Hartford, Connecticut

IN HARTFORD, WITCHES BROUGHT ME to church. Days before Halloween, I drove up from New York City through a kaleidoscopic crush of turning leaves. Hartford was a ghost town when I arrived for a morning service honoring the victims of Connecticut's witch hunts. The city was in full-on fright mode—houses wrapped in clouds of cobwebs, storefronts decorated with vampire bats and ghoulish jack-o’-lanterns—but inside Center Church, it was the history of witch hunting that occasioned fear.

Towering over Main Street next to the Ancient Burying Ground, Center Church and its congregation date back to the founding of Hartford in 1636. Center Church was also the spiritual home to some of Hartford's accused witches and witch accusers.

Upon arrival, I passed between the church's imposing Ionic columns and followed the blood-red carpet down the aisle into a well-worn pew. Aside from a few family weddings and funerals, my church attendance over the last twenty years has been quite limited, but I'm game for anything in the name of witches.

The service began with a lecture about New England witch hunting. Dr. Richard S. Ross III spoke about the origins of the diabolical witch, continental demonology, and the English impact on the early modern American witch hunts. Behind him, Jesus hung from the cross in a stained-glass window. The wind tossed the leaves outside on a bright fall day.

Ross cannily laid out the history of witch hunting, eventually speaking of the English Civil War and its impact on American mindsets. When fighting escalated in the 1640s, witch hunting saw a bloody peak in the east of England. Parliamentarians and Royalists trading propaganda demonizing one another in the battle for religious superiority coupled with the anti-witch zealotry of Matthew Hopkins—the so-called Witchfinder General—set the stage for some 250 to 300 people to be accused of witchcraft. “Likewise, judicial and administrative structures, geared to supporting the war effort, were stretched sufficiently to dilute that caution which the assize courts normally demonstrated in matters of witchcraft,” explains James Sharpe in “Witch Hunts in Britain.” The only large-scale witch hunt on English soil saw the deaths of nearly 100 people thanks to Hopkins, which, in turn, influenced English colonial views about supernatural evil.

Midway through the lecture, I began to look around. The studs and zippers on my leather jacket clanked against the wooden pew, echoing loudly inside the spacious church. Everyone in attendance seemed to be at least a decade or more older—and dressed far more respectably. I was apprehensive about the coming ceremony and questioned if I belonged there. In a nearby row, a woman shifted in her seat, and her blouse lifted up to reveal a triple goddess tattoo. The familiar sight was reassuring. I supposed I was in the right place after all.

Although colonists in Connecticut had left their former country, they remained connected to the culture and politics of England. Those from the elite to the very poor all had networks of communication that snaked back to the Old World, including letters and books as well as pamphlets read aloud and gossip spread in bedrooms and over kitchen tables. “The emphasis on witches and the invective language used in pamphlets, broadsides and sermons provided a highly charged atmosphere,” explains Richard Ross in Before Salem: Witch Hunting in the Connecticut River Valley, 1647–1663, which “stimulated an atmosphere receptive to the witch hunts in New England in the period under discussion.”

Connecticut winters were harsh, and the threat of disease, famine, and conflict with “heathen” tribes stoked fears of demonic forces at work. This was only made worse by ministers declaring the Devil to be alive and active in this unforgiving new land. Acts of maleficium abounded, and “witchcraft was a continuous presence in the life of local communities,” John Demos writes in Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. “Trials were usually preceded by months or years of preparation, during which suspicion intensified and spread, gossip flourished, relations between accused and accusers gradually deteriorated.” Sometimes, revenge was a dish served freezing cold.

Alice or Alse Young was the first woman executed for witchcraft in New England. She had moved to Windsor, Connecticut, from London with her ailing husband in 1640/1 and was believed to be a cunning woman or have some knowledge of healing that her community found threatening. Little evidence remains about what exactly she did to invoke the ire of Windsor, but Young was hanged as a witch in Hartford in 1647. Her daughter, also named Alice, would be accused of witchcraft too, some thirty years later.

Witchcraft was built into Connecticut law, and church and state were intimately entwined from the start. The 1642 Capital Laws of Connecticut modeled after the Massachusetts Body of Liberties from the year prior included a witchcraft statute crafted from three biblical passages, including “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” To execute said laws, legal manuals written in England were brought over to serve as guides. Michael Dalton's Countrey Justice, published four years after the Lancashire witch trials ended, was an important tool for New England courts. “Dalton's book came to function much like the third part of the Malleus Maleficarum or Witches’ Hammer had earlier on the continent,” Ross affirms.

The second person to be hanged for witchcraft in Hartford bears all the marks of the sexually transgressive witch—and was deemed a worthy subject for noted Puritan minister Cotton Mather to mention in his book Magnalia Christi Americana.

Mary Johnson was an unmarried servant accused of stealing from her employer's household and was whipped as punishment. Sometime later, Mary was accused of witchcraft and confessed that the Devil did favors for her. When she was scolded for not cleaning the soot out of her master's chimney one day, the Devil came along and helped clear the hearth. When she was sent to wrangle her master's hogs, the Devil helped her do that, too. Mary also confessed to the “murder of a child,” and admitted she was guilty of “uncleanness with men and Devils.” Later records suggest that she was pregnant at the time of her conviction. Mary Johnson was allowed to give birth in prison before they slipped the noose around her neck.

I learned more horrifying stories of women punished for merely trying to survive under exceedingly harsh conditions. But under patriarchal Puritanism, such women were easy scapegoats to shore up community obedience and piety. When the lecture came to a close, a constellation of names and questions hung in the air. A hush fell upon the room as Reverend Rochelle A. Stackhouse stepped up to her pulpit to deliver an impassioned sermon about the legacy of the witch hunts.

Drawing from Psalm 43, Stackhouse affirmed “the need for truth-telling,” in the planning of this ceremony. She spoke of contemporary persecutions and the necessity for vigilance on the part of everyone in this country to do what we can to stop oppression of all kinds. (I had noticed a rainbow flag affixed to the church when I walked up.) The reverend instructed those present to pick up a black stone from a basket near the entrance doors and head outside to the garden. Inspired by the Scottish tradition, these cairn stones would be piled together by our hands as a memorial to those who were not allowed to be buried here when they were executed as witches.

“We are going to allow them to rest in our sacred ground,” announced Stackhouse. The small group filed outside into the garden with solemnity, slowly stacking each stone on a square of dirt between plantings. Then, we were asked to close our eyes and pray to whatever was holy to us. The reverend's voice was rich and clear and strong, asking forgiveness for the sins and faults of the church that once persecuted these women. “We grieve the loss of our ancestors,” she intoned as the group was enrapt in collective prayer. She asked that we all have the strength to prevent the othering and persecution of people today who are in the same position these “witches” once were. “Our society excels at persecuting people as Other,” the reverend said, but asked us again to commit ourselves “to seek understanding and community with all.”

The names of the accused eleven witches were read aloud. I squeezed my eyes shut to keep tears from springing forth. The air hummed with “amen” and “blessed be” before the group dispersed into the afternoon sun.

Next door to the church, I found remnants of the accused in front of the Ancient Burying Ground. The oldest cemetery in Hartford was awash in gold, scarlet, and green leaves. Nearby bricks surrounding a statue of Reverend Samuel Stone—who played a pivotal role in Connecticut's witch trials—have been marked as memorials. One reads: “Alse Young CT Witch Hanged May 26, 1647.” Nearby is another: “Mary Barnes Hanged 1662/3 For Witchcraft.”

I stepped gingerly over the bricks into the Ancient Burying Ground. Winged skulls chiseled into aging gravestones were in stark contrast to the vivid colors above and below. I explored the historical graves of former witch accusers, ministers, and magistrates—the only ones involved in the witch trials dignified with a final resting place. I overheard some of the attendees speaking about other witch trial memorials in process across Connecticut as I walked past the memorial garden.

Through the wrought-iron fence, I could see the small pyramid of black cairn stones we had just left. Falling leaves had already obscured part of the pile, but no more than the history of Connecticut's witch hunts had already been obscured.

It's easy to be cynical about honoring eleven long-dead people when so many continue to suffer in the United States today, singled out as targets by religious leaders and politicians alike. But the care with which the reverend tended to the long-forgotten members of her flock was moving. Who would have thought that witches would be the thing to finally bring Pagans and Christians together in ritual and prayer.