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

that they Cold not be pulled from them except they should have ben broaken off.”
    For Martha, worse was yet to come. Ann reported that she saw “a speet at the fier with a man apon it and Goodey Corey you be a turnning of it.” At that, Mercy Lewis “toock a stick and struck at” the spectral torture scene, which (Ann reported) first vanished, then quickly reappeared. When Mercy declared that she would strike again, Ann warned her, “do not if you love your self,” but Mercy ignored the admonition. She then “Cryed out with a grevious pane in her arme” and Ann disclosed that she had seen Martha Corey’s specter hit Lewis “with an Iron rood.” The two “gru so bad with panes,” Edward recounted, that “we desired goodey Cory to be gone.” This time Martha Corey could not have misinterpreted the meaning of the encounter.
    The apparition Ann Putnam Jr. described at the hearth would have resonated deeply with anyone who learned of it. Readers of Cotton Mather’s
Memorable Providences
would surely recall that in 1688 the eleven-year-old John Goodwin had complained of being “roasted on an invisible Spit, run into his Mouth, and out at his Foot, he lying, and rolling, and groaning.” Martha Corey’s turning a spectral spit clearly connected her to the tortures experienced by the Goodwin children. But there was also another obvious link: redeemed captives of the Wabanakis had returned with tales of English settlers being “roasted” to death by slow fires. Such stories would carry particular meaning for those who lived, or had lived, on the northeastern frontier, and who had not only heard the tales but could realistically believe themselves in imminent danger of meeting just such a fate. 8
    FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 1676; FALMOUTH, CASCO BAY, MAINE.
    The little girl called Mercy was about three years old, living with her parents and perhaps a young sibling or two, surrounded by her father’s extended family. Her grandfather George Lewis had brought his wife and three children to Maine from England in the mid-1640s; four more children—including her father, Philip—were born in America. On Wednesday, August 9, some Wabanakis had killed a cow belonging to Captain Anthony Brackett. An Indian named Simon, who had been hanging around Captain Brackett’s farm for several weeks, said he would find the culprits. Early on Friday morning, Simon returned with the men responsible for the killing. They invaded Brackett’s house, took his weapons, and asked him “whether he had rather serve the
Indians,
or be
slain by
them.
” Faced with that choice, Brackett surrendered, along with his wife and children. But his brother-in-law tried to resist and was killed. 9
    The Indians moved through the area called Back Cove, striking one farm after another on the mainland north of the peninsula on which the town of Falmouth was situated. At Robert Corbin’s, they surprised him and his brother-in-law Benjamin Atwell while they were haying in the fields, killing them and capturing their wives and several children. They next slew James Ross and his wife, taking some of their children captive. Two men traveling by canoe managed to warn the town, but the losses of people killed and captured mounted as the day wore on. Mercy’s parents escaped with her to an island in the bay, along with their minister George Burroughs and others, but her father’s extended family was hard hit. The dead Benjamin Atwell and James Ross were her uncles by marriage, the captured Alice Atwell and the dead Ann Ross her father’s sisters. Her paternal grandparents were among those slain. Many of her cousins were killed or captured, including all but one of the children of another of her father’s sisters, Mary Lewis Skilling. One more uncle—her father’s brother John—and his wife died later in the war.
    Altogether, wrote a survivor five days later, eleven men died and twenty-three women and children were killed or captured at Casco on August 11. “We