want all of these, Agnes and others, to be known so that what you're saying of the changes that need to happen can happen based on the injustices that we know and that we see now.
Mary W Craig: One of the other reasons why I think we need to talk about apologies and pardons and memorials is the fact that there are still people today who are killed as witches. It's still happening to this day, and that is something. You can believe anything you want, but you can't [01:04:00] use that belief to persecute another individual. And that's a really strong message that I think we still need to get across because there are still women and men today being executed as witches around the world.
Josh Hutchinson: We've recently spoke with an activist from South Africa, and he explained the situation there, and it's really eye-opening. There's so many people that are still tortured and killed.
Mary W Craig: Was that Leo Igwe?
Josh Hutchinson: This was Damon Leff that we spoke with. We're hoping to speak with Leo pretty soon.
Mary W Craig: Leo's excellent. That's the saddest part is the fact that we, we're 400 years on and it's still happening, so human beings can be so nice and so fantastic and so wonderful to each other. And we can produce amazing things like, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the Mona Lisa. And yet we can equally be absolutely awful to one another, and we need to recognize that part of our personality and guard [01:05:00] against it whenever we can.
Josh Hutchinson: Is there anything that we could do to stop hunting witches in the present day?
Mary W Craig: That's a difficult one, because the witch hunts that are happening today have different roots. So a lot of the ones in Africa are rooted in evangelical church, so it's coming from Christian belief. But there are witchcraft trials in places like Nepal and Saudi Arabia, countries like that, where it's not coming from a Christian perspective. So I'm not sure what their concept of witchcraft is.
I think it's a case of talking about it, keeping it in a public domain, getting it recognized as what it is, which is terror. And speaking to people like Leo Igwe, speaking to campaigners who are working in these actual countries and finding out what's going on there. I'm currently researching a book about colonial India and the witchcraft [01:06:00] trials that took place there under British rule and the parallels that are still happening in some of the Indian states today.
So it's difficult to pick apart exactly what's meant by witchcraft and Witches in some of these areas, but it's speaking to local campaigners and making sure it's on the internet, it's on social media, it's in the news. I think that's what those of us here can do about it.
Josh Hutchinson: One of the things that we're starting to do, we're trying to speak with Leo and Damon and those kinds of people who are on the ground in those nations and know what's going on and get their voices on our podcast. And we find every day stories of these atrocities happening in so many countries, and we share those on social media and try to get the word out the best that we can, and so far that's the thing that we're able to [01:07:00] do.
Sarah Jack: It feels like there should be more to say about that, because it's such a huge, the scope is so wide, but I don't know. It's also silencing when you think about it.
Mary W Craig: I think the problem is the fact that most people, certainly in Scotland, think, "oh, we did it then, and it's all over." And then you'll say, "and there are witchcraft trials happening today" or, "there are witch executions happening today." And people say, they don't know, quite know what to say, because we think of it in the past, I almost liken it to modern day slavery, because up until, I would say 10 years ago, I would reckon most people in Britain thought that slavery was over and done with, was over and done with over 150 years ago.
And it's taken a long time for people in Britain to understand about modern slavery and what that means. For a long time people thought, "oh no, but we abolished the slave trade. There isn't any slavery anymore." And then you discover that the young lady in the nail salon that you go to [01:08:00] might be a modern day slave or the lad that's washing your car.
And that took a long time for people to get that understanding. And I think it's the same with modern witch persecutions. I think is gonna take a bit of time for people to accept it. And then once they say, "oh yes, that is still happening. And so we need to put a stop to that, we need to stop that."
In a way it's quite tied together. It's persecution of people who can't stand up for themselves, because of poverty and or ignorance or political unrest in their home countries. And they are then very quickly victimized, and they could be victimized as a witch, or you could end up being a slave doing my nails in the local salon or something. All of these things are quite interlinked now. So raising the profile and making people understand that it is still happening. Yeah, it's a big, it's a big thing to do, but it's something I think we all should be doing.
Sarah Jack: I'm really hopeful that these messages that we're starting to pull together are [01:09:00] going to just keep reaching more ears and those people are gonna talk about it, too. But there's a parallel, too, with the family of the victims. When I asked about descendants in Scotland, and they didn't want to be connected to those who had been executed. I think in some of the nations today that are having witch attacks, they have to also find a way to carry on in the aftermath and not also be attacked because their grandmother was or their cousin was.
Josh Hutchinson: It was a real eye-opening discussion and very important discussion, and you spoke eloquently to the problems that are still going on today and why it's important to memorialize and pardon. And I want to thank you for that. And thank you for being our guest.
Sarah Jack: I'm really looking forward to getting to know Agnes Finnie.
Mary W Craig: It will be available as a [01:10:00] paperback, hardback, and also in a Kindle version on Amazon, or you can get it direct from the publishing house, Luath Press.
Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with another update on Witch. Hunts happening in modern times.
Sarah Jack: Here is End Witch Hunts World Advocacy News.
As you just heard from Mary Craig, Scotland is actively attending to the damage the witch trials brought to their ancestors. Activists are seeking justice for the innocent people accused and convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1563. As you learned, there is much to make amends for, as much as can be done.
Many individuals and groups have collaborated over recent years to build an effective campaign across the country of Scotland. This effort can heal the massive trauma from their alleged witch executions and trials. Today I want to briefly catch you up on their official progress and point you to the sources of information.
The Scottish Parliament established a precedent of pardoning convictions of innocent past [01:11:00] individuals when it passed the Historical Sexual Offences (Pardons and Disregards) Act of 2018. Recognizing this precedent, King's Counsel Claire Mitchell submitted a petition to the Scottish Parliament for the pardoning of Scotland Witches. She states, "history still records these people as convicted witches -- justice demands that this is put right. History should properly reflect what these people were -- innocent, vulnerable people, caught up in a time where allegations of witchcraft were widespread and deadly."
This petition has a strong message, and it's being heard. Two official apologies have been declared to Scotland from within its leadership this year. First, on International Women's Day, March 8th, 2022, the Scottish First Minister on behalf of the Scottish Government issued a formal apology stating, "I am choosing to acknowledge that egregious historic injustice and extend a formal posthumous apology to all of those accused, convicted, vilified, or executed under [01:12:00] the Witchcraft Act of 1563." The second apology occurred at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, when a unanimous motion was accepted based on a report by its theological forum to apologize for its role in the murders of thousands of people, mostly women, who were accused of witchcraft between the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
Following these landmark apology statements by the Scottish government and the Church of Scotland, Member of Scottish Parliament Natalie Don submitted a member's proposal for a bill requesting a formal pardon, stating, "to build the fairer, more equal, and forward thinking Scotland that we all want to see, we must address the historic abuses of our past. Under the Witchcraft Act of 1563, an estimated 3,837 people were accused of witchcraft in Scotland, with approximately 2,500, executed between 1563 and 1736."
As Claire Mitchell so clearly pointed out in her petition, Scotland's victims were caught up in a [01:13:00] time where allegations of witchcraft were widespread and deadly. The world today must admit that thousands of living alleged witches are caught up now in a time where allegations of witchcraft are widespread and deadly. The deadly time is still here. It's called today. Actions must be taken to intervene for alleged witches in Africa and the Asian Pacific that are being attacked, tortured, and killed in this deadly time.
Can you accept that witch hunt thinking has not ended? It has not disappeared, it has not stopped. These strongly-held fears must be addressed and stopped immediately. While we watch and wait, let's support the victims across the world. Use your social power to help them support them by acknowledging and sharing their.
Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunts movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts and visit our website at endwitchhunts.org.
End Witch Hunts movement and Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast support the [01:14:00] worldwide movement to recognize and address historical wrongs.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for that informative news segment, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcast.
Sarah Jack: Visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell all the people in your life about our show.
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end modern witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.Org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:15:00]

December 22, 2022

Marion Gibson on The Witches of St. Osyth

List of books authored by Dr. Marion Gibson

Show Notes

Presenting a dynamic witch trial history interview with historian and accomplished author Dr. Marion Gibson. We discuss her new book release “The Witches of St. Osyth” available next Thursday, December 22, 2022. It uncovers the story of a witch trial in Elizabethan England in St. Osyth. Get the preview scoop this week and read it next week! We continue the conversation with a hearty inquiry of our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Links:

Order book, Witches of St. Osyth by Dr. Marion Gibson

The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Leo Igwe, AfAW

Advocacy Against Witch Hunts, South Africa

End Witch Hunt Projects

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Transcript

[00:00:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to an exciting episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we have the privilege of speaking with Marion Gibson about her new book, The Witches of St. Osyth.
Sarah Jack: I'm excited about this one, because it's another close look at a community that went through witch hunts.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, we talk about the community of St. Osyth. We talk about the approximately 20 people who were accused there.
Sarah Jack: This community was going through a lot of change, and [00:01:00] they also believed in magic.
Josh Hutchinson: They did. We know about these witch trials from a pamphlet written by a mysterious W. W. but based on the accounts of one Brian Darcy, who was the chief prosecutor and interrogator. He was the powerful person in the area. He became the sheriff later. He produced the pamphlet possibly out of his own self-interest to promote himself as the tough on crime figure of the day.
Sarah Jack: Yes, he was very proud of his severe actions towards anyone that could be an enemy of God, these witches.
Josh Hutchinson: So we talk about him. We also talk about the victims, the accused, and we talk about their [00:02:00] accusers.
Sarah Jack: We learn about the good and the bad magic that they had in their culture.
Josh Hutchinson: And we talk about their familiar spirits, these animal-like creatures that could be summoned and kept almost like pets in baskets of wool and used at the witch's discretion to go out and afflict people.
Sarah Jack: And as always, you'll hear us talk about why we should care about these individuals and these stories, and hear us discuss what we can learn from what they went through and why it matters now.
Josh Hutchinson: We learn about not treating people as the Other, not labeling and treating people like they're outsiders within their own community. We learn about how we can be good to people today [00:03:00] and avoid these types of behaviors that lead to witch-hunts of various types.
We learn about these people from the late 16th century, and the thing that we learn is that they're just like us. They have the same emotions, the same motivations, the same fears, and those fears led them astray into a terrible tragedy. And so we discuss how we can avoid making those same errors.
Sarah Jack: Josh, I hear you've got some interesting history for us today.
Josh Hutchinson: During our research, we encountered a book with a fantastic title. We read excerpts from a book by one Reginald Scot written in 1584. He was a skeptic about witch trials and[00:04:00] some of this in response to Brian Darcy's pamphlet and the trials of the Witches at St. Osyth.
But his book is titled The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Wherein the lewde dealing of witches and witchmongers is notablie detected, the knaverie of conjurors, the impietie of inchantors, the follie of soothsaiers, the impudent falsehood of cousenors, the infidelitie of atheists, the prestilent practises of Pythonists, the curiositie of figurecasters, the vanitie of dreamers, the beggarlie art of Alcumystrie, the abomination of idolatrie, the horrible art of poisoning, the vertue and power of naturall magicke, and all the conveiances of legierdemaine and juggling are deciphered: and many other things opened, which have long lien hidden, howbeit verie [00:05:00] necessarie to be known.
That is some wordy title. It's the whole table of contents in a title, and though this was a common practice at the time, this is one of my favorite titles that I've come across from this period of writing. I love the way he lists all the different types of magical practices at the time with their various names and descriptions. I love his pestilent practices of Pythonists. Great alliteration. Great job naming this book, Reginald.
Sarah Jack: It's so fantastic, and it leaves you with more to research just after listening to the title.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. What do these things mean? What are Pythonists? What are figurecasters? What is [00:06:00] cousening? You could find out if you read Marion Gibson's book, Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550 to 1750.
Sarah Jack: Thank you for that great history, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome.
Sarah Jack: And now it is my pleasure to introduce Marion Gibson, author of Witchcraft in Society in England and America, 1550 to 1750, Witchcraft Myths in American Culture, Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing, and many more books, and next, The Witches of St. Osyth.
Josh Hutchinson: When was witchcraft outlawed in England?
Marion Gibson: That is a good question. And it had clearly been going on a long time before it was outlawed, so I, it's important to say that it's quite a long tradition of people practicing magic there. The first law against it was 1542, so we're looking at the reign of Henry VIII. He's thinking about people [00:07:00] practicing magic, potentially round the peripheries of his court.
You might remember that his queen, Ann Boleyn, was accused of witchcraft as part of her fall from grace and eventual execution. So he's thinking about those kind of things, and a law is brought in, but it doesn't seem to be applied very widely, and it just disappears. So in the 1560s, specifically 1563, his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I brings in an act against witchcraft and the practice of witchcraft, and then it remains illegal until the 1730s.
There's another act in 1604, King James VI of Scotland, I of England, has a witchcraft act, too. I guess for practical purposes, if you wanted to talk about the period where witch trials really start, you'd probably say the 1563 Act is the one to look at.
Sarah Jack: And as the laws progressed, what were the differences between those laws?
Marion Gibson: So the [00:08:00] 1563 one, which is the important one, I think, was an act which did condemn people to death, if they were found to be guilty of witchcraft, but only if they had killed someone. So if it was thought to be a really serious crime, if they were essentially a murderer, they would be executed. They'd be executed by hanging, rather than burning, as was true in some other jurisdictions.
But you could also be imprisoned, if you were found guilty of a lesser offense under that 1563 act. You might be imprisoned for a year, which was a bit more merciful. I mean, the prisons weren't great. You were quite likely to die of jail fever, or, at the very least, have an absolutely horrible time in an Elizabeth in prison and be kept in vile conditions and so on. But it was at least a better punishment than being hanged.
And four times a year, you would be taken outta the prison, and you would be carted around the local market towns and put in the stocks, and you'd have to do penance, essentially, for your crime. And people would come and jeer and throw [00:09:00] stuff at you. You'd get to go out four times a year, but it will be a horrible experience. We do know people survived it. We also know some convicted witches who were sent to prison and died there. So that was the first round of punishments that they devised under that 1563 act.
In 1604, things get worse. So the the third, if you like, witchcraft act of that series prescribed death for more or less anything. So the imprisonment option is much less favored, and James is thinking a lot more about witchcraft as a religious crime, as a crime, which is to do with devil worship and crimes against the state, as well as against neighbors, and so on.
And you also could be executed if you were thought to have fed a familiar spirit or covenanted with the devil, so certain kinds of, if you like, thought crime or crimes of imagination, which were short of actually killing your neighbors. So things get worse under the 1604 act.
Those are really the two [00:10:00] main ones. And then, in 1736, witchcraft is decriminalized. So you can still be, you can still be taken to court for saying that you are a witch, but you'll be judged as somebody who's a fraud or a charlatan. Somebody who's doing it because they want to make money. So you are actually stealing money from people by saying, aha, I can tell your fortune. From that point of view, that is, again, a better outcome. You will not be executed, you'll be essentially convicted of a kind of fraud. And by the 1730s, things have got a great deal better for people who might previously have been accused of witchcraft and executed, therefore.
Sarah Jack: Thank you so much.
Josh Hutchinson: So why did they change the law in 1604?
Marion Gibson: There are a number of explanations that people have come up with. Unfortunately, nobody wrote down exactly why they wanted to do it. It would be lovely, wouldn't it, if it was a nice rationale? There isn't, but one of the things that might have had impact on that is King James's own brush with witchcraft.
He's king of Scotland before he's [00:11:00] king of England and Scotland, and when he's only king of Scotland in the 1590s, he feels that he has been bewitched himself. So he thinks that when he's about to marry his Queen, Princess Anna of Denmark, that somebody who's trying to interfere with that marriage and that they're trying to stop her coming over the sea from Denmark, and that they're trying to stop the marriage being consummated and him producing heirs, therefore, and that they're trying to depose him and replace him with one of his courtiers, his cousins, the Earl of Bothwell.
So his personal experience seems to be quite important in his desire to tighten the laws against witchcraft. There might also be other factors. I The king doesn't bring in laws by himself. He has to work with his parliament. He has to work with counselors. It may be that there's a feeling that, generally, the problem of witchcraft is getting worse, but it does seem to be, at least partly to do with that transition from Elizabeth's reign [00:12:00] to James's reign and his sense that witches have it in for him personally, which is what he thinks.
Sarah Jack: And what were the differences between the Scotish and the English witchcraft acts?
Marion Gibson: Yeah, again, so there are two acts in 1563. The kingdoms are then separate. So the English one is the one I pretty much described to you. The Scotish one is always a lot broader. There's always more of a sense that you can be executed for more or less anything.
And the way that the crime is investigated and witches are questioned, and so on, is very variable in Scotland. It doesn't have quite the same centralized administration system that the English state has at the time. So in Scotland you might be questioned by the church, you might be questioned by your local magistrate, you might be questioned by some Lord, if you like, who has power over the particular geographical area that you live in.
It's a lot more formless, and the outcomes are really quite horrendous. So Scotland ends up prosecuting a lot more people. It ends up executing a lot [00:13:00] more people, and some of them are burned to death. Some of them are hanged, some of them are burned. There's a lot more fluidity in how they understand the crime and what they think they should do about it.
But that law yeah, runs along in parallel until the 1604 act. At which point, I guess James thinks right, let's tidy things up here.
Josh Hutchinson: At the time of those first three acts in England, did pretty much everyone believe in witchcraft?
Marion Gibson: Yeah, I think I would probably say that, in as far as we can tell. Again, people don't tend to write this stuff down, which is such a great pity, but it does seem quite likely.
You can imagine the sort of world they lived in. They lived in this world that was absolutely heaving with the idea of angels and demons and elves and fairies and strange, supernatural manifestations of creatures and omens and signs and all the rest of it. It seems quite logical, then, as part of that, people would generally have [00:14:00] believed that their neighbors could be witches and could harm them.
It's not really clear always exactly how they conceived that that might work. Some of the things they might have thought the people were doing included making a pact with the devil or having a chat with a talking animal that had come to them, who may or may not be the devil, or they might have thought it was some kind of inherent power that their neighbors had.
A lot of the people who were accused were thought also to be able to do good magic. So it was quite common for somebody to be accused if they were a cunning person or a folk magician. You can never quite tell what the accusers thought was going on, but once people have been accused, they get sucked into the legal system, and certain kinds of definitions which the magistrates know about tend to come into play. But yeah, I think it's probably fair enough to say that everybody that we know about seems to have believed in witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: And so when did the skepticism start to emerge?
Marion Gibson: It is there [00:15:00] from the early days in various ways. People seldom go as far as saying that there are no witches. So in the 1580s, there's a chap called Reginald Scot, who's a magistrate in Kent, a county in the south of England, and he starts saying he's not sure that witches should be punished in the way that they're being punished. And he gets very worried about the idea of witches as devil worshipers. He's really quite unconvinced by that.
And he, at least one of the things that he does in researching for his book is speak to somebody who's actually in court being accused of witchcraft. And she says to me, "of course I'm not a witch. What are you talking about? I've been accused by my minister. And he's accused me because he's ill, but he's ill because he's ill, not because I made him ill." And it's that kind of conversation that seems to make Scot think that, at least the idea of witchcraft, as it is conventionally defined, is not one that he wants to believe in, that he thinks is [00:16:00] defensible.
He never goes as far as saying there are no witches, though. He's a religious man, it appears, in the same way that all the people in his community are. Presumably he believes in the devil. He has concerns about exactly how the devil might manifest. He's very interest in the idea of spirits and what a spirit means, and how that interact with people in the real world. He has all these kind of philosophical concerns, but even he seems to believe that there are such things as witches, just not the people who are right in front of him. He feels quite compassionately, I think, that they should be kindly treated and released.
But those sorts of ideas are bubbling away in the background. By the time you get to the 18th century, the idea is strengthened and strengthened, and more and more people have explored different bits of it. They're not thinking quite the old binary ways that they were, you're either on God's side or the devil's side.
And that makes it a lot easier for people to say, " yes, maybe I believe in witches, but not this kind, or not that kind, or I don't believe that they covenant with the devil. I don't believe that they operate in the way that you say they [00:17:00] do. So therefore, why don't we change the law to make it a lot more difficult to prosecute people?"
So by the time you get to 1730s, there are certainly still people they believe in witches, there are some who don't believe in witches, and there are some who probably dunno what they think.
Josh Hutchinson: We read a number of the accounts in Witchcraft and Society, and another question that came to us was, why were the male examiners so obsessed with the sexuality of the accused witches?
Marion Gibson: They were, weren't they? It's a good observation. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that's going on is to do with the position of women in European society in the time more generally, which of course transfers over to American society, as well, but it's particularly influenced in medieval and early modern Europe by clergy who are sometimes celibate, as part of their commitment to religion. Sometimes they're Catholic clergy, so they don't have wives, they don't have daughters, they don't spend a lot of time thinking about the worlds that women live [00:18:00] in. And they regard women as a sinful creatures, tempting creatures. Bodies are dangerous. Their souls are more open to demonic corruption than men's are.
And that does seem to transfer over into Protestant conceptions of what witches are. So even where societies are a little more open to the idea that women might be religious, you know, they might be literate, they might be engaged in religion, in good ways, there still seems to be always that suspicion that well, look at Eve, the first woman, terribly sinful, open to temptation. Look what happened to her. I think it goes on. And so I think that they're obsessed with female sexuality, because they're told from the earliest times when they're doing Bible readings as children, that women are sinful, because Eve was sinful. They don't know a great deal about the world of women. Women's bodies are mysterious to them.
And it seems that they have a sense that women are this secondary kind of creature and maybe a way that the devil finds [00:19:00] his way into the world. And these are not unfamiliar ideas now, either, are they? We still very often come across this sense that women are a, a secondary creature. Women are not as important. Women's rights are not as important. So I think you can see the kind of context that we're dealing with here. Yes, they're obsessed with female sexuality and it's because they're suspicious of women.
Sarah Jack: When you said, "look at Eve," that's so interesting.
Marion Gibson: It's one of the things they keep coming back to, isn't it? Women are, their bodies are tempting, but their voices are tempting, too. And that goes back to Eve eating the apple, turning to Adam and saying, "aha, the apple, why don't you have some?" So there's always this sense that women are, some clergy refer to them as the devil's gateway. So there's this sense that they've let Satan in, and now they're going to come around to your house. You good Christian gentleman, are they going to corrupt you as well? So it's about temptation. It's about the permeability that women were thought to have to temptation.
Sarah Jack: We're really excited to talk [00:20:00] about your book that's coming out. Can you tell us why you wrote it?
Marion Gibson: Yeah, so this is The Witches of St. Osyth, and I've been wanting to write this book for 25 years, which even now seems to be a very long time.
Many years ago, I was given a photocopy of the news pamphlet about this trial, which happened in 1582 in the eastern English County of Essex. And I was given this photocopy, and I could not put it down. I started reading the stories of these witches, and I just got particularly fascinated by the female witches and what they were saying.
I hadn't read before that kind of account where a woman was talking about her ordinary life. She was talking about baking and making soap, and she was talking about minding children and going to the mill with stuff to grind and coming back with sacks of flour and brewing and all of those kind of things. And at the same time, the women were [00:21:00] confessing quite often to having demonic familiars in the shape of cats and dogs and so on. And I was utterly confused about what was going on but completely enchanted, because I wanted to know about these women's lives, and I wanted to know why I thought they were telling these stories about their lives.
So I began to look at the questioning process and what happened to these people and it just went off from there really. So I wrote the book because of those questions I had all those years ago. And in 2018-19, I had the opportunity to go to St. Osyth itself and to go to the local record repository in Chelmsford, in, in Essex, and actually start to dig out the records of their lives, which remain. So the book has come outta that.
Sarah Jack: Excellent. I love how the questions that pop up lead us on these discoveries. So that's so exciting.
Marion Gibson: Yes. I've had this continual itch wanting to scratch, wanting to answer those questions, and I do feel the book answers them. I've been [00:22:00] really pleased with the outcome. Doesn't tell us everything about those people, but it tells us an awful lot more than what we knew about their individual lives, about their communities, about the kind of landscape that they lived in, about why they might have told those stories about themselves.
Josh Hutchinson: We like those kinds of books that focus on the people, so you get an idea of what these humans were like at that time, and usually it turns out they're pretty much like us.
Marion Gibson: Yeah, that's my feeling. Yeah. This isn't some sort of strange, archaic community of people who are not at all like us. They're not like us in some ways, they're probably more religious generally. They have a much greater sense, as we've said already, that they're surrounded by a spiritual world and that the devil is lurking in that world, as well as all sorts of other spirits. But beyond that, they do seem awfully like us.
And some of the stories are just heart-rending. They come out of family tragedies, they've lost children,[00:23:00] their remaining children are dreaming dreams of their lost brothers and sisters, and these kind of ghost dreams get mistaken for stories about demonic familiars, and so on. I felt really close to them by the time I was done, whilst having that sort of a slight scholarly skepticism.
You can't know, but you can try and guess, and I really felt that we ought to try and guess, we ought to try and ask those questions and give those people back an identity, which was other than that of witch. Who were they before? They were a wife. They were a husband. They were a daughter. They were a spinner, that they spun wool in their village. They dyed cloth. They had other identities. Could we reconstruct some of those?
Josh Hutchinson: And where is St. Osyth located?
Marion Gibson: So it's in Essex, on the southeast coast of England. And if think about where London is, it's just a little bit east of that, basically. So the river Thames goes out into the North Sea, and there are various other rivers [00:24:00] flowing out in eastern England. And on one of those estuaries, St. Osyth sits. It's a flat landscape. It's wild. It's haunted by marsh birds. And there's a big fishing industry. They're a big oyster industry. It's wild marshland, and it's bitterly cold a lot of the time. You go there in winter, and that east wind nearly cuts you in half. It's a very chilly place, but in summer it's very dry because, again, it's got that sort of easterly wind. It's got a connection with the continent both in its weather systems and in its culture. So it's quite close to the European continent.
Sarah Jack: You talked a little bit about the daily lives of the women. Is there anything else about the community that you'd like to share that was happening during those trials?
Marion Gibson: Yeah, I think there were some other things going on that were important. These people were living their lives, but they were living them within this wider historical context.
And one of the things about religious change, so just talked about how they're close to European continent. Essex was a place where ideas came and went and [00:25:00] flowed through, really. Ships came over from Belgium, the Netherlands, Holland, carrying with them pamphlets about religion, particularly Protestant religion. So Essex becomes quite a Protestant place. There's quite a bit of religious conflict there. And also carrying the other kinds of religious ideas, I think demonological ideas. So ideas about the study of witches and demons came over there, too. And I think that's quite important. It's quite a connected place. So there's that.
And there's also the fact that in that it's tiny little village, it's practically nothing there. It was a little bit busier in Elizabethan times. There's hardly anything there now. But one of the things that is there is a massive former Abbey, which is known as the Priory in modern times and was this massive, wealthy religious foundation. But of course in Henry VIII's reign. Along comes Henry and thinks, " I quite like the revenues of the church. Thank you very much. Please let me close it down and take it over and give it to one of my noblemen." Which he does. So he [00:26:00] throws out the abbot and the monks, as he does across all of his lands, the time of the dissolution of the monasteries.
So there's been a massive religious change in the 1530s to 40s. Previously, they had this institution up the road, which was wealthy and charitable, and was plugged into their lives in every way that you could imagine. As tenants, the villages could go up to the abbey, in order to get charity and food and so on.
Many of them would've worked for the abbey, and then it's all gone. So there's been this massive disruption, and the new family who is put in, the noble family that the king and his commissioners give the monastery to, they're called the Darcys. And although they also have all those connections with the local community, they're really facing out of the community rather than towards it, as the church was. They're looking towards London, they're looking towards various kinds of courtly advancement, and it's one of the Darcy families, a minor branch. But one of the Darcy men, who is involved in questioning the witches, he seems really [00:27:00] important in claiming a starring role in this witch trial. And so that religious context is important, but also the new family who comes in and their establishment of power in the village. That seems to be really important too.
Josh Hutchinson: Is there anything else we need to know about Brian Darcy?
Marion Gibson: Yes it is he. Yes. I don't like Brian Darcy, perhaps won't surprise you to know. I'm sure he was also a man like us, and it's important to remember that he's not some kind of appalling villain. And he gets into the situation that he gets into, presumably because he has religious beliefs, because he feels a certain way about his position in his family, and so on. But I find him bullying and negative and abusive towards the people who he is supposed to be caring for. And he does some awful things when he's questioning the suspected witches.
He's a local magistrate. It's his duty to do it. So if somebody brings a [00:28:00] witchcraft suspect to him, yeah, he has to do something about it. From that point of view, that's not his fault. But he goes above and beyond. So he starts lying to them. He starts saying to them, "if you confess, I, of course, I'll treat you very nicely, and you won't be accused of anything, and you'll be fine." And I guess they go along with it, because yeah, he's the big powerful man, isn't he? Why wouldn't they? Of course they confess. And he starts putting pressure on them. He has artifacts brought from their houses to question them about.
He brings in their children, really young children, children who are eight, children who are six. And he questions them about their parents. And of course they come up with all this fantastical stuff from dreams and imaginations and folk beliefs and wherever else they're getting this stuff from.
And I think there's a very, very high probability that what Brian does when he publishes the newspaper account of all of these is he redates everything. So he makes it look like he questioned mum and dad first and the kids afterwards. But when you look at the [00:29:00] confessions, and you look at the way that they're arranged in the pamphlet, and you look at the dates, you can see that what the children are saying is them being put to mom and dad as something that somebody said already. I think Brian and the people who were helping him with this investigation have had a think about this and thought, "under English law, this kind of thing isn't really permitted. We'll just have to make it look like we questioned the parents and then the kids came in and just confirmed all the stuff that had been said."
I don't like him. I think he's a really pernicious influence in the village, and he's really wealthy. He doesn't need to do this, in so many different ways. He has a really nice life, as far as one can tell. He has wife and children of his own. He's got these massive estates. He's raking it in. Why does he need to pick on these poor individuals in this village and try to get them to confess to being witches? And I guess he thinks it's his time. He's gonna make a big splash. He can be important in local [00:30:00] justice. He can find the enemies of God in his community. No doubt, he sincerely believes at least some of this. I don't think he's making it up, but he does a terrible thing. Yeah. That's Brian Darcy.
Sarah Jack: When I started reading his severe attitude towards the enemy, it made me wince. I was like, "oh man, this is really not gonna be enjoyable to read," because he just starts right out saying how what they have coming isn't even awful enough.
Marion Gibson: He does. There's a preface to the newspaper account, the pamphlet about the witches, which I think is written by somebody else. And I think, and I've identified for the first time in the book that I know who this person is, which is just so exciting. And this is a guy who's working with Brian Darcy. So I think you're right. I think they share that position. And what this person says, and Brian signs off on, is, "yeah, hanging isn't enough. We should be burning them." And you just really wonder, don't you, how somebody does come to that [00:31:00] position about the other human beings in their society? Obviously burning was quite a common punishment for people like heretics, and he would've known that across the European continent.
A lot of people were burned for religious crimes, and he conceived witchcraft to be a religious crime, a crime against God. But nevertheless, this was a horrendous thing to say. And Reginald Scot, the guy I was talking about earlier, slaps him down specifically for that in his book. He says, " if it was up to Brian Darcy, there'd be hardly anybody left in the villages," because he's got these crazy ideas.
So he gets criticized even in his own time for being harsh, which is quite surprising, isn't it? Looking back, you get this sense that these were difficult times and a lot of horrible things happened, but Reginald Scot thinks that Brian Darcy has gone above and beyond and has done something even more horrible than he needed to do.
Josh Hutchinson: Really looking forward to reading the book when it comes out and seeing how this all plays out and who that [00:32:00] person you identified was. That's exciting.
Marion Gibson: I think it felt by the time I'd done it that it was writing itself, like books do sometimes, and I think it's such an important story. I think it's really important that people have a look at it, because it does have messages for now. It is about people turning on each other. It's about the vulnerable being picked on by the incredibly wealthy and already successful. It's about scapegoating, it's about minorities, it's about people being singled out for no good reason that we can see.
So I think it's quite an important story from that point of view. And I did love writing it. It was really hard, and the pandemic happened in the middle of it as well, which made everything far worse. So there was quite a long period where I didn't write anything. And of course I couldn't go to archives either because they all closed down so I couldn't get in.
It was a difficult book to write, but it felt like it had to be written. And I really enjoyed doing the research, and I really enjoyed writing about these people and just trying to give them something back. [00:33:00] I really felt quite powerfully, more so than with any of my other books actually, that there was something here that I needed to do. So I do hope people enjoy it. Yes.
Sarah Jack: We would love to hear more about who the witches of St. Osyth were.
Marion Gibson: Yes. So there's a group of people from five different villages, and Osyth is at the heart of it? And it seems to start there because of the Darcy family and because of Brian Darcy, specifically. The first person he questions there is a woman called Ursley Kempe, which Ursley seems to be a version of Ursula. So I think that's what she's called. And she's basically a single mother. We don't quite know what her history is, but we are told that she has this illegitimate child, a boy called Thomas, who he's eight. And she's questioned, and he's questioned, and they come up with this story.
When Brian Darcy starts bullying Ursley, she bursts into tears and submits to him, essentially. And she starts confessing all this stuff about how she has animal familiars and so on and so forth. And it all takes [00:34:00] off from there. And then, unfortunately, she names other people, so she starts turning on other villagers and saying, "this person is a Witch, that person is a Witch." So she accuses quite a lot of other women from her village, and then it spreads out.
So accusations start coming in from other villages and Brian goes on this journey off to the east. So he rides down the coast, and he rides out onto those flat marshlands towards the North Sea, and he visits other villages as well. And there he finds other people to question. So we've got Cysley and Henry Selles, who are a married couple living in the village of Little Clacton. And they have at least four children, and they've also lost some children in their family history, as well. Some of their children have died young, so they have this sort of haunted family life. And Brian starts prying away at this and finds out things from their children, which he then asked Henry and Cysley about.
And I managed to find things like their marriage [00:35:00] record. I found out about that family history, which nobody knew before. So they had this really interesting, complicated history that I've told in the book. And then he goes a bit further. He goes to a village called Thorpe, where he questions some more people, who also confess things.
It's interesting by then people are starting to resist a little bit, though. So there's a woman called Elizabeth Eustis and another one called Margaret Gravel, and they flat out refused to tell him anything, which I really do respect. They were in a very vulnerable position, but they just said to him, "no, I'm not a witch. I'm not telling you anymore." So that was interesting.
And then he goes a bit north, he goes to a village called Little Oakley. And then finally he goes to a coastal village called Walton. But in Little Oakley, he finds a woman who is the woman where I end the book, and she's really fascinating. Her name is Annis Herd.
So women in Essex at this time are often called Annis, which seems to be somewhere between Anne and Agnes. Seems to be quite a specific local name. So Annis Herd is really interesting. She, too, has [00:36:00] this interesting sexual history. She's clearly had a number of lovers by the time Brian comes to her village and she's suspected as being a light woman, which is a thing that she must not be in her time and place. And she's got at least two illegitimate children, one of whom, a little girl, is questioned by Brian. So I found out more about her, and I found out more about her family, and I found she had some land holdings, a small one. She was very poor, and I found out who her mother and father were, and I managed to trace some of her connections in the community.
And she gets accused by her local vicor, a guy called Richard Harrison. And I found out a bit more stuff about Richard and his family, as well, and what happened to him, not only at the time ,of the trial, but also what happens to him afterwards. He gets himself into some sticky trouble himself later on, which, being who I am, I was quite pleased to see, although I thought that was, I do try and be objective, but I was quite pleased to see Richard get a little of what was coming back to him, [00:37:00] if I'm perfectly honest and Annis goes on, Annis has a history that goes on through the trial and afterwards, and I found out a little more about that. And I thought she was a particularly fascinating character, because you always assume that these people are disempowered and are put upon to the extent that they would confess anything and are really not able to resist.
And what they found with Annis was that she did resist, she had her own life. And there were records of that life going back into the 1570s and then going on, and I really got this strong sense of her as an individual, which I hope comes across in the book. She's a survivor. She's somebody who fights back, and I thought she was a fascinating person to write about.
So there's a group of, by the time you had done, you've maybe got 20, 25 individuals who flit across the pages of the book. Some of them I know more about than others. Some of you know there are more records surviving of them than others, but they're basically ordinary villagers caught up in this astounding hurricane of [00:38:00] accusations that's come down on them.
And what I try and do is tell each story individually so that readers can get to know them, too, as well as we're ever going to, at any rate.
Josh Hutchinson: Those 20 to 25, those were the accused?
Marion Gibson: Yes. It's not always clear what happens to them. So even though accusations are made against, some of them are not tried. I think there's quite good evidence that at least two of them ran away and were never heard from again or were heard from later in other guys' maps, with other names. I think one of them does come back into the record later on, although it's hard to tell. But there's just this sort of storm of accusation flying about, and some people are named and not tried, and some people are tried but not convicted, and some people are tried and supposedly acquitted and supposed to be freed from jail, but are not freed from jail. It's very messy.
But yeah, you could say you were dealing with a group of about 20 individuals, say, but there's also a big group of accusers. And I must say I found those just as [00:39:00] fascinating. One of the things that when I read the initial account really prompted me to ask those questions about the stories was the sense of, I didn't understand why the witches were confessing, but I didn't understand why the accusers were accusing either. How could they think this stuff about their lives? And they, too, told me about their children and their domestic processes and what their husband was up to and all this kind of thing. So there's an even broader group of individuals who are accusers, and I've really tried to hunt them down as well. I've tried to find out what I thought their motivation might have been, what their circumstances were like, and so on.
Sarah Jack: In these cases, did some of the accusers become the accused?
Marion Gibson: Yes. So yes they did. One of the problems with Brian's technique of questioning is that once he's got somebody in front of him, he asks the individual to name others, and sometimes the people they name are the accusers, either of them or of somebody else. So people get drawn in. And there's two sisters in [00:40:00] particular, Alice Hunt and Marjorie Barnes. And you can see them struggling between these identities. They have made accusations, or at least Alice has, but then they get accused and they're really not sure what to do.
So there's this sense that it could have been anybody, really. All somebody had to do was say your name, and you moved very quickly from the position of somebody who was stood on the sidelines saying, "oh yeah, I'm sure she is a witch. Yes, I'm sure she did be witch my cow," to somebody who's saying, "no, I'm not a witch. I didn't bewitch your horse or your child." So there, there is this sense of identity is being shifting. Yes.
Josh Hutchinson: Was St. Osyth typical of English witch trials?
Marion Gibson: It's a bit bigger than a lot of the the trials seem to be. But there's always a question about exactly how much we know and exactly how much survives. One of the things I do want to do is hunt down a couple of the others now. Now I've done it with this one, especially in Essex, are there other ones that I can do? And yes, I think there are. I do think [00:41:00] there are other cases I could write about. Five years time, maybe I'll be able to say a bit more about how typical it is.
I think it's a slightly bigger hunt than normal. It's slightly more driven by one individual than most of them seem to be. But those are the ones that tend to get into print, cuz that one individual tends to get quite excited and produce a lot of paperwork, and somebody then thinks, "oh, we could publish this." Makes the money out of it. So in a sense, it's typical of those sorts of trials, the ones that get publicized. It's very difficult to tell, though. The picture is very muddied. There's very good record survival in the Southeast, so near London essentially, the paperwork gets drawn in and kept, but in some of the outlying areas in the North and the West, it's all gone from this period. You can't find anything much in the West and most of the West of England before the 1670s. So we can't really say whether this one is typical of what was going on there, because we just don't know.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. I found it very interesting how the pamphlets [00:42:00] become the story.
Marion Gibson: I love them. Yes. They were where I started my academic career, really, reading these stories. So the St. Osyth one and then branching out to read loads of others. And I loved them. I loved the way that they framed the stories. That was one of the things that really interested me. So it wasn't just that the stories themselves are fascinating, I was really interested in the publication of them, who was writing the prefaces? What for? Was it done for money? Was it kind of hack journalism? Was it, " we need something to publish. Quick, find us a story, go around the courts, ask some questions, pick up some documents, see what we can get up by next Tuesday." Was it that kind of thing? And I think in some cases, yes, maybe it was.
Or was it a single powerful individual saying, " I'm religiously deeply committed, and I want to say something about the devil's work in my community. And I've put together this group of witchcraft accusations. Here's the paperwork. Would you like to publish this, Mr. Publisher?" And it felt really interesting. It felt like there was a really interesting [00:43:00] interface between the legal authorities and, if you like, the popular press, the journalists, the paparazzi of their time. They were getting their stories from these really quite elite people and publishing them to a wider audience.
And sometimes you can see that the pamphlets are really influential in later witch trials. They did the right thing from their own points of view in getting those stories out, because then accusations spread to other communities, and other people started reading the pamphlets. "Oh, that happened in Essex. And here I am in this village in Northamptonshire 40 years on. I think it's happening here too." So I found that really fascinating. The way that stories about witchcraft were monetized, were publicized, and spread.
Josh Hutchinson: And why do you believe Brian Darcy wanted to publish this pamphlet?
Marion Gibson: Yeah, I think he wants power, really. I think it must be quite difficult for him being a member of this junior branch of the family. He's incredibly wealthy and powerful, but he's not as [00:44:00] incredibly wealthy and powerful as his relatives. And I guess that maybe stings a bit. It's hard to say, but that's what you feel from his account.
And he also wants, I think, to assume more of a role in the judiciary in his county. I think he's keen on running for office, and he ends up being sheriff of the county, which is the top legal official. That probably translates really well into the American context, doesn't it?
Nobody knows what it means in England anymore, but yeah, for you guys, that probably makes sense. So he really wants to have more sway in local justice, I think. And he gets that. Annoyingly, he gets what he wanted outta publishing it.
Sarah Jack: So do you think some of these villagers and the community members saw that coming, that their interactions with him on this were going to be impacted by his authority? That it was growing?
Marion Gibson: Yes, I think so. I [00:45:00] think they saw him as somebody to be afraid of and to be wary of and to count out to and answer the questions of and submit to, generally. I think he was very much that kind of figure for some of these people. I would be pretty sure he was, if not their landlord, and he may have been their landlord, at least somebody who owned a lot of property in their community, was seen riding through on his horse and generally looking magnificent, who certainly had the power to do things like fine them or take them to court in various ways. And his family, the Darcy family, are lords of the manor in all of the communities where he questions someone, which I think is really important and haven't really been thought about before. So yeah they do see him coming. He's the big man. They do what the big man says.
Josh Hutchinson: Back to the accused and their accusers, what was going on in their lives that we should know about?
Marion Gibson: They were people under quite a lot of strain, I think. So [00:46:00] economically, St. Osyth wasn't doing as well as it had been. Yeah. We talked about the religious changes, and that was a massive disruption. All of the kind of trading arrangements, every kind of tax collection, every kind of relationship to do with deeds and property and ownership changed hands from the church to the secular lords, the Darcys, who came in. And that has its own knock-on effects, doesn't it? If you break stuff up, if you disrupt stuff, as we learned recently, it does not end well.
And your economy can suffer, and your society can suffer, and people can be set against each other. And I think they're that kind of society. I think we're struggling with that. And economically, they're not as well-off as they were. The wool industry, which a lot of them are involved in, and the Abbey was involved in, isn't prospering quite as much as it was. Trade with the European continent has suffered.
So the wool trade is really [00:47:00] strong, going across to Belgium and Holland, coming back to Britain, and that's got a bit disrupted. They're in somewhat of a difficult situation, really. And if you go to St. Osyth now, there's almost nothing happening there. It's the sort of place where there used to be successful industry but now there isn't. It was never on a very large scale, but it did support that community, and I guess made them feel like they had a strong local identity, and there was money coming in and stuff like that.
It feels like it's a community where people are getting poorer and are struggling with who they are, really. They're no longer built around the abbey in that community like they used to be. What's their relationship with the Darcys? What's their relationship with each other? What about people coming in from the European continent? What about the religious turmoil of the period? I think you probably felt really vulnerable and, obviously, one of the things people do in that situation is lash out at other people, and it feels like the witch hunt might have had something to do with that.
We've covered the religion. [00:48:00] We've talked about the economy a bit. We've talked a bit about gender and the way that women were under pressure in that society. We've talked about how the Darcys are really important and are basically wandering around kicking people. If you look at all those things together, that's what makes the witch hunt happen. It's not one thing, it's circumstances coming together in this toxic mess, and out of that comes this witch hunt. So I guess, that's how I'd summarize it, really. They're all in a very bad situation in different ways, and out of that comes scapegoating, and the community is further torn apart, when it would've been so much better if they had come together.
Sarah Jack: So they're having a lot of desperation. They're feeling things slip away. Would've there been more behaviors that you know, they're trying to good magic to try to resolve some of the misfortune? Were things like that happening, and [00:49:00] would've that been viewed as negative or positive?
Marion Gibson: Yeah, that's a really good question. Yes, there are people practicing what they would've thought of as good magic in these communities. And the first woman to be questioned, Ursley Kempe, seems to have worked as a healer, a midwife or nurse, somebody who minds people's children for money, essentially, and to have wanted to improve her position in that way and have more patients, if you like, more clients going to her.
So one of the things we learn about her is some of the spells that she does to cure people's rheumatism. She uses herbs, and she uses ale, and she uses things like pig's dung, which is probably not a good thing to be putting in any kind of medicine. But for her, that's a powerful, magical ingredient. Yes, I think that one of the things they were trying to do was find magical answers to their difficulties. Yes. Whether that went beyond medicine, I don't know. But I do get this sense that they felt [00:50:00] they lived in this kind of haunted landscape and that there were spirits all around them, which could be used for good as well as for evil.
I think it's probably true that a number of the women, in particular, I think there's quite good evidence from very small things that they say that a number of them were these kind of magical practitioners, that they stood out in their community a little bit more than others, because they were the people that you went to get an ointment, if somebody was sick, or they were the people that you went to get a spell said for you if you thought somebody cursed you, that kind of thing. So yes, I think that's quite an important context, too.
Josh Hutchinson: What sort of bad magic were they accused of?
Marion Gibson: They're thought to have these animal familiars in the form of things like cats and toads and so on, the classic witch's familiar. And through them, they're thought to project this harm onto their neighbors. They would make an arrangement with this demonic cat, which had come to them and said, "I [00:51:00] am Satan, please work with me." And they send them to the neighbors. They've quarreled with the lady down the street, and she's refused to give them something that they've asked for as a gift or as a loan or some work that they wanted. She's gone elsewhere. She's employed someone else. And they send the demonic cat or toad or whatever to her house, and it costs a magical spell of its own. It's like a, it's a transmitter really. That creature is an agent of the witch's power, and the witch is an agent of the devil's power, supposedly. So it goes into the house, and it projects this magic.
In some cases in, not the Saint Osyth ones, but in other cases the witches seem to think that the creatures bite or scratch their victim. But it honestly, in St. Osyth's case, it seems enough that the creature has been there, that somebody's seen it and has caught in it being cursed. So they're sending these creatures around the local community, and they're doing some really quite serious things. They're accused of killing people, children and adults. They're [00:52:00] accused of things like causing back pain.
They're accused of causing certain kinds of other harm, like financial harm. So they are thought to have disrupted people's brewing and baking activities, making their daily lives much harder. They're accused of things like killing horses who are pulling a plow. They're accused of killing livestock. They're disrupting all sorts of activities across the community.
So really the worst thing that they can do is kill someone, but they can also do a whole range of other different kinds of harm as well. So people are really genuinely afraid. And the volume of accusations is fascinating. It really does feel like these are villages where spells are thought to be flying around like signals going through the air from transmitters, if you like, like the air is charged with this magical energy, and a lot of it is really negative.
Yeah. You are very lucky, if you're not walking down towards the mill one day, and a curse lights on you, and then heaven knows what could happen. So it feels very much like it's a [00:53:00] community of people throwing spells at each of the good and bad.
Sarah Jack: I found it interesting how much the spirits are given an identity, a name, they're having conversation, the women are negotiating or deciding. You had said the information that came from the small things the women said, and there really is a lot of information in what they said about their experience.
Marion Gibson: Yeah, the animals do feel like fully rounded characters, don't they? And they often do in these kind of accounts. There really are accounts of cats called Satan in some of the others. This one, they tend to give them nice, familiar pet names, don't they? Jack and Tiffin and things like that. And you get the sense that maybe we're dealing with pets here in some cases.
I can't really imagine people keeping pet toads, although perhaps if you were a lonely, older person and this creature was a companion for you in your garden, maybe you would, I can see myself doing that. I like wild creatures. Maybe I would get this sense that I'd [00:54:00] adopted one, as it were.
But I think sometimes it's maybe just ordinary cats and dogs, and they do seem to have these intense relationships with them. It's one of the things that puzzles historians. What is going on here? Do people genuinely think their pet cat curled up in the corner is a spirit? And then, going beyond that, do they think it's a demonic spirit, or is somebody putting that idea in their head when they're questioned? Why do they think this?
And nobody's really got to the bottom of it, because nobody explained it, and maybe they couldn't have explained it. It's a very nebulous sort of idea, isn't it? Animals have strong personality. Some people attribute magical or totemic energies to them. That does make sense, but actually thinking that your dog is the devil is a big step beyond that. And it's never been entirely clear to me, or I think anyone else really, what's going on here.
They have these familiar spirits, and they also seem to share them. Some of the women talk about ways in which they had a sort of shared group of [00:55:00] familiar spirits, who they could dispatch. You know, Ursley Kempe says that she and her neighbor, Alice Newman, they had these four spirits in common, if you like. So something bad had happened to Alice, Ursley said, at any rate, Alice could just send the spirit to go and smite Father So-and-so who had upset her. What they're sharing pets as a pet-sitting arrangement? What's going on here?
Or are they just imaginary? Are they imaginary animals? Lots of children have imaginary animals. Is this something that carried on in the minds of early modern people, under great strain and in circumstances of poverty and loneliness and so on? Did that inform what they said about the familiar spirits?
And it is still something that puzzles me. I talked about the way the book had given me some answers, and I was really pleased with that. But my goodness, there are still a lot of questions, aren't there? What is it that people are talking about when they tell the stories? What really happened?
Did the people who were accused and confess really think that they had these powers and [00:56:00] that they were witches or that maybe they had magical powers where they could heal people and somehow this had all gone horribly wrong? Is that what they thought? Or? Is it all fantasy on behalf of their accusers?
And I think it come down on the side of thinking that the people in the village have strong magical beliefs. I don't think Brian Darcy could have generated all this stuff by himself. And I'm not sure he would've wanted to. He did genuinely want to know what the devil was up to in his community, I think. But at the same time, the balance between those two viewpoints is really difficult.
Sarah Jack: It makes me wonder, too, what was going on in his home? What were his children and his wife and his servants? What were they saying? Did they have pets? Was he comparing to what he wouldn't wanna share with anyone that's inside his walls?
Marion Gibson: It's a great question. I would like to know that. I know where he did the interrogations and know the house. It still stands, which is really great. I've thought [00:57:00] about what was going on in that house and found it difficult to imagine. There is a few surviving accounts of stuff that was going on, but it's basically at the level of people paying rent, it's documents about who was living there and who was working as his secretary and so on. There's really hardly anything left, and it's quite businesslike what remains.
But it was a moated house. So it had a moat around it. It was built as a defensive structure. And I think that makes me think interestingly about Brian's mindset. If you live in a massive, moated house, maybe you do have a kind of defensive mindset. Maybe you do feel set apart from the community, and there's a sense of threats surrounding your walls, maybe. But his family, yes, I would love to know more about them. He has sons, he has daughters. He sends his sons to Cambridge University and to the inns of court. So they train as lawyers.
One of his sons, the one who will succeed him, ultimately, is married off to the daughter of another important local family. He's [00:58:00] struggling in his local community with religiosity. We don't quite know if he's Catholic or Protestant. I think he's probably Protestant-leaning, but many of his connections are strongly Catholic, still. And that's a difficult thing to be in Elizabethan England. That means you've lost some of your rights. It means people are going to come around and ask you questions about your beliefs, basically. So I think he's under strain from that point of view.
But they're wealthy people, so he wants his children to marry to the big Catholic families, and his big relatives the Darcys are Catholics. Maybe there's a sense of he's struggling with that identity of his locality and of Englishness and his religious identity and so on.
And I wonder how he felt about his sons. Was he proud of what they had done, or was he continually carping at them to do more? What about his two daughters? He leaves them an awful lot of money when he dies. He's very helpful to those two young women. How did he find [00:59:00] an identity for them in a society where he had so often persecuted other women, and he knew what their position was, which was essentially, not good. How did he feel about those girls? They went on to be highly successful, and one of them later on came to be involved in another witch trial, which is something I'm going to be looking at over the next couple of years, as well, because I want to know more about her and her husband and what happens to her. It feels like his family situation must matter, doesn't it? But it's also very difficult to see. He doesn't leave the kind of records that I'd have wanted him to.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you want people to take away from reading your book?
Marion Gibson: I want them to have an increased sense of the individuality of these people and, like you said earlier, to think of them as people like us. I think it's quite easy for historians sometimes to treat people as units of data. There were all these witch trials, it was absolutely terrible, this [01:00:00] many number of hundred people were executed. I want to give the sense that yes, each of these people was an individual. Each of them had a story, beyond the moment when they were accused of witchcraft and they were tried and they were executed or whatever happened to them.
So I want them to feel increased sense of respect for those people and engagement with them, which I think is one of the things that history has to do. It has to make us see people as individuals, and it has to, I think, draw on empathy and feeling to do that. I don't like a dry history of just statistics. I prefer something that gives me a sense of these people's lives.
And I think it ought make them think also about persecution. The projects I'm going on to now, next, are both about persecutions, too, and I think it ought to make us think about why we persecute each other. Why do we hate each other so much? Why is there so much anger in the world?
And I think we live in angry times now. And looking back to the times of the Reformation, when there was this, broad [01:01:00] division between Catholics and Protestants, and we were colonizing the world from Europe and oppressing indigenous peoples everywhere. That was an angry and harsh time, and we seem to live in quite an angry and harsh time too, in different ways.
So I hope people will reflect on that scapegoating and come away from the book. You can't expect that people will suddenly become kinder to each other across the world, or it would be nice if they did, but I do want people to have that sense of empathy, if they can do that when they finish the book.
Sarah Jack: What can we apply from those stories to our modern story?
Marion Gibson: I think there's a couple of things. One of them's about gender. We talked about this a little bit already. I think we still struggle with the idea of powerful women, and I still think we struggle with the idea of female sexuality and women as empowered creatures in their own right. And I think we need to pay a lot more attention to the history of witch trials, because they are the history of oppressing women, making choices [01:02:00] for them, persecuting them. And I think that's all really important in contemporary times.
And then there's that sense of of oppressing the poor, if you like, as well. Picking on people who are seen as outsiders or minorities or people who are too vulnerable to defend themselves. And I'd like people to think a bit more about that because this seems to be part of that long history of doing that. And perhaps if we can understand a bit more about why we did it in the past, we can understand a bit more about why we do it now.
Again, it seems a very noble hope, doesn't it? It would be lovely if that were to happen, but I, that's my 2 cents contribution to trying to make the world better.
Sarah Jack: We're very passionate about using these conversations to remind people and to call out against tolerating that kind of oppression. So we really appreciate your thoughts on that.
Marion Gibson: That's great. I think you are right. Yes. We do have to try and understand the history of this, don't we, so that we can see what's going [01:03:00] on now?
Josh Hutchinson: We feel like we still have a lot of the same witch-hunt mentality and that we do need to find ways that we can stop ourselves from doing that.
Marion Gibson: I think you're absolutely right. The next book of work, there are two things, actually. One of the books is called Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials, and it does try and do exactly that. So it looks across 700 years of history right up to the present and says, "look, witches are still on trial. We are still holding witch trials. Can we not do that?" So that's one of the projects.
And the other one is about Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General in English history. So I'm looking at his activities in the 1640s, and he's sort of Brian Darcy figure in many ways, but he kicks off a witch-hunt, in which at least 200 people are caught up. And there's no proper history of that, really. There's a very good account of origins of that hunt, and various people have written accounts of sections of it. But I'd like to try and [01:04:00] write a history of the whole thing, if I can do. That's the next thing I'm up to. And they basically are both what you said. They are arguments for greater empathy. They are arguments for trying to understand the history of persecution.
Sarah Jack: I just had a question. I was thinking about the magical atmosphere of St. Osyth and the magic in the air, as you were saying. Was there as much fear there? I can't help but compare it to the American colonies and some of the Salem Witch Trials, and there you feel like you could cut the fear that was in the air with a knife, not necessarily the magic.
Marion Gibson: Yeah, I think there's a lot of overlap. Yes. I do think the Witchcraft History in Thirteen Trials has a couple of American cases in it. There's one in Virginia in the 1620s, and then there's a Salem one, which you kind of have to, don't you, in a history of witch trials? And I think there's more sense of fear of the Other in those communities, because they are settlers who've come to [01:05:00] live on the eastern edge of this enormous, unknown continent full of people who they don't understand, in many cases don't want to understand. So I think there's more of a sense of the Other being out there in the woods and the devil owning that continent as people like Cotton Mather said and so on.
I think it's stronger there, if you like, but it is essentially the same impulse. It is the same fearfulness, even though it expresses itself in different ways, in different contexts. I think in Essex they were afraid, too. They were maybe afraid of different things. They were afraid of poverty, they were afraid of malarial insects coming in of the marshes they were afraid of religious change, and so on. I think it is the same.
We are very fearful creatures, aren't we, people? We've lived through a period of immense fear recently, and I do think it leaves its mark, and I do think it encourages us to try and turn on each other in ways that are really unhelpful. Hopefully, it will result in something better, if we can only understand why we are [01:06:00] doing that and try not to do it.
Josh Hutchinson: Now here's Sarah with another important update on real-life witch-hunts happening today.
Sarah Jack: Being accused of harmful witchcraft in a violent and threatening manner is abuse. This is abuse just like the other abuses our modern world recognizes and stands against. We broadly recognize and fight abuses against women and children, but this specific abuse is not being robustly addressed. This intentional harm must also be addressed in a way that uplifts and rescues the abuse victims.
There is a perpetuating aftermath of horror for communities where alleged witch targeting is normalized. These vulnerable women, children, and sometimes men are tortured to death in horrendous and violent confrontations or left abandoned without their intended lives. Because of witchcraft allegations, they lose the grasp they had on their future and safety. They're left uprooted and stranded, living in danger.[01:07:00] Without authentic expectation and supportive counsel, local officials will not have a protocol that supports the recovery and protection of such victims in a collective and effective way.
Josh and I have recently spoken with an advocate in South Africa and an advocate in Nigeria, Damon Leff and Leo Igwe. Please see the show notes for links to their organizations and go and read about the situation. Although these African countries have unique witch attack and witch prejudice contexts, both of these advocates are offering solutions. They both have answers on some things that can be changed. To begin immediate intervention and support, they suggest informed interventions to trigger change.
Stay tuned to our podcast for two very important upcoming episodes that share these situations. You will hear an important message and conversation with Damon Leff, and, in another episode, an important message and conversation with Leo Igwe. These conversations are clarifying and informative. You must listen.
Government and [01:08:00] non-government agencies are engaging in conversations to address this human rights violation. They acknowledge the crimes, and they search out what interventions they can insert to intervene. They request input, sort recommendations, extend alliances, and compose and publish reports. But what action is coming out of all this collaboration? Why is this widespread, vicious practice difficult to address immediately? Why is it so difficult to get going on change? Don't we know what to do with abuse? Other robust campaigns for gender violence and child protection are active and global. Why is addressing witch hunt abuse different within the global human rights violation perspective?
In Nigeria, the Advocacy for Alleged Witches is telling them what they need to begin immediate intervention. Likewise, several NGOs have made recommendations and asked for support in South Africa. Why aren't funded and powerful agencies supporting the work through the advocates already in the trenches?
[01:09:00] There is an immediate change that must take place in the mindset of the, in the mindset of the UN and powerful government teams that show a resemblance of concern but hold back on supporting the essential action. It is the same change that must take place in the mindset of all individuals. What is your mindset on witch-hunting abuses? Witches should not be hunted. It should not be tolerated. We know that assaults are abuse. We know that these victims are helpless. We must concede that enough is not being done that can be done. Denial at all levels of society is delaying action for protecting the vulnerable, targeted by witch accusations.
The world has accused and executed innocent humans for centuries, and we are still allowing it. There are communities that are waiting to be made safe. These are behaviors that have no place in a world that seeks to protect the vulnerable.
When we ask for this, when any advocate asks for this, ears should be listening, minds should be realizing, and bodies should be moving to take [01:10:00] swift action. While we watch and wait, let's support the victims across the world where innocent people are being targeted by superstitious fear. Support them by acknowledging and sharing their stories. Amplify the message of local advocates on the ground in these regions. What are they saying? What assistance are they specifically calling for? Please use all your social power and communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches.
Please follow our End Witch Hunts movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts and visit our website at endwitchhunts.org.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for that wonderfully informative segment, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome, Josh.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Sufferer: The Witch Trial Podcast. Remember to pick up the book, The Witches of St. Osyth. It's releasing Thursday, December 22nd. You can get a discount currently on the Kindle version. It's going [01:11:00] for $29.99. That's $10 off the regular price.
Sarah Jack: Please join us again next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Sarah Jack: Always visit us at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, neighbors, everybody you encounter about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
Sarah Jack: Join us and support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:12:00]

December 15, 2022

Descendants of Connecticut Witch Trial Victims

Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England by John Putnam Demos
Annie Eliot Trumbull, “One Blank of Windsor”, Literary Section, Hartford Courant, December 3, 1904 (requires newspapers.com subscription or free trial)
Detestable and Wicked Arts, Paul B. Moyer
Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut
Join the CT Witch Trial Exoneration Project Discord Server
Mary Lousie Bingham on the Connecticut Accused Witches
CT W.I.T.C.H. Memorial
Salem Witch-Hunt
The Witch Trials Hysteria History of the American Colonies
Samuel Wyllys Papers
Associated Daughters of Early American Witches
Witchcraft Belief by Boris Gershman
Leo Igwe, AfAW
Advocacy Against Witch Hunts, South Africa
End Witch Hunts Projects
Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.
Website
Twitter
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Buzzsprout

Show Notes

Presenting intimate interviews with the descendants of Connecticut witch trial victims. They discuss why the exoneration of Connecticut witch trial victims is important to them and to the accused witches in our modern world. Learn how discovering this ancestry impacted descendant lives and why the stories of their accused witch ancestors must be talked about. Grab a tissue box and get ready to feel the emotions.

Descendents:

Sherri Kuiper

Alse Freeman

Rosemary Lang

Morgan Leigh Kelsey

Sue Bailey

Laura Secord

Caitlin Golden

Sarah Jack

Links:

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:27] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:28] Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we speak with descendants of Connecticut witch trial victims about efforts to exonerate their ancestors.
[00:00:37] Sarah Jack: I am one of those descendants.
[00:00:39] Josh Hutchinson: Im not descended from anyone accused in Connecticut, but I am descended from some of the Salem accused.
[00:00:48] Sarah Jack: I am as well. That's why when I found Winifred Benham in my tree, and it said that she was the Witch of Wallingford, Connecticut, and I looked into it, and she was [00:01:00] actually an accused witch, I was very baffled, cuz I knew nothing about witch trials outside of Salem.
[00:01:06] Josh Hutchinson: Not many people know there were witch trials and Connecticut, but we're hoping to change that.
[00:01:13] Sarah Jack: That is changing.
[00:01:15] Josh Hutchinson: More people are learning every day. There's been a lot of it in the news lately. And, of course, we've done several episodes of the podcast about Connecticut. And people are finding out through social media, as well.
[00:01:29] Sarah Jack: It's a very exciting change for the history, and I'm really hoping that the descendants can start to feel camaraderie and learn about their ancestors from each other. And I'm looking forward to seeing what Connecticut decides to do with this history.
[00:01:50] Josh Hutchinson: Hopefully, they do the right thing with it and exonerate those accused and make this part of everyone's education, so people know the [00:02:00] stories, and we don't make these same mistakes again.
[00:02:03] Sarah Jack: We're gonna find out what these descendants that we've brought together have to say about those things.
[00:02:09] Josh Hutchinson: I'm sure they have some good things to say, perhaps some profound things to say about their feelings, how they felt when they discovered these ancestors, how they feel now, what they think about the ConnecticutWitch Trial Exoneration Project.
[00:02:27] Sarah Jack: Watching this exoneration project come together has been really beautiful.
[00:02:33] Josh Hutchinson: We've come a long way since May.
[00:02:37] Sarah Jack: We have. In May, there was just a few of us trying to talk about it. We were throwing it out there. Who can hear us?
[00:02:45] Josh Hutchinson: And I was just watching you tweet. But then we came together in June and formed the project. And we've had media attention. We've got the podcast going. We've got the social media going. There are eyes on it [00:03:00] now.
[00:03:00] Sarah Jack: There is, we've learned a lot from many of the descendants.
[00:03:05] Josh Hutchinson: The resolution is being discussed by members of the Connecticut General Assembly. We're hoping that they do take it up to vote on it in their next session.
[00:03:17] Sarah Jack: Which is upon us soon.
[00:03:20] Josh Hutchinson: Soon, soon. Starts the beginning of January, in fact. But I know it runs until June. So we'll just keep plugging away while they're working. We'll be trying to get their ears and to get them to focus on this and get it done, hopefully sooner rather than later.
[00:03:43] Sarah Jack: I definitely think they'll have some things to think about after hearing the powerful words of our descendants on this episode.
[00:03:51] Josh, do you have any Connecticut history for us today?
[00:03:54] Josh Hutchinson: For this episode's history segment, I'm going to talk about the witch trial victims who were the [00:04:00] ancestors of the descendants we spoke to. There are five ancestors of these eight individuals.
[00:04:08] Four of the descendants are related to Alice Young of Windsor, who was the first known person to be executed for witchcraft in the American colonies on May 26th, 1647.
[00:04:27] One of our descendants is related to Lydia Gilbert of Windsor, who was hanged in 1654.
[00:04:35] Another is related to Rebecca Greensmith of Hartford, who was hanged in 1662 or 3 with her husband, Nathaniel.
[00:04:46] And we have Mary Barnes of Farmington, who was hanged in 1663.
[00:04:52] And, finally, our Sarah Jack is descended from Winifred Behnam, Sr. of Wallingford, [00:05:00] who was the second of three generations of women to be accused of witchcraft. Her mother, Mary Hale, was hanged for witchcraft in Boston. Winifred Sr. was acquitted of witchcraft twice, and her daughter Winifred Behnam, Jr. was also acquitted of witchcraft. Their last trials were in 1697, and so they were the last two accused of witchcraft to be taken to trial.
[00:05:39] Sarah Jack: Awesome. Josh, thank you for covering all that descendant and ancestor information for us today.
[00:05:45] Josh Hutchinson: It was my pleasure. I'm really looking forward to talking to these descendants now.
[00:05:51] Sarah Jack: And here are my fellow descendants talking about their ancestors and why this project has been important to them.[00:06:00] Sherry Kuiper, descendant of Alice Young, Alse C. Freeman, descendant of Alice Young, Rosemary Lang, descendant of Mary Barnes, Morgan Leigh Kelsey, descendant of Alice Young, Sue Bailey, descendant of Alice Young, Laura Secord, descendant of Lydia Gilbert, Caitlin Golden, descendant of Rebecca Greensmith, and Sarah Jack, descendant of Winifred Benham, Sr.
[00:06:30] Josh Hutchinson: How did you find out about your ancestor who was accused of witchcraft?
[00:06:35] Sherry?
[00:06:37] Sherry Kuiper: My mom's retired, and she's the one who does all the research in our family, and I'm the one who will say, "get in the car, and let's drive to Connecticut and see what we can find." And we like it that way. It works really well. And we call it visits, right? We go visit our ancestors.
[00:06:51] So she has a cousin that they do some research together on the family, and we were all together one day, and he said, [00:07:00] "I think we have an accused witch." And I was like, "no way." I didn't believe it, and then he said, "it's on the internet. Look it up." And I was like, "okay." I mean, Google's great and all, but that's not how genealogy works, right? And my mom was like, "let's just look and see." And so we started looking, and it made some logical sense, so then my mom really started digging into it. All the way up until her daughter, we had a paper trail, and then the Associated Daughters of Early American Witches, which is one of the many lineage societies out there, but this one is dedicated to those accused and hanged of witchcraft. They had that missing link from her daughter to her. So it was really just this conversation. In fact, I was the naysayer. I was like, "there's no way we have somebody who's this fascinating a part of American history. And early American history." But he was absolutely right, and we were able to do the research and prove it.
[00:07:57] Josh Hutchinson: Alse C.?
[00:07:59] Alse Freeman: [00:08:00] My sibling, who had access to the family history library, did extensive genealogical work, and somehow I had missed the bottom line of their research, which all it said was Alse Young, 1600 to 1647, parentheses, "witch." And I don't think I had even gotten to the bottom of that list, but it was in March of 2020 that I went and had a gathering with a lot of my family members on my dad's side, and they were talking about their ancestors with certain fondness.
[00:08:34] And then right after that, the pandemic hit, and I felt, "well, I, I want to go deep into this genealogy myself," and it was a chance I could do a free trial for one month on one of these websites and learn a lot more than I already knew. But my sibling had already done all this great research, so most of what I did was just corroborate, fact checking various other people's [00:09:00] accounts, making sure that there was no errors in what my sibling done. And it's led back to Alse Young, died in 1647.
[00:09:08] Josh Hutchinson: Rosemary?
[00:09:11] Rosemary Lang: This genealogy was presented to my mother when I was a baby, and when I was older, I read about it and found out about Mary Barnes being an accused witch, and in the genealogy it said she was accused of drunkenness and fornication. So I was just appalled, and I started looking into her a little bit, and that was probably 40 years ago, and I found nothing. But there seems to be a whole lot more online, especially, to find out about her. But I'm not ashamed or anything about it, because she was probably just an innocent woman.
[00:09:50] And I remember quite a few years ago there was a presentation at the old State House in Hartford. It was made as a Halloweeny event, [00:10:00] and they had a little play going, and it was about Mary Barns, and I knew that we were descended from her somehow. So I went to this play, and the Old State House was packed, and I think I was the only one that cried. I thought, "oh my God, this is my relative. It's so sad." And for everybody else, it was just a Halloween event.
[00:10:21] Josh Hutchinson: Morgan?
[00:10:23] Morgan Leigh Kelsey: So my dad passed away in 2016, and he had done a lot of genealogy. So Alice is on his father's side, and he had done up to one generation prior to Alice, to Alice's daughter, the other Alice, and when I saw Alice's name, there was some kind of knowing within me that just sparked a curiosity and a need to dig further. And so I ended up just simply googling [00:11:00] "Alice Young," and all of a sudden it brings up that she was the first in the colonies to be executed, and I felt pretty shocked by that, very shocked by that.
[00:11:12] Josh Hutchinson: Sue?
[00:11:13] Sue Bailey: A friend of Beth Caruso's from Windsor is my massage therapist, and her name's Donna, and she told me, "oh yeah, my friend wrote a book about the first accused witch that was executed, and I said, "oh, that's really cool." And I thought, "well, that's really interesting."
[00:11:31] I had my genetics done, and I see this relative that was a second cousin. I'm like, "who is this person?" So you can email someone through 23andme, which I did. He was an elderly gentleman, but his daughter answered me and said, "oh, I've done a lot of research on the family on that side," that would be my mother's father's side, "and we're related to the first person executed as a witch in the colonies." And I said, "oh my God, it must be Alice Young." And it [00:12:00] was, and then I started looking just online through all the genealogies that are available. I'm actually paying a genealogist to do a whole view of all four sides of me now, just because I wanna perhaps show my kids, and they thought it was pretty cool.
[00:12:16] Josh Hutchinson: Laura?
[00:12:18] Laura Secord: My husband is a historian, genealogist, and I think he'd gone in his family all the way back to the beginning of time, and one day he just came and he was looking at my family. I didn't even know he was looking at my family. And he came and said, "well, your great, great, great, great, great was found guilty of witchcraft in Connecticut in 1654."
[00:12:42] Josh Hutchinson: Caitlin?
[00:12:44] Caitlin Golden: So I am an avid ancestry user, like the ancestry.com, and I had found her name, but I didn't look too much into her until I got a hint that was talking about the witch trials, and of course that was eye-catching to me, and so I read about her, and I'm like, "oh my [00:13:00] gosh."
[00:13:00] I never knew about the Connecticut Witch Trials. Of course, I knew about Salem. We talked about it in school, but the Connecticut Witch Trials was never something I knew about. I knew that Salem wasn't the only trials. But then I researched her, and my jaw dropped. It's absolutely insane and horrible what she and all of these other victims went through, and it just hurts knowing like she was a mother, and I can't imagine how her children felt.
[00:13:27] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Caitlin. Finally, we have our very own host, Sarah Jack.
[00:13:34] Sarah Jack: I was working on a family line, and it was one of the first ones that took me into Connecticut, and I started reading through documents, and I saw that this person was an accused witch, and I didn't understand how that could be, because it was not Salem.
[00:13:54] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:13:55] How did you feel when you learned about your ancestor, [00:14:00] who was accused of witchcraft?
[00:14:03] Sherry Kuiper: When I was in college, I took a really amazing class at Edinboro University with a woman named Dr. Jenrette, and she did a class called History of Witchcraft, which was about the Reformation, all the way up through the Salem Witch Trials. And she took us to Salem on Halloween weekend, and it was amazing, right? Probably the coolest class trip in the world.
[00:14:23] I've always been interested in that and always fascinated by it. I don't know if I had any feelings of anything. I thought it was, I hate to say this because people died, but I thought it was really cool, because I thought that these people who did get accused and didn't die from it, they were kind of badasses, if I'm allowed to swear on your podcast. They were people who really kind of bucked the system in a lot of ways, and usually that's what got them to be an outcast, or they were different.
[00:14:53] In that respect, I thought it was really cool that my ancestor was somebody who was causing enough trouble that they felt that [00:15:00] this was the way to deal with her, and then when a lot of my friends found out, you know, a lot of them were like, "we're not surprised that you were descendant from somebody like this." So that's kind of how that initial feeling was. And then of course, you know, it just kept going from there. And then really understanding, too, like yeah, there's that kind of interesting history part of it, but then there's the reality part of it, of what really happened to these people, my ancestor and all the others, and then that kind of manifested more into a little bit of activism that all of us share today.
[00:15:32] Alse Freeman: Once I kind of knew that connection with 95% certainty, I tried to read anything I could to find out more about her, and really there just wasn't very much at all. Just putting myself in her shoes at the time, it really just struck me with extreme sadness. Like I remember getting goosebumps all over my body and just like a chill running through my body and a sinking feeling in my stomach, just [00:16:00] putting myself into her shoes and being, almost being there on the gallows, looking down at my six or seven year old daughter.
[00:16:10] And then putting myself in that daughter's shoes, who's also my ancestor, of looking up at her mother thinking, " what's going on? I don't understand what's happening." And just that moment, whether or not it's actually how things went down. I really was chilled by it, and it really stuck with me, and I wept, and part of the reason I wept, I think, is just this extreme feeling of injustice that was.
[00:16:38] And so much injustice has been done to so many people through our nation's history, but this was like a really visceral feeling for me, where I, I actually felt connected with my ancestor in a way that I hadn't felt very connected to any other ancestor that I had ever heard about.
[00:16:57] I had this connection with Alse and [00:17:00] her daughter, and so it was soon after that that I decided to carry the name Alse, or Alse C. is how I pronounce it, so I could still keep the letter C from my given name. But I felt like it was a way that I could honor my ancestor and keep her memory alive in a way.
[00:17:19] From there, I realized that there were hundreds and thousands of people potentially who were interested in the same thing, who were also descendants. I got connected with Beth Caruso's Connecticut WITCH Memorial Facebook page and started following those updates. And those updates led me to learn about the campaign to have the witch hanging victims exonerated. And so everything's just flowed from there, where I've seen that there's potentially hundreds of thousands of people, who if they knew, they are actually descended from these witch hanging victims. And potentially millions of Americans are connected in some way to this legacy through [00:18:00] their blood.
[00:18:00] Sarah Jack: I was baffled. I was very eager to get more information, and then I was quickly disappointed that there really wasn't much, and Connecticut wasn't offering information about their Witch trials, so I really had to dig around, and I found that extremely disappointing.
[00:18:23] Josh Hutchinson: Do you think your ancestor should be exonerated?
[00:18:28] Alse Freeman: There's no graveyard that I can actually go visit my ancestor. There's just a brick in Hartford in the courthouse square, and it feels not like a true memorial. It just says "witch hanging victim" and doesn't really speak to who she was as a person. We don't have very many details.
[00:18:48] I just wanna be clear that, you know, my ancestor's exoneration is not more important than other wrongfully accused people, and so I'm really grateful that your podcast is [00:19:00] also highlighting modern-day victims of the witch hunts. Another thing I just wanna mention is our country has a huge reckoning to do, in terms of understanding its past and making amends and seeking justice.
[00:19:14] Specifically focusing on the case of Alse, absolutely she needs to be exonerated by the state of Connecticut, because first of all, there's no record of any actual harm she committed upon anyone. There are no records. Secondly, if current laws do not penalize practices which can be considered witchcraft, then those who are punished for them need exoneration under the current laws, is the way I see it. And it's just as simple as the state of Connecticut allowing posthumous pardons.
[00:19:45] This should not be such a big challenge, and it should just be a stepping stone to open the door to all types of people rectifying injustice that have been committed against them and their families.
[00:19:59] Rosemary Lang: [00:20:00] Yes, of course, I think they all, all of them should be, especially because did she really do any harm to anybody? Was it just people's words that accused her? She should be exonerated, and I think they all should be. I don't think whatever she did does she deserved to be hanged for. So I hope they do exonerate them.
[00:20:26] Morgan Leigh Kelsey: I do. I do. I think that it's also complicated. There's a lot of layers there. I think that it is important to exonerate or to restore the good name. One, just to kind of bring some light to that and to bring some awareness to people. Generally, if I'm talking with anybody about that, I feel like there's always some sort of an education that ends up happening, because they're like, " I didn't know," or people just think, "oh, you [00:21:00] know, the witches, they burn the witches. They hung the witches. What are the witches, really?"
[00:21:06] What do we often do to people who might be a little different or might be the people that are the healers, the people that are bringing truth and light to situations, and nobody wants to hear or accept that sometimes. Just the fact that people could have gotten together, tortured people, then killed them, and said that that was okay, and that that was in the name of God is horrific, and I think that people really should be made aware of that.
[00:21:45] Sue Bailey: Yes, I do. And I can't even believe there was, when this was brought up in 2008 in the legislature that they didn't do it. What in the world are they thinking? That, "well, we don't have any proof they weren't [00:22:00] witches." What kinda crazy thing is that? How is it that they couldn't say, "of course we're gonna exonerate them?" Salem did it. Why in the world wouldn't we? It doesn't make sense.
[00:22:09] Laura Secord: I have like a list of reasons witches need to be exonerated, because they're innocent. First of all, the main reason is they were innocent. They were falsely accused. They were almost always women. So there was not entirely, but the bulk were women. They weren't weak. They weren't women that were easily duped by evil. They were the participants who helped to build this country, mothers, wives, helpmates, human beings, healers. Without them, we wouldn't have created what we have in this country now.
[00:22:47] Because their lives and their stories paint a clear picture of what our country's beginning was like. Because as modern persons, you and I have attained levels of knowledge and [00:23:00] education, and we now understand the science of nature behind the colonists' irrational fear. Because women were part of founding this country. Because these persons are our family and we want them remembered, celebrated, and honored, instead of carrying the stain of disgrace based in ignorance and hysteria. And because today forces of false truth, hysteria, and misogyny are rising up again, vilifying and naming women criminals, liars, and manipulators.
[00:23:41] Caitlin Golden: Just like everyone else, she was innocent. She was just trying her best to live. Just live a simple life back then, and this is just a big human rights violation. Simply because people disliked her, and she didn't have a good reputation, they figured, "hey, let's just call [00:24:00] her a witch, and that's all of her we'll see." It's wrong and it's horrible.
[00:24:05] Sarah Jack: Yes. I wanna acknowledge that they should not have been water tested, that they should not have had to flee.
[00:24:13] Josh Hutchinson: Why is it important for your ancestor's name to be cleared?
[00:24:17] Sherry Kuiper: It's not even just her name, right? It's all of their names. It doesn't matter if it was three days ago or 300 years ago, a wrong thing was done. And even though that the state of Connecticut saying, "I'm sorry, Sherry, that we did this to your grandmother" isn't gonna change anything, just that recognition that, "hey, this was a crappy thing that happened and it should have never happened." Sometimes we have to own those mistakes, even though we might have not been the ones who directly made it.
[00:24:45] Do I think anybody alive today had anything to do with this? Absolutely not. But just to, Really remind people because, you can look at some things going on in society today, and there's been references made to modern-day witch-hunts. And while we [00:25:00] might not hang people from trees like that happened to Alice, there are still things going on today, and we just need to remind ourselves how easy we can fall into those traps.
[00:25:10] It's just important for all of those people, all those ancestors. I can prove that this is my grandmother. So to say that nobody around today cares is not fair, and, frankly, I think that it's, while I'm sure there's red tape of bureaucracy, as there always is, I don't think it's as hard as they're making it to just come together and say, "these people are no longer accused, and we exonerate them." And I am glad that there are people finally in the state of Connecticut who are trying to help us move towards that resolution.
[00:25:43] Rosemary Lang: The cider goes bad, and they're accused of being a witch, or all the children in the town get sick but your own, so you must be in league with the devil to protect them. Stupid things like that. It was just so unfair. [00:26:00] Nobody listened to anything they said. I'm sure it was a jury of all men. Magistrates were all men. They were just lowly housewives, so nobody cared what they had to say. So, yes, they should all be exonerated.
[00:26:16] Sarah Jack: It's important, because although we don't know much about them, we do know that they were not witches. I don't want anybody in this country confused anymore about these victims that went through these witch trials. And if the state of Connecticut clears the names of their accused, it's a giant statement towards clarifying that these were innocent people.
[00:26:44] Josh Hutchinson: Why is exoneration relevant today?
[00:26:48] Alse Freeman: I think exoneration is relevant today because this case and these cases of the 11 witch-hanging victims in Connecticut can be a [00:27:00] teachable moment for us that these people were scapegoated in the past, most likely for something they did not do wrong, but some huge upheavals were happening in society at the time.
[00:27:15] There was a flu outbreak that was killing a lot of people, including many children, as Beth Caruso points out in her research. And so you gotta look at what's going on today with how people are being scapegoated for the various ills that are afflicting society.
[00:27:35] What I'm hopeful for is that my ancestor's case can be this way to highlight retrospectively how scapegoating is a part of our culture, how we're constantly looking for someone to blame. These days, often it's very in a very partisan way, but throughout [00:28:00] our nation's history, we have blamed others. We've blamed The Other for a lot of our collective problems that need a collective solution.
[00:28:11] Just to bring up the history of our treatment of the indigenous people of this country. And it's just, it's heartbreaking. To me, it's an even higher level of heartbreaking even than just my ancestors standing on the gallows. I know that other ancestors of mine participated in some of these colonial battles and even enslaved an indigenous child, um, one of my ancestors did. And so that for me is a great reckoning that I need to come to terms with myself. And I think it's very hard for our country to come to terms with that part of the story, so it's a little easier for us to focus on the tragedy in the colony, but the tragedy outside the colony was [00:29:00] just so monumental that, in the course of what we're doing, we need to like remember that that is a part of it, too. That is the context in which this was happening. I think just like acknowledging that the people were there before these, the colonies would be one starting point.
[00:29:20] Sue Bailey: I think the passage of time doesn't negate the wrong. Just because it's a long time ago doesn't mean that it's too late to do some sort of retroactive exoneration to right a wrong. And it would be for all the relatives. Some people might think, "oh, well that was cool that they were accused of. I like to think that they were really a Witch or something."
[00:29:49] I just can't help but think most people, when they find out they had a relative that goes back nine, 10 generations, that's a person just like we are, that [00:30:00] has all the same feelings and fears and loves people. And why would their death be any less meaningful 375 years later? It's still the fact that they were put to death wrongly, undoubtedly wrongly. It's just an injustice that needs to be addressed, even 375 years later.
[00:30:24] Caitlin Golden: While most of us look at witch trials as though that's just in my history book, it's still happening today in other countries around the world. And so if we make a good example, maybe it'll stop worldwide.
[00:30:37] Sarah Jack: I hope that when Connecticut exonerates their accused witches that it'll send a message and a signal to leaders in communities in other parts of the world, where witch-hunts are being tolerated. I want the message to be that we must stand against witch-hunting, that it's [00:31:00] no longer something that is acceptable, that it is murder, that it is destroying families, and it does not need to happen anymore.
[00:31:12] Josh Hutchinson: What would you like to say to the Connecticut General Assembly about why your ancestor should be exonerated?
[00:31:21] Sherry Kuiper: Just do it. Like, seriously, it's really that easy. And I know we can come up with lots of reasons why it's difficult , but just do it. I mean, because people said to me, "well, Sherry, it happened so long ago. Who cares?" I'm like, "well, then just do it. Who cares? Just get up there and say it. Sign the piece of paper and be done with it."
[00:31:40] It's the right thing to do and you just gotta do it. And Massachusetts has done it. Salem has fully embraced what has happened to their people, to almost to do a complete 180 or 360 really of what happened there. So I just tell state of Connecticut, just review it, do what you gotta do, but get it done. It's long overdue, and there's no [00:32:00] reason we should be waiting any longer.
[00:32:01] Alse Freeman: I think the basic requests we have are acknowledge that the injustice happened, recognize officially the innocence of these 11 victims who are executed, and recognize not only their suffering, but also their families and their descendants. Removing the ill fame from their descendants is one part of it. Reversing the charge is the bottom line.
[00:32:29] But I would add one extra thing, which is just we need to educate people on this history, not just a little paragraph on Wikipedia, but people need to be taught in schools about what happened in our country. And it's gonna be a long story to tell, but that is part of the way you can get closer to a country that has justice, which we are supposedly a country of justice and a country of laws. So you can't tell that story and then [00:33:00] hide the story where injustice was committed. And so the basic step forward is we need to move on to an education piece after we've exonerated these people, because their story needs to continue to be told. It's not just close the book and never talk about them again.
[00:33:19] Rosemary Lang: Because Mary Barnes was just a housewife and a mother taking care of her farm and her children. She was accused of something, we don't even really know what, that probably didn't harm anybody, and she should be exonerated. In all fairness, all of them should be.
[00:33:42] Morgan Leigh Kelsey: If that passes, that to me almost feels like it heals something in my DNA and in the DNA of others and in the DNA of future generations. And I think that can be thought in [00:34:00] a larger view. If you take that same principle and apply that to a whole lot of other things, if you apply that to Native Americans and you apply that to people who have been oppressed, and murdered, that's huge. So what I would say to the Connecticut General Assembly is that that is an important motion, an important movement for the future of all the people.
[00:34:32] Sue Bailey: The people that were executed were more than likely innocent, and for what comfort it can bring their souls now or their relatives who are still alive. If it can bring them comfort and some measure of closure, I think it's a small task for them. I mean, it would be a really good gesture on the part of the legislature.[00:35:00]
[00:35:00] The old Connecticut General Assembly or whatever they called themselves back then, I forgot the management of the colony, maybe they're the ones that voted on deciding that she should die. Now here, this current legislature could vote on freeing those people from that stigma of potentially a Witch or be an evil person. They were put to death. I mean, I think it's still really important. The length of time that's elapsed doesn't mute the wrong. And it's still something that's important.
[00:35:39] Caitlin Golden: I think I would again say this was a big human rights violation, and it's not fair that even after death, she and as many other people are still considered criminals, even though they were very clearly innocent. And as a descendant, it would mean the world to me to be able to have her name cleared. [00:36:00] And I'm sure she would've been ecstatic, as well as everyone else, to finally be recognized. "Hey, I didn't do anything wrong. I was just a victim."
[00:36:08] Sarah Jack: I want the exoneration to acknowledge that all the Connecticut accused should not have had their good names defamed.
[00:36:15] Josh Hutchinson: What type of memorial do you want to see?
[00:36:20] Sherry Kuiper: I would like to see a memorial. I do like them, because I do think it serves as a reminder of things that have happened. I love visiting historical places and everything, so I think it would just really be dependent on where it is.
[00:36:33] I think it would need to be Hartford Square there, where a lot of the victims were hanged. Something in a place like that, I think would be ideal, because it's in a place of significance. It's a place where people are gonna see it and actually stop. If you put it in the middle of nowhere, like I love all the small Connecticut towns, my whole family's from up there, if you go back far enough. I think it loses its value. So I think it needs to go in a significant place, where it's actually going to be [00:37:00] seen.
[00:37:00] I love Windsor, Connecticut. It's a beautiful little town. You're not going there unless you're going there for a very specific reason. Harford Square, it's in the center of town, a popular place where people go, so I think it would be great if it's put in a place that's going to actually reach people.
[00:37:16] Just to bear their names and probably with whatever words it is that exonerates them, however the state is going to recognize that, I think would be really important. But definitely to put their names in there, because I'm a big believer that, as long as your name is out there, your legacy will live on. People will be able to look up Alice Young, it's on the internet. They can read about her and know a little bit about her.
[00:37:39] Alse Freeman: I would love to be part of coming up with what that would look like, and I would love to be present when it's initiated. My ancestor, she's dead, and she's not gonna ever be able to feel that vindication of being cleared. At least, I don't think she will. But I really like to believe that her story could be [00:38:00] an example of how we as a society can learn to make peace with the past and also learn from our errors. So I would love to see the memorial kind of speak to that, that we are learning from the past, and we are gonna move forward as a country of justice.
[00:38:17] Rosemary Lang: Well, no brooms or funny hats, for sure. Something beautiful, a little bench for people to sit and contemplate, everybody's name's inscribed. They have something like that in Salem. It's a nice, peaceful area. Something along those lines. Not religious and not halloweeny.
[00:38:41] Sue Bailey: Well, it shouldn't have a pointy hat, I'll tell you that. It was talked about, I think maybe when I was interviewed for that channel 30 thing that, it was a joke when the legislature, when they were addressing this before in 2008 and the legislature, like they didn't take it [00:39:00] seriously. I mean the people that were in the legislature reviewing it. And I think if you put a pointy hat on the statue, much as it's amusing, it doesn't take it seriously enough. Should it be a woman? Yeah. Why not it, it should be a statue of a woman. I mean, men were accused too, though. I mean, maybe you want a woman and a man.
[00:39:22] How about this? Is this too much like the Kennedy grave, like an eternal flame? That meaning you could do something like that. It would be cheaper, too. That or something peaceful but something that symbolizes the continuity of life and the fact that that tiny lapsing is of no significance. It's just as relevant today as it was then. Something to show that the memory of what they went through goes on.
[00:39:54] Caitlin Golden: If there can be like some kind of like plaque or monument maybe, or maybe since she was a mom, maybe it [00:40:00] would be possible to have a little playground. I think that would be nice, so I feel like she would like that, for children to be able to play there, and you can still have remembrance for them.
[00:40:11] Sarah Jack: I want their names on it, but I want, if other people are discovered, their names to be able to be added. I want it to be accessible. I don't want it to be a side. I want it to be a monument that is known, so that the history is known, but I want it to represent that a new page has been turned in that book.
[00:40:35] Josh Hutchinson: What does the exoneration project mean to you?
[00:40:39] Rosemary Lang: It's great that all this information is coming out. Witches aren't evil, I don't think. And I think by presenting all this information that you are will help people to realize that they're just people, and people need [00:41:00] to know that they're just innocent women, really, and men, and it was a tough time.
[00:41:07] Morgan Leigh Kelsey: I guess it's something that I never expected to be a part of that really caught me by a surprise. Just the discovery of the situation and my tie to it. To me, all of it just really feels like it's all about healing. I think whenever you can go and go look back and look at wrongs that were done and try to do something about it. I mean, you can't take it back. But I think when you educate people, when you look forward, when you look at something and say, "this can never happen again." I think that's the most important part of it.
[00:41:51] Caitlin Golden: I think for me, I always love history, and any chance I can get to volunteer or help for a cause [00:42:00] beyond me always makes me very happy. If I can get the word out and better educate myself on this and help better educate other people, I think it's just making a difference in many people's lives.
[00:42:13] Josh Hutchinson: Have you felt more connected to your accused ancestor due to the project?
[00:42:19] Sherry Kuiper: Yeah, when I do research and find these fascinating people in our history, which I believe everybody has fascinating people in their genealogy, we just have to find it and find their stories. So whether it's Alice Young, or whether it's some of the other really neat people in my history, I think it's just important to remember it and to talk about it and to really understand what their life was like. The more I learned about her and the closer I looked at some of the things and being involved in the Associated Daughters of Early American Witches, it just made me realize that more needed to be done for these folks.
[00:42:52] Recently, thanks to, to the great internet and social media and stuff, I've been able to support it in a lot of ways from afar, and I find that really important [00:43:00] because even though it's what, 370 some years since since Alice Young was hanged and the ones who came after her, there's really still been no justice for a lot of them. And so it's important it's important to recognize those wrongs, even if it's 300 years later , we still, it's still important for for us to recognize that as a country, well, I guess pre country, but as colonial Americans, these things happened. They happened in Connecticut, and it would be really nice if they would just take the steps to rectify what had happened.
[00:43:34] Rosemary Lang: Definitely, I do feel connection and I really would like to learn more about her and try to go back.
[00:43:42] Morgan Leigh Kelsey: Yeah, I do feel deeply connected, and I think it's, when you go back that many generations, it seems so far back, and it's almost like having that knowledge. I guess it's more a piece that's in my heart that I [00:44:00] feel, but you feel like you're able to just reach back into the past and pull that to you. And I guess even just thinking of that's your grandmother and thinking of that female lineage and thinking of how incredibly far back that traces her. It just feels like there's this palpable line to the past and this woman that I feel like is now right here that I never knew about.
[00:44:27] Caitlin Golden: I would definitely say I feel a lot more connected, and the more I learn about her, the more, obviously, I want to, help get her exonerated, as well as everyone else. Yeah, I do, I definitely feel a lot more connected to her.
[00:44:41] Sarah Jack: I do, because I'm hearing what the project and the ancestors mean to the other descendants, and it helps me to see that I'm not the only one that feels this way.
[00:44:55] Josh Hutchinson: Do you think any differently about what you've been taught about [00:45:00] history?
[00:45:00] Rosemary Lang: I don't recall ever learning anything in history class about the witches, maybe a little bit of the witch trials. Probably we had to read The Crucible. Other than that, most of my learning has been as an adult, an older adult. I think the history classes are changing in a lot of ways, and that's one way they could present it differently to kids, just like with Columbus and all of those discoverers, supposedly. I think they should change the presentation for witches, as well. Because I think kids still, it's Halloween, it's, you know, pointy black hats and broom and things. So it'd be nice to portray them more as just women that were mistreated.
[00:45:52] Caitlin Golden: I definitely feel like I haven't learned everything that maybe should have been taught to me, [00:46:00] because I would've never known about the Connecticut witch trials, if I had never found Rebecca Greensmith in my family tree. I definitely feel like a lot of it is not discussed, because of how dark it is, or there's just some things that maybe the school systems don't feel is necessary to teach. But in cases like the Connecticut witch trials, any witch trials, I think it's really important to discuss, so that we don't repeat history ,because it's still happening that people are being accused and executed because of it, and it's wrong, so clearly we haven't learned that lesson.
[00:46:32] Josh Hutchinson: Do you feel more hopeful?
[00:46:35] Sherry Kuiper: I feel more hopeful, because I think the big shift was there is somebody in the government in Connecticut who has taken up this case. And so that to me was a big thing of hope, because with any sort of legislation of any kind, you need somebody to pick it up and look at it and say, "you know what? I think this is important enough to move forward with it." So that actually is a huge thing.
[00:46:57] And so that kind of coupled with[00:47:00] some of the press that we've been able to do over the past few months with that person picking up that piece of paper and saying, "you know what? This is worth it and I'm gonna look into this." It does give me hope, and I think we've got a lot of great forward momentum, and I think we need to keep showing this legislator why this is important, and however we need to show up for her to carry that on, I think this is really going to be it. And I think this is probably the best shot we've had ever to get something done. I am just grateful that somebody finally picked it up and said, "you know what? This is important, and we're going to take a look at it."
[00:47:32] Alse Freeman: I'm very excited that thousands of people are working on a collective solution for this one problem, and I hope that we can build off that and develop more collective actions that lift up our country's people, instead of tearing them down.
[00:47:50] Josh Hutchinson: And now here's Sarah Jack with an important update on witch hunts happening in our world right now.
[00:47:58] Sarah Jack: Here is End Witch Hunts [00:48:00] World Advocacy News. You are living in a world with a pervasive belief in harmful witchcraft with a mass occurrence of holding women and children responsible for supernaturally causing death, illness, and misfortune. This deep-seated conclusion is delaying action for protecting alleged witches, promoting witch-hunting behaviors, and blurring the recognition that worldwide historic witch trials executed innocent humans. These are communities that are waiting to be made safe. These are behaviors that have no place in a world that seeks to protect the vulnerable. These historic victims should have their names cleared and their innocence acknowledged by the communities that prosecuted them. When any advocate asks for this, ears should be listening, minds should be realizing, and bodies should be moving to take action.
[00:48:51] I hope you have had a chance to look up Dr. Leo Igwe of the Nigerian organization, the Advocacy for Alleged Witches. Please find the website link [00:49:00] in our show notes. Here's a quote from a recent message from Leo.
[00:49:04] " Part of the objective of Advocacy for Alleged Witches is to tackle the misperceptions of witches and witchcraft, whether alleged or not. Advocacy for Alleged Witches seeks to address associated fears and suspicions. It aims to correct the pervasive misconceptions and fears associated with the term witch or witchcraft, because these misperceptions are at the root of witch persecution. Saving alleged witches cannot be realized until Nigerians disabuse their mind and free themselves from fears and suspicions that the term witches or witchcraft, engenders. So the mission of combating witch persecution and supporting victims starts in the mind. It starts by demystifying the term witchcraft or witches. It starts by clarifying misconceptions and misperceptions that are linked to terminologies such as witches, witchcraft, and supposed occult forces."
[00:49:57] Can you accept this change in thinking? [00:50:00] Consider it a message not just for Nigeria, but also for you and every human. As Leo states, misconceptions linked to the idea of witches, witchcraft, and harmful occult forces must be demystified. It is time to stop obscuring the truth and start diffusing the panic that is ignited by what we fear as malevolent.
[00:50:19] Last week, I brought attention to a situation in Ireland. The Northern Ireland Borough of Larne wants to commemorate eight Witch trial victims from the Islandmagee witch trial that took place on March 31st, 1711. A borough councillor raised questions of whether the eight women and a man who were found guilty of witchcraft were actually innocent. When criticized for his deferral of action, due to what authority he perceives the council holds, he has stated that actually he feels ambivalent about the matter of innocence. Ambivalent?
[00:50:51] He feels the council does not have authority to acknowledge innocence due to obscurity around witches and witchcraft. He is, however, interested in [00:51:00] having tourists play a game of determining guilt of these historical people that are still waiting to have their names cleared. He wants their convictions left alone, but he wants to draw tourists to the historic site by the opportunity to vote for guilt or innocence with tokens.
[00:51:14] This incident on the other side of the world from me matters, because I have asked the Connecticut legislature to exonerate the accused witches of Connecticut colony. I cannot imagine a response where the Connecticut legislature embraces ambivalence and suggests a tourist game at historical sites, instead of exoneration and memorials. Please, hear your community and the descendants of accused witches when they say that recognizing innocence matters, it matters to women and children that are being attacked as witches today. Acknowledging their innocence builds the foundation for dismantling witch-hunt mentalities that are destroying lives in our modern world.
[00:51:54] While we watch and wait, let's support the victims across the world where innocent people are being targeted by [00:52:00] superstitious fear. Support them by acknowledging and sharing their stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunts movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts and visit our website at endwitchhunts.org.
[00:52:18] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that update.
[00:52:23] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:52:24] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: the Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:52:33] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:52:34] Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:52:42] Sarah Jack: Visit at thouschaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:52:44] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell everyone you know about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:52:51] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to End Witch Hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:52:56] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today [00:53:00] and a beautiful tomorrow.

December 8, 2022

Katherine Howe on the Salem Witch-Hunt

KatherineHowe.com
University of VA, Salem Witch Trials Documents and Transcriptions
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England by John Putnam Demos
In the Devil’s Snare by Mary Beth Norton
Witchcraft Belief by Boris Gershman
Islandmagee Witch Trial News
Leo Igwe, AfAW
Advocacy Against Witch Hunts, South Africa

Show Notes

Presenting New York Times best selling author Katherine Howe. She discusses how we should view the individuals from the Salem, MA witch trial history. Katherine gives us an exciting preview of her current fiction book project on 17th century female pirates:: A True Account of Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself: a novel. We continue the conversation inquiring with our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?

Links:

End Witch Hunt Projects

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Josh Hutchinson: " Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
[00:00:03]
[00:00:24] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:31] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:33] Josh Hutchinson: Today's guest is the extraordinary author Katherine Howe. We'll speak with her about the causes of the Salem Witch Hunt and about her new book on pirates. I'm excited to talk about Salem Witch Hunt again and really curious what her book is about.
[00:00:56] Sarah Jack: Yeah, it doesn't matter what time of year.
[00:00:59] Josh Hutchinson: [00:01:00] It's always Christmas for pirates.
[00:01:02] Sarah Jack: Just like Katherine's other books, you are going to be delighted by the characters and the adventure. Fun getting to hear about it, and it's gonna be hard to wait for the publishing.
[00:01:17] Josh Hutchinson: She has wild swashbuckling shenanigans. But first, on a more serious note, we talk Salem, Witch Trials, what caused them, what didn't cause them, why Katherine Howe it gets fired up about certain topics.
[00:01:37] Sarah Jack: We get to a lot of layers.
[00:01:40] Josh Hutchinson: Peeling that onion.
[00:01:42] Sarah Jack: We just take Katherine right into the depths of the mechanics.
[00:01:48] Josh Hutchinson: We talk about the different spheres that Malcolm Gaskill spoke about that are nested in each other and how each of those [00:02:00] spheres contributed to the witch-hunt.
[00:02:03] Sarah Jack: We talk about what kind of perspective do we need to be using when we look back at the individuals that were in a different time in history.
[00:02:12] Josh Hutchinson: Oh yes, we do that, don't we? Wow, this is gonna be one hell of an episode!
[00:02:19] Sarah Jack: Aren't they all?
[00:02:20] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, but I have a good feeling about this one. It's gonna be something special.
[00:02:26] Sarah Jack: It's another dynamic conversation with a phenomenal author and researcher, and she does not hold back.
[00:02:36] Josh Hutchinson: She does not. The emotions come out. Be ready.
[00:02:43] I'm going to talk about the before the Salem Witch Trials, what the conditions were in Massachusetts Bay Colony and Salem Village and Andover.
[00:02:56] Colonies used to have charters, so they [00:03:00] were officially recognized by the English government to govern themselves without direct supervision from the Crown and Parliament. Massachusetts Bay lost its colonial charter in 1684, when King Charles II revoked it because they had been naughty boys. And when the witch hunt began in early 1692, they still didn't have a charter, so they were in legal limbo.
[00:03:34] In addition, they were fighting King William's War and still recovering from King Philip's War, which was the costliest and bloodiest of the colonial wars, occurring between 1675 and 1678. In fact, the Massachusetts economy did not recover to pre-war levels [00:04:00] until the 1800s, after the Revolution.
[00:04:04] Economic hardship resulting from the wars and the collapse of land speculation were also contributed to by an influx of refugees from the frontier in Maine and New Hampshire, and Essex County, where Salem's located, was especially impacted, due to its proximity to that frontier, being the northernmost county in Massachusetts. Many of the settlers of Salem had moved on to Maine and New Hampshire, only to be forced to return when their villages were burned to the ground.
[00:04:50] Beyond these issues, in Salem, the town had recently gone through a bit of a separation, [00:05:00] where Salem Village was allowed to begin its own church. In 1689, Salem Village hired the fourth in a series of unpopular ministers, and there were disputes over his contract, so there was a lot of tension in the area.
[00:05:23] There was also tension in Andover, which was the hardest hit by the witch trials, with some 45 individuals being accused. There, there was a dispute between two ministers, Francis Dane and Thomas Barnard. Francis Dane was an older gentleman with health issues, who was no longer performing full duties as minister. So they had brought in Thomas Barnard, a younger man to take over some of [00:06:00] his duties, but were still paying both men in 1692, leading to tensions within the community that may have fueled some of the allegations there.
[00:06:13] We'll get into these issues further with Katherine Howe, and specifically we'll be discussing Andover in a few weeks with author Richard Hite and get into more of whether the dispute over the ministers did or did not contribute to witch-hunt fever in that community.
[00:06:35] Sarah Jack: That was good, Josh. Thanks, Josh.
[00:06:39] Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome. It was a fun one to do, and we're going to dig into that stuff some more with our guest.
[00:06:48] Sarah Jack: I am excited to introduce author Katherine Howe, whose works include The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Conversion, [00:07:00] The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs. She's an editor of The Penguin Book of Witches and co-author of Vanderbilt.
[00:07:09] Josh Hutchinson: We've read that you're actually connected to somebody accused, which is an interesting connection. So can you tell us about who it is that's your ancestor?
[00:07:22] Katherine Howe: It's a little bit of a funny story. So my last name is Howe, like, how are you? But with an "e" on the end. And one of the witches who was accused towards the beginning of the Salem panic and who was put to death was Elizabeth Howe. And she was from the same broad region that my family was from also. So it wasn't a huge surprise when my aunt, back in the nineties, she was doing some genealogical research, and she figured out that that Elizabeth Howe is, I think it's like my eighth great aunt. So it's a lateral thing, rather than a direct thing. But at the time, she discovered that Elizabeth [00:08:00] Howe was related to us that way and also that Elizabeth Proctor was also a eighth or ninth great aunt, as well.
[00:08:07] Just not all that surprising given that those communities were pretty small, and there were lots of intermarriages between different family groups and things like that. So it was in the nineties when I first learned that and thought, of course, it being the nineties and me being a grunge kid, and I thought was like, "oh, that's so badass. That's so metal." thought that was the greatest thing ever.
[00:08:27] I didn't give it much thought beyond that, until I was actually living in that region of New England, because my family left New England in the 1930s. I grew up with this sense of it as like the motherland, but I didn't actually grow up there myself. So I arrived in this region with this kind of funny twin consciousness of, oh, this is home, but I'm also a stranger here. And so it was being a stranger in this place that I felt this kinship that probably contributed somewhat to my getting started [00:09:00] writing fiction.
[00:09:00] My first book was The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which was something I started working on when I was in graduate school at Boston University and just trying to think about the humanity of people living in this time and the, maybe a funny little detail. So one of the historians of witchcraft who I really admire the most is a woman named Mary Beth Norton, who wrote a book called In The Devil's Snare, which anyone is interested in Salem has to know Professor Norton's work, cause she's just like the kind of detail that she can bring to it. And she writes in a novelistic sort of way. It's just like the most gripping account of Salem ever. And Professor Norton has said that the more you work on witchcraft, the more superstitious you become. And I have to say that this is true. As evidenced by the anecdote I'm about to tell you.
[00:09:54] So my first book was The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. It asked, "what if one of the Salem witches the real [00:10:00] thing?" But the real thing the way the colonists believe, which is to be not in that pointy hat fantasy, Harry Potter Sense.
[00:10:07] And I built that story around a woman named Deliverance Dane who's a real person. And she was a minor person in the Salem Witch crisis. She was accused towards the end of the panic. She was not put to death. She really, like, was a footnote, I think, in the real history of Salem. And so I felt like it was okay to build a more fantastical story.
[00:10:30] Physick Book is a magical realist story, so I wanted room to have kind of a fantastical story around a real person. And so I picked her because of her obscurity, but also because of her name. Her name is so evocative of this particular moment in time of this like subculture that she was living in, Puritan New England, Deliverance Dane. Just amazing. So that is why I chose to write about her.
[00:10:59] That book [00:11:00] came out in 2009, and so several years later I was futsing about on a genealogy website because of course, for people who are interested in family history, life's gotten a lot easier. Over the last couple of years, with the advent of digital humanities and so many more ways of doing research online. Like, when my aunt was doing research in the nineties, it was really hard to do, and now it's actually much more accessible, which is a huge gift.
[00:11:25] So I'm messing about, point, click, point, click, and I come upon Nathaniel Dane, which is actually the name of a character in the book that I wrote, and I was like, "huh, that's a weird coincidence. Who knew?" Point, click, point, click, point, click. Lo and behold, I learned that it turns out Deliverance Dane, the real one, is my eighth great-grandmother. And so she's more closely related to me, genetically speaking, than Elizabeth Howe, even though Elizabeth Howe and I have the same last name. And I had [00:12:00] zero idea, no idea whatsoever, and I'd written an entire novel about this person and found that there she was, just hanging out, waiting for me. So I definitely have gotten more superstitious the longer I've worked on witchcraft.
[00:12:11] Josh Hutchinson: That's a very strange thing to have happen to you. But it turns out that Deliverance Dane is actually my like eighth or ninth great grand aunt, and Elizabeth Jackson Howe is also an aunt, and Deliverance Dane, in her confession, says that she worked with Mary Osgood, and that's my grandmother. I connected to a lot of the people you're connected to.
[00:12:39] Katherine Howe: So we're cousins, Josh.
[00:12:40] Josh Hutchinson: And Sarah's my cousin through Mary Esty.
[00:12:44] Katherine Howe: Wow.
[00:12:45] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. It's a small world when you get back to those little towns back there.
[00:12:50] Katherine Howe: Yes. It really is, for sure. It's still pretty far back there. It's a long time ago. It was very funny. I once did a book event, and someone came out to me very emotional, [00:13:00] and they were, turns out, a descendant of a judge from the Salem trials. And this person wanted very much to personally apologize to me. And I was like, " no, it's really, it's okay". Like he's, this is not something that you need to feel badly about. This is, everything's fine, cool's fine. But it is interesting to me how close people can feel to people who are living in such a distant time period.
[00:13:26] Josh Hutchinson: We definitely feel connected to our ancestors, and we talk to a lot of descendants of which trial victims, and they have an emotional bond with those ancestors, but that was so long ago. Did you get interested in Salem because of your connection with Howe and Proctor?
[00:13:51] Katherine Howe: Partly. I went to graduate school for American and New England studies, which is like interdisciplinary American history. And I actually came to it from an art history [00:14:00] background. I have a background in visual culture, and it's a where for grad school visual culture and also material culture, which is to say, stuff, objects. On a whim, my husband and I moved to Marblehead, Massachusetts, which is a small town on the water close to modern-day Salem.
[00:14:19] We're having this conversation in October, and there was just an article on Boston Globe about how like a hundred thousand people came to Salem for Halloween and running streets. Salem is a town of 40,000 people. I can't even wrap my head around how many people they cramming in this season. And a lot of people come to Salem for Halloween. It's like Halloween Central, and understandably.
[00:14:41] But it was interesting to me while I was living in Marblehead and I was studying history. And I was living in a house that was built in 1705. And so one thing I have to say is people associate me so closely with Salem, because I've written so much Salem fiction. I grew up in [00:15:00] Houston, Texas. Okay. So the oldest building extant in Houston, Texas is a wine bar that was originally built as a bakery, and it's from 1856. So the oldest building in the entire city that I grew up in is six years younger than the new edition of the house that I was living in in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Earlier, when I was talking about having a sense of being home but being a stranger there. I brought my new south eyes to this incredibly old environment, because Marblehead has the biggest collection of century houses in the entire country. They even have more than Colonial Williamsburg, for instance, except that in Marblehead, the houses have been continually occupied.
[00:15:46] On the second floor of the house was an apartment, but the house had been a single-family house, been carved into apartments. Pine floors were like foot wide, and the ceilings were incredibly low. Like, you couldn't stretch your arms over your head, cuz [00:16:00] the ceilings were so low. And this is actually when I learned for the first time, talking material culture, that bed headboards actually have a function. They're not just decorative. And I discovered this, because we were so broke in grad school that we would turn the heat down as far as we could manage.
[00:16:16] And so the room that we used as our bedroom, ice would form on the inside of the windows, because it was so cold, and we were so broke. And so when we were first living there, we had this futon I'd brought with me from Texas, of course. And there was no headboard on the futon. And so we were freezing, just like having your head up by this wall with ice on the window. We were freezing cold. And it wasn't until we got like a bed with a headboard, we like, "oh, this is a lot warmer. This is great." We just only then did I discover that a headboard really is important, at least if you're living in New England.
[00:16:48] And in this room, the bedroom that we had was tucked under the eaves of the lean-to part of a house. So if you're familiar with colonial architecture, houses tended to be built in stages. You'd have room here and a [00:17:00] room here, and you have maybe you'd add a second floor and you might add a lean-to in the back to add some extra space. So we were in what had been the lean-to, and there was a little door that went into the back stair, and over the back stair, there was this little horseshoe-shaped charm over the back door that had been painted over. And of course, horseshoes are something that I think all over the country, we all recognize what they mean, and they mean that they're there for luck or for protection. And you see this all over the place. This is a piece of folk magic belief that is incredibly widespread, such that we don't even really notice it, as evidenced by the fact that you can buy horseshoe necklaces at Tiffany's, wherever. We don't even think about it anymore. But it was interesting to me to see this little remnant piece of magic. It wasn't a real horseshoe. It was clearly there. It was tiny. It was a charm. It had been made as a charm, sold as a charm.
[00:17:54] And so then I started looking around and noticing horseshoes wherever I went. And it got me thinking [00:18:00] between the fact that there was this little remnant magic shred, that there was that and also the fact that I was in this physical space that people had been moving through, who had been present when the trials were happening. Like we were only one town over from Salem, and, of course, when the trials were happening, people were traveling from towns all over the place to come and see, because it was a huge spectacle. People were talking about it.
[00:18:26] So there was one day when I was sitting and thinking, like, "someone's foot has been on this board, this actual board under my hand. The same foot was standing and watching what was going on." And something about that tangibility or that proximate tangibility was really moving to me, and it got me thinking about the humanity of people who were living through that very strange moment in time, cuz I feel like much of the time their humanity is elided by our presentist biases or what have you. I feel like in [00:19:00] highly fantasy versions of witchcraft, the humanity of the people in the past is elided, and in, certainly in Arthur Miller, the actual humanity of people is alighted.
[00:19:12] I started thinking about what became the story in Physick Book from that perspective, from like occupying this very weird, specific physical space as a stranger and trying to think about what it meant to be in that space and like how it felt to be in this space, over this incredible span of years, and how, in one sense, the early modern period is this incredibly alien and remote time. Their understanding of how reality worked is very different from our understanding of how reality works. But at the same time, there are certain common elements of common humanity that persist, like lying in bed and being freezing cold, unless you have a headboard at your head, and so a lot of my fiction, my desire to write fiction came [00:20:00] from thinking about these common points of humanity across really wide, gaping spans of time.
[00:20:06] Josh Hutchinson: Can you give us a little background on what the situation was in Massachusetts Bay, when the witch trials started?
[00:20:17] Katherine Howe: A few things were happening. A question that I get a lot is, what is the proximate cause o f the Salem Witch crisis, what caused it? And the thing that I think is interesting about that question is that it suggests that it would be so much easier if there were just one cause, if we could just point to the thing, and be like, "oh, that's the thing."
[00:20:36] When we were corresponding, Josh, you mentioned the ergot hypothesis, that back in the seventies, somebody floated the idea that maybe all the afflicted girls had eaten moldy bread and were suffering from ergotism, and they were all tripping outta their mind. And that hypothesis was actually dismissed, I think, six months after it was first floated. But it still bubbles up periodically in [00:21:00] documentaries and popular discourses about Salem, because, and I think the reason that it doesn't go away is because it's so simple. It's so tidy to be like, "okay, that's the thing."
[00:21:11] And the truth of the matter is there isn't one thing. The way that I sometimes talk about it is that it's like a Venn diagram, and Salem is the point of the intersection of all the overlapping circles.
[00:21:24] So one overlapping circle is the very specific kind of religion that everyone in Salem adhered to. It was a world view that did not hold that there was anything outside of Christianity. So, for instance, the indigenous population that was already living in Massachusetts at that time, by virtue of not being adherents of Christianity in their very specific puritan worldview, that which is not Christian is by definition devilish, and it was actually Mary Beth Norton who's made the point that a lot of the language that the [00:22:00] people at Salem use to describe the devil is language that is used to describe indigenous people. So, one big Venn diagram circle is the specific religious and cultural moment that they're living in.
[00:22:15] Another diagram circle that we could point to is the weather, that the first panicky behavior that erupts with Betty Parris and with Abigail Williams, it starts in January, January, super cold in Massachusetts, cold, dark. The sun sets at 4:30 in the afternoon. And I'm not exaggerating, like it is dark AF. And and that's true in the 17th century, as it's today. And also in 1690s, North America was in miniature ice age. It was even colder and more bitter than it is now in Massachusetts.
[00:22:50] Another piece is pretty relentless class and gender context. The girls who first experienced symptoms that they describe as [00:23:00] fits are Betty Parris, daughter of Samuel Parris, who's the unpopular minister in Salem Village, Abigail Williams, who's his 11-year-old, she's described as being his niece, although that had a different meaning for them than it does for us today, but she was bound out to service.
[00:23:17] So can you imagine living in a culture where when you can't afford to feed your 11-year-old, you just give her to somebody to live with, for her to work for them? You just give her away. And so Abigail was this lonely, impoverished, starving, freezing child whose job it was to obey everyone all the time.
[00:23:42] Oftentimes, I think with great sympathy about Abigail Williams, poor Abigail, who, by the way, in Arthur Miller is turned into a 17-year-old temptress. She's a child. She's a child. And if you look at the descriptions of her behavior that are described as her being in her fits, a lot of her behavior sounds to me like playing, [00:24:00] like running around in circles and flapping your arms and saying, " whish" and saying that you're gonna fly at the chimney.
[00:24:05] Is that devilish possession, or is it an 11 year old girl being silly? And I feel like that is a, that is something that's worth thinking about. So there's the kind of class and gender politics, that's another big.
[00:24:16] So there are a number of different aspects, but you were asking about the politics and the charter. So this is another pretty big circle. So, typically in the early modern period in the colonies, if someone was accused as a witch, they would be accused and have a trial, and if they were found guilty, by the way, it's hard to find people guilty. They actually had a pretty high bar for for evidence at that time. Believe it or not, you could be tried and found guilty, and if you're found guilty, you could be put to death, and that could happen within a matter of weeks. Salem, the panic begins in January, the first hangings aren't until June. That's like a huge long span of time. And the reason for that long span of time is because the Glorious Revolution was unfolding.
[00:24:57] Back in England at that [00:25:00] time, Massachusetts Charter had expired, so they didn't have the legal wherewithal to hold a trial. That's why the Salem trial trials are conducted by a special Court of Oyer and Terminer. They basically had to convene like a special tribunal to deal with this problem that had come together. In fact, there's some historians who wondered if the Court of Oyer and Terminer didn't just deal with witchcraft. They were supposed to deal with all the rest of the backlog. But we just don't know what that backlog was, cause the records of the witch trials are what have survived.
[00:25:28] And then there's another piece of the Venn diagram, and we have to consider it. At the very beginning, the very first person who's accused as a witch is accused by Abigail and Betty and she's the only person who has less social and cultural power than they do. And they accuse Tituba or Titube Indian, who is an enslaved woman in the Parris household.
[00:25:50] So she's basically the only person who has less ability to protect herself than these children themselves do. And so Tituba's accused. She [00:26:00] has two confessions, and there's some evidence that she is beaten in between the two confessions. And in one of the confessions, Tituba introduces the idea of a conspiracy. She says that there is a group of witches at work in Salem Village. She doesn't know who they are or how many.
[00:26:20] And so at one point early on, there's actually a sermon is preached in Sermon Village that I'm gonna man the title, but it's something along the lines of "Christ Knows How Many Devils There Are." And so you have this idea of an unknown number of conspirators, who must be discovered. And when you have this undefined, invisible threat and also no legal relief, there's no like pressure valve that this tension could be released by, because of the like, unfortunate timing of the expiration of the charter.
[00:26:58] So you bring [00:27:00] all of these circles in the Venn diagram together, and that is why Salem gets as big as it does. And by the time Salem was over and done, 19 people were put to death and hundreds had been accused, hundreds in a period of time when a given town would only have a couple thousand people.
[00:27:16] Josh Hutchinson: That was a great, thorough explanation of how it took all these different factors to create the situation. It wasn't something, a single bullet theory, that you can put to rest.
[00:27:32] Katherine Howe: But I think one reason that, that we keep craving for simplicity is because with a simple explanation for why than it's easier to consign, to history. It'd be so much more encouraging or it'd be such a relief to be able to say, "Oh, it was air got poisoning. No big deal. That's all." But like the fact that it, what really was at stake was this intersection of circumstances and that everyone who was a participant in [00:28:00] Salem pretty much believed that they were doing the right thing. Not only the right thing, but the necessary thing to save their community. That to me is also a moving but also terrifying thing to remember and to realize.
[00:28:13] Because certainly we all, we've all lived through moments where we are convinced that we're doing the right thing, only to see ourselves perpetuating horrors, and that is I think that's one of the reasons we as a culture are never really able to let go of Salem.
[00:28:25] Sarah Jack: You said, " as a culture, we're never able to let go of Salem." Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, " shall we never get rid of this past? It lies upon the present like a giant's dead body." I'm wondering what you think you would write now about that.
[00:28:43] Katherine Howe: Hawthorne in particular is someone who, like he personally, so felt the weight of Salem's past in a very personal way, because he was a descendant of Judge Hathorne, obviously. And because he was living there himself, and for many [00:29:00] generations, in fact, much during much of the time period when Hawthorne was living in Salem, the witch trials were not discussed in polite society. This was true into the 20th century, actually. They were not discussed. It was not something that was brought up. It's certainly something my family never talked about until this is something that my, my aunt uncovered. There was a sense of embarrassment attached to it, I think.
[00:29:23] But I'm also intrigued by the fact that when Hawthorne has tried to grapple with it, and he has tried to grapple with it, he took the line from he, he knew what had happened. Like he took a line from Sarah Good and put it in the mouth of Matthew Maule, in The House of the Seven Gables.
[00:29:39] Was it Hawthorne who grumbled about "damn scribbling women?" I think it was. I think it was. And so this is me tweaking his nose a little bit, but Sarah Good. Sarah Good was a beggar. Okay. She was destitute. She was one of the first people accused, because she was in no position to defend herself. She was thrown into jail. She has a baby on her and like [00:30:00] toddler, essentially with her, the baby dies while they're in jail. The toddler, whose name is Dorothy, ends up losing her mind and has to be like supported by the town after the trials are all over. So like this person is in absolutely dire straits and is and suffers mightily at the hands of the community where she lives and who's supposed to be helping them.
[00:30:23] And when she's on the scaffold, she says the most badass thing anyone has ever said in history of time, my unbiased opinion. She says, "I'm no more than a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink." And I wish I had that kind of wherewithal, because who has that kind of wherewithal under in those circumstances?
[00:30:45] And so Hawthorne takes this line, Hawthorne knows it's happened, and he puts this line in a guy, in a guy's mouth. I understand that he's writing in the 19th century. I get it. But at the same time, I think it's impossible to [00:31:00] look at Salem and not consider gender politics in place. The fact that virtually everyone who's accused and put to death was a woman. Any man who was accused cuz he's associated with a woman who was already accused. Giles Corey was crushed to death between stones. He's accused cuz his wife, Martha's accused first, but also the accusers are initially children, but then also women. So there's a really intense gender politics in place here.
[00:31:28] So your question was, the past lying with the weight of the giant and what would Hawthorne say today? And I'm actually curious what Hawthorne would say about it today. I think he would sympathize with, or maybe be aggravated by the fact that we're still having the conversation that he was having a hundred and fifty years ago. But at the same time, I feel like we're talking about different things from what he was concerned. And and also I think he would be really annoyed because I write novels. I'm a woman.
[00:31:58] Sarah Jack: I [00:32:00] love that you brought up that he took Sarah's words and gave them to a man, because it just dawned on me very recently that Ann Putnam didn't read her own apology. I just assumed, and I think that possibly other descendants, we read that, we think I don't know what we really think about it. We're evaluating what it says anyways, but we're doing that with her voice in our head, and no, it was not.
[00:32:30] Katherine Howe: One thing that, that continues to interest me, as a history person, about Salem is that it's one of the rare instances when regular people are at the center of the store. So much of history, especially the further you go into the past, the vast majority of people who've been alive in history of ever, have left no record of themselves. They weren't literate, they weren't of sufficient note to have their burial place noted, [00:33:00] and so much of history, even academic history, as it's gotten more serious about excavating stories, just by the nature of the way that archives come to exist, there's still going to be a bias towards power.
[00:33:13] There's gonna be a bias towards privilege and a bias towards power, and, when it comes to Salem, that is one of the rare instances where the bias towards power falls away, because the people who are at the center of the drama are regular people, and where historians have put the work in to try to excavate what is able to be excavated of these lives that otherwise would've been invisible to us.
[00:33:40] Would we have known Abigail Williams ever existed, if she hadn't been part of the Salem Witch Trials? We would not have? And in fact, even with her central position at the beginning of the panic, we don't know what happened to her. We don't know where she went. We don't know how old she was when she died. Nobody actually knows for sure.
[00:33:56] And so particularly talking about people who are not literate, Anne [00:34:00] Putnam had her confession read. If I remember correctly, Anne Putnam wasn't literate. And so you're right in saying here's this apology that she delivered in front of everybody and that it was read on her behalf. To what extent was she the author of her own apology? And it's impossible to say. It's impossible to know.
[00:34:19] And it's one of the reasons that you've touched on one of my rant buttons, I'm sorry to report, but as a writer of historical fiction, like I have so little patience for historical fiction about kings and queens. I don't give a damn about kings and queens. Who cares? They get enough attention, they have enough records, they're all literate, everyone documents every single thing that they do. And I do not give a damn, because history pays them enough attention, and I'm so much more interested in trying to excavate the history of people who would otherwise be forgotten.
[00:34:54] Sarah Jack: I caught that from you reading Conversion, because [00:35:00] your main character, Colleen, she's getting to give us the firsthand experience like no other afflicted person was able to do.
[00:35:09] Katherine Howe: Thank you for saying that. I confess I haven't looked at Conversion in kind a long time. You're making me think I should look at it again, cuz there's actually a group of high school students who are reading it right now and I'm gonna talk to next week. I should read that book.
[00:35:22] But I appreciate you saying that, because I feel like, like one question I sometimes wrestle with as a history person and someone who's a novelist is what does historical fiction have to offer that nonfiction doesn't have to offer? Like, why not just write a really good history of something?
[00:35:38] And I feel like in many instances, in the cases where a story cannot be recovered, that's where historical fiction can be a really wonderful intervention. If you can build a credible world with credible material culture, and credible details, and credible politics, and credible ideology, and then [00:36:00] people it with people who are credible people, it is a way of accessing history that otherwise is not extant, where it doesn't exist.
[00:36:11] Is there going to be some imagination involved? Obviously, but it is, I feel like that's where the opportunity lies. And I realize we've gotten off Salem a little ,bit and I apologize, but it's something that I think about a lot. Like, particularly for some, a story that's as revisited as often as the Salem story is, what does fiction have to offer? Like why tell a fictional version of this story? I feel like fiction gives you permission to fill in and shade in stories that where there just is no other shading available. And that to me seems like the real area of opportunity for storytelling.
[00:36:52] Josh Hutchinson: I wanted to ask you about the afflicted girls. Do you think it's plausible that conversion disorder could [00:37:00] explain some of the fits?
[00:37:01] Katherine Howe: Yes and no. I'll explain that hedge of an answer. For one thing I find it always a little bit tricky to apply contemporary psychoanalytic categories to people in the past. Like on the one hand, I believe very urgently in, the shared humanity of people in the past, but at the same time, like we take as natural so many habits of mind that are actually very historically contingent. The fact that you and I might casually talk about what our dreams mean or what our subconscious motivations might be for something like that is indicative of post-psychoanalytic. And I think it's tricky to try to access the interior light of people who are living in a different moment, especially a moment like the early [00:38:00] modern in Massachusetts. It's even hard for a scholar of that time period to really grasp the extent to which Christianity informed every, single aspect of existence.
[00:38:15] So for my second novel I was working on. No, it's Physick Book. I was reading up about alchemy, and like we know about alchemy as this pseudoscientific practice in early modern practice in which someone tries to turn that into gold. Okay, fine. But that's actually not what it was. It is actually a way of understanding the order of the universe that took as scientific fact the perfectability of the human soul.
[00:38:41] There's this tense layering of religion and materiality and mirroring of structures and images like, like as soon as I would get close to thinking I understood alchemical thought, it would slither out of my grasp. And I would realize this because I'm just [00:39:00] too much of someone born in the 20th century to, to I will never actually really understand that intellectual landscape.
[00:39:09] So when you ask can conversion disorder explain the girls' behavior? Like in a way yes. But in another way I don't know that we can actually really understand their selfhood, the way that these girls thought about themselves or understood themselves as individuals.
[00:39:28] It's just very different from the way that we think. It's very different. So that there's that qualification. With that qualification in place, I would say that, so conversion disorder is where you are under so much stress that your body converts it into physical symptoms. And then mass psychogenic illness is when a group of people experience strange behavior together.
[00:39:56] And there are many examples of mass psychogenic illness [00:40:00] or mass psychogenic illness expressions of conversion disorder, and many examples of it across cultures, across time, across continents, across ethnicities. And it very often happens among adolescent girls, for whatever reason. Maybe cause we are conditioned to be more like socially engaged with other people. Who knows? You can try to explain it a number of different ways.
[00:40:22] But it's not only adolescent girls. I think that it is, this is gonna be a controversial thing to say, but like the recent incidences of Havana Syndrome are pretty clearly an example of mass psychogenic illness. Now it's important to say that mass psychogenic illness is real. It counts as a real thing. It's not just people like, it's not all in your head. You know what I mean? Like the fact that it is, that it has its origin in mental disorder doesn't make it any less real to the body. Conversion disorder is a disorder. It is your body being sick. It's just that the sickness originates [00:41:00] from inside your own organism. That doesn't make it count less. You know what I mean?
[00:41:03] All of which is to say, did a group of girls start exhibiting strange behavior? Yes. Did it spread from girl to girl on networks of kinship and friendship? It did. But at the same time, their behavior, when you say "fits" today, that has a very specific connotation. And it sounds like a epileptic seizure or something like that to, to us today. If I say, "Oh my gosh, I just saw this person have a fit." You'd be like, "Oh no." And you'd imagine that they fell down twitching and foaming at the mouth, but that's not what they were doing.
[00:41:32] What they were doing was behaving out of the ordinary. So like earlier we were talking about Abigail running around flapping her wings and saying, her arms, and saying, "whish, whish, whish." That is her in her fits. Or like another instance of Abigail in her fits is when she challenges Deodat Lawson to name his text. She like gets up in the middle of church and like mouths off to this very famous divine and rolls her eyes about how boring it's gonna be when he reads his text. That's [00:42:00] not her having a fit. That's her misbehaving.
[00:42:02] But her behavior was such a challenge to the gender and economic power structure that was in place while she was living. It was so out of the ordinary that her community could only chalk it up to devilish influence because it was that unimaginable that she would behave this way.
[00:42:20] So was there a social illness aspect to the afflicted girl's behavior? I feel certain, yes. So that, that's my long and qualified example about or discussion of conversion disorder.
[00:42:34] Josh Hutchinson: Do you think that they were really afraid of witches and that the fear of witches might have also translated?
[00:42:43] Katherine Howe: Sure. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think the fear was real. I think it is a mistake to either chalk it up as craven opportunism or as naked stupidity or superstition. One of [00:43:00] the things that I think is important, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt who live in the past and that is that like absolutely they were afraid.
[00:43:08] Can you imagine, what does it feel like to live in a world where you really, actually, honest to gosh believe that the devil can go walk about on the earth, as a real person and that he can disguise himself as people you know and love and trust? That at any given time, I could be talking to you right now, Josh, and you could be the devil in disguise, and I wouldn't know it.
[00:43:30] That's a and if you really believe that, you really do believe that, and you actually really believe that hell is a real place that you can go there if you make a mistake. That there is no, this is another like aspect of puritan belief, that like they believed in the elect. The idea that you have no way of saving yourself. That your being saved was only up to God, and you had no control [00:44:00] over it whatsoever. Like what? You couldn't go to confession. You couldn't do penance. You could try your best to behave, but it was ultimately just up to God.
[00:44:10] What an existentially dreadful way to live your life, to have no certainty. It's a little, a really hard life, first of all, and to believe that there was such a thing as paradise after death, but to have no idea whether or not you got to go there and that nothing you did made any difference. And that everywhere, at every turn, the devil was waiting to trip you up. Like that would be a difficult and impossible mental landscape to occupy.
[00:44:44] So yes, if your question was did they really believe in witchcraft and was that fear, could not fear contribute to their behavior? Like absolutely. What a terrifying way to live, and also what a relief. Like one of the reasons that I think witches [00:45:00] was such a persuasive idea for so many people at that time was wouldn't it be great if something was going bad in your life, to be able to not try to see it as a sign of God's Ill favor, but instead to have someone to blame for it? To be like, "it's not me. I'm not messing up here. Someone's doing this to me."
[00:45:20] I think that's also very human, that human feeling. It's not just bad luck or misfortune or like the luck of the draw, and it's so much more of a, "no, this person doing something to me. They wish me ill, and that's why my life is hard." I think that's a very human way to be.
[00:45:39] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We talked a little about Anne Putnam, Jr.'s apology earlier, and she still does that in her apology. "The devil made me do it."
[00:45:49] Katherine Howe: And Samuel Sewall does the same thing, like the two big apologies that come about after Salem is over after everything's done are Ann Putnam's and [00:46:00] Samuel Sewall's apology. But Samuel's apology, too, is weird where he like, first of all, he comes to it. It's not that he stops believing in witchcraft or stops believing that there is an invisible world. He comes to it after a series of wonders and marbles, including, if I remember correctly, like his house being tilted with stones. Who knows what really happened? And maybe there was like a passing hailstorm is how it took it.
[00:46:22] But he comes to it after a series of wonders and marvels, and he comes to believe that the devil tricked them all. That it wasn't that that the devil wasn't luring people into witchcraft. Instead, the devil obscured the minds of the people who are supposed to keep the community safe. And but also what a horrifying thing to, to come to believe about yourself. To look back at your actions and think you're doing the right thing, and think that you are saving your community from the most threatening presence that your imagination can come up with, and instead to conclude that, no, what happened [00:47:00] was that threatening presence tricked you. That you were so weak that you were fooled. Like what a, what a heinous thing to believe about yourself. It's a very punishing worldview that they subscribe to.
[00:47:16] Josh Hutchinson: Do you see any modern parallels to the Witch hunt?
[00:47:20] Katherine Howe: Sure. A few years ago a historian of witchcraft named John Demos published a book about witch hunting, in which he has a chapter about the 1980s daycare satanism thing that happened, much of which I was only dimly aware of, being a small person in 1980s myself.
[00:47:41] But what happened was, a group of people were put on trial, actually put on trial and actually convicted of having you run a daycare center and used the children in satanic rituals. And at the time that it was happening, and this is preposterous, like I, it's actually just like on the surface of it, I [00:48:00] think preposterous. I think, taken out context, any of us looking at this would say, "this makes, this is ridiculous. Obviously this did not happen." And at the time that it was unfolding, John Demos saw it unfolding and he was like, "Oh my God, it's Salem all over again." Like the same pieces are in place, like the idea of a conspiracy, the idea of trusted people that you cannot trust, the idea of children being at risk.
[00:48:24] And I think that you see some of the same hysteria and language. I don't like using the word hysteria, cuz it's such a specific word, but you see some of this in like contemporary corners of the conspiracy internet, where I try not to spend any time, but Isn't that Pizzagate? Isn't there some like thing not too long ago about worrying a particular pizzeria was like putting kids at risk in this same kind of way? Like you see the same kind of like at any time that someone worries that children are at risk, there will be a lot of open-mindedness about it.
[00:48:55] But of course, here's me getting political. Like, of course, children actually literally are at [00:49:00] risk by, by school shooting, right? Like the one thing that would really keep children really safe in places where they're supposed to feel safe and trust people around them, is if they restricted access to military assault weapons. That's my opinion. My opinion is that if we really care about keeping children safe, we take those guns off the street, right, full stop. But feel free to send me hate mail. I can be reached to KatherineHowe.com/contact.
[00:49:21] Sarah Jack: So I think asking the question about are there parallels, we have these modern parallels that are popping into our heads. We have our strong feelings, but what can the understanding of the Colonial Witch trials and those before do to help us with these parallels? Can it help us? Will it help?
[00:49:43] Katherine Howe: I'd like to think that it can. One of the things that I like to say when talking about Salem is that I feel that one of the reasons we can't let Salem go. As a culture, like we come back to it and we, like we can't let it go.[00:50:00]
[00:50:00] And I feel that the reason that we can't let it go, among the many reasons, but I think one of the big reasons is that it forces us to confront how fragile our ideals really are. We are an unusual country in that in many respects, we are, notwithstanding those of us who were brought here against our will, which is many of us, but broadly construed, you could argue that we are something of an intentional community.
[00:50:26] That the only thing that really holds us together is this set of shared ideals, and that some of our shared ideals include religious freedom. They include a social safety net. That we value people who are different from us, that we value people who are vulnerable. " Bring us you're tired, your poor, your huddled masses." Like that, that arguably this is an ideal that we hold in common. This is an organizing principle of the culture in which we live.
[00:50:52] And yet Salem is this instance where everybody, believing they were doing the [00:51:00] absolute right thing, instead put to death, the state put to death 19 people. That, in the course of doing the right thing, the state did the absolute wrong thing, and they also put to death people who were, many of them were vulnerable in their community. People who were more likely to be accused were those who were at the most vulnerable, who were the most out step vulnerable in community. And so I feel like Salem is an instructive moment for that, because here's this moment where, in the course of being convinced of our total moral authority and correctness, a huge miscarriage of justice took place.
[00:51:41] And I think that's a really difficult thing to reconcile. And I think especially for a country like ours, where also so many of us are brought up to look to the colonial period for our origin, that we're told, rightly or wrongly, that we are taught to look into the 18th, and to a lesser [00:52:00] extent the 17th century, and see in it the seeds of the country that we would become.
[00:52:04] Maybe that's another way of thinking about it. Like another way of thinking about it, is it more productive to think about what we want the future to look like than it is to try to think about what the past has to tell us? That's a question. That's a question that I think is interesting. One, particularly for an intentional community like ours. We have, we get to reinvent ourselves as a country, and we get to decide, and what kind of place do we want to be? Do we want to be the kind of place that protects vulnerable people? Do we want to be the kind of place that protects people who are at risk, who are different from us, who are angry, who are grumpy, who read too many books? I would prefer to live in a place that protects those kinds of people. But we get to choose We choose who we protect.
[00:52:47] Sarah Jack: We can make that choice, and not only is it going to stop suffering here, there are places in this world that are still totally captured [00:53:00] by doing the wrong thing, thinking they're doing the right thing, witch hunting. This discussion it is about us here, but it's about us there.
[00:53:10] You have referred to time so much. That is such a strong piece of this. Even in Conversion, one of the simple quotes you have says, "any number of things could happen in the time it took to go down the hall." You like go right to the time thing. And today when you started talking, you talked about time. And I look at the history, I look at us now, how do we all get caught up on this witch-hunting mentality and start looking out for humanity and protecting other?
[00:53:42] Katherine Howe: It's a hard thing. It's a really hard thing. And I wish I had easy answers for it. I think simply the act of reflection and awareness is an important one. Stopping to interrogate what our assumptions are.
[00:53:56] Josh Hutchinson: We've talked about a lot of heavy things. [00:54:00] I wondered if we could switch and discuss your new book project. What can you tell us about it?
[00:54:06] Katherine Howe: Oh, so many things. So I'm obsessed with pirates, who isn't? Hopefully, the answer is everyone is obsessed with pirates.
[00:54:13] So I have a book coming out in fall, and I think they're gonna let me keep the title. And you. Okay, Josh, Sarah, you guys have to tell me what you think of the title. You ready? So get comfortable, here it is: A True Account of Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself. That's the title. It's a mouthful.
[00:54:30] It starts in Boston in 1726 at a very real an actual pirate trial that really did happen. Like most of my stuff, it's, it is grounded in actual facts and then becomes what I'm describing as a little bit like Gone Girl meets Treasure Island. And I had so much fun with it, and I'm really excited about it. And it is a little bit of a departure from what I've done, but it is about a girl, Hannah Masury, who has to disguise herself in order to escape some pretty heavy circumstances. And [00:55:00] she ends up basically stealing away on what turns out to be a pirate ship. And we have to follow her on her adventures.
[00:55:06] And I have so much fun with some basic pirate tropes. There is treasure, there is a parrot. It's so much fun, and there's also some, a little bit of romance, and I have the most fun ever.
[00:55:18] Josh Hutchinson: Sounds like a fun one to read.
[00:55:22] Katherine Howe: I really hope so.
[00:55:24] Sarah Jack: I'm so delighted by what I just heard.
[00:55:28] Katherine Howe: That makes me very happy. Makes me very happy. It's weird because it's one of the, it's probably the most violent book I've written. If y'all have read my stuff, then you know I'm a teensy bit squeemish and shy away from. So there's some violence in this book, but what's strange about it is, I didn't invent any of it. It is actually all from historical record. I take no responsibility whatsoever for any of the stuff that happens in this book, because it all ripped from the headlines. It all really happened.
[00:55:55] Josh Hutchinson: And was Hannah herself based on a real person?[00:56:00]
[00:56:00] Katherine Howe: Hannah is based on a couple of people. She's inspired in part by real accounts of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who are two working-class women, who ended up disguising themselves as men and going raiding in Jamaica at the end of the 17th century. They were real people ,and there was a real Hannah Masury ,who I talk about a little bit in the author's note of the book. She was a 19th-century person, and she ended up, I was inspired when I came across her. She was the wife of a ship captain. She was married to a ship captain, and she ended up putting down a mutiny by herself, armed only with a pistol, in the Pacific Ocean.
[00:56:39] And so I read about her, and she didn't have any children, and I was like, "oh my gosh, I am obsessed with you." And so I decided to name my awesome pirate after her. Hannah, Hannah comes from a couple of different sources, but I really like her as a person. She's a tough character .
[00:56:56] Josh Hutchinson: Sounds like it. You said that it's set [00:57:00] around a pirate trial in Boston?
[00:57:03] Katherine Howe: Yeah, it starts, the action starts in Boston in 1726, and in 1726, it's the end of the golden age of piracy. It's actually funny that the Salem period, like the witch craze, the end of the witch craze and golden age of piracy are at the same time period, which I think is interesting. And a guy named William Fly was tried as a pirate, and the person who ministered to him and preached about him was none other than Cotton Mather .
[00:57:32] So Cotton Mather by then was this like hugely famous, successful cleric. He was really rich. He was, like, had a very popular ministry and so he had taken it upon himself to crusade against piracy. So he tries to bring William Fly and his compatriots back to God, and he's there when they're hanged. William Fly was hanged, and then he was gibbeted. He was, his body was hung in chains on a tiny island in the Boston Harbor Islands and [00:58:00] left there to rot. He was really avid as a warning to other people who might go out on the account, which is a way of describing going, turning pirate.
[00:58:09] And so I was fascinated by this. It was only a hundred years later that excursion boats are starting to leave Boston. Like steam boats are going from Boston to Nahant. This is no time all. To think that you could go by Nixes Mate, which is where William Fly was hanged and chained. You could go by there and to see you remnant oft remain dangling there.
[00:58:29] So that's where the action begins at William Fly's trial, and things even crazier.
[00:58:36] Josh Hutchinson: Sounds like a fun ride. .
[00:58:38] Katherine Howe: I'm excited for it. I'm not sure when it's coming out. I think it's gonna be November, 2023. So it's coming up.
[00:58:46] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with an important update on what's happening now in your world.
[00:58:51] Sarah Jack: Thank you for listening a few minutes longer to hear End Witch Hunts World Advocacy News. How many innocent world citizens [00:59:00] is it okay to accept as suffering from violent brutalization, due to harmful practices related to accusations of harmful witchcraft and ritual attacks? These attacks are happening now to thousands of innocent people, who are not causing supernatural harm but are being punished by their community, as if they are the ultimate explanation.
[00:59:20] They are innocent, not dangerous witches. These attacks are happening across countries of Africa and Asia. Please see the show notes for links to read about how some countries have advocacy groups working to intercede. When there is not an answer for unexpected bad luck, unfortunate death, or personal misfortune, blaming others for supernatural malevolence is the actual crime. This witch fear is still causing unfounded, violent attacks against women, children, and sometimes men. Listen and watch for the reports. These attacks are reported on.
[00:59:55] The Northern Ireland borough of Larne wants to [01:00:00] commemorate eight Witch trial victims from the Islandmagee Witch Trial that took place on March 31st, 1711. A borough counselor raised questions very recently of whether the eight women and a man who were found guilty of witchcraft were actually innocent. In the trial era, using witchcraft was a covenant with the devil against the victims. When this counselor questioned if it is within the counsel's capacity to say they were innocent, he's questioning if the accused were indeed working with the devil himself to cause harm.
[01:00:32] Is it within human capacity to not assign witch harm guilt onto others? I want to answer that question right now. Yes, it is within our capacity to stop questioning other people about their status as a supernaturally harmful witch. It is our duty to stop questioning accused witch innocence, past or present. These accused people were not, and today's accused witches are not, causing the supernatural harm that is feared of them.
[01:00:59] [01:01:00] This week, academic research was published that is "a new global data set on contemporary witchcraft beliefs ." It has determined that witchcraft beliefs cut across sociodemographic groups, but are less widespread among the more educated and economically secure. Country-level variation in the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs is systematically linked to a number of cultural, institutional, psychological, and socioeconomic characteristics. Altogether, the resulting data set covers more than 140,000 individuals from 95 countries and territories and 5 continents. Over 40% of all survey respondents claim to believe in witchcraft. Stay tuned for a discussion on this research outcome. Find a link to the report in the show notes.
[01:01:48] While we watch and wait, let's support the victims across the world where innocent people are being targeted by superstitious sphere. Support them by acknowledging and sharing their stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an [01:02:00] intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunt movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts. And visit our website, endwitchhunts.org.
[01:02:11] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah, for that eye-opening update.
[01:02:16] Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[01:02:21] Sarah Jack: Join us next week for a special Connecticut witch trial victim descendant episode.
[01:02:31] Josh Hutchinson: And join us in our efforts to end modern witch hunts. Go to endwitchhunts.Org.
[01:02:38] Sarah Jack: Subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen.
[01:02:41] Josh Hutchinson: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[01:02:44] Sarah Jack: Remember to tell your friends that you love what you've been hearing on Thou Shalt Not Suffer, so that they will not miss out.
[01:02:52] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:02:56] [01:03:00]

December 1, 2022

The Putnams of Salem with Greg Houle

Short Story: The Putnams of Salem by Greg Houle

Show Notes

Presenting author and communications professional Greg Houle. He discusses his upcoming novel, “The Putnams of Salem”. Listen as he gives us a glimpse of what he imagines the first person perspective could have been for Ann Putnam Jr, and her father Thomas Putnam. What role did they play in the trials? His fictional short stories are linked below. We continue the conversation inquiring with our advocacy questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?
Links:
Greg Houle Website

Short Story: A Tie is Never Just a Tie by Greg Houle

Short Story: Oomancy by Greg Houle

University of VA, Salem Witch Trials Documents and Transcriptions

End Witch Hunt Projects

Please sign the petition to exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Listen in Your Favorite App

Listen and subscribe wherever you enjoy podcasts:

Transcript

[00:00:00] Josh Hutchinson: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Exodus 22:18.
[00:00:05]
[00:00:26] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to another episode of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:33] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:35] Josh Hutchinson: Today's guest is Greg Houle, an author currently working on a novel about the Putnams of Salem.
[00:00:43] Sarah Jack: Because you like the show, please share it with your friends, family, and followers.
[00:00:47] Josh Hutchinson: We hope you're enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving. Have a slice of Turkey for me.
[00:00:53] Sarah Jack: Share the mashed potatoes.
[00:00:55] Josh Hutchinson: Pass that gravy.
[00:00:58] Sarah Jack: This is a great topic for [00:01:00] Thanksgiving. I'm looking forward to talking to a Putnam of Salem descendant.
[00:01:06] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and we hope this episode gives you lots of conversation ideas for your Thanksgiving dinner.
[00:01:15] Sarah Jack: Especially if you've been having boundary disputes with your friends or family.
[00:01:21] Josh Hutchinson: Make a peace offering, and be sure to watch Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, the best Thanksgiving anything ever made, hands down.
[00:01:33] Sarah Jack: But only after you watched Holly Hunter's Home for the Holidays.
[00:01:36] Josh Hutchinson: Then get back to your Walking Dead marathon. That's what you're really watching. Or House of the Dragon.
[00:01:42] Sarah Jack: And now Josh is gonna tell us some history about the Putnams of Salem.
[00:01:47] Josh Hutchinson: The Putnams of Salem Village were instigators of the Witch Hunt. Thomas Putnam and his brother, Edward, were two of the four men who [00:02:00] filed the first complaints against Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. Thomas went on to make 35 complaints, testify against 17 people, and record 120 depositions, including those of his daughter Ann Putnam, Jr., who was the first villager outside of the parsonage to be afflicted. Later on, she was joined by her mother Ann Putnam, Sr. and their maid, Mercy Lewis, among the ranks of the afflicted. The Putnam family was an important family in the village for three generations. 12 out of the original 25 villagers to sign the church covenant were Putnams, and they ranked among the top taxpayers in the village, along with the Porters.
[00:02:55] After accusing many people and going through [00:03:00] all her theatrics in the courtroom, Ann Putnam, Jr. did apologize in 1706, specifically to Rebecca Nurse's family, but also to the whole village, as she joined the church under the new minister, Joseph Green.
[00:03:17] Sarah Jack: Thank you for introducing us to the Putnams of Salem. I cannot wait to get more of these details from Greg.
[00:03:23] Josh Hutchinson: You're welcome. I'm also looking forward to hearing this family covered in depth. They were so heavily involved, what they did in the witch trials, which was so much. So many Putnams were involved in so many ways.
[00:03:40] Sarah Jack: I'm so happy to welcome Greg Houle, writer of short fiction and author of The Putnams of Salem, coming 2025.
[00:03:49] Greg Houle: So I came into this story, the story of Salem and the Salem witch hysteria like a lot of people do, with a personal family connection to it.[00:04:00] My mother is a Putnam. She is a direct as descendant of Thomas Putnam, Jr., who, along with his oldest daughter Ann, were probably two of the most prolific accusers during the Salem witch hysteria. But yet, despite that connection, I really didn't have any interest in exploring the story as I was growing up. And in spite of having a really intense, lifelong interest in history, I really didn't care, and I think part of that was because of the fact that Salem is such a huge story, and it has a life of its own, and it's become this kind of larger than life almost true crime story.
[00:04:44] And I think a lot of times what has happened is it's deflected a lot of the attention away from the important things, the victims, why it happened, how can we prevent it from happening in the future, that [00:05:00] sort of thing. It was always an interesting thing to be connected to, so many of us are.
[00:05:04] Everything changed in the summer of 2021. And that is that summer, I live in LA now, and my wife and daughter went back east to visit our family, and my wife's family lives in Boston. And while we were there, we decided, let's go to Salem. And we went there, I thought, "Okay I really want to connect my daughter to my, her grandmother's side of the family. I really ought to understand the story better and really dig into it. "And that's really what I did.
[00:05:35] And as soon as I did that, I became immediately enamored by what was going on in the heads of someone like Thomas Putnam, Jr. and Ann. So you have someone who's accusing all of these people, and then you have another one who is said to be afflicted. And I started exploring [00:06:00] that. And this is the part that's unknowable for a historian. So we all wish we could be inside their heads and understanding what's going on during that time. I thought the best way to explore it would really be to look at the environment in which they were in, the things that led to Salem and what happened there and then really just use fiction at that point to tell the story, and, of course, no historian would ever use conjecture , but the beauty of fiction is you can do that. And I think what I tried to do initially in this short story and then now to much greater depth in the novel, is really explore that and look at the forces that created this really tragic event.
[00:06:54] The short story and the novel, at least a tentative title of the novel is The Putnams of Salem. [00:07:00] And there is a sort of subtitle that I'm throwing around. That's really The Fall of an American Family. Not sure how my family will feel about that, but it's what we find out in this story.
[00:07:14] And I think it's really quite fascinating when you think about all the different forces involved in the world that they were living. One of the major themes of the short story and the novel is really fear and the way in which fear drives a lot of what happens and the various types of fear and various sources of fear, from the fear that's inherent within the Puritan religion to fear of the native population. In the case of Thomas Putnam, there's fear of losing your place in society. The sense that throughout history there's the common case of [00:08:00] the patriarch of a family kind of building something, the second generation making it stronger, and then the third generation messing it up somehow. Thomas Putnam Jr. was the third generation of the Putnams in America, and it really does follow that trajectory. And I think it's really interesting when you insert this man into these circumstances and you see the way in which it drove him to do some pretty awful things.
[00:08:30] Josh Hutchinson: You've touched on it already, but how did you go from where you were doing your research into your family to deciding to write stories and then a novel about them?
[00:08:43] Greg Houle: Yeah, it's a great question. I, again, a lot of the impetus for this was my 12 year old daughter at the time and really wanting to connect her to this story in a way that I thought was meaningful. For me it was about really trying to get behind any [00:09:00] lore that existed within our family to the actual story, and it's not always easy to do when you're dealing with 17th century America. You can't always get every detail.
[00:09:14] In my family, there was not a lot of detail. I think there was always the sense of we are connected to this great American story, "great" in quotes, by the way. And isn't that fascinating? But I think, for me, my interest in history has always been about the fact that it is multi-dimensional and dynamic. I think what tends to happen with history is over time we flatten it out, and it becomes very one dimensional. So the sort of typical story of Salem is that it's these sort of fundamental crazy puritans who experience something one [00:10:00] day, start accusing women of witchcraft, and then put them to death. And while the basic facts may be true, there's so much more involved in that story. They lived in a different world than we live in today, obviously, but they still wanted to succeed.
[00:10:21] They laughed sometimes. They cried. They had fights, and they, wanted to be successful. And I think a lot of times we forget that. And in looking at the story, the part that really fascinated me was thinking about the context of this tragedy within that parameter.
[00:10:43] And so for me that's my entry point into this. And so when I really thought about both Thomas and Ann, I kept thinking, " what must be going on in our heads?" I think a lot of times our simple answer is Thomas [00:11:00] is a devout Puritan, and he believes wholeheartedly that all these people he's accusing are witches. And isn't that crazy? But the reality of the fact is that's probably not true, right? He was very strategic in his efforts. Again, we don't wanna have too much conjecture here and assume that we know everything that was going on, but, for me, I was fascinated by that.
[00:11:26] And then you also have Ann, who, in my writing of her, tried to present her as the sort of typical, idealized Puritan girl who's really trying to do all the right things and failing because of her affliction. We know that her afflictions are probably not a real thing, but they are something, and it's it's a sort of interesting juxtaposition between [00:12:00] the two of them. And that was what really fascinated me.
[00:12:03] Josh Hutchinson: For our listeners who aren't as familiar with the Putnams, can you explain Thomas's role in the trials?
[00:12:11] Greg Houle: The sort of patriarch of that family was John Putnam, who came over during the great Puritan migration, came over from England probably in the early 1630s. He was one of, not the initial group of settlers that settled Salem, but he was there a few years later. Pretty prominent landowner. But one of the things that the Putnams at least say that they always wanted to do was create this kind of communal society in Salem, where it was a little bit more, " we're not worried about individual wealth, we're gonna just try to bring everyone up."
[00:12:51] But again, this was at a time where everyone, where Puritans were much more sanguine about their prospects and in the new [00:13:00] world. And I think by the time we get to the witch hysteria 60 years later, everything, the shine has come off a little bit. But so John was the initial patriarch of the family, and then Thomas Sr. was, of course, Thomas Jr.'s father, and he built their land holdings. They were farmers. He was pretty privileged person, but things were different for him, and they weren't quite so easy. By the time we get to 1692, Thomas is still doing pretty well, and his family is pretty prominent.
[00:13:39] He was known as Sergeant Thomas Putnam, because he fought in King Philip's War, which was, some say, the bloodiest war in colonial American history, where it was, in many ways, almost like a akin to a world war in some respect. [00:14:00] It was fought throughout New England between the colonists and their Native allies and other native communities. I think by the time of the Salem witch hysteria, 1692, Thomas was a much different person than his father and his grandfather.
[00:14:21] I think that there are a couple of things that, that are going on. One is the realization that the Puritans are not going to have a shining city on the hill like they initially thought. Now, that doesn't mean that, that they weren't still trying, or they didn't still believe that they were superior in many ways. But I think they realized at that point that wasn't gonna be easy.
[00:14:49] The relationships that they had with the native populations in New England had really soured to the point where that [00:15:00] had created a lot of fear. You may have talked about the fact that they that Massachusetts did not have a charter at that time, had lost its charter. So there's a lot of uncertainty there. So I think, the way I portrayed in the novel and the short story, to some extent, is that Thomas is really this fading patriarch but family that is still prominent, but like a lot of people with power, he wants to do whatever it takes to keep that power, and this opportunity arises, and he takes advantage of it.
[00:15:35] Josh Hutchinson: What were some of the things that he did during the witch-hunt that stand out to mark him as a prominent figure?
[00:15:43] Greg Houle: So he accused many people of witchcraft. He also pretty much wrote all of the documents that needed to be submitted to court for Ann, so he was really orchestrating a lot of that. There [00:16:00] was also, as I'm sure you're aware, quite a rift in the community and had been for generations about who leads the church, and Thomas was very much in favor of the head of the church, Samuel Parris, but others were not. There was a lot of choosing sides there, and that became a big part of it as well.
[00:16:26] In terms of his actual role, he was there during the very first examinations of the first three witches when they were examined by the magistrates. The first three were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, who were three kind of outcasts. But he was there and playing a very prominent role. I think that he saw himself as a leader. He was, a military [00:17:00] leader and a fairly wealthy person with land, and I think he saw his role as being someone who should take a prominent role during a time like this. And he certainly did. And I think, certainly, as I explore in the novel, he uses that as an opportunity to really reshape the nature of his relationships.
[00:17:26] Sarah Jack: What you had just said about growing and securing their wealth with that land, I think that was a really big part of the fight, as well as having a stake in what was happening with the church.
[00:17:40] Greg Houle: That's a great point. I think that another interesting component with Thomas is his father, Thomas Sr., remarried at a very older age, so Thomas had a half brother who ended up inheriting a lot of what he was expecting to inherit. In many [00:18:00] ways, he comes across by 1692 as really just having this series of just one after another of what he would think are tragedies. But again, the thing I kept coming back to and what was fascinating to me was this idea that, you have this privileged person who's then throwing a fit because he's not getting his way every time.
[00:18:23] Maybe I'm projecting something that's 330 years old to today, but I really, that was the thing that I kept coming back to, and a lot of it is tied up in those land disputes and the endless lawsuits and the just no way to ever solve these problems, either in court or outside of court. And it really brought it to the forefront that you realize that they have a lot of these kind of frivolous and difficult problems that we all deal with [00:19:00] today. And I think, again, going back to what I said earlier, we tend to just have this very one dimensional view that they were this sort of whole community block that just all did, were in lockstep with each other, and it's just not like that.
[00:19:17] The other thing I explore in the novel and have fun with is their desire to gossip and just really spread these, rumors and innuendo and all of this other stuff. Obviously, a lot of it was part of the driving force of the accusations of witchcraft, but it's really tied up in the same disputes, those family squabbles. They were a big deal obviously, but they go back generations. When you start digging into it, you realize, you know, what a mess it actually is.
[00:19:56] Sarah Jack: And it sounds like getting to look inside [00:20:00] the Putnam family the way you are doing it with your novel is a way to redeem them.
[00:20:05] Greg Houle: That's a really great point. I hope so. There's a lot of redeeming that needs to be done. The one thing that I've never really been able to quite put my finger on, and I think it's really difficult, because we don't have full knowledge in the historical record, and that sort of thing is what role someone like Thomas really did play. I think, obviously, it's clear he made a lot of accusations.
[00:20:34] I'm making a lot of conjecture that was purposeful and political and driven by anger and annoyance and all these other things, but we don't really know how true that is. And we don't know if he got caught up with the people on his side of the argument. And so it's really one of those things where I want to be a little [00:21:00] careful. I certainly don't pull any punches and protect my family members, but I don't really know, and I've never really been able to pinpoint the role precisely that the Putnams played.
[00:21:15] And, for me, what's more interesting actually is to think about the role that Ann played as a 12 year old , because, you imagine a scenario where she is really believing that she has done something wrong, or she, like a lot of Puritans at the time, thinking that they've let the devil into their being and into their world. But then there's a part of me that thinks, "or was she just doing what her father wanted her to do?" so it becomes one of those things where those are the unknowable questions that I think are challenging for us to understand.
[00:21:55] But you can certainly, looking at the history, looking at [00:22:00] the situation of the Putnam family, you can see where they may have said, "hey, let's just make this thing happen. Let's just keep pushing it forward and see what we can do." And perhaps that was what happened, and that's what's so challenging about this, because we never really will know. But part of what's fun about writing historical fiction is you can then tell the story the way you want to tell it, right?
[00:22:27] Josh Hutchinson: I think the way that you're telling it is so important, because to understand how witch hunts happen, we need to get into the head of both sides of them. So we need to know the people who were making the accusations, what were they thinking, what was going on in their minds, so we can learn from that, and I think it's just terrific that you are exploring, getting inside the heads of Thomas and Ann in the way that you [00:23:00] are.
[00:23:00] Greg Houle: Thank you. I think you're right. That's the part that is just so fascinating. I think a lot of it, and certainly the work that you're doing here with the podcast is really touching on this as well, but I think we live in modern times, and I think we can't help but think about the way that works today, the way, you know, people are exposed to certain media and develop certain beliefs, and then that manifests itself in certain actions. And so I think the whole time that I've been working on this, that's always been in my mind is it's easy for us in a one dimensional world to say Thomas was just a leader in the community. He was a devout Puritan. He firmly believed that these women were evil, and he just [00:24:00] wanted to cleanse Salem, which, by the way, the novel is a dual narrative between, first person narrative with Thomas and Anne, and he's basically saying that the whole time, he's saying, "no, I'm just trying to cleanse our community."
[00:24:14] But I think as intelligent people, we know that cannot possibly be the case, that it isn't just black and white, that there may be an inkling of that there. We don't want to completely dismiss it, but it's just too convenient for him not to have taken the opportunity to, essentially, engage in behavior that resulted in the deaths of many needlessly.
[00:24:45] Josh Hutchinson: I like the way you frame it as, in the terms of, dimensions that we look at, history as this one dimensional black and white thing. And I like how you're getting into [00:25:00] the persons of these complicated people, getting into their minds and their characters to analyze them from a human perspective and make them three dimensional. I think that's very important to our modern understanding of how we operate today.
[00:25:18] Greg Houle: Yeah, that's right. I think it's a really important component anytime we look at history, I think, for anyone, and I'm sure you both feel the same way. Anyone who has real interest in history tends to be interested in the fact that it's really about people, right? And it's about decisions they make and then how those decisions affect other decisions. And this kind of long stretch of what occurs. And I think, a lot of times, people think of history as a series of events and things that happen at certain dates. And it really is about taking that three dimensional or [00:26:00] multidimensional view and really trying to understand what was going through the minds of people when these things were happening.
[00:26:07] I think the probably any legitimate historian listening to me would be very angry, because without actual historical record or information, you can't extrapolate what is actually happening. But I do think the value of something like historical fiction, in this case, is really trying to use your knowledge and the information you have to make those leaps a little bit and try to understand it.
[00:26:39] One thing I'll say about the novel is that I really tried hard to make it plausible. Obviously, I wasn't privy to what was going on inside of Thomas or Ann's mind, wasn't privy to a lot of conversations that they may have had with other people, but the world in which they lived [00:27:00] and the thinking that they had were, it's legitimate, and I'm trying to create something is realistic in terms of, how they would respond to those things. And I think, when you look today, at similar manifestations of persecution, you really do the same thing.
[00:27:23] Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about Ann Jr. And her struggles during all of this?
[00:27:31] Greg Houle: She, very early on, was afflicted, and I'm using the air quotes, and struggled a lot with various manifestations of that affliction. But one thing about Ann that you can tell from what sparse information is available about her, is that she was pretty well liked. And she seemed to, at [00:28:00] least the way I present her is, she was a good girl, I guess you could say, for lack of a better way of putting it, that she tried to live the way Puritan girls were meant to be living.
[00:28:15] What is very interesting, though, about Ann is in 1706, when she went back to the church in Salem and requested to take communion and become a member of the church. And that was when she essentially apologized, although it was a semi apology.
[00:28:42] Sarah Jack: I think readers would love to hear what she was thinking around that. We have the apology, but I wanna know what she was thinking. I've seen so many family researchers or descendants of the accused talk about that, and they have different [00:29:00] perspectives, which I always enjoy reading. Some feel that it was very acceptable, especially based on what her beliefs of the devil's work in her life would've been. Others think it was not really good enough. Getting to hear what was going on in her mind around the apology would be really interesting.
[00:29:20] Greg Houle: I agree. It's a very rare example for us to hear from someone who was involved so early on being also involved at the end like this. My view is that Ann was a broken woman at that time, and my thinking, and again I wanna preface this by saying, "of course I could be completely wrong here," but my thinking is that, by that point, everyone knew, of course, that what happened in 1692 was this horrible thing, and she was this last vestige of that. And so [00:30:00] my read of the situation is that she is this outcast, and at the end of the novel, there's a sort of epilogue where this comes up, and the pastor, Pastor Green at the time, is hesitating and thinking, "do I really wanna let this person back into the church? I worked so hard to try to bring us back together." And, ultimately, of course, does, because she really has nothing else.
[00:30:29] Both her parents died the same year, in 1699. She never married. By all accounts, her experience was the kind of thing that basically ruined her life. And by the time 1706 rolls around, she basically just realizes that the only thing she has is the church, and she'll do anything to be a part of it. So that's my read. Now, whether or not it is sincere,[00:31:00] I think it's really hard to speculate about. I think that it's very plausible that it was not, but it's also plausible that, there is a way of thinking about it where Ann truly was an innocent victim. Not saying that's the case, but she may very well have manifested all of these afflictions and challenges and that she was encouraged by her father and others and that by the time they were all gone, she thought it was safe now to beg for mercy and try to live a life where she could be member of the church again.
[00:31:43] Sarah Jack: I had mentioned family researchers and descendants. I'm wondering, are you ready for other Putnam descendants and other descendants to reach out to you about the book you're writing?
[00:31:54] Greg Houle: You know, I really would love to hear what they have to say. I'm sure I could learn a lot [00:32:00] from those folks. So I really am interested in that. You know, I'm not someone who wants to defend the Putnams or what occurred here. So I'm happy to have those discussions. I think that's a very dangerous thing, so I would not wanna do that at all, but I would definitely love to hear what others know, and the Putnam family has a very important long legacy in New England, and there's a lot to be proud of, but this is not one of those events that anyone should be proud of.
[00:32:33] Sarah Jack: One of the things that you can be proud of is that there were seven Putnam that signed Rebecca Nurse's petition.
[00:32:41] Greg Houle: I think, you know, it speaks to another aspect of the Salem witch hysteria that really fascinates me, is how quickly it seemed to go south, right? The whole collection of events took place in a very short period of time, but it was like [00:33:00] all of a sudden the bottom fell out and everyone realized it was as if they woke up and realized what were we doing? And so that's something that I'm not really that knowledgeable about, would love to know more about, because I think it's really like a community of people realizing at that moment that they were on the wrong side of history and saying, "what are we doing? What have we done? How can we get out of it?" And I think, that's why we see some of this stuff happening so quickly after, and even maybe why we saw Ann petition to, to want to join the church again.
[00:33:40] Josh Hutchinson: I can totally relate to that. I'm a descendant of, among others, Joseph Hutchinson, who was one, along with Thomas Putnam, who complained against the original three suspects, but then later on he changes sides and defends Rebecca nurse. [00:34:00] So I've been exploring that a lot in my own mind, how you start off believing in this witchcraft and then at some point you realize you are on the wrong side of history.
[00:34:14] Greg Houle: The one thing I'll add to that is, when you think of the first three women who were accused, they were clearly outside the norm of late 17th century Puritan society. Tituba is a slave from the West Indies. Sarah Good is essentially homeless, for the most part. Sarah Osborne was always outside of the norms. In the beginning you think, "of course they're gonna be the ones who were accused." But it's interesting as the accusations continue to fly going forward. When you get to someone like Rebecca Nurse, who is not like those folks, and that she was [00:35:00] well respected, it's almost like the fire burned out of control, and you had a point where maybe people realized, "what are we doing at that point?" I think maybe some of that was what was happening, and that's where you get people switching sides ,and there are multiple cases of that sort of thing. And I think part of that has to do with the fact that, I don't know if anyone really expected it to become this kind of inferno that ended up really engulfing the entire community.
[00:35:39] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I think about that too, cuz I think about when I first realized that people were writing testimony and defense of Rebecca and signing some petitions for her, and there were a lot, I remember thinking, "how was this not enough?" And also, [00:36:00] when her verdict was changed on her. I just remember, I'm like, "how could that happen?" And it's just another tell of how out of control, when a fire takes off, sometimes you just don't have enough water to put it out right then, and that was definitely happening.
[00:36:20] Greg Houle: Yeah I think in many ways this goes back to the kind of perfect storm that existed, where you have, you know, a community appearance that is moving away from their original purpose, or they know that they're not as pious as they should be at this point, three generations on, you have fear of, " what's gonna happen to our charter? Are we going to remain a colony of England?" And then you have this really burgeoning concern over the native population and the conflicts that were existing there. You have just the [00:37:00] inherent concern that exists within the Puritan religion of, " am I going to heaven?" This idea of predetermination and that you don't even really know and it's all determined. "Am I on God's path? I don't know."
[00:37:15] And I think it was almost like this perfect storm, where some things happen. Some people who are outcast get accused as. One would expect in a case like this, and then it just took off from there, and I would contend that people like Thomas Putnam were fanning the flames. There were others, as well. But I think that is part of what speaks to this, is that convergence of all of those different things and the kind of fear and concern about the future and what their world was gonna be like.
[00:37:54] I think, also, this may be a reach, they're going into a new century soon, and I think there was a [00:38:00] lot of concern about, " who are we gonna be?" There was, after King Philip's War, there was a lot of concern that it was so gruesome that, "are we turning into these savages, who we claim they are?" So there's all kinds of components here, and I think it's interesting how they all play together.
[00:38:18] Josh Hutchinson: It was a grand conflagration. In previous witch trial cases, you'd have one, maybe two people get accused at a time. And I think that's what they expected in the beginning, when you had those first three outsiders accused. But then you get things like Tituba's confession, where she says there's nine witches, and you have people like Samuel Parris fanning the flames every week in church. And, like you said, a perfect storm of ingredients had to come together for it to continue and to expand the way it did.[00:39:00]
[00:39:00] Greg Houle: Yeah. And I'm glad you brought up Tituba, because I think that was really the linchpin of a lot of this. And that scene is portrayed in the novel, and the way I portray it is they, it's almost like boiler plate. Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, of course they're gonna deny it, but we know they're witches. And then Tituba comes and says, "yeah, the devil came to me. Yeah, he wanted me to kill these girls. Yes, there was a yellow bird," and saying all this stuff that they are suddenly thinking, "whoa, wait a minute, we weren't expecting this."
[00:39:36] So I think in many ways her saying the things that she said to the magistrates really helped get the wheels turning in the heads of a lot of people like Thomas Putnam. Again, it's conjecture, I know, but I think that it's an interesting concept to think about that, that really helped turn the tide a little [00:40:00] bit and fan the flames further.
[00:40:02] Sarah Jack: And, like you said, there was this uncertainty with the charter. We know there was deceit with the new charter that ended up coming, but the court that was opened that, that was certain, that had procedure. It gave the powerful men power. So you had that piece sliding in when everything else was uncertain.
[00:40:27] Greg Houle: Yeah, that's a really important point. It was a sense of certainty at a time of great uncertainty. And that helps push the process along. And, also, and maybe we're gonna touch on this, but the other aspect that really fascinates me is how, the new governor's wife suddenly gets accused and everything falls apart at that point. So it also is a nice button to the story in the sense that you realize these external forces [00:41:00] are really what is driving this, rather than the Satan, the underworld, these dark forces. It's endlessly fascinating, but there are all kinds of those markers along the way that you see, where you realize, "okay, this is why this happened, or this is why this didn't happen, and et cetera."
[00:41:21] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I'm thinking, when would've the devil have got his foot in the door on some of this? It was already full.
[00:41:28] Greg Houle: I don't know. Yeah. I think again, looking at it from our eyes now with everything we see and just seeing the, maybe some of it, and it's not, not trying to be political, and the novel is not political in that regard, but I think it's, we see divisions in our own society and you see how those divisions are further exploited. And so it's very easy to look back through that lens and [00:42:00] see where that is happening. And I think I was doing a lot of that as I was researching and writing this, this novel.
[00:42:08] Josh Hutchinson: So what does it boil down to? What you are trying to say through your writing on the Putnams?
[00:42:16] Greg Houle: That's a really great question. For me, the biggest thing that I want to say, I think about the Putnam's is that it's the story of this privileged family who was losing its privilege. And in many ways, as that happened, you see what the family did in order to try to retain that power. For me, that's what I kept coming back to, is that there is this sort of multi-generational, pretty powerful family that is losing its power in [00:43:00] that moment, and the years leading up to the Salem witch hysteria, it's a fading family. That's why I said earlier that a good subtitle for the book would be The Fall of an American Family, because I think it really is that kind of story, and so for me it's about telling that story through this sort of famous American tragedy. And that's, I think, probably the biggest thing that I want to try to do.
[00:43:32] Sarah Jack: When you talk about their fall, and when one reads about all of their tactics with what was happening with all the families and the boundaries and stuff, they were really put trying to push forward. They were really fighting tooth and nail to not lose footing.
[00:43:51] Greg Houle: That's something that I really try to explore through various flashbacks and so forth. And the novel is just the [00:44:00] idea that Thomas Jr., In particular, has the weight of the world on his shoulders. His father did so much to try to build it up, and now it's all on him, and you can feel it slipping away. But he's very arrogant, and he's got a lot of hubris, and he just is gonna keep saying that he's great. And what's interesting about how it appears during the witch hysteria at Salem is that you see there, you witness the fall, you witness the way in which he was trying to take advantage of this opportunity and failing, ultimately.
[00:44:44] And that's what I really enjoyed exploring, even though it is a tragic story within my own family. And of course, again, a lot of this is fiction. I don't wanna sound like I know everything that went on inside his [00:45:00] head, but I do think that it's all plausible, and I think, the way the story sort of progresses before and after Salem, you see it, as we already talked about with Ann, you see what happens to her. She fades from history at that point. And that's, in many ways, a metaphor for the entire family. Now, I don't mean to say that my Putnam family no longer exists. They're fine. They're all over the country, but it's not the same. So that is what I was trying to tell that story through this major event.
[00:45:38] Josh Hutchinson: What do you hope people take away from your stories and your novel?
[00:45:43] Greg Houle: I think the biggest thing I'd like for them to take away is realize that what we've been talking about in terms of the multi-dimensional aspect of history is real. When we think of [00:46:00] the Salem witch hysteria, we often think about it as, "well, there was witchcraft and these, this monolithic group of puritans then went crazy and accused witches and then put them to death," but the reality, of course, is that there were a lot of things that led up to that and a lot of things that happened after it. And I think for me the biggest takeaway's for people to see this story as a larger story, as the story of various things occurring at the same time, rather than just this one snapshot of an event.
[00:46:46] Because, going back to what I said earlier, my feeling with Salem is that it is often almost like a caricature of what we talk about, this idea that this thing happened [00:47:00] and isn't that crazy? But the reality is it happened for a variety of reasons. And to me the biggest takeaway that someone reading the novel would get would be, "wow, I understand that there are multidimensions to this. And isn't that an interesting way of thinking of it?
[00:47:20] Sarah Jack: I think right now as a society, there's a growing number of people who are learning to look at history dimensionally. So many of us were taught it as a snapshot, and I think everyone is ready. Not everyone, I think the amount of people ready to take a deeper look is now, and I think that's why historical fiction is important, and the history's important, but I think it's great timing. I think your book is coming at a great, I know it's, you still have a little while before it's released, but that just means more people are gonna be ready to receive it.
[00:47:56] Greg Houle: I think the same is true with podcasts. I think that's why we're having a [00:48:00] moment with podcasts. I think that's why, even when you look at like true crime series and things that really take a deep dive into these stories that were often very flat and one dimensional, I think that is, you're right that we're at a time where a lot of people are interested in that, and for me that was really what I was trying to do here is create some dimension to this story. Now, I don't claim to be the first person ever to do that, many others have, but I think that there needs to be as much of that as possible, in order for people to be able to connect to the elements that we hopefully will learn from and avoid, as we go into the future.
[00:48:45] Josh Hutchinson: I think your writing is so important to help people understand what really happened. I know it is fiction, but it gets people into the right mindset to [00:49:00] start exploring possibilities of what happened and to reflect on what's happening now. So I highly recommend that everybody read it. How can people access your writing currently?
[00:49:14] Greg Houle: I guess the easiest way is they can visit my website, which is greghoule.info, that's g r e g h o u l e.info. There are links to some of my writing about the book, and I'll continue to build that up prior to publication.
[00:49:32] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you. We very much appreciate you and your wisdom, and you've gone a long way towards answering the fundamental questions that are behind the podcast. We like to get in every episode part of the how do we hunt witches why do we hunt witches, how can we turn away from hunting witches? And your [00:50:00] answers have been quite elegant, speaking on those questions.
[00:50:05] Greg Houle: Obviously, it was much different, but they had the same sensibilities. They wanted to succeed. They wanted to defeat their enemies, and they wanted to make sure that their kids succeeded. And there were a lot of the same fears that they had that are very familiar to us today.
[00:50:27] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I like to point out that witch hunting in one form or another has been going on as long as humans have been around, because we, though the technology evolves and our beliefs evolve, at the core of us, we still have those same insecurities and fears that you point out.
[00:50:51] And now Sarah's here with another update on real-life witch-hunts happening in the present day.
[00:50:58] Sarah Jack: Welcome to this [00:51:00] episodes Witchcraft Fear Victim Advocacy Report, sponsored by End Witch Hunts News. Today's Thanksgiving 2022 in the United States. I thank you for tuning into our weekly End Witch Hunts News. Thank you to the advocates across the globe standing in the gap. For those who can't, thank you for being an activist against witchcraft.
[00:51:21] On its 47th session, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on July 12th, 2021 for the promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economics, social, and cultural rights, including the right to development. Here is what they resolved regarding the situation of the violations and abuses of human rights rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks. It requests the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to organize an expert consultation with states and other relevant stakeholders, including the United Nations [00:52:00] Secretariat and relevant bodies, representatives of subregional and regional organizations, international human rights mechanisms, national human rights institutions, and non-governmental organizations, the result of which will help the office of the High Commissioner to prepare a study on the situation of the violations that abuses of human rights, rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as well as stigmatization and to inform further action by existing mechanisms at the United Nations and to submit a report thereon to the Human Rights Council at its 52nd session.
[00:52:39] Mr. Volker Turk is the current United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He took up official functions as high commissioner on October 17th, 2022. His Twitter handle is @ V O L K E R _ T U R K. Let him know you support his taking a suggested action on the [00:53:00] resolution. Let him know people like you stand against these violations and support finding solutions. Thank him for his work and accomplishments.
[00:53:07] Next, support the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project. You can support the project by sharing @_endwitchhunts, CT Witch Hunt, and CT Witch Memorial social media, and especially the news interviews in the first three Thou Shalt Not Suffer Podcast episodes. You can support the project by signing your name on the change.org petition. All these links are in our show episode notes. Go to the links, learn, support, and share.
[00:53:36] When the state of Connecticut moves forward with an exoneration for their accused witches, they're taking state action that stands with the promotion and protection of all human rights. Their exoneration decision is for Connecticut, but it is also for Africa and Asia. Their decision shows where they stand on violations and abuses of human rights, rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as [00:54:00] well as stigma.
[00:54:01] While we watch and wait, let's support the victims across the world where innocent people are being targeted by superstitious fear. Support them by acknowledging and sharing their stories. Please use all your communication channels to be an intervener and stand with them. The world must stop hunting witches. Please follow our End Witch Hunt movement on Twitter @_endwitchhunts and visit our website at endwitchhunts.org.
[00:54:25] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:54:26] Sarah Jack: You're welcome. Join us next week.
[00:54:29] Josh Hutchinson: Like, subscribe, or follow wherever you get podcasts.
[00:54:32] Sarah Jack: Visit thoushaltnotsuffer.com often.
[00:54:35] Josh Hutchinson: And join our Discord for rousing discussions of the show.
[00:54:41] Sarah Jack: Follow us on social media, links in description.
[00:54:45] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends, family, and anybody else you run into about Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:54:53] Sarah Jack: Catch you next time.
[00:54:55] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[00:54:59] [00:55:00]

November 24, 2022

Documenting the Exoneration of the Last Witch of Salem