Fair - American witches: a broomstick tour through four centuries

Copyright 2016 by Susan Fair

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0380-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0381-0

Printed in the United States of America

Blame not witches, blame not wizards, magicians, sorcerers, or evil spirits, you are self-witched, infatuated, depraved.

A Debate Proposed in the Temple Patrick Society , 1788

Contents

Preface

I was once accused of being a witch. I was ten years old.

Blame it on my proclivity for dressing up as a witch on Halloween. Blame it on my well-known interest in spooky things, or on a childs overactive imagination, or a bad dream. At the time, all I knew was that my very large, very intimidating next-door neighbor Mr. K was at our door, and he was looking for me. He entered the house; from behind him came the sound of muffled sobs, and then the cute but tear-streaked face of his five-year-old daughter Becky peeked out fearfully from behind his pants leg. When she caught sight of me, she screamed. She tried to run out the door, but her dad caught her.

Noooo! she wailed, flailing in her fathers arms. It turned out that my adorable little neighbor had dreamed the night before that I was a witch. The nightmare had been so real she could not be convinced that her neighborhood buddy, the shy and timid Susan, was not the sinister fiend she had seen in her dream. Becky had woken up early, Mr. K explained, screaming Susans a witch! and had remained semi-hysterical, disrupting her familys morning until finally her father said, Okay, lets go over and see Sue. Youll see shes not a witch. Then he pretty much had to drag her kicking and screaming over to our house.

Now he stood behind her in our kitchen, his hands braced on her shoulders, trying to get her to look at me. See? Its just Sue! Shes not a witch. Shes just Sue! It was just a bad dream, he kept telling her. Becky kept clinging to him, giving me a five-year-olds version of the evil eye. My parents snickered as they passed in and out of the room, getting ready for church. Finally, Mr. K suggested that I dig out the witch hat I had worn that past Halloween, the one with the hot pink tissue paper fringea hallmark of a fake witch if ever there was one. Beckys wailing subsided to whimpering and sniffling at this proposal, though she was still staring at me with a look that was part fear and part disgust. But what I felt most was her suspicion . Suddenly, it was up to me to prove that I was not a witch. For a moment I wondered if maybe I really was a witch. Something that was pretty close to fear knotted my stomach.

I ran down into our basement, yanked a large, mildewed box marked HWeen down from a dusty shelf, and, heart pounding, started rummaging through the semi-spooky debris of Halloweens past: a plastic red devil-head window light (dang, I wish I still had that!), cardboard cutouts of hissing cats, and bits and pieces of unidentifiable orange and black. Spying the incongruous hot pink fringe and glow-in-the-dark stars, I snatched out the hat, smooshed and raggedy though it was, and dashed back upstairs. Becky regarded it dubiously from the safety of her fathers arms. She wasnt 100 percent convinced that I wasnt a witch, but she was also getting kind of tired of the whole thing. If I was a witch, I was a pretty boring one. She sniffled and took a cookie my parents offered her. The Great Harrisville Road Witch Hunt was over.

Its startling today to realize that, during a certain time in American history, an incident as seemingly innocent as a little girls scary dream could have resulted in someone being prosecutedand even executedas a witch.

But heres a confession: for a while when I was a little girl, I was a witch. At least I tried to be a witch. My subgenre of witchcraft consisted of wielding a little baggie of pixie dust (colored sugar left over from Christmas baking, in very un-witchlike shades of red and green) that I would sprinkle around to presumably do magic. (In reality, I probably just managed to attract ants.) I also had a book of spells that my father had found on a bus and brought home to me, knowing I liked weird stuff and that I liked all books, period. I might have attempted some of the spells in that intriguing book if they didnt call for prohibitively hard-to-obtain ingredients, like bat blood and unpronounceable herbs; none of them called for my festive sugar pixie dust.

Okay, so I probably wasnt a witch, but what is a witch, anyway? Youll find out soon enough, and youll also see that I got off pretty darn easy for my suspected witchery, because not so long ago simply having someone believe that you were a witch could transform your life into a living nightmare.

Notes

Identities changed.

Introduction

W hat makes witches so fascinatingand so terrifying? Maybe its all the stuff theyve been accused of doing over the years: eating children, having sex with the devil, making someones bread smell funny. Admittedly, some of their hijinks are more fascinating and terrifying than others, but its undeniable that witches are a staple of nightmares, fairy tales and American history. Yet few of us realize what a pervasive presence witches have been in America. This history is traditionally and perhaps justly defined by the Salem witch trials, but we do ourselves a disservice when we limit our awareness of American witches to the year 1692. The purpose of this book is to bring to light some of the extraordinary lesser-known stories from Americas witch history.

Youre about to undertake a strange and startling tour across four hundred years of witchcraft in America, and its going to be way weirder than you can even imagine. Our Broomstick Tour will showcase America as youve never seen it. Here is a sneak peek at what well encounter along the way. Ready to take off?

Lookdown there! On the deck of that storm-tossed ship on its way to the New World we see a mob of angry sailors about to hang an old lady; in a few moments, shell be swinging above the deck from a makeshift gallows on the yardarm. And over there, in that seemingly normal Puritan household in New Englandare those children flying around the room? And quick, over there at the hearth! Is something trying to pull that little girl into the fire? And what on earth is going on here? Its the eve of the Civil War; why is that man putting on a dress to go witch hunting in New York City?

You will read about these and many other strange events in American witch history. How do we know these things really happened? Because the witches and their accusers left some very detailed records, including court documents, town ledgers, journals, diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts from an amazing number of witchcraft cases. But its those first-person narrativesthe diaries and lettersthat tell the most compelling tales.