Paranormal Yakker

Witches of Massachusetts: Beyond Salem's Shadow

• Stan Mallow

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 Beyond the infamous Salem trials lies a haunting landscape of forgotten witch stories spanning four centuries of Massachusetts history. In this captivating interview with historian and anthropologist Peter Muise on “Paranormal Yakker” we uncover the heartbreaking tales of ordinary people whose lives were destroyed by superstition, fear, and social conflict.

The Puritans who settled Massachusetts in the 1620s brought with them a deep-rooted fear of witchcraft, codified into law by 1641. What's particularly fascinating is how witch accusations followed consistent patterns—targeting those who didn't conform to social expectations or had contentious relationships with neighbors. When misfortune struck a community, these already-marginalized individuals became convenient supernatural scapegoats.

Peter shares the tragic story of Margaret Jones, Massachusetts' first executed witch in 1648, whose only "crime" was being an effective healer. Her simple remedies like "anise seeds steeped in red wine" aroused suspicion rather than appreciation. Even more surprising is the tale of Ann Hibbins, a wealthy merchant's wife, proving that social standing offered no protection against witchcraft accusations when one fell out of political favor.

We explore the evolution of witchcraft beliefs through the stories of Dogtown, a haven for outcasts where women made their living as "witches" selling remedies and fortune-telling services; Elizabeth Knapp, a servant girl who claimed the devil tempted her to murder; and the immortality-seeking alchemist Ephraim Gray whose corpse allegedly went missing. Perhaps most memorable is "Half-Hanged Mary" Webster, who survived a hanging attempt and later inspired her descendant Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."

These forgotten histories reveal how easily societies can turn against their most vulnerable members when fear overrides reason. What would you have done if your butter wouldn't churn or your bread wouldn't rise in 1690s Massachusetts? Who among your neighbors might you have condemned?

 Witches and Warlocks of Massachusetts: Legends, Victims, and Sinister Spellcasters, Salem Witch Trials, Peter Muise, Puritans, Margaret Jones, Elizabeth Knapp, Ephraim Gray, Half-Hanged Mary Webster, The Handmaid’s Tale, Dogtown, immortality, elixir, bewitched, malevolent spirits, Paranormal, Paranormal Yakker, Stan Mallow 

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Hi everyone. I'm Stan Mallow, welcome to Paranormal Yakker My guest today is historian & author Peter Muise. I'll be talking with him about his book.

Witches & Warlocks of Massachusetts:

Legends, Victims, & Sinister Spellcasters. Peter is a life long resident of New England& holds 2 degrees in anthropology. He has blogged about local folklores since 2008 & authored Legends& Lore of the North Shore, his writing appeared in 13 Most Haunted Crime Scenes Beyond Massachusetts & The Real Witches of New England among other places. He appeared on Mysteries of the Museum podcasts & radio shows to talk about local legends& folklore & that's what he'll be doing on this show. Peter Muise welcome to Paranormal Yakker. Thanks Stan. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Massachusetts has a rich history of witchcraft that spans nearly 4 centuries. Most people are aware of the Salem Witch Trials, but not the victims who died so unjustly. Your book fills that void with dozens of fascinating stories. To begin with, Peter, how is the word witch interpreted in 1600s Massachusetts? So the Puritans came over to New England in the starting of 1620. They founded Plymouth in 1620, Salem was founded in 1626, Boston, 1630. In 1641 they passed a law against witchcraft, drawing from language from the Bibles, & you know, & they define the witches any man or woman who has business with familiar spirits shall be put to death, & they excited the various Bible verses, & so for them it was a man or woman who worked with spirits. That was their definition of a witch. For them, witches were always malevolent. I think, you know, in the 21st century we may know people who are witches who practice witchcraft as a spiritual path or wiccans or people like that. We're not really talking about that in right now in my book. We're talking about that older tradition of witches as kind of malevolent forces who cause harm to people.& if you look back at sort of these older witch trial accounts. They follow very standard pattern, usually. Usually the person who's accused of being a witch is someone who did not get along well with their neighbors. Maybe they asked too much from them, maybe they were argumentative, maybe they were foul mouthed, maybe they were sexually promiscuous,& so those traits kind of made them stick out in a bad way in Puritan society, & so then when somebody experienced misfortune, they would say, oh, I think a witch has done this, who would be the likely person to be witch? So for instance, Stan, if I were your neighbor in a Puritan village, those Puritan villages were very everyone was very intertwined, where you were dependent on each other. There were small villages, everyone had to work together to make things succeed.& so anyone who didn't work together was thought of as a witch. So if you were my neighbor & you weren't your crops weren't doing well, & you kept asking me for food or you kept asking me for wood for your fire. Like boy, Stan's not holding up his end of the bargain here. He's really asking too much for me, & then if you were kind of not grateful or grumpy, but boy Stan, he's causing you know, he's not a great person. But then when bad things happen to my family or my livestock, let's say my cows die, my butter doesn't churn, where you be a lot about butter, not churning, something like that. I would think, how come he's bad things are happening to me at this moment? They're not happening to other people?& then I think, oh, Stan & I had an argument. Stan I had a fight. It was Stan. Stan's probably a witch. I would go to a magistrate & I think Stan might be a witch. other neighbors who may be fought with Stan Would be, oh, you know what we fought with Stan, too, & after we fought with Stan, our child got sick or after we fought with Stan, our bread didn't rise, right & suddenly you think, oh, you know what? I think Stan's probably a witch & then you go on trial. That's sort of how it happened. These domestic things that you hear about these old witch stars like the butter doesn't churn or the bread doesn't rise. I think to a 21st century person, they don't seem that serious, or they seem kind of silly, but back in the 1600s people were dependent on that, like if the butter didn't churn that meant the milk wouldn't keep longer, right butter was a way to keep milk longer. bread doesn't rise don't have anything to eat. If your livestock dies, you're out of luck, right? You may starve. So these little domestic disturbances to us were very important matters to the Puritans. The region in England where many of the Puritans who colonized Massachusetts where they came from could explain why they were already preconditioned to believing in & being fearful of witches when they arrived in the New World. What, Peter can you tell me about that region in England? A lot of the Puritans who came here came from a part of England called East Anglia. East Anglia, not coincidentally had the biggest witch trials in England, & then the biggest witch trials in North America happened in New England where the East Anglians emigrated from.& so that was an area a lot of witchcraft belief. Interestingly, East Anglia did not have a lot of belief in fairies or other sort of magical beings, A lot of the blame for bad things would go to witches, versus in places where maybe they were fairies, for example, fairies might have been blamed for more of the bad things or versus witches. I know, for example, if you think of Ireland, Ireland had very few witchcraft trials, & part of that was because& part of that was because they had such strong belief in fairies. So in Ireland, if the butter doesn't churn or your cow gets sick, you think oh, I probably offended the fairies somehow, I should leave out an offering for the fairies. You know some honey or some milk, some fairies so they won't harass my live stock. East Anglia they didn't really believe in fairies that much, & so anything bad that happened in East Anglia, they say okay, it would be a witch. So when the East Anglians came here, they basically brought that folklore in that belief with them. The Puritans were very serious about witchcraft, believing it was a deadly threat to their colony. In fact, the 1641 Massachusetts legal code addressed witches & how they should be punished. What can you tell me that code? Oh, it was a punishable by death. This was the code I mentioned earlier about a witch is a man or woman who has business with a familiar spirit, or does you know works with a familiar spirit. Witchcraft was punishable by death. If you were found guilty of being a witch, you would be executed by hanging, which is not great let's face it. Often a kind of pop culture you see witches being burned at the stake & the horror movies witches are burned at the stake that didn't really happen in New England, partly just because in England it didn't happen. That was not the way witches that's not how executions were cared on England. They were hanged. So if you see anybody who says well, witches was burned at the stake in Massachusetts, that's not correct they would have been hanged. Interestingly, there is a in the 1800s, I want to say it was the 1880s, 1890s. I don't remember the exact date. There were a church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, burned to the ground& it had burned down twice already,& some of the local neighbors in this you know this church Said they had heard strange moaning sounds& things like this. A reporter from the one of the Boston papers to the neighborhood & talked to people like, why do you think this is happening? Somebody from the neighborhood said, oh, many years ago there was a woman who lived here in the 1600s. Her name was Anne Hopkins. She had been spurned in love & she was spurn in love kind of go a little crazy, & then the neighbors accused her being a witch. They burned her at the stake because of a smallpox outbreak, but she cursed this spot when she died & this spot where she burned is where this church is that's why the church keep burning down.& so that was the story that the Globe the Boston newspaper printed, but it couldn't be true because they didn't burn witches, witches weren't burned in Massachusetts & there's no record of a woman named Anne Hopkins being executed, but it's an interesting story, I think, just just to show how even in like the 1890s, when people didn't really believe in witches, you still see those memories of like witchcraft trials & witchcraft execution is kind of playing to local folklore. Who Peter was the first witch to be executed in Massachusetts? Poor woman named Margaret Jones, Margaret Jones I want to I want to say it was 1648. She emigrated from England to Massachusetts with her husband. They lived in Charlesestown, Massachusetts, which is now a neighborhood in Boston, but at the time was a separate settlement. She worked as a healer & um she was very effective with her cures& they were very simple we there are records of them. It's like oh anise seeds, you know, steeped in red wine, things like that. Nothing really unusual for her cures, but they were very effective, & so I think some of her neighbors like how come her cures are so effective? It's a little strange that these ingredients I have around my house, she can make them cure all these illnesses, & she would also say to patients or people she was treating things like well, you have to continue to take my medicine or you gonna, your illness will get worse, which of course makes sense in a sense, like keep taking your medicine or the illness will get worse, but some of the people she said this to said, oh, I think she's just threatening me. Like if I stopped taking her medicine, she's going to use witchcraft to make me get sick, like this is a threat she had make against me.& so those 2 things kind of led some people to think, oh, maybe she is actually a witch,& there may have been a possibility that some of the male physicians may have seen her as a threat to their business. It was sort of women tend to be more of an herbal healer & men were physicians,& so there was this clash between them, I think, & you see in some other witchcraft cases. Margaret Jones was also accused of having a familiar spirit that served her,& it appeared as a small child was what people said, right? This is all just hearsay, but a small child, & people said they saw it appear in her jail cell, even when she had been imprisoned& was awaiting trial. There would see a small demonic child appear in her jail cell & sucked blood out of her body. That's supposedly how familiar spirit sustained itself with sucked blood from a witch's body. She was put on trial & she was found guilty. When she was found guilty, a big storm blew through Boston knocked over trees, maybe a church steeple, things like this, & they people took it as further proof. Oh, clearly she was a witch, even when she died, she like caused all this chaos. Her husband was also accused, but he was not found guilty. There is a weird legend about him when he was trying to get out of Boston after he his wife was executed. He boarded a ship sailing for Barbadoes. He got on the ship & the ship kind of tilted oddly in the water& the crew were like oh, it's this guy. He's causing it to happen. He's the witch or he's kind of lopsided or too heavy, he's unnatural.& so once they kick him off the ship the ship supposedly righted itself. I don't know what happened to her husband, but Margaret Jones was the first person to be execute as a witch. It's clear from your book, Peter, that there was no discrimination when it came to accusing some of being a witch, rich & poor alike were accused of doing the devil's work & had to be punished. One of those persons was Ann Hibbins a very wealthy lady. What Peter is her back story? So Ann Hibbins again emigrated to Boston from England with her husband. Her husband was quite wealthy. He was a wealthy merchant. He became a politician here in Massachusetts. He joined the general court, which was like the House of Representatives for Massachusetts, the Congress of Massachusetts. So he was on that general court. They had a big house in Boston. They also owned land in Brookline, which is just outside of Boston. They owned several hundred acres of farm land out there. So they were doing pretty well. At one point, her husband lost some money in some business deal, like a merchant ship sank or something, he lost some money, which apparently was very disturbing to Ann & she became very concerned about not losing more money.& she got into an argument, this is a minor thing to you & me But it was a big thing back then. She got into an argument with a carpenter. She & her husband had hired a carpenter to add some cabinets to their house in Boston. She thought the carpenter was overcharging her. She screamed & yelled at him. The carpenter brought in another carpenter to give a second opinion,& this this carpenter said, yeah, I would charge the same amount money it's the labor it's the materials, whatever it's the same price. She screamed & yelled at him too,& so this was kind of beyond the norm for what wealthy Puritan woman should do. She was misbehaving in public. she was yelling at men, & people also thought that she was not listening to her husband. Her husband had told her to not do it. She kind of was not obeying him. She was actually excommunicated from the church that she belonged to for this, which to me is crazy. Like this is a minor argument with a contractor to at that time was like, ooh, she's really out of control. So she was excommunicated from the church, which is a huge deal because it was basically a Puritan theocracy, right? The church was very central to the whole society. When her husband died, suddenly she was alone she had money still, but she didn't have his political connections necessarily to shield her,& so she was accused of being a witch. Unfortunately, we don't have any of the trial records from her trial, so we don't know exactly what the accusations against her were. Like what did people say she did with her witchcraft? We know she yelled his carpenter you know, that's not witchcraft, but somehow people probably took that & spun it into other things, so she was executed for being a witch& there were several different layers, like magistrates, judges, all these different layers. So she was found guilty by a jury. The magistrates said, no, we're going to overturn this. We don't think she's guilty, but then the general court, the political body, did find her guilty,& so it was like guilty, not guilty guilty,& she was executed,& people think perhaps the general court found her guilty just because she was so politically unpopular, which is a terrible thing, right? all these stories are terrible because none of these people are witches, they're just people who were accused of being a witch, but they weren't actually witches. Interestingly Ann Hibbins appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne's book, The Scarlet Letter, which I don't know if you had to read that as a kid or in high school, but it's a talk here.& she uh, in that book is indeed a witch. Like she is a real witch & she tries to uh get Hester Prynne to join her in the woods& dance with the devil. Hester Prynne's like no thanks I'll pass. Dogtown, which is now a ghost town, was at one time overrurn by dogs, vagabonds & witches. I'd like to know about those witches who called Dogtown their home. Dogtown is located in Cape Anne, Which is on the north shore of Massachusetts got a it's a peninsula that stick up the ocean.& so it's Dock hunt is sort of between Gloucester& Rockport these 2 towns up there.& when it was first settled in the 1700s, it was a place for craftsmen to live. It was like blacksmiths, cobblers, barrel makers, folks that would live in this area.& it was just called the common settlement. So there was the main part of Gloucester down by the harbor,& then up in the highlands up on the plateau was the common settlement, & in between them was like the meeting house, right, which is the church, the Puritan church. So it was conveniently located. You go to church & you go back up here & work. So for a while it was quite successful, but then at some point the meeting house here moved over here moved further away from this common settlement,& it was no longer a good place to live. Like you had to go from it for church. It wasn't convenient, & so all the crafts people who lived up there moved to other parts of Gloucester.& so these houses were abandoned. It wasn't really a great place for farming& it had all these empty houses. So people in Gloucester& probably rock were also who were sort of outcasts, emigrated& kind of moved into those abandoned houses. Some of them were folks like freed slaves, for example, who were not welcomed in Gloucester would go into the common settlement. There were some people who these days we might consider transgender. There's a man named I think his name was Sammy Stanley, who dressed in women's clothing & would do women's work for people in Gloucester, so folks like that, but there were also a lot of women who got who moved to Dogtown who made their living as witches, which is interesting. This was a time in Massachusetts history, where the people were no longer put on trial for witchcraft. The Salem Witch Trials were the last witchcraft trials in Massachusetts. They were in 1692, so by the time people are in Dogtown, people still kind of believe in witches, but it's not something you can get executed for. This group of women in Dogtown make their living as witches. They do things like they sell herbal remedies. They read tea leaves as a way of telling people's fortunes,& there were some of them who were particularly frightening looking, would threaten to curse people who were passing through Dogtown unless the people paid them. So it's sort of like almost like a toll or a fine for passenger Dogtown, like I am hideous, I am scary. She's probably wearing like animal teeth around her neck, you know, matted hair& whatever to make herself look frightening. She stuck her head out the window. She screamed at the wagon like you better stop. I'm going to curse you. & people are terrified like okay, we'll pay you. We will pay you this whatever you are asking & one of these witches I don't remember which her name I think it was Tammy Younger I think her name was. She was on these particularly terrifying ones. When she died, a carpenter in Gloucester was making a coffin for her. The carpenter's wife was like, you can't even keep that coffin in the house because that's where the carpenters made. Their coffins was in the house. You can't keep it in here. It's too terrifying I can sense her witchy presence so they had to keep the coffin outside. They thought it was too too frightening, which again, these people weren't really witches, they were making their living as witches, but they didn't have supernatural powers. A Pepperrell farmer hired a hypnotist to save his bewitched daughter. What did the hypnotist do to save the farmer's daughter & was he successful? This is a good one. I'm trying to remember the farmer's name something Lawrence. This was in the 1800s, when witchcraft again was not widely believed in, in Massachusetts. This farmer's daughter was undergoing, was going through fits her body would contort, all of these things were happening, & so this farmer who thought his daughter might be bewitched, actually hired a traveling hypnotist who came to the house,& the hypnotist traveled he worked with what they were called mesmerism or animal magnetism,& he brought with him a woman who he put into a trance using hypnotism, & the woman in the trance said that she could see while she was in a trance an old woman on a horse with no horseshoes on it come into their yard, & I think the no horseshoes is very significant because horseshoes were believed to witches from entering people's homes. You would hang a horseshoe over the door to keep a witch, & you still see people's not hang horseshoes saying it's good luck. So it's significant that this horse that this woman rode in the yard had no horseshoes,& so they saw this woman who was hypnotized the hypnotist assistant saw an old woman on a horse come into the yard,& then this is kind of creepy. The old woman kind of went under the door crack, so she kind of like came under the door crack & up into the house, & they could hear they said noises in the house as she was coming like the doors were slamming. Things were moving around the house& all this stuff. But they they said they expelled using like mesmerismic power or something. They said they got the witch out with him turned her away.& eventually they um that family moved, they did leave town. They said, they wanted to be sure they got away from the witches as they moved out of town. They moved to southern New Hampshire A servant girl named Elizabeth Knapp who worked for a Reverend Samuel Willard claimed she was approached by the devil. He asked her to sign her name in his book with her blood, & she would be rewarded with great riches if she killed her parents, neighbors, the reverend she worked for & his family. How did that turn out? Yes so she this is the 1600s in a town outside of Boston. Elizabeth Khapp was a servant girl working for this reverend.& the family started to notice the usual odd behavior with her that you would see in witchcraft are like maybe she's barking like a dog. She is laughing hysterically at things no one else can see. she would say that there was someone in the cellar of the house& they would look there was nobody there, & eventually she confessed that while she was walking home she had seen the devil& the devil promised her money & riches if she would kill all the people, her parents, the reverend, the reverend's wife, the reverend's kids, right?& I think he was very specific like throw them in the oven, do all these horrible things to them. She confessed to being a wittch, which is pretty bad confess to dealing with the devil. She wasn't quite a witch, but close, right? She said that she had refused she wasn't going to do it, but she was very tormented by the devil, right? He was kind of kind of possessing her body, causing her pain all these things, which she refused to sign over her name, her name into the devil's book.& so the reverend & other reverends prayed over her, they prayed a lot, a lot of prayer, a lot, a lot of prayer,& eventually it just passed. She married somebody. She had children, & she kind of fades from history. so she didn't slaughter the reverend, she didn't slaughter any children. It was it just an emotional issue. Was it a need for attention? Was she just unhappy being a serving girl in whatever it was 1660, which probably was not a great thing to be. There was no happily no murders involved. It's a little scary when you someone in your house says, you know the devil told me I was half to kill you. It's not something anyone you really wants to hear, right? You don't hear that. But you have to give kudos to that reverend for being compassionate for listening & for not suddenly saying, oh, she has to be executed. I think you have to give him kudos. He's a wise person, I would say. To create a potion or elixir that would allow us to live forever is a dream come true for every scientist & sorcerer. You write about one of those people who attempted to create such an elixir His name is Ephraim Gray, & he's in your chapter The Man Who Wouldn't Die. What Peter is Ephraim's story? Well, this is a weird, good story from Malden, Massachusetts, which is outside Boston. It's on the subway, another old town, & Ephraim Gray was a wreck supposedly I don't know how true any of this story is, but it's a great legend. Ephraim Gray was a recluse who lived in Malden in a big house,& he never really socialized with his neighbors. He had a man servant who would go out & buy the food& do other errands, but Ephraim lived alone in his house with the mans servant.& the neighbors often would smell strange smells coming from the house, see weird smoke, hear see strange lights, hear strange noises, like oh, this is really kind of weird. But they didn't accuse him of witchcraft. This is like the 1800s, so it's probably probably like the late 1800s. One day the smoke stops, the noise stops, everything stops. & the man servant comes out & he tells the neighbors who are gathered outside the house like what's happening. He says Ephraim Gray was basically kind of an alchemist, & he was trying to find the cure for death. He was trying to find a potion for immortality. The man servant says well, he succeeded, but there's a catch. He died, but his body will never age. It apparently his body was would never rot never decay, although Ephraim himself was supposedly dead.& so Ephraim was buried in the tomb in Malden. The mans servant left the household, somebody else else these things. That's could have been the end of this story, but it's not quite because at some point in Malden's development, they have to move the tomb, right? They're putting a road through, they have to move the tomb so the workmen open up the crypt of Ephraim Gray & they move his coffin. They are a couple different versions of the story. They move his coffin, they go to have their lunch. When they come back, the coffin is opened as if someone had opened it from the inside,& to think oh gosh, like Ephraim Gray he finally came back alive who's out there wandering in the world. That's one version of the story. In another version of the story, the workmen move the tomb & they open the coffin themselves for some reason, & when they open the coffin they see that Ephraim's head is missing, & in this story its sort of Ephraim's head was stolen by medical students & who want an experiment on it,& the workman like, oh God, Ephraim's head is missing, who took it? They go off to get their supervisor,& then when they come back, Ephraim's headless body is gone.& so somewhere out there Ephraim Gray's body headless is wandering around looking for his head,& I don't think he'll ever find it, but um that's a few versions of that story with Ephraim Gray. Half hanged Mary the witch who died twice& inspired The Handmaid's Tale is an intriguing story. What Peter can you tell me about her? Mary Webster she was a witch in Leicester, Massachusetts, I think in Hadley, Massachusetts. She is ancestor of Margaret Atwood, the famous author who wrote The Handmaids Tale & many other things. So Mary Webster was again, one of these people who was quite unpopular in Hadley for various reasons. Perhaps she's just a scapegoat for the things that were going wrong in people's lives. One really well-liked person in town was quite ill & he blamed it on her& things like this. So a mob there's no trial in this. A mob grabs her & they hang her from a tree on their own. This angry mob says we're sick of it we're going to hang him from tree. They hang her. She's hanging from the tree& then they cut her down & leave her in the snow to die& she comes back alive. She apparently was not completely dead. The snow revived her & she came back. I believe she then was put on trial later for a bewitching this man who was quite ill, but then She's found innocent. That is her one time that she is hanged, but it's um being hanged just once is bad enough, I think so but Margaret Atwood discovered her that she was one of her ancestors, & I believe The Handmaid Tale is dedicated to her. Should viewers of Paranormal Yakker want to buy Witches & Warlocks of Massachusetts learn about Legends & Lore of the North Shore, as well as your blog about local folklore how Peter can they do that? Well, they can buy the book anywhere online, any online book vendor should have it. I'm not going to name specific companies you can buy them wherever you buy your online books. You can read my blog at at NewEnglandFolklore, one word NewEnglandFolklore.blogspot.com I've been blogging there since 2008. I took a few months off last year, but I'm back blogging again, so it's got about 17 years of weird stories on there. You can buy a spiral booklet Legends Lore of the North Shore any place online as well. Peter Muise, I thank you for being my guest on Paranormal Yakker. It's been great yakking with you, thank you. Thank you, Stan is great to be here.