My Grandma, The Witch

Some things don't change

There are eleven ‘greats’ between me and Grandma Margaret.

The only reason I know about her is because another grandma told me about her. That other grandma is called Meme (she is great, but there are no ‘greats’ between her and me).

Both Meme and I share a love for the macabre, the twisted, the dark stories that families don’t easily speak of. The stories that would’ve disappeared into a nondescript grave had it not been for a perfectly timed tequila and a gutsy question chaser.

That’s why both Meme and I love genealogy. You find lots of secret stories there. It’s not a hobby that brings a lot of closure, though. If you’re lucky, you’ll uncover an answer, but it’ll come with two new questions. Yes, you’ll come face to face with your ancestors. But their rich, interesting lives will often be summed up in unsatisfying little statements scrawled on official documents.

Cause of death: ‘Burned in farm accident.’ There’s so much there we’ll never know because there’s no one left who remembers. That’s maddening.

Every so often, though, you’ll uncover a proper story – a story that reveals the complexity of the players and shows their humanity. A story that reminds you how humans have fallen prey to the same vanities, temptations, and wickedness for hundreds of years. That’s Grandma Margaret’s story.

We only know a few things about her, and the only reason we know anything is because she caught the attention of the wrong people.

My Grandma Margaret was involved in America’s first true crime story.

Here’s what we know about her:

She lived in an era of extremes.

Just a few generations removed from its founding, she lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a place dominated by Puritanism. This hardnosed religion bred hot tempers in a frigid landscape. In The Witches, Stacy Schiff says the Puritans “tended toward fission and factions, strong opinions, righteous indignation. Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them.”

Outwardly, they were a people staunchly convinced that their way was the only way, and they would tolerate no alternative ways of thinking. One Massachusetts cleric of the time claimed that religious tolerance qualified as “a satanic idea.”

At the same time, the Puritan’s unrelenting Calvinistic roots stirred an unending internal battle. They believed that before you were even born, you were selected for either salvation or damnation, and you had no way of knowing where you were destined. So they constantly wondered:

Am I good enough? Am I truly saved? Could I unknowingly be an agent of sin and devilry?

Their belief in predestination bred an obsession with fortune-telling and a thirst for meaning. Dreams weren’t just dreams. A comet wasn’t just a comet. Anything could be a portent of something.

Reoccurring sermon refrains centered around the spiritual war that constantly raged all around them. But these were a people besieged in the real world, too. They continually fought with the region’s First Peoples, including the Wampanoag, who had initially been peaceful (even lifesavers, as we remember every November) toward the fledgling colony. But relations soured after the newcomers refused to be satisfied with the land allotted to them. At the same time, the Puritans sparred with pirates and the French and even their former country, who tried mightily to maintain control of the colonists known to be of “peevish and touchy humor.” They continually resisted and refused England’s leadership, which left a power vacuum that could be felt in daily life and made them vulnerable to all the various enemies they were fighting.

Grandma Margaret’s generation lived in the shadow of seemingly fearless forefathers who had left their homes, crossed an ocean, weathered a brutal first winter, and began the work of taming a new land, all for the cause of worshipping “with more purity and less peril than they could do in the country” they’d left.

It would be no leap to imagine that the men in power during Grandma Margaret’s time bristled beneath that shadow's weight, that they were waiting for an opportunity to prove their own purity and write a new chapter where they played the righteous heroes.

She was very poor.

Grandma Margaret married a man, Benjamin Scott, and they had several children together. Statistics make it easy to assume that Grandma Margaret buried a few of her children before she got to hear their first word or see their first horseback ride.

We don’t know much about their married life or what kind of work they did, but when Grandma Margaret was 56, Grandpa Benjamin died.

In this patriarchal society, it was common for women to lose land, businesses, livestock, even full inheritances upon the deaths of their husbands. I don’t know if that was the case with Grandma Margaret. I don’t know if she had any of those things to lose. But I do know that, following Benjamin’s death, she and her children plummeted into a deep poverty. This meant she was dependent upon her community for support.

Every new battle with the Wampanoag or the French (to say nothing of accidents or illnesses) created a new wave in a tide of the helpless. She was just one face in a growing cohort of widows and orphans who relied upon a structureless, leaderless community to sustain their lives. Men with authority tended to be standing in pulpits and believed that hardship was often the result of unconfessed sin. This helped put the onus on the one suffering rather than on their neighbors.

So, more often than not, Grandma Margaret’s community did the 17th-century equivalent of rolling up their windows and averting their gaze, trying not to make eye contact with the person holding the cardboard sign.

I wonder, did this make her bitter? Did she mutter resentful admonitions under her breath when her many neighbors turned her away, dooming her and her children to pass yet another night at an empty table by an cold hearth?

Did her neighbors hear and remember those admonitions?

She was old.

…not always, of course. But when she suddenly found herself to be the topic of troubling conversations, she was 77.

She was accused of being a witch.

In August of 1692, Grandma Margaret’s community of Salem had spent the last eight months in the grip of witchcraft pandemonium. Bridget Bishop was the first to hang for being a witch in June of that same year, and the accusations and confessions continued to pelt the stricken community. Some reports claim that there were more than 700 witches in Salem and the surrounding area. Fifty-five people confessed to witchcraft, none of which would be among the executed.

When August came, hot and thick with humidity and biting insects, Grandma Margaret found herself accused of being a witch. Her neighbors and acquaintances had heard her resentful mutterings, and when a child or cow promptly became sick or an unexplainable accident occurred with a plow, what other conclusions could they draw? She had bewitched them when they refused to support her.

The chief accusers at this time often had incredible motivation to point their fingers. Some of them were people who had themselves been accused of witchcraft, and feared the gallows if they were unable to divert the attention to someone else. Some of them had already spent some significant time in prison, a place where inmates were afforded no food or water (except what was brought by family), no dignity, and highly inhumane living conditions. Some had given birth while in prison. Some had been nursing when arrested, which forced their infants also to be imprisoned. Some had lost those infants.

And not once were the shackles removed from their bodies.

Other accusers stepped forward out of a sense of righteous responsibility. “If the neighbor of a saint sins, then the saint sins also,” a famed minister, Cotton Mather, was known to tell his congregants. This was an incentive to police your neighbors, harshly. It was a Puritan responsibility. So maybe a young farmer had spent some time at the tavern (there were 15 in Salem town alone) and had undiagnosed nearsightedness, but he thought he saw old widow Scott participating in a nefarious activity. It was his responsibility to tell someone.

There was also, most famously, a gaggle of young girls. Many of them were servant girls who had been given an eight-month reprieve from their duties while the devil and his accomplices pinched, poked, and accosted them. A few of these girls were war orphans who had not known such devoted attention (and certainly not from men of high power and social standing) since their parents had passed away. Or maybe ever.

These girls were inspected medically. However, as no formally trained physician had yet stepped foot in the state, the task was left to the next best thing: a man who was partly literate and owned a few medical books. It was determined the girls’ conditions defied medical explanation and could only be bewitchment.

We can assume that Grandma Margaret, like so many others, was convicted based on “spectral” evidence: visions of actions that could neither be proven nor disproven.

We don’t know the exact specifics because Grandma Margaret entered the picture so long after that first accusation, and the novelty of the whole thing seems to have worn off for the community. No real records were kept, and the notes we do have were written by the men who ruled over the proceedings and only bothered to write about them after the fact (some records came years afterward) when questions appeared and would not go away.

She was murdered for it.

332 years ago. Almost to the day.

On September 22, 1692, she was hanged by the neck on Gallows Hill along with seven other convicted witches, including Mary Esty, a mother of seven who bid her family a mournful farewell from the gallows, and Martha Corey, who prayed ardently until the moment she could speak no more.¹

Samuel Wardwell was also among the eight hanged that day. The executioner blew a cloud of pipe smoke into his face as he uttered his final words, and as he began to choke, the accusers in the crowd jeered that it was the devil who interrupted his final claims of innocence. Meanwhile, the sheriff was already seizing the entirety of his property after deciding not to wait until the troublesome detail of his execution was resolved.

This was not a swift drop-and-snap into eternity. The eight were forced to climb a ladder, one at a time, hands bound. They were given a chance to say their last words to the onlooking crowd that had assembled for the entertainment of it all. Often, the last words they heard were sneers and ridicule. Then, a hood was placed over their heads and a noose around their necks. And they were shoved off the ladder to gasp and sputter and slowly suffocate.

When it was all over, it’s documented that Nicholas Noyes, one of the Puritan ministers who presided over the affair, looked at the eight swinging deceased and scoffed, “What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there!”

Grandma Margaret was one of the last people to die in Salem’s famous witchhunt, and she’s believed to be the oldest woman executed. We don’t know what her last words were. We don’t know if her children (by then, grown) were in the crowd or if they risked their own lives and reputations to secretly retrieve her body from the mass grave the executed were forced to share. We don’t know if anyone mourned her.

We don’t know.

We won’t ever know.

Margaret’s only crime was being an old woman who broke the mold. She was no longer useful to a man or a community. She dared to ask to be cared for in a world where women cared for, and her neighbors chafed under that constant demand. She was certainly outspoken, she may have been cantankerous, maybe abrasive: all adjectives that no Puritan wants to use when describing a woman. She may have been violent. She may have been an abusive old fiend.

She may have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She may have just been alone.

When a woman thinks alone…

Since its publication in 1487, Malleus Maleficarum (or Witch Hammer) written by Catholic clergymen was an indispensable guide for witch hunters and religious men, including those in power at Salem in 1692. In this tome, the author takes great care to unequivocally prove: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”

It goes on to say that, even sans occult power, women are “a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment.”

This book was used, alongside scripture, to excuse, direct, and mandate a human² holocaust that spanned hundreds of years and multiple continents. The women who were not burned or drowned or hanged were still impacted by this heinously misogynistic worldview presented in partnership with the word of God. The effects still ripple through Christendom even now.

Schiff says that Salem is “the story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.” I agree, but I would add that it wasn’t just the answers that were unquestionable. It was also the authority of men who had much to gain from a community that, in the grips of a great and terrible fear, offered them complete control.

And they seized it.

Her face is mine.

Since I learned Margaret’s name, I look in the mirror and I wonder how much of her looks back at me. The mole by my left eye: did she maybe have it, too? Genes are funny things, it’s not impossible. If she had it, did it look like a witch’s mark to her accusers? Did it help to incriminate her? Would it have incriminated me?

Sometimes, I think I can still hear the echo of the witch hunts in my bones. And I hear, too, a voice (maybe it’s Margaret’s) that says, “Hide! Don’t use your voice; don’t make yourself a target. Don’t be too skilled or too smart. Don’t be too loud or needy, and if you can help it, don’t get old.” That cardinal feminine sin.

I want to cradle her in my marrow and tell her that she can rest, that things are different now because, in some ways, they are. But some things don’t change. I need to keep her voice reverberating through my nerves, and my daughter’s, and her daughter’s. Until eleven ‘greats’ turn into a hundred.

I hope that those of us who can still hear the echoes never stop being attuned to them. All it takes for a Salem to happen again (figuratively or literally) is for us to forget. We can’t forget that all predators need to seize power is for the rest of us to be too fearful to question them.

1. Martha was the wife of 80-year-old Giles Corey, who had, two days prior, been murdered while enduring a torturous execution of being pressed for several days until he died. It’s recorded that, in his final moments, his tongue protruded from his mouth. The Sheriff, Corwin, used his cane to force it back in his mouth. As soon as Giles was dead, Corwin left to seize the entirety of the dead man’s estate.

2. While witches were very commonly women, they were also occasionally men and, even more rarely, animals. At Salem, two dogs were found guilty of witchcraft and executed.