This Smithsonian oil painting is based on the true story of the 1656 Boston execution of "witch" Ann Hibbins.
The woman who posed for the artist was her descendant, per the New York Historical Society. This descendant was at the time a librarian at the Cincinnati public library.
The painting is Witch Hill or The Salem Martyr (1869) by Thomas Satterwhite Noble. "Mistress Hibbins" was also a fictional witch in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The scarlet letter.
The evidence from the witchcraft case did not survive. The actual crimes of Ann Hibbins, wealthy and well-connected, appear to have been, one, outliving her husband and two, fractious relations with workmen and neighbors. A minister who witnessed the events would later say she was hanged for being smarter than her neighbors. But who knows. Maybe she coupled with the prince of darkness in her spare time.
This week's episode of CLEWS: The Podcast tells the story of a modern-day Salem witch trial - the story of Jessie Costello. Hundreds of thousands of women were martyred in the last few hundred years by a form of misogyny called "witch hunts." And in 1933, in Massachusetts, in the Costello case, they caught a real witch.... check out CLEWS for "The Salem Witch Trial of 1933."
#clews #truecrime #jessiecostello #femmefatale #femmesfatales #edmundpearson #witches #salem
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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