My dad, Clyde Roy, writes a weekly column for The Paintsville Herald. Here’s a column he wrote a while back about the family’s ties to the Salem witch trials.
It’s almost Halloween, so, in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d tell you about the time my cousin accused this woman of being a witch, and a jury believed him and sentenced her to death.
It sounds crazy, but I’m not making it up. It really happened. It didn’t happen around here, though. It happened about 330 years ago in Massachusetts. Cousin Sam testified in the first Salem witch trial that ended with an execution.
I’m not proud of this. I just think it’s interesting.
Samuel Shattuck and I are related through my dad’s great-great-grandmother, Phebe Worth Wooten. She lived in Lawrence County, but my son, Todd, was working on family history stuff and found the paperwork showing that Phebe was born in Massachusetts, on Nantucket Island. Phebe’s great-great mother was Sam’s aunt, making Sam my cousin.
I didn’t say we were close. I just said we were cousins.
Anyway, Sam testified against Bridget Bishop. According to the folks at the Salem Witch Museum, Bridget “was clearly a person who made others uncomfortable.” Her first two husbands died young, and people speculated she had something to do with it. Bridget and husband No. 2 fought loudly and in public, even on Sundays.
Bridget Bishop was charged with “sundry acts of witchcraft.” She supposedly bewitched five woman, and several. Her spirit was said to have visited several men in the night, and one neighbor claimed he’d seen her flying over her orchards.
At her trial, Cousin Sam accused her of bewitching his sickly teenage son. Sam said whenever Bridget was close by, the teen would be “taken in a very drooping condition.” Sam’s son stumbled once and fell. Sam didn’t think he simply lost his balance or trip. Sam told the court he fell “as if he had been thrust out by an invisible hand.”
But wait, there’s more. Sam dyed fabric, and Bridget had asked he’d dye a piece of fabric for her. Sam thought the fabric wasn’t big enough for anything practical and decided she wanted it for a poppet, which was a small doll used in casting spells, kind of like a voodoo doll.
We may roll our eyes these accusations – there’s nothing the witnesses described that can’t be dismissed as coincidence, dreams, or the result of a wild and uneducated imagination – but this was serious stuff in 17th century New England. Cotton Mather, a famous Puritan minister, wrote that there no need to prove the charges were true because Bridget’s guilt was “evident and notorious to all beholders.” She was found guilty and hanged on June 10, 1692.
That’s something else I thought was interesting. In real life, the Salem witch trials didn’t have anything to do with Halloween. Over a period of 15 months, about 200 people were tried for witchcraft in and around Salem. Nineteen were convicted and hanged. Despite what you see in the movies, none of the condemned was burned at the stake, although one guy accused of being a wizard was crushed by rocks because he refused to plead guilty or innocent.
It took a few years, but people up there finally came to their senses. In 1711, the courts reversed judgment against 22 people wrongly convicted of witchcraft, and officials agreed to pay a cash settlement to the victims of the witch trials or their survivors. It wasn’t until 2001 that the Massachusetts Legislature passed a bill formally exonerating Bridget Bishop and four other innocent women hanged for being witches.
The governor signed the bill on Halloween.
My mom’s cousin died a couple of weeks ago. He was my cousin, too, but he and Mom grew up together and were about the same age, so I think of him as her cousin. I didn’t know him well, but I always liked him, and I’ll never forget the story he told about the time he threatened to open a hog farm and slaughterhouse in his backyard
Todd Pack 