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Witch Trials, but not Salem · TheCampyTraveler

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Picture this with me.
0:01
SPEAKER_00: July 10th, 1706.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: There's a woman standing on a misty riverbank.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: In the cool of the morning, despite the damp, a crowd has gathered, a big one, like everyone in the county showed up.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: And they're all just standing there.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: And as they stand there, they're watching five women tie this other woman up.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: They tie her right thumb to her left foot, followed by her left thumb to her right foot.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: And then for good measure, they hang a 13-pound Bible around her neck because apparently that's just something that you do.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: Then last of all, they shove her, Bible and all, into a sack, as one does.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: She doesn't struggle because get this, she asked for this, and she knows what is about to happen.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: Before they sew the sack closed over her head, they plead with her one last time to just repent already.
0:53
SPEAKER_00: She doesn't.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: As needles are laced through the diminishing opening of the sack, the woman speaks, and what she says sits uncomfortably in the ears of all who hear it.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: I be not a witch, I be a healer.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: And they throw her in the river.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Campy Traveler Podcast.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm Holly, the Campy Traveler, and I'm so glad you're here.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: All you really need to know about me is that I am an incredibly curious person.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: I don't just want to know everything about everything which I do.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: I want to get up and close and personal with the weird and the wonderful stuff history has left lying around.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: I was that kid, you know, the one that asked a question about a question about a question, and I guess I never really outgrew that.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: I decided to make a career out of it instead.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: If you've ever wondered about the weird, wonderful things hiding behind old buildings, down winding streets, forgotten ruins, or the people who came before us, we can totally be friends.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: I want to hear your stories.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly the kind of questions I'm gonna ask, and I'm itching to spill the tea all over.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Come with me.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: Now, a quick disclaimer, because I want you guys to know and be comfortable with what's gonna happen here.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: This is not the typical travel story.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna tell you about which cafes or where the best sunsets are, maybe a little, but this is about the story behind the travel.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: And I bring that to the forefront.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: We're doing it backwards.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: The witch trials, the hauntings, the scandals, the quietly buried disasters.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: What's that doohickey on that building?
2:32
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about it, and I'm gonna tell you where to stand to see those things, what places you can go to to get up close and personal.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: If travel's not your bag, don't worry about it.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: There's lots of books, there's movies, there's documentaries, so you can snuggle up at home and have a break while satisfying your curiosity.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: Each episode will explore curious people, remarkable places, the weird, wonderful moments that remind us our world is way more connected and way stranger than it seems on the surface, like sewing a lady with her 13-pound Bible around her neck and then tossing her into the river.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: I'll always share real places you can actually visit, or stories, or podcasts, or documentaries that you can research more.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: So whether you're commuting, folding laundry, enduring leg day at the gym, or just need 45 minutes where your brain can have a break, I hope this gives you a chance to slow down, wonder a little bit more, and follow curiosity wherever it wants to take you.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes that's a real place, sometimes that's deeper down today's rabbit hole between the pages of a good book.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: So let's get curious.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: Okay, remember the lady on the river?
3:41
SPEAKER_00: We didn't talk about her that long ago.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Her name was Grace Sherwood, often called the Witch of Pungo.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: Hold on to her because we're not going to go back to her quite yet.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: First, to understand what happened.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of context before we are sewing a Bible clad woman into a sack and tossing her into the river.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: The real start comes years earlier.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: Quick check.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: If you were like me, I heard about the Salem witch trials growing up.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: I didn't hear much other American witch trial stories.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: Today we're gonna actually dive into the ones that preceded Salem and came after Salem because Grace is after Salem.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: But if you thought Salem was the only one, I thought that for the longest time has only been a ridiculously advanced age.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: Then I started to learn I was really ignorant about some of these others.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: So we're going back 60 years and several miles to the north to a small town in Connecticut to do something no other court had yet done.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: Actually execute a witch.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: But first, we're gonna start with the very first witch trial.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Accusation and trials for witchcraft popped up basically in every colony, all up and down New England, from the very start.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: The very first witch trial was actually in Jamestown.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: And didn't happen very long after they got here.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: Accusations and trials for witchcraft popped up in basically every colony that's now New England, plus early settlements of New York and Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, Salem and Andover, Massachusetts were the biggest and the loudest.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: No contest, but Connecticut and Virginia are right behind them for sheer witch hunting enthusiasm, which I want to be clear is a genuinely bizarre sentence to say out loud in the 21st century.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: And yet, that's what it was.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: If you don't hear about Virginia and Connecticut much, it actually makes sense.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: Salem was so loud, so chaotic, that it sucked all of the oxygen out of the room for everything that happened around it.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that gets lost.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut helped to build Salem, and then Connecticut quietly walked away and allowed Salem to take the fall and to be the face of the shame that was witch hunting.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: There was torture, there was hanging, there was one genuinely horrific pressing death, but burning was legally reserved for heresy, and witchcraft got filed under felony.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: So weirdly they had standards.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: Somehow that doesn't make it feel any better.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: Zooming out for sheer numbers, just for a second, because sometimes a nerd's got a nerd.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm a nerd.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: Across the whole 250-year run of the history of witch trials, we're talking about 200 formal witch trials in American history.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: And about half of those accused never actually made it to trial.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: So that's then 400, 200 of which got tossed out before they became trials.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: And even more of those never even made it to the formality of a trial, just stayed in gossip.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: So, which kind of tells you accusing your neighbor of witchcraft was basically a normal 17th-century hobby, kind of like calling someone a Karen today.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes deserved, sometimes not, always available.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: Of the ones that did go to trial, most of them actually ended up acquitted.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: About 35 to 40 people were legally executed as a result of a conviction, but the real number of lives lost once you start to count everyone that died in prison as a result of the accusation is significantly higher.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: I was not able to find reliable numbers, so I'm not even going to guess at that.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: Salem was the single deadliest panic, but Connecticut wasn't very far behind.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: I can just say it just genuinely blows my mind that a five-decade campaign in Connecticut was lost to history.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: Here's my theory, here's my pet theory, and take it take it or leave it.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: I think Connecticut's magistrates watched Salem go up in flames, figurative flames, I promise.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: And they thought, wow, they're really out of control over there.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: And then presumably they looked in the mirror long enough to recognize a little bit of familiarity, but then they just refused to admit it publicly, which you know, why would you want to?
7:53
SPEAKER_00: And they let them take the fall.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: I picture the colonial powers of bee in Connecticut quietly dismissing their own charges and whistling on the walk back home, like nothing to see here.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: Just keep your eyes over there on Massachusetts.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: So the very first recorded witch trial in the colonies wasn't even in Connecticut.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: And this is what I was saying is right from the very start.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: That one is Virginia's.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: So we'll go down to Jamestown just for a second and then pop back up to Connecticut.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: In Jamestown in 1626, there was that's where we meet a midwife who was, in the language of the time, a cunning woman.
8:28
SPEAKER_00: And is that really a bad thing?
8:29
SPEAKER_00: I would have thought in Jamestown, you'd want all the cunning you can get, smart stuff.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: I would think they would want that kind of thing to survive.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's just me.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: But this cunning lady was named Joan Wright, and she stands accused of predicting deaths, cursing crops, and livestock.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: In her court proceedings, she does not grovel.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: She flat out admits to practicing folk medicine, which plenty of the time, which plenty of people at the time considered one short hop from actual magic, but instead of begging for mercy, she asks God to forgive her accusers.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: Bold.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: Iconic even.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: Honestly, not really endearing to her accusers or a superstitious population.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: The judge, Sir George Yardley, looks at the evidence, which is mostly gossip, suspicion, bad blood between neighbors and throws the whole case out.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: That acquittal matters a lot.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: It genuinely sets a high bar legally.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: Superstition and grudges aren't enough to convict.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Not yet, at least.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: And honestly, the reason the bar held, even briefly, is almost boringly practical.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: Jamestown in 1626 was a busy just trying not to die, building shelter, finding food, surviving winter.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: Like I said, cunning should really have come in handy.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: But witch hunting is a luxury problem.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: You need a town with some breathing room to have energy left over for a moral panic, and Jamestown just didn't have it.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: Joan Wright's case sets the bar high, but unfortunately, legal precedent is not enough to keep the bar from falling.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: That happens in Connecticut.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: Everything from here is where the bar starts to slip.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: Windsor, Connecticut, in 1647, the colonies had what Jamestowns lacked.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut had stability.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: Towns are established, industry is humming, and suddenly there's bandwidth for spiritual anxiety.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut gets straight to legislating.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: In 1642, the Connecticut passed the Capitol Law.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: This law, among other things, formally makes witchcraft a capital offense.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: And because, you know, they want to make sure they're doing the thing right, scripture citations and everything else is in the law, and Puritans are taking this seriously.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: But the law on the books didn't start the panic by itself.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: First, you need a trigger, the law, then the trigger, something big enough and scary enough that nothing but supernatural can explain it.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: The trigger comes in Windsor in 1647, in the form of a brutal flu that is deadlier than most that happens in the winter of 1647.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: It tears through Windsor, Connecticut, killing 27 people.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: In a town of maybe 400 to 500 people, do the math with me.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: That's roughly 6% of the entire town gone in just a few weeks.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: Several of the town's most prominent family lost people, including children.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: And I'm choosing my words very carefully here.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: Some of those families stood to benefit if a certain widow, set to inherit her late husband's estate, suddenly stopped being in any position to hold on to it.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to sit here and claim Windsor's leaders cooked up a witchcraft accusation specifically to steal a widow's inheritance.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: I am going to point out that the two most commonly targeted profiles of women, of witchcraft accusations in the era were one, poor, troublesome women with nobody to protect them, and two, outspoken women with land, money, and opinions that Puritan leadership found inconvenient.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: Alce Young was very much the second kind.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: So when the town's grief needed somewhere to land, Alice, a visible woman with something to lose, became the target.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: Her trial looked nothing like Joan Wrights.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: The evidence was circumstantial and spectral, exactly the kind that Yardley threw out 20 years earlier, but this time there's a capital law behind it, and a jury willing to convict on nothing but fear and bad luck.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: Alice Young was hanged in May 26, 1647, the first person ever to be executed for witchcraft on what will become the United States.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: And here's the detail that says everything about how thin the historical record actually is.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: We only know her name at all because a Windsor town clerk named Matthew Grant happened to draw it down in his personal diary.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: No portrait, no surviving trial transcript, not even the full agreement among historians as whether her name was Alice or Alice.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: I use Alice ALS E because that is the more commonly accepted.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, a woman gets executed by the government, and the only reason she isn't a complete blank space in the historical record is that one guy happened to be keeping a diary that year.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: That bar is breaking.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: Once a jury proves it can convict on grief and suspicion alone, every nearby town takes note and they're not far away, and so begins five decades of witch hunting in Connecticut.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: Now, under questioning, and please picture me doing massive aggressive air quotes right now because I am.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: Mary admits to consorting with the devil, to theft with unnatural help, and even to the death of a child.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: Now, let's be honest, the questioning almost certainly meant here some flavor of torture that only stopped once those in charge got tired or the answers they wanted.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: A confession might sound like solid ground to convict on, but it isn't.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: Mary's case is exactly why.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: She wasn't accused because of dramatic trigger like the Windsor's flu outbreak.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: She was more unlucky than that.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: Just normal colonial life had problems like the death of children.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: Normal colonial life had problems like an extremely high child mortality rate.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: Mary's life was the very definition of misfortune from the start.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: By the time she confesses of consorting with the devil, she had no family, no standing in the community to protect her, and previous accusations already hanging over her.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: Years earlier, Mary was dismissed from a job for stealing.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: Never actually accused, she was just dismissed from a job.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: Because she was already poor, unmarried, and previously accused of petty theft in Puritan eyes, she was uniquely vulnerable to the devil's temptation.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: Mary spent years enduring questioning, remember the air quotes here, from church elders in their efforts to secure her soul.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: Historians argue over how much of that confession Mary actually believed of herself versus how much was just a frightened, isolated woman saying whatever would make the questioning stop.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: Either way, it didn't save her.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut had its first openly recorded witch confession, a template that got reused, refined, and weaponized in the next 50 years.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: She was convicted in December and executed two years later enduring further questioning.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: Which is awful.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: Not long after Mary's execution, two people got indicted together.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: This is the first record of family acquaintances.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: Joan and John Carrington were poor, but on paper in decent standing with the church, no criminal record with regular attendance on Sundays.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: Their real offense in the neighbor's eyes was being a financial drain on a town that is religiously obligated to support them.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: That earns resentment on its own.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: Then John made it worse by trading a gun to Native Americans, a serious violation, though seriously kind of a rational move for a man who's trying to feed his family.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: And then there's strike three.
16:31
SPEAKER_00: Joan was John's second wife, 21 years younger than him.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: That age gap alone apparently was the eyebrow raise that tipped the whole community over the edge.
16:42
SPEAKER_00: I'll be honest, this one actually surprised me.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: I grew up assuming that a big age gap between a husband and a much younger second or third wife was totally a normal feature of the era.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: It actually wasn't, and I went down a separate rabbit hole in that, and that's a story all on its own.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: There are exceptions in the record for sure, but the average Puritan household, that kind of age gap read as genuinely improper, maybe even scandalous, but not normal.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: So let's review the Carringtons case.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: Poor, financially draining, illegally training with native people, and an unconventional marriage.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: That's three strikes in a community that's actively looking to swing.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: The Carringtons were indicted and hang together in Hartford.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: The actual indictment survives and reads the way you'd exactly expect it to.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: Thou art indicted by the name of John Carrington of Weathersfield, Carpenter, that not having the fear of God before thine eyes, thou hast entered into familiarity with Satan.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: Familiarity is Puritans speak for doing the nasty.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: Hartford is where almost every one of these Connecticut executions took place.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: Different towns produced the accusation, but Hartford is where the rope was.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: It's a genuinely small colony.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: And if you want to do a road trip, you can visit all of the towns within a day or two.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: You'll probably even walk them within five days if you wanted to hike it.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: And there are places in each of these towns about these cases.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: So the case also previews something Andover will later scale up dramatically.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: Once suspicion lands on a household, everyone under that roof is guilty by association.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: 1651 wasn't done with Connecticut yet.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: Things heat up next in Stratford with good wife Bassett.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: She's also vulnerable because her husband is frequently away for work, leaving her to run the household alone, which makes her independent and wealthy.
18:39
SPEAKER_00: And scant surviving reading records suggest that she's also seen as, let's say, abrasive.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: An independent, outspoken woman was not the boss babe energy it would read today.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: It read in that time as suspicious.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: And using good wife instead of her first name is a quiet clue that she's lower on the social ladder importance.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: Once accused, cultural bias moved things fast along, accusation, trial hanging all in very short order.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: But before she died, Goody Bassett did something different that rippled out for years.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: She named other suspected witches nearby.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: We know her last words, weirdly, but not her first name, which tells you a lot about which words 17th century record keepers thought were worth writing down.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: What she said as she stood on the gallows was, There is another witch in Fairfield that holds her head full high.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: And that line landed exactly where powerful Puritan leaders wanted it to.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: Proof that witches are real, they know each other, and they're out in your community, so we need to go find them.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: A dying confession that names names doesn't end one case, it seeds the town's next panic.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: Suspicion travels the same roads people do, and two years later, nine miles away in Fairfield, bad fortune and suspicion pop up again, and Goody Nap fits the mold exactly.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: She's poor, socially marginal, unlucky enough to live where Bassett accusation named.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: She's convicted and at the gallows.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: And this is interesting because this has become standard practice now.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: Prominent townspeople crowding around this poor woman in her final moments, pressuring her to name names.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: And this is what makes this one a little bit unique is they're not pressuring her to name any name.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: There is a specific woman that these townspeople are going after that they want Goody Knapp to name.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: And they name the woman they want to get rid of is Mary Staples.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: Goody Knapp knew her fate was sealed, but refused to seal the fate of anyone else by naming her as a fellow witch on her way out.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: A dying confession counted as strong evidence in court, and everybody knew it.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: Goody Knapp refused to give it to them.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: And this is a twist that nobody wants to advertise.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: Mary Staples' husband turns the legal tables and wins.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: He sues the people who were trying to induce Goody Knapp's confession.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: And Goody Bassett's last words are entered in as evidence against the accusers.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: A colony willing to hang a woman on spectral evidence could apparently still recognize defamation when it landed on the right people.
21:24
SPEAKER_00: Make of that what you will.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: Okay, this next one is okay, they're all kind of crazy, but this one for me is even crazier because there was a fatal accident in Windsor in 1651, and as a result, a woman is accused three years later.
21:39
SPEAKER_00: There was a militia drill, as you know, colonial things, you have your militia drills, you do it.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: And Henry Stiles was shot and killed when Thomas Allen's musket accidentally discharged during the drill.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: It was an accidental shooting.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: Allen admits it, is convicted of it, and actually serves time in jail as a result of his admission.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: But three years later, this incident is brought up as evidence against Lydia Gilbert.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: Puritan theology didn't believe in accidents.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: And even though Alan admitted it, it wasn't good enough.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: Misfortune is viewed rather as divine judgment.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: If divine judgment lands on someone that the leaders think deserve it, great, that's God doing his thing.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: He took care of it.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: If it lands on someone that is seen as being a proper member of society, that's seen as sorcery.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: That's seen as divine on the wrong side of the divine scale.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: Stiles was a powerful man in good standing with the community.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: Lydia Gilbert was not.
22:44
SPEAKER_00: An accidental musket discharge wasn't going to stay a satisfying answer when a less powerful, inconvenient woman was available to be blamed.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: And three years later, Lydia is tried and convicted of using witchcraft to orchestrate Alan's accident, resulting in Styles' death.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: Then comes a truly horrific stretch.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: It starts like all these things do, well, not all of them, but many of them, it starts like Salem did with a child.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: Eight-year-old Elizabeth Kelly gets violently ill, and before she dies, she blames a neighbor of tormenting her.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: That alone might have faded out quietly, but then a second child, Anne Cole, starts showing signs of possession and pointing her own fingers at the fuse is lit.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: Magistrates start rounding up suspects, not from their own town center, but from the literal fringes of society, the forest fringe where the socially marginalized lived.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: Rebecca Greensmith gives an extraordinarily detailed confession, not only of her own guilt, but the whole witches meeting, which plot twist was almost certainly an unauthorized Christmas party.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Imagine that.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: A covert Christmas party with a bottle of wine passed around under a tree on the outskirts of town was enough to make the church leader so upset that it seemed a conviction of witchcraft was the only plausible solution.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, she confesses, and let's be real, confessions were not obtained under anything the Geneva Convention would condone.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: In her confession, she implicates her own husband, Mary Barnes, Mary Sanford, and many others.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: But the four above just named were the only ones to pay for it with their lives.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: Four executions from one cluster of accusations in one town 30 years before anyone in Salem so much as flinched, all because they attended a Christmas party.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: One of the people swept up in that same cluster deserves her own spotlight because her case might be the single best illustration of how much luck, timing, and sheer stubbornness decided whether you lived or died in this system.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth Seeger was married since she was 21 to a much older, well-off Landover named Richard Seeger.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: He was 54 when they wed, and by the time the panic, the two of them had five children together.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: When the young, afflicted Ann Cole started naming names during a special day of prayer held on her behalf, Elizabeth Seeger was one of them to be named right alongside Rebecca and Elizabeth.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth Seeger's reaction on the record was to call the whole accusation hodgepodge.
25:29
SPEAKER_00: A fair assessment, honestly, but not exactly the safest thing to say out loud when a girl having public fits just named you as her tormentor.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: Sure enough, Rebecca Greensmith cracked under questioning and confessed to her infamous witches meeting, saying Elizabeth Seeger was one of the names that also attended.
25:49
SPEAKER_00: Supposedly dancing with the devil in the woods alongside Mary Barnes and the Stanfords and the heirs.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't, not even close.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth Seeger's was formally tried for witchcraft three separate times over the next few years.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: And the result is one of the strangest legal records of the entire Connecticut panic.
26:15
SPEAKER_00: Trial number one, January 1663, she was acquitted by most records.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: This was a genuinely narrow call.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: Trial number two was that same year in July, just one month after Governor Wilthrop got back from a trip to England.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: The jury couldn't make the witchcraft charge stick a second time either.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: So instead they turned around and convicted her of adultery.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: And this is a wild pivot.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: Think about that.
26:41
SPEAKER_00: You came to court being tried for witchcraft and wanting to hang a woman for consorting with the devil, and you leave having convicted her of consorting with another person instead.
26:51
SPEAKER_00: She got two years of relative peace after that.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: And then they tried her for a third time, and this time it worked.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: On the strength of the testimony that placed her out in the woods at night with a group of other women, according to one witness, two black creatures, he took to be shape-shifting figures, and the jury finally convicted Elizabeth Seeger in the court's own words of familiarity with Satan.
27:16
SPEAKER_00: Kough, cough.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: That Puritan speak there.
27:21
SPEAKER_00: And this is exactly where Winthrop steps back in.
27:25
SPEAKER_00: By 1665, he'd secured Connecticut brand new royal charter, and that charter gave the governor explicit power to pardon offenders.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: Winthrop used it, he overturned Elizabeth Seeger's conviction, and after roughly a year in prison, she walked out a free woman, the first person in Connecticut's recorded history to survive an actual witchcraft conviction rather than just an accusation.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: You'd think that would be the end of it.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: Mostly it was, not entirely though.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: She was accused a fourth time three years later because apparently some of their neighbors simply could just not get over it.
28:02
SPEAKER_00: But by then the machine had lost its teeth and no fourth trial actually really happened or produced any evidence.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: And Elizabeth left Connecticut for good because, you know, she wasn't going to go through that a fifth time.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut's leadership took note of Hartford and they did not like what they saw.
28:20
SPEAKER_00: Governor Winthrop, a guy whose own background in alchemy and natural magic, so he actually knew something about separating the real occult practice from mass panic, came back into the spotlight right as Hartford executions were winding down and started to ask the one question nobody else bothered.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: Is any of this evidence actually good?
28:42
SPEAKER_00: He pushed through a rule requiring at least two independent witnesses for any single act of alleged witchcraft, personally reviewed convictions, and as Elizabeth Seeker's case shows, used his newly granted pardon power to overturn them outright when he thought the evidence didn't hold up.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: The execution stopped, the fear didn't.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: The accusations kept trickling in for years, but the machine that turned fear into a rope stopped running quite so smoothly.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: So when accusations flared up again three decades later in Fairfield, the outcome looks completely different.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: And it's not a coincidence.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: That's Winthrop's fingerprint still on the process.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: Quietly, almost anticlimactically, Connecticut's witch hunting era ends in Fairfield in 1692.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: Yes, that 1692.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: While Massachusetts is tearing itself apart up the coast over spectral evidence and touch tests, Connecticut has its own spate of trials that same year.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: Mercy Dissenborough and Elizabeth Clausen both accused.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: Clausen acquitted.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: Dissenborough is convicted and sentenced to hang.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: And then in a move Connecticut courts had never once managed before, a special court steps in and grants her reprieve.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: No news.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: After 50 years and 11 executions, the last person convicted of witchcraft in Connecticut survives.
30:13
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut spent five decades building this machine, proof by duress-filled confessions, proof by spectral evidence, and then watched as that same machine set Salem on fire.
30:25
SPEAKER_00: Then, looking at the medical dumpster fire that the Salem trials were in real time, Connecticut leaders quietly took its own hand off the lever.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: Salem inherited Connecticut's 50 years of legal precedence, and Connecticut inherited the lesson and quietly faded away.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: So Salem became the loudest, bloodiest, most exhaustively documented witch panic in American history.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: Its quieter northern neighbor closed out its own five-decade-long nightmare without so much as a headline, and it's still not in the headlines.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: The tragedy of Connecticut's trials is in one sentence.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: It was spread out enough over enough decades and enough towns that no single moment was ever shocking enough to be remembered.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: Just a slow, steady drumbeat, suspicion, trial, rope.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: Town after town for two full generations.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: And that is sad because these women worthy of remembrance.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: It took until 2023 for Connecticut to say the word I'm sorry.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: And I could go into more of that, but there are plaques and places that you can visit.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to get too long and lose you guys in the middle here, but it's shocking that it took until 2023.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: And one interesting thing to note is it wasn't actually historians or lawmakers.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: It was the actual descendants, not only of accused witches, but also of those who leveraged accusations who came together to push for this vote to happen.
31:56
SPEAKER_00: And it passed the Senate 33 to 1.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: Who's that one dude that voted not to say sorry for witch hunting 300 years ago?
32:03
SPEAKER_00: That's a crazy dissenting vote.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: Who is that guy?
32:06
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to look it up because I don't want to carry that kind of bad thought in my head about an actual person.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, Salem had already cleared its last Salem era conviction the year before.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing that Connecticut and Salem that get lost.
32:27
SPEAKER_00: We treat Salem like the beginning, the middle, and the end rolled into one terrifying package.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: It's actually not the start.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: Jamestown was, followed very closely by Connecticut and Alice Young swimming from a rope in Windsor.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: It's not the end, not the long shot.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: For that, we leave New England entirely and head south to the swampy edges of Princess Anne County, Virginia, modern Virginia Beach, to the woman locals still call the Witch of Pungo.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: We opened with Grace Sherwood hitting the water.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: Now you know exactly what she was inheriting.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: Fifty years of witchcraft hunting and zeal and suspicion.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: Let's actually meet her, because most people who've heard of Grace Sherwood only know the ducking, and that's genuinely the least interesting part of her story.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: Grace was born in 1660, likely right there in Pungo, to a father who worked as a carpenter and was, by all the standards of the time, a literate, reasonably established landowner.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: In the spring of 1680, when she was 20, she married a farmer named James Sherwood, a man with basically nothing to his name.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: He didn't own land, wasn't literate, and never held a position of any real standing in the community.
33:41
SPEAKER_00: Grace's father gave the Newlyweds 50 acres of land as a wedding gift, and later the rest of his land after he died, which is the only reason the Sherwoods ended up with land with being landowners at all.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: They had three sons together, John, James, and Richard, and settled into farm life in the small, swampy community of Pungo.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: This is where I have to slow down for a second because the Grace Sherwood that most people picture, tall, strikingly beautiful, definitely wearing men's trousers while she worked the fields, so gorgeous that other wives in town seethed with jealousy, that image is a much later invention.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: Grace's story was never hidden in history, so she took on many iterations over the years and she became bigger and brighter as folklore does.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: So much more beautiful, much more cantankerous, much more independent than the actual real Grace, although she was still problematic for her time because she was too independent.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: A lot of it tracks back to children's books written in 1973, decades after historians had already picked through the actual account and the court records that existed.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: Going back to the primary sources, which is always the best place to go, as soon in history as it is recorded, those are the best places to look at stuff.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: Going back to primary sources, there's just not much to support the trousers, which is unfortunate because I love the idea and the audaciousness of a woman wearing pants.
35:10
SPEAKER_00: And there's not much to support the jaw-dropping beauty either.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: Although it doesn't really explicitly say, so she could have been gorgeous.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna say she is.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: Maybe not pants, but gorgeous.
35:21
SPEAKER_00: What the record does support is simpler and honestly more interesting.
35:25
SPEAKER_00: A woman who worked her own land, grew herbs, healed people and animals as an informal healer, midwife, and veterinarian.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: Grace spoke her mind in a culture that wanted women to do the opposite and refused to just eat and insult when one came her way.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: That's not folklore, that is in the written record.
35:47
SPEAKER_00: Because it's documented repeatedly across dozens of different lawsuits.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: She was personally party to over the years.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: For a colonial woman legally required to appear in court alongside her husband, she has a genuinely wild number of court appearances racked up for one person.
36:06
SPEAKER_00: So how does she go from local herbalist with strong opinions to the witch of Pungo?
36:11
SPEAKER_00: Slowly and through her neighbors, not out of nowhere.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: The first formal accusation is in 1697 when a local man accused Grace of using witchcraft to kill his bull.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: The case went nowhere conclusively, but Grace and James sued him for defamation anyway, which tells you exactly how she was going to handle each and every accusation going forward, not quietly.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: That next year, in 1698, two more neighboring couples piled on, accusing her of bewitchering the neighbor's hogs and destroying his cotton crop.
36:44
SPEAKER_00: Grace and James both sued both couples for slander.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: They lost both cases, and this is where you start to see a pattern that follows over the next eight years.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: Accusation, lawsuit, loss repeat, with reputation compounding every single time.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: In 1705, things get physical.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: Grace gets into an actual fist fight with a neighbor named Elizabeth Hill.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: And for once the legal tide turns in Grace's favor.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: She sues Elizabeth for assault and battery and wins.
37:17
SPEAKER_00: Walking away with 20 pounds in damages, which was a real sum of money at the time, and today's money that's about$3,700.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: If you're Elizabeth Hill's husband, Luke, watching your life lose a public fist fight and then get sued formally and beaten in court by the town's supposed witch, you might start looking for a way to even the score.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: And in January of 1706, Luke found one.
37:43
SPEAKER_00: He formally accused Grace of witchcraft, claiming he'd bewitched Elizabeth and caused her to miscarry.
37:50
SPEAKER_00: This is the accusation that finally sticks.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: Following the procedure, the court assembled a jury of 12 ancient and knowing women whose job it was to physically search Grace's body for witch marks.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: And these witch marks could be anything.
38:04
SPEAKER_00: And it was thought that if you had consorted with the devil, he'd leave a mark on your body somewhere.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: But it could be anything from a scar to a mole to anything.
38:13
SPEAKER_00: And they supposedly found two.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: And if you think about that, being searched by anything ancient, ancient and knowing, that's terrifying.
38:20
SPEAKER_00: It's horrid.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, the four women of the jury named Elizabeth Barnes had accused Grace of witchcraft herself years earlier, and nobody in Princess Anne County was pretending not to notice that very real conflict of interest.
38:35
SPEAKER_00: They just didn't care.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: The jury came back reporting two suspicious marks, and they took the to the general attorney in Williamsburg to look at the evidence.
38:45
SPEAKER_00: He called it too vague and he sent it back to do the thing properly.
38:48
SPEAKER_00: So the local court reached out for the one tool Colonial Virginia had left on its shelf, trial by ducking.
38:56
SPEAKER_00: Now let's talk a little bit about that.
38:59
SPEAKER_00: Trial by ducking.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: It's genuinely messed up logic because, like we said, the woman is tied in the bag with opposite thumbs to opposite toes, so you're all bent over in a ball, in a sack, and thrown into the river.
39:13
SPEAKER_00: And if you float, it's proof of being a witch.
39:18
SPEAKER_00: If you sink, you're innocent, you're not a witch, but you might legitimately drown before they pull you out, which I think is really interesting.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: And this again gets crazy, and it's even crazier because Grace agreed to this.
39:31
SPEAKER_00: She asked for this.
39:32
SPEAKER_00: She's like, Yep, duck me.
39:34
SPEAKER_00: I'm ready.
39:35
SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
39:36
SPEAKER_00: So the local court got ready.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: They scheduled it and then they actually called it off and put it off because, and this is again weird.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: The day the original ducking was set to happen had bad weather.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: So, in concern for Grace's health, she might catch a chill on her way to being tossed into the water.
39:52
SPEAKER_00: So they reschedule it.
39:53
SPEAKER_00: So it all happens on the 10th.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: And this is where we left it.
39:59
SPEAKER_00: She's tied up, she's sewn in.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: I be not a witch, I be a healer.
40:04
SPEAKER_00: And she hits the water.
40:05
SPEAKER_00: And not only does she float, she manages to free herself from being tied, open the sack, and swims to the bank and gets out of the water.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: So there it is.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: She's a witch.
40:17
SPEAKER_00: She's guilty.
40:20
SPEAKER_00: She's thrown in jail.
40:21
SPEAKER_00: And a second trial is ordered against her as part of any surviving record shows.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: The second trial never actually happened.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: And Grace sits in jail for seven years before being let go, quietly to return to her land, pay her back taxes, get her name indeed back, where she lives until she's 80 on her land, quietly for the rest of her life.
40:47
SPEAKER_00: On July 10th, 2006, exact 300th anniversary of the ducking of Grace, governor of Virginia issued a formal pardon, formally restoring Grace Sherwood's good name.
41:00
SPEAKER_00: He didn't dress it up much.
41:01
SPEAKER_00: His reasoning, more or less, was that three centuries of hindsight was more than enough time to admit trial by water was an injustice.
41:10
SPEAKER_00: The pardon came years after advocacy from a local historian named Belinda Nash, who literally wrote the book on Grace.
41:19
SPEAKER_00: Now it's really interesting that it was read aloud at the cemetery.
41:23
SPEAKER_00: It was read aloud at a ceremony at the Ferry Plantation House, where Grace's original trial took place, and where local actors reenact the ducking for a crowd that this time had shown up on purpose to watch her win.
41:40
SPEAKER_00: So they reenacted the ducking, which is interesting.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: Grace's story didn't stop accumulating detail just because she was found to be innocent.
41:48
SPEAKER_00: In fact, she's grown into a figure of massive folklore.
41:51
SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite things is the legend of the black cat, where locals for a long time were terrified because they thought greats could shape shift into a cat and come down their chimneys to cause mischief and harm to them.
42:03
SPEAKER_00: So it's fun and quirky unless you're a cat, because they did bear the brunt of that particular bit of folklore.
42:10
SPEAKER_00: And then also there is stories that a violent and sudden storm rolled in as her conviction was read.
42:18
SPEAKER_00: And depending on who was talking, this storm was either treated as divine judgment that Grace was guilty or retribution that Grace was innocent.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: Again, you can see both sides.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: Grace's own curse landing on the people who convicted her.
42:35
SPEAKER_00: And because ghost stories abhor a vacuum, Grace has also become a recurring figure in Virginia Beach's local haunted history circuit, the fairy plantation house, where part of her original case was heard three centuries ago, still runs ghost tours today that include her as one of the spirits that is said to linger there.
42:57
SPEAKER_00: Grace's influence shapes the map to this day.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: The road that led down from town to where she was thrown into the water is called Witch Duck Road, and it still appears on Google Maps like any other street in Virginia Beach.
43:11
SPEAKER_00: A statue went up alongside the local hospital in 2007.
43:16
SPEAKER_00: The ducking itself still gets reenacted every year at Ferry Plantation House.
43:20
SPEAKER_00: And a local historian named Belinda Nash, who spent about 20 years piecing the whole story back together and pushing for the pardon in 2006, literally wrote the book on her.
43:31
SPEAKER_00: 300 years later, and you can stand in the exact spots.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: Lineup Connecticut witch hunts with Grace's ducking and the shape of the whole American witch hunting era clicks into place.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: Alice Young hanged in Windsor the first, Grace Sherwood ducked in Lynhaven in 1706, one of the last major formal witch proceedings in the colonies.
43:52
SPEAKER_00: 59 years apart.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: Salem is almost the exact middle of that.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: Notice how differently the two book cases end.
44:01
SPEAKER_00: Alice dies, Grace lives, soaked and humiliated, imprisoned for years, but alive, and gets to go home and grow old in Pungo.
44:11
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut Hunt is northern, Puritan, methodical, dragged out across two full generations and a dozen small towns.
44:19
SPEAKER_00: Nobody outside New England could name.
44:21
SPEAKER_00: Virginia's case is southern, singular, almost theatrical.
44:24
SPEAKER_00: One woman, one river, one road that still carries her legacy.
44:29
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut buried its own story so well it took 376 years and a room full of descendants with genealogy results to drag it into the light.
44:38
SPEAKER_00: Virginia's story never really left.
44:41
SPEAKER_00: It turned into folklore, then a tourist plaque, then eventually a formal pardon on the exact anniversary of the day it happened.
44:50
SPEAKER_00: Same fear, same flimsy evidence, same instinct to find a woman to blame when the crops failed, the milk soured, or the child died too young, or a child died too young for anyone to make sense of it.
45:03
SPEAKER_00: It just took American colonists almost 60 years, one infamous detour through Salem, and a whole lot of quiet cruelty in between for the thread to run all the way out.
45:14
SPEAKER_00: If you're ever actually in Virginia Beach, you can drive down Witch Duck Road yourself and stand near the spot, near the water that took her under and let her back up.
45:25
SPEAKER_00: Know that the feet under your ground remember something Connecticut spent 300 years trying to forget.
45:32
SPEAKER_00: And it gives me chills.
45:33
SPEAKER_00: I will have the places in the show notes.
45:36
SPEAKER_00: I am so glad you're here.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: Of the many interesting places to visit, that's the one I want to go see the most, is to walk down that road and think about what she may have been thinking as she walked as she walked to what was gonna be a sack over her head.
45:52
SPEAKER_00: And that's where we leave it today.
45:54
SPEAKER_00: If any of this sent you down your own rabbit hole, good.
45:58
SPEAKER_00: Genuinely, that's the whole point.
46:00
SPEAKER_00: Go fall down it.
46:01
SPEAKER_00: Look up the place, read the plaque next time, check the show notes for books or places.
46:06
SPEAKER_00: And if you're a curious person and you liked today's episode, the kindest thing you can do is to send it to one curious person, not just tell about, not just tell them about it, actually send the episode.
46:18
SPEAKER_00: They need the whole thing.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: And if you're feeling extra generous, a follow or a review helps this weird little show find its people because that's what I really want this to be.
46:29
SPEAKER_00: Not just something half listened to on a commute, but a community of curious, slightly too online about history people who make the world feel a little less overwhelming and a lot more interesting.
46:41
SPEAKER_00: If that's you, please do all the things and welcome.
46:44
SPEAKER_00: You're one of us now.
46:46
SPEAKER_00: Show notes, sources, and real places worth visiting.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: If this story hooked you in the way it hooked me in, are all linked below.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: I hope to see you next time when we explore the legends that shape spooky season.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: I really fell down the hole on this one from the great pumpkin to the devils and witches that it turns out I didn't really know.
47:06
SPEAKER_00: Until next time, slow down and stay curious.