Myths and Legends of Our Own Land — Volume 04 : Tales of Puritan LandSkinner, Charles M. (Charles Montgomery)
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Myths and Legends of Our Own Land — Volume 04 : Tales of Puritan Land
Skinner, Charles M. (Charles Montgomery)
Folklore -- United States
But the belief in witches did not die even when the Salem people came to
their senses. In the Merrimac valley the devil found converts for many
years after: Goody Mose, of Rocks village, who tumbled down-stairs when a
big beetle was killed at an evening party, some miles away, after it had
been bumping into the faces of the company; Goody Whitcher, of Ameshury,
whose loom kept banging day and night after she was dead; Goody Sloper,
of West Newbury, who went home lame directly that a man had struck his
axe into the beam of a house that she had bewitched, but who recovered
her strength and established an improved reputation when, in 1794, she
swam out to a capsized boat and rescued two of the people who were in
peril; Goodman Nichols, of Rocks village, who "spelled" a neighbor's son,
compelling him to run up one end of the house, along the ridge, and down
the other end, "troubling the family extremely by his strange
proceedings;" Susie Martin, also of Rocks, who was hanged in spite of her
devotions in jail, though the rope danced so that it could not be tied,
but a crow overhead called for a withe and the law was executed with
that; and Goody Morse, of Market and High Streets, Newburyport, whose
baskets and pots danced through her house continually and who was seen
"flying about the sun as if she had been cut in twain, or as if the devil
did hide the lower part of her." The hill below Easton, Pennsylvania,
called Hexenkopf (Witch's head), was described by German settlers as a
place of nightly gathering for weird women, who whirled about its top in
"linked dances" and sang in deep tones mingled with awful laughter. After
one of these women, in Williams township, had been punished for
enchanting a twenty-dollar horse, their sabbaths were held more quietly.
Mom Rinkle, whose "rock" is pointed out beside the Wissahickon, in
Philadelphia, "drank dew from acorn-cups and had the evil eye." Juan
Perea, of San Mateo, New Mexico, would fly with his chums to meetings in
the mountains in the shape of a fire-ball. During these sallies he left
his own eyes at home and wore those of some brute animal. It was because
his dog ate his eyes when he had carelessly put them on a table that he
had always afterward to wear those of a cat. Within the present century
an old woman who lived in a hut on the Palisades of the Hudson was held
to be responsible for local storms and accidents. As late as 1889 two
Zuni Indians were hanged on the wall of an old Spanish church near their
pueblo in Arizona on a charge of having blown away the rainclouds in a
time of drouth. It was held that there was something uncanny in the event
that gave the name of Gallows Hill to an eminence near Falls Village,
Connecticut, for a strange black man was found hanging, dead, to a tree
near its top one morning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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