Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 by Richard Godbeer

Goodman Graves with a scowl.
    Abigail tried to persuade her husband to be more “yielding,” as she put it. “You do not know,” she warned, “what he can do to us.”
    “I fear no man,” Samuel Dibble retorted—rashly as it turned out.
    What followed became town legend. Abigail was pregnant and about a fortnight before she was due to give birth, William Graves paid his daughter a visit. “Abigail,” he declared, “fit thyself to meet the Lord. For if you are not delivered of the child quickly, I believe you will die.”
    Several neighbors who were present saw the look of consternation that Abigail gave her husband on hearing her father’s grim warning. There followed a long and exceptionally difficult labor during which Abigail suffered much trembling and claimed to be bitten all over. The midwives in attendance shook their heads and muttered that this was no ordinary childbirth. The young couple feared that Abigail was bewitched and that her father was responsible.
    William Graves agreed that his daughter was under an evil hand, but denied that he was the culprit. He declared that if Abigail died he would want everyone in the town to come and lay hands on her body: when the murderer touched her corpse, the body would move and so expose the miscreant. There was general relief in Stamford when Abigail gave birth successfully and survived, not only for her sake and the child’s: the prospect of a postmortem investigation with Goodman Graves watching closely as his neighbors lined up to lay hands on his daughter’s corpse sent shivers down many a spine. Soon afterward local magistrates conducted an inquiry into allegations that William Graves had bewitched his daughter, but they concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.
    As fear of witchcraft again cast its shadow over Stamford, the allegations this time came from not one but many households.  Once Katherine Branch named her tormentors, beginning with Elizabeth Clawson, townspeople gathered in knots of righteous anxiety to relive their many ugly encounters with Goody Clawson and to vent their long-festering suspicions against her.

    It made good sense to folk such as John Finch, Mary Newman, and Thomas and Lydia Penoir that they should explain their misfortunes in terms of bewitchment by vengeful neighbors. Much that occurred in their lives was mysterious and unnerving: physicians and midwives were all too often perplexed by their neighbors’ ailments; loved ones, livestock, and crops frequently sickened for no apparent reason. But such adversities were incomprehensible only until one looked beyond the natural realm. In common with other New England settlers, the people of Stamford believed that supernatural forces intruded constantly into their lives. The Reverend Bishop taught that all adversities were sent by the Almighty to punish sinners, warn of His anger, and test faith through adversity. Whosoever inflicted the harm, it should be understood as God’s will. But some of the pastor’s flock were more inclined in times of affliction to seek out the more immediate and human causes of their problems.  The people of Stamford did not need a minister to teach them that just beyond the range of the eye there glimmered a realm of occult forces that, if harnessed by malevolent folk, could inflict grievous harm. Personal experience and shocking stories that passed from household to household, from community to community, from one side of the Atlantic to the other, and from generation to generation taught that enemies in their midst could wield dark skills with ghastly results.
    Enmities tended to be intense and festering in communities such as Stamford, for the simple reason that everyone’s welfare depended on personal cooperation. Day-to-day life involved innumerable informal exchanges and favors between neighbors, relatives, friends, and sometimes enemies. Mary Newman would have obtained most of the household goods that she did not produce