Historical Witches: the Other Witchhunt of 1692 - pt. 1

The Salem Witchhunts are a fairly well-known piece of history. Even if someone doesn't know the details about what happened in Salem, they at least have some awareness of its significance in history. What is often missed is that the witchhunts of 1692 were not limited to Salem. They occurred throughout colonial New England.

Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 by Richard Godbeer, covers the case of a community, two hundred miles south of Salem, who experienced witchcraft accusations.

The most interesting piece of this story is the stark contrast of how the community reacted to these accusations. The community of Stanford was much more cautious, and the process of comparing evidence and listening to multiple testimonies was taken very seriously.

In April 1692, Katherine Branch (known as Kate) began to experience a strange set of symptoms:

• Blood-curdling screams heard by neighbors.
• Randomly collapsing with convulsions
• crying out in pain during these convulsions
• claimed to feel as if she was being "pinched and pricked" by invisible creatures during these fits
• Sink into a paralyzed trance.
• Claimed to see her attackers as cats who turned into women, and then these women turned back into cats.
• Claimed that she had been bewitched.

Katherine was a maidservant for Daniel and Abigail Wescot in Stamford, Connecticut. Since she worked and lived with them, they were in charge of her care during this period.

One of the first signs of caution vs immediate hysteria was that Abigail sent for the midwife to examine Kate to see if there was a physical sickness to explain these symptoms. The midwife believed that there was a logical medical explanation, however, her treatment did not yield results quickly enough and so it was believed that Kate was in fact under the foul spell of a witch.

Stamford was a very religious Puritan community. Due to this, negative things (such as loss of crops, livestock dying, or sickness) that occurred in the community were thought to be caused by God punishing misdeeds, possibly natural causes, or the evil in the world that is always working against God's good work.