Salem And Other Witchcraft

: TALES OF PURITAN LAND
: Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land

The extraordinary delusion recorded as Salem witchcraft was but a

reflection of a kindred insanity in the Old World that was not extirpated

until its victims had been counted by thousands. That human beings should

be accused of leaguing themselves with Satan to plague their fellows and

overthrow the powers of righteousness is remarkable, but that they should

admit their guilt is incomprehensible, albeit the history of every
<
r /> popular delusion shows that weak minds are so affected as to lose control

of themselves and that a whimsey can be as epidemic as small-pox.



Such was the case in 1692 when the witchcraft madness, which might have

been stayed by a seasonable spanking, broke out in Danvers,

Massachusetts, the first victim being a wild Irishwoman, named Glover,

and speedily involved the neighboring community of Salem. The mischiefs

done by witches were usually trifling, and it never occurred to their

prosecutors that there was an inconsistency between their pretended

powers and their feeble deeds, or that it was strange that those who

might live in regal luxury should be so wretchedly poor. Aches and pains,

blight of crops, disease of cattle, were charged to them; children

complained of being pricked with thorns and pins (the pins are still

preserved in Salem), and if hysterical girls spoke the name of any feeble

old woman, while in flighty talk, they virtually sentenced her to die.

The word of a child of eleven years sufficed to hang, burn, or drown a

witch.



Giles Corey, a blameless man of eighty, was condemned to the mediaeval

peine forte et dure, his body being crushed beneath a load of rocks and

timbers. He refused to plead in court, and when the beams were laid upon

him he only cried, More weight! The shade of the unhappy victim haunted

the scene of his execution for years, and always came to warn the people

of calamities. A child of five and a dog were also hanged after formal

condemnation. Gallows Hill, near Salem, witnessed many sad tragedies, and

the old elm that stood on Boston Common until 1876 was said to have

served as a gallows for witches and Quakers. The accuser of one day was

the prisoner of the next, and not even the clergy were safe.



A few escapes were made, like that of a blue-eyed maid of Wenham, whose

lover aided her to break the wooden jail and carried her safely beyond

the Merrimac, finding a home for her among the Quakers; and that of Miss

Wheeler, of Salem, who had fallen under suspicion, and whose brothers

hurried her into a boat, rowed around Cape Ann, and safely bestowed her

in the witch house at Pigeon Cove. Many, however, fled to other towns

rather than run the risk of accusation, which commonly meant death.



When the wife of Philip English was arrested he, too, asked to share her

fate, and both were, through friendly intercession, removed to Boston,

where they were allowed to have their liberty by day on condition that

they would go to jail every night. Just before they were to be taken back

to Salem for trial they went to church and heard the Rev. Joshua Moody

preach from the text, If they persecute you in one city, flee unto

another. The good clergyman not only preached goodness, but practised

it, and that night the door of their prison was opened. Furnished with an

introduction from Governor Phipps to Governor Fletcher, of New York, they

made their way to that settlement, and remained there in safe and

courteous keeping until the people of Salem had regained their senses,

when they returned. Mrs. English died, soon after, from the effects of

cruelty and anxiety, and although Mr. Moody was generally commended for

his substitution of sense and justice for law, there were bigots who

persecuted him so constantly that he removed to Plymouth.



According to the belief of the time a witch or wizard compacted with

Satan for the gift of supernatural power, and in return was to give up

his soul to the evil one after his life was over. The deed was signed in

blood of the witch and horrible ceremonies confirmed the compact. Satan

then gave his ally a familiar in the form of a dog, ape, cat, or other

animal, usually small and black, and sometimes an undisguised imp. To

suckle these familiars with the blood of a witch was forbidden in

English law, which ranked it as a felony; but they were thus nourished in

secret, and by their aid the witch might raise storms, blight crops,

abort births, lame cattle, topple over houses, and cause pains,

convulsions, and illness. If she desired to hurt a person she made a clay

or waxen image in his likeness, and the harms and indignities wreaked on

the puppet would be suffered by the one bewitched, a knife or needle

thrust in the waxen body being felt acutely by the living one, no matter

how far distant he might be. By placing this image in running water, hot

sunshine, or near a fire, the living flesh would waste as this melted or

dissolved, and the person thus wrought upon would die. This belief is

still current among negroes affected by the voodoo superstitions of the

South. The witch, too, had the power of riding winds, usually with a

broomstick for a conveyance, after she had smeared the broom or herself

with magic ointment, and the flocking of the unhallowed to their sabbaths

in snaky bogs or on lonely mountain tops has been described minutely by

those who claim to have seen the sight. Sometimes they cackled and

gibbered through the night before the houses of the clergy, and it was

only at Christmas that their power failed them. The meetings were devoted

to wild and obscene orgies, and the intercourse of fiends and witches

begot a progeny of toads and snakes.



Naturally the Indians were accused, for they recognized the existence of

both good and evil spirits, their medicine-men cured by incantations in

the belief that devils were thus driven out of their patients, and in the

early history of the country the red man was credited by white settlers

with powers hardly inferior to those of the oriental and European

magicians of the middle ages. Cotton Mather detected a relation between

Satan and the Indians, and he declares that certain of the Algonquins

were trained from boyhood as powahs, powwows, or wizards, acquiring

powers of second sight and communion with gods and spirits through

abstinence from food and sleep and the observance of rites. Their severe

discipline made them victims of nervous excitement and the

responsibilities of conjuration had on their minds an effect similar to

that produced by gases from the rift in Delphos on the Apollonian

oracles, their manifestations of insanity or frenzy passing for deific or

infernal possession. When John Gibb, a Scotchman, who had gone mad

through religious excitement, was shipped to this country by his tired

fellow-countrymen, the Indians hailed him as a more powerful wizard than

any of their number, and he died in 1720, admired and feared by them

because of the familiarity with spirits out of Hobbomocko (hell) that his

ravings and antics were supposed to indicate. Two Indian servants of the

Reverend Mr. Purvis, of Salem, having tried by a spell to discover a

witch, were executed as witches themselves. The savages, who took Salem

witchcraft at its worth, were astonished at its deadly effect, and the

English may have lost some influence over the natives in consequence of

this madness. The Great Spirit sends no witches to the French, they

said. Barrow Hill, near Amesbury, was said to be the meeting-place for

Indian powwows and witches, and at late hours of the night the light of

fires gleamed from its top, while shadowy forms glanced athwart it. Old

men say that the lights are still there in winter, though modern doubters

declare that they were the aurora borealis.



But the belief in witches did not die even when the Salem people came to

their senses. In the Merrimac valley the devil found converts for many

years after: Goody Mose, of Rocks village, who tumbled down-stairs when a

big beetle was killed at an evening party, some miles away, after it had

been bumping into the faces of the company; Goody Whitcher, of Ameshury,

whose loom kept banging day and night after she was dead; Goody Sloper,

of West Newbury, who went home lame directly that a man had struck his

axe into the beam of a house that she had bewitched, but who recovered

her strength and established an improved reputation when, in 1794, she

swam out to a capsized boat and rescued two of the people who were in

peril; Goodman Nichols, of Rocks village, who spelled a neighbor's son,

compelling him to run up one end of the house, along the ridge, and down

the other end, troubling the family extremely by his strange

proceedings; Susie Martin, also of Rocks, who was hanged in spite of her

devotions in jail, though the rope danced so that it could not be tied,

but a crow overhead called for a withe and the law was executed with

that; and Goody Morse, of Market and High Streets, Newburyport, whose

baskets and pots danced through her house continually and who was seen

flying about the sun as if she had been cut in twain, or as if the devil

did hide the lower part of her. The hill below Easton, Pennsylvania,

called Hexenkopf (Witch's head), was described by German settlers as a

place of nightly gathering for weird women, who whirled about its top in

linked dances and sang in deep tones mingled with awful laughter. After

one of these women, in Williams township, had been punished for

enchanting a twenty-dollar horse, their sabbaths were held more quietly.

Mom Rinkle, whose rock is pointed out beside the Wissahickon, in

Philadelphia, drank dew from acorn-cups and had the evil eye. Juan

Perea, of San Mateo, New Mexico, would fly with his chums to meetings in

the mountains in the shape of a fire-ball. During these sallies he left

his own eyes at home and wore those of some brute animal. It was because

his dog ate his eyes when he had carelessly put them on a table that he

had always afterward to wear those of a cat. Within the present century

an old woman who lived in a hut on the Palisades of the Hudson was held

to be responsible for local storms and accidents. As late as 1889 two

Zuni Indians were hanged on the wall of an old Spanish church near their

pueblo in Arizona on a charge of having blown away the rainclouds in a

time of drouth. It was held that there was something uncanny in the event

that gave the name of Gallows Hill to an eminence near Falls Village,

Connecticut, for a strange black man was found hanging, dead, to a tree

near its top one morning.



Moll Pitcher, a successful sorcerer and fortune-teller of old Lynn, has

figured in obsolete poems, plays, and romances. She lived in a cottage at

the foot of High Rock, where she was consulted, not merely by people of

respectability, but by those who had knavish schemes to prosecute and who

wanted to learn in advance the outcome of their designs. Many a ship was

deserted at the hour of sailing because she boded evil of the voyage. She

was of medium height, big-headed, tangle-haired, long-nosed, and had a

searching black eye. The sticks that she carried were cut from a hazel

that hung athwart a brook where an unwedded mother had drowned her child.

A girl who went to her for news of her lover lost her reason when the

witch, moved by a malignant impulse, described his death in a fiercely

dramatic manner. One day the missing ship came bowling into port, and the

shock of joy that the girl experienced when the sailor clasped her in his

arms restored her erring senses. When Moll Pitcher died she was attended

by the little daughter of the woman she had so afflicted.



John, or Edward, Dimond, grandfather of Moll Pitcher, was a benevolent

wizard. When vessels were trying to enter the port of Marblehead in a

heavy gale or at night, their crews were startled to hear a trumpet voice

pealing from the skies, plainly audible above the howling and hissing of

any tempest, telling them how to lay their course so as to reach smooth

water. This was the voice of Dimond, speaking from his station, miles

away in the village cemetery. He always repaired to this place in

troublous weather and shouted orders to the ships that were made visible

to him by mystic power as he strode to and fro among the graves. When

thieves came to him for advice he charmed them and made them take back

their plunder or caused them to tramp helplessly about the streets

bearing heavy burdens.



Old Mammy Redd, of Marblehead, Sweet milk could turn to mould in churn.



Being a witch, and a notorious one, she could likewise curdle the milk as

it came from the cow, and afterward transform it into blue wool. She had

the evil eye, and, if she willed, her glance or touch could blight like

palsy. It only needed that she should wish a bloody cleaver to be found

in a cradle to cause the little occupant to die, while the whole town

ascribed to her the annoyances of daily housework and business. Her

unpleasant celebrity led to her death at the hands of her fellow-citizens

who had been worrited by no end of queer happenings: ships had appeared

just before they were wrecked and had vanished while people looked at

them; men were seen walking on the water after they had been comfortably

buried; the wind was heard to name the sailors doomed never to return;

footsteps and voices were heard in the streets before the great were to

die; one man was chased by a corpse in its coffin; another was pursued by

the devil in a carriage drawn by four white horses; a young woman who had

just received a present of some fine fish from her lover was amazed to

see him melt into the air, and was heart-broken when she learned next

morning that he had died at sea. So far away as Amesbury the devil's

power was shown by the appearance of a man who walked the roads carrying

his head under his arm, and by the freak of a windmill that the miller

always used to shut up at sundown but that started by itself at midnight.

Evidently it was high time to be rid of Mammy Redd.



Margaret Wesson, old Meg, lived in Gloucester until she came to her

death by a shot fired at the siege of Louisburg, five hundred miles away,

in 1745. Two soldiers of Gloucester, while before the walls of the French

town, were annoyed by a crow, that flew over and around them, cawing

harshly and disregarding stones and shot, until it occurred to them that

the bird could be no other than old Meg in another form, and, as silver

bullets are an esteemed antidote for the evils of witchcraft, they cut

two silver buttons from their uniforms and fired them at the crow. At the

first shot its leg was broken; at the second, it fell dead. On returning

to Gloucester they learned that old Meg had fallen and broken her leg at

the moment when the crow was fired on, and that she died quickly after.

An examination of her body was made, and the identical buttons were

extracted from her flesh that had been shot into the crow at Louisburg.



As a citizen of New Haven was riding home--this was at the time of the

goings on at Salem--he saw shapes of women near his horse's head,

whispering earnestly together and keeping time with the trot of his

animal without effort of their own. In the name of God, tell me who you

are, cried the traveller, and at the name of God they vanished. Next day

the man's orchard was shaken by viewless hands and the fruit thrown down.

Hogs ran about the neighborhood on their hind legs; children cried that

somebody was sticking pins into them; one man would roll across the floor

as if pushed, and he had to be watched lest he should go into the fire;

when housewives made their bread they found it as full of hair as food in

a city boarding-house; when they made soft soap it ran from the kettle

and over the floor like lava; stones fell down chimneys and smashed

crockery. One of the farmers cut off an ear from a pig that was walking

on its hind legs, and an eccentric old body of the neighborhood appeared

presently with one of her ears in a muffle, thus satisfying that

community that she had caused the troubles. When a woman was making

potash it began to leap about, and a rifle was fired into the pot,

causing a sudden calm. In the morning the witch was found dead on her

floor. Yet killing only made her worse, for she moved to a deserted house

near her own, and there kept a mad revel every night; fiddles were heard,

lights flashed, stones were thrown, and yells gave people at a distance a

series of cold shivers; but the populace tried the effect of tearing down

the house, and quiet was brought to the town.



In the early days of this century a skinny old woman known as Aunt

Woodward lived by herself in a log cabin at Minot Corner, Maine, enjoying

the awe of the people in that secluded burg. They moved around but little

at night, on her account, and one poor girl was in mortal fear lest by

mysterious arts she should be changed, between two days, into a white

horse. One citizen kept her away from his house by nailing a horseshoe to

his door, while another took the force out of her spells by keeping a

branch of round wood at his threshold. At night she haunted a big,

square house where the ghost of a murdered infant was often heard to cry,

and by day she laid charms on her neighbors' provisions and utensils, and

turned their cream to buttermilk. Uncle Blaisdell hurried into the

settlement to tell the farmers that Aunt Woodward had climbed into his

sled in the middle of the road, and that his four yoke of oxen could not

stir it an inch, but that after she had leaped down one yoke of cattle

drew the load of wood without an effort. Yet she died in her bed.



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