Episode 180 - The History of The Connecticut Witch Trials

Before Salem, there was Connecticut.

In this episode of Lunatics Radio Hour, Abby Brenker sits down with historian Josh Hutchinson to explore the Connecticut Witch Trials, which spanned 1647 to 1697 and led to 11 executions decades before the events in Salem.

They discuss the Puritan beliefs and English laws that shaped colonial prosecutions, the role of coerced confessions and spectral evidence, and the social instability that fueled accusations. The episode examines cases including Alse (Alice) Young, Mary Johnson, Goody Bassett, Goodwife Knapp, Katherine Harrison, and the 1662 Hartford executions.

Josh also shares insights from his work with the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project and discusses ongoing efforts to formally clear the names of those convicted.

A factual look at one of early America’s lesser known chapters of legal and religious history.

Sources discussed include:
– Amanda Pitts, NBC CT https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/four-decades-before-salem-there-were-witch-trials-in-connecticut/3407226/
– Research by Josh Hutchinson https://www.legendsofamerica.com/mary-johnson-witch/
– William K. Holdsworth, The New England Quarterly
– Godbeer, Escaping Salem
– Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe
– Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman
– Connecticut Colony Code of 1642

Other links mentioned in the episode:
https://connecticutwitchtrials.org/trail/
change.org/witchtrials
https://endwitchhunts.org/

Get Lunatics Merch here. Join the discussion on Discord. Check out Abby's book Horror Stories. Available in eBook and paperback. Music by Michaela Papa, Alan Kudan & Jordan Moser. Poster Art by Pilar Keprta @pilar.kep.

Transcript

Flipping The Show’s Format

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Member Podcast. I'm Abby Brinker, and today I'm sitting here with Jamash Hutchinson. Jamash, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Thank you so much for having me here. I'm so honored to be here with you.

Personal Roots And Salem Ancestry

SPEAKER_01 0:33

I'm so excited to talk to you. I'm going to get into kind of how this episode came to be in a minute, but first I just want to say today we're really flipping the format of this show on its head. We're looking at an example of the history of horror instead of kind of tracing back the horror of history. Josh, I'd love to start by talking about your work with the Connecticut Witch Trials Exoneration Project. What initially drew you to this piece of history?

SPEAKER_00 1:08

And I went on a summer trip during high school to go look at colleges in the Northeast. And we stopped at my grandpa's hometown, which was Danvers, Massachusetts. And um Danvers used to be Salem Village. So that's where the Salem Wood Trials started. And we went to the Rebecca Nurse homestead where there's a nice uh memorial to a woman who was executed for witchcraft. But there's also a monument there to people who defended Rebecca Nurse. And um I found my name on there. It says uh well, you look closely and it says JOS apostrophe H Hutchinson, which later I found out was Joseph Hutchinson, who's my uh uh ninth or tenth great grandfather. And uh so we had that link to the witch trials, and I've been interested ever since, did a lot of research in college and then coming out of college and had a social media presence for uh Salem witch trials. And then I saw what was going on in Connecticut where people were trying to uh get their voices heard to have something done to honor those who had been executed in the Connecticut witch trials to clear their names. So that's how we started the project. I was one of uh five people who co-founded that project. Um there was Beth Caruso, a Connecticut author, Tony Grigos, a retired police officer, Mary Bingham's a social activist from New Hampshire, and Sarah Jack's an activist from Colorado. And uh most of us, well, three of us have Salem ancestry, one of us had Connecticut ancestry, and the other two were Connecticut residents, so we were all very interested in uh supporting that effort.

Discovering Connecticut’s Untaught History

SPEAKER_01 3:12

That's so cool. And um, I want to talk a lot more about the Witch Trials Exoneration Project, but I also just first want to share how how we came to be having this conversation and my connection to it a little bit just to set the stage. And it's not as direct as yours, maybe. I don't I'm still looking into it a little bit, but um, as far as I know right now, it's it's not as direct as yours. But I am originally from Connecticut. I grew up in Connecticut, I only left for college and I live in New York City now, but my family still lives there, and I'm very lucky that my parents and sister are very accessible to me, even though I'm in New York and they're in Connecticut. It's only, you know, a few less than two hours on the train, so I get to go visit a lot. But I really grew up going to historic cemeteries with my mom and learning about my family's ancestry through her as well. And I actually learned about the Connecticut Witch Trials um after visiting ancestors at a cemetery in Stratford. And I didn't know about the exoneration project, but I was mind-blown that I was an adult who grew up in Connecticut who's very into cemeteries and ancestry and didn't know about the the Connecticut Witch Trials. So I've been thinking about doing a project about them for a long time. Um, and if anyone follows me on social media, you know that I have a really deep love for historic cemeteries. And that's largely because it really was a family activity for me growing up. And so about a year ago, my mom sent me an article on the Connecticut Witch Trials Exoneration Project, which is how I came to reach out to you. And yeah, and so here we are, but I just wanted to share my connection because I have relatives that are buried at these cemeteries where the accused are buried, and I'm, you know, my mom is doing work on our lineage and seeing if there's any other connections there, but it does feel very personal, I think, in the way that it felt to all of you, you know, that for to learn about this history.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

It really is very personal when you learn about it. You learn, you have that, I don't know if you call it skin in the game. It's kind of feeling that you have that my people were involved in this. So there's something, maybe a little marker in my DNA that's been passed down from either the trauma of suffering in the event or just the the great cultural memory of the events themselves that comes down from the generations.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

So, Josh, I'd love to learn more about the Connecticut Witch Trials Exoneration Project and the work that you guys were doing. So, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Launching The Exoneration Project

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Yes. The project began in 2022, and we initially worked to clear the names of those accused of witchcraft in colonial Connecticut. So there were uh some 34 individuals who were actually indicted for the crime of witchcraft, and those people we had named in legislation um to be exonerated by name, including the 11 who were executed, as well as others who just uh suffered imprisonment and other you know ill fates. Um a lot of them had actually had to leave the colony entirely to be safe. So we wanted to honor everybody. That legislation passed on May 25th, 2023, um, which was a day before the anniversary of when we started the project, which was on the the 26th of May, because that's the anniversary of the Alice Young hanging.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Right. Well, congratulations. I mean, I feel like it's so rare and special that you know a group of volunteers is able to change legislation. So that's really powerful and amazing.

Winning Connecticut’s Legislative Exoneration

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Yeah, thank you. We're trying to do the same in Massachusetts for a group of Boston witch trial victims that have been overlooked as Salem has been addressed. Boston has been left by the wayside.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

Yeah. So now that I'm on this path of uncovering unknown witch trials, there's Salem and there's Connecticut and there's Boston. Are there other New England witch trials or or across the US that people don't largely know about?

Beyond Salem: Overlooked Witch Hunts

SPEAKER_00 7:26

Uh there's several that happened in Maryland and Virginia. Um and even on the way, on the ships coming over to Maryland and Virginia, there were hangings by the sailors for witchcraft at sea. So people would just be hanged and then tossed over. And um that happened to at least three different women uh just crossing the sea to get to America. And there's little activity in New York or Pennsylvania in New Hampshire and Maine, they were largely uh controlled by Massachusetts in the 17th century. So a lot of their trials went through Salem and Boston and Vermont. There was a later incident in reported of 1785 of a woman being given the swimming test and apparently passing because she survived the trial or whatever she faced. There's little documentation about that one.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Can you tell everybody a little bit more about the swimming test if they don't know what it is?

The Swimming Test Explained

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Yeah, the swimming test or or the water or ducking test is you bind a person's um hands and feet, you lower them into a body of water, a river or a pond in most circumstances, but sometimes the ocean or the a bay. Uh so you drop them in the water and you see whether they sink or they float. And if they float, the water is rejecting them, which is basically saying that God's baptismal waters reject the witches, and so then you're a witch. But if you sink, you're you're innocent, but they've got to pull you out with the rope really fast. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

So wow, that's horrifying. That's so scary.

Podcasts On Witch Hunts And Salem

SPEAKER_00 9:29

It'd be terrifying. I can't believe it.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

You also, Josh, have several podcasts, I believe. Um, one called The Thing About Witch Hunts. Can you tell us a little bit about your podcast?

SPEAKER_00 9:40

Yeah, on the thing about witch hunts, we talk to a lot of scholars and also artists that are creating works based on the witch trials. So we've talked to a lot of playwrights and authors um at ballet about the Salem witch trials. Uh, we've had a lot of really interesting talks. We've we started in 2022, uh, just after we started the exoneration project, mostly to talk about Connecticut witch trials, but we knew that because of how much material there is on Connecticut is somewhat limited, that we needed to talk about Salem and others. Plus, we've had this long interest. So we talk about witch trials around the world and we talk about witchcraft persecution that's happening now around the world. And then we have another podcast called The Thing About Salem that is exclusively about the Salem witch trials, and that's a weekly podcast that started last June. We do a little bit shorter episodes so people can get a quick hit and without having to devote a whole afternoon to it. And uh this year we're retelling the day-to-day events of the Salem Wood Trials in daily episodes. So the thing about Salem, you're gonna see an episode every day plus a weekly one.

Sources And Firsthand Records

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Wow. Wow, you're so busy. That's so cool. It's really the thing about this podcast, about Lunatics Radio Hour, is that I don't know, the kind of what you're describing about the thing about witch hunts feels similar in that we are dissecting the art that we love to understand like the history that inspired it or the folklore that inspired it. And it feels similar in that way, except you're coming at it through a very specific lens about witch trials. And yeah, I would encourage everybody to listen to that who listens to this podcast because I think there's so much overlap in the love of bringing something important to life, you know, from history and also how that feeds into art in a modern era. So we're gonna get into the history of the Connecticut witch trials. And before we do that, let's talk about some of our sources. There's also a handful of firsthand sources that I'm going to list out in the show notes, but here are some of the articles that we used. An NBC Connecticut article by Amanda Pitts, four decades before Salem. There were witch trials in Connecticut, a Legends of America article by our guest himself, Josh Hutchinson, called Mary Johnson Confessed Witch of Connecticut, Adultery or Witchcraft, a new note on an old case in Connecticut by William K. Holdsworth as part of the New England Quarterly Volume 48. And again, there's going to be more sources listed in the show notes. But Josh, before we get into the history, I do want to call out that a lot of the sources I'm using are just listed today are secondhand sources where historians or researchers have really compiled and pieced together parts of history. But you and I have talked previously about the firsthand sources that you've worked with. Can you just tell us at a high level a little bit about those, um, where those sources live and generally what they are?

SPEAKER_00 12:49

The key source for Connecticut witch trials is are the Samuel Willis papers. They were held by a early magistrate of Connecticut named Samuel Willis and passed down through his family for many generations. But now half of them live with the Connecticut State Library, and the other half live at Brown University over in Providence at the John Hay Library. So you to see them in person, you need to go to those two locations. But they both have the images available online and transcripts. So you can read and you can view in person to see the old handwriting if you're curious about what that looks like.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

Always. Yeah. I am always trying to parse what it means. You know, sometimes you it can be hard to read uh to read something that old. So it's a fun, it's a fun test.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

Right. That's where the professional transcriptions come in really handy for people like me. I wasn't trained on reading 17th century handwriting, and it's quite different, and the spelling is there was no standard spelling. So every word, every name is spelled different by every writer.

Puritan Beliefs And English Law

Why Connecticut Trials Are Forgotten

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Yeah, yeah. In 17th century Connecticut, many people were Puritans who viewed the devil as an active force in daily life, and believed that God's covenant with the community required strict moral discipline. Puritans who settled New England were influenced by English Reformed theology. They accepted the reality of witchcraft as both a spiritual and legal crime, drawing in part on the biblical injunctions such as Exodus 22, 18, Thou Shall Not Suffer a Witch to Live, and on English statutes that criminalized witchcraft, including the 1603 Witchcraft Act. This is when the laws were intensified in England, making witchcraft a felony. This change also ensured that the accused theoretically had the protections of ordinary criminal procedure, meaning that burning at the stake was no longer used except in cases where witchcraft was combined with petty treason, most convicted witches were hanged instead. Any witch who committed a minor witchcraft offense, punishable by one year in prison, and was accused and convicted a second time, was sentenced to death. Obviously, this law was based in England and not in the colonies, but it helps give context to how relevant witchcraft accusations were at this time. Connecticut's 1642 legal code made witchcraft a capital offense, reflecting these inherited English laws and the colony's theocratic governance structure. So again, even though Connecticut was different, removed from Europe, some of that, you know, historic context is still relevant to how people in the 1600s in Connecticut were thinking about witchcraft. Social instability also set the stage. Frontier warfare, epidemics, high mortality rates, and tensions within highly knit communities fostered anxiety and suspicion, conditions that historians identify as common catalysts for vampire and witchcraft accusations across New England, and beyond New England, certainly. In this environment, any misfortunes such as illness, crop failure, or infant death could be interpreted not as random tragedy, but as evidence of supernatural malice, making formal accusations and executions legally and theologically conceivable within the colony's worldview. I also just want to say that ongoing conflict with indigenous people also contributed to social instability and fear. So the Connecticut witch trials predate the Salem witch trials by decades. And again, even growing up in Connecticut, I had not heard of them until adulthood. And it sounds like Josh, that was very similar for you, and I think for a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

I think for most people that we've encountered, uh even growing up in Connecticut, this isn't a subject that's taught in the schools, and it's not public historically, it hasn't been publicized as much, as nearly as much as the Salem witch trials. Those have just dominated the American concept. We come into a lot of of people who confuse witch trial with Salem witch trial and believe those were basically the witch trials.

Numbers, Dates, And The Accused

SPEAKER_01 17:15

Yeah, it's interesting because you know, we did a whole history section in in middle school and high school on the Salem witch trials. We also read The Crucible a few times, you know. So it just feels like, yeah, like it wasn't like the curriculum was shying away from the topic of witch trials. It was that Salem is the only thing that's being talked about in history books.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Right. I think it's so important to understand Salem in context that it was part of a larger set of New England witch hunts, which were a subset of the English witch hunts themselves, which were an even larger body of witch trials.

English Influences And Providence Thinking

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Yeah, yeah. The Connecticut witch trials spanned from 1647 to 1697, and there was a mini Salem-like episode in 1692 when Winifred Benham and her daughter Winifred were the last tried in 1697. So in total, 34 people were indicted, or at least faced grand juries. Fourteen were convicted, though three convictions were overturned, and 11 people were executed as part of the Connecticut witch trials. Today we're going to tell the stories, as much as we know, of some of these people. Josh, before we talk about these stories, I'd love to talk a bit more with you about the landscape in the community. Why was it so easy for so many people to be accused of witchcraft? And I know I just talked through some of the factors that I've learned in my research, but is there anything else that we should talk about to set the stage for this?

SPEAKER_00 18:47

You've addressed them really well so far. It's you really hit those on the head. But I do want to say that there was a major witch hunt in England by a guy who called himself the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, in the 1640s during the English Civil War. He took advantage of a power vacuum and went around East Anglia hunting witches. And a number of the uh Puritan settlers to New England came from that region.

unknown 19:20

Uh-huh.

Alice Young: The First Execution

SPEAKER_00 19:21

So they were bringing over uh information about those witch trials to America. And his publication, he wrote a book, The Discovery of Witches, that was read in New England. Some of his methods were followed in the New England witch trials. So that was a piece of it. But like you had pointed out, the Puritans and really Christians in general in the 17th century, they saw everything as providential. It was either God being pleased with people and showering them with benefits, or God being angry and possibly letting the devil loose to uh do some kind of suffering and torment to teach them a lesson. So everything they did was basically divine.

How Panic Spread In The River Valley

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Right, right, right. Alice Young is believed to likely be the first person to be executed for witchcraft in the American colonies. She was from Windsor, Connecticut, slightly north of Hartford. Though there is broadly less historic information and firsthand sources on the Connecticut trials, we do know about Young's execution from the journals of John Winthrop. And just a side note here, this is really a quest for my mom, but I do know, even though she is the ancestry um person in the family, that my Connecticut lineage is through the Winthrop family. So I'm just putting that out there, Mom. Let us know. Let us know if there's a connection to John Winthrop. Um John Winthrop was the governor of Massachusetts Bay, and we also know about uh Alice Young through Matthew Grant's writings, and he was the second town clerk of Windsor. There were few known details around Young's accusations and trial. It was known that there was an influenza epidemic that had broken out in the region around the same time. Some believe this may have contributed to the accusations. And I actually found this information from an NBC Connecticut article that interviewed one of your peers who was working in the Witch Trials Exoneration Project. The article spoke with Beth Caruso, who you you mentioned at the beginning. Beth explains in the article that there was a cluster of deaths right next door to Alice. Four children next door had died, but her one child had survived. And this is something that we see again and again in history. We actually did an episode a few years ago on the New England vampire panic, which has a ton of similarities to which trials the vampire panics do. Right? With the vampire panic in New England, it started with misunderstanding of tuberculosis. Symptoms and people dying unexpectedly and feeling like there was some pattern, right, to those who were dying, and thus accusing people who are maybe enemies, you know, of those people of being vampires. But it just feels very, very, very similar.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

It is very similar. Around the world, we see that often places seem to choose between do they have vampires or do they have witches? And it can change over time. So Connecticut has witches first and then vampires. Other places might have gone the other way or flipped back and forth. Yeah. But they seem to be almost everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

Yeah. And again, it just coming back to kind of the thesis of the Lunatics Project, it just feels like such a little ecosystem to prove that out, right? Like vampires and witches and werewolves have become pop culture sensations, right? And they're even like children in children's books now. But like going back in history, this was not just folklore, but like folklore being used to to kill people unjustly. And it really has like a dark, I think, and largely misunderstood origin in history.

Mary Johnson’s Coerced Confession

SPEAKER_00 23:13

There's so much fear. A lot of it has to do, I think, with the mystery that's believed to be behind witchcraft, the secrecy, and you know, because people weren't publicly practicing it historically. So yeah, a lot of it just has to do with we don't understand this, it's scary.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

Right, right, yeah, totally. So back to Alice Young, another potential contributing factor to Young's accusations. It's believed likely that she was married to a man named John Young. And if so, she potentially would have inherited his property, which may have made her a target. And this is something that's gonna come up a few times in today's episode: this idea that a woman having the potential to inherit property being a reason that she's accused of witchcraft and potentially, you know, executed.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

Yeah, I do want to point out that uh John Winthrop Jr., who was governor of Connecticut, um, he was also a physician and he treated John Young for uh skin disease. And on the back of one of his medical notes, he wrote, His wife was hanged for a witch at Hartford.

SPEAKER_01 24:25

Wow. So that's an another kind of like first-hand source that we have.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

That's something that uh Beth Caruso and her collaborator, Dr. Catherine Hermes, found. They wrote an article called Between God and Satan, and it's about that link. The neighbor that you talked about of Alice Young, Thomas Thornton, his links to various witch trials around New England is very fascinating.

What Counted As Evidence

SPEAKER_01 24:51

Yeah, yeah. We'll have to look up. We'll if we we'll link that article so everybody can go read it. Sadly, Alice Young was executed on May 26, 1647, marking the true beginning of Connecticut witchcraft panic in North America. Josh, Alice Young's case feels so important and horrible for so many reasons. She wouldn't have had the context as other people, right? She was the first, so she didn't know what was happening or what was gearing up to happen beyond maybe understanding it from you know Europe. But can you talk a little bit about how her case ignited the witchcraft panic and what came to follow?

Gender, Power, And Accusations

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Right. She may have been aware of witch trials from when she was a child, maybe heard about them in England. We don't know exactly where she came from or when she was born, but she would have come from England and may have may have heard something. But definitely she wouldn't have seen it firsthand in Connecticut. Uh nobody had been tried before her, so there wasn't even a basis to think maybe there's a chance that they acquit me. There's no knowledge of what a Connecticut court is gonna do to somebody facing witchcraft charges. And we spoke with uh Malcolm Gaskell about the a witch panic in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is also on the Connecticut River Valley. And one thing that he pointed out to us was that though Massachusetts, the first settlers come to Plymouth in 1620, Connecticut settled by 1633, 1634. And it just it took a while, years of suspicion usually of somebody before you would actually make an accusation. You had to kind of build up all this suspicion to a point where you felt like taking action. So that was part of explaining the timing why it took until 1647 they weren't trying witches right off the boats. Um but now that things touched off, they did spread around the Connecticut River Valley. It was very active. You had seven of the first seven people tried for witchcraft in Connecticut were executed. And by 1663, 11 people had been had been hanged in Connecticut versus just four in Massachusetts. So it was actually deadlier to be in Connecticut for a while. And you could look at the Connecticut River and just follow that line, all the towns up along down there, and there were a lot of accusations going around that area.

SPEAKER_01 27:40

It's hard to imagine living in fear of that, right? Like of living both in fear of having witches who might be after you, but also of being accused, and it just feels so foreign. But for so many people for a long period of time, it was very common, right? And it must have been very unsettling and uh everyone kind of on edge all the time.

SPEAKER_00 28:03

Right. It didn't happen in every town every year, but it happened close enough to you in your county, somewhere nearby, that there was constant buzz and rumors.

Goody Bassett And Local Memory

SPEAKER_01 28:16

Yeah, yeah. I also want to talk about Mary Johnson. Mary Johnson was another woman accused of being a witch. Her case is unique because hers was the first recorded confession of being a witch, but as we all know, there is not a lot of merit in confessions that were obtained by coercion. Mary was working as a house servant, and in 1648 she was accused of theft. She was subjected to not just coercion, but torture and interrogation. Eventually she confessed to familiarity with the devil. She further confessed to sexual relationships with men and the devil and to killing a child. Again, all of this was under torture and interrogation. Sadly, Mary Johnson was executed on June 6, 1650, in Hartford. There is an interesting side note with this case. My initial research had told me that Mary's execution was delayed because she was pregnant, but Josh pointed out to me that Mary Johnson was actually not pregnant when she was convicted of witchcraft. This is a commonly repeated assumption based on an 1885 article in which Mary is confused with another woman, good wife Elizabeth Johnson, who was executed for an unknown reason, possibly adultery. And Josh, you even wrote an article about this, so I'd love to hear a little bit more from you on this topic.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

Right. That was an interesting one to research. And um we started doing it independently looking at the records because it didn't make sense that some people were saying Mary Johnson was hanged in 1648, and others were saying that no, she was delayed till 1650 or 1651. And so we started looking at at the details, and I found the record that talked about the um pregnancy, and it references good wife Elizabeth Johnson. So has two clues right there. One, Mary Johnson wasn't married, so she wouldn't have been called Goodwife, and then of course Elizabeth wasn't her first name. Now, names get mixed up sometimes in the records. I've seen plenty of Salem documents where an Anne is listed as uh Abigail or something, it happens, but um consistently in the records that we have about the pregnant woman, it refers to Elizabeth and the others refer to Mary, who we know had a previous conviction for theft. So she's tied to another record. But this good wife Elizabeth Johnson, she gave up her son to the jailer and then they executed her.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

That's horrible too.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

And we don't know what she was in for.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Right, right, yeah. Do you have any insight into how which trials generally were conducted? Like w were witnesses called forth? Was was it generally how a trial is conducted today? Like how how much evidence did they need to to come, you know, to find that they were going to execute somebody?

Fairfield Panic And Witchmarks

Catherine Harrison’s Banished Life

SPEAKER_00 31:27

Yeah, the question of evidence is really tricky because what they were told that they needed in sources of the day written by Puritan ministers, justices in England, they read all this literature and there were specific criteria of what constituted grounds for examining someone for witchcraft, and then grounds for actually convicting them of witchcraft, which came down to basically either having a confession or having multiple witnesses say that they saw somebody do witchcraft and they saw the result of it in real time. Um so that's kind of what they came down to, or the other re way was to catch somebody covenanting with the devil, which I think is hard to do. You've got to be like in the right place at the right time, following them in the bushes, right? Following them in the bushes or something. And um so that that was kind of what evidence really needed to be uh done. So initially you would have uh the complaint issued by one of the citizens, uh-huh, and then the magistrates or justices of the peace would question the suspect in what was known as an examination. This is basically their preliminary court hearing, and the magistrates question them like they were uh uh police officers today would do. It was that interrogation. Uh then if the magistrates believed there was evidence to hold you over, you'd go to jail, you'd eventually face a grand jury, you might be indicted, and um you could be indicted either for harming someone with witchcraft or for covenanting with the devil. We see both of those in the Salem witch trials. Um we don't have the exact records of those indictments, all of them. We have many of them in Connecticut, but not nearly a complete set. So we can't say exactly. But you know, you'd then things were pretty much like how we'd expect a court to work today. You'd have a trial by jury, they would reach a verdict, and then you would be sentenced. In the Connecticut witchcraft cases, that sentence was always execution by hanging. And then that sentence would either be carried out, or if in three cases they reviewed the cases, the higher court reviewed the cases and decided that the convictions should be overturned.

SPEAKER_01 34:11

Right. Right. So interesting. Thank you for sharing that. It's yeah, I'm I'm still thinking about how to catch one, you know, hanging out with the devil. And I I guess if that ever was brought up as evidence, it was just clearly totally exaggerated or lied, right?

Hartford Witch Panic Details

SPEAKER_00 34:32

Right. There was, you know, a case in Connecticut in the Hartford Witch Panic when Rebecca Greensmith and some other women were supposedly seen in a field out like a meadow in the woods or something. A guy saw them at night during Christmas season, which Christmas wasn't celebrated in New England, by the way, officially, but people still took kept the holiday themselves. Yeah, yeah. Um so they're having this little gathering, supposedly, and it looks like there's a cauldron on a fire. There are little black creatures dancing around the fire along with the women. So it's like they're having a Sabbath there with the devil. So they're like seen with the devil, basically. And that's kind of the only way that you could really prove that because nobody ever you know turned up the devil's book. Um, nobody turned up any physical evidence that the devil had ever showed up.

SPEAKER_01 35:34

It is less common, but as in Salem, men were also accused in the Connecticut witch trials. In 1651, Joan and John Carrington were executed. Though some men were executed in the Connecticut trials, witchcraft accusations generally impacted women with property, widows, and those seen as outsiders.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

The men involved in those trials, as you you mentioned, you read the names, um the two that were executed in Connecticut were executed along with their wives. And if you look at the pattern of men in general in New England who were accused, about half of them had were connected to a woman who was accused first. So either their mother, their sister, their wife, somebody they were connected to gets accused, and then by association they get accused. So a lot of times the men weren't the primary targets. Right. Um, but there were you know, half of them in the Salem Wood trials were primary targets that we don't have a link to we don't have a link to another person that was accused. It's just them. But the ones who were executed, they had deviated from the standards of masculinity in some way, either by being too aggressive with their wives or sinning in some other way that fell short of the ideal man. Just like the witches were the antithesis of the ideal woman, the witches were also the antithesis of the ideal man. They either weren't a good father, they weren't a good spouse, they weren't a good citizen.

Winthrop Jr. Brings Skepticism

SPEAKER_01 37:22

I think it's interesting. I have this very vivid memory, and the only reason that I have this memory is because my sister, and this is, I don't know, maybe a side note about this strange um Connecticut curriculum that we grew up with, but in must have been middle school, like must have been third or fourth grade, my sister had to make a diorama of the Connecticut witch trial or of the Salem witch trials. And she, I remember she had to make Giles Corey, who was killed by being crushed to death under stones. And I will only remember that that's how he died because she I remember how she made that, like you know, and what a horrifying assignment for a middle school child to make. Um but because of that, I I was just thinking when you were talking about how it's also interesting that he was killed in a different way than a lot of the women who were hanged.

Modern Memorials And Exonerations

SPEAKER_00 38:14

Right. He was killed that way specifically because he refused to stand trial. They asked him, Will you stand trial by king and country or god and country? And he said no, or stayed quiet. Right. And uh they just kept pushing him, adding more weight. Will you stand trial now? Add more weight, please. You know, more weight is his last words uh according to uh witness testimony. So but that's a really gruesome thing for a middle schooler to have to represent. It was not a pretty sight, according to the records that we have.

Ongoing Efforts In Massachusetts

The Connecticut Witch Trial Trail

SPEAKER_01 38:56

Yeah, yeah, really horri and still in my head, you know, many, many years, 30 years later, still in my head. Let's talk about Goody Bassett, who was executed on May 15th, 1651. Hers was the fourth of the eleven Connecticut executions. Bassett spoke of another witch in Fairfield, which eventually led to the arrest and execution of Goody Knapp, and more on her in a minute. Very little is known about Goody Bassett's origins that historians aren't even clear on her true name, though some believe it to be Mary Payne Bassett. It is known that Bassett was married to Thomas Bassett, who was a carpenter and had previously lived in both New Haven and Windsor before moving to Stratford in 1651. The only mention of Bassett's trial is from the official record of the New Haven colony, which stated that on May 15, 1651, quote, the governor, Mr. Cullock, and Mr. Clark, are desired to go down to Stratford to keep court, to keep court upon the trial of Goody Bassett for her life, end quote. It is widely believed that Bassett was tried for witchcraft and that she made a confession under torture. It is also believed that Bassett's trial was overseen by John Haynes, a founder of the Connecticut colony, along with leaders from New Haven. Some contemporary sources state that Bassett was accused of placing curses on individuals that caused them physical pain. Other accounts claim that people experienced hallucinations, illness, and death shortly after Bassett moved to Stratford in 1651, though there is no clear evidence supporting these claims. During the 1653 trial of Goodwife Knapp, it was reported that Bassett suggested there was a witch in Fairfield and allegedly stated that there were, quote, others who hold their heads full high, quote. Bassett did not explicitly name Knapp, and it is unknown whether the two women knew each other, although Bassett had previously lived in Fairfield, so there is a potential. Bassett was executed by hanging on May 15, 1651. Nineteenth century retrospective sources allege that Bassett attempted to cling to a boulder while being transported to the gallows, leaving peculiar marks on the stone. Although Bassett is commonly believed to have been executed in Stratford, the exact location of her death is disputed. Proposed sites for the gallows include what is now an exit of Interstate 95, an area behind an ice cream parlor, and the vicinity of Phelps Mansion. Local records indicate that Bassett's husband moved to Fairfield following her death.

SPEAKER_00 41:30

The town of Stratford observed Goody Bassett Day in 2023, and we happened to be in town, several of us, in the in Connecticut, I should say, because the legislation was going to be voted on in the House and Senate. So we were there in May of 2023, and they held a Goody Bassett ball, uh, which was well attended. There was well over a hundred people there at Goody Bassett's ball. Bassett ice cream or Goody Bassett's ice cream parlor was actually on hand serving ice cream to all of us. So that was so such an interesting experience to have a gala, which was a fundraiser for the Stratford Historical Society, but based on one of the accused witches that we we just don't know that much about. We know a little bit about her because of a lawsuit that happened between uh Mary Staples and Roger Ludlow, who's one of the people who came up with the laws for Connecticut. But he said that Goody Bassett told him that Mary Staples was a witch before she died, that she like whispered that in his ear right before they hanged her. So there's that little detail.

Where To Follow Josh’s Work

SPEAKER_01 42:56

I feel like there's a few of those that we've talked about today or that we are going to talk about, where people being accused of witchcraft are then either actually accusing, or you know, people are tell saying that they've accused other people and there's no way to prove it because they've just been executed. You know, it's it it feels a little convenient sometimes, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 43:15

It's too convenient. Uh just it's hard to believe that somebody's dying words only to you were accusing somebody else of witchcraft, and you have no other evidence to corroborate.

SPEAKER_01 43:30

Goodwife Knapp was a woman living in Fairfield, Connecticut. Knapp was accused in the testimony of Goody Bassett. Again, tangentially, right? Like we just talked about this, that Bassett never named her explicitly, but she made a comment about witches in Fairfield. Knapp maintained her innocence always. She never faltered. She also never accused another of witchcraft, claiming that she did not want to, quote, render evil for evil, end quote. She was executed in 16. 1853. Catherine Harrison was a widow, working as a servant for Captain John Cullock. Harrison migrated to the New World in 1651, from England where she was born. After her husband's death, she inherited his estate in Weathersfield, making her significantly more well off. This estate was worth one thousand pounds at the time, which in 2026 would be worth about three hundred thousand pounds. And like I said, Catherine was from Weathersfield, as was Mary Johnson. Some historians refer to them as the Weathersfield witches. In 1668, Catherine Harrison was sued for slandering Goody Griswold. And just a side note for those interested, and I could have said this earlier, but in the 1600s the term goody referred to a married woman of a lower or middle class. A mistress referred to a wealthy married woman, and good man referred to the male equivalent. But back to Catherine Harrison. About twenty years after losing her husband, starting in 1668, she was accused of witchcraft. We know a bit about the specific accusations against her. She was accused of appearing in spectral form to others, breaking Sabbath, calling to the devil, black magic, and fortune telling. On May 11, 1669, she was taken into a jail cell to await trial. Harrison's trial encountered several complications. The first jury did not reach a verdict. The second jury found her guilty, but the magistrates did not agree with the decision because most of the evidence was spectral and based only on the accuser's testimony. And so in May of 1670, Harrison was released from prison and banished from the Connecticut colony. She and her family relocated to New York.

SPEAKER_00 45:45

Catherine Harrison, when she got to New York, she went to a town called Westchester, which is now a part of Brooklyn, I believe. It's not the Westchester County we think of today. But she was actually run out of that town too, to an unknown location. We don't know where she moved, if she stayed in New York, or maybe she made her way to Rhode Island or some other friendlier colony. But she was being persecuted wherever she went because she supposedly had been a fortune teller and learned at the hand of a very famous um astrologer in England.

SPEAKER_01 46:32

It's interesting because I actually have a friend, Marie Carter, who wrote a book about women in the Lurie side in Manhattan who were persecuted as fortune tellers. And so I I can totally see the the through line and the connection to um you know those accusations following her around wherever she went. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:55

Right. And if you get a fortune wrong, somebody can believe that you actually cursed them and caused the bad thing that you predicted.

SPEAKER_01 47:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00 47:05

So you really wanted to just predict good things, I think.

SPEAKER_01 47:10

Yeah, and I do want to point out the reason why there was a lot of women who went into fortune telling at this time or different versions of that, uh, is because it was a profession that allowed women outside of prostitution or other things to kind of control their own lives and not work in a factory or under dangerous conditions. And it was dangerous because it was illegal and it was um not without its faults, but it gave women some autonomy in a world where they really struggled to find that.

SPEAKER_00 47:41

Right. There were cunning folk which were basically the magic practitioners of the day. They were the village healer, they were the person you went to if you lost something or something was stolen, or if you wanted to find treasure, or so many uses, love magic. Yeah, they were they did it all.

SPEAKER_01 48:02

Yeah, yeah. There were certain pockets of Connecticut that saw more activity. Hartford was one of them, and you talked a little bit about the Hartford witch trials. In the 1640s, Hartford experienced a wave of witch accusations. Anne Cole accused Rebecca Greensmith and Elizabeth Seeger of using magic to harm her. Elizabeth Kelly's parents accused Goody Ayers of using black magic to kill her daughter. Other claims included one person saying Satan caused her to speak with an accent, and another claiming neighbors turned into animals at night. Catherine Branch, a servant of the Westcott family, was accused of having fits and other unusual incidents, which Daniel Westcott described as quote beyond nature, including floating above her bed. A minister from a nearby village said Branch's afflictions were caused by her refusal to join a witch coven. Four people from Hartford were executed for witchcraft. Nathaniel Greensmith, Rebecca Greensmith, Mary Sanford, and Mary Barnes were hanged in 1662. Elizabeth Seeger was accused, but the charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence. And I want to ask you, and forgive if this is kind of a naive question, but just this kind of high-level research I've done, it feels like the Hartford trials feel like a panic to me. Like the accusations feel a bit wilder, I guess, and more supernatural. Um, but tell me if that's totally off base. It just it just they feel a little bit um wilder than some of the other Connecticut accusations we've talked about.

SPEAKER_00 49:40

There are uh basically two sets of accusations in Connecticut that we refer to as a witch panic. The Hartford witch panic, which was 1662 to 1663, and then the Stanford Fairfield Witch Panic, which was the one that happened in 1692 and really resembled Salem in so many ways, because the girl who made the accusations was afflicted in very similar ways to the Salem village girls.

SPEAKER_01 50:13

Yeah, it's so interesting. It's so interesting. And Josh, are there the you know, these are again some of the the people that I found enough history to talk about on today, but are there other stories or people that we should mention from the Connecticut Witch Trials?

SPEAKER_00 50:27

Yeah, actually, I'd like to talk a little more about the Stanford Fairfield Witch Panic. The story of the Stanford Fairfield Witch Panic, it packs it in. You've got talking cats, um, Catherine Branch finds a table of meats that's offered to her to kind of lure her to the witch side. Um, you've got witchmarks uh involved in this story, and the water test actually performed on two people in 1692, which they didn't even do that in Salem, but in Connecticut, one of the uh suspects actually requested it because she believed it would vindicate her. Right. So she's like, please duck me. I want to be tested, see if I float or not. Yeah, which marks were basically kind of skin tags or moles or we don't know exactly what they always were, but any kind of defect on your skin, any blemish or mark, it could just be a red spot, a blue spot on your skin. And they were believed to be there so that the your familiar could feed from you. So they were basically used as teeth for feeding imps and familiars. And Matthew Hopkins in the East Anglia Witch House was really interested in these and he set up a process called watching where they would sit you in the middle of a room and watch you day and night and not let you sleep for days uh to see if your familiar came in and fed.

SPEAKER_01 52:12

So wild. It's so supernatural and yeah, strange. By 1663, the witchcraft trials in Hartford were slowing down, partly because John Winthrop Jr., the governor of Connecticut, returned.

SPEAKER_00 52:25

Right. He went to London to get a charter for the colony because a lot of people don't realize this, but Connecticut was founded without a charter. They didn't have permission from the king to do what they were doing from 1634 until 1663.

SPEAKER_01 52:44

Winthrop was known as an expert in witchcraft cases because he was the son of the Massachusetts governor and had studied alchemy. He had also seen John Dee and Robert Flood oppose false witch accusations. Winthrop often took part in trials to prevent wrongful executions. His involvement led to more skepticism about witchcraft claims. In 1669, his court ruled that multiple witnesses had to see the same act of witchcraft for an accusation to be valid. This reduced the number of accusations, and after Catherine Harrison was released in 1670, no one else was executed for witchcraft in Connecticut. On October 6, 2012, descendants of the executed petitioned the Connecticut government to pardon the victims, but it was not approved. In 2007, Addie Avery, a descendant of Mary Sanford, who was executed for, quote, dancing around a tree while drinking liquor, end quote, contacted the British government to seek acquittal for the convicted witches. Avery has also participated in plays about the Connecticut Witch Trials, including The Witching Hour. On February 6, 2017, Windsor passed a resolution to symbolically clear the names of Alice Young and Lydia Gilbert. In June 2017, memorial services were held in Windsor for the victims, marking the 370th anniversary of Alice Young's execution. In May of 2023, the Stratford Historical Society, and this is what you were talking about, held its first Goody Bassett ball, and the mayor, Laura Hoydick, recognized Bassett for her valuable contribution to Stratford's history. 371 years after her death, on October 26, 2023, Goody Bassett was formally exonerated at a ceremony in Stratford. The Stratford Historical Society had requested that Stratford Town Council pass a resolution to exonerate her, describing it as correcting a historic injustice. Bassett has been described as, quote, a relatively powerless scapegoat who became the focus of a community panic, likely whipped up by a baseless rumor, end quote. And as you said, an ice cream polar in Stratford is named after Bassett. Josh, I would love to close this out if with you telling us a little bit about the amazing exoneration work you've done and where kind of things stand today and what's next for the group.

SPEAKER_00 55:10

Right. Well, fortunately, everyone in Connecticut who's been accused of witchcraft has now had their name cleared through that legislation passed three years ago. And since then, we've been working in Massachusetts to have eight people who were convicted in Boston get their names cleared and to have everyone who was accused of witchcraft anywhere in Massachusetts recognize and acknowledge that they did suffer in various ways, whether they were executed or not. And that legislation right now it has passed by the Judiciary Committee, and now it's in the House Committee on Ways and Means, which basically looks at things that might impact the state financially. And this has no cost to it. It's just a proclamation, basically. So uh there's no cost. So this should move through that committee and go to the House for a vote this spring. And if people want to help, they can go to change.org slash witch trials and sign our petition.

SPEAKER_01 56:22

Amazing. I mean, congratulations on getting it so far. It's again, I'm so in awe of the work that you've done and you know how far you've been able to get uh within the government. It's it's very exciting. So definitely everyone will link the petition in the show notes and on social media as well so people can find it easily. I also want to call out part of the Connecticut Witch Trials Exoneration Project's work, which was to create a trail of places to visit in Connecticut where relevant historic events took place. And as someone who's constantly visiting historic cemeteries and landmarks, I've really been enjoying this interactive map, which came out of your group. Um I'll also link it in the description because I plan to visit a lot of these places and um it's very helpful and it's very cool to be able to see the proximity to where my family is or where I grew up to some of these historic moments that again I wasn't aware of until really the last year of my life.

SPEAKER_00 57:18

Right. The trail guides people to the communities where either witchcraft accusations happened or trials were held, uh, any of those locations, and we direct people to the local museums and historical societies to learn more about the local history as they go along, and you accumulate that as you travel the state, and so you learn the whole history of the Connecticut witch trials.

SPEAKER_01 57:48

Yeah, it's so cool, and I think it's just a reminder, you know, this again, this is like history that's very close to home for me, but there's so many amazing historical societies out there that are putting on such great events and doing such great work, and wherever you live, you know, looking at the events coming up and learning a little bit about where you are, I think is a really cool way to support your community, to connect and to learn about the history of this country, you know, and I think it all helps inform where we are today. Um but Josh, thank you so much for being here. This has been so fun, and I'd love for you to tell everybody where they can listen to your shows and follow your work and kind of stay tuned for more from you.

unknown 58:29

All right.

SPEAKER_00 58:29

You can watch us on video on YouTube and Spotify, and we're available audio through Apple Podcasts and all the other major podcast carriers. You can visit our main website at indwitchhunts.org. That's the website of our nonprofit inwitch hunts, and you can learn about all of our podcasts there.

SPEAKER_01 58:54

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for the time. It was so lovely to talk to you, and I hope that we will talk soon and we'll do you know some other collaboration in the future at some point.

SPEAKER_00 59:04

Great. I I look forward to that. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 59:08

Thanks, Josh.