Lore - Episode 12: Half-Hanged

Episode Date: August 7, 2015

History is full of people who took things too far. Humans are gifted at turning on one another, a skill we’ve honed over the millennia. But when a small town in colonial Massachusetts needed a scapegoat for a dying hero, they discovered a target who refused to go down without a fight. ———————————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  Lore News: www.theworldoflore.com/now  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Simeon Smith was one of the early settlers of New Hampshire in 1772. He built a farm there on the border between Wentworth and Warren and held the local office. By trade, he was a tailor, but like a lot of men of that decade, he fought with a Continental Army. It's easy to look back at Simeon Smith as the typical pioneer from the late 1700s. He was patriotic and a stereotypical New Englander, for sure. But few people in town liked him. Why, you might ask?

Because Simeon Smith, according to the local stories, was a sorcerer. It was said that Simeon would saddle and bridle a random neighbor and then ride them all over the countryside, just despite them. When women were having trouble churning butter and it simply wouldn't work, it was because, they said, Simeon Smith was in the churn. If children in town behaved badly, it was because he had bewitched them. He could become as small as a gnat and move through the keyholes of your locked doors. He could become larger than a giant and would stalk through the forest at night.

Or so they said. Stories like these were common in early America. They were a mixture of fact and fiction, of historical truths and hysterical superstition. In an effort to explain the unexplainable, sometimes neighbors and prominent figures were thrown under the proverbial bus. The era between the mid-15th and late-16th centuries was precarious for many people. This wasn't the age of Harry Potter, witchcraft wasn't something that was spoken of lightly or with a sense of wonder and excitement, it caused fear, it ruined lives, it made good

people do bad things, all in the name of superstition. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Superstition was common in the late 1600s. If something odd or unexplainable happened, the automatic response from most people was to blame the supernatural. But most scholars agreed that these beliefs were merely excuses to help people deal with neighbors and family members that they didn't care for. If he didn't like somebody, it was common to accuse them of witchcraft.

In the most famous historical example of this, the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, we can see a clear pattern in the events. Many of those accused of being witches were wealthy and held religious beliefs that were different from their accusers. Once a suspect was convicted, their estate would be confiscated by the court, and in a community that was known for property disputes, grazing rights, and religious arguments, that became a recipe for disaster. What happened in Salem happened elsewhere, all around New England, just on a smaller

scale. Those accused neighbors constantly, stories were told, lives were ruined. It was the way of things, I suppose. Not ideal, but not uncommon either. In one story from Exeter Road Island, a farmer was said to have been carting his lumber to market when a cat ran across the road. For some unknown reason, the farmer immediately jumped to the conclusion that the cat was actually a neighbor of his, a woman who he insisted was a witch.

She had transformed herself into a cat in order to meddle in his business. This farmer was fast on his feet. Not only did he see the cat running and then make the connection to his witchy neighbor, but he managed to pull out his gun. He was said to have fired a silver bullet at the cat, something well known at the time to be effective against witches, and struck his target. At that very moment, according to the story, the suspected witch fell in her own home, breaking her hip.

In the town of Salem, New Hampshire, a man decided that his cow looked strangely different from how he remembered, and he made the most logical conclusion he was capable of. His neighbor was a sorcerer, and the man had bewitched his cow. The folklore dictated the solution. He cut off the cow's ears and tail, and then burned them. Soon after, the farmer's neighbor was found dead, victim of a house fire. In West Newbury, Vermont, a farmer had settled in for the evening beside his fireplace. Perhaps he was enjoying something alcoholic and refreshing, or maybe he was trying to

read a book. While he was there, he witnessed one he called Spectral Shapes that danced and moved in the flames. This farmer immediately thought of one particular woman in town, a woman known to be a witch, and he took some tallow and beeswax and sculpted a careful likeness of her. Then, taking a branch from a thorn bush, he pierced this little figurine before tossing it into the fire. At the same time, across town, the suspected witch apparently tripped on her own stairs

and broke her neck. Back in the town of Wentworth, our friend Simeon Smith received his own fair share of retribution. It was said that a local boy, named Caleb Merrill, was struck deaf by the sorcerer. After that, he began acting strange, running up the sides of the house like a squirrel and writhing in agony. After some trial and error, Caleb's parents put the perfect combination of ingredients into a witch bottle, a sort of homemade talisman designed to combat sorcery.

They buried the bottle beneath their hearth, and soon after, the town was burying Simeon Smith. The stories of neighborhood witches and the ways in which the good citizens of the towns defeated them were common all across New England. They border on the cruel and cast these people, often simply the poor or non-religious among them, in a horrible light. For many people, suspicion was a convenient excuse to hate your neighbor and wish them ill.

In no other place was that attitude more pronounced, more dominant, and more extreme than the town of Hadley, Massachusetts. In Salem, the townspeople worked within the legal system. In Hadley, however, the people took matters into their own hands, and the results were horrifying. Want to visit your family for that big thing mom has planned, but don't want to get there so early that you have to help with all the setup, but also don't want to arrive after everyone else because what if all the good food is gone?

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equal world. Learn more at can'tcancelpride.com When Philip Smith was dying in 1684, the town went looking for answers. It was hard to blame them. Smith was a model citizen and a leader in the community. He had been a deacon of the church, a member of the general court, a county court justice, and a town selectman. He was respected, trusted, and maybe even well loved.

The sole suspect in the crime was an old woman named Mary Webster. She and her husband were poor. They lived in a tiny house in the middle of some of the pasture land outside of town. Sometimes when things got tough, they even needed assistance from the town. Colonial era welfare, so to speak. It was easy to blame Mary Webster. She and Smith had not been on the best of terms, although few people in town were on good terms with her.

She was cranky, you see. Accounts of the events include the almost sarcastic comment that her already poor temper had not been helped by poverty. She was a sour and spiteful woman, and she had a tendency to shoot her mouth off. A lot. Her fierce temper and stinging tongue had earned her a reputation as the town witch. Apparently she wasn't much of a churchgoer, and that did little to help her case. But the clincher was that she had just gotten back from Boston one year before.

Why? Well, she'd been on trial there. For witchcraft. She'd been taken to Boston in chains sometime in late April of 1683. Mary, an old woman with a foul mouth, had been accused of having Congress with the devil, of burying his children and suckling them. These children looked like black cats, they said. She had strange markings on her body, they said.

It was conclusive and obvious, they said. There were other stories of Mary Webster. It was said that when teams of cattle were driven toward her property, they would panic and bolt in the opposite direction. They claimed that when this happened, the men would approach the house and threaten to whip her, and only then would she let the animals pass. Once, a load of hay toppled over near her home. The driver of the wagon went to Mary's house, literally went inside, and was about to give

her a piece of his mind when the cart magically righted itself, or so they say. Another story tells how she entered the home of some local parents, and when she set eyes on the infant in the cradle, the baby levitated out and touched the ceiling. Not once, but three times. There's even a story about some people who were inside one evening, boiling water and getting ready for dinner. All of a sudden, a live chicken came down the chimney and landed in the pot, only to escape from the house moments later.

The next day it was discovered that Mary herself had been scalded that night, though she wasn't telling people how it happened. And so Mary was transported 100 miles to Boston, along with a sheaf of those eyewitness accounts that had been written by her accusers, and brought before a judge and jury. The jury listened. They read those papers. They looked everything over and did their best as impartial, rational individuals. They disgusted amongst themselves, and when they returned to the court, they had a verdict.

Mary Webster was not guilty. Maybe this pissed off her neighbors. Maybe they thought they were finally done with her when she had been taken away. I can almost imagine their surprise when she rode back into town, a smile on her face and a fire in her belly. She had beaten the odds. But when Philip Smith, her old adversary in Hadley, took sick just a few months after her return, that newly won freedom looked like it might be in jeopardy.

The winter after Mary's return from Boston, Philip Smith began to look ill. The people of Hadley didn't know what the cause was at first. What they did know was that Smith was in a bad way. He had frequent seizures and seemed delirious most of the time. The people caring for him, his family and friends and nurses, were all deeply concerned. Whatever it was that he was suffering from, it didn't appear to be normal. In fact, it appeared to be the work of the devil. What else could possibly cause a man to suffer fits and scream and babble for hours in an

unknown language. When Smith could be understood, he cried out that someone was pricking his arm with nails, hundreds of them, over and over, painfully. His nurses looked for the nails, but they never found anything that could have been causing the pain. He claimed a woman was in the room with him. Some of the young men in town had a theory though. They had been talking about it for a while and decided they needed to give it a test.

You see, they thought Mary Webster was behind the man's illness. In their minds, there was only one way to find out. One of the men stayed with Smith while the others went to Mary's home. Three or four times, they knocked on her door and bothered her, thinking that if she was indeed casting a spell over Smith, this would break her concentration. When they returned, the man who had been tasked with watching over Smith claimed that the sick man was at ease three or four times while they were gone. There were other things they noticed.

The small pot of medicines that had been laid out for Smith were mysteriously empty, as if someone were stealing their contents. They frequently heard scratching beneath the man's bed. Some of the men claimed to have seen fire on the bed, but when they began to talk about it, it would vanish. The details of the events surrounding Philip Smith's illness are rife with superstition and fear. These young men even claimed that something as large as a cat would stir under the covers

near the sick man. But whenever they tried to capture it, it would slip away. Others said that the bed would shake enough to make their teeth rattle. All of this was just too much for them. Convinced that they knew who was causing Smith's illness, the group of young men returned to the home of Mary Webster. This time, though, they had more than disturbing her peace on their mind. They dragged Mary from her home and out into the snow and cold of the New England winter.

They beat her. They spat on her. They cursed her in whispers and in shouts, and then they carried her to a nearby tree. One of the men slung a rope through the branches while another fashioned a noose, and there, in a snow-covered field outside of her own home, Mary Webster was hanged. When she stopped moving, the men cut her down and took her body and rolled it in the snow, burying her. And then they left.

They walked back into town, back to the home of Philip Smith, back to the others who knew what they had done. And they waited. They waited for Smith to get better, for the curse to lift, and for their lives to return to normal. They waited for safety, for their superstitions and fears to fade away now that Mary was gone. But oh, how wrong they were. The world of the 17th century was tensive and harsh, especially for the people trying

to carve out an existence in colonial New England. The Protestant Reformation of the century before had left most Europeans with the belief that bad things happen because of the devil. Everything that went wrong, and I mean everything, was caused by something supernatural. This was a time when misfortune, loss, and even a simple illness would be blamed on the work of witches and sorcerers. Because of this, everyone in town was on the lookout. If something went wrong, there was always someone to blame.

It seems there was a devil in every community. History is full of people who took things too far. The events that took place in Hadley in the winter of 1685 are just one of the countless examples of what superstitious people are capable of when their fear gets the better of them. Sadly though, it didn't work. When friends arrived the next day to look in on Philip Smith, he was dead. What they found, though, gave their suspicions new life.

It was said that his body was still warm despite the winter cold, that his face was black and blue and fresh blood ran down his cheeks, his chest was swollen and his back was covered in bruises and holes from something like an awl, or nails. Now they had more questions than answers. Who beat the man overnight, who kept his body warm against the creeping chill of winter, and who put those holes in the flesh of his back while he lay dying in bed? I imagine the people who visited him that morning were disappointed. He was respected by most of the town.

Many people there most likely depended on him for something. He done so much to take care of him, even gone as far as to murder another person. And yet, it hadn't worked. Philip Smith was dead, and all they had left were questions. Something else would soon disappoint them, though. You see, although Philip Smith had died, Mary Webster hadn't. Even though she had been beaten and hung from a tree before being buried in the snow and left overnight, Mary had somehow survived.

In fact, she went on to live eleven more years before passing away in her seventies. And it turns out that Mary was also an ancestor of the well-known novelist Margaret Atwood. In 1995, Atwood published a poem entitled Half-Hanged Mary. It was written in sections, each one covering an hour of her torture, beginning with the hanging and ending with her return from the dead. The poem, written from Mary's point of view, ends with a line that makes a person wonder. Before, I was not a witch, but now I am one. This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey.

Lore is much more than a podcast. There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

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