Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Connecticut: The Windsor Witch | Episode 114

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Connecticut: The Windsor Witch | Episode 114 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Crista Cowan: The very first person accused of and executed for witchcraft in the American colonies was written about in the journal of the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
• 0:12
  Crista Cowan: Sort of.
• 0:13
  Crista Cowan: In the spring of 1647, he wrote one blank of Windsor, arraigned and executed at Hartford for a witch.
• 0:23
  Crista Cowan: He left a literal blank line where her name should have been.
• 0:29
  Crista Cowan: Just an empty space on the page, a hole in history.
• 0:34
  Crista Cowan: The governor probably knew who she was.
• 0:37
  Crista Cowan: The town definitely knew who she was.
• 0:40
  Crista Cowan: But for 200 years, no one else remembered who she was or what exactly she was accused of.
• 0:48
  Crista Cowan: No one knew if she left anyone behind.
• 0:52
  Crista Cowan: All they knew was she was someone deemed dangerous enough to hang and not important enough to name.
• 1:01
  Crista Cowan: This is the story of the woman whose name belonged in that blank space.
• 1:09
  Crista Cowan: Her name was Alse.
• 1:11
  Crista Cowan: She was a wife, a mother, a neighbor.
• 1:15
  Crista Cowan: And on May 26, 1647, in Hartford, Connecticut, she became the first person ever executed for witchcraft in the American colonies.
• 1:25
  Crista Cowan: 45 years before anyone in Salem was even looking for witches.
• 1:30
  Crista Cowan: She deserves more than a blank line.
• 1:34
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 1:42
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 1:46
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 1:57
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 2:06
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from Sea to Shining Sea the stories that live in us.
• 2:12
  Crista Cowan: Alse Young wasn't just the name of the Windsor Witch.
• 2:17
  Crista Cowan: She was part of a family.
• 2:20
  Crista Cowan: And as it turns out, the Shadow of the Gallows didn't stop with her.
• 2:25
  Crista Cowan: To understand why Alse was chosen as a scapegoat, we have to look at a town gripped by paranoia, a doctor who couldn't save his own child, and a daughter named Alice, who 30 years later would face the same accusations as her mother.
• 2:47
  Crista Cowan: To understand why Alse was chosen, you also have to look down a row called Backer Row.
• 2:55
  Crista Cowan: That's where the young's lived.
• 2:56
  Crista Cowan: It was a small cluster of houses near the Farmington River, on the very edge of town.
• 3:04
  Crista Cowan: And if you knew Windsor in 1647, you knew that Backer Row, it was just slightly different.
• 3:12
  Crista Cowan: The families who lived there weren't part of the original founding group.
• 3:17
  Crista Cowan: Most of Windsor's earliest settlers had arrived together on a ship called the Mary and John 17 years earlier.
• 3:26
  Crista Cowan: These families were from the West Country of England, from the counties of Devon and Dorset and Somerset.
• 3:34
  Crista Cowan: They'd crossed the Atlantic Ocean together.
• 3:38
  Crista Cowan: They had settled together in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
• 3:42
  Crista Cowan: And then they'd picked up a few years later and moved together, effectively founding Windsor, which is the oldest settlement in the state of Connecticut.
• 3:56
  Crista Cowan: This group of people shared a dialect, a culture, a way of worshiping, and probably a web of cousins and loyalties that stretched back in England for generations.
• 4:06
  Crista Cowan: Alse Young wasn't one of them.
• 4:10
  Crista Cowan: She and her neighbors on Backer Row were likely from Berkshire, near London, different dialect, different customs, different way of worshiping, even with a shared faith.
• 4:23
  Crista Cowan: And today we might think that a distinction like that is really silly.
• 4:28
  Crista Cowan: But in a village with no more than several dozen families, isolated together in a colonial settlement, held together by shared belief and mutual suspicion, being from the wrong part of England mattered tremendously.
• 4:45
  Crista Cowan: Here's what that meant practically.
• 4:48
  Crista Cowan: When trouble came, those West Country families closed ranks around their own.
• 4:56
  Crista Cowan: Cousins were going to defend cousins.
• 4:59
  Crista Cowan: Shipmates were going to vouch for shipmates.
• 5:02
  Crista Cowan: That web of loyalty that they had created was, in a very real sense, protection for them.
• 5:08
  Crista Cowan: Alse didn't have that protection.
• 5:11
  Crista Cowan: She had John, her husband.
• 5:13
  Crista Cowan: She had little Alice.
• 5:14
  Crista Cowan: She had her few neighbors and families on back her row.
• 5:18
  Crista Cowan: And when the fever arrived in the spring of 1647, none of that would be enough to save her.
• 5:26
  Crista Cowan: It started as a cough, then it became a searing fever.
• 5:32
  Crista Cowan: Today we know it was probably just a massive influenza epidemic.
• 5:37
  Crista Cowan: But in 1647, it was a nightmare.
• 5:40
  Crista Cowan: Within weeks, the death rate in Windsor quadrupled.
• 5:44
  Crista Cowan: And a sickness like that doesn't care about status or loyalty.
• 5:49
  Crista Cowan: It took two children from the local minister.
• 5:52
  Crista Cowan: And then it reached the house of Bray Rosseter.
• 5:57
  Crista Cowan: Rosseter was the town doctor.
• 6:00
  Crista Cowan: He was the man the entire community looked to for answers.
• 6:04
  Crista Cowan: But as he watched his own child slip away, his medical knowledge hit a wall.
• 6:10
  Crista Cowan: In the 17th century, a doctor's failure wasn't just a professional tragedy, it was also a spiritual crisis.
• 6:20
  Crista Cowan: If medicine can't explain death, then the cause has to be something beyond nature.
• 6:27
  Crista Cowan: Rosseter is a disturbing figure in Connecticut history.
• 6:30
  Crista Cowan: Years later, in 1662, he would perform the first recorded autopsy in the New World, not to find a virus or a cure, but looking for witch marks on a child's organs.
• 6:44
  Crista Cowan: He was a man obsessed with proving that the invisible world was responsible for tragedies that he couldn't prevent.
• 6:53
  Crista Cowan: And in the spring of 1647, Dr.
• 6:56
  Crista Cowan: Rosseter couldn't save his own child.
• 6:58
  Crista Cowan: And he couldn't save the minister's children, and he couldn't save his neighbors.
• 7:04
  Crista Cowan: But somewhere on Backer Row, Alice Young's daughter was still alive.
• 7:11
  Crista Cowan: And to a grieving community, that survival wasn't a miracle.
• 7:16
  Crista Cowan: It was suspicious.
• 7:17
  Crista Cowan: If Dr.
• 7:18
  Crista Cowan: Rosseter provided the theory for why people were dying, it was the family living right next door to Alse that provided the proof.
• 7:29
  Crista Cowan: In the spring of 1647, Thomas and Anne Thornton were living through a parent's worst nightmare.
• 7:37
  Crista Cowan: They buried four of their children that single season.
• 7:42
  Crista Cowan: Thomas Thornton, he was a tanner by trade, but the trauma of that spring changed him enough that he eventually became a minister.
• 7:52
  Crista Cowan: He became obsessed, much like Dr.
• 7:54
  Crista Cowan: Rosseter, with the battle between good and evil.
• 7:57
  Crista Cowan: Years later, he would sit down with the famous witch hunter Cotton Mather, and he would recount the final moments of his daughter Priscilla's life.
• 8:07
  Crista Cowan: He claimed that when she lay dying, Priscilla didn't just have a fever.
• 8:11
  Crista Cowan: She was much troubled by Satan.
• 8:14
  Crista Cowan: He spoke of sins, he spoke of dark bouts with the invisible world.
• 8:19
  Crista Cowan: In 1647, when a child dies screaming about the devil, you don't look at the water or the air or what virus it might be.
• 8:26
  Crista Cowan: You look at who's standing next to their bed.
• 8:29
  Crista Cowan: You look at the neighbor whose own six-year-old daughter was somehow perfectly fine while the children in the house next door were all dying.
• 8:40
  Crista Cowan: As a neighbor, Alse Young was likely in and out of that house.
• 8:45
  Crista Cowan: Maybe she offered an herbal remedy that didn't work.
• 8:49
  Crista Cowan: Maybe she was a healer.
• 8:51
  Crista Cowan: Or maybe people simply whispered about the most suspicious fact of all that while prominent families of Windsor, the minister, the doctor, the Thorntons now, were burying their children, Alse's only daughter, Alice, was still alive and healthy.
• 9:11
  Crista Cowan: In a community gripped by fear-based thinking, survival isn't a blessing.
• 9:19
  Crista Cowan: To the Thorntons, little Alice's health wasn't just a coincidence.
• 9:23
  Crista Cowan: It was a sign of a pact with the devil, is what they would call it.
• 9:28
  Crista Cowan: In their grief-stricken minds, Alse Young hadn't just watched their children die, she had caused it.
• 9:35
  Crista Cowan: And it was likely their testimony that walked Alse Young to the gallows.
• 9:41
  Crista Cowan: Now, you might wonder if the Thorntons lived on Backer Row 2, weren't they outsiders?
• 9:50
  Crista Cowan: Probably not.
• 9:51
  Crista Cowan: Because while they shared the same dirt road, Thomas Thornton was a man who knew how to align himself with power.
• 9:59
  Crista Cowan: And we see this because of his trade as a tanner and because he was a man who would eventually join the ranks of the ministry.
• 10:07
  Crista Cowan: So in a community where everyone is looking for a scapegoat, the best way to prove you belong is to find someone who doesn't.
• 10:17
  Crista Cowan: And by pointing the finger at Alse, the Thorntons weren't just explaining their grief, they were securing their place in Windsor's inner circle.
• 10:28
  Crista Cowan: They were the insiders on the outsider street.
• 10:32
  Crista Cowan: And that made them Alse's most dangerous neighbors.
• 10:35
  Crista Cowan: We don't know what Alse Young was accused of specifically, other than witchcraft.
• 10:43
  Crista Cowan: No trial survives.
• 10:45
  Crista Cowan: There's no formal charge.
• 10:46
  Crista Cowan: There's no transcript of a testimony.
• 10:49
  Crista Cowan: Whatever was said about her, whether it was whispered accusations or a formal courtroom hearing, it's been lost.
• 10:57
  Crista Cowan: What we know is this.
• 10:59
  Crista Cowan: In the 17th century, executions were not private affairs behind prison walls.
• 11:07
  Crista Cowan: They were very, very public.
• 11:09
  Crista Cowan: Alse would have been removed from Windsor to Hartford, eight miles away.
• 11:14
  Crista Cowan: She would have been marched into Meeting House Square, the very center of the colony's spiritual and political life at the time.
• 11:24
  Crista Cowan: Today, that's the site of the old state house.
• 11:27
  Crista Cowan: It's a place of tourism and government.
• 11:29
  Crista Cowan: But in 1647, it was the site of the gallows.
• 11:33
  Crista Cowan: There was no Witch's Hill like in Salem.
• 11:36
  Crista Cowan: There were no dramatic confessions recorded for the crowd.
• 11:41
  Crista Cowan: There was just this woman in a rope and a community that believed her death would stop the fever.
• 11:51
  Crista Cowan: And so on May 26, 1647, Alse Young was hanged.
• 11:56
  Crista Cowan: She was 32 years old.
• 11:58
  Crista Cowan: Her daughter Alice was six.
• 12:01
  Crista Cowan: For the next 200 years, the name Alse Young vanished from the public.
• 12:06
  Crista Cowan: If you look at the official records of the Connecticut colony, you will not find any mention of her.
• 12:13
  Crista Cowan: Governor John Winthrop, a man who documented almost every significant event in New England, couldn't even bring himself to write her name.
• 12:24
  Crista Cowan: In his journal, under the date May 1647, he simply wrote one blank of Windsor, arraigned and executed at Hartford for a witch.
• 12:34
  Crista Cowan: He left a physical blank space on the page.
• 12:38
  Crista Cowan: Whether he couldn't be bothered to learn her name or didn't want to actually write it, we probably will never know.
• 12:48
  Crista Cowan: It wasn't until 1891 that a historian named James Hammond Trumbull found a different diary.
• 12:55
  Crista Cowan: It was the personal record of Windsor's town clerk, Matthew Grant.
• 13:00
  Crista Cowan: And on the inside cover, tucked away from the official eyes of the law, Grant had scribbled four words that changed everything.
• 13:10
  Crista Cowan: May 26, 47, Alse Young was hanged.
• 13:16
  Crista Cowan: Those four words were the only thing that kept her from being forgotten forever.
• 13:22
  Crista Cowan: But that was all history gave her.
• 13:24
  Crista Cowan: A blank line in the governor's handwriting and four words from the town clerk.
• 13:29
  Crista Cowan: After Alse's execution, the town moved on.
• 13:33
  Crista Cowan: Alse's family and friends couldn't.
• 13:36
  Crista Cowan: Her husband John sold their land and fled to Stratford.
• 13:40
  Crista Cowan: Her little community of outsiders quietly packed up and left Windsor.
• 13:46
  Crista Cowan: They didn't just leave, they fled.
• 13:49
  Crista Cowan: Within six years, every house on Backer Row was empty, as if they knew exactly what the town was capable of and they didn't want any part of it.
• 14:00
  Crista Cowan: That quiet exodus, I think, tells us something that no court record ever could.
• 14:07
  Crista Cowan: And her daughter, young Alice, who was only six years old when she watched the town turn on her mother, carried that blank space with her.
• 14:20
  Crista Cowan: In the 17th century, the stain of witchcraft didn't die with the accused.
• 14:26
  Crista Cowan: It was believed to be passed through the blood, particularly from mothers to daughters, like a curse.
• 14:34
  Crista Cowan: And Alice would grow up with a target on her back, one that would be triggered 30 years later.
• 14:42
  Crista Cowan: In 1677, she was no longer a child watching from the sidelines.
• 14:47
  Crista Cowan: Now Alice was a wife.
• 14:49
  Crista Cowan: She was a mother of 12 children, including a set of four-year-old twins.
• 14:55
  Crista Cowan: And when a neighbor leveled the same accusation of witchcraft against her, it must have felt a little inevitable that the stain had surfaced.
• 15:08
  Crista Cowan: But the world had changed.
• 15:10
  Crista Cowan: And so had Alice.
• 15:12
  Crista Cowan: Unlike her mother, she had some protection.
• 15:17
  Crista Cowan: She had a husband, Simon Beaman, who stood by her.
• 15:21
  Crista Cowan: She had a dozen children, at least one of whom was a grown man at the time.
• 15:26
  Crista Cowan: And most importantly, I think she had the memory of what had happened to her mom.
• 15:32
  Crista Cowan: When the accusations started, she did not flee, but she also didn't stay quiet.
• 15:40
  Crista Cowan: She defended herself in court, claiming she was being slandered.
• 15:45
  Crista Cowan: She turned the town's suspicion right back on the accusers.
• 15:50
  Crista Cowan: And what we know is that she was never indicted.
• 15:53
  Crista Cowan: I don't know if Alice ever told her children the story of what happened to her mother.
• 15:58
  Crista Cowan: I don't know if she whispered the story in her daughter's ears as a way to fortify them against accusations that might be leveled at them someday.
• 16:09
  Crista Cowan: I don't know if her sons were warned about how to protect their wives and daughters against unjustness, or if they were challenged to never levy charges like that against another man's wife.
• 16:23
  Crista Cowan: But I do know she broke the cycle.
• 16:26
  Crista Cowan: She lived to see her children grow, and she died as an old woman, not a witch in a nameless grave, but as a matriarch of a whole family.
• 16:37
  Crista Cowan: For nearly four centuries, Alse Young was a warning and a scapegoat and a blank line in a governor's diary.
• 16:45
  Crista Cowan: And then slowly the world caught on.
• 16:49
  Crista Cowan: On February 6th, 2017, the town of Windsor finally looked back at Backer Row.
• 16:56
  Crista Cowan: And in a unanimous vote, the town council passed a resolution acknowledging that these executions were the result of community-wide hysteria and fear.
• 17:09
  Crista Cowan: They didn't just apologize.
• 17:11
  Crista Cowan: They voted to restore her good name so she could finally, in their words, rest in peace.
• 17:17
  Crista Cowan: Then in May of 2023, on the 376th anniversary of her death, the state of Connecticut went even further.
• 17:25
  Crista Cowan: The state senate voted 33 to 1 to officially pardon Alse Young and 11 others executed for witchcraft in the colonial era.
• 17:36
  Crista Cowan: 33 to 1.
• 17:37
  Crista Cowan: And I want to know who the heck was that one person who thought this wasn't a good idea.
• 17:43
  Crista Cowan: But if you walk the north end of the Windsor Town Green today, you'll find two small red bricks pressed into the ground.
• 17:53
  Crista Cowan: They aren't much to look at.
• 17:55
  Crista Cowan: I imagine thousands of people walk right past them or over them every year without ever looking down.
• 18:02
  Crista Cowan: But one of those bricks bears her name, Alse Young, witch hanging victim, May 26, 1647.
• 18:11
  Crista Cowan: I know this because I stood there.
• 18:15
  Crista Cowan: In the fall of 2024, my brother Cameron and my parents and I went to Connecticut together as part of a fall leaf peeping trip.
• 18:24
  Crista Cowan: And we went to the old state house in Hartford, the very ground where Alse was hanged.
• 18:30
  Crista Cowan: We stood on that lawn and we tried to imagine a gallows there.
• 18:34
  Crista Cowan: And we tried to imagine a crowd gathered to watch.
• 18:38
  Crista Cowan: And we tried to imagine a six-year-old girl somewhere in Windsor waiting for her mom to come home.
• 18:45
  Crista Cowan: And then we drove to Windsor, and we found the town green and we found the bricks.
• 18:53
  Crista Cowan: And I stood there looking down at her name for a really long time.
• 18:58
  Crista Cowan: Here's what I haven't told you yet.
• 19:02
  Crista Cowan: Alse Young is my nine times great-grandmother.
• 19:07
  Crista Cowan: Her daughter, Alice Young Beaman, that little girl who lost her mother, the woman who learned what protection meant, the matriarch.
• 19:19
  Crista Cowan: She is my eight times great-grandmother.
• 19:21
  Crista Cowan: My connection to them runs through a woman named Carrie Inman, my two-times great-grandmother, who was the subject of the very first episode of this podcast and is one of the primary reasons why I became a genealogist.
• 19:39
  Crista Cowan: I have spent my entire career helping people find the stories hiding in their family trees.
• 19:47
  Crista Cowan: I have sat with thousands of people as they discovered ancestors they never knew they had.
• 19:54
  Crista Cowan: And it never gets old.
• 19:56
  Crista Cowan: Standing on that Windsor Town Green, looking down at that brick with my dad standing next to me, I just, it hits different every time.
• 20:09
  Crista Cowan: This wasn't just someone's ancestor.
• 20:12
  Crista Cowan: This was mine.
• 20:13
  Crista Cowan: This was ours.
• 20:14
  Crista Cowan: And probably the ancestor of tens of thousands of other people out there.
• 20:19
  Crista Cowan: Because remember when I mentioned that Alice had 12 children, Alse Young was erased in real time.
• 20:28
  Crista Cowan: A blank line where her name should have been.
• 20:32
  Crista Cowan: And somewhere down that long line of mothers and daughters and sons and fathers, she led to me.
• 20:39
  Crista Cowan: And she led to my dad.
• 20:42
  Crista Cowan: Standing on a town green in Connecticut on a fall evening, finally saying her name out loud.
• 20:50
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.