Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (2 page)

Though Ebenezer Bishop had never before witnessed such horrors, he knew well that afflictions of this sort did occur and that they were often the handiwork of spiteful neighbors who knew how to wield occult powers against their enemies. Many were the stories he had heard growing up of strange fits and other bizarre ailments, the unexplained death of livestock, the mysterious withering of crops, and the premature spoiling of food. To be sure, such incidents could sometimes be traced to natural causes. Yet Ebenezer knew that supernatural forces were constantly at work in the world. Sudden losses or mishaps might well be judgments from God, sent to chastise sinners and encourage moral reformation. But sometimes these misfortunes turned out to be the handiwork of someone closer to hand with much less exalted intentions, a malign neighbor using dark cunning to torment and even destroy—witchcraft might be to blame.

Daniel and Abigail Wescot had feared from the very onset of their servant’s afflictions that Kate was under an evil hand. Still, they were willing to consider other explanations and so called in the local midwife to examine the young woman for signs of a physical ailment, which would be a much less disturbing explanation for her torments. The midwife was reassuring: she evidently thought that Kate’s symptoms might well have a natural cause. But when the treatment she recommended had no lasting effect, the Wescots concluded that their servant’s affliction must be supernatural. Kate herself was clearly convinced of that. “A Witch! A Witch!” she cried out in her fits. “Why will you kill me? Why will you torment me?”

Meanwhile, the Wescots’ neighbors argued among themselves over the cause of Katherine Branch’s fits. As news of her torments spread rapidly throughout Stamford, townsfolk went to observe the young woman’s symptoms and to help the Wescots look after her. Some declared that Kate was clearly under an evil hand, but others suspected that she was counterfeiting her symptoms. It was after Ebenezer Bishop heard these conflicting reports that he decided to go and see the fits for himself. Those who gathered in the Wescots’ home witnessed strange and disturbing occurrences: mysterious lights that entered and traveled through the house at night; the inexplicable appearance of bruises on Kate’s body; the materialization of pins in her hand that Kate claimed were put there by witches; and, of course, the fits themselves. Kate’s body went through horrifying contortions that seemed far from natural and she fought off those who tried to restrain her with a strength that she had never before exhibited. Though some townsfolk remained suspicious, many became convinced—among them Ebenezer Bishop—that Kate was indeed bewitched.

If so, the likely culprit was close at hand. Elizabeth Clawson, a longtime resident of Stamford, had quarreled often with the Wescots and many other townsfolk. Indeed, Goodwife Clawson was notorious for her argumentative nature and her vengeful spite. Some locals believed that she used occult powers to injure her enemies: confrontations with Goody Clawson were often followed by strange ailments or mishaps in the households of those with whom she quarreled. No one in the town was surprised when Katherine Branch named Elizabeth Clawson as one of her tormentors.

There were others. The Wescots had also quarreled with Mercy Disborough, who lived several miles away just outside the county town of Fairfield. Kate had never met Goodwife Disborough, but she had overheard conversations about her. Goody Disborough’s neighbors had long suspected her of witchcraft and Kate now claimed that Mercy was afflicting her as revenge for the quarrel with her master and mistress. As the days and weeks passed, Kate named additional women as her tormentors. Some were Stamford residents; others Kate knew only by reputation...until they began to visit her as apparitions during her fits.

How many witches, wondered Ebenezer as he neared his home, were involved in tormenting Katherine Branch? Why had they combined forces to afflict this one maidservant? And how would the authorities deal with them? News had reached Stamford that almost two hundred miles to the north, just outside Boston in the village of Salem, a group of girls and young women were wracked by fits similar to Kate’s. They also had accused witches of afflicting them. Information about the afflictions in Salem had arrived piecemeal: there were as yet no newspapers in the North American colonies and so news spread slowly up and down the Atlantic coastline, through letters or gossip carried by travelers; those who journeyed by land would stop at taverns along their way and share news with locals as they quenched their thirst. The road that connected Stamford to other towns was rocky and treacherous, with long and often ill-maintained bridges that stretched precariously over deep ravines. Yet the town was not cut off from the rest of New England: it had a fine natural harbor and most travelers journeyed to and from Stamford by water. According to the merchants and seamen who sailed into the harbor, carrying with them news of the outside world, dozens of Massachusetts residents had already been arrested and charged with witchcraft. Was that about to happen in Stamford?

The Salem witch hunt is without doubt among the most infamous events of American history. Indeed it has the dubious distinction of being one of the few occurrences from the colonial period with which most modern Americans are familiar. During 1692 over one hundred and fifty Massachusetts women and men were formally charged with the crime of witchcraft; many more were named informally as suspects. By the time that the trials came to a halt, nineteen of the accused had been hanged. Several others died in prison and one man was crushed to death during interrogation. This was by far the largest witch panic in colonial America: it convulsed an entire region and even today, over three hundred years later, it continues to fascinate and appall students of history.

But it was not the only witch hunt to occur in New England that year. The other took place in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and began with Katherine Branch’s torments. That other witch hunt of 1692 took a very different course from the panic in Massachusetts. Stamford townsfolk were for the most part remarkably cautious in reacting to Kate’s accusations. The officials responsible for handling Connecticut’s witch crisis refused to make hasty judgments about the accused and insisted on weighing carefully the evidence against them: if witch suspects were to hang, their guilt must be irrefutable. Escaping Salem provides a corrective to the stereotype of early New Englanders as quick to accuse and condemn. That stereotype originates with Salem, which was, in its scale and intensity of hysteria, unlike other outbreaks of witch hunting in New England. Stamford’s witch hunt was much more typical.

There were striking parallels between the Salem and Stamford witch panics. Both began with strange fits that many locals came to believe were caused by witchcraft. In both colonies accusations of witchcraft spread beyond the immediate community in which the afflicted lived. And there was no consensus in either Massachusetts or Connecticut as to whether the accused were guilty as charged. In the early summer of 1692 magistrates began convicting and hanging witch suspects in Salem based on evidence that some observers found problematic. Those who criticized the court’s actions—a growing chorus of magistrates, ministers, and other “gentlemen” in and around Boston—did not doubt the reality of witchcraft. Most of them also believed that the afflicted in Salem Village were bewitched. But how, they asked, could a court of law be sure that particular suspects had committed what were, after all, invisible crimes? The evidence presented against the accused was, they argued, insufficient to convict. By October of 1692 attacks on the court had become so forceful that the governor of Massachusetts, also worried by news that his own wife had recently been named, felt he had no choice but to suspend the trials. There followed an agonized postmortem over what had happened and why. The Salem witch hunt has been notorious ever since.

The witch trials in Connecticut did not begin until September 1692. We know that those involved were aware of recent events in Salem and the increasingly controversial convictions. The magistrates presiding over the trials in Fairfield County were determined to avoid the fatal errors of judgment that they believed had occurred in Massachusetts. It helped the cause of restraint that there was only one afflicted person at the center of the Stamford panic and that her own trustworthiness became, as we will see, a subject of debate. In fact, the magistrates agreed to prosecute only those suspects against whom there was evidence from witnesses other than Katherine Branch herself. As a result, only two women came to trial: Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough. The limited scale of the witch hunt in Connecticut, especially when compared with what was happening in Massachusetts that same year, accounts for its subsequent obscurity. But for the two women on trial and those who accused them, Connecticut’s 1692 witch panic was no trivial matter. What follows is the story of their ordeal.

That story has two phases. Initially, the witch hunt took the form of a local and informal crisis as Stamford residents came together to interpret Katherine Branch’s fits. Neither the Wescots nor their neighbors assumed straight away that Kate’s fits must be the result of witchcraft. These were by no means the blinkered and credulous New Englanders that persistent stereotypes might lead us to expect. Neighbors came to observe Kate partly out of curiosity, partly to support the Wescots, and partly out of genuine concern for the young woman. But they also wanted to test Kate’s claims. The Wescots’ home became a laboratory of sorts as the people of Stamford watched Kate closely and carried out experiments to ascertain whether her fits were natural, supernatural, or perhaps counterfeit. Once the Wescots and other townsfolk became convinced that witchcraft was causing Kate’s afflictions, her tormentors had to be identified, evidence had to be gathered, and witnesses had to be willing to speak out. All of this was risky given that most previous witch trials in New England had not resulted in conviction—if witches were tried, acquitted, and released, they might wreak terrible revenge upon those who had testified against them.

The second phase of the story centers on the appointment of a special court to deal with the allegations against Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough. Both women were accused of having “in a preternatural way afflicted and done harm to the bodies and estates of sundry of their Majesties’ subjects.” Dozens of men and women now came together—as magistrates, jurymen, accusers, witnesses, and defendants—to participate in that most elusive of legal tasks, the prosecution of an occult crime. The two women had their supporters, especially Goody Clawson. But hostile witnesses related feuds and confrontations between neighbors, personal misfortunes that occurred soon after quarrels with the accused, and the venomous spite that apparently wove these stories together into a quilt of deadly vendetta. They had come to demand justice and retribution.

Yet the magistrates were committed to a careful and cautious sifting of that testimony, which placed them in potential conflict with those who believed that they and their neighbors had provided ample evidence to justify conviction. Much of the drama that unfolded in Fairfield County that year would center on the tension between fear of witchcraft and the scruples of the court. Would the magistrates prove willing to convict the witches whom local residents believed to be lurking in their midst? If not, they might save two innocent women from the hangman’s noose. Or they might fail the past, present, and future victims of witchcraft by freeing malign individuals who would then continue to wreak havoc in their communities. At stake were the lives of two women, Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough, as well as those of their alleged victims.

It was a beautiful afternoon in the last week of April 1692. Winter was giving way to a warm spring and the townsfolk of Stamford were once again released from cramped winter companionship. Most families lived in small timber-framed homes with only four rooms, two downstairs and two above. A large stone or brick chimney stood at the center of the house, at its base an open fireplace. The outside walls were covered with clapboard. Inside the house a narrow entrance hall divided the two rooms on the ground level. A stairway, usually built alongside the chimney, led to the upper chambers. The beams supporting the steep shingled roof remained exposed, as did the other woodwork—these were unpretentious, utilitarian structures. Windows were mostly small and the houses dimly lit even during the day. There was no storage space, other than wooden chests, and so clothes and other belongings were all on view amidst the bustle of domestic activity. Some families created more space by extending the rear roof and adding more rooms, but most Stamford homes offered little in the way of privacy and must have seemed especially crowded by the end of winter. No longer driven by the cold to huddle inside whenever they could, townsfolk now dispersed gladly into the fields, drawn by the freedom of being outdoors as much as the seasonal labors that came with springtime.

Abigail Wescot’s husband, children, and servant had all left the house and she was enjoying a moment of peace. Though the Wescot family had not been spared its share of trials and tribulation, Providence now seemed to be smiling upon them. Her children were flourishing, even her eldest daughter Joanna, who some years ago had fallen prey to strange pains and frights but was now fully recovered. Abigail’s husband Daniel, who at forty-nine was her senior by just over a decade, had become a leading figure in the town. Daniel’s prominence in local affairs had recently been confirmed by his election to a second term as one of Stamford’s representatives to the colonial assembly. That their neighbors recognized Daniel’s qualities was a source of much pleasure to Abigail. He was also a sergeant in the town militia and she hoped that he might one day become an officer. Meanwhile the Wescots’ status in the town earned them the honorific titles of Mister and Mistress, much more satisfying than the modest though respectable prefixes Goodman and Goodwife. And besides, the linen was drying rapidly outside in the spring sunshine. Praise be to God!