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
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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.