[history/witchcraft] Oh man, today I'm gonna take all y'all back to 1680s Massachusetts to tell you the story of Half-Hanged Mary.
oh what a name
Oh yeah this is where I heard this name from oops. /accidentally stole it/ anyway /sits here/
We can share! 
\o/
/chinhands
/sits here
There aren't any big trigger warnings in this one, but "the devil" and "witchcraft" are going to be thrown around a lot.
/settles in
This one's surprisingly hard to just google search... most of this will be straight-out sourced from the Lore Podcast.
LORDY I wrote 1860 instead of 1680... THEY'RE VERY DIFFERENT DATES.
I fixed it, I'm sorry... how numbers...
WITCHES /slams in here
And lastly before I start talking, I should mention that this did take place in sixteen-something-something, and so even if I had twelve different sources, it's unlikely that any of them would be accurate.
yeah the internet back then was sooo spotty
The wifi was terrible...
YEAH, you can find plenty of accounts of witch trials from this period of time, but unbiased journalism wasn't exactly a thing...
So all of this should obviously be taken with a grain of salt. Maybe just carry a whole saltshaker around.
BUT HERE'S THE STORY
So, the seventeenth century was a heck of a time.
/SITS
To give this some context, pilgrims had only just sailed over from England and established the Plymouth Colony in 1620.
Boston (and the Massachusetts Bay Colony) wasn't established until ten years later.
So, really, New England had only been a thing for fifty or sixty years at the time of this story.
I don't know how much everyone remembers from their middle-school history classes, but being a colonist was awful and terrifying.
There was patriotism and exploring the new world and all that, but there was also a lot of starvation, sickness, and disagreements over religion.
Most superstitions arise as a way to rationalize what frightens us, or give us some control over something that would otherwise be uncontrollable.
Our modern vampire myths likely began as a way for people to explain the horrible TB outbreaks in the 19th century.
The myth of the werewolf was popularized in the 16th century, largely to help explain horrible things happening to otherwise innocent people in Europe.
And in 17th century New England, with the recent Protestant Reformation, it made a whole lot of sense for everyone to blame their problems on the Devil, and those who associated with him.
Witches, in other words.
Y'all have at least heard of the Salem Witch Trials, which is the famous and probably the worst example of people being accused (and often executed) for crimes of "witchcraft".
From those records, it's pretty easy to assume that people used these accusations to justify getting rid of people they didn't like.
If I remember this explanation right, most of the accused were either wealthy members of the community (their property was re-claimed by the town governance when they were gone, then redistributed or sold)
or they were poor members of the community, or they had religious beliefs that differed from that of their accusers.
BUT, there are also a number of weird stories from that time period about people performing rituals to get rid of their witch neighbors, and those rituals... working.
For example, one man walked out to his barn one day to find that one of his cows looked strange and not how he remembered it.
He immediately thought of his neighbor, who was said to be a witch. Following what superstition dictated, he cut off the cow's ears and tail and burned them both in his fireplace.
poor cow
That night, his neighbor died in a mysterious house fire.
(I know, right? Poor cow...)
Another story claims that one man sculpted a wax figure of a woman in town who was rumored to be a witch. He pierced the figure with a thorn and threw it into the fire.
Allegedly, at the same time across town, that woman fell down her own staircase and broke her neck.
One man, famously rumored to be a sorcerer, cursed a young boy into having seizures and "running up the walls like a squirrel".
The parents created a witch potion, buried it under their hearth, and the alleged sorcerer was dead the next morning.
Total coincidence? Maybe. Covering up foul play? Possibly!
But stories like this only fueled the fear and belief in witchcraft, and man, they would blame anything on witchcraft.
Sick family? Witchcraft. Your kitchen wall fell in? Witchcraft. Bad weather? Totally the work of the Devil.
The Salem Witch Trials were awful, there's no doubt, but at least those people tried to operate within the laws of the time.
Some places... not so much.
Sometimes people decided to take the law into their own hands.
This is what brings us to the story of Mary Webster, an old lady from Hadley, Massachusetts.
See, a guy in Hadley named Phillip Smith had taken mysteriously ill. He was a pastor and member of the city counsel, and generally a prominent member of the community.
A lot of people really liked him, looked up to him, or depended on him for something.
Whatever was wrong with Smith wasn't just a winter flu; he started suffering seizures and convulsions, and spoke incoherently whenever he could speak at all.
He was frequently delirious and said he was in terrible pain, that it felt like someone was stabbing hundreds of nails into his arm over and over and over again.
(They found nothing, and his arm looked fine.)
He'd often complain about a woman being in the room with him, when there had been no one at all.
To his family and friends, he looked like he was struggling to fight off the Devil himself, and all signs pointed right to witchcraft.
And conveniently for them, they already had a town witch, who was rumored to have an argument with him only days earlier.
The town witch was Mary Webster. Wikipedia has a charming illustration to lead your imagination, here:
Mary was this crotchety old woman, probably in her late 50s or early 60s. She was reportedly cranky, foul-mouthed, and bitter towards the town.
She and her husband had become poor, and now lived in a little house out in the middle of the town pastures. There are no records of her having any children.
They sometimes had to ask the town for money and assistance, sort of like old-timey welfare, which didn't really help endear her to the town.
She was despised and often harassed on account of supposedly being a witch, which I can't imagine helped her "ill-tempered" manner any.
And, of course, the town had stories about her.
Groups of animals led near her house were said to start panicking and run in the other direction. It wasn't until people went up to her door to berate her that the animals would pass by without incident.
One man's cart toppled over in the road by her house, which he assumed was her fault. After going into her house to yell at her about it, he found that his cart had mysteriously righted itself again.
One story claims that Mary visited someone's home; when she looked at their newborn child, the child is said to have levitated out of the crib until it touched the ceiling... three times.
The most popular rumor was that one family witnessed a live chicken suddenly dropping down their chimney and into the pot of water that was boiling above their fire.
They chicken skittered out of their house before they could catch it, and the next day, Mary was mysteriously scalded and refused to explain why.
However, the one thing that incriminated Mary the most was that she had already been on trial for witchcraft once before.
After all of the aforementioned stories, she was chained and sent off to Boston, a hundred miles away.
(Probably in a horse-drawn wagon that was going an average of six miles an hour, so this was no small journey.)
She was sent along with a long written collection of all of the stories and rumors from the town. When she was put on trial, the judges looked over all of the evidence, used their best unbiased judgement...
And found her not guilty.
The town was probably relieved to have finally gotten rid of her... so imagine their surprise when the old lady showed up in town again almost two years later.
I have no evidence to suggest that she would have been smug about it, but I am still going to imagine that she was hella smug about it.
It was that very winter of her return that Philip Smith took ill, and a group of young men from the town decided they had to take matters into their own hands.
First, they ran a little experiment. One of them stayed with Smith, while a group of them went to her house to go harass her.
/sits
They knocked on her door three or four times, figuring that if she was casting some kind of an enchantment on Smith, breaking her concentration would also break the spell.
When the group got back, the man who stayed with Smith told them that he'd inexplicably been at peace, three or four times, while they were away.
This wasn't the only reason they had to believe Smith was being cursed... They reported seeing lots of strange things around Smith during his sickness.
Some of them saw something the size of a cat moving around under his blankets, but nothing was there when they looked.
A couple of times, they claimed that they saw fire on the bed, but the fire would disappear when they started to point it out.
Apparently the medicine left in the room for Smith would frequently go missing, as hard as it would have been for someone to steal it.
So, with this final link between Mary and Smith, they were finally scared and angered into action.
That night, the group went to Mary's house, dragged her outside into the freezing Massachusetts winter, and started beating her.
They spit on her, yelled at her, cursed her, and eventually dragged her in the direction of a nearby tree.
Once there, they strung up a rope through the branches, made a noose with it, and hanged her.
Once she stopped moving, they cut her down and rolled her up in the snow, essentially burying her.
The left the body there on her own property, in front of her own house, and headed back to town thinking that their problems would soon be over.
They... were very wrong.
Because this is where the story gets weird.
The next morning, Smith was not any better. In fact, he was pretty much the exact opposite, in that he was dead.
ldsksa
Strangely, his body was covered in bruises, like he'd been severely beaten. His face was black and bleeding.
His chest was swollen and his body was warm... despite living in what was probably a stone house in the middle of winter.
When they turned him over, he had a bunch of holes in his back, as if someone had driven nails into it over... and over...
No one could figure out who could have possibly snuck in and beaten him in the dead of night, not to mention whatever happened to his back...
And then, the craziest part?
Smith may have died, but Mary Webster didn't.
That's right, despite being beaten, hanged, and left for dead in the snow overnight, old lady Mary didn't die.
In fact, she got back up and lived another 11 years after that, dying peacefully in her own home at the age of 70-something.
...Did they hire the town fuck-ups to keep Smith alive and kill the witch?
"...and no one ever fucked with her again. the end."
The tiny wiki blurb claims she lived for 13 years instead of 11, but either number is impressive.
It also says Margaret Atwood is supposedly a descendent, just in case you wanted to know who you shouldn't fuck with in the 21st century.
Thanks for the story. I love these plurks so much. 
I'm just like... Colonists rarely lived past 70 without getting beaten and harassed on the regular. Maybe she was fueled entirely by crotchety spite...
And yeah! Margaret Atwood wrote a poem about her, and also dedicated A Handmaid's Tale to her.
The title of the poem is Half-Hanged Mary.
Which has the lovely closing lines:
*Before, I was not a witch.
But now I am one.*
*Before, I was not a witch.
But now I am one.*
Oh fine, formatting, be that way.
BUT YES, that's the story of Mary Webster, the alleged witch who probably scared the shit out of everyone until the day she died.
amazing
YOU GUYS ARE GREAT thank you for reading. 
yeah i agree she made that crotchety spite her fuel omg
it's a natural resource....
what a good
this is a fantastic story, thank you!
Thank you very much for sharing!
omg i love this 
also i'm adding the fuck out of you because i love storytimes
omg that's a great story
thank you it was great!
inb4 she was actually consorting with Cthulhu and killing people
I live next door to Hadley why haven't I heard of this
Wow! That was great!
Thank for these; so intriguing
Late, but that was a cool read
hahaha MAN that was great
"and then no one ever fucked with her again" mte.
Geeky Spouse grew up in Hadley and he had never heard of her either. He thought this was fascinating.
moral of the story: don't fuck with old ladies
I'm from the area and didn't know about this either.
Now I wanna go poking.
if you find anything feel free to share |D
dude this is an awesome story
Holy crap. Yeaaah, she totally just lived out of spite and no one can really blame her.
Whoa this was so good! 
omg
Oh gosh I hadn't seen all of these replies, t-thank you... 
Like I said, I'm still having trouble finding good sources for this story... I did find this one, which cites its sources at the bottom...
She's brought up in enough texts that I can at least believe she was a real person, even if the events didn't happen Quite As Told.
So if anyone gets really interested and happens to find out more, you're totally welcome to come back and share! :>
what the hell, i live here and i've never heard of this 
awesome
(I had just showed up in Salem for an appointment when this plurk went up. It was awesome.)
another mass resident reporting in to have never heard this story before
(also spookystick would you mind pinging me for the next historical story time? i think you also did the one about that serial killer in the midwest involved in a bunch of insurance fraud and such)
Oh, you have a ping list! If I could also be added, that would be great!
AND YES I did do that one about the serial killer with the insurance fraud and the crazy murder labyrinth hotel
I don't have any personal stuff on this plurk, so you can look backwards at old spooky story stuff pretty easily :>
god, what a magnificent story
you tell these so well
thanks for telling us!
IF ANYONE ELSE WOULD LIKE PINGS, just let me know and I'll add you to the list :>
gosh you're so welcome I'm REALLY happy to tell them.
I am most intrigued 
I keep trying to think of something else to do with them short of starting a podcast of my own or something djfksl but I've liked this the most.
FRIENDING IS OKAY TOO 
Yessss good
oh shit you have a story about danvers state 
(that shit is apartments now, that has to be haunted as all holy fuck)
yesssssssssss
I'd like pings!
You guys should get "Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692". It describes the trials surrounding the curse on Katherine Branch.
spookystick: ping meeeee
If you like ghosts/creepy/weird things, look up Mary's Grave and Mount Misery, both are on Long Island.
I'm following you, but I'd love it if you'd ping me if you ever post more stuff about Massachusetts! :3
i would love to be added to the ping list too. i've just been reading in silence so far, but. i love these plurks.
i'd like pings too!
that was a good story, thank 
Awesome story! You do a bang-up job sharing these weird chapters in history, bringing in all these interesting details.
spookystick I'd like to be added to this ping list!!
spookystick: Can I get a ping too pls? 
Oh my gosh this story is amazing but DID I JUST FINISH READING AS A MYSTERIOUS BANGING HAPPENED OUTSIDE AT 3AM? Yes, yes, I did.
I like to imagine her smug as well
I would also like pinging pls! YAY MORBID HISTORICAL STORIES.
Oh man this was a super cool read, thank you for the historical storytimes!
Echoing everyone else and OOOOOOH a ping would be awesome.
I'd like a ping list add
I'd love to be on the ping list, these are great
pinglist sounds awesome! i love history facts like this
I like pings. Pings are cool.
A ping would be great if you don't mind - I loved reading this!
Ping me for story time too please?
I'd like to be added to the ping list!!
I need pings to anything story time going up in this plurk please
all of these stories are just so neat and morbid and I love them, I'm totally friending you
Yes please ping me for story time!
Late but would like the pings please? 
ooohhh what a fun story aaaaaa
THANK YOU FOR SHARING THIS
If Mary did cause Smith's death, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of those townspeople
Jynxed: I will absolutely look into these things, omg. And I'll add you to the ping list!
AND EVERYONE WHO WANTED PINGS, I will add y'all to the list! I'm so flattered that people are interested in these plurks, thank you for the compliments jdfksld 
"It wasn't until people went up to her door to berate her that the animals would pass by without incident."
"After going into her house to yell at her about it, he found that his cart had mysteriously righted itself again."
"One of them stayed with Smith, while a group of them went to her house to go harass her."
And the townspeople never could figure out why she was so cranky :|a
Must be witch
Ah, I just realized I could follow you, so you can take me off your ping list (which must be super long) and I will just keep an eye out myself :v
this is awesome
this is so cool. and i would love to be on the ping list as well.
It's almost amazing how these old timey people think that someone has all these super powers, and none seem to think, "...Maybe I should buy her a really nice card."
Like, if someone could summon storms and plagues, I'd want to be on their good side lol
true. someone write such a story. that's a book I would love to read!
and thank you for another fantastic creepy story!
Seriously tho.
I would like pings, too, please
This just got replurked to my list and you tell it brilliantly! I'm also local and this stuff fascinates me.
I'm also local and this stuff fascinates me.
Ah this was a fun read! would love pings for more.
would love pings for more.
If I could get pings that'd be awesome! This was so much fun to read
Ahhhh what a good story!
lycanthropy101 a Mass witch!
ohhhhh, what a story!! i went to school just outside of hadley too!!
witchcraft accusations are really fascinating in the colonies because they're not just like a mob gathering together and tossing someone up into a tree though, but they usually have to reason it out
especially the trials where they work out "no this wasn't actually witchcraft and here's why" is super fascinating. when i worked at the new hampshire historical society i got to transcribe a document that
𝒻𝒶𝓃𝒸𝓎 𝒸𝑜𝒻𝒻𝑒𝑒
was
basically the proceedings of a witchcraft accusation which ended up being like "we don't know if witchcraft is actually real so we can't actually make a decision about this, yours truly, everyone present"
ITS SOME PRETTY NEAT STUFF!!!! /bows out now haha
TIL that the old-timey cure for witchcraft.... was witchcraft. (spells and potions and voodoo dolls? yeahh... )
lurking from a replurk, but it should also be noted that witchcraft wasn't considered inherently evil until James took the throne and he changed it from something like "don't do deals with demons"
to "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". witchcraft used to be a legitimate part of everyone's life, even for priests and the like...
If you're referring to the King James version of the Bible, he changed multiple passages because iirc, the dude was petrified of witches for some reason. There was also the passage
thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live which apparently? meant one who poisons well-water for a town. But he changed that to witch.
oh. yeah plurk hid your reply for a second.
no problem and yep, yep he was terrified of witches
Which kinda makes the Scottish play even more amusing, in some ways.
(James I was descended from Banquo. The scene with the portraits and mirror? The positioning of the mirror would have shown the royal box. And James, when he was at the play.)
before that witches were a every day part of society, unfortunately yeah, james was terrified of witches. just petrified of them, so he punishes all of them......
but prior to that most households had forms of 'magic' that they would perform as daily course.
Yeah.
lmao I know that feel
James himself was pretty strange. He doesn't get discussed a lot outside of the Bible/witch stuff, but
If you read about the time a little more, his court was notoriously corrupt as English courts went.
A good place to start, if anyone's interested in that, is looking up the Overbury affair/scandal/murder and reading a few different accounts
oh, huh! fascinating.
Fuck King James, tbh
lycanthropy101: THIS IS VERY COOL WOW thank you for sharing... YEAH, I'm really fascinated by early reasoning on this kind of stuff.
Because it's really easy to simplify and say that everyone back then was stupid, since what they did seems so outlandish and ignorant to us...
BUT... they often really were acting on what they thought was most logical, at the time, so MAN I would be so interested in seeing accounts of people trying to pick through this stuff in a trial setting...
djfksldfsjdk I should stop replying to these plurks so that they don't keep pinging up on people's lists but I just get so excited about learning stuff dfjksdl
Hey, I'm not complaining. This is all really cool.
WHOA King James, dude
d u d e...
That's all super-interesting context, though...
Yep! Dude was pretty borked. But that can be said about a great deal of royalty (if not most) lol Being wiccan myself, I find this stuff very interesting. :>