Elizabeth Morse of Newbury was Convicted of Witchcraft in Boston in 1680
Elizabeth Morse of Newbury was convicted following poltergeist-like events in her home after she and her husband William took in their grandson John Stiles. Sticks and stones were thrown at their house from nowhere. Objects disappeared and came down the chimney repeatedly. Pots hung over the fire danced and clanged together. The bedclothes flew off the bed. John Mighill testified that a calf’s skin fell off, replaced by something red like a burn; a cow excreted waste from its side; other animals experienced unusual illnesses and deaths. Robert Earle heard a strange sucking sound “like a whelp feeding” while visiting Elizabeth. Esther Wilson reported that her mother believed Elizabeth was a witch and nailed a horseshoe to the door as protection. Elizabeth would not enter while the horseshoe was present but knelt by the door to talk. When Minister William Moody removed the horseshoe, Elizabeth entered freely. Moody’s mother then began having visions of Elizabeth and experiencing fits, and Moody himself became convinced of Elizabeth’s guilt, providing influential testimony as a religious authority. On March 6, 1680, Constable Joseph Pike was ordered to arrest Elizabeth and take her to Ipswich jail. She was tried in May 1680 and convicted, with Governor Simon Bradstreet pronouncing the death sentence on May 27. However, on June 1, Governor Bradstreet and the assistants reprieved her, possibly because they determined that seeing a specter was not the same as seeing Elizabeth perform witchcraft, and that multiple witnesses to the same event were necessary. This decision by Bradstreet and the assistants to reprieve Elizabeth despite her conviction represented an important precedent in questioning spectral evidence, foreshadowing debates that would become critical during the Salem trials twelve years later. William Morse petitioned for better treatment, and Elizabeth was eventually released into his custody under a form of house arrest. It has been 344 years since her conviction, and she has never been cleared of wrongdoing.
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Sources:
David D. Hall, Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History 1638-1693
John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England
Paul B. Moyer, Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World