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Live Event November 16 to Remember Goody Glover, Executed for Witchcraft Nov. 16, 1688

Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences

Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana

City of Boston proclamation declaring November 16, 1988 to be Goody Glover Day

Transcript

Goody Glover_ The Full Story of Boston’s Last Witchcraft Execution Download

Sarah Jack: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast revealing the true stories of witch trials and their victims. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today, in the fourth episode of our Massachusetts Witch Trials 101 series, we're exploring the life and witch trial of Goody Glover of Boston, who was executed for witchcraft on November 16th, 1688.
Josh Hutchinson: For many years, Goody Glover has been a footnote in histories of the Salem witch trials, her own trial thought of as a preamble to the greater witch hunt to take place four years later.
Sarah Jack: However, in the late 19th century, antiquarians and others began to take some interest in Goody Glover's saga for its own sake.
Josh Hutchinson: And in the 20th and 21st centuries, Goody Glover has become important to many people, including members of the Irish American community and the Catholic Church.
Sarah Jack: She is now recognized as a martyr for dying without turning her back on her faith.
Josh Hutchinson: On the 300th anniversary of Glover's [00:01:00] death, she was honored in Boston when the City Council recognized November 16th, 1988 as Goody Glover Day.
Sarah Jack: Goody Glover Day continues to be recognized each year unofficially. However, no official functions take place.
Josh Hutchinson: We believe Goody Glover deserves greater recognition as the victim of the first fatal witch trial in Boston following the 1656 hanging of Ann Hibbens.
Sarah Jack: Thirty-two years had gone by without a supposed witch being executed in Massachusetts.
Josh Hutchinson: And nobody would ever be convicted of witchcraft or hanged for that crime in Boston again, as the 1692 and 1693 witchcraft convictions and hangings all occurred in Salem.
Sarah Jack: So, who was Goody Glover, the last person hanged for witchcraft in Boston, and what were the accusations against her?
Josh Hutchinson: The earliest source on the events is a letter from minister Joshua Moody to eminent Puritan divine Increase Mather. Dated October 4th, 1688, the letter was written to inform Mather, [00:02:00] who was then in England, of the astonishing events occurring in the household of John Goodwin of Boston.
Sarah Jack: The letter begins, quote, "We have a very strange thing among us, which we know not what to make of, except it be witchcraft, as we think it must needs be."
Josh Hutchinson: Moody explained that "three or four of children of one Goodwin, a Mason, that have been for some weeks grievously tormented, crying out of head, eyes, tongue, teeth, breaking their neck, back, thighs, knees, legs, feet, toes, etc. And then they roar out, 'oh my head, oh my neck.' And from one part to another, the pain runs almost as fast as I write it."
Sarah Jack: And yet, Moody reported that, quote, "when the pain is over, they eat, drink, walk, play, laugh, as at other times. They are generally well at night."
Josh Hutchinson: Moody said that many people observed a day of prayer at the Goodwin home,and he and Charles Morton, Charlestown's minister, each prayed for an hour.
Sarah Jack: Sometime after these [00:03:00] prayers, Goodwife and Goodman Goodwinexpressed that they suspected "an old woman and her daughter living hard by."
Josh Hutchinson: A complaint was filed with the authorities, and the two suspects were jailed.
Sarah Jack: After the women were arrested, the children were well, but only when they were away from home.
Josh Hutchinson: The four afflicted children were placed in neighbors' homes, as they had terrible fits whenever they entered their own house.
Sarah Jack: Moody wrote, "we cannot but think the devil has a hand in it by some instrument."
Josh Hutchinson: Following this letter, the next document referencing the case of Goody Glover is Samuel Sewell's diary entry for November 16, 1688, when he recorded, quote, "about eleven M, the widow Glover is drawn to be hanged. Mr. Larkin seems to be marshal, the constables attend, and Justice Bullivant is there."
Sarah Jack: This is our first indication that Goody Glover had been widowed, and in lieu of a trial record, this is the only known document from 1688 [00:04:00] to tell us the outcome of the case.
Josh Hutchinson: Goody Glover and the Goodwin family next turn up in Cotton Mather's book, Memorable Providences, which was published in 1689.
Sarah Jack: In this book, Mather gives a fairly detailed account of the events leading up to Goody Glover's execution.
Josh Hutchinson: Mather begins the book by extolling John Goodwin's virtues.
Sarah Jack: Quote, "There dwells at this time in the south part of Boston a sober and pious man, whose name is John Goodwin, whose trade is that of a mason, and whose wife, to which a good report gives a share with him in all the characters of virtue, has made him the father of six now living children. Of these children, all but the eldest, who works with his father at his calling, and the youngest, who lives yet upon the breast of its mother, have labored under the direful effects of no less palpable than stupendous witchcraft."
Josh Hutchinson: Mather explains that the oldest son also suffered from pains and continues, "but these [00:05:00] four children mentioned were handled in so sad and strange a manner as has given matter of discourse and wonder to all the country and of history not unworthy to be considered by more than all the serious or the curious readers in this new English world."
Sarah Jack: According to Mather, the oldest of the afflicted children was about 13 years old, and the youngest was about a third as old, so around four.
Josh Hutchinson: The children, quote, "had enjoyed a religious education and answered it with a very towardly ingenuity. They had an observable affection unto divine and sacred things, and those of them that were capable of it seemed to have such a resentment of their eternal concernments as is not altogether usual."
Sarah Jack: He continued, "their parents also kept them to a continual employment, which did more than deliver them from the temptations of idleness, and as young as they were, they took a delight in it. It may be as much as they should have done."
Josh Hutchinson: "In a word, [00:06:00] such was the whole temper and carriage of the children, that there cannot easily be anything more unreasonable than to imagine that a design to dissemble could cause them to fall into any of their odd fits, though there should not have happened, as there did, a thousand things, wherein it was perfectly impossible for any dissimulation of theirs to produce what scores of spectators were amazed at."
Sarah Jack: This belief in the piety of the children and parents perhaps goes some way to explain Mather's gullibility, which will be apparent time and time again throughout his book.
Josh Hutchinson: In Mather's account, the witchcraft scare began in the summer, shortly after some of the Goodwins' linen went missing. The oldest Goodwin daughter, age 13, confronted the unnamed laundress, who was the daughter of Goody Glover.
Sarah Jack: Goody Glover was incensedby the allegations of the theft against her daughter.
Josh Hutchinson: According to Mather, Goody Glover was, quote, "an ignorant and a [00:07:00] scandalous old woman in the neighborhood."
Sarah Jack: Her, quote, "miserable husband before he died had sometimes complained of her, that she was undoubtedly a witch, and that whenever his head was laid, she would quickly arrive onto the punishments due to such a one."
Josh Hutchinson: Unfortunately, Mather does not tell us the name of Goody Glover's husband or give us his occupation or any other identifying information.
Sarah Jack: Mather has a frustrating tendency to leave out such details.
Josh Hutchinson: Continuing Mather's account, quote, "this woman in her daughter's defense bestowed very bad language upon the girl that put her to the question, immediately upon which the poor child became variously indisposed in her health and visited with strange fits beyond those that attend an epilepsy or a catalepsy or those that they call the diseases of astonishment."
Sarah Jack: Soon afterward, the girls' siblings became ill with the same symptoms. Mather writes, "within a few weeks, they were all for [00:08:00] tortured everywhere in a manner so very grievous that it would have broke a heart of stone to have seen their agonies."
Josh Hutchinson: This is a pretty typical witchcraft accusation. Someone has an argument, harsh words are used, and a misfortune occurs.
Sarah Jack: That same recipe is repeated again and again through accounts of both the witch trials of the past and the witch trials of the present. Quarrels with neighbors can have severe consequences when witchcraft is then suspected for whatever misfortune next visits the aggrieved parties.
Josh Hutchinson: Like in Salem four years later, those concerned about the Goodwins' children's afflictions consulted medical authorities. As Mather writes, "skillful physicians were consulted for their help, and particularly our worthy and prudent friend, Dr. Thomas Oakes, who found himself so affronted by the distempers of the children that he concluded nothing but a hellish witchcraft could be the original of these maladies."

Josh Hutchinson: [00:09:00] Quote, "and that which yet more confirmed such apprehension was that for one good while the children were tormented just in the same part of their bodies, all at the same time together, and though they saw and heard not one another's complaints, though, likewise, their pains and sprains were swift like lightning, yet when suppose the neck or the hand or their back of one was racked, so it was at that instant with the other two."
Josh Hutchinson: Like with the story of Salem Village physician William Griggs telling Samuel Parris that his daughter, Betty, and his niece, Abigail Williams, were under an evil hand, we have a medical professional simply giving up and declaring that the problem was beyond his comprehension, so it must be witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: Mather continues, "the variety of their tortures increased continually, and though about nine or ten at night they always had a release from their miseries, and ate and slept all night for the most part indifferently well, yet in the daytime they were handled with so many sorts of ails that it would [00:10:00] require of us almost as much time to relate them all as it did of them to endure them."
Josh Hutchinson: Years later, Beverly minister John Hale wrote about the Salem Village afflicted persons. In A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, he writes, "I will not enlarge in the description of their cruel sufferings because they were in all things afflicted as bad as John Goodwin's children at Boston in the year 1689. He means 1688. So that he that will read Mr. Mather's Book of Memorable Providences, page 3, etc., may read part of what these children and afterwards sundry grown persons suffered by the hand of Satan at Salem Village and parts adjacent, Anno 1691 1692. Yet there was more in these sufferings than in those at Boston, by pins invisibly stuck into their flesh, pricking with irons, as in part published in a book printed 1693 viz. The Wonders of the Invisible World."
Sarah Jack: So we see [00:11:00] that even in the time of the Salem Witch Trials, the afflictions then were compared to those of the Goodwin children, which themselves can be compared to many earlier afflictions supposedly resulting from witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: Back to Memorable Providences,
Sarah Jack: Mather continues, "sometimes they would be deaf, sometimes dumb, and sometimes blind, and often all this at once."
Sarah Jack: As in Salem, these things could be faked and often occurred at convenient times.
Josh Hutchinson: Mather writes, "one while their tongues would be drawn down their throats, another while they would be pulled out upon their chins to a prodigious length."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "they would have their mouths opened unto such a wideness that their jaws went out of joint, and anon, they would clap together again with a force like that of a strong spring lock."
Josh Hutchinson: So were these just childish antics or did the children truly lack control over their bodies?
Sarah Jack: And there's [00:12:00] more. "The same would happen to their shoulder blades, and their elbows, and hand wrists, and several of their joints."
Josh Hutchinson: "They would, at times, lie in a benumbed condition, and be drawn together as those that are tied neck and heels, and presently be stretched out, yea, drawn backwards to such a degree that it was feared the very skin of their bellies would have cracked."
Sarah Jack: Children are more flexible than adults. Were they faking?
Josh Hutchinson: According to Mather, strange behavior was not all that afflicted the children. "They would make most piteous outcries, that they were cut with knives and struck with blows that they could not bear."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "their necks would be broken, so that their neck bone would seem dissolved unto them that felt after it, and yet, on the sudden, it would become again so stiff that there was no stirring of their heads. Yea, their heads would be twisted almost around, and if main force at any time obstructed a dangerous motion [00:13:00] which they seemed to be upon, they would roar exceedingly."
Josh Hutchinson: "Thus, they lay some weeks most pitiful spectacles, and this while as a further demonstration of witchcraft in these horrid effects, when I went to prayer by one of them that was very desirous to hear what I said, the child utterly lost her hearing till our prayer was over."
Sarah Jack: How convenient a time to lose her hearing.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. These kids were allergic to work and religious practice.
Sarah Jack: Mather writes, "it was a religious family that these afflictions happened unto, and none but a religious contrivance to obtain relief would have been welcome to them."
Josh Hutchinson: "Many superstitious proposals were made unto them by persons that were I know not who nor what, with arguments fetched from I know not how much necessity and experience, but the distressed parents rejected all such counsels with a gracious resolution to oppose devils with no other weapons but prayers and [00:14:00] tears unto him that was the chaining of them, and to try first whether graces were not the best things to encounter witchcrafts with."
Sarah Jack: As with the controversial witch cake baked in Salem, using the supernatural to explain the supernatural was frowned upon by religious authorities in Massachusetts. It was considered going to the devil for help against the devil.
Josh Hutchinson: Mather's account continues, "accordingly, they requested the four ministers of Boston, with the minister of Charlestown, to keep a day of prayer at their thus haunted house, which they did in the company of some devout people there. Immediately upon this day, the youngest of the four children was delivered and never felt any trouble as afore. But there was yet a greater effect of these applications unto our God."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "the report of the calamities of the family for which we were thus concerned arrived now unto the ears of the magistrates, who presently and prudently applied themselves with a just vigor to [00:15:00] inquire into the story."
Josh Hutchinson: "The father of the children complained of his neighbor, the suspected ill woman, whose name was Glover. And she, being sent for by the justices, gave such a wretched account of herself that they saw cause to commit her unto the jailer's custody."
Sarah Jack: Note that Mather does not give Goody Glover or her husband a first name.
Josh Hutchinson: According to Mather, Glover herself told the magistrates whatever they needed to hear to lock her up.
Sarah Jack: Mather writes, "Goodwin had no proof that could have done her any hurt, but the hag had not power to deny her interest in the enchantment of the children, and when she was asked whether she believed there was a god, her answer was too blasphemous and horrible for any pen of mine to mention."
Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "an experiment was made whether she could recite the Lord's Prayer, and it was found that though clause after clause was most carefully repeated unto her, yet when she said it after them that prompted her, she could not possibly avoid making nonsense [00:16:00] of it, with some ridiculous deprivations. This experience I had the curiosity since to see made upon two more, and it had the same event."
Sarah Jack: Here, we encounter the confusion over what was an acceptable experiment. Those proposed to the Goodwins earlier were not worthy. However, the Lord's Prayer Test was acceptable here and in the Salem Witch Trials.
Josh Hutchinson: According to Mather, "upon the commitment of this extraordinary woman, all the children had some present ease, until one, related unto her, accidentally meeting one or two of them, entertained them with her blessing, that is, railing, upon which three of them fell ill again, as they were before."
Sarah Jack: This is, again, similar to the Salem Witch Hunt, when the afflicted were momentarily freed from suffering whenever a suspect was jailed.
Josh Hutchinson: But would then relapse upon seeing the suspect in court.
Sarah Jack: Mather continues, "it was not long before the witch, thus in the trap, was brought upon her [00:17:00] trial, at which, through the efficacy of a charm, I suppose, used upon her by one or some of her crew, the court could receive answers from her in none but the Irish, which was her native language, although she understood the English very well and had accustomed her whole family to none but that language in her former conversation, and therefore the communication between the bench and the bar was now chiefly conveyed by two honest and faithful men that were interpreters."
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's interesting that Mather believes witches charmed Goody Glover into only speaking Irish at trial. He may have actually exaggerated or misunderstood how well she understood English. Perhaps she couldn't actually follow what the officials were saying to her.
Sarah Jack: Unfortunately, the two "honest and faithful men" that were interpreters are never named.
Josh Hutchinson: Mather goes on, "it was long before she could, with any direct [00:18:00] answers, plead unto her indictment. And when she did plead, it was with confession rather than denial of her guilt."
Sarah Jack: " Order was given to search the old woman's house, from whence there was brought into the court several small images, or poppets or babies, made of rags and stuffed with goat's hair and other such ingredients. When these were produced, the vile woman acknowledged that her way to torment the objects of her malice was by wetting of her fingers with her spittle and stroking of those little images."
Josh Hutchinson: Poppets were commonly used in image magic. When used to represent a person, a poppet was believed to be a very effective way of manipulating a target's health.
Sarah Jack: A magic user could burn a poppet, prick it with pins, cut it, stroke it, or squeeze it,
Sarah Jack: and like effects would supposedly be produced in the personrepresented by the image.
Josh Hutchinson: Memorable Providences continues, "the abused children were then present, and the woman still kept stooping and shrinking as one that was almost [00:19:00] pressed to death with the mighty weight upon her.But one of the images being brought unto her, immediately she started up after an odd manner and took it into her hand, but she had no sooner taken it than one of the children fell into sad fits before the whole assembly."
Sarah Jack: Okay, so I'm thinking about this. These stories make it sound like she's the only woman in town that had a poppet.Especially if there is this language barrier and everybody else is poppeting each other when they're mad. And that's her poppet and they're handling her poppet. She's going to take it. She might wet it and smooth it down, if they were being rough with it. I'm just thinking about what was her experience. What was her perception of the poppet versus what Cotton is making it sound like?
Josh Hutchinson: And the poppet could even have symbolized something else for her, could have been represented one of [00:20:00] her saints, or maybe it represented a loved one and she wanted to be nice to it.It's really unclear, they don't describe the poppet, for us, and poppets were basically just dolls, so any kind of doll that you had in your house for your child, or whatever it was for, could be interpreted as being this magical tool.
Sarah Jack: Quote, " this the judges had their just apprehensions at, and carefully causing the repetition of the experiment found again the same event of it."
Josh Hutchinson: This is interesting because now it's the magistrates doing the experimentation.
Sarah Jack: We hear the word experiment a lot when we're looking at some of the Connecticut Witch Trials, too. Because they would do the experiments with Ann Cole? Oh, yeah.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. Not [00:21:00] just that, they're playing with proverbial fire. Who knows what a real witch could have done to the children with that poppet? If it truly were possible to use one as feared.
Josh Hutchinson: Continuing, quote, "they asked her whether she had any to stand by her. She replied she had, and looking very pertly in the air, she added, 'No, he's gone.'"
Sarah Jack: Quote, "and she then confessed that she had one who was her prince, with whom she maintained I know not what communion, for which cause, the night after, she was
Josh Hutchinson: heard expostulating with a devil, for his thus deserting her, telling him that because he had served her so basely and falsely, she had confessed all."
Josh Hutchinson: Here Mather bothers me because he assumes that she's speaking to a devil rather than God, a saint, or an angel, or any of these other entities she could have been addressing, which would have been a totally logical assumption.
Sarah Jack: He [00:22:00] proceeds, "however, to make all clear, the court appointed five or six physicians one evening to examine her very strictly whether she were not crazed in her intellectuals and had not procured to herself by folly and madness the reputation of the witch."
Josh Hutchinson: "Diverse hours did they spend with her, and in all that while, no discourse came from her but what was pertinent and agreeable, particularly when they asked her what she thought would become of her soul, she replied, 'You ask me a very solemn question, and I cannot well tell what to say to it.'"
Sarah Jack: What if she just said, what?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, she might have just said that, and they said that she said what they said she said.
Sarah Jack: Quote, "she owned herself a Roman Catholic and could recite her Pater Noster in Latin very readily. But there was one clause or two always too hard for her, whereof she said she could not repeat it and if she [00:23:00] might have all the world. In the upshot, the doctors returned her Compos Mentis and sentence of death was passed upon her."
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Mather doesn't tell us what language was used with Goody Glover in her mental examination.
Sarah Jack: Based upon a later comment on the rarity of her use of English, we can probably assume that the sanity evaluation was conducted in Gaelic through the interpreters Mather mentioned earlier.
Josh Hutchinson: The book continues, "diverse days were passed between her being arraigned and condemned. In this time, one of her neighbors had been giving in her testimony of what another of her neighbors had upon her death related concerning her."
Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "it seems one Howen, about six years before, had been cruelly bewitched to death. But before she died, she called one Hughes onto her, telling her that she laid her death to the charge of Glover,
Sarah Jack: that she had seen Glover sometimes come down her chimney, that she would remember this, [00:24:00] for within the six years, she might have occasion to declare it.
Josh Hutchinson: But it appears that Hughes never made any allegations against Glover prior to 1688, and she may have regretted coming forward then, as we'll see.
Sarah Jack: In Mather's account, quote, "this Hughes, now preparing her testimony, immediately one of her children, a fine boy, well grown towards youth, was taken ill, just in the same woeful and surprising manner that Goodwin's children were."
Josh Hutchinson: "One night particularly, the boy said he saw a black thing with a blue cap in the room, tormenting of him, and he complained most bitterly of a hand put into the bed to pull out his bowels."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "the next day, the mother of the boy went on to Glover in the prison and asked her why she tortured her poor lad at such a wicked rate."
Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "this witch replied that she did it because of wrong done to herself and her daughter. She denied, as well as she might, that she had done [00:25:00] her any wrong."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "well then, says Glover, let me see your child and he shall be well again."
Josh Hutchinson: Quote, "Glover went on and told her of her own accord, 'I was at your house last night.' Says Hughes, 'in what shape?' Says Glover, 'as a black thing with a blue cap.'"
Sarah Jack: " Says Hughes, 'what did you do there?' Says Glover, 'with my hand in the bed, I tried to pull out the boy's bowels, but I could not.'"
Josh Hutchinson: "They parted, but the next day Hughes, appearing at court, had her boy with her, and Glover passing by the boy expressed her good wishes for him, though I suppose his parent had no design of any mighty respect unto the hag by having him with her there. But the boy had no more indispositions after the condemnation of the woman."
Sarah Jack: Of course, it would have been Hughes, not Glover, who told the account of Glover saying that she was at Hughes' house that night, and it's unclear how Hughes would even have communicated with Glover if her jailhouse [00:26:00] visits really took place.
Josh Hutchinson: How is she speaking the Gaelic? Mather goes on to speak of his own visits to Glover. "While the miserable old woman was under condemnation, I did myself twice give a visit unto her. She never denied the guilt of the witchcraft charged upon her, but she confessed very little about the circumstances of her confederacies with the devils. Only she said that she used to be at meetings, which her prince and four more were present at."
Sarah Jack: Quote,
Sarah Jack: As for those four, she told who they were, and for her prince, her account plainly was that he was the devil."
Josh Hutchinson: For reasons known only to Mather, he never revealed the names of the four confederates of Goody Glover, so we do not know who else was named as a witch in Boston in 1688.
Sarah Jack: Mather continues, "she entertained me with nothing but Irish, which language I had not learning enough to understand without an interpreter." I'm so mad right now. She had to have [00:27:00] an interpreter, but I'm just saying an interpreter was fine enough for her, but not for him. I'm going to start over. "She entertained me with nothing but Irish, which language I had not learned enough to understand without an interpreter. Only one time, when I was representing unto her that, and how her prince had cheated her, as herself would quickly find, she replied, I think in English, and with passion, too, 'If it be so, I am sorry for that.'"
Josh Hutchinson: This is the only time Mather, or anyone else, quotes Glover directly.
Sarah Jack: And he thinks it was in English. And he's so certain, he's so certain of everything else. How often would he say, I'm not sure? So we do not have her side of the story at all.
Josh Hutchinson: We really don't. Mather continues, "I offered many questions unto her, unto which, after long silence, she told me she would fain give me a full answer, but they would not [00:28:00] give her leave. It was demanded, they, who is that they? And she returned that they were her spirits or her saints, for they say the same word in Irish signifies both. And at another time, she included her two mistresses, as she called them in that day. But when it was inquired who those two were, she fell into a rage and would be no more urged."
Sarah Jack: Like I can really see here how he was persecuting her religiously because he is saying, he is appropriating the devil and spirits ontowhat her faith is. He knowingly was doing this and portraying her as speaking with the devil, when he understood Catholicism.
Josh Hutchinson: He understood Catholicism a lot better than he's letting on. He was a Harvard trained religious scholar, so of course he knew. And to say that, [00:29:00] you know, saints and spirits, it's the same word. I don't know if that's even true, but, he obviously should know that when she's talking about saints, that's something different than devils.
Sarah Jack: He continues, "I set before her the necessity and the equity of her breaking her covenant with hell and giving herself to the Lord Jesus Christ by an everlasting covenant."
Sarah Jack: Oh, my word, every time I get into these quotes, I'm getting really mad because that isn't the covenant that her faith would have been directly based on. Her covenant isn't broken by hell, nor, that's just not Catholicism.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, he's saying that she has a covenant with hell, and she's saying that she has a covenant with God, but it's Roman Catholic God.
Sarah Jack: " And giving herself to the Lord Jesus Christ by an everlasting covenant, to which her answer was that I spoke a very reasonable thing, [00:30:00] but she could not do it, I asked her whether she would consent or desire to be prayed for. To that she said, if prayer would do her any good, she could pray for herself."
Josh Hutchinson: "And when it was again propounded, she said she could not unless her spirits, or angels, would give her leave. However, against her will I prayed with her, which if it were a fault, it was in excess of pity."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "when I had done, she thanked me with many good words, but I was no sooner out of her sight than she took a stone, a long and slender stone, and with her finger and spittle fell to tormenting it, though whom or what she meant, I had the mercy never to understand."
Josh Hutchinson: Mather doesn't say how he knew what she did after he was out of her sight, but presumably the jailer or somebody else present told him, but still, how is she tormenting this stone by rubbing it with her [00:31:00] finger?
Sarah Jack: It was a fidget.
Josh Hutchinson: It's her fidget, her fidget stone.
Sarah Jack: He forcibly prayed for her against her will.
Josh Hutchinson: And Mather continues, "when this witch was going to her execution, she said the children should not be relieved by her death, for others had a hand in it as well as she, and she named one among the rest, whom it might have been thought natural affection would have advised the concealing of."
Sarah Jack: This comment about natural affection has contributed to the belief that she may have been speaking of her daughter there.
Josh Hutchinson: She may not have even been trying to say that her daughter, or whoever it was that she actually named, was a witch. It might have just been a misunderstanding.
Sarah Jack: Mather goes on, quote, "it came to pass accordingly that the three children continued in their furnace as before, and it grew rather seven times hotter than it was."
Josh Hutchinson: " All their former ails pursued them [00:32:00] still, with an addition of, tis not easy to tell how many, more, but such as gave more sensible demonstrations of an enchantment growing very far towards a possession by evil spirits."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "the children in their fits would still cry out upon they and them as the authors of all their harm. But who that they and them were? They were not able to declare."
Josh Hutchinson: "At last, the boy obtained at some times a sight of some shapes in the room. There were three or four of them, the names of which the child would pretend at certain seasons to tell, only the name of one who was counted a sager hag than the rest, he still so stammered at that he was put upon some periphrasis in describing her."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "a blow at the place where the boy beheld the specter was always felt by the boy himself in the part of his body that answered what might be stricken at. And this, though his back was turned, which was once and again, so exactly [00:33:00] tried that there could be
Josh Hutchinson: no collusion in the business."
Josh Hutchinson: "But as a blow at the apparition always hurt him, so it always helped him too, for after the agonies, which a push or stab of that had put him to, were over, as in a minute or two the boy would have a respite from his fits a considerable while, and the hobgoblins disappear.
Sarah Jack: Quote, "It is very credibly reported that a wound was this way given to an obnoxious woman in the town, whose name I will not expose, for we should be tenderer in such relations, lest we wrong the reputation of the innocent, by stories not enough inquired into."
Josh Hutchinson: And here he's calling Goody Glover every name in the book, the 17th century, Puritan book. Except for, yeah, he doesn't tell us her real name and that he's telling us, 'Oh, we should be cautious and not spread stories about people without really knowing,' and I guess that's why he didn't [00:34:00] tell any of the four accomplices' names, but like, where's he drawing the line here? He's like, it's this obstinate, older Irish woman, who's got no husband alive to protect her, so I'll go after her. But like these other ones, he draws a line somehow.
Sarah Jack: And you know he, in his mind, he was going after the Catholic saints as well.
Josh Hutchinson: And, also once again, we see parallels with Salem with an afflicted person seeing the disembodied specters of witches and others striking at thin air in their attempts to remove these tormentors.
Sarah Jack: Of course, the boy was the only one who could see the specter, so he could easily have told them that they had hit the specter's arm or leg or head. They would have been none the wiser. It really didn't matter that his back was turned.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. All he really had to do was guess when they hit the witch by listening to what sounds they were making. [00:35:00] And then he'd say, 'Oh, you've got her again. That time you got her arm and, Oh, my arm hurts too.'
Josh Hutchinson: Mather continues, "the fits of the children yet more arrived unto such motions as were beyond the efficacy of any natural distemper in the world."
Sarah Jack: So those afflicted girls in Salem, they knew for sure expressing afflictions was not natural distemper, like that, it would be taken as witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: There was no doubt. They already knew. They had the playbook written by one Cotton Mather himself, but also writings of his father, Increase, before. This was the established playbook of how to behave when you were bewitched.
Sarah Jack: This is where it gets fun. Quote, "they would bark at one another like dogs. And again, purr like so many cats."
Josh Hutchinson: "They would sometimes complain that they were in a red hot oven, sweating and panting at the same [00:36:00] time unreasonably. Anon, they would say, cold water was thrown upon them, at which they would shiver very much."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "They would cry out of dismal blows, with great cudgels
Josh Hutchinson: laid upon them. And though we saw no cudgels nor blow, yet we could see the marks left by them in red streaks upon their bodies afterwards."
Josh Hutchinson: "And one of them would be roasted on an invisible spit, run into his mouth and out at his foot, he lying and rolling and groaning as if it had been so in the most sensible manner in the world. And then he would shriek that knives were cutting of him."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "sometimes also he would have his head so forcibly, though not visibly, nailed into the floor that it was as much as a strong man could do to pull it up."
Josh Hutchinson: "One while they would all be so limber that it was judged every bone of them could be bent. Another while they would be so stiff that not a joint of them could be stirred."
Sarah Jack: Much similar imagery was used during the Salem Witch Trial. [00:37:00] During the Salem Witch Hunt, afflicted Mercy Lewis even used the image of a person roasting on a spit in her testimony against Martha Cory.
Josh Hutchinson: And the story continues, "they would sometimes be as though they were mad, and then they would climb over high fences beyond the imagination of them that looked after them."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "yea, they would fly like geese, and be carried with an incredible swiftness through the air, having but just their toes now and then upon the ground, and their arms waved like the wings of a bird," whish, whish. "One of them in the house of a kind neighbor and gentleman, Mr. Willis, flew the length of the room, about twenty foot, and flew just into an infant's high armed chair, as 'tis affirmed, none seeing her feet all the way touch the floor."
Josh Hutchinson: She's just moving really fast. In his book, A True Narrative of Some Remarkable Passages, Deodat Lawson wrote that Abigail [00:38:00] Williams, during the Salem Witch Hunt, " was at first hurried with violence to and fro in the room, though Mrs. Ingersoll endeavored to hold her, sometimes making as if she would fly, stretching up her arms as high as she could, and crying, 'whish, whish, whish,' several times."
Sarah Jack: The afflicted persons of Salem and surrounding communities had definitely imbibed the stories of the Goodwin children and other afflicted children.
Josh Hutchinson: Memorable Providences continues, "many ways did the devils take to make the children do mischief both to themselves and others, but through the singular providence of God, they always failed in their attempts."
Sarah Jack: "For they could never essay the doing of any harm, unless there were somebody at hand that might prevent it, and seldom without first shrieking out, 'they say, I must do such a thing.'"
Josh Hutchinson: How convenient.
Sarah Jack: Mather continues, "diverse times they went to strike furious blows at their tenderest and dearest friends, or to fling them downstairs [00:39:00] when they had them at the top. But the warning from the mouths of the children themselves would still anticipate what the devils did intend."
Josh Hutchinson: "They diverse times were very near burning or drowning of themselves, but the children themselves, by their own pitiful and seasonable cries for help, still procured their deliverance, which make me to consider whether the little ones had not their angels, in the plain sense of our savior's intimation."
Sarah Jack: So, their angels are okay?
Josh Hutchinson: Their angels are okay. Hers are not.
Sarah Jack: They either had angels, or they were stopping themselves just short of inflicting any real harm.
Josh Hutchinson: Mather adds, "sometimes when they were tying their own neck clothes, their compelled hands miserably strangled themselves, till perhaps the standers by gave some relief unto them."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "but if any small mischief happened to be done where they were,
Josh Hutchinson: as the tearing or dirtying of a garment, the falling of a cup, the breaking of a glass, or the like, they would rejoice [00:40:00] extremely and fall into a pleasure and laughter very extraordinary."
Josh Hutchinson: I mean, who doesn't?
Sarah Jack: Quote, "all which things compared with the temper of the children, when they are themselves, may suggest some very peculiar thoughts unto us."
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, one of the peculiar thoughts occurring to me is that the children were faking. Though it is possible they may have been going through some stress-induced psychogenic illness, which is a theory about the Salem Witch Trials as well, and this illness manifested in these strange behaviors because of this genuine fear of witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: And my laughter and making fun is of the adults, not that the children had no way to work through the stresses that they were feeling. I just want to be clear on that. This is about the narration of the adults about what was going on with the children whose lives were wonderful.
Sarah Jack: Cotton
Josh Hutchinson: [00:41:00] Mathers, gullibility, and, just believes anything.
Sarah Jack: We'll never really know why the children did these things. As far as we can tell, nobody did any where are they now type follow ups years later.
Josh Hutchinson: And none of the sources ever quotes the children themselves.
Sarah Jack: They're not named by the sources. They're named later.
Sarah Jack: Mather continues, "they were not in a constant torture for some weeks, but were a little quiet, unless upon some incidental
Josh Hutchinson: provocations, upon which the devils would handle them like tigers
Josh Hutchinson: and wound them in a manner very horrible."
Josh Hutchinson: "Particularly upon the last reproof of their parents for any unfit thing they said or did, most grievous, woeful, heartbreaking agonies would they fall into."
Sarah Jack: I can just see the eyes welling up with tears, just like that, Josh. Yes. Quote, "if any useful thing were to be done to them or by them, they would have [00:42:00] all sorts of troubles fall upon them."
Josh Hutchinson: Seriously, do these children just not want to work or to get in trouble with their parents?
Sarah Jack: Were they afraid of what punishment their parents would dole out? That's just a question, as we have no way of answering that.
Josh Hutchinson: And Mather writes, "it would sometimes cost one of them an hour or two to be undressed in the evening or dressed in the morning. For if anyone went to untie a string or undo a button about them, or the contrary, they would be twisted into such postures as made the thing impossible."
Sarah Jack: That sounds like toddler transition frustrations that we all see children do in 2024.
Sarah Jack: "And at whiles they would be so managed in their beds that no bedclothes could for an hour or two be laid upon them, or could they go to wash their hands without having them clasped so oddly together there was no doing of it."
Josh Hutchinson: It's just those troublesome kids at bedtime.
Sarah Jack: [00:43:00] Wash your hands! Wash your hands! Did you wash your hands? That's all that is.
Josh Hutchinson: No. Did you just run the water and not wash your hands? Yes, "but when their friends were near tired with waiting, anon, they might do what they would unto them."
Sarah Jack: There were limits.
Sarah Jack: "Whatever work they were bid to do, they would be so snapped in the member which was to do it, that they, with grief, still desisted from it."
Josh Hutchinson: " If one ordered them to rub a clean table, they were able to do it, without any disturbance. If to rub a dirty table, presently they would, with many torments, be made incapable."
Sarah Jack: I can't believe he wrote this down!
Josh Hutchinson: It's just troublesome. Did he never deal with his own children? He had plenty of them. He was 25 or 26 when he wrote this, but he already had several children.
Sarah Jack: Quote, "and sometimes, though but seldom, they were kept from eating their meals by having their [00:44:00] teeth set when they carried anything onto their mouths."
Josh Hutchinson: But even worse than work, another horror awaited the children.
Sarah Jack: Religion was even worse for them than chores.
Josh Hutchinson: As Mather writes, "nothing in the world would so discompose them as a religious exercise."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "if there were any discourse of God or Christ, or any of these things which are not seen, and are eternal, they would be cast into intolerable anguishes."
Josh Hutchinson: Once, those two worthy ministers, Mr. Fisk and Mr. Thatcher, bestowing some gracious counsels on the boy, whom they then found at a neighbor's house, he immediately lost his hearing, so that he heard not one word, but just the last word of all they said."
Josh Hutchinson: How does he hear only the last word? He's waiting for them to stop, obviously, and then he knows what last word they said because he was waiting for them to stop.
Sarah Jack: Was it Deodat's message where they were like, I [00:45:00] just missed that whole thing?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah,Abigail Williams is saying, if you had a doctrine, I don't know what it was.
Sarah Jack: Quote, "much more, all praying to God and reading of his word would occasion a very terrible vexation to them. They would then stop their own ears with their own hands and roar and shriek and holler to drown the voice of the devotion."
Josh Hutchinson: "Yea, if anyone in the room took up a Bible to look into it, though the children could see nothing of it as being in a crowd of spectators or having their faces another way, yet would they be in wonderful miseries till the Bible were laid aside."
Sarah Jack: "In short, no good thing must be then endured near those children, which, while they are themselves, do love every good thing in a measure that proclaims in them the fear of God."
Josh Hutchinson: And this is how Mather ends his account.
Sarah Jack: But Mather does not conclude his section on Goody Glover here. Instead, he continues with another telling of the story.
Josh Hutchinson: He included a [00:46:00] section supposedly written by John Goodwin himself.
Sarah Jack: Mather labeled this section Mantissa, a term for a minor addition to a text, and it's basically a retelling of the story from Goodwin's perspective.
Josh Hutchinson: "In the year 1688, about midsummer, it pleased the Lord to visit one of my children with a sore visitation, and she was not only tormented in her body, but was in great distress of mind, crying out that she was in the dark concerning her soul's estate, and that she had misspent her precious time, she and we thinking her time was near at an end."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "hearing those shrieks and groans, which did not only pierce the ears but hearts of her poor parents, now was a time for me to consider with myself, and to look into my own heart and life, and see how matters did there stand between God and my soul, and see wherefore the Lord was thus contending with me. And upon inquiry, I found cause to judge myself and to justify the Lord."
Josh Hutchinson: " This affliction continuing some time, the Lord saw good [00:47:00] then to double the affliction in smiting down another child, and that which was most heartbreaking of all, and did double this double affliction, was that it was apparent and judged by all that saw them, that the devil and his instruments had a hand in it."
Josh Hutchinson: A
Sarah Jack: double double. A
Josh Hutchinson: double double.
Sarah Jack: And trouble.
Sarah Jack: "The consideration of this was most dreadful.I thought of what David saidin second Samuel 24:14. If he feared so to fall into the hands of men, oh, then to think of the horror of our condition to be in the hands of devils and witches."
Josh Hutchinson: "This our doleful condition moved us to call to our friend staff. Pity on us for God's hand had touched us."
Sarah Jack: "I was ready to say that no one's affliction was like mine, that my little house that should be a little Bethel for God to dwell in should be made a den for devils, and those little bodies that should be temples for the Holy Ghost to dwell in should be thus harassed and abused by the devil and his cursed
Josh Hutchinson: [00:48:00] brood."
Josh Hutchinson: " But now this twice-doubled affliction is doubled again. Two more of my children are smitten down. Oh, the cries, the shrieks, the tortures of these poor children. Doctors cannot help. Parents weep and lament over them but cannot ease them."
Sarah Jack: " Now, I considering my affliction to be more thanordinary, it did certainly call for more than ordinary prayer."
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, you might be wondering why he's talking about his affliction when the kids are the ones suffering. And, well, it wasn't uncommon for the men of the time as heads of the households to feel like any misfortune that befell their family was a judgment on them in particular. Cotton Mather behaved the same way, and so did Samuel Sewell, which was why Samuel Sewell did an apology for the Salem witch trials. um, sort of.
Sarah Jack: Thus the gall of John Goodwin to act like he was the one afflicted [00:49:00] when it was his own children who allegedly suffered pain.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. What gall? What nerve? His children are suffering. He's like, Oh, God has beef with me. What's this beef with me about?
Josh Hutchinson: And Goodwin continues, quote, "I acquainted Mr. Allen, Mr. Moody, Mr. Willard, and Mr. C. Mather, the four ministers of the town with it, and Mr. Morton of Charlestown, earnestly desiring them that they, with some other praying people of God, would meet at my house, and there be earnest with God on the behalf of us and our children, which they, I thank them for it, readily attended with great fervency of spirit, but as for my part, my heart was ready to sink to hear and see those doleful sights."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "now I thought that I had greatly neglected my duty to my children, and not admonishing and instructing of them, and that God was hereby calling my sins to mind, to slay my children." So which is it? Is it God or witches? [00:50:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. he can't make up his mind. And, you have to wonder, were they thinking as Cotton Mather referenced earlier, their symptoms were approaching diabolical possession, so they could have been possessed or they could have been bewitched, or it could have been a judgment of God. Either way, ultimately in the Puritan belief of the time, it would have come back to Godjudging them in some way. Whether he used, let the devil and his witches have their way for a little while as a test or judgment, He's the one who ultimately has the power in the situation. Continuing," then I pondered of that place in Numbers 23:23. 'Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel.'"
Sarah Jack: Quote, "and [00:51:00] now I thought I had broke covenant with God, not only in one respect, but in many. But it pleased the Lord to bring that to mind in Hebrews 8:12, 'for I will be merciful, for I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.'"
Sarah Jack: So then why is Goody Glover getting the ultimate punishment? Yeah. This is all within the household in between God. In his broken covenant, Goodwin's broken covenant with him, what, why are they hanging Goody Glover?
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Yeah. Why? Fear. Just lack of understanding because the true will of God was unreadable.But you could go after the devil's instruments. couldn't really go, you couldn't take the devil to court. You couldn't take God to court and say, just to ask him, 'what did I do? I'm sorry, I want to reform.' [00:52:00] You couldn't even do that. Because his mind is unknowable. But you're afraid of the earthly, even as much as you believe in the heavenly, you're afraid of the earthly. And so you're afraid of the witch who you know more than the devil that you don't.
Sarah Jack: Continuing the account, quote, "the consideration how the Lord did deal with Job and his patience and the end the Lord made with him was some support to me."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "I thought also on what David said, that he had sinned, but what had these poor lambs done?"
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, this part here reminds me of your great grandmother, Rebecca Nurse in Salem, saying that she was unsure what sin God must have found in her, that he would allow her to be accused of witchcraft, where here it's like the flip side of that. John Goodwin is asking, what sins have I and my children not repented of that God would allow the children to be afflicted by a [00:53:00] witch?
Sarah Jack: Goodwin continues his account, quote, "but yet in the midst of my tumultuous thoughts within me, it was God's comforts that did delight my soul."
Josh Hutchinson: "That in the 18th of Luke and the beginning, verse 1, where Christ spake the parable for that end, that men ought always to pray and not faint. This, with many other places, bore my spirit."
Sarah Jack: And I want to point out that much of the same scripture possibly would have been known by Goody Glover, and she could too be asking questions of God and quoting scripture to try to flesh out what was happening to her spiritually.
Josh Hutchinson: The only difference is she's probably thinking of it in Irish, and he's thinking of it in English, but, she would have been just as versed, anybody at the time, drilled again and again, these things into your head.
Sarah Jack: And I'm thinking about when Cotton was speaking of her in the [00:54:00] jail, saying things and asking questions of the spirits. Could it, would it not be just like this account ofGoodman Goodwin questioning and quoting?
Josh Hutchinson: Very much.
Sarah Jack: "I thought with Jonah 2:4 that I would yet again look towards God's holy temple, the Lord Jesus Christ. And I did greatly desire to find the Son of God with me in this furnace of affliction, knowing hereby that no harm shall befall me."
Josh Hutchinson: But now this solemn day of prayer and fasting being at end, there was an imminent answer of it. For one of my children was delivered, and one of the wicked instruments of the devil discovered, and her own mouth condemned her, and so accordingly executed."
Sarah Jack: Goody Glover's death was the answer to John Goodwin's prayer.
Josh Hutchinson: He goes on to say, quote, "here was food for faith and great encouragement still to hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord, the minister still counseling and encouraging me to labor to be found in God's [00:55:00] way, committing my case to him, and not to use any way not allowed in God's word."
Sarah Jack: This really reminds me of
Josh Hutchinson:
Sarah Jack: when Paul Moyer discusses in his book, Wicked and Detestable Arts, how, in our conversation with him on that episode he made with us, how the scriptural family framework was holy and anything that fell outside of that would have not been valuable. And Goody Glover, everything about her life fell outside of that scriptural family, in their perception.
Josh Hutchinson: In the Puritan
Sarah Jack: perception.
Josh Hutchinson: And we never find out if she has any other children. They're never mentioned, only her one daughter. And we know from other cases, like Alice Young had just one daughter that we know of, and you look at the case of [00:56:00] Goody Eunice Cole, who had no children of her own, and was reported to be jealous of others who had children and wanted to take their children. But this like low fertility thing also was considered to be a judgment of God against you, that you had somehow done something wrong, or you weren't chosen by God to have children, so therefore you were valued less in society.
Sarah Jack: It was okay for the ministers and magistrates to try their experiments, but they did not want John Goodwin tempting the devil through folk magic or other means not specifically sanctioned by the Bible.
Josh Hutchinson: Goodwin continues, quote, "it was a thing not a little comfortable to us, to see that the people of God was so much concerned about our lamentable condition, remembering us at all times in their prayers, which I did look at as a token for good. But you must think it was a time of sore [00:57:00] temptation with us, for many did say, yea, and some good people, too, were it their case that they would try some tricks that they should give ease to their children."
Sarah Jack: Why was it so important for them to document that they weren't doing witch cakes and such?
Josh Hutchinson: I think in here part of the, if you look at this from like a propaganda perspective, basically the story that's being sold is that the Goodwin family is very pious and dedicated and devoted and did nothing to bring this on to themselves other than whatever sin Goodwin worries about there. They didn't do any witchcraft. They didn't do any magic. Only Goody Glover tried magic and her four accomplices that are unnamed. So it's like creating, it's like serving as, even though the trial had already happened and the execution had already happened, [00:58:00] it's like preserving for future generations, the high level of decency of the victimsand likewise showing just how detestable Goody Glover was.
Sarah Jack: And then I'm thinking about how important, at the beginning of the tale of the afflicted girls in Salem, the witch cake. That's kicks off the story, that Tituba allowed that to happen.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, and Tituba gets blamed, even though Mary Sibley's the one who comes up with the idea for it, and she gets scolded in church, but then they vote, and they say, 'oh, we forgive you'.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, Reverend Parris would have been really familiar that Goodman Goodwin refused to use that folk magic, and it happened right in his house.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Reverend [00:59:00] Parris, before he went up to Salem, he was living in Boston in 1688. He moved to Salem Village in 1689. So he was still in Boston while this was going on, and he was a member of Mather's church.
Sarah Jack: And he possibly talked about this in his home.
Josh Hutchinson: Probably. And
Sarah Jack: when I say possibly, I'm being sarcastic.
Josh Hutchinson: He did. Yeah, he did. You know he did.
Sarah Jack: Yeah,
Josh Hutchinson: it's all there was to talk about, really.
Sarah Jack: Continuing, "but I thought for us to forsake the counsel of good old men, and to take the counsel of the young ones, it might ensnare our souls, though for the present it might offer some relief to our bodies, which was a thing I greatly feared, and my children were not at any time free for doing any such thing."
Josh Hutchinson: "It was a time of sore affliction, but it was mixed with abundance of mercy, for my heart was many a time made glad in the house of prayer."
Sarah Jack: And [01:00:00] Goodwin continues, "the neighborhood pitied us and were very helpful to us. Moreover, though my children were thus in every limb and joint tormented by those children of the devil, they also, using their tongues at their pleasure, sometimes one way, sometimes another, yet the Lord did hear and prevent them, that they could not make them speak wicked words, though they did many times hinder them from speaking good ones. Had they in these fits blaspheming the name of the holy God, this you may think would have been a heartbreaking thing to us the poor parents, but God in his mercy prevented them. A thing worth taking notice of."
Josh Hutchinson: "Likewise, they slept well at nights, and the ministers did often visit us and pray with us and for us. And their love and pity was so great, their prayers so earnest and constant, that I could not but admire at it."
Sarah Jack: If they admitted at this point that their fits included blasphemy, then it would totally discredit Cotton's analysis of their pious [01:01:00] family.
Josh Hutchinson: And they had to get out in front of any rumors of blasphemy that might have been spreading.
Sarah Jack: "Mr. Mather, particularly now, his bowels so yearn toward us in this sad condition that he not only prays with us, and for us, but he taketh one of my children home to his own house, which, indeed, was but a troublesome guest. For such a one that had so much work lying upon his hands and heart, he took much pains in this great service, to pull this child, and her brother and sister, out of the hand of the devil."
Josh Hutchinson: So Cotton Mather took one of the Goodwin children in,
Sarah Jack: David D. Hall refers to her as Martha in his book, Witch Hunting in 17th Century in New England.
Sarah Jack: John Goodwin's account continues, "let us now admire and adore that fountain, the Lord Jesus Christ, from once those streams come,
Sarah Jack: the Lord himself requite his labor of love."
Josh Hutchinson: "Our case is yet very sad, and doth call for more prayer. And the good ministers of this town and Charlestown readily came, with some [01:02:00] other good praying people to my house, to keep another day of solemn fasting and prayer, which our Lord saith this kind goeth out by."
Sarah Jack: "My children, being all at home, the two biggest lying on the bed, one of them would fain have kicked the good men, while they were wrestling with God for them, had not I held him with all my power and might, and sometimes he would stop his own ears."
Josh Hutchinson: "This, you must needs think, was a cutting thing to the poor parents. Now our hearts were ready to sink had not God put us under his everlasting arms of mercy, Deuteronomy 33:27, and helped us still to hope in his mercy, and to be quiet, knowing that he is God, and that it was not for the potsherds of the earth to strive with their maker."
Sarah Jack: One thing that I notice here is he says that they talked about keeping fasting and prayer, which our Lord saith, this kind goeth out by. Isn't the kind that goes out by fasting [01:03:00] and prayer having to do with possession and not witchcraft?
Sarah Jack:
Sarah Jack: John Goodwin was concerned for the well being of his children, but he often comes across as more concerned for his own needs, such as here when he talks about his and his wife's hearts being ready to sink because this was, quote, "a cutting thing to the poor parents."
Josh Hutchinson: But to be fair, he's also speaking to the parents in his audience about things they might experience in their own times of need.
Sarah Jack: And giving them advice on how to maintain their faith that God will deliver them from their troubles.
Josh Hutchinson: He continues, "well might David say, Psalms 1:2, that had not the law of his God been his delight, he had perished in his affliction."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "now the promises of God are sweet, God having promised to hear the prayer of the destitute and not to despise their prayer, and he will not fail the expectation of those that wait on him, but he heareth the cry of the poor and the needy."
Josh Hutchinson: "These Jacobs came and wrestled with God for a [01:04:00] blessing on this poor family, which indeed I hope they obtained, and may be now worthy of the name Israel, who prevailed with God and would not let him go till he had blessed us."
Sarah Jack: "For soon after this, there were two more of my children delivered out of this horrible pit. Here was now a double mercy, and how sweet it was, knowing it came in answer of prayer."
Josh Hutchinson: "Now we see and know it is not a vain thing to call on the name of the Lord, for he is a present help in the time of trouble, Psalms 46:1. And we may boldly say the Lord has been our helper. I had sunk, but Jesus put forth his hand and bore me up."
Sarah Jack: And I just keep thinking how Goody Glover would've been clinging to the same scripture, for her hope and rescue. "My faith was ready to fail, but this was the support to me that Christ said to Peter in Luke 22:32, I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail [01:05:00] not."
Josh Hutchinson: So Goodwin owns his crisis of faith and shares how he overcame it.
Sarah Jack: Quote, "and many other promises were as cordials to my drooping soul. In the consideration of all those that ever came to Christ Jesus for healing, that he healed their bodies, pardoned their sins, and healed their souls, too, which I hope in God may be the fruit of this present affliction."
Josh Hutchinson: "If God be pleased to make the fruit of this affliction to be to take away our sin and cleanse us from iniquity and to put us on with greater diligence to make our calling and election sure, then happy affliction!"
Sarah Jack: So mad right now.
Josh Hutchinson: Meanwhile, this woman died for, to make this guy happy.
Sarah Jack: It's so unhappy that they're willing to kill a woman. It's so unhappy that it was crushing the hearts of the parents, but now it's happy. The rescue.
Josh Hutchinson: Ding dong.
Sarah Jack: "The Lord said that I had need of this to awake [01:06:00] me. I have found a prosperous condition."
Josh Hutchinson: "I have taken notice and considered more of God's goodness in these few weeks of affliction than in many years of prosperity."
Sarah Jack: And this is really a point that we have even discussed with some of the European witch trials that we've discussed, that if witches were being found in your parish or church or community, that was a sign that you were having some spiritual prosperity. And so then you were a target by the devil, just as Goodman Goodwin here said that prosperous condition is a dangerous condition.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes.
Sarah Jack: "I may speak it with shame, so wicked and deceitful, and ungrateful is my heart, that the more God hath been doing for me, the less I have been doing for him. My returns have not been according to my receivings."
Josh Hutchinson: "The Lord help me now to praise him in heart, lip, and life. The Lord help us to see by this [01:07:00] visitation what need we have to get shelter under the wing of Christ, to haste to the rock where we may be safe."
Sarah Jack: I'm really impressed with this mason's writing skills.
Josh Hutchinson: He blows me away. He's better than cotton.
Sarah Jack: "We see how ready the devils are to catch us and torment our bodies, and he is as diligent to ensnare our souls in that many ways, but let us put on all of our spiritual armor and follow Christ, the captain of our salvation. And though we meet with the cross, let us bear it patiently and cheerfully, for if Jesus Christ be at the one end, we need not fear the heft of it. If we have Christ, we have enough. He can make his rod as well as his staff to be a comfort to us. And we shall not want if we be the sheep of Christ."
Josh Hutchinson: " If we want afflictions, we shall have them, and sanctified afflictions are choice mercies. Now I earnestly desire the prayer of all good people that the Lord would be pleased to perfect that work he hath begun, and make it to appear that [01:08:00] prayer is stronger than witchcraft. December 12th, 1688, John Goodwin."
Sarah Jack: John just shared a lot of scripture that is very familiar to many people. And it's just very insightful to see how it can be twisted to sanctify one person and discredit another person's humanity.
Josh Hutchinson: It's so easy to twist words.
Sarah Jack: And that ends the Goody Glover section of Memorable Providences.
Josh Hutchinson: Cotton Mather then goes on to detail other cases. One final source reflects another attitude about the Glover case, Robert Calef vocal critic of Cotton Mather and The Salem Witch-Hunt, wrote More Wonders of the Invisible World as a counterpoint to Mather's own Wonders of the Invisible World, a fawning work praising the actions of the Salem Witch Trial's judges.
Sarah Jack: In More Wonders of the Invisible World, Calef [01:09:00] included a couple paragraphs on the case of Goody Glover.
Josh Hutchinson: Calef wrote that he had perused the trial records of Goody Glover. Unfortunately, these records are not available today.
Sarah Jack: He wrote, "in the times of Sir Edmund Andros, his government, Goody Glover, a despised, crazy, ill-conditioned old woman, an Irish Roman Catholic, was tried for afflicting Goodwin's children, by the account of which trial, taken in shorthand for the use of the jury, it may appear that the generality of her answers were nonsense, and her behavior like that of one distracted."
Josh Hutchinson: "Yet the doctors, finding her as she had been for many years, brought her in compos mentis, and setting aside her crazy answers to some ensnaring questions, the proof against her was wholly deficient. The jury brought her guilty."
Sarah Jack: Quote, "Mr. Cotton Mather was the most active and forward of any minister in the country in those matters, in the country, taking [01:10:00] home one of the children and managing such intrigues with that child. And after printing such an account of the whole and his Memorable Providences as conduced much to the kindling those flames, that in Sir William's time, threatened devouring this country."
Josh Hutchinson: So now we've covered four contemporary sources of information on the Goody Glover case.
Sarah Jack: We talk about them losing hold of the country and here Calef uses the word devouring, that I just find that significant.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's interesting because Cotton Mather, when he talks about Salem, he talks about the devil's dominion is, New England is the devil's dominion. And, the people of that dominion are all allied to take down the Massachusetts Bay Colony and it's thePuritanized Church. So it's interesting Cotton Mather's saying [01:11:00] that the devouring of the country is by Satan and his instruments, and Calef is saying, no, the devouring is you guys with your witch trial running rampant.
Sarah Jack: And witch hunting is still devouring.
Josh Hutchinson: What do you think caused the afflictions?
Josh Hutchinson: I believe the Goodwin children, like the girls in the Salem Village Parsonage in 1692, were under a great deal of stress. Cotton Mather told us that they were kept continuously employed in order that they could avoid temptation. That sort of strict management of their life could have driven them to extremes in an effort to avoid more work.
Sarah Jack: And Martha wouldn't have wanted to be blamed for the missing linen. So she confronted the laundress in an effort to get it back.
Josh Hutchinson: Or cynically, you might think she was just trying to cover herself by shifting the blame for whatever really happened to the linen to someone else.
Sarah Jack: Then when the [01:12:00] stressed-out Martha Goodwin was bawled out by Goody Glover, she feared the woman was a witch who had cursed her.
Josh Hutchinson: She then embodied the symptoms of bewitchment, which were known at the time.
Sarah Jack: And her younger siblings followed suit either out of their own bewitchment fear or simply to play the game.
Josh Hutchinson: Whatever caused the children's behaviors, we know one thing that didn't, real witchcraft.
Sarah Jack: That's right. We know for a fact that Goody Glover was not guilty of using witchcraft to harm the children.
Josh Hutchinson: With that much known, there's still much that we do not know about Goody Glover.
Sarah Jack: The men who wrote about her in the 17th century did not include details on her background.
Josh Hutchinson: You'll notice in these four sources that nobody ever gave Goody Glover a first name or a maiden name.
Sarah Jack: Or names her husband or daughter.
Josh Hutchinson: Unfortunately, some information that is commonly shared about Goody Glover today is not based on these sources or other true historical [01:13:00] record. Despite best guesses, Goody Glover's first name and maiden name are not known.
Sarah Jack: But part of popular lore.
Josh Hutchinson: Yes, part of popular lore.
Sarah Jack: We only know her by her husband's surname and the honorific Goody, which was short for Goodwife, a term applied to most married women in early Massachusetts. I know many people know her as Ann, but the contemporary sources we have do not include this information.
Josh Hutchinson: In fact, Goody Glover was first given the name Ann in 1905 by Harold Dijon in his article, "The Forgotten Heroine," which was published in the Ave Maria magazine's January 7th, 1905 issue and was later reproduced in the Journal of the American Irish Historical Society.
Sarah Jack: Sadly, Dijon fabricated historical details such as supposed quotes from Glover herself. Still, despite the glaring inconsistencies and inaccuracies, the story of heroic Ann Glover took hold in people's minds.
[01:14:00]
Josh Hutchinson: From this article and others like it, additional misinformation and speculation about Goody Glover has spread.
Sarah Jack: In 1872, Father James Fenton speculated that Goody Glover, quote, "was probably one of the unfortunate women whom English barbarity tore from their homes in Ireland to sell as slaves in America."
Josh Hutchinson: This was published in the book Sketches of the Establishment of the Church in New England.
Josh Hutchinson: Conjecture that Goody Glover was enslaved by OliverCromwell's regime and transported to Barbados made the rounds in the years following publication of this book. Then, in 1905, Harold Dijon removed the conjecture by claiming that Goody Glover, quote, "herself has stated that she and her husband were sold to the Barbados in the time of Cromwell."
Sarah Jack: No author ever cited this seemingly important quote by Goody Glover.
Josh Hutchinson: For his own part, Cotton Mather, writing soon after the execution of Glover, [01:15:00] only quoted the Irish woman briefly, saying, quote, "when I was representing unto her that and how her prince had cheated her, as herself would quickly find, she replied, I think in English, and with passion too, 'if it be so, I am sorry for that.'"
Sarah Jack: Quote, "if it be so, I am sorry for that." Is that really all he could be bothered with writing down out of everything she said?
Josh Hutchinson: Well, he was busy writing the 388 books and pamphlets he published.
Sarah Jack: But he had time to accuse Goody Glover of having familiarity with the devil and evil spirits.
Josh Hutchinson: So, how should this woman be remembered?
Josh Hutchinson: Over the years, various efforts have been made to resuscitate Glover's reputation. These have gone a long way to rehabilitate her image, but her story is still not widely known.
Sarah Jack: In 1987,a committee was formed to change that by erecting a statue in Goody Glover's honor.
Josh Hutchinson: The plan was [01:16:00] referenced in a Boston Globe article titled "In Honor of Goody," found on page 15 of the November 16, 1987 edition.
Sarah Jack: In this article, Patrick G. Russell, described as a local history buff from Stoneham,
Josh Hutchinson: wrote that Reverend Vincent A. Lapomarda of Holy Crossand Reverends Leonard P. Mahoney and Francis W. Sweeney of Boston College had formed a committee to push for the memorial, which has not been built.
Josh Hutchinson: Sadly, these three gentlemen have since passed. If anyone out there knows any more about this committee, we would love to hear what you have.
Sarah Jack: But there is a plaque on a church in Boston, and there is another way we can honor her very soon.
Josh Hutchinson: Goody Glover has never been exonerated of her supposed crime, though it is abundantly clear she was not guilty of being a witch, legally defined at the time as having or consulting with a familiar spirit.
Sarah Jack: As nobody has ever proven a connection with a familiar spirit, nobody [01:17:00] could have proven Glover a witch, as defined by Massachusetts law.
Josh Hutchinson: if you believe, like us, that Goody Glover deserves justice, we encourage you to sign our petition at change. org slash witchtrials.
Sarah Jack: And join us on Zoom this Saturday, November 16th, 2024 at 2 p. m. Eastern for a remembrance ceremony for Goody Glover.
Josh Hutchinson: Please check the show notes for details on that event. There's a Facebook
Sarah Jack: event, yeah,
Josh Hutchinson: There's a Facebook event, you can go to Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project Facebook and Witch Hunt Facebook and find it there, but we'll also have it in the show notes. And at this event, we'll have information on how you can help the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project clear the names of Goody Glover and seven other individuals who were convicted of witchcraft in Boston, and an apology for all witchcraft prosecutions in Massachusetts.
Sarah Jack: If you would like to get involved right now, and you are in Massachusetts, [01:18:00] please write your senator or representative to encourage them to support legislation to exonerate the eight people convicted of witchcraft in Boston. We're going to need people anywhere to write, but right now we really need people that are local in Massachusetts.
Josh Hutchinson: So please visit massachusettswitchtrials. org to learn more about the project and to complete our simple volunteer registration form.
Sarah Jack: And now Mary Bingham has a new minute with Mary.
Mary Bingham: Imagine a child grieving the loss of her mother as the woman she looked to for comfort and support all her life. Now imagine her mother died because she was hanged for a crime she did not commit. This was the case for Goody Glover's daughter, who was accused of stealing linen, which resulted in her mother's accusation of witchcraft. The younger Glover was orphaned at the moment of her mother's death in [01:19:00] 1688. Unfortunately, what happened to Goody's daughter is lost to history. What we do know is that she died without seeing justice for her mother or herself.
Mary Bingham: Boston did declare November 16th, 1988 as Goody Glover Day, but one day to honor her is not enough. The stain needs to be removed once and for all from Goody Glover. It's time the state of Massachusetts fully exonerate Goody Glover and offer an official state apology to all those who were accused for the capital crime of witchcraft.
Mary Bingham: Thank you.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

Sarah Jack: For my segment today,I'd like to read for you the proclamation, which set November 16th, 1988, as Goody Glover Day. You will notice the wording includes both [01:20:00] historical fact and some of the lore we have covered in this episode. And now, read for the first time since 1988, the proclamation. "City of Boston and City Council. Resolution of Counselor O'Neill designating November 16th as Goody Glover Day in Boston, commemorating the tricentennial of her religious martyrdom here." Whereas, 300 years ago this day in Boston, on November 16th, 1688, Goodwife Ann Glover, a penniless Irish laundress, was hanged, refusing to renounce her Catholic religion;
Sarah Jack: and "Goody" Glover thus became one of the early Puritan Colony martyrs to the witchcraft mania, which was to spread to Salem four years later; and
Sarah Jack: She was executed one day after her trial in Boston amidst an atmosphere unsympathetic to her Gaelic speech and disapproving of religious relicsfound in a search of meager living quarters the widow and her daughter had; [01:21:00] and
Sarah Jack: At her trial, without benefit of counsel, inarticulate in her defense, she was convicted of witchcraft based on charges stemming from the tantrums of a young girl;
Sarah Jack: The eve of her execution, she refused to save herself by recanting her faith,then failed to recite the Our Father in the version approved by the Reverend Cotton Matherwhen he visited her cell;
Sarah Jack: Goody Glover's martyrdom has been recognized by scholars, although her name has never been cleared on the records;
Sarah Jack: This past Sunday,a plaque to Goodwife Ann Glover was dedicated in Our Lady of Victory Shrine in Bostonas a donation by the order of Alhambra, therefore be it:
Josh Hutchinson: Resolved:The Boston City Council on this anniversary of Goodwife Ann Glover's death, and as a token of redemption of her name, declares November 16, 1988 as Goody Glover Day in Boston. Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for joining us for this episode of Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: We hope to see you [01:22:00] Saturday at our online event and back next week for another listen.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and remember Goody Glover.

November 13, 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

⁠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

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

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⁠Maryland Witches Exoneration Project⁠

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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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Transcript

The Putnams of Salem_ A Conversation with Author Greg Houle Download

August 28, 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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Witch-Hunting in European and World History – Ronald Hutton

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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

Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project

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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Links

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

Transcript

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

Transcript

Nathaniel Ingersoll and His Tavern in the Salem Witch Trials Download

June 16, 2024
Salem Aftermath with Tom Phillips

Welcome to Witch Hunt, where we uncover the truths behind some of history’s most compelling events. Today, we are joined by award-winning filmmaker Tom Phillips, who is here to discuss his new award-winning screenplay, “Salem Aftermath.”
“Salem Aftermath” will be a drama series that explores the strained relationships following the Salem Witch-Hunt and the psychological impacts on those who lived through it like never before. Tom’s extensive research and collaboration with leading scholars infuses real life perspective into this often sensationalized period. Find out which historical voices he has brought to life and how science enabled these stories to unfold. Additionally we discuss the powerful Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project, an active effort working to exonerate the remaining accused witches of Massachusetts. Below, you can check out Tom Phillips’ award-winning film “Chasing the Dead: Requiem,” streaming now. Please see links below to get in touch with Tom’s team or to join the Justice Project efforts.

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Show Notes

Agency Representing “Salem Aftermath”

How to see Salem Witch Hunt Examine the Evidence through the Essex National Heritage Area

America’s Hidden Stories: Salem’s Secrets

Murderous Minister | National Geographic Expedition Week: Salem: Unmasking the Devil: Produced by Tom Phillips.

Trailer, Chasing the Dead: Requiem

Tom Phillips Interview on Chasing the Dead: Requiem film

Tom Phillips on IMDB.com

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

Transcript

Salem Aftermath with Tom Phillips Download

June 12, 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

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

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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Introducing The Last Night, a Connecticut Witch Trials Play

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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

The Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project Marks Anniversary of Exoneration Download

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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0086 Alice Markham-Cantor Download

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

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The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World by Malcolm Gaskill

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

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

Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project

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.

List of those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts

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

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

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

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

International Alliance to End Witch Hunts

Stop Sorcery Violence

Storymap explaining the dynamics of sorcery accusation related 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 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.

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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

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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

A True Account of Pirates with Katherine Howe

Show Notes

New York Times Bestselling Author Katherine Howe climbs aboard ship for a captivating conversation about her new novel, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself. Embark on a voyage with us as Katherine navigates us across the enthralling seas of piracy history, offering listeners an unforgettable discussion that delves into the high-stakes world of seafaring adventures. Her expertise and passion shine through, making this episode a must-listen for history enthusiasts, book lovers, and anyone seeking a thrilling journey into the past. Ready to embark on a literary adventure? Weigh anchor and hoist the mizzen! It’s time to press play and sail through the seas of history, mystery, and the indomitable spirit of characters like Hannah Masury. And we don’t forget the witch trials.

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www.KatherineHowe.com

Buy the book: A True Account by Katherine Howe

Buy the book: The Penguin Book of Witches, Edited by Katherine Howe

Order the book: The Penguin Book of Pirates, Edited by Katherine Howe

Petition to recognize those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts

List of those accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts

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Transcript

[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Ahoy, and welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial and Pirate Podcast. I'm Able Seaman Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:19] Sarah Jack: And I'm First Mate Sarah 'Calico' Jack.
[00:00:23] Josh Hutchinson: Today's guest is acclaimed author Katherine Howe, who is here to talk to us about her new book on pirates.
[00:00:30] Sarah Jack: That's right, this is our special pirate Thanksgiving episode. You may also be asking what pirates are doing on a witch trial podcast.
[00:00:39] Josh Hutchinson: Well, you know Katherine Howe the witch trial writer, but you're fixing to meet Katherine Howe the pirate writer.
[00:00:45] Sarah Jack: As announced here last year, she has written a wonderful historical novel titled, A True Account, Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pirates, Written by Herself.
[00:00:55] Josh Hutchinson: It's not just wonderful. It's marvelous.[00:01:00]
[00:01:00] Sarah Jack: That's an understatement. I had such a great time reading this book.
[00:01:05] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. Once I picked it up, I literally could not put it down until I was done. It's really a thrilling book, and you have to know what's coming up next, so it just keeps you in its hook like grip.
[00:01:24] Sarah Jack: Hannah's account pulls you in immediately, and you start hearing it from the moment the story begins. It's full of local history and Hannah.
[00:01:39] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, the beginning of the book is just so captivating and really drew me in. And that's why I just, from there on, things just kept going and going. And I had to keep reading and reading.
[00:01:58] Sarah Jack: This is one of those books, as soon as you [00:02:00] have your nose in it, you are so glad you picked this book up and started it and you're thinking about your schedule and you hope you can clear your calendar so you can enjoy every page.
[00:02:11] Josh Hutchinson: Yes, you will be willing to drop everything once you get into this. Forget about sleeping that night or running the errands. They can wait, but Hannah Masury's story cannot.
[00:02:25] Sarah Jack: Hey, book clubs, this is a book for your club. This is great for discussion.
[00:02:32] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, you really enjoy Katherine Howe's comments on the book in this episode, and you can use those as some talking points in your book club. And we talk about how there are more similarities between witches and pirates than you might think.
[00:02:54] Sarah Jack: Executing the witches and executing the pirates were both acts of purification for the community.[00:03:00]
[00:03:01] Josh Hutchinson: Katherine Howe is the best selling author of The Physic Book of Deliverance Dane, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, Conversion, The House of Velvet and Glass, and The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen. She is editor of the Penguin Book of Witches and, coming soon, the Penguin Book of Pirates.
[00:03:21] Josh Hutchinson: She coauthored Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune and Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty with Anderson Cooper.
[00:03:32] Katherine Howe: Chapter One, Boston, June 1726. I don't know what made me determined to go to the hanging. I'd always made a point of avoiding them. I resisted the entreaties of my friends who wanted to be in amongst the throngs of onlookers, ears pricked for the last words and the pious advice of the soon to be damned. Of course, I'd always been curious. One cannot help but wonder about the face of one condemned, [00:04:00] to see his carriage toward the crowd and himself, to feel the swelling cheers and cries of all the townsfolk, to hear the crack of the felon's neck snapped like a chicken's. I wondered if their eyes were open or closed when their moment came.
[00:04:14] Katherine Howe: What happens in the instant in between being a living, breathing creature, trembling with needs and wants and fears, and being an empty sack of flesh and bone? Is it the same for an old woman alone in her bed with the covers pulled up tight as it is for a man mounting the scaffold before God and everyone? Does an unearthly light of heaven attained shine upon the greasy strings of their hair if they have confessed and repented? Everyone repents at the end, or so I've been told. I'd heard the moment of public death described often enough, usually by someone with a hand around a glass, but I'd always been of too delicate a nature to see for myself.
[00:04:54] Katherine Howe: I didn't like to drown kittens or stomp trembled whiskered mice, and as often as not found a way to avoid such grim [00:05:00] chores on the occasion Mrs. Tomlinson chose to impose them on me. I even crossed the street from dogs lying dead in the gutter. But something about William Fly was different. I made up my mind that I would go.
[00:05:15] Josh Hutchinson: Such a good introduction. That hook just grabbed me when I was reading it. So starting with the execution, that was quite a way, quite a bang right at the beginning.
[00:05:29] Katherine Howe: Why mess around? One of the things that I enjoyed about working on this book, because it's set in 1726, it opens at a real event. So the hanging of William Fly was a real thing that happened. William Fly led a short-lived mutiny and went briefly pirating off of Cape Hatteras, and then he trusted a guy to take him to, I think it was Martha's Vineyard for water with, he had renamed his boat the Thames Revenge, which is such a great pirate name, but the guy he trusted [00:06:00] to pilot him fooled him and led him off the coast of Boston, which of course now as a sailor in Massachusetts, I find myself wondering like going on the outside of Cape Cod, which is how you have to go to get from Martha's Vineyard, like all the way around and get back to Boston, it's actually like a really long trip. It's like really way out of their way because there was no Cape Cod canal to cut through. So that must have been, William Fly must have been a pretty naive leader, unfortunately.
[00:06:24] Katherine Howe: But what happened was William Fly's public trial and gibbeting. So William Fly is tried and he's found guilty and he's not just hanged in front of everyone, but he's gibbeted. And what that means is that his body, after he is dead, it hanged in chains in a public place for everybody to see. And so he was gibbeted on a little rock, one of the Boston Harbor islands called Nix's Mate, and just left there to rot. And the historian Marcus Rediker has pointed out that is a that practice of publicly [00:07:00] displaying the mutilated bodies of people convicted of piracy was a, was like a conscious act of terror by the state. The state was trying to terrorize people out of thinking of turning to piracy.
[00:07:12] Katherine Howe: And it's so interesting to me because, of course, this is so most people who know my fiction associate me with Salem witch trial stories or Salem stories. And of course, this is a generation later, because Salem is 1692 and William Fly is 1726. But the idea of using public execution as a mode of terror is still very much in play. And interestingly enough, too, one of the theologians who presided over William Fly's trial was Cotton Mather himself. He was much more famous by the time the 1720s rolled around, and at the beginning of the story, in A True Account, we actually talk a little bit about his fame, that people respond to him like, like he's a celebrity, they freak out when they see him in the street.
[00:07:56] Katherine Howe: And Hannah Masury, is bound out to service in a [00:08:00] real tavern, Ship Tavern is a real place, at the foot of Clark Wharf, which is a real wharf, one of the longest, most major wharfs in pre-revolutionary Boston. And so I imagine her mistress, Mrs. Tomlinson, as being very much enthralled to Cotton Mather, very much like touched by his fame and the proximity of his fame.
[00:08:20] Katherine Howe: And so at one point, I even have Hannah remark to herself that she grew up in Beverly, which is a town close to Salem, which is on the water, a seafaring town, and that she grew up close to where Cotton Mather had driven the devils out of Salem a generation before, before she was born, which seems impossible to her, as impossible as driving fairies out of a hole in the ground, because public thinking about witchcraft had changed by the 1720s, but not completely. Hannah is still living in this sort of just post-Calvinist world and much of her internal monologue or the way that she understands the world is inflected by [00:09:00] Christianity because of the moment in which she's living, even though she herself is living a very, what we might term, unchristian life.
[00:09:09] Josh Hutchinson: As you mentioned, you're known for writing about Salem Witch Trials. What drew you away from that to write about pirates?
[00:09:18] Katherine Howe: I think, I think everyone is secretly attracted to pirates. Maybe that's a sweeping generalization, but maybe it was partly having spent so much time thinking about the world of very early European-settled, English-settled Massachusetts, and what an incredibly strict and hierarchical culture that was. And trying to imagine ways that people chafed under that structure or bucked that structure a little bit. And if Salem was, if the Salem Witch Crisis was one example of when regular people are at the center of the story, which is so a little bit unusual. So [00:10:00] much of our history is so called great man history where you talk about leaders or kings or queens or people who are in charge. And I've never been particularly interested by the people who are in charge. I'm much more interested by the people who are just trying to make their way in the world who are regular people.
[00:10:15] Katherine Howe: And so another instance of regular people in extraordinary circumstances is piracy. So often pirates didn't plan to be pirates, or they turned to piracy through mutiny or, as William Fly did, through what they called hard usage, and especially at a time when impressment was such a big part of the British Navy. You could be snatched away from everything that you knew in your life and thrown into a ship with no desire to ever leave the land and have your freedom taken away. And so I was interested by piracy, like the golden age of piracy, which kind of wound down in the 1720s, but stretched broadly from the 1680s to the 1720s, the same period [00:11:00] as the period of the witch trials in North America.
[00:11:02] Katherine Howe: And also it is an example of the collision between the most radical forms of freedom and the most radical forms of unfreedom. Because so much golden age piracy was inextricably bound up with the money to be made in the transatlantic slave trade, and one of the reasons that it was so important to the state to strike terror into the hearts of mariners of the threat of being tried as pirates was because of the economic risks that they posed to this very wealthy triangle trade between the Caribbean and the North American colonies and Great Britain.
[00:11:40] Katherine Howe: And so I was, I just was very drawn to the idea of here are people in extreme circumstances, under extreme forms of constraint, or sometimes forced servitude, and who throw off those constraints, often using violence and often, with no hope of success, [00:12:00] really, depending on how we define success.
[00:12:03] Katherine Howe: So I was just very, I was very moved by it, and also very moved by, the story of witchcraft is so much a story about women in extreme circumstances, and typically piracy is a story of men in extreme circumstances, but not always. There are a couple of very famous examples of women who disguised themselves as men and went pirating, and I was very moved by that possibility and what that might look like and how that might feel.
[00:12:34] Katherine Howe: And so I have Hannah Masury at the beginning of her story, she gets a sort of traditional call to adventure, as a way of structuring the story, where she's working, she's in her late teens, we never really learn exactly how old she is. She's bound out to service, which is not unusual for this time period. In fact, Abigail Williams, famously, who kicked off the Salem Witch Panic, who was 11 years old and was bound out to service.[00:13:00]
[00:13:00] Katherine Howe: And so Hannah ends up getting tangled up in the events around the trial of William Fly and winds up having to flee for her life in a way that she does that, because the only way in or out of Boston, pre-revolutionary Boston at this time, was by the Neck, which is a long, skinny stretch of land. So Boston at the time was this, was a peninsula. And it was very easy to choke off access to that peninsula. The only way that Hannah could escape, people are trying to hunt her down. I don't want to give away too much about why they're trying to hunt her down. They're trying to hunt her down, and so the only way she can flee is over the water. And so she disguises herself and ships out on what she thinks is a fruit packet down for the Azores. And then her adventure goes in a pretty wildly unexpected direction.
[00:13:47] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, quite a lot of wildly unexpected directions. Yeah, you keep us guessing what's going to happen next.
[00:13:56] Katherine Howe: Yeah, I don't want to give too many twists away, but I've been telling, when [00:14:00] people ask me about this story, I've been telling people it's a little bit like Treasure Island meets Gone Girl. And and there are people who are fans of pirate fiction, anyone who's read Treasure Island is going to see a couple of little winks here and there, narrative winks or things that are slightly familiar seeming but that is of course like the ultimate pirate story, which is also set in the 17, I've never learned the specific year, but sometime in the 1700s, but was written in the 19th century.
[00:14:29] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's what got me interested in pirates, Treasure Island. Read that very early.
[00:14:36] Katherine Howe: Yeah we're, I have a young son and I've been reading Treasure Island to him at night for some weeks now. And as you can imagine, we're a completely normal family. So his playhouse in our garden has a pirate flag on it. It has a sign hanging from it that says the Admiral Benbow Inn, which is where the action starts in Treasure Island, and a bill of fare hanging from a nearby tree. And my son likes to demand kid rum. Everything's completely [00:15:00] normal in my family. Kid rum is water, I hasten to add.
[00:15:04] Josh Hutchinson: Oh, okay.
[00:15:05] Katherine Howe: Not to worry. That's a worry.
[00:15:08] Josh Hutchinson: I was thinking it was a Juicy Juice or something.
[00:15:10] Katherine Howe: no. He gets very frustrated when other kids want to play pirates, but they don't know all the weird, obscure plot points of Treasure Island. He's no, you have to be the blind man.
[00:15:19] Katherine Howe: He's, very controlling. Anyway,
[00:15:22] Josh Hutchinson: That's adorable.
[00:15:23] Sarah Jack: It is. And he'll share his love for the story with his peers. Yeah.
[00:15:28] Katherine Howe: Whether they want him to or not.
[00:15:33] Sarah Jack: How has your love for sailing influenced your writing about seafaring?
[00:15:37] Katherine Howe: I think certainly my, I sail a lot in my free time. It's my only hobby, really. And it was inevitable that I would want to write a seafaring story, even though they're perhaps a little bit out of fashion these days, but there's something so unique about being at the mercy of the elements so completely. I mean, there are many elements of [00:16:00] seafaring that are attractive from a fiction perspective. One is that it is this self-contained world, if we're talking about the Age of Sail. You're living within this community in very close quarters. of a really profound intimacy can form, but even within that intimacy there is rigid hierarchies and structures and lines of authority and lines of command.
[00:16:22] Katherine Howe: There's also an incredible technicality to it that I find interesting, and especially imagining someone like Hannah, who has no background in seafaring at all, suddenly finding herself in this universe of ropes, where every rope has a specific name and a specific purpose, and the technical aspects of it, and how much knowledge there is to acquire in order to be able to effectively make a sailing ship go has was interesting to me from a narrative perspective.
[00:16:52] Katherine Howe: And also I think there's the idea of exploration, the idea of we now live in this world of instant discovery. If I want to [00:17:00] see what a picture of New Guinea looks like, all I have to do is type it into my phone. But the idea of these undiscovered worlds or uncharted worlds, you know maps that say 'here there be monsters,' and the idea of sailing into the unknown is for me, still a very romantic idea and something that I find interesting to think about. And over the course of the story in A True Account, we encounter many different characters who are all trying to find a path towards their own self-determination. If anything, I think that is the theme of the book. There’s Hannah, obviously, who’s trying to find her own route to freedom, if you will.
[00:17:42] Katherine Howe: Many of the pirate characters that she encounters are themselves actually seizing their own authority and freedom for themselves. And something about the freedom and the rebellion of it has always been very attractive to me.
[00:17:57] Katherine Howe: And also just speaking [00:18:00] personally, I think there are only two times in my life when I'm really fully present. And both of those times, one, one is when I'm writing, if I'm really engaged in what I'm writing and I'm completely involved in it. And then the other is when I'm sailing, when I'm underway, because it is so necessary to completely focus your attention on what you're doing, on what the surroundings are, on what's going to happen next.
[00:18:25] Katherine Howe: There's no room for distraction. There's no room for worrying about something else. There's no room for preoccupation. And for someone like me who lives in the head so much all the time, that is an incredibly liberating sensation. And so my mind, I wanted to try to explore in fiction, what that sensation can be like, and what that distinctly weird world is like as well.
[00:18:52] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah you built the world so excellently. All of those details that you put in, [00:19:00] and I loved learning the the terminology that you were just talking about, the names of the ropes, the mizzenmast, and this and that, and they're so good.
[00:19:11] Katherine Howe: Thanks. And I, believe it or not, I don't even get all that technical. If you read Patrick O'Brien, it's simply staggering how much, he's the guy who wrote Master and Commander, simply staggering the level of detail that he's able to access. But having Hannah come into a sailing world, naive, means that I can get away without actually weighing it down with a whole lot of jargon.
[00:19:35] Katherine Howe: But I also enjoy, I think there's so many turns of phrase and idioms that we use in English that are derived from seafaring, some of which we know in an abstract way, but many of which I think we don't know. Three sheets to the wind for being drunk is a great one, or armed to the teeth means carrying a knife in your mouth because you're about to board somebody else and you need to bring your arms with you. I really enjoyed unearthing some of [00:20:00] those turns of phrase that we still have this nautical discourse that we're not even aware that we use.
[00:20:07] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, really all of that, the rich detail, really helped bring the world to life. It was like you're there experiencing all the senses. Job well done.
[00:20:18] Katherine Howe: Thank you very much. But not too jargony, right? I hope not.
[00:20:22] Josh Hutchinson: No I was able to follow and I think I've been on boats like twice and they've been like speedboats at lakes.
[00:20:31] Josh Hutchinson: Uh,

[00:20:33] Katherine Howe: Glad to hear that, that it worked okay for you, Josh.
[00:20:36] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, my brother is in the Navy and he knows a lot about naval history, so I'm going to send him a copy of the book and see what he thinks of it. I think he'll get a kick out of it like I did.
[00:20:50] Katherine Howe: I hope so.
[00:20:52] Sarah Jack: And it allowed for us to really, as you said, experience her introduction to what she was going to [00:21:00] have to do to cope on that vessel and work. And As you can even hear in the very introduction of your book, you take us right into who Hannah Masury is. We start to learn the details about her. Who is Hannah?
[00:21:17] Katherine Howe: So Hannah Masury is, in the book, she's in her late teens. She was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, but she doesn't really remember any of her early childhood, because from when she was very small, she, it's hazy what her family situation was, but it's clear that wherever she was living, she, her parents couldn't afford to keep her, which was not unusual at that time.
[00:21:42] Katherine Howe: And so she's given to a distant relative of her mother's, and she doesn't remember if it's an aunt or a cousin, it's some kinswoman, some like long, long distance family member named Mrs. Tomlinson, who runs this inn, Ship Tavern. And Mrs. Tomlinson we understand has 13 kids, and it's a [00:22:00] boisterous kind of place.
[00:22:01] Katherine Howe: And Ship Tavern, most of their customers are Men who are sailors, who have just come rolling into town and need a place to stay, and not unlike Treasure Island, which opens in an inn, so the first, the character in Treasure Island is Jim Hawkins, and he is working in the Admiral Benbow Inn, and so I had Hannah begin her working life in a seafaring inn, which is when she first starts to encounter some of the pirate life, and similarly to early scenes, for example, in Moby Dick, you know, There's a lot of scenes there opening in where Ishmael meets Queequeg because they have to share a bunk. Because in many of these places it was very crowded and you would have to sleep in shifts or sleep two sailors to a bed head to foot or things like that.
[00:22:44] Katherine Howe: So one thing I wanted to explore a bit was the kind of, once again, I think when we look at the past we have a tendency to look at the way people with wealth lived. And it's partly because the material culture of people with wealth was more likely to [00:23:00] survive. We have a greater picture, we have a greater imagination of what a grand house might be like. House museums tend to preserve a higher class level of living. And I wanted to try to explore what was a more common way of living in around 1726.
[00:23:17] Katherine Howe: And so Hannah's days were organized by her work. She's a girl of all work. She has to wait at tables and scrub things and clean things and empty the chamber pots and do all those nasty things that she wouldn't want to do. But she also has friends who are like her. She has like girls that she hangs out with who are in similar circumstances.
[00:23:37] Katherine Howe: And early on she, she sneaks out of the inn after her mistress has told her she can't go to William Fly's hanging. She had seen them at church, because the pirates had been brought to church to be preached at by Cotton Mather, who was trying to bring them back publicly to repent. There are sins of swearing and whoring and disobedience.[00:24:00]
[00:24:00] Katherine Howe: And so it was, there was really in this time period, a unified perspective between religious leadership and government leadership to try to ensure compliance and obedience. And one of the things that I found so moving and striking about it was that in, in William Fly, Hannah sees someone who refuses to comply, who refuses to bend to what authority demands of him.
[00:24:29] Katherine Howe: And that is the moment that invites her own refusal of the circumstances in which she's living. And as she goes on her adventure, she ends up having to disguise herself as a boy, as a cabin boy, to go on this ship. And there are ways that I deal with objections, like why it might seem difficult for a girl to make it like she was a boy on in this time period, but I think it's actually quite credible, the more you think about it, the more you know about what the body would have been like after a [00:25:00] lifetime of work and after a lifetime of insufficient nourishment and things like that. And so we watch her come into herself or come into being as. As the more time she spends on the fruit packet, which we think is called the Reporter, but then is revealed to have actually been a ship called the Fancy, we watch her come into herself. She starts to learn what she's doing. She starts to learn her way around. She does things that she would never have imagined herself doing. At the beginning of the story, we see her steal a mug from a drunk person who is in her tavern, who drives her crazy. And at one point, that's the worst crime she's ever committed in her life. And then, within a few months, she committed crimes she never thought that she could possibly have imagined.
[00:25:45] Katherine Howe: And so one thing that I liked thinking about with Hannah was, not that she's proud of everything that she's done. She's still a moral being. But it's also an examination of what happens to our moral systems based on the circumstances in which we [00:26:00] find ourselves. In some context, morality is a luxury. And so I wanted to look at what it would be like, not to write an anti hero exactly, but to write someone who does things that we personally might find horrifying or objectionable, but to write it in such a way that we not only understand why she does them, but actually sympathize with her choices that she's made. I'm being a little bit deliberately vague, because I don't wanna give too many things away. And in the end, I also don't wanna give away the matter of what happens in the end.
[00:26:33] Katherine Howe: But suffice it to say, I also have fun with the pirate tropes. There's definitely a parrot, there's definitely a guy with one leg, there's definitely treasure, because you can't have a pirate story without a parrot, you've got one leg, and treasure.
[00:26:47] Katherine Howe: And one of the other things that is fun for me in this book, in A True Account and which you can see in the title, A True Account: Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pirates, Written by Herself, is the question of what is true?[00:27:00] Can something be emotionally true, but factually false? What does it mean to have a relationship between truth and fiction?
[00:27:08] Katherine Howe: And there's an ongoing debate about authorship and and authority, and who is writing what in the course of this story, and who is reading what in the course of this story. I get a little bit meta, but hopefully not in an exhausting kind of way. But as someone who is a historian who writes fiction, these are issues that I think about all the time, especially knitting together things that really happen, like William Fly's trial, I actually take pretty much verbatim from the trial transcripts. So all the discourse that happens on when William Fly is hanged, I didn't make it up. It's what people actually said. And Hannah herself is based on some historical antecedents, but she herself is a fictional character. So what does it mean if I'm braiding those things together?
[00:27:55] Josh Hutchinson: She's such a rich character, how hard has it been for [00:28:00] you to wait to be able to introduce her to the world?
[00:28:04] Katherine Howe: I'm very, I feel very close to Hannah. I think I'm more emotionally involved with her than I have been with a lot of my protagonists. I'm still very emotionally involved with the protagonist in my first novel, Connie Goodwin, because I think it's not unusual to feel very close to your protagonist in your first novel and because she was so personal to me, but I feel very emotionally involved with Hannah. I feel protective of her, maybe because she's younger than me, by a lot actually now. But at the same time, I feel proud of her, and, and so I'm excited for people to meet her. I'm curious. I'm very curious what people are going to think. Also cause it's not usual for me to write someone who does despicable things, and Hannah definitely does some despicable things. But at the same time I feel, I don't know, proud of her. Is that the right word? I don't even know. It's a little unusual for me to still be as [00:29:00] emotionally bound up with a fictional character.
[00:29:04] Katherine Howe: It's a shame to say that you play favorites with your protagonists, but right now I'm definitely feeling, I'm very, I'm treasuring Hannah a little bit right now.
[00:29:12] Sarah Jack: What you did with presenting her and bringing us along and what she was experiencing is incredible. Even, even when she was like needing to rest, you like felt it with her. Is she going to get enough hours to recuperate? So I can see how you would feel so proud of her. As a reader, and you start to feel like, oh, maybe she's your friend, or you want her to be your friend. You want to know her more and more. So when she takes care of things, does things to move forward and take care of yourself, you're like, it's a role model in a way for determination and moving forward.
[00:29:54] Katherine Howe: Thank you. One thing that also comes up in this book, and a lot of my fiction [00:30:00] deals with the ways that gender roles constrain or enable things that we're able to do, that we're expected to do. And this book is a little bit unusual. A True Account is unusual in being pretty explicit about about gender roles, in part because Hannah makes such a conscious decision to disguise herself. She assumes a different identity, and that identity is of a different gender.
[00:30:25] Katherine Howe: And there's another character in the book, and I don't want to give it away, it's too much of a twist. There's another character in the book who has a similar kind of fraught relationship with her own gender, with her own sexuality, at a different moment in time.
[00:30:39] Katherine Howe: And so I wanted it to be a way for the story to talk about a different perspective on the kinds of strictures that are in place, historically, but I think in the present too, we're living through this really interesting moment where so many young people are rethinking what gender can mean and what it [00:31:00] should mean and what they want it to mean and taking control of it for themselves.
[00:31:04] Katherine Howe: And in some ways, I was looking for a historical lens through which to think through some of those same kinds of questions. And, so it's inevitably different and historically grounded and rooted in sources, but it is trying to be part of that conversation. I think I've been thinking a lot about gender roles throughout my fiction writing career. But this is a another way of looking at it, as well.
[00:31:29] Josh Hutchinson: You alluded to another character. As in your other works, this is a dual timeline narrative. What's the relationship of each timeline to the other? How do they, are they echoes of the same story?
[00:31:49] Katherine Howe: Yeah, again, I don't want to give too much away, but there is a mystery that is, that surrounds Hannah's story. And there is a [00:32:00] character who is looking at Hannah's story and is trying to figure out whether it is a true account or not. And which is one reason I was so wedded to the title, A True Account, because it is insisting on its own truth.
[00:32:13] Katherine Howe: And yet anything that is trying to insist on its own truth, I think you should automatically question whether or not it is true. And so there is a kind of a framing story. And in a similar way to Hannah looking at William Fly and taking him as an inspiration for a change that she makes in her life, I have a character who's looking at Hannah and who ends up taking some of Hannah into herself and thinking about ways that it can change what her life is going to look like. And again, I don't wanna give it too much away, 'cause there's a, there is a little bit of a twist involved. There is a relationship between those two.
[00:32:51] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I definitely don't want to give away the ending, so we won't even go within 50 miles of that. I'll just say that it's such a [00:33:00] good ending. Readers will be pleased with that. Take care in the way you wrap things up.
[00:33:07] Katherine Howe: Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, as usual, there are a couple of like local nonprofits I should probably like warn are in this book. I don't think the Beverly Historical Society has any idea that they're mentioned in this book, I should probably tell them as a courtesy.
[00:33:22] Josh Hutchinson: Oh yeah, and maybe they'll get some questions in there. Can we see Hannah's book?
[00:33:27] Josh Hutchinson: In addition to the dual timelines, you also do an artful job of weaving a lot of different story threads through. You've got people on a sort of a quest for independence and freedom, but there's the pirating that happens and there's other layers.
[00:33:50] Katherine Howe: One, one major character that Hannah meets, so Hannah ends up meeting some real people and some fictional people. One of the real people that Hannah meets is a guy named [00:34:00] Edward Low, who was one of, who was a real person who was based for a time in Boston in this period, and he was a real pirate, and he was a famously cruel one. He was the guy who, one of the best known kind of first person accounts of piracy in this period was actually written by a Marbleheader named Philip Ashton, who was a fisherman on the Grand Banks and who was captured by Ned Low and escaped. He ran away from him in an island in the Gulf of Honduras and ended up having to live on his own on an island before he hitched a ride home on a ship that was based out of Salem.
[00:34:37] Katherine Howe: And so we learn a lot about Ned Low's cruelty, and we get a lot of the details about life on board a pirate ship come from some of those sources. From that, we actually learned that Ned Low had a soft spot for dogs. That was true. And we learned that he refused to have married men in his crew, the [00:35:00] nominal reason being that that he felt that someone should be home with their family if they had a family, but practically, as Hannah comes to think to herself, that's, there's a less noble interpretation of it, and that is that somebody who is married has a reason not to fight, if they have something else to live for, they're not going to fight quite as hard. There are a couple of ways you can interpret Ned Lowe's perspective in that regard. So she meets Ned Lowe, and some of the details about pirating come from the truth of what happened with Ned Low and some of his raidings.
[00:35:34] Katherine Howe: And there's another character she meets who is a fictional character, but who is based on fact, and that character is a man named Seneca, who is a little bit older than Hannah, he's in his early twenties. And Seneca we gradually realize is a self-liberating person. He, we never really learn any of his backstory, but we do learn that he liberated himself from bondage and went pirating, and there are actually several examples of [00:36:00] men who took it upon themselves to flee a life in bondage and to take to the high seas in doing that.
[00:36:07] Katherine Howe: And in fact, one of the things that was so interesting to me in reading primary sources of piracy was the ways that there are so many more pirates of color than he would anticipate. In fact one of the most notorious North American pirates was Blackbeard, who was active in the Carolinas. And when he was finally taken off the coast of, I think it was Hatteras. When he was finally taken, half the crew who was with him were men of color. And in fact, there was a guy who was all set to, he was like, with, he had a flint and he was all set to blow up the gunpowder magazine and destroy the entire ship and himself out of loyalty to Blackbeard. And he was talked out of it by a guy who was like imprisoned nearby, "no, don't do it."
[00:36:50] Katherine Howe: And and it's interesting to me, because I think there's some ways in which pirates of color get overwritten if you look at a lot of pop culture, Pirates [00:37:00] of the Caribbean or whatever, every, everybody is white, but that's just not what it looked like. One of the things that was really interesting to me was to think about the way that pirate crews tended to be these mostly men of like of no country in a way, and so the crew that Hannah ends up joining are from all over the place. One of the characters that she deals with is a Spanish Creole from, who had lived in Louisiana and speaks French. One of the guys, originally from Marblehead, but it's been a lot of his time in St. Petersburg, because that's where he had ended up traveling. There, there were men from the west coast of Africa. There are men from the Caribbean. There are men who are native. There are men who are all different kinds of people. And so the thing that binds them all together is their will to self determination and perhaps a certain degree of brutality.
[00:37:49] Katherine Howe: But I was and still am very interested in the ocean as its own nation, and so one argument that the novel, that A True Account makes is [00:38:00] that it's like a different model of citizenship, in a way, that you are no longer bound to wherever you happen to have been born or even where you happen to have spent most of your time on land. You're bound to the articles you pledge yourself to live under, and you're bound to your shipmates.
[00:38:18] Katherine Howe: And one of the terms of art that I liked about piracy is the way that the collective of pirates would be called the people. The people choose this, the people elect the captain by popular acclaim, the people do this, people do that. And especially given this time period, in the early part of the 18th century, that idea of the people, of the polis, is such a unique and intoxicating idea, such a proto democratic idea, almost, that it's something that I was really interested to explore.
[00:38:49] Katherine Howe: And so Seneca ends up. We discovered that Seneca has named himself because he has cast off the name that was foisted upon him, and no one's allowed to use it. And so he has chosen [00:39:00] the name of a philosopher for himself, a Stoic, and when we first meet him, or when Hannah first meets him, she doesn't know what a philosopher is.
[00:39:08] Katherine Howe: And so I liked the idea. It was important to me to have a main character who was a person of color, who was a self liberating person, because that is a part of the history of piracy that I feel like hasn't been really sufficiently explored.
[00:39:23] Josh Hutchinson: The articles and the structure of how they organize themselves on the ship was, it's so radically different than what Hannah grew up with where she's got Mrs. Tomlinson being the authority figure, but then beyond Mrs. Tomlinson, there's the ministers and the magistrates.
[00:39:45] Katherine Howe: Everybody outranks Hannah in Boston in 1726. And so the moment that she discovers that when she's on a pirate ship, they all put their, they all sign the articles, which are loosely based, I think, on the [00:40:00] articles of war. But it is a list of rules that really existed that spelled out their obligations to each other, who the officers were and how much everyone would be paid, how much people would be paid in the event of their being maimed or otherwise hurt and offers specific outlined bonuses. So when she discovers that there's a special bonus, you get to choose the best arms on board if you are the first person to spot a prize that you end up taking. It's the first time that Hannah has ever really been in an incentive labor relationship, that where she actually has an incentive to, to apply herself and do what she's doing.
[00:40:38] Katherine Howe: And she throws herself into it very quickly. And we actually see how she is able to rise a little bit in the ranks from just being like a regular crew member to being rated able. Being an able seaman gives her like a greater sense of authority and purposefulness and belonging.
[00:40:57] Sarah Jack: When I read your [00:41:00] articles, I thought how enjoyable that must have been for you to create. And then I just, I felt like I was taking all your bait through the story. And the article that jumped out to me... You know, a few sentences after the articles, here you have Hannah grabbing onto that article. And I had already written a note for myself. Oh, this is my favorite one. We saw that as her in, know, one of her ends, one of her ways to get traction to her next step. So I really loved the articles. I loved picking one and then finding that I was following the crumbs. I was like, oh man.
[00:41:40] Katherine Howe: I'm glad. Yeah. Yeah. Hannah has freakish farsightedness, which is actually something that that I've given her for myself. There's not a whole lot of myself personally in Hannah, but I've always been farsighted. And particularly in one eye more than the others, which makes this bad for ball sports. So don't expect to throw a ball at me and have [00:42:00] me actually catch it. But can be handy when you're looking for something on the horizon.
[00:42:05] Katherine Howe: I will also mention as you can imagine, I did a lot of research for A True Account. And the fruit of that research, besides the novel itself, is that in February, I'm releasing an edited volume, The Penguin Book of Pirates for Penguin Classics. And it's going to be a primary source reader, basically like The Penguin Book of Witches.
[00:42:26] Katherine Howe: And it will include a lot of the original source materials that I read to fuel my imagination for a true account and for Hannah's adventure. And it starts in the 1500s and goes up through the Amistad, the case of the Amistad, which is in the 19th century, and I'm pretty excited for people to read that book. I think it's going to be really fun. And it also includes two excerpts from the most widespread fictional accounts of [00:43:00] pirates. One thing that's interesting to me, both as a historian, but also as obviously as a fiction writer is the way that, especially for something like piracy, the way that myth and fact can sometimes blur a little bit.
[00:43:13] Katherine Howe: So there are a few examples in The Penguin Book of Pirates that are not factual, but were so widely circulated that people mistook them for fact. And then it includes two excerpts, one from Peter and Wendy, the novel version of Peter Pan, which talks about Captain Hook. And the other is 'What I Heard in the Apple Barrel,' the chapter from Treasure Island where Jim learns that Long John Silver is actually the leader of a secret pirate crew.
[00:43:44] Katherine Howe: And it was fun to do those both, because those are both pirate stories we all know so intently, they're dramatized so much. And yet have you actually really gone back and really read them? For instance, Captain Hook [00:44:00] in Peter and Wendy, which is from 1911, we learned that he was a graduate of Eton.
[00:44:05] Katherine Howe: And so like a lot of Captain Hook's ridiculousness, like you picture him, this sort of Disney restoration flowing wig and then crazy, the crazy coat and everything. But his foppishness derives from an embedded class critique in Peter and Wendy beyond anything else.
[00:44:22] Katherine Howe: Or it's also interesting to me that there is actually an allusion in Peter and Wendy. Hook's nickname is Barbecue, or they talk about him going up against a pirate named Barbecue, and they're actually alluding to Long John Silver in Treasure Island. So they're like origin point, because Long John Silver's nickname is Barbecue in Treasure Island. So there is this intertextual aspect of even classic pirate lore, and that extends even into examples of actual piracy itself, because the generation of pirates who were active at the beginning of the 18th century, [00:45:00] like Edward Low or Blackbeard or some of these other guys that we know. They're actually a generation later then the first golden age generation of pirates from the 1680s, 1690s. So the guys who go pirating in the 1720s and teens have been hearing stories about the guys who were pirating in the 1680s and 1690s. So there's already this like meta aspect of even actual piracy.
[00:45:26] Katherine Howe: And in fact, one of the, one of the guys who's my favorite is he was the guy who was dramatized in Our Flag Means Death. So one of the guys who was an active pirate in Bermuda, I think it was, in the 1710s and 1720s, was a guy named Stede Bonnet, and Stede Bonnet is fascinating, because whereas usually men go pirating out of necessity or a desperation, Stede Bonnet is rich and decides he just feels like going pirating. He gets out a ship, he hires the crew, [00:46:00] he consciously chooses to leave his life as a wealthy plantation owner and go raiding on the high seas. And he likes to wear all red and red feathers, and there's this very self aware aspect to it that I thought was really, it was really fascinating. So that's one of the reasons that the story in a true account is very much engaged with questions of authorship and truth and fiction and the relationship between those things and what is, what counts as a trustworthy source when we're talking about piracy.
[00:46:37] Sarah Jack: What you do with your writing, your fiction writing, shows the power of historical fiction and why historical characters and fictional character representations of historical characters are so important.
[00:46:52] Katherine Howe: Thank you very much. I'm glad that you think so. I have a sort of a different approach to historical fiction, but I think it's mainly, I think it's largely rooted in being an [00:47:00] Americanist and being, as I said before, particularly interested in the kinds of stories or the kinds of histories that are largely overwritten by the archive or are harder to excavate from the archive, stories about regular people, stories about people who are not literate or are not otherwise remembered, people who maybe have dramatic and memorable lives, but maybe those lives are not written in, historical annals. And so I think that's my perspective as a historical fiction author.
[00:47:35] Katherine Howe: I'm not going to be writing any regency romances, I'm afraid. Although I do enjoy them, they are quite fun, but there's not going to be any court intrigue and no regency romance in my wheelhouse.

[00:47:48] Katherine Howe: Piracy, yes. Riots, absolutely.
[00:47:54] Josh Hutchinson: oh, wonderful, yeah,
[00:47:57] Sarah Jack: Yes.
[00:47:58] Katherine Howe: 100%.[00:48:00]
[00:48:01] Josh Hutchinson: I'm there for that,
[00:48:02] Katherine Howe: Yeah,
[00:48:02] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah I wanted to know if we could talk about Hannah's sexuality,
[00:48:08] Katherine Howe: Sure. Yeah,
[00:48:10] Josh Hutchinson: because You've mentioned a lot of the important themes in this story, but one of those is her quest for finding herself, and that's revealed partly through her sexuality.
[00:48:23] Katherine Howe: That's true. And yeah, writing Hannah as an explicitly sexual being, I'm, I tend to be a prude. And most of my fiction is very PG or PG 13. I tend to like, not have romantic scenes that much just because I don't think I'm very good at them. They're actually really hard to do well.
[00:48:43] Katherine Howe: And so Hannah is, for me, is a little bit of a departure in that she is so explicitly a sexual being. And one of the questions that I wanted to raise in thinking about her was, I think was the extent to which [00:49:00] she, because she operates because of her class status and because of her gender, she operates in a tense point between, on the one hand, she could be seen as sexually vulnerable, right? And there are moments in the course of the story where we see a picture of that vulnerability.
[00:49:22] Katherine Howe: Like at one point, she's, she's coming home from having sneaked off with her friends to watch William Fly's hanging, and she's on her way home and she doesn't want to go back to the inn because she's going to get in trouble for having sneaked out. And so she's hanging out in the street for a while by herself, but it's nighttime. But then she starts to attract attention because she is a young woman alone at night in the street, and she has to, and nothing happens in that moment, but I wanted to, us to be aware of what that choice would suggest about her.
[00:49:52] Katherine Howe: We don't get a full picture of, of her life, her tavern life, as she puts it. But, she, there is a [00:50:00] fluidity to her sexuality, also. She has a quasi-romantic relationship with one of her female friends. And she gives us to understand that she'll let people stop in her hayloft with her, but that it's her decision.
[00:50:15] Katherine Howe: And so on the one hand, she, within the context of her time, she is morally, like debased is too strong of a word, but she's not married. She is not a virgin. She is a sexual person, despite the fact that she's young and she's not married and she lives in this Calvinist, just post-Calvinist moment.
[00:50:37] Katherine Howe: But at the same time, I wanted to explore Hannah, the way that Hannah takes what could be a vulnerability and turns it into a source of power for her, a source of power, also a source of pleasure, because Hannah, in, in her life has so little of her own, right? So little of her own that she owns or that she can enjoy or that she can rely on or that [00:51:00] she can count on.
[00:51:00] Katherine Howe: She has no leisure to speak of. She has no time. She has no goods. She has very little comfort, but sexuality is a way that lots of people can find comfort or can find pleasure or can find freedom. And so I wanted to explore that a bit, and that comes into play in the pirate crew, as well.
[00:51:22] Katherine Howe: Because of course there you would think with a young, sexed person, in a crew only of, of men, there's an obvious question to be asked there. And Hannah does ask that question. She addresses that question. She's here's how I made up my mind that I'm going to deal with that eventuality or that possibility. And so I'm intrigued that you wanted to, that you wanted to ask about her sexuality because it is, there's at least one sort of scene of Hannah's sexuality being deployed.
[00:51:53] Katherine Howe: And it's not gratuitous, I don't think. I think it is important because it advances the plot in a way that the [00:52:00] plot has to advance. And of course there's an added risk of her discovery. And so that, that is part of what is at stake in the deployment of her sexuality later on in the story.
[00:52:11] Katherine Howe: But I think that's something that, that we all have to decide as we are, especially when we are in our coming of age, as it were, coming into ourselves, whether that happens in our teens, whether that happens later in life. Sometimes, as there's another character in the story who comes into her own sexuality and the deployment of her sexuality. She's at a later point in her life. But for whatever reason, this is the moment when it is happening for her. And so I wanted to make that an issue for Hannah that she had to, it is another arena for her to decide how she wants her life to be lived and how she wants to assert control over her life.
[00:52:52] Josh Hutchinson: And I think between the two eras that you choose, they're times of great sexual suppression, [00:53:00] and she's taking her independence from that.
[00:53:03] Katherine Howe: Yeah, but sexual suppression of a different kind. One thing that's interesting to think about, talking of like the colonial period, on the one hand, it was a time of sexual suppression, but on the other hand, it was also a time of sexual frankness. You would have shared rooms like a married couple would have, a kid sleeping on a trundle bed next to them and a baby in the bed next to them, right there. They're not waiting until everyone's at school. You know what I mean? They're not like, they're not waiting for date night. That's not a thing that happens. Like there was a greater, you know, there were no bathrooms. You'd go off into the corner and you'd use the pot and whatever.
[00:53:39] Katherine Howe: There was a different relationship between bodies in the late 17th and into the early 18th century than we have now. And it's partly because of the way that space was at a premium. There was a different sense of what privacy could look like at that time. Which I think is something that we forget, especially in [00:54:00] thinking about the kind of moral strictures under which Calvinists and just post-Calvinists were living.
[00:54:06] Katherine Howe: There's a weird tension between those two facts. Like there's the fact of bodies in everyday life, and there's also the fact of this like incredibly heavy, overbearing Christianity informing every aspect of everyday life. And then in the other time period that we're talking about, which is 1930, that is a slightly different time when there were, I don't want to go into too much detail about it because I don't want to give too much away from that timeline.
[00:54:33] Katherine Howe: But, it was also a time of changing sexual mores a bit, after the 1920s and into 1930, they're like, like laws were changing around sexuality to some extent, and the way that gender was performed or policed, depending on who you were and where you were and what time you were, was changing to some degree but not entirely. So it's a very different time.
[00:54:56] Katherine Howe: But both of those times are actually quite different from the time we're living in right this minute, [00:55:00] which is another thing that I think is worth considering that, we, all of these historical moments are so contingent on so many different factors and so many different things. And so things that we would assume as natural in one time period would seem profoundly unnatural in another.
[00:55:18] Josh Hutchinson: And you use that issue of privacy on, in Hannah's life on the ship also, where she's in disguise and can't be found out, but she has to share a head with dozens of men.
[00:55:32] Katherine Howe: I know.
[00:55:33] Josh Hutchinson: yeah,
[00:55:33] Josh Hutchinson: that gets a little awkward for a moment.
[00:55:36] Katherine Howe: Yeah. It's a little, it's a little bit awkward. At one point we address the question of of like her body and whether or not her body would give her away. And so even though she was 17 she was starving. So she was starving, and she'd spent her entire life undernourished.
[00:55:52] Katherine Howe: So she would have been skinny. She would have been almost wiry. She would not have had any body fat. Without enough body [00:56:00] fat, she wouldn't, she may have even never started menstruating, right, even at 17. She would not have had breasts to speak of. She, her body would have still looked not like a child, but like a young youth. I think her body would have read very differently.
[00:56:17] Katherine Howe: And so one thing that we, that I suggest in the story is that particularly in a time period where costume or clothing choice was so rigidly determined that if you saw someone dressed in britches and a blouse or a waistcoat, the assumption would be that you were looking at a male gendered person.
[00:56:40] Katherine Howe: That there, there was no like, oh, I feel like wearing shorts today, option, like I'm speaking to you in t shirt and shorts today, I'm wearing the exact same thing that like a 12 year old boy would wear potentially, but that simply wasn't the case in the 1720s, and so thinking about Hannah's body, but also what that [00:57:00] body would have looked like, like the way that poverty and that time period etches itself in the body in some ways independent from sex, arguably.
[00:57:10] Katherine Howe: And so that is part of how Hannah is able to be so persuasive in her disguise. And in fact, at one point I have a scene in the book where someone is looking at lots of paintings on the wall of sailors, and a lot of them are boys. And the character who's looking at them is starting, for the first time, thinks, oh, wait a minute. Are they boys? I don't know. Maybe they're not like part of it is, part of it is that you see what you expect to see.
[00:57:37] Sarah Jack: Yeah, I really enjoyed the lessons that you give about that in this story, throughout the story. I think that right now our society is grappling with that, why do we have to expect a specific, defined person. The youth and others are [00:58:00] teaching You can't count on that.
[00:58:03] Katherine Howe: Yeah. We're living through a really fascinating and exciting moment. And it's, I enjoy grappling with some of those questions in the way that I would being a, you know, a historian and a historical fiction person grappling with it and in a historically-informed way.
[00:58:20] Sarah Jack: Do we have time to talk about execution?
[00:58:22] Katherine Howe: We always have time to talk about execution. Are you kidding?
[00:58:25] Sarah Jack: I really like the parallel between the hangings of the pirates in Boston, and then you've got how the crews handle punishment.
[00:58:36] Katherine Howe: Yeah, that's true. That is also true. And this again, this goes back to the uses of terror. This is an argument that historian Marcus Rediker very generously gave me a quote for A True Account. I was really blown away that he would agree to do that. His work is very seminal to my thinking about pirates and piracy. And one of the big arguments that he has made is about the [00:59:00] role of terror in piracy. And that role was twofold. One was the terror that the pirates inflicted on the people that they were raiding. So it was actually, the threat of violence was actually their most effective tool, perhaps even more effective than the violence itself.
[00:59:19] Katherine Howe: And at one point in the course of a raid, we even learned that it's not out of, it's not unheard of for a ship to see pirates coming and just say, 'take it all, we give up,' because the threat of terror, A, and B, because of the role of insurance, actually. From a historiographic standpoint, thinking about insurance probably doesn't sound very exciting, but all the cargo that were raided by pirates, including human cargo, thank you very much, were all insured by insurance companies, and so in many cases, the mariners who are on board the ship, they have no interest in what is being taken from them. They, why would they lay their lives [01:00:00] down for a load of lumber and, or a load of breadfruit or whatever it is? Why would they lay their lives down for that when the insurance company is just going to make the syndicate whole anyway? That's the insurance company's problem. And of course, the insurance companies were then in a position to put pressure on governments to reduce the risks of piracy to maritime trade.
[01:00:19] Katherine Howe: But in many instances, the threat of violence was enough. And would give a reason for mariners to, to happily give up, not, maybe not happily, but to give up their goods. And and oftentimes if a mariner, for whatever reason, or a captain decided to fight the pirates off and was successful, I can point to at least one example of an insurance company actually rewarding the captain with a really nice silver tea service for defending their property. And so it was certainly in the insurance companies' interest for piracy to be suppressed.
[01:00:55] Katherine Howe: That being said, there's a scene where the Ned Lowe's crew [01:01:00] takes a small man of war, a small like Navy ship and hangs everybody up in the spars and in the rafters. And that was a not uncommon way of either murdering people or at times trying to torture them into getting information. So like you could hang somebody and then let them down and ask, 'okay, tell me where the goods really are,' hang them, let them down, 'no, really. I mean it', hang them, let them down because hanging, of course If it's the choking kind takes a little while.
[01:01:29] Katherine Howe: That's a grim way to think about it, but it's absolutely true. So you're right. There is a parallel, a visual parallel between the hangings of pirates at the beginning, the gibbeting of William Fly's body, the way that the state used terror to try to suppress piracy. And the ways that pirates used terror to try to get what they wanted, or the threat of terror to get what they wanted.
[01:01:54] Katherine Howe: And as I said, that argument, that sort of dual pronged uses of terror, twin uses of terror, was an [01:02:00] argument Marcus Rediker has made, not me. But which I think is a very persuasive and interesting argument, and is at work in some plot points in
[01:02:07] Sarah Jack: and it gave you then the opportunity to show the responses of the people who are experiencing the terror. And there are different ones.
[01:02:17] Katherine Howe: Yeah. There are some different ones. And yeah it's interesting because at the very, at the beginning, we see the responses to William Fly's gibbeting, particularly for Hannah, like the William Fly actually becomes kind of a recurring theme, almost like a Greek chorus in Hannah's ear a little bit, because she keeps thinking about him. She keeps turning her mind back to him. And because she was so horrified by the spectacle of his mutilated body. He had gone from being this very handsome man, who not much older than her, handsome, rebellious like playing to the crowd. One thing that William Fly really did do this, which is amazing, William Fly, he's on the scaffold, he's [01:03:00] about to be hanged, and he looks at the noose, and he says to the hangman, "don't you know your trade?" He unties the noose and reties it better, because he's a sailor and he knows how to tie knots. Which like, for my mind is ranked right up there with Sarah Good, "I'm no more witch than you are a wizard. And if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink," for badass things people have done on a scaffold. Things that I would be far too terrified and pipsqueaky to possibly contemplate. But he really did do that.
[01:03:28] Katherine Howe: And so there is both the way that Hannah experiences some kind of mixture of inspiration and love and pity when she sees what's done to William Fly that then turns into a kind of determination or rebellion.
[01:03:46] Katherine Howe: And then there is a different reaction later in the story to a pretty grotesque scene of hanging that causes a pretty pronounced change in how the plot is unfolding and in the group of pirates. [01:04:00] And it shows the different ways that terror can be brought to bear on individual people. .
[01:04:08] Katherine Howe: And for that matter, it's still also for anyone who spent as much time thinking about witches and witchcraft as I have, or as your listeners have, you can't help but think about the spectacle of the hangings at Salem too. That was also a method of the state employing strategies of terror to get compliance. It was the same thing, the same strategy. And the fact that the Salem Witches bodies were cut down and then chucked into a ravine and were not, that it's not gibbeting, but it's not that different. It's treating their bodies like, like trash instead of objects in which a soul used to dwell. And so in that sense, especially given the proximity of those events in time, the fact that Cotton Mather presided over both of them is, at least for me, certainly something that was in the back of my mind while writing those scenes.
[01:04:57] Josh Hutchinson: And since you've [01:05:00] written about both witches and pirates, have you detected any other similarities between the two?
[01:05:07] Katherine Howe: I think the biggest areas of similarity are, well, now that, thinking about it, in some respect, they're both economic crimes. And one of the things, and piracy ends up being suppressed and becomes less of an issue in the late 18th century and then resumes its role into the 19th century as the politics of the slave trade changes, and witchcraft recedes as a crime with the dawning of the consumer revolution in the 1730s, and so in that instance, of course with witchcraft it's like personal household level of crime, butter not coming together, beer going off, what have you. And with piracy it, the crime is perhaps on a larger scale, because it is being, it is against nations and [01:06:00] nations' economic interests, and therefore nations have an invested incentive to suppress it and to thwart it.
[01:06:07] Katherine Howe: But other than that, there it, there's a funny, there is a funny similarity to it. They're both essentially economic crime. They're essentially economic crimes that are controlled or suppressed with methods of terror. They are crimes that are perpetrated by working people, people without a lot of economic power, a lot of, or without a lot of social power. So in that sense, maybe there are some similarities, of course, and of course, but then you have to look at the way that they're gendered.
[01:06:36] Katherine Howe: But that has to do with the universe in which each crime is unfolding, because the universe of the witchcraft crime is a domestic universe. It is the domestic sphere. And the universe of piracy is a maritime universe, which is an almost entirely male space. So in a, maybe there is more points of commonality between those two than we've thought about up until this point.
[01:06:59] Katherine Howe: It's a good question, [01:07:00] Josh. I'm glad you asked.
[01:07:01] Sarah Jack: I had thought on the side a little bit, because you had me thinking so much about gender roles. And then I was thinking, I was like, Oh, look at this over here with the piracy. That's a lot of male. And then over here in, In New England, a lot of, female witch accusation. So that's interesting.
[01:07:20] Katherine Howe: yeah, it's interesting. I don't know that I have a a particular conclusion to draw, but it is intriguing to, to juxtapose those two sets of circumstances, those two sets of extreme people, like individual regular people in extreme circumstances are, that's an interesting juxtaposition.
[01:07:37] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, there's two sides of a coin, they're the female and male aspect of the supervillain, so to speak. They're menaces, and they terrorize communities.
[01:07:51] Katherine Howe: And anyone can be turned. Maybe there's another way to think about it, too, that you don't know who, who is going to, who will fall next. Who is going to, who will [01:08:00] resist like Philip Ashton and swim away to Roatan Island and camp out, and who will cave and sign the articles?
[01:08:05] Katherine Howe: And there's also a question of signing. You put, you, you put your mark on the articles just as you write your name in the devil's book. And I have actually the. The signature that I have Hannah use when she signs the article, she chooses a spiral, and because she's not literate at the time of the story. And she says she chooses it because of the pattern of stars that she sees in the night sky over her head.
[01:08:28] Katherine Howe: But actually, I chose that mark for her because it was one of the marks, one of the Salem girls made. One of the accusing girls made that mark, who wasn't It wasn't literate. I'm sure other people made that mark as well or chose that mark, but I, that is where I had seen that mark before.
[01:08:45] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, that's a powerful symbolism. You've certainly had a busy writing schedule and publishing schedule.
[01:08:57] Katherine Howe: I'm tired.
[01:08:58] Josh Hutchinson: Would you like to tell us anything [01:09:00] about Astor?
[01:09:01] Katherine Howe: So I have been, yeah it's a busy publishing season for me. On September the 19th, whatever that Tuesday is my next collaboration with Anderson Cooper is going to be published by Harper. It's called Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune, and like Vanderbilt, it is an unconventional look at the sweep of one person.
[01:09:27] Katherine Howe: It's about a major American family, but it also, it goes in a couple of unexpected directions, just as Vanderbilt did go in some unexpected directions. But it starts with John Jacob Astor, who immigrated first to Baltimore and then to New York from Germany, Waldorf, Germany, and became first a fur trader and then started making his money in Manhattan real estate.
[01:09:49] Katherine Howe: And then we go all the way up through the kind of conflagration that ended the Astor dynasty in New York, which was the trial of Brooke Astor's son, [01:10:00] Anthony Marshall, for elder abuse shortly after her death. And that was about 20 years ago, give or take. And in between, we have some really interesting waypoints, including an Astor being the most famous person who went down on Titanic and including some unexpected twists and turns.
[01:10:18] Katherine Howe: So we talk, we end up having a way of talking about the draft riots, which is the biggest race riot in New York city history that happened. If you saw Gangs of New York, actually, the movie, the Martin Scorsese movie. We just saw a dramatization of of, the draft riots. And we also touched on the Astor Place Riot, which happened before before the draft riots.
[01:10:37] Katherine Howe: And it looks like Vanderbilt. It looks at, What wealth can do to individuals, but it also looks at the unusual ways in which this one particular family have etched themselves into the American landscape in some regards. And I think it's going to be pretty fun. It's meant to be like an episodic history, easy to dip into and out of. You can read a [01:11:00] chapter at a time, very meant to be very readable. And if you're at all interested in the Gilded Age or in New York or riots, it's a pretty great read, and I'm really proud of it. And so that'll be out in September. And A True Account: Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pirates, Written by Herself comes out on November the 21st.
[01:11:20] Katherine Howe: I have to say as a native Texan where there, there is an independent bookstore on the front lines of attempts to ban books in schools for teenagers. Shout out to Blue Willow Books for all that they're doing. I think it's very important. We actually can't really overstate how important independent bookstores are for free reading. And so I would really encourage readers who are listening to this to support their independent bookstore and their local library that way.
[01:11:45] Katherine Howe: A True Account will be out on November the 21st, which is the Tuesday right before Thanksgiving. And I'm gonna be doing a couple of events that week, and then also the following week, which you can find out about on my website katherinehowe.com/events, [01:12:00] or on my Twitter, where I'm still, strangely, on Twitter, @katherinebhowe, or on Instagram which I have a little bit more fun, and there's lots of sailing pictures there, too, which is also @katherinebhowe and then The Penguin Book of Pirates will come out in February, on February 6th. So it's going to be a piratey winter in my household, and maybe then I'll have a vacation.
[01:12:23] Sarah Jack: Good. So is that what's next for you? Some
[01:12:27] Katherine Howe: We'll see I, I have, I'm already have an idea or two for a couple of novels that I would like to work on next. I think one of them might be a New York City, It's a little bit, because I've been spending so much time thinking about New York in the 19th century riot era New York, I might find that a fun time to write about, and we'll see if Anderson and I can come up with another collaboration. I think it would be fun to do, and I have a, an idea where that might go, but we'll have to see what his schedule looks like for that as well.
[01:12:55] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I know Vanderbilt is such a great book.[01:13:00] Looking forward to reading Astor.
[01:13:02] Katherine Howe: We're really proud of Astor. I think it's pretty great, and I think it's a little bit. As I say, we try to have a more critical view of history. So it's not like a straight up celebration of wealth and splendor book. There's plenty of wealth and splendor, but there's also some the other side of the coin as well, as you might expect from anything I'm involved with.
[01:13:23] Katherine Howe: Yeah. Gotta have riots. Riots.
[01:13:27] Josh Hutchinson: How can you have a book without a riot?
[01:13:29] Katherine Howe: How can you have a book about a riot? Is it even possible? Is it a book if there's no riot?
[01:13:33] Katherine Howe: Oh, that's what's up for me.
[01:13:36] Josh Hutchinson: Oh, that's awesome. Congratulations on all your successes.
[01:13:42] Katherine Howe: Thank you so much. And thank you so much for inviting me back on on your podcast. I've had such a pleasure. Such a great time visiting with you both.
[01:13:50] Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
[01:13:52] Mary-Louise Bingham: Dr. Charu WaliKhanna welcomed me from India in September with a smile and [01:14:00] namaste before we chatted about ongoing witch hunts. She is a Supreme Court lawyer specializing in women's rights. Dr. WaliKhanna educates on accusations against tribal, single, elderly, or widowed women who inherit or own their land. A related family will call her a Daian, the Indian term for witch. The family will kick her off her land, if she is not killed first. There is no centralized anti-witch-hunting law in India. However, there are varying anti-witch-hunting laws in different states, the strictest in the state of Assam. Anyone who accuses another as a dayan in Assam and the accused is murdered will go to trial with no possibility of being released on bail and could face seven years to life in jail.
[01:14:46] Mary-Louise Bingham: Watch Dr. WaliKhanna's interview in the video, Witch Hunting in the 21st Century. Read her book, Law on Violence Against Women. Thank you for your voice, Charu WaliKhanna.
[01:14:59] Sarah Jack: Thank [01:15:00] you, Mary.
[01:15:01] Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
[01:15:04] 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, especially with Giving Tuesday right around the corner. We have donate buttons on our websites.
[01:15:46] Sarah Jack: Our latest historical justice initiative, the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project, is dedicated to securing formal exoneration for those wrongly convicted as witches in Boston. We are also seeking a formal apology for all documented victims of the [01:16:00] Massachusetts Colony Witch Trials. Each of these individuals has a story of innocence, injustice, and consequences due to false accusations. You can make a difference immediately by signing and sharing the petition. Do so now at change.org/witchtrials.
[01:16:16] Sarah Jack: 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.
[01:16:43] Sarah Jack: This holiday season, as you gather with friends and family, consider sparking friendly conversations about social issues, like the historical and modern implications of witch hunts. While it requires a thoughtful and respectful approach, discussing such topics within your community can be both enriching and eye opening.
[01:16:59] Sarah Jack: [01:17:00] Here's a guide to initiating a positive dialogue. Identify shared interests and experiences. Begin by finding common ground. Try asking about their podcast or reading preferences. Creating a comfortable sharing atmosphere before diving into more substantial topics. Lead with basic information, starting the topic with an informative comment, such as, 'I've recently been learning about historical and modern witch hunts.' This statement naturally invites a response and opens the door to a relaxed and friendly chat about the realities of witch hunting. Share a specific element. Choose one aspect of witch hunts that you find intriguing or important and share it casually. Whether it's a historical fact about witchcraft trials, or your interest in learning about modern violence related to witchcraft accusations, keep it simple and factual. Bring up a favorite book, podcast episode, share about relevant online resources like our website. This approach helps ease into the topic and fosters a more comfortable environment for such a layered social issue. Respect diverse perspectives, [01:18:00] especially around celebrations and get togethers with loved ones. Accept that people have diverse perspectives on social issues.
[01:18:07] Sarah Jack: Recommend additional resources. If the conversation flows smoothly and your friend or family member expresses interest, recommend additional resources on modern witch hunts. This could include documentaries, articles, more podcast episodes, or other educational materials. Always be mindful of comfort levels. Pay attention to cues from your conversation partner. If they seem disinterested or uncomfortable, respect their boundaries and avoid pushing more information. You've already successfully introduced the topic and created awareness. They may take time to think about and process what you introduced them to. Let them decide to learn more.
[01:18:40] Sarah Jack: May our suggestions serve as inspiration for you as you craft your unique approach to navigating social issue conversations. This holiday season, aim to enrich your personal growth by fostering understanding and by seeking meaningful connections, successfully weaving the social significance of witch hunting into your conversations is undoubtedly a triumph. [01:19:00] However, when you dedicate effort to learn more about those around you, recognizing their perspectives and experiences, consider that a victory as well. Whether you immerse yourself in thought provoking discussions about witch trials or focus on finding connections, both avenues actively contribute to richer social interactions.
[01:19:16] Sarah Jack: 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.
[01:19:28] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah,
[01:19:30] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[01:19:32] Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial and Pirate Podcast.
[01:19:37] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[01:19:39] Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:19:43] Sarah Jack: Visit ThouShaltNotSuffer.com.
[01:19:45] Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell your friends about the show.
[01:19:48] Sarah Jack: Please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:19:52] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
[01:20:00]

November 23, 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

Colonial Earthquakes: Witchcraft or God’s Will? with Kathleen Langone

People Hidden in History Podcast

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Show Notes

Kathleen Langone of the People Hidden in History podcast speaks with us about colonial New England Earthquakes before the 19th century as signs from God. We discussed several historic earthquakes and the colonists’ reactions. What did the ministers and other leaders have to say about the tremors? Were earthquakes acts of witchcraft or acts of God? What providences were considered acts of witchcraft?

Interview with Greater Boston, Josh Hutchinson, and Dr. Emerson Baker (at 15:38)

Preservation Connecticut Presentation: Sarah Jack and Josh Hutchinson

Fox Live Now, Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack

Washington Post, Josh Hutchinson Interview

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

Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.

Transcript

[00:00:10] Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast, the show that asks the questions, why do we hunt witches? How do we hunt witches? And how do we stop hunting witches? I'm Josh Hutchinson.
[00:00:23] Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
[00:00:25] Josh Hutchinson: Today, we're speaking with Kathleen Langone, host of the People Hidden in History podcast, talking about colonial New England earthquakes as signs of God's wrath.
[00:00:34] Sarah Jack: How did the society respond to earthquakes differently than other misfortunes?
[00:00:46] Josh Hutchinson: And what did the ministers have to say about the potential meaning of the earthquakes?
[00:00:53] Sarah Jack: Kathleen Langone is the creator and host of People Hidden in History podcast. She enjoys telling people about history that isn't commonly known, or possibly people hidden in the shadows of the more famous. Be sure to check out her website, peoplehiddeninhistory.com, and find her on X to find out more about these hidden stories. .
Kathleen, we are so happy to have you join us today on our podcast. You've had us twice as guests to talk about witch trials. Thank you for coming.
[00:01:28] Kathleen Langone: I'm delighted to be on this series, and it was always fun to talk to you folks from my podcast series, and just briefly about my series, it's called People Hidden in History, and I cover very interesting but not well known people from the 1600s up through about the 1960s. And there are 20 episodes now, a few more to come. And these are, I would say, longer, more academic episodes, but I would love for some of your listeners to come over and listen to some of these podcasts. Thank you.
[00:02:00] Sarah Jack: I love your episodes. Our listeners will really enjoy hearing them and I just, your podcast has a special place in my heart ,because it was my first experience talking on a podcast and thank you for that.
[00:02:15] Kathleen Langone: You're welcome.
[00:02:18] Josh Hutchinson: And how did you come to have expertise in New England earthquakes?
[00:02:24] Kathleen Langone: It's an interesting story, folks. I actually had an undergraduate degree in earth science. I got that from the University of New Hampshire, and through a number of circumstances, I connected with New Hampshire Emergency Management, actually in the late 1980s. There was actually money coming into New England to do research on earthquakes, because various people realized in the United States Geologic Survey that there was a pretty extensive history of earthquakes, as we'll talk about, in the 1600s, 1700s, and there was some concern if these were to happen again that there'd be little preparation, in terms of emergency management. So they brought me in and actually hired me. I worked for a couple of different groups to do historical research on earthquakes, and I went through a lot of dusty library shelves and many interesting historical accounts. And that's really how it all started.
[00:03:21] Sarah Jack: At that time, the research would have been really like hands on. You would have been digging in archives and looking at actual documents for that information, not just jumping on the internet.
[00:03:35] Kathleen Langone: Yeah, that was very true. Back then, there was very little that had been scanned in and digitized, so many hours spent in libraries. And my thanks to the many generous librarians that let me hang out in their institutions.
[00:03:48] Sarah Jack: So have earthquakes become less common? They were more common hundreds of years ago. What's the situation on the frequency of earthquakes in New England?
[00:03:59] Kathleen Langone: That's a good question, because I think people today don't really perceive earthquakes as a threat to New England. They were really quite common in the 1600s, 1700s. And even recorded back to the 1500s. So if you look at the major events, there was a major earthquake in 1638, I think was recorded likely up in New Hampshire.
There were two major earthquakes in the 1700s. 1727, epicenter believed to be in Newbury, Massachusetts, which was in northeastern Massachusetts on the coast, and the 1755 earthquake, which was quite large, maybe the epicenter about 25 miles off the coast of Boston. And then there was a break of activity. And interestingly, there were no earthquakes of note during the Revolutionary War. I think had there been, this would have been much more prominent in history. Very little activity in the 1800s, then there were actually twin earthquakes up in Tamworth, New Hampshire in 1940, and not much since then.
[00:05:03] Josh Hutchinson: You talked about earthquakes in the 17th and 18th centuries. How would the colonists have responded to those? How would they have viewed that experience?
[00:05:16] Kathleen Langone: When I first started researching earthquakes, of course, I was aware of the witch trials in the 17th century, the 1600s, and I thought that these would have been attributed to, the devilish acts of these witches, and there was never a connection there. But these events were definitely seen as acts of a vengeful God. So many of these earthquakes created sermons, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So there was a definite division between what witchcraft could cause. They often would attribute things like diseases, stillbirths, dead livestock, things of that nature, to witchcraft, whereas earthquakes, maybe even hurricanes or things of that nature, were of this very powerful, vengeful god.
[00:06:02] Sarah Jack: And what do the ministers say about his vengeance or what was to follow? What kind of ideas or messages did they have for their churches?
[00:06:17] Kathleen Langone: I think that they almost welcomed these earthquakes, in a way, because to them it was a very clear message that people have sinned and to prevent them from sinning in the future. So these ministers would record these earthquakes, like I said, as acts of a vengeful God. And we'll talk about one minister, Cotton Mather, from 1727, and he's talking about the conditions just before the earthquake and then the earthquake occurring. And he says, "the air was never more calm, the sky never more fair, everything in all imaginable tranquility." But then he says, "was heard in Boston, passing from one end of town to another, a horrid rumbling."
And let's talk back to 1638. There's a recording from William Bradford, second governor of Plymouth Colony, and this passage was actually written at a time when they were having meetings. The town fathers were meeting about actually expelling some people who were not adhering to whatever the laws were of the community, and during this meeting, the 1638 earthquake occurred, and it states, "as if the Lord would hereby show the signs of his displeasure." So in other words, if earthquake was seen as justification for them having this meeting to expel these people.
[00:07:43] Josh Hutchinson: That's really remarkable timing, the 1638 earthquake happening while you're making a weighty decision. I would definitely see them, how you would interpret that as being a sign of what you're supposed to do.
[00:08:01] Kathleen Langone: I would like to mention another recording from the 1638 earthquake. At the time that occurred, the famous Anne Hutchinson that we know ran up against Governor John Winthrop, et cetera. She, in a sense, had been expelled. She was down in Rhode Island at this point, and she was having a meeting, a religious meeting, if you will, at her home. And when the earthquake occurred, from her perspective, it was almost a justification that she was where she was, that it's good that she was no longer up in Massachusetts. So to her, it was a positive sign. And in a couple of weeks, I hope to have a podcast out on Anne Hutchinson. I've recorded it. I'm still editing it, but that's going to be an interesting story that I think you two will enjoy also.
[00:08:46] Josh Hutchinson: I'm really looking forward to that. There's some witchcraft implications in the case of Anne Hutchinson and her associates, the midwives for bearing the children with congenital disorders that they deemed the monster birth, to use the term of the day. Yeah, and John Winthrop even called one of Anne Hutchinson's friends a witch.
[00:09:20] Kathleen Langone: Exactly, Josh, she did have a monster birth. Sadly, I think when the various trials were going around, she was still in Boston. She did have basically a deformed baby that died, and I'm sure that they pounced on that.

[00:09:33] Kathleen Langone: Now in addition to earthquakes, there were some other odd phenomenon that happened in New England. In 1780, though, much later, there was something called a dark day, and this was attributed, they understand now, to these massive forest fires in Canada, which of course we're very familiar with this year, bringing over these huge clouds of smoke and it's stalling over New England. You can have one of these thermal inversions where the air just doesn't move off to the coast. And there was a minister in Connecticut that actually labeled this as a sign of a judgment day that had come across his community. And, you know, I think that's a very strong statement to actually call this a judgment day. So again, earthquakes and some other less easily explained phenomenon were seen as acts of God.

[00:10:24] Sarah Jack: Some of the other things that impacted the colonists, you wouldn't necessarily feel it, you might see it or hear it, and with an earthquake, you've got all your senses being pulled into it. I think how powerful that must have felt to them.
[00:10:41] Kathleen Langone: Well, I think, following up on what you said, the fearful colonists, I think would want to hear from their ministers, because they would see this as an act of God. They would like to hear that confirmed by the ministers, or maybe know in ways that they can repent.
So not only was there shaking of houses and everything, there was an odd phenomenon occurred with the 1755 earthquake called earthquake lights that was even more frightening. So in New England, there's a lot of granite. We all know about granite in New England. And when these earthquake waves would come through, and if they were intense enough, they would actually compress the granite and the quartz in the granite would emit sparks or lights. So in the middle of this earthquake, they would actually see lights skitter across the ground. It was recorded as a blue light, and that's even more fearful. And again, an example of something that would not be explained and be very fearful.
[00:11:37] Sarah Jack: How powerful.
[00:11:39] Kathleen Langone: So I just want to bring up a more humorous aspect of a minister talking about the 1755 earthquake. This is Reverend Phillips from Andover, Massachusetts. And I guess before the November 1755 earthquake, there'd been a lot of people who fell asleep in his sermons. And of course he would rebuke them, etc. And after the 1755 earthquake occurred, he was able to say, you better not sleep now, because God's pretty upset with you. And people stayed awake for a while in his sermons.
[00:12:09] Sarah Jack: Nobody wants to get rapped on their shoulder for dozing off in a service or class, but how even more upsetting to be rattled by God's hand on an earthquake.
[00:12:24] Kathleen Langone: And I think those sermons back then, Sarah, were a couple of hours. They weren't like the nice sweet and short ones we have now at 45 minutes. These were a couple of hours. So I probably would have fallen asleep, too.
[00:12:34] Josh Hutchinson: They would hold two a day on Sundays. You'd go for morning service, break for a long lunch, and then go back in the evening. And sometimes the evening service, it would be so dark in there that you could hardly see the minister. But these are long hours that you're putting in an uncomfortable wooden bench in a building that's either too hot or too cold. It's rarely just right inside one of those buildings.
Was an earthquake always a sign of God's displeasure?
[00:13:12] Kathleen Langone: It mostly Josh, for the earlier earthquakes. By 1755, you had some other trends coming in. This coincided with the Age of Enlightenment from Europe, a lot of new scientific thought coming out, trying to explain things in the world with rational scientific explanations. So there were scientists at that time in Boston who were trying to explain these earthquakes by other means.
There was John Winthrop, a scientist from Harvard, that said these earthquakes could be occurred by strange vapors that might explode underground. And he published his theories on that. There were even theories that Ben Franklin's lightning rods were causing these earthquakes, and you could think of conducting that energy through the lightning rod and the house into the ground causing earthquakes, which of course was not the case.
But these more rational thoughts were not met very well by the ministers, because that would take away their messaging that this was a vengeful god, so there was actually conflicts back and forth between some of the Harvard scientists and the ministers at the time.
[00:14:20] Josh Hutchinson: Were there actions or maybe a set of actions that ministers would take following a sign like an earthquake? Would they, their messaging change? What would they be pushing for to happen as a response?
[00:14:39] Kathleen Langone: They would like some sort of sign of repentance from the parishioners, and there were these fast days called where they would be asked to fast for a day. I know for the 1755 earthquake, there were broadsides, basically posters that were posted in and around Boston saying that people should lead a less sinful life, etc. These fast days were very real.
There were also more frequent sermons and meetings held at the churches. And it's funny what happened with these earthquakes, with any earthquake, of course, there would often be aftershocks. So you'd have your primary shock, and people think it's over. I'll repent. I'll be a good Christian. But then the aftershocks kept coming, and they would think God's still looking at me. I better not sin. And what happened as the aftershocks would decrease with frequency, people would be less apt to go to church. So you'd see this great uptick of people going to the sermons and even though the ministers would keep wanting them to go to church and have more frequent services, the attendance fell down when the aftershock stopped.
[00:15:43] Josh Hutchinson: It's like they had a sense of urgency while the earth was still rumbling, that you let your guard down afterwards.
[00:15:53] Kathleen Langone: And it was to their advantage, really, because it supported their word. Now one other thing I would like to mention of the 1755 earthquake, a few weeks before that earthquake, so the Boston earthquake was November 18th. On November 1st was the very famous Lisbon earthquake that was far more violent and damaging, many people died in that earthquake. It leveled Lisbon. There was a tsunami, all of these various effects. But you have to realize the news of that earthquake reached New England literally right after their earthquake, so if you're thinking of a vengeful god, this would have been even more profound and frightening, because not only did he shake up New England, he shook up Europe, so at that time, they would have thought God was very upset with mankind, and an interesting literary note about the Lisbon earthquake, it was mentioned in the book Candide by Voltaire, And it was an example of how life can turn very horrible, even though you think life is good and God is good, there can be very severe consequences.
[00:16:57] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, so other earthquakes happening in other places, the news of that must also have shaken things up, excuse the pun, in New England for as far as the them interpreting signs of God's displeasure. Hearing of earthquakes in other places must have also affected them.
[00:17:21] Kathleen Langone: Very much and again, I think it, it supported those who saw as a religious angle on this with a vengeful God. It further supported that without question.
[00:17:31] Josh Hutchinson: I know denominations, Catholics and Protestants and Puritans and Anglicans, often used natural disasters politically against each other. Did you ever see anything where say the New England ministers, there was an earthquake, maybe in a Catholic territory, and they pounced on that as a sign that God was unhappy with the Catholics?
[00:17:59] Kathleen Langone: It's interesting that you say that. Because, obviously, Lisbon was predominantly Catholic, and sadly, there were hundreds of lives lost. The number might have even been higher, so the Calvinists and the Puritans in New England might have seen that God was very directly vengeful by killing all those people. Because, if you look at some of the sermons out of Boston of 1755 Earthquake, they cite, a very powerful, vengeful God, but then maybe a kind God in that nobody died in that earthquake or any of the previous earthquakes. So it could be an example that he was directly punishing the Catholics. So you might have a point there.
[00:18:41] Josh Hutchinson: I didn't realize nobody, nobody died in those New England earthquakes. That is quite remarkable.
[00:18:49] Kathleen Langone: Let me follow up on that, because there's a saying among seismologists, "earthquakes don't kill people, buildings kill people." Because if you're just standing out in a field, and even if it's a severe earthquake, at most you're just going to be knocked down. So if you think of the structures up until 1755, they were post and beam. And when earthquakes would come through to these post and beam homes, they could shake and creak a little bit, but they didn't necessarily collapse, because there was some give given the construction.
In Boston, by 1755, there were a number of brick buildings, and they didn't completely collapse, but definitely there were bricks littering the streets, but still nobody got killed. And you didn't have highway overpasses, you didn't have large, metal bridges. So the things that killed people now simply weren't present back then.
[00:19:41] Josh Hutchinson: I imagine in Lisbon, you had more stone buildings in an established older European city.
[00:19:49] Kathleen Langone: I think that would have been very true, and if you ever read the accounts of that earthquake, it was especially nasty.
[00:19:57] Sarah Jack: Kathleen, we don't have a lot of extra information on the Jamaica earthquake. We saw that Marilynne Roach mentions it in her Day by Day Chronicle, when it happened.
[00:20:10] Kathleen Langone: I can tell you I know what the physical effects were. It was on one end of the Jamaica Island, and it was a pretty nasty earthquake. Part of the land actually subsided into the ocean, and the land there became like quicksand, and I have an account, it's a little bit gruesome, but it's a realistic account.
Some people who were walking around as this land began to subside, it became wet, it became like quicksand, and people were actually trapped in the land to the point where just maybe their head was above, and nobody could pull them out. And then actually dogs came around and actually ate some of these people. I know that sounds horrible, but it was pretty gruesome.
[00:20:55] Josh Hutchinson: Samuel Sewell mentioned it in his diary in 1692, and so it had some relevance with Salem witchcraft crisis going on. There was a belief that there was a diabolical conspiracy against the Puritans, against their mission in New England. They had warfare going on with the French Catholics and the Native Americans, who they considered to be pagans.
So they thought that they were being surrounded on all sides by the devil trying to tear down Christ's church. And I know that it was recorded that they did take some solace in that, with the Jamaica earthquake, as terrible as it was, the Puritan minister survived, and no New England vessels were lost in that earthquake. So they took that as solace, but they were still deeply concerned of what the earthquake itself meant.
[00:22:05] Kathleen Langone: Yeah, that's an interesting comment. And again, it goes to the examples where no one died in the New England earthquake. So again, it was a vengeful God, but he spared lives. And I do want to talk a little bit about the 1755 earthquake again. That was during the height of the French Indian War. And a number of accounts are in the accounts of the war, et cetera. So they do mention that earthquake. So it was recorded in journals, if you will, of the French Indian War.
[00:22:39] Josh Hutchinson: That's fascinating how you seem sometimes to have these events compounding, there's just one thing on top of another, and that really gets you wondering, what is this a sign of? Is this maybe the end times?
[00:22:57] Kathleen Langone: Exactly.
[00:22:59] Sarah Jack: You mentioned the dogs at the Jamaica disaster. I was curious if you got to see any other information about animals responses, or if anybody talked about behavior, animal behavior in relation to earthquakes.
[00:23:18] Kathleen Langone: Very good question. There were often recordings of dogs howling just before earthquakes. There's even been some scientific study on that, that before you have the ground motion, there could be some sort of very high frequency waves that can come through an area that animals pick up on. It's been documented many times that dogs and other animals will howl or become restless within a few minutes of an earthquake.
[00:23:44] Sarah Jack: I was also wondering with the fishing, if anybody reported an effect on their fishing.
[00:23:52] Kathleen Langone: There was an account with the 1755 earthquake from a ship that was off the coast of Boston, that just after the earthquake, they saw this huge upwelling of dead fish. It might have been some sort of compression of the water waves that might have killed a school of fish, so there was a recording of that.
[00:24:12] Josh Hutchinson: Wow, that is fascinating. You mentioned tsunamis in regards to the Lisbon earthquake. Was there ever a report of a tsunami or anything to that effect in New England?
[00:24:27] Kathleen Langone: There were not. It just happened to be with the angle that these earthquakes occurred, if you will. There's no recordings of that per se. There are recordings of land subsidence, maybe not huge chasms in the earth, but there were recordings of certain areas of land that became depressed. And there was another effect that I'll mention, what happened in the Jamaica earthquake. If you have certain kinds of sandy soil ,and if it's moist, it can become like quicksand. There were incidences of land that would just depress. You might have a hole where the sandy soil was. You might have some trees tilt over, if they were rooted in this sort of soil. There were many accounts of that.
In fact, what scientists do now, and in present time, they might go to an area that they suspect had this kind of soil. And they would take samples, they would take these ground corings, and they would see through the levels of the sand or the clay or whatever, these explosions, if you will, they're called sand blasts or sand blows. So that would have occurred, and that's a great marker when people do research, because if you have these, you have to have an earthquake of magnitude at least five or above.
And let me digress for a moment and talk about the magnitude of these various earthquakes, just to give people a reference. The 1638 could have been a very powerful earthquake, maybe 6.8 on the Richter scale. The one in 1727 in Newbury, Massachusetts, maybe a little less, maybe a 5.7 or 5.8 on the Richter scale. The Boston earthquake could have been as powerful as a 6.1 or 6.3 on a Richter scale. And do remember that the Richter scale is logarithmic, simply meaning that if you go from a 6.1 or 6.2, it's a pretty large jump. So it just gives you an idea of the magnitude of these quakes. They were quite appreciable.
[00:26:24] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, 6.8, in modern times with modern structures, would be devastating.
[00:26:33] Kathleen Langone: Most certainly. And there's certainly a lot of predictive models that say these earthquakes will come back, and they will at some point. I don't know if they'll be in our lifetime, but they easily could occur again. And just to give some explanation of how these earthquakes occur, there are no active fault lines that we have here. We're very familiar with the San Andreas Fault in California, etc. But these are called intraplate earthquakes, so they're in between the spreading zones. So you think of the Mid Atlantic Ridge, which you might be familiar with, where you have the earth being formed and the crust sort of pushing both against the North American continent and towards Europe. So as this pressure keeps happening, something has to happen. It's like the middle of a graham cracker cracking, if you will. So this pressure comes into New England and old faults from many eons ago are basically activated, and you have these earthquakes.
[00:27:29] Josh Hutchinson: I didn't know that type of earthquake existed. I was thinking there must, surely there must be a fault. I live out in the West, so I'm much more familiar with the California earthquakes. I've experienced a couple of those. And knowing that there's activity in the middle of a plate, that's brand new.
[00:27:51] Kathleen Langone: Yeah, there is, because all these crusts, you put enough pressure on anything like that, and it's going to crack at some point.
[00:27:58] Sarah Jack: At what point would have they started reflecting on these scientifically, putting data together, would it always have been looking back to get information, or I'm just curious, when you have Governor Winthrop reporting what he saw and what the experience, when did the documenting become more scientific?
[00:28:24] Kathleen Langone: I think that you have to look at the rise of science of geology. I think geology came into its own more so in the 1800s, and maybe there was more scientific recording, etc. So back, I believe in the 1970s, there were seismic networks set up throughout New England and Southern Canada, seismographs, of course. And now we have Weston Observatory, which is basically an earthquake observatory in Weston, Massachusetts. They're associated with Boston College, and they're, if you think of it, a major monitoring station and their instruments will pick up anything in New England, as a matter of fact, anything from around the world. So there's quite a sophisticated network set up now, but I think that's really recent, in the last 60 or 70 years. I don't think there was much monitoring formally done before then.
[00:29:17] Josh Hutchinson: And how are these magnitudes of historic earthquakes, how is the magnitude calculated?
[00:29:26] Kathleen Langone: Very good question. Of course, back then, you know, in the 1600s and 1700s, you didn't have the concept of a Richter scale. You had a scale, which we now call the modified Mercalli scale, and that is a scale of felt effects. And I'll give you an example, back to colonial times. If you had, let's say, a pewter goblet fall off the table, that might be a magnitude like a Richter scale four or something like this. So a lot of these reports and what people like myself and many others did, they would record all of these physical effects and say, okay, if I've had a collapse of a chimney, that's maybe at least Richter five. So you would map these physical effects to what that would map into the modern day Richter scale.
And it's funny back then, because if we think of an earthquake coming through, we might say it would sound like a jet coming by or a train, but back then it was carriages coming by, like large, thunderous carriages. So there were different descriptions of how these things were back then.
[00:30:32] Josh Hutchinson: It's interesting.
[00:30:33] Sarah Jack: I'm curious what surprised you while you were researching. Did you have any insights that you didn't expect or what was most impactful to your research for what you found?
[00:30:49] Kathleen Langone: I think what surprised me the most was the tight correlation between religious life and these events. There was no question when these occurred, people would immediately think it was an act of God. There was no question. There was not a split second, gee, I wonder what that was. It was immediately thought of as an act of God. And how these ministers would use these earthquakes or things like the dark days to bring people into their parish and to help people stay to the way of God's and not be sinners. So again, it was a very integrated thing of these events going into the religion of the time.
[00:31:24] Sarah Jack: Yeah, it really shows how encompassing the interpretation of all the things happening, how tied it was to God's favor or God's displeasure and what their behavior should be. We look at the witch trials, and we see what a major piece of that the religion was, but it's very interesting to look at weather or these natural disasters and see that it didn't take them off guard. They didn't try to find a reason for it. They just knew, hey, this was part of God's working as well.
[00:32:03] Kathleen Langone: Now, from both of your research, what would you say was most frequently perceived that witchcraft would cause? We talked a little bit about that, but what would you say, witchcraft caused this in the village? What would that list of bad things be?
[00:32:18] Josh Hutchinson: Start with the death of animals and children. Death and sickness were the most common issues. There were some reports of weather related to witchcraft. There was one of a ship that was caught in a storm by witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials. There was also a really infamous case, the North Berwick Witch Trials in Scotland, where King James VI of Scotland, who became the first of England,, his bride was on the way over from Denmark to meet him in Scotland to get married. And this huge storm nearly sank the ship and they blamed it on, I believe they ended up rounding up dozens of individuals as witches based on that storm. So there was some of that, but most commonly it was a neighborly dispute that led to an animal dying or was believed to have directly led to an animal dying or a child dying or a mysterious illness, maybe an early death.
[00:33:45] Sarah Jack: Another one that comes to mind is food or anything they might've been preparing, butter. It comes up on all the continents as being bewitched, and then even soup has been a culprit in more than one dispute.
[00:34:04] Josh Hutchinson: And the pudding in Springfield, Massachusetts, with the case of Hugh Parsons, he was believed to have bewitched a pudding, so it came out of the oven split evenly, as if by magic, and there were in Ireland, I know Andrew Sneddon mentioned the butter thieves and milk thieves that by witchcraft would take the milk from your cow directly. So then when you went to milk the cow, it was dry.
And there's some degree of nature, some degree of magnitude where a witch could cause a minor storm, but God would cause an hurricane or an earthquake, or was often responsible for large fires and plagues. Where a smaller, individual community episode of smallpox might be witchcraft, a grand plague sweeping would've been seen as requiring more power than what the devil could have given to a human.
[00:35:23] Kathleen Langone: Oh, that makes perfect sense. I could see plagues certainly being directly attributed to God and not a couple of weakling witches, if you will. That's very interesting, Josh.
[00:35:32] Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, there were limits to the power of witches based on the limits biblically to the devil's powers, because he was the source of all the witchcraft powers, at least in the eyes of the ministers and the elite. Now, the folk beliefs in witchcraft were largely just based on believing that certain people had innate abilities to perform magical feats, but again, that there would be, presumably be, some limits on what a human can do compared to what a demon or a devil or some more advanced being could do.
[00:36:14] Sarah Jack: Katherine Harrison had too much good luck, and they would attribute her cattle responding to her well to her witchcraft.
[00:36:26] Josh Hutchinson: That's right. She called to her cattle, and her cattle came to her more quickly than other people's cattles came to them. There were like multiple witnesses to this event. She went out and she said some, something that to the hearers sounded like a magical phrase. It was like a nonsense word. And she just shouted this to her cattle, and then they came at a gallop, according to the witnesses. There were interesting effects with livestock.
[00:37:01] Kathleen Langone: So for your listeners out there, if you Google New England earthquakes, there's a lot of great online resources. There's certainly a web page for Weston Observatory, which I mentioned is a very active observatory now. And for those living in New England, you just might want to know about how to deal with an earthquake if it occurs. It wouldn't be a bad thing to read.
[00:37:22] Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
[00:37:24] Mary Bingham: Sashiprava Bindhani, a lawyer, was the first advocate to meet with me, a board member representing End Witch Hunts. Her beautiful smile lit up my phone screen last July and we have remained in touch. Sashi relayed how she put measures into place to slow the spread of witch hunts in her home state of Odisha, India.
Her reasons? To protect women from witch hunts. After all, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognizes that both men and women deserve equal protection under the law. Before 2014, anyone who accused a woman to be a Dayan or a Dhani, the Odisha words for witch, suffered little consequence.
Sashi's hard work resulted in the Odisha Prevention of Witch Hunting Act and was signed by the governor in 2014. Anyone who now accuses a woman to be a die in could be imprisoned up to three years and or pay a fine of one thousand rupees, which is twelve US dollars. Thank you, Sashi.
[00:38:27] Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
[00:38:29] Josh Hutchinson: And here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
End Witch Hunts News. End Witch Hunts is a 501c3 non profit organization. End Witch Hunts is a movement to stop the deadly practice of witch hunting around the world. Our vision is a world without witch hunts, where all victims are exonerated, and modern victims and their families receive justice. Your financial support empowers us to educate and advocate. Your donation is tax deductible. Please keep us in mind when you give your holiday charitable gifts. Thank you for supporting our podcast project. Go to the show notes to see how to donate to our nonprofit organization and podcast.
Our newest project, the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project, is seeking formal exoneration for those convicted as witches in Boston, and asking for a formal apology for all those documented to have suffered in the colony witch trials. We have researched these individuals, and they each have a story of innocence, injustice, and devastating life altering consequences due to false witchcraft accusations.
We want to address this colony wide miscarriage of justice with an amendment to the previous legislation that has already exonerated those convicted in the 1692 Salem Witch trials. Please sign and then share the petition change.org/witchtrials to show your support.
To learn more about this project and how you can get involved, visit Massachusettswitchtrials.org. Our podcast creator, Josh Hutchinson, and Professor Emerson Baker had a great conversation last week on GBH News Greater Boston about the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project. Watch it today to hear about the significance of acknowledging the five innocent women who hanged in Boston for witchcraft. Margaret Jones, Alice Lake, Elizabeth Kendall. Ann Hibbins and Goody Glover.
An amendment to previous legislation is all that it takes to clear their names. It's the right thing to do. It's an easy thing to do, but someone in the Massachusetts General Court has to initiate the amendment. Thank you for stepping up and making a difference. 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.
[00:41:04] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
[00:41:06] Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
[00:41:08] Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast.
[00:41:12] Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
[00:41:14] Josh Hutchinson: Please rate and review wherever you get your podcasts and hit that subscribe button.
[00:41:19] Sarah Jack: Go look at our other episodes at thoushaltnotsuffer.com.
[00:41:24] Josh Hutchinson: Remember to tell your friends about the show.
[00:41:27] Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to help end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
[00:41:32] Josh Hutchinson: To support the show, please make a tax deductible donation, purchase books from our bookshop or merch from our Zazzle shop, links are in the show description.
[00:41:43] Sarah Jack: Have you considered supporting the production of the podcast? Join us as a super listener. Your super listener donation is tax deductible. Thank you for being a part of our work.
[00:41:53] Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.

November 9, 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

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

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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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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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

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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 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

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

Connecticut Explored Magazine and Podcast

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

Samuel Wyllys Papers

Windsor Historical Society

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

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
Facebook
Instagram
LinkedIn
YouTube
TikTok
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

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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