Tag: Halloween

True Story: My Cousin Testified in the First Salem Witch Trial

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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.

The worst Halloween ever (or, the night a girl and her mom stole my candy)

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When I was 5, my parents took me trick-or-treating. It was drizzling, and I had a nasty cold, but I didn’t want to miss Halloween.

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Florida Memory/public domain

I don’t remember my costume, but I remember my bag. It was a paper, with paper-cord handles. This is important. It was a paper bag.

I got a lot of candy, but there were a few duds. One woman was giving out pieces of popcorn — loose, not bagged, just reaching in a bowl and dropping a few into the paper bag — and there was a doctor up the street who gave out pennies.

So, there I am, sick, sniffling, coughing, with a slight fever, walking down the street in a drizzling rain, and I say, “Mom, my bag feels lighter.”

She says, “Oh, you’re just getting used to the weight.”

I stop and look at my bag and say, “No, it broke!”

The bottom had dropped out of my damp paper sack, and all my candy had fallen out.

We looked up the sidewalk and there, maybe 20 feet behind us, a girl and her mother were scooping up my candy and putting it in the girl’s bag.

I looked at Mom. She looked at the girl and mother stealing my candy and sighed. “OK,” she said. “Let’s go to a few more houses, then.”

We did, but we’d already hit most of the houses on the street, and I didn’t get enough candy to make up for the candy the girl and her mother stole.

A few years ago, my parents and I were talking about the kids’ costumes and about Halloween when I was a kid — like the time our neighbor’s big black dog chased me down the street, or the many times teenagers blew up our pumpkins with M-80s — and I asked Mom why she hadn’t tried to stop the woman from taking the candy.

Mom said she knew the woman, or knew of her. I’m from a really small town in eastern Kentucky where everybody knows everybody else, including their family histories and their family’s criminal history. “That woman was mean,” my mom said.

I understood. It would be a waste of time to get into an argument with an idiot over a couple bucks worth of chocolate. I imagine she would have claimed it was hers under the widely held legal principle of “finders keepers.”

So, this Halloween I’ll carve a pumpkin (yuck) and take the kids out trick-or-treating and, because they asked, I’ll wear a costume — Indiana Jones, because I have a jacket and a hat that would work — and if I see a kid spill some candy on the sidewalk, you can bet Things 1 and 2 and I will help him pick it up.

The absolutely true story of the ‘ghost’ that rolled my toy across the room

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Let me start by saying that I don’t believe in ghosts or the supernatural, but when I was 4 or 5, my mother and I saw part of a toy rocket flip onto its side and roll across the living room floor by itself.

It was an Apollo Moon Rocket. It was probably 12 inches tall and maybe 2 inches across. It had 5 stages: the capsule, the thing the capsule sat on, 2 tubes that formed the body and a round base with 5 nozzles on the bottom but no moving parts, no springs or anything that would make it move by itself.

One afternoon, the parts of the rocket were scattered across the floor, and the base was lying flat, nozzles down. I was sitting on Mom’s lap on the couch watching TV when the base stood on edge, rolled 4 or 5 feet across the floor and fell over onto the nozzles.

It scared the crap out of me.

Mom tried to calm me down. I remember her telling me that it wasn’t a ghost, although she couldn’t explain why it stood on its side and rolled across the room.

When Dad came home from work, I remember running over to tell him what happened, and even though I had a witness, I don’t think he entirely believed me, and, frankly, I don’t blame him.

I doubted the story myself until I asked Mom about it a few years ago. She said it happened, that it wasn’t a trick, that no one touched it, no one was near it, that nothing else in the house moved, just the rocket part.

Like I said, I don’t believe in the paranormal. I’m sure there’s some logical explanation, but damned if I can think of one.