In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton Page A

apparition indeed later returned after dark (making an accurate description of her clothing impossible) only confirmed them in that opinion.
    What stimulated Village gossip about Martha Corey being a witch is not revealed in surviving records, but Ann surely did not originate the charge. Quite possibly the very church membership of which Martha was so proud led to her accusation. Three years before her marriage to Henry Rich about 1680, Martha had borne a bastard mulatto son, who lived in the Corey household. Her acceptance into the church, given her personal background and the exclusivity of church membership in Salem Village, must have set tongues to wagging. On at least one other occasion in seventeenth-century New England, the admission to church membership of a woman with a checkered sexual past fomented an uproar among her neighbors. The same could well have happened in the case of Martha Corey, causing speculation about the validity of her reputed adherence to Christianity. 4
    Sunday, March 13, brought Ann new miseries, but not from Martha Corey’s specter. Instead, the little girl complained of being afflicted by an apparition she could not positively identify: “I did not know what hir name was then,” Ann later deposed, “tho I knew whare she used to sitt in our Meeting house.” A witness elaborated: “she saw the apperishtion of apale fast [
sic
] woman that Sat in her granmothers seat.” Soon, most likely within twenty-four hours, Ann knew the woman’s name: Rebecca Towne Nurse, the seventy-year-old wife of Francis Nurse, a substantial Village yeoman. Goody Nurse belonged to the Salem Town church, although she often attended services in the Village. 5
    Many of Goodwife Nurse’s Towne relatives lived in neighboring Topsfield; her natal family had a long-standing dispute with various Putnams over the boundaries of their respective lands and towns. It is not difficult to imagine that Ann had heard about many confrontations between the two extended families, and that Rebecca Nurse’s name came easily to her lips once it was suggested to her. But precisely how that occurred became a subject of contention. Nurse’s son-in-law John Tarbell later inquired at the Putnam house about how Ann learned the unidentified specter’s name. “Who was it that told her that it was goody nurs?” he asked. Tarbell recorded the response: the Putnams’ nineteen-year-old maidservant, Mercy Lewis, replied, “it was goody putnam that said it was goody nurse: goody putnam said it was mercy lewes that told her: thus they turned it upone one an other saying it was you & it was you that told her.” Regardless of the exact origin, the new apparition now had a name. 6
    On Monday, Martha Corey called at Thomas Putnam’s, having been asked to do so—by whom is not recorded. 7 Edward Putnam witnessed the consequences. As soon as Goody Corey entered the house, Ann “fell in to grevious feets of Choking blinding feat and hands twisted in a most grevious maner and told martha Cory to her face that she did it, and emediately hur tonge was dran out of her: mouth and her teeth fasned upon it in a most grevious maner.” When at last Ann regained control of her tongue and could speak, she told Martha that “ther is a yellow burd a sucking betwen your fore finger and midel finger I see it.” She moved toward the visitor to see the bird more clearly, but Edward saw Corey put her finger on the place Ann had identified “and semed to give a hard rub,” at which point Ann could see nothing and was again blinded. To anyone who had heard Tituba’s testimony about Sarah Good’s spectral yellow bird sucking her in the same spot, the implication was obvious: the two women shared the same animal familiar. The girl furthermore described how Goody Corey’s specter had “put her hands upon” Bathshua Pope’s face during Sabbath services the previous day, and as Ann demonstrated what she meant “emediately her hands were fasned to her eyes