CURRITUCK COUNTY

Bewitched in Currituck

There is but a hairline between truth and superstition.

A. W. Tozer

Owing to its unusual geographic features and its location in the far northeastern corner of the state, Currituck County has long been known as “the Lost Province” of North Carolina. Despite its current state of relative isolation, Currituck, organized as a precinct in 1681, is one of the oldest political subdivisions of North Carolina. Accordingly, it was the stage on which some of our earliest colonial history was written.

Like many of the other Europeans who became the first permanent settlers of the Carolina colony, early Currituck residents maintained a strong belief in the supernatural. When he traveled extensively through the colony in the first decade of the eighteenth century, John Lawson, the first resident historian of North Carolina, was appalled by the “Thoughts of Spirits” that prevailed among the settlers. He fretted that stories of “Hobgoblins and Bugbears” were being told to the children of the Carolina province. In his famous journal, he made the following observation: “Their idle Tales of Fairies, and Witches, make such impressions on our tender years, that at Maturity, we carry Pigmies’ Souls in Giants’ Bodies, and ever after, are thereby so much deprived of Reason, and unmanned, as never Masters of half the Bravery Nature designed for us.”

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the fear of witches was very real in Currituck. By 1697, it reached the point of hysteria when a local woman, Susannah Evans, was arrested and brought before the General Court of Oyer and Terminer of the Albemarle. According to the witchcraft charges lodged against her, she, “by the institution of the devil … on or about the twenty-fifth day of July last past, the body of Deborah Bourthier … devilishly and maliciously bewitch[ed], and by the assistance of the devil, afflict[ed] with mortal pains, the body of the said Deborah departed this life. And also did diabolically and maliciously bewitch several other of her majesty’s liege subjects.”

After hearing the evidence against Evans, the grand jury ruled that the facts presented would not sustain a conviction for witchcraft. Cornelius Jones, a sea captain, served as foreman of the grand jury. Very much aware of the witch hunts and related executions that had recently taken place in Salem, Massachusetts, Captain Jones used his knowledge and powers of persuasion to convince his fellow jurors to dismiss the charges, in hopes of averting the panic so prevalent in New England.

Nonetheless, the witch scare already had a firm hold in Currituck. News of the unusual trials and public executions of witches in the North spread across the border from the ports of tidewater Virginia, where sea traders called almost every day. A second witchcraft case from Currituck soon made its way to the court. In the papers filed against Martha Richardson, it was avowed that the woman did “devillishly and maliciously Bewitch and by ye assistance of the Devil afflict the Body of William Parker.” Fortunately for the accused witch, the grand jury from the Evans case heard the evidence against Richardson. It ruled just as it had in the first case.

Over time, the legal proceedings involving witchcraft came to an end in Currituck, and the area avoided the garish executions of Salem. But don’t think for a moment that the widespread local belief in witches ended when the legal accusations did.

On Knotts Island, the teardrop-shaped peninsula on the northern tip of the county, the early settlers—primarily Englishmen from London and Liverpool—had a strange encounter with a witch. The lasting effects of that incident can still be observed among descendants of those settlers.

In those days, rosemary was a much-desired herb for the seasoning of food. To the dismay of the new arrivals from Europe, there was no rosemary growing on Knotts Island. Then, early one morning, as the sun began to rise above the vast Atlantic, residents observed a tiny speck in the sea, making its way toward the old Currituck Inlet. The locals were mystified to see that it was a small boat plying the waters at significant speed without the aid of oars or sails. When the vessel made it to the Knotts Island shore, an old, eccentric woman known to all of the residents came ashore. Although the strange woman never divulged where she had been, the local gossip was that she had made a trip to England. With her, she brought a rosemary plant, which she promptly planted in the fertile soil.

As the days passed, the woman’s odd behavior led the locals to suspect her of being a witch. Thereafter, the people of Knotts Island and other parts of Currituck County deemed the rosemary growing on the peninsula to be “witchy” and refused to consume it.

The witchcraft alarm that was sounded in Currituck over three hundred years ago is nothing more than a dusty page of the ancient history of this remote spit of land. Or is it? Just find some Currituckers whose roots are deeply entrenched and ask them about rosemary. Chances are their response will be this: “We don’t use it because we don’t like the taste.”