CLEWS Your Home for Historic True Crime

Seeking Justice for a Hanged Witch

Adelaide Avery is a young girl on a mission to obtain a posthumous pardon for her ancestress, who was hanged as a witch.

Mary Sanford was executed in Connecticut in 1662, accused of participating in Satan-worshipping rituals involving wine and a bonfire. Curiously, her name does not appear in the Espy file, generally considered the most thorough and all-encompassing roll of names of the executed in the United States. One historian who delved deeply into the records says there was some doubt about her fate. (For more on Connecticut's witch hunts, see Hartford's Witches.)

As her descendant, young Addie, recently told a Connecticut legislative committee: "This isn't something that just happened 350 years ago in some far-off place that doesn't relate to us whatsoever. The Witchcraft Trials happened right in Hartford and the surrounding areas, which are the founding cornerstones of the State of Connecticut. Whether or not the society at the time believed that this was right or wrong, or whether it was legal or illegal, we know now it was so wrong. I think this would be a great acknowledgement towards our past if we let it be known that present and future people of Connecticut realize that these people who were hanged were wrongly convicted."

The New York Times takes her campaign seriously, but some mock the effort. The snide commentary comes from far right-wing bloggers already troubled by requests that the government apologize for other egregious errors such as slavery, lynching, and the WWII internments of Japanese-Americans. Unbeknownst to the young Connecticut girl, she has touched a nerve already quite raw. 

One essayist remarked that Addie Avery owes the public an apology.

Said another anti-ACLU blogger: "You’d be excused if you just rolled your eyes at the silliness of it all and you’d also be exhibiting the proper reaction to the whole business.... I see no reason to apologize... for something that hasn’t happened to anyone else for 300 years. "

The trouble, of course, is that it has happened to other "Satan worshippers" since then.

Does anyone care to take a guess when the last woman was arrested and/or convicted of witchcraft in the English-speaking world? (Take a guess.) The last witch convicted in the UK was Helen Duncan, who died in 1956 while in custody following her second arrest. For details, see The Mirror. The last female arrested in the US for witchcraft (as far as I can find, in a quick search) was in 1950 in Delaware.

And, as a matter of fact, a man was convicted of  a Satanic murder two years ago in Ohio. A chief witness against him: an ordained exorcist who told the jury the murder was an occult ritual.

Do you, high-minded, educated, all-knowing, modern ladies and gentlemen, do you think there will never be another groundless arrest and conviction for witchcraft or Satanry or devil-worship in the United States ever again?!

Then explain Father Robinson's case to me!

True Crime to Avoid, and Witchcraft links

You’ll forgive me if I say that there are some crime stories that are better in fiction. Oh~! Did I type that? Will I not delete that? Some subjects are too painful otherwise. For me, the four subjects I cannot tolerate in true crime are (a) stories of witch hunts and the exterminations of women, (b) stories of the slaughter of small children, (c) the Holocaust, and (d) racial mass murders and lynchings in the Civil Rights era. I’m no longer interested in non-fiction reading in any of these sub-subjects, not even to enjoy as history. They’re too godawful depressing.

It’s my guess that every true crime aficionado has things they can’t tolerate while the next true crime nut stands hypnotized. Do you avoid some subjects? Are there things you used to study that you’ve turned from? It seems everyone’s lists change over time. A story of a small child cruelly slaughtered didn’t make me blink until my own two darlings came along. Maybe we outgrow some things, too. I vaguely recall doing a lot of reading about witchcraft, witch hunts, and the Salem trials when I was a teenager, along with a lot of other girls fumbling their way through adolescence while studying the historical limits on female knowledge and behavior.

Long ago, I came across an impressive list of links about witches and witchcraft from the DMOZ Open Directory Project, Social_History / Oppression_and_Intolerance / Witch_Hunts. Some of these are excellent stories with good endings. Others are like the listening to the BBC World News Hour on the radio : they make me want to jump from the roof, -and without the broom. Maybe you’ll appreciate them more than I can right now. Maybe when I’m old I’ll wear purple robes and long earrings and give lectures on the Great Burnings.

• The Burning Times Myth - Article about the myth about "the burning times" by Arlea Æðelwyrd Hunt-Anschütz. Published in the Spring 1999 issue of Connections Journal.
• Gendercide Watch: European Witch-Hunts - A case study of the european witch hunts, c. 1450-1750 and witch hunts today.
• Greywing's Witch Hunt Research - Links and research into European and English witch hunts. Also links for grieving parents.
• Groton In The Witchcraft Times - Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Boston, 1883, 1-29, 3rd series.
• Historical Witches and Witchtrials in North America - Compiled by I.Marc Carlson.
• The Lindheim Witch Trials - The story, victims, and movie of the trials of 1664.
• The Malleus Maleficarum - Unabridged online republication of the 1928 edition. Introduction to the 1948 edition is also included. Translation, notes, and two introductions by Montague Summers.
• Mary Ingelman, The first witch of Winnsboro, S.C. - Describes the illegal trial where a lady named Mary Ingelman was accused, found guilty and tortured for being a witch in 1792 in Fairfield County, South Carolina.
• The Pendle Witches - The story of the Pendle Witches, detailing their family backgrounds, their alleged crimes, trial and terrible fate.
• Witch Hunt Commented Links - A link collection.
• The Witch Hunts - An archive of texts and documents.
• Witch Hunts - A collection of articles and some links.
• Witch Hunts (A.D. 1400-1800) - Articles and essays about Europeans' heightened concern with the phenomenon of witchcraft during the early modern era, including materials about specific witch-hunt episodes in Europe and America.
• Witch Trials of Long Island and Sayville - Witchcraft trial on Long Islandand the settlement of Sayville, with information about people accused of being witches in New York.
• Witchcraft & Magic History - The history of witchcraft and magic is usually concerned with the era of the witch-trials, a period that officially ended in Britainwith the passing of the Witchcraft Act of 1736.
• The Witchcraft Bibliography Project - Collect and disseminate bibliographical information about books and articles in many languages about witchcraft in early modern Europe. [PDF]
• Witchcraft Craze History - Personal and historical perspectives on the pursuit of witches and witchcraft in early modern Europe.
• Witchcraft, Magic and Witch Trials in Finland - A historical archive of witchhunt and witchcraft in Finland, based on studies by Ph.D. Antero Heikkinen, lawyer and historically oriented lawyer and criminologist Timo Kervinen, and Ph.D Marko Nenonen.
• Witches in the Bible and in the Talmud - Essay examining reports of witches in the Jewish Bible, in the context of the role of women and in relation to the subsequent history of witch hunts in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages.
• The Witching Hours - A starting-point for research into the European witch trials of the medieval through enlightenment periods.
• Helping 'Witches' Who Live in Exile - Christian Science Monitor article about the situation of widows in Ghanawho are branded as witches and forced to live in isolation. (June 22, 2006)

A Scholarly Tale of Witchcraft

I enjoy stories in which the heroes are scholars, like The Historian and Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons and Harry Potter. So I thoroughly enjoyed The Tale of Mary Ingelman, the First Witch of Winnsboro.

The first-person tale by Will Kale begins when the author visited a local history museum in South Carolina and was shown some articles about a woman, Mary Ingelman, who was accused of being a witch, found guilty, and tortured. The punishment took place in South Carolina in 1792 -- a full century after the Salem witch trials.

The discovery of this forgotten trial is really noteworthy. There's nothing else on the internet about it (although the story already appears to have been plagiarized in more than one place).

"Now I wonder," remarks the writer, "how many other 'witch' trials have been held in our country, hidden away and not talked about."

The story of what happened to Mary Ingelman, the untold and yet all-too-familiar fate of the old German immigrant woman who healed the sick, apparently hasn't seen print in generations, and the details on the website are intriguing. I think it would make an excellent book.

Indeed, there may be quite a few books out there waiting to be written, bloody stories of sorcery and retribution and the suppression of botanical and medical and feminine knowledge, the evidence buried in the time-encrusted vaults of local museums and historical societies.

(Via)

The Wizard of Hoboken

He was tall, blond, 40, and easy on the eye. He was once a Baptist minister, but then he “discovered his powers.” And he had the exquisitely inappropriate name Christian Christensen.

In 1914, he was also the proprietor of “The Psychological Research Society” which was headquartered in downtown Hoboken, New Jersey. And here, he made demonstrations of his ability to talk to the dead.

Mr. Christensen attracted an ever-increasing flock, to the point that he moved his lectures to the Odd Fellows Hall. That turned out to be a ghastly error, as the local police began to attend. The policemen recognized him, as he’d given a lecture in Hoboken the year before – on exposing the tricks of mediums.

The policemen stood in the middle of Mr. Christensen’s lecture. “That’ll be about enough. Just get your hat and coat and come down to headquarters with us.” An uproar followed the popular seer straight into the courthouse when the local prosecutor dusted off the oldest books in the law library and charged Christian Christensen with “teaching and practicing witchcraft.” An estimated forty women crammed the courtroom to testify to his psychic powers and to warn officials of the dire consequences of meddling with him.

The curtain closes on this courtroom drama here, as I could not find an article that mentions the sentence imposed by the court. Presumably Mr. Chrisensen stopped talking to the dead in public. Something about the story suggests his private behavior changed little.

From the Washington Post, Jan. 9, 1914: “Jailed As A Wizard; Women Plead for Ex-Minister Accused of Witchcraft.”