Tag: tour

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

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

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

Links

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

⁠Eastern history professor publishes book on legendary Virginia ‘witch’⁠

⁠End Witch Hunts⁠

⁠Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project⁠

⁠Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project⁠

⁠Maryland Witches Exoneration Project

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

⁠Author’s Corner with Scott O. Moore⁠ ⁠

Witch Hunt Website

Transcript

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