"They Were Innocent Persons..."

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

I woke up this morning before dawn, the only sound the muffled thud of our plow horse’s feet in the meadow below my window. I walked outside in my pajamas, barefoot, looked back at the outline of my old house, the great elm tree planted by my great-great grandfather all auburn leaves and gnarled branches. The sky was barely grey around the edges, a thick mist rising from the still-green fields. It was cold, a shimmering frost on the grass. A crow sat atop the flagpole, a repurposed ship spar, and cawed a reply to the last owl of the night. I was half awake, the shadow of a dream lingering. No wonder people believed in spirits, good and evil, I thought. This is a haunted land. I thought of the people accused of witchcraft mounting the scaffold in the cold hours of a fall morning in 1692, their village a warren of ancient houses and…

The Poore Farm fields at dawn on a fall morning, 2022.

My favorite ghost, my great-aunt, Emily Noyes Poore, came up behind me and snorted. “NONSENSE.” Hers is a true haunting, entirely internal. She does not float along in ethereal mists, nor does she appear as cold vapors in the corner of the room. No. She is, more’s the pity, very much actually dead, but she said just enough in her 96 years of life to be with me always, especially when I am succumbing to the charms of mythical nonsense.

And she thought, for good reason, that people dressed as witches and heading off to Salem as if this was connected somehow to the witchcraft accusations of 1692 was as big a pile of nonsense as she had ever encountered. I’ll recap her best arguments:

1. There were no witches.

2. There were no witches.

3. There were no witches.

Please do not misunderstand me. Aunt Emily was not without a powerful sense of fun. She tobogganed well into her 70s with any child who asked, loved a good go-cart race at Salisbury Beach, and occasionally landed a legendary zinger. Once, I said in my best romantic Anne of Green Gables voice that I wished I could live in the crumbling farmhouse owned by an elderly neighbor. “I think he’s single,” she snorted, and chuckled privately at the thought for hours.

Emily Noyes Poore did not have an easy life. Her mother, the sunshine of her dour old family, died in 1934, when she was barely 14. Her father, who could barely eek a living out of the rocky soil of West Newbury in the best of times, was paralyzed by grief as the Great Depression sucked all the remaining resources from the household. Furniture was sold. The house went unheated in winter. Milk was cut with water. I think that this figured into her general distaste for things supernatural or other-worldly. For her, this present world was hard enough. There was no energy or time to devote to the shadowy forces of darkness.

Emily Noyes Poore, second from the right, with her mother, Mary Dyer (Noyes) Poore, and sisters Charlotte and Louise, the year her mother died.

I respect that, but like so many of the Newbury families in the 17th century, I have an active imagination and veer toward superstition. I can certainly understand how, in a world where almost everything seemed beyond human control, people saw malevolence around every corner. The events of 1692 are so frightening to me because they are so normal, so much a part of the way that human beings often behave. I remember leaving a West Newbury town meeting years ago where a particularly contentious land dispute had been raised. One of the combatants, an older woman, walked out ahead of me while the person behind me said, “they used to burn people like her at the stake.” There was laughter, and a rising cold fear in my chest.

I know, I know, nobody in 1692 was burned at the stake. Nineteen people were hanged, Giles Corey was pressed to death, and five people died in jail. Put your letter to the editor away. My point is that you can too-easily draw a straight line between the festering squabbles of small-town life today and witchcraft accusations three centuries ago. And the witchcraft trials seem uncomfortably close right now, and our bonds of civil cooperation particularly perilous.

And so, I am having a harder time than usual this year getting into the spirit of Halloween, particularly of the Salem, witch-hat variety. I know the ties between the costumed revelers and the actual witchcraft trials are tangential at best, a bit of wildly successful marketing that began with the sale of souvenir spoons in Daniel Low's late 19th century Salem shop.

Advertisement for the Salem “witch spoon” that helped solidify Salem as a tourist attraction.

I just can’t get past the fact that this town, this community whose history I love so passionately, was complicit in the judicial murders of 1692. Wicked complicit. Though no Newbury residents were executed in 1692, I can confidently say that there is not one single person involved in the trials, either as accused or accuser, that did not have some connection to Newbury. Their world was simply too small.

Ann Putnam, whose daughter, also Ann, was one of the “afflicted” girls, primary accusers during the witchcraft trials, was born Ann Carr. Her father, George Carr, was the ferryman first from Newbury to Salisbury via Carr’s Island in the Merrimack River, and then, as business boomed, just the leg from the island to Salisbury. The Carr family is tremendously important in the 17th century history of Newbury. The Carrs were a contentious and litigious family, and so their voices are well recorded in the Essex County Quarterly Courts, where I spend a great deal of my discretionary time. Ann Putnam Jr., granddaughter of George the ferryman, accused a staggering 62 people of witchcraft. Twenty-five people died as a result – five of them in prison.

Newbury’s John Atkinson, his wife Sarah, and Ensign Joseph Knight all testified against Susanna Martin, who was hanged alongside Rebecca Nurse. Judith Coffin of Newbury was the mother-in-law of both Joseph Knight and Rev. John Hale (1636-1700) of Beverly, author of A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft and one of the most influential voices in the 1692 witchcraft trials.

Rev. John Hale, married to Newbury’s Elizabeth Somerby, was considered an authority on witchcraft at the time of the trials.

And then there is Judge Samuel Sewell, who also grew up in…you guessed it…Newbury. His mother was living on High Road during the trials, in a house that Sewall later inherited.

Smibert’s 1729 portrait of Samuel Sewall. Image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Aunt Emily (and I) descend from accused and accusers, judges and jurymen, the murdered and the reprieved. It did not take long for these families to begin intermarrying once again, the thin pool of possible spouses triumphing over any lingering bad feeling from that time your grandpa sentenced my grandma to death.

And maybe that is the lesson here, the ultimate triumph. Communities can only convulse for so long before a trauma becomes a fading memory, or conversely, a ginned-up tourist attraction, a celebration of a mythic past.

And I will leave you with this bit of hope. Ann Putnam, granddaughter of the one-time Newbury ferryman, was the only one of the 1692 accusers to apologize publicly. “I desire to be humbled before God…that I, then being in my childhood, should…(have been) made an instrument for the accusing of several people for grievous crimes, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom, now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons…”

So, to recap my best arguments:

1. Apologize when you’re wrong.

2. Look out for each other.

3. There were no witches.

Happy Halloween, all! Despite myself, I love it – I promise!