Mass hysteria in Massachusetts: the 17th-century witch crisis in America

One September day in 1649, in the frontier town of Springfield, Massachusetts, Anthony Dorchester returned from church to the house he and his wife shared with a couple called Hugh and Mary Parsons. He went to check on a cow’s tongue he was boiling for dinner but to his surprise it wasn’t in the pot. He searched high and low but couldn’t find it. Mary told him that her husband had sneaked off mysteriously on the way to the meeting house and was now nowhere to be seen. Given that the two men had argued about possession of the tongue, the obvious conclusion would surely be that Hugh had stolen it. But for Dorchester and his neighbours a more plausible explanation was that Hugh had made it disappear through the ‘juggling’ of witchcraft. And witchcraft was, of course, a capital crime.

It is dizzying to see the trivial details of everyday life escalate so abruptly into trauma. Eighteen months later a woman called Hannah Langton was cooking a bag-pudding — a concoction of offal and oats stuffed into muslin — but when she opened it she found that it had split from one end to another. Once again a trivial culinary setback was attributed to witchery.

Malcolm Gaskill is excellent at exploring the pressures that could produce such extreme reactions and lead to the Parsons facing the charge of witchcraft. On the one hand, this God-fearing community found itself in the middle of a wilderness populated by wild animals and pagan Indians. Counterbalancing this vulnerability was the claustrophobia of small-town life, where people got to know each other’s fads and foibles only too well, and where jealousy and suspicion could readily ramp up out of control.