Butters, Mary (late 18th–early 19th centuries)

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An attempt to cure a cow of bewitchment with white magic ended in disaster for Mary Butters, the “Carmoney Witch,” who narrowly escaped a trial in Carrickfergus, Ireland, in March 1808.

Butters was a reputed wise woman, skilled in herbal knowledge and various spells.

In August 1807 Butters was hired by Alexander Montgomery, a tailor who lived in Carmoney, to cure a cow that gave milk from which no butter could be made.

Montgomery’s wife was convinced that the cow was bewitched.

On the appointed night of the exorcism, Butters arrived with her charm bag of magical ingredients.

She ordered Montgomery and an onlooker, a young man named Carnaghan, out to the barn, where they were to turn their waistcoats inside out and stand by the cow’s head until she sent for them.

Butters, Mrs Montgomery, the Montgomery’s son, and an old woman named Margaret Lee remained with her in the house.

Montgomery and Carnaghan waited until dawn, growing increasingly worried.

They returned to the house, where they were shocked to find all four persons collapsed on the floor.

The smoky air smelled of sulphur; on the fire was a big pot containing milk, needles, pins and crooked nails.

The windows and door were sealed tight, and the chimney was covered.

The wife and son were dead, and Butters and Lee were close to death; Lee died moments after the men arrived.

In a fury, Montgomery threw Butters, Mary Butters out onto a dung heap and began kicking her to consciousness.

On August 19 an inquest was held in Carmoney, at which it was determined that the victims had died of suffocation
from Butters’s “noxious ingredients” and smoke.

Butters, terrified, claimed that during her spell-casting, a black man appeared inside the house wielding a huge club.

He knocked everyone down, killing the other three and stunning Butters to unconsciousness.

Butters was put forward for trial at the spring assizes, but the charges against her were dropped.

The community’s reaction to the tragedy was one of derision.

The incident was made the subject of a humorous ballad.

Corey, Martha (d. 1692)

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The fourth person to be accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witches hysteria of 1692–93, who was tried and executed.

Martha Corey was the wife of Giles Corey, who also was executed.

The Coreys were well-to-do, pious residents of Salem Town.

Martha’s age at the time of the trials is not known.

Presumably, she was beyond child-bearing years.

She was Giles’ third wife; the couple had no children of their own.

Corey was renowned for her piety, but she became a target after the slave Tituba confessed to witchcraft.

Tituba said that four women were hurting the afflicted girls, but named only two—Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.

The afflicted girls came up with no names.

Then gossip circulated that the girls were talking about others as witches, including Martha Corey.

Thirteen-year-old Ann Putnam broke the silence in March 1692 by naming Corey next as one of the four who was tormenting them.

Corey, she said, appeared in spectral form and pinched and tormented her.

One of the girls’ tricks was to claim that they could identify their tormentors, who came in spectral form, by
their clothing, which they could see.

Two representatives, Thomas Putnam (Ann’s uncle) and Ezekiel Cheever, were chosen to visit Corey to ask her questions about the allegations against the girls.

First, they asked Putnam to describe Corey, Martha the clothing that Corey would be wearing when they arrived.

But Putnam dodged the matter, claiming that Corey had struck her blind so that she could not see the clothing.

When Putnam and Cheever arrived at the Corey residence, Martha confidently denied any knowledge or role in the girls’ afflictions.

When told she had been cried out against by Putnam, she asked if Putnam had identified her clothing.

Apparently, Corey was wise to the trick and thought she would expose it.

Instead, her answer was taken as a sign of witchcraft, for how else would she know?

Corey was arrested on March 19 and taken to the Salem Town meetinghouse for examination by the magistrates.

She seemed to be convinced that common sense would prevail. She denied being a witch and said she did not know if there were any witches in New England.

She laughed at some of the questions.

She said the magistrates were blind to the truth, and she could make them see it, but then declined to do so.

Days later, Putnam was sent for and, when in the presence of Corey, went into fits.

If Corey bit her lip, the girl said she was being bitten.

If Corey clenched her hands, she said she was being pinched.

Corey was sent to jail and tried in September.

She continued to think that it would be impossible for a person such as herself to be found guilty of witchcraft.

What could she do, she said, if others were against her?

Unfortunately, her husband Giles contributed to the case against her.

Giles had bought completely into the hysteria and said that Martha acted in strange ways “like the Devil was in her.”

He testified that some of their animals had been mysteriously hurt or sick, implying that Martha may have been responsible.

Corey was condemned to death.

She was excommunicated from the church in Salem Town on September 11.

On September 22, she was hanged with seven others.

She ended her life with prayer.

As Corey and the others swung at the ends of their ropes, Reverend Nicholas Noyes said, “What a sad thing
it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there.”

Corey’s excommunication was reversed on February 14, 1703.

In its statement, the brethren of the church said that “we were at that dark day under the power of those errors which then prevailed in the land” and that Corey’s execution “was not according to the mind of God.”

Burroughs George (d. 1692)

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Burroughs, George (d. 1692) Minister accused of witchcraft and executed in the Salem Witches hysteria in Massachusetts in 1692 to 1693.

George Burroughs served as minister of Salem Village from 1680 to 1682.

He was a man of good reputation, having graduated from Harvard in 1670.

He had distinguished himself as a preacher in Maine, especially in the face of hostilities from Indians.

Invited to Salem Village, he had no idea of the hornet’s nest of social and political infighting that awaited him.

Not everyone was pleased to have him.

After moving, Burroughs and his wife lived for a time with Thomas and Rebecca Putnam.

Later, when the witch-burning times hysteria broke out, the Putnams alleged that Burroughs had treated his wife cruelly.

Burroughs’ wife died in September 1681.

By then, Burroughs had not been paid his salary for some time, a casualty of the local infighting.

He went into debt to pay for his wife’s funeral.

Perhaps it was the combination of grief over his loss and frustration at the sentiments raging in the village, but Burroughs decided not to pursue the monies owed him and quit his job.

He returned to Maine, where he became a pastor in Wells.

In 1683, a suit was brought against Burroughs for the unpaid debt for funeral expenses.

The suit was dropped when Burroughs demonstrated that the village owed him back salary, which could be applied to the debt.

The situation fomented ill will against the minister.

Burroughs was long gone from Salem Village when the witchcraft hysteria erupted in 1692.

Burroughs was decried as a witch.

Twelve-year-old Ann Putnam said that on April 20 the specter of a minister appeared and tortured and choked her, urging her to write in his devil’s book.

She identified the specter as Burroughs.

She said he told her he had three wives and that he had bewitched the first two to death.

He also said he had killed Mrs Lawson and her daughter Ann; he had bewitched many soldiers to death; and he had turned Abigail Hobbs into a witch.

He claimed to be a conjurer, which was above a witch.

On May 4, Burroughs was arrested at his home in Wells, Maine—while he sat at his dinner table with his family, according to lore—and brought immediately to Salem.

In his examination on May 9, he was accused of witchcraft, of not attending communion on some occasions and of not baptizing all but his eldest child.

These were grave sins for a minister.

Like others who had been cried out against, Burroughs was simply astounded both at the accusations and the girls falling into fits claiming that he was tormenting and biting them.

Putnam said that on May 8, the apparition of Burroughs appeared to her again and told her that she would soon see his dead two wives, who would tell her lies.

She saw two ghosts of women in burial shrouds.

They said that Burroughs had been cruel to them and had killed them.

The first wife said she had been stabbed beneath the armpit and the wound covered with sealing wax.

She pulled aside her burial shroud to show Putnam the wound.

Putnam also said that the ghosts of Lawson and her child appeared and said they, too, had been murdered by Burroughs.

Later, Putnam saw the ghost of Goody Fuller, who said Burroughs had killed her over a dispute with her husband.

Others, including eight confessed witches, came forward against him.

Burroughs was a man of small stature but had exceptional strength for his size.

It was alleged that his unusual strength came from the Devil, and that he reveled in letting others know of his occult powers, also granted by the Devil.

By the time the testimonies were done, Burroughs was the ringleader of all the witches, tempting and seducing them, giving them poppets for evil spells.

Burroughs was tried on August 5. Found guilty, he was condemned to death by hanging.

On August 19, he and four others were driven to Gallows Hill in an open cart.

He mounted the gallows and then preached a sermon, ending with the Lord’s Prayer.

His flawless recitation of the prayer upset the onlookers, for it was strongly believed that a witch could not say the prayer without stumbling.

Cotton Mather, watching astride his white horse, kept the execution on track by telling the crowd that Burroughs was not an ordained minister and, thus, the Devil could help him recite the prayer.

The executions proceeded.

Burroughs and the others were cut down and dragged by halters to a shallow hole about two feet deep.

Burroughs’ shirt and pants were pulled off, and an old pair of pants belonging to one of the executed were put on him.

The bodies were barely covered with dirt.

Burroughs’ chin and one hand stuck out from the ground, along with a foot of one of the others.

After his execution, more stories of his dealings with the Devil circulated through Salem.

The citizens seemed to need a sense of justification at having killed the man who once led their church.

Mather made special effort to spread disparaging stories.

Filled with loathing of Burroughs,

Mathers said he could hardly speak his name

He would not have done so except that the state of Massachusetts asked for accounts of the Salem trials to be included in Mather’s book, On Witchcraft: Being the Wonders of the Invisible World.

Gowdie, Isobel:1662

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Scottish witch whose stories of wild sexual escapades with the Devil titillated and shocked her stern neighbors and reinforced the prevailing beliefs in witches as evil creatures bent on destroying their fellow man.

Isobel Gowdie, an attractive woman with red hair, a color associated with witches, voluntarily confessed to witchcraft on four occasions in April and May 1662.

The confessions in themselves astonished the local folk, but what was even more astonishing was Gowdie’s assertion that she had been engaging in obscene activities for 15 years.

No one, apparently, had ever caught on, not even her husband.

According to her confessions, Gowdie’s involvement with the Devil began in 1647, when she met him in the shape of a man in gray in Auldearne, the remote area in Morayshire where she lived.

He enticed her into his service, and that very evening baptized her as a witch in the local church with her own blood, which he sucked from her.

He gave her a Devil’s mark on her shoulder and renamed her Janet.

Much of her witchcraft, she said, was taught to her by fairies. Gowdie said she joined a coven of 13 witches—thus bolstering the myth that all witches organize in groups of 13—which met regularly for sabbats marked by sexual orgies with demons and the Devil, feasting and dancing.

She proudly explained how she sneaked away to attend these affairs without her husband knowing: she substituted a broomstick for herself in bed, and he never realized the difference.

She and her sister witches flew off to the sabbats on corn straws, beanstalks and rushes, which they charmed into flight by shouting, “Horse and Hattock, in the Devil’s name!”

If someone below spotted them and did not cross himself, they would shoot him down with elf arrows.

Gowdie delighted in describing her intercourse with the Devil: how he plunged an enormous, scaly penis into her, causing excruciating pain, and how his semen was cold as ice.

As painful as she made it sound, Gowdie also apparently enjoyed it.

If she or the other witches displeased the Devil, he beat them with scourges and wool cards.

She also told how she and her coven members tormented their neighbors.

They raised storms by beating wet rags upon stones while reciting incantations.

They made farmland sterile by ploughing it with a miniature plough drawn by toads.

They hexed children by sticking pins in dolls.

They blasted one farmer’s crops by digging up the body of an unchristened child and burying it in his manure heap.

They shot elf arrows at people to injure or kill them. If they became bored with tormenting others, the witches amused themselves by metamorphosing into animals, usually hares and cats.

Stunned by these stories, the local authorities had Gowdie stripped and searched for the Devil’s mark, which they found.

The records give no reason as to why Gowdie one day decided to confess these lurid tales, without any prompting or suspicion upon her.

Furthermore, she welcomed punishment:

“I do not deserve to be seated here at ease and unharmed, but rather to be stretched on an iron rack: nor can my crimes be atoned for, were I to be drawn asunder by wild horses.”

In Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), Sir Walter Scott speculated that “this wretched creature 144 Gowdie, Isobel was under the dominion of some peculiar species of lunacy.”

In The Occult (1971), Colin Wilson suggests she was a highly sexed woman with a vivid imagination, who turned to fantasies to alleviate the boredom of a dull existence; at some point, her fantasies became real to her.

But after 15 years, the excitement of having a secret grew thin, and there was only one way to recharge it—by making a public confession.

The records also do not indicate what became of Gowdie or the other unfortunate Auldearne witches she named.

Cole, Ann (17th century)

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Accused witch in Hartford,Connecticut, who was believed to be under demonic possession.

The case was recorded in a letter written by Reverend John Whiting, which in turn was published by Increase Mather in An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious
Providences (1684).

Ann Cole was described by Mather as a woman of great integrity and piety. In 1662,

she was living in the house of her father—“a godly man”—when she began having bizarre fits,

“wherein her Tongue was improved Witches sacrificing cock and snake to raise hailstorm (Ulrich Molitor, De Ianijs et Phitonicius Mulieribus, 1489) Cole, Ann by a Daemon to express things which she herself knew nothing of,” Mather wrote.

Sometimes the discourses went on for hours.

Cole named other persons as witches and described how they intended to carry out “mischievous designs” against herself and others, by afflicting bodies and spoiling names.

The demons told her to “run to the rock.”

Cole’s fits happened in public as well as in private.

They were violent physically as well as verbally.

She even disrupted church services, causing one person to faint.

At times Cole lapsed into gibberish.

Then the demons said they would change her language so that she could tell no more tales.

She began speaking English with a precise Dutch accent, describing how a woman who lived next to a Dutch family had been afflicted by a strange pinching
of her arms at night.

Cole’s Dutch accent was so good that others pronounced it to be genuine and impossible for Cole to imitate on her own.

One of the alleged witches named by Cole was her next-door neighbor, Rebecca Greensmith, who was convicted and executed in 1693.

A man and a woman named by Cole were given the swimming test of being bound and thrown into water.

They neither floated nor sank, but bobbed like buoys, half in and half out of the water.

A witness, protesting that anyone bound with their hands to their feet would not sink (and therefore be guilty), underwent the test himself.

He was lowered gently into the water, not thrown in as were the accused, and promptly sank.

It is not known how many others named by Cole were accused of witchcraft and executed; some fled Hartford and were never seen again.

Once the accused were dead or gone, Cole recovered and had no more fits.

She resumed her life as “a serious Christian.”

Twenty years later, Whiting reported that she was still devout and free of fits.

One possible explanation for Cole’s fits is multiple personality disorder.

More likely, her fits were brought on by intense fear of witchcraft, prevalent at the time.

Greensmith, Rebecca (17th century)

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Hartford, Connecticut, woman accused of witchcraft, who confessed and was executed.

Rebecca Greensmith and her third husband, Nathaniel, lived next door to Ann Cole.

The couple was reasonably affluent, but Rebecca was considered a “lewd and ignorant” woman.

In 1662, when Cole was brought up on charges of witchcraft, Greensmith was already languishing in prison on charges of witchcraft, which she denied.

Cole named several accomplices, including Greensmith.

Rebecca was brought before a magistrate and was confronted with the accusations of Cole that had been recorded by Reverend John Whiting and Joseph Haines.

At first Greensmith was astonished and protested her innocence once again, but soon confessed that all Cole had said was true.

Greensmith said that she and others had familiarity with the Devil, but had not signed a Devil’s pact with him.

However, she had gone with him whenever he had called her.

The Devil told her that at Christmas the witches would have a fine celebration and would all sign the pact with him.

Greensmith was questioned again on the following day by Haines.

She told him that she was in such a rage that she could have torn him limb from limb.

Haines persisted in his interrogation, and Greensmith broke down again, saying that she felt as if her own flesh was being pulled from her bones.

She again confessed to the accusations.

She said that the Devil appeared to her in the shape of a deer or a fawn and skipped around her until she was not frightened.

The Devil began conversing with her and then frequently had sexual intercourse with her.

“I liked it very much,” Greensmith stated.

She said she met with other witches at a place not far from her home.

The witches all flew to the meetings in different animal shapes, one of them being a cow.

Greensmith was sentenced to death and was hanged in January 1663.

Her husband, Nathaniel, was also accused of witchcraft by association and was executed, despite his lack of confession of guilt.

Good, Dorcas (17th century)

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The youngest victim of the Salem Witches hysteria of 1692–93.

Dorcas Good was the daughter of Sarah Good, one of the first persons to be accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

Only four years old, Dorcas was also accused of being a witch.

In a childlike fashion, she readily confessed to witchcraft, which she said she learned from her mother.

Dorcas was arrested about a month after her mother, in March 1692. She was cried out against by the afflicted girls along with Rebecca Nurse and Elizabeth Procter.

The girls accused Dorcas of tormenting them, saying she was taking supernatural revenge for the arrest of her mother.

When brought up for examination, Dorcas was confronted by three of the afflicted girls, Ann Putnam, Mary Walcott and Mercy Lewis.

Putnam and Walcott fell into their fits, claiming Dorcas had bitten, pinched and choked them.

They showed the marks of pinpricks and little teeth on their arms.

The evidence was convincing to the magistrates and the onlookers.

Little Dorcas was an easy mark and became the second person after the slave Tituba to confess to witchcraft.

Asked if she had a familiar, Dorcas said yes, it was a small snake that sucked at the lowest point of her forefinger.

Dorcas showed the examiners a red mark at the spot, about the size of a flea bite.

In all likelihood, it was a flea bite, but it was accepted as a witch’s mark or Devil’s mark by the examiners.

Asked who gave her the familiar, the child replied that it was not the “Black Man,” the Devil, but her mother.

Dorcas continued to give evidence against her mother, testifying at her trial that Sarah had three familiars in the shapes of birds that hurt the afflicted children and others.

One was black and one was yellow.

Because of her confession, Dorcas was not tried for witchcraft.

She was sent to prison in Boston, along with her mother, for about seven to eight months.

There she was treated abominably, as were the other prisoners, and was confined in chains.

They were too poor to pay for their upkeep, and “the country” was billed for their food and blankets.

Her father, William Good—who testified against his own wife—wrote a letter to the General Court in 1710 in which he protested the damage done to his family, including Dorcas.

The child, he said, “hath ever since been very chargable, having little or no reason to govern herself.”

Burning Times

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A term used by Witches and Pagans to refer to the period in Western history of intense witch-hunting and executions, generally the mid-15th to mid18th centuries.

Burning, one of the most extreme forms of execution, was urged by St. Augustine (354–430), who said that pagans, Jews, and heretics would burn forever in the eternal fire with the Devil unless saved by the Catholic Church.

During the Inquisition, charges of witchcraft were used against heretics, social outcasts, and enemies of the church.

Such individuals were declared to have renounced God and formed a compact with the Devil.

Fire is the element of purification, so nothing less than fire could negate the evil of witchcraft.

Jean Bodin, a 16th-century demonologist, stated in De la démonomanie des sorciers:

Even if the witch has never killed or done evil to man, or beast, or fruits, and even if he has always cured bewitched people, or driven away tempests, it is because he has renounced God and treated Satan that he deserves to be burned alive . . .

Even if there is no more than the obligation to the Devil, having denied God, this deserves the cruelest death that can be imagined.

Not all witches were burned at the stake; hanging was the preferred means of execution in some countries, including England and the American colonies.

In France, Scotland and Germany, it was customary to strangle condemned witches first, as an act of mercy, by either hanging or garroting and then burn them to ashes.

Nonetheless, many were burned alive, especially if they recanted their confession at the last moment or were unrepentant of their “crimes.”

The expenses of the burning—along with all the expenses of the trial and the stay in jail—were billed to the deceased’s relatives or estate.

Witch lynchings and burnings continued sporadically into the late 19th century in England, Europe and Latin America.

There are no reliable figures of the numbers of persons burned or otherwise executed for witchcraft.

Estimates by historians range from 200,000 to 1 million.

Pagan authors have cited 9 million as the number of victims, but this is an inflated figure without evidence of support.

The burning of a witch was a great public occasion.

The execution took place shortly after the sentencing, just long enough to hire an executioner, construct the execution site and gather the fuel.

In Scotland, a witch-burning was preceded by days of fasting and solemn preaching.

The witch was strangled first, and then her corpse—or sometimes her unconscious or semiconscious body—was tied to a stake or dumped into a tar barrel and set afire.

If the witch was not dead and managed to get out of the flames, onlookers shoved her back in.

Records of trials in Scotland report that burning a witch consumed 16 loads of peat plus wood and coal.

In 1608 witches in Brechin, Scotland was executed in the following manner, according to original records as cited in Enemies of God: