About the same time another house was infested at Salmon falls[22] in New-Hampshire. And, in 1684, one Philip Smith,[23] a justice of the court, and representative of the town of Hadley, on Connecticut River, an hypochondriac person, supposed himself to be under an evil-hand; and suspected a woman, one of his neighbors; and, continuing in that state until he died, he was generally supposed to be bewitched to death. In 1685, a large and circumstantial account of all or most of these instances was published,[24] and anybody who doubted the truth of them would have been pronounced a Sadducee. In 1688[25] begun a more alarming instance than any which preceded it. Four of the children of John Goodwin, a grave man and good liver at the north part of Boston, were generally believed to be bewitched. I have often heard those who were then upon the stage speak of the great consternation it occasioned. The children were all remarkable for an ingenuity of temper, had been religiously educated, and were supposed to be incapable of imposture or fraud. The eldest was a girl about thirteen years of age, it is said, it may be something more. She had charged a laundress with taking away some of the family linen. The mother of the laundress was one of the wild Irish, and gave the girl very bad language; after which she fell into a sort of fits, which were said to have something diabolical in them. One of her sisters and two of her brothers, whose ages were not transmitted,[26] soon followed her example, and they are said to have been tormented in the same parts of their bodies at the same time, though kept at a distance so as not to know one another’s complaints. One thing was remarkable, and ought to have been taken more notice of, that all their complaints were in the day time, and that they slept comfortably all night. They were sometimes deaf, then dumb, then blind, and sometimes all these together. Their tongues would be drawn down their throats, then pulled out upon their chins. Their jaws, necks, shoulders, elbows, and all their joints would appear to be dislocated, and they would make the most piteous outcries of being cut with knives and beat; and plain marks of wounds might afterwards be discovered. The ministers of Boston and Charlestown kept a day of fasting and prayer at the troubled house; and after that the youngest child made no more complaints. But the magistrates unfortunately interposed; and the old woman was apprehended, examined, committed and brought to trial, and seems neither to have owned nor denied her guilt, being either really a distracted person, or endeavoring to appear such; and, before sentence of death was passed, the opinion of physicians was taken; but they returned that she was _compos mentis_, and she was executed, declaring at her death the children should not, or perhaps it might be, would not be relieved by her death, and that others besides her had a hand in their afflictions.