Why Connecticut is Exonerating Witches

Little-known victims of witch trials may finally receive justice

The Economist HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT

In 1642 colonial Connecticut adopted a list of 12 capital crimes, which included murder, kidnapping, treason—and witchcraft. Five years later Alse Young was the first person recorded in colonial America to be executed for the crime of witchcraft. On May 26th 1647 she was hanged on the grounds of the Hartford meeting house, now the site of Old State House. Ten other people were executed for witchcraft in Connecticut and more than 30 people were indicted for it between 1647 and 1697. More than 375 years after Young was executed, her absolution may be nigh.

Last month a judiciary committee of the state legislature agreed to consider a resolution that would exonerate those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut. At a hearing on March 1st William Schloat, a nine-year-old, testified that he wished he had a time machine so he could help the accused. John Kissel, a Republican state senator, wondered about the state’s role in any exoneration, since the trials took place before the United States existed, when Connecticut was a colony: “Once you go down that path, where does it end?” Luther Weeks, a descendant of a deacon who may have been involved in the prosecutions, countered that the state had no issue celebrating the positive aspects of colonial history; it needed to acknowledge the dark side, too.

Many accused of witchcraft were vulnerable. Unmarried pregnant woman were frequent targets. Young, a new arrival, may have been targeted because some thought she caused an outbreak of influenza. Beth Caruso, co-founder of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, made up of amateur historians and descendants, says her husband’s ancestor was found guilty of bewitching a gun that had accidentally killed someone three years earlier, even though she was not there. Some may have been coerced into confessing. Many met their end at the gallows. Others faced the ducking test: suspected witches were dropped into water; the innocent sank and the guilty floated.

Sarah Jack, co-host of “Thou Shalt Not Suffer”, a witch-trial podcast, discovered three years ago that she was a descendant of Winifred Benham, the last person accused of witchcraft in Connecticut. “I was confused,” she says. “I had no idea there were more witch trials in New England outside of Salem.” Schoolchildren learn about the witch trials that took place in neighbouring Massachusetts. Arthur Miller, a playwright, used the trials of 1692 as an allegory of the anti-Communist panic. Salem, the heart of the hysteria, has embraced its history and become a kitschy, witchy tourist spot, with plenty of wands for sale.

Massachusetts has made several efforts to atone. In 1702 the General Court of Massachusetts declared the trials unlawful. A decade later the state overturned the convictions. In 1957 and 2001 more alleged witches were exonerated. Thanks to the efforts of children working on a history project, the last accused witch in Massachusetts was cleared of wrongdoing last summer. Also last year Nicola Sturgeon, then Scotland’s first minister, issued a posthumous apology to the thousands of people persecuted as witches in Scotland.

But in Connecticut efforts have been successful only on the local level. The town council in Windsor, where Young lived, exonerated her in 2017. Proponents of the bill hope a history trail remembering those accused would be meaningful. Some say lawmakers have more pressing matters to deal with than exonerating those dead for nearly four centuries. Jane Garibay, who introduced the bill in the state’s House of Representatives, says exoneration has been a long time coming, and that any injustice is worth putting right. “It was a wrong,” she says. The bill is “saying we’re sorry”.

The Occult Museum

Now this is something I would want to see, thanks to Atlas Obscura. It is the Occult Museum .

This museum is located in Monroe, Connecticut and the creators of the museum, Ed and Lorraine Warren, are buried nearby. The Warrens were some of the prolific paranormal investigators in American history. Their real escapades inspired one of the highest grossing fictional horror franchises, The Conjuring Universe. The pair of devout Catholics also ran the Occult Museum for many years.

Ed claimed to be a demonologist, while his wife Lorraine was a self-professed medium a clairvoyant. Together, they traveled the country, investigating infamous cases such as the Enfield poltergeist, an alleged instance of possession that formed the basis for The Conjuring 2, and Amityville Horror, a prominent 1975 case in which a couple claimed that a demonic presence haunted their home, and a 1968 case of a haunted Raggedy Ann that inspired the cinematic murder doll, Annabelle. 

Ireland's Fairy Forts

This report by Atlas Obscura describes Ireland's ring forts which are associated with the supernatural. Here is an excerpt:

Deep in western Ireland’s rugged landscape, in the sleepy town of Kilmaine, two brothers decided to build a house. But first, John and Tom Mooney had to find construction materials. According to a story passed down for generations, John came upon an old, forgotten lios, a medieval ring fort made, conveniently, of suitable stones. The next day, the brothers started pulling out the bushes that grew along the fort’s walls. As they cleared the overgrowth, they thought they heard the echo of someone crying, but shrugged it off and kept working. When a local priest noticed what they were doing, he warned them to leave the fort alone—but the brothers were undeterred. As dusk gave way to evening, the brothers finally stopped their work and returned home. By morning, both John and Tom Mooney were dead. A week later, as he was walking past the fort, the priest fell and broke his leg. Locals knew the tragic events were no accident—the fairies were to blame.

In the 1930s, young Paddy Gannon contributed the Mooneys’ story to the Schools’ Collection, where more than 50,000 schoolchildren compiled folktales from parents, neighbors, and grandparents. With some 32,000 ring forts, or “fairy forts,” scattered across Ireland, it’s perhaps not surprising that many of those folktales are set in these curious structures. “It’s a very standard set of stories,” says archaeologist Matthew Stout, author of The Irish Ringfort. Many of the stories share a similar plot: Someone disrupts a fairy fort and then falls ill, loses a limb, or dies—as the Mooney brothers did. “Whether fairies turn into rabbits, or whether they’re making shoes, or there’s gold inside the fort, everything happens inside of a fort,” says Stout.

Over the span of time, abandoned ring forts became associated with the supernatural. In Gerald of Wales’s 1189 Conquest of Ireland, the first history written about the island, the medieval priest-historian recounted that when invading troops camped “in a certain old fortification” one night, a ghostly army of “spectral appearances” descended upon them; many of the soldiers fled in terror and hid in the surrounding woods and marshes.

When the forts became associated with fairies in particular is less clear. According to Irish studies scholar Patrick McCafferty of the University of Leipzig, the association of fairies and ring forts was “quite well-developed” by the 1850s, when folklorists began documenting tales that had been passed down orally for centuries.

The Irish fairies in these tales are no Tinkerbells. The wingless, human-sized mythical beings are also, for the most part, better left alone. They can be helpful, bestowing favor and good fortune. Or they can be vindictive, destroying property, abducting loved ones, or even taking lives.

John Duncan’s Riders of the Sidhe (1911) depicts highly stylized fairies in the Irish tradition. Public Domain

According to Irish folklore, fairies were once a god-like race of people known as the Tuatha Dé Danann (“people of the goddess Danu”) or the Tuath Dé (“tribe of god”). The Tuatha Dé Danann ruled ancient Ireland, were immune to aging and sickness, and possessed magical powers. They were able to control the weather and shape-shift, sometimes appearing as birds and other animals to test various heroic figures in Irish mythology.

According to myth, the ancestors of modern Irish people defeated the Tuatha Dé Danann and drove them underground, at which point they became known as the Sidhe or Aos sí. McCafferty says, “they go into another world or underworld, linked with places like Newgrange,” Ireland’s most famous prehistoric tomb, and other abandoned ancient places, including ring forts. Sidhe literally means “mound,” and so the Tuatha Dé Danann became “people of the mound.” In other tellings, the Sidhe are fallen angels or spirits of the dead.

Superstitions about fairies have saved many ring forts from destruction; it’s why thousands still dot the Irish landscape.

The Oracle of Delphi

As Atlas Obscura tells it -

For ancient Greeks, Delphi was the center of the world: a site sacred to the god Apollo, where all Greeks united to worship. But at its heart was a dark, strange place: the mysterious sanctuary where the priestess of Apollo prophesied.

The priestess, called the Pythia, sat above a chasm in the earth, which belched forth fumes. She breathed deeply – some believe that the fumes possessed hallucinogenic properties - and slipped into semi-consciousness. Her prophecies were opaque, often frantic. This was the Oracle of Delphi: the Greeks’ most famous and most feared window into the will of the gods. It lay in “a cavern hollowed down in the depths” of the hillside, as the historian Strabo reported, underneath the great Temple of Apollo.

Today, the ruins of the Temple sit on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. It was destroyed by the Emperor Theodosius I, in 390 CE, in an attempt to eradicate the old pagan beliefs. Few traces of the Oracle remain, but the site is still an eerie one: mist clings to the hills, and you can almost hear the ghosts of Croesus, Nero, and Alexander.

 

Reading the Future Using Eggs

Atlas Obscura's Diana Hubbell writes about telling the future using eggs. A fascinating history. Here is an excerpt -

The Long, Extremely Witchy History of Telling the Future With Eggs - From ancient Greece to the Salem Witch Trials.

Shortly before his death in 1700, John Hale, a Puritan reverend from Beverly, Massachusetts, decided to document a dark historical moment. His posthumously published work, A Modest Inquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft, is one of the few written records from someone present at the Salem Witch Trials.

Hale’s accounts described one particularly interesting form of divination: oomancy, or using eggs to interpret the future. Even by the 17th century, the idea of oomancy was aleady age old. Ancient Greek soothsayers coined the term, which stems from the words for “egg” (oon) and “divination” (manteia). Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, a Roman historian who lived from 69 to 122 B.C., once described how the Empress Livia Drusilla kept a chicken egg in her cleavage believing that its sex would foretell the sex of her unborn child.

Cultures around the world, from Southeast Asia to Latin America, have relied on eggs to unscramble the mysteries of the future. One method, described by Hale as the “Venus glass,” may have its roots in Scotland. The concept is simple: take a glass of warm water, slowly pour in a raw egg white, and watch what shapes form as the proteins denature. Much like tea leaf-reading, or tasseomancy, the resulting shapes offer clues as to whom you might marry or how you might die.

“If you see that the egg whites kind of look like a plow or a horse, your husband might be a farmer,” Muise explains. “Or if it looks like a fortress, your husband might be a soldier, or if it looks like a boat, your husband might be a fisherman.”

For the ancient Druids, oomancy was often an important part of the celebrations for Samhain, the pagan holiday from which most Halloween traditions originated. German pagans used a similar fortune-telling technique with egg whites in water, which they sometimes referred to as Eierorakel, or an “egg oracle.” In his 1878 book Deutschen Mythologie, Jakob Grimm describes tossing an egg in water to find out if a child was bewitched.

Part of its widespread appeal may lie in the egg’s inherent connection to birth and the cycle of life; a greater part has to do simply with its near-universal accessibility. “[Puritans] didn’t have a lot of material stuff,” Muise says. “You see magic with apples, eggs, cabbage, nuts, because that’s what people had around the house. They didn’t have tarot cards or crystals.”

It’s not a coincidence that food-centric magic features so prominently in the lore of the witch trials. Tales of witches from the 1600s often fixate on their culinary elements. “The butter won’t churn, because a witch has bewitched the cream itself,” Muise says. “They may make food spoil, they may make a cow give rotten milk out of its udders. So often the witch is very much imagined to be disrupting the domestic production of food.”

At the time, women were responsible for virtually all food production, from the beer that kept the Puritans hydrated in the absence of sanitary water, to the bread on their tables. Any woman who dared to disrupt her domestic lot in life, was a threat to the social hierarchy and stability of these small, fragile societies. It’s little wonder that many of the women accused of black magic in Salem were those who lived somewhat outside the social norms; or that their supposed transgressions often started in the kitchen.

As the mass hysteria around witches began to fade, so did the moral panic around fortune-telling. Food-centric methods of fortune-telling, from oomancy to dumb cakes, which the Puritans had regarded as dangerous entry points to Devil worship, were increasingly regarded as harmless party games. While the “Venus glass” may have fallen out of fashion, there’s nothing to stop modern-day Halloween celebrants from attempting to decipher their future in a swirling mass of egg whites.