Transcript
right volume THE SPRINGFIELD WITCHES Parts 2
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[00:00:00] You're about to listen to the second and final part of a two part episode of Frightful Exploring, a little known case of witchcraft in Springfield, Massachusetts. I first learned about this tragedy in the Fantastic book, the Ruin of All Witches by Malcolm Gaskill, which I highly recommend. It's the 17th century, and Hugh and Mary Parsons have moved from England to set up life for themselves in the new world of New England.
[00:00:22] Yet as the precious of pioneer life, build so do the tales of witchcraft and demons, and now Hugh and Mary's relationship has become so toxic that they are accusing one another of witchcraft. This is a story of Mary and Hugh Parsons, the witches of Springfield.
[00:00:46] Mary Parsons was still obsessed with witches. At one point, she even accused a local woman called Mercy Marshfield of being a witch, and this led Mary to be accused of slander, and she was told that she [00:01:00] and Mercy would have to appear in court at a defamation trial. Yet just before this happened, Mary spoke to her.
[00:01:08] John Matthews, and she didn't talk to him about Mercy being a witch, but rather Mary explained that Hugh, her husband, was a witch. Matthews asked her how she knew this was to be true, and she told him. She said that she had seen Satan coming to her husband in the deep of the. And that Satan did feed upon her husband's body causing him to rise in agony.
[00:01:38] The court case between Mercy and Mary came round and Mercy Marshfield stood before the court and said she was certainly no witch, that she was just being targeted by a spiteful neighbor, Mary Parsons, and the court believed mercy and so Mary was sentenced to be whipped 20 lash. [00:02:00] Though she would end up deferring that by paying a fine of three pounds directly to Mercy.
[00:02:05] Marshfield Mary chose not to be flogged and to pay this fine instead, which only added more pressure to the Parsons family. Money troubles. As you can imagine, Hugh Parsons was furious, so they both pressed on through the fall and in September, smallpox started spreading throughout New England and one of the Springfield people infected.
[00:02:28] Was Sarah Dorchester who was lodging with the Parsons family. Mary tried to look after Sarah as best she could, but she had many troubles of her own, and Mary was starting to see strange supernatural visions. One evening in the twilight, she was on an errand for Hugh walking along the river path when she saw something move just by the wash.
[00:02:54] It was a great and frightening dog, and she immediately knew that this was not a natural [00:03:00] creature, and so she spann around and ran home. We had, things were happening at home too when Hugh came. She would sometimes hear a strange and loud rumbling sound throughout the house, and yet while her suspicion of him being a witch grew, he began to wonder if she might be the one who was in league with Satan.
[00:03:24] After all, he saw her as a woman who had sucked the energy and hope from his life. And so at one point he demanded that his wife strip naked so he could examine her body for witch marks. She refused saying that this was an a modest action and he didn't push it. But over the coming weeks and months, husband and wife would look at one another through narrowed eyes wondering, are they living with the devil's?
[00:03:54] One night Mary even crept up to Hughes's bed and after making sure he [00:04:00] was asleep, she carefully peeled the bed clothes back and she lifted a candle so she could examine his naked body. She found no mark, but that did little to allay her suspicions that Satan was stalking her and her children through their father.
[00:04:19] Hugh, you. It was around this time that Samuel Parsons, her young son, fell ill. The doctor examined him and noticed that his genitals were shriveled during one frightening incident in the middle of the night. Both Hugh and Mary were woken. When Samuel started screaming, they ran to the cradle and saw that the child was in extreme distress.
[00:04:43] He couldn't breathe. Hugh rushed out for help banging on the door of a neighbor, and he was sobbing in shock at what had happened.
[00:04:55] The neighbor, Sarah Cooley came to check the. And when she [00:05:00] saw his shriveled secret parts, his genitals, she started to believe that witchcraft was indeed at work. Little Samuel managed to pull through that frightening night and maybe the shock of what was happening to their child. Brought both Hugh and Mary together a little because on the last Sunday, in September, they were heading out to church together and they actually seemed to be in a good mood.
[00:05:22] Mary would later say how Hugh was quite pleasing in his demeanor towards her that. But then something bizarre happened that would ruin any sense of growing hope. The Parsons lodger, Anthony Dorchester had been cooking a cow tongue back at the house, but when he went to check after church, the root of the cow tongue was missing.
[00:05:45] Huh. And for some reason, news of this missing tongue started spreading around the. Hugh did not go home that day. Instead, he went out to the Long Meadow and just lay there looking up at the sky [00:06:00] while Mary continued to nurse baby Samuel whose condition was starting to worsen. And this time he did not pull through.
[00:06:12] The baby died and Hugh was still out there in the fields. And so his next door neighbor, Jonathan byd, went out to find Hugh to break the news. And he was, of course, expecting Hugh to be distraught after all he'd been through there, and how frantic he'd been the other night when Samuel couldn't breathe.
[00:06:30] But Hughes response was, it was unfathomable. He showed no emotion to the news. Instead, he just wandered off and turned up at the house of George Colton. And when they opened the door, Hugh casually said, I hear my child's dead, but I'll cut a pipe of tobacco first before I go home. And he started to pack his pipe while George and Deborah just stared at him, baffled his child [00:07:00] had died.
[00:07:00] And here he was just smoking like nothing had. Hugh still seemed unfazed when he eventually went home where he found his wife Mary, sitting there with the corpse of Samuel and Gaskell writes this, Reverend Moen was informed and the grave digger instructed Samuel would be buried. The same day later, Hugh came home and called at the houses of his neighbors, inviting them to his son's funeral, wrapped in the linen shroud.
[00:07:30] The tiny body of Samuel Parsons was. The length of the main street, followed by his parents and mourns Nobel told town could not yet afford one at the graveside, Moen followed the Puritan custom of quiet meditation. There was neither prayer nor sermon. The bundle that was once a life was lowered into the hole and earth shovel.
[00:07:55] Samuel's grave would have its simple memorial. A [00:08:00] slab of Welsh slate as some new Englanders chose would've been a slice of home for Mary, but these were inexpensive imports. Her son would have wood, which would blacken and rot or sandstone, quickly weathered away by storms and frosts.
[00:08:21] And so a child was dead, and then just three days later there was another death in town, Sarah Stepin, and a few weeks later, Sarah Dorchester, the lodger. She died as well and the people of Springfield could not get over the way. Hugh had responded to the death of his son, not to mention all of the weird incidents of blood filled milk and strange visions of boys in the night and over quiet, paranoid fire.
[00:08:52] At nights married couples would say out loud what everybody was thinking. Hugh Parsons was not only a [00:09:00] witch, but he was killing people with so, And so devilish was his heart that he wouldn't even shed a tear after murdering his own son. Over the coming weeks, more rumors of witchcraft and demonic activity were spreading, not only in Springfield, but all across New England.
[00:09:19] The folk horrors that had gripped the old world had well and truly arrived in the new. And then one day, Mary Parsons was with some others in the town when she announced that her husband Hugh had Bewitched. And was able to hear whatever she said. But despite her saying he would be listening, she opened her heart to the others saying that her husband was wicked and that he was cruel, and that he'd even threatened to hit her with a lump of firewood, which actually was true.
[00:09:48] And she also added that he cannot abide anything should be spoken against witches. And then she went into some sort of trance. She slipped out of [00:10:00] it with the sound of the meeting house Bell, and they all gathered to hear a sermon preached by George Mosen. But during the sermon, another woman from the town fell to the floor and started flailing her arms as two men tried to hold her down, and then another woman.
[00:10:17] And another collapse to the floor, convulsing and writhing and screaming and shouting out. A bizarre claim that mice and rats were now crawling around inside their bodies, and the horrified town spread looked on as the meeting house erupted in the frightening lunacy of the village. . More strange events occurred in the days ahead, and the people of Springfield were now convinced that there was something absolutely demonic flowing from the Parsons house.
[00:10:48] And so finally, William Pension issued a warrant for the arrest, not of Hugh Parsons, but of Mary. She was seized and interrogated, and then she [00:11:00] was detained while two men from town were tasked with watching her overnight to see if any satanic animals might slither and creep into the cell and suckle on her in the darkness.
[00:11:11] Nothing came apart from her testimony. You see through that night of watching, Mary would talk to her observers about Hugh saying that he was a vengeful man with access to supernatural power and that he had indeed killed his young son. And the reason. It was simple. He did it so that Mary would not have to take the time to look after him so that she could be freed up to get working in the maze fields.
[00:11:40] The next day, Mary Parsons was brought before William Pinch, the leader of the town and other friends and neighbors came to say that Mary was right. Hugh Parsons was a soer, and after hearing the tales of curses and visions and threats, Hugh Parsons was arrested that same day. And a woman from the [00:12:00] town called Anne Stepin saw him being marched by the authorities across town and she cried out, ah, witch.
[00:12:06] Ah, witch. And then she collapsed later. Anne was sitting in her home when she became fixated with the fireplace and she was convinced that there was something hiding inside there up in the chimney. And so she crawled towards the fireplace and. And she said, there hangs Hugh Parsons. And then she fell backwards yelling that he was going to fall on her, and she went into a jerking violent seizure.
[00:12:35] And so during all of this, Mary Parsons was under house arrest with her daughter and a baby boy. Hugh Parsons appeared before the court and he had to answer all of the accusations of curses from scary visions and missing cow tongues to cursed. But the thing that really worried the court was this way, he had reacted to his son's death today.
[00:12:55] We might have said that Hugh Parsons was simply in shock, but back then they [00:13:00] saw it as a sign of demon and the evil continued to rage in the Parsons house because while Hugh was on trial. Something awful happened back home. They'd already lost baby Samuel, but now their son Joshua died. Everybody in town was convinced that Mary Parsons must have killed him while sitting at home and when she was accused of it.
[00:13:26] She did not deny it, and so the town register recorded his death as murder at the hands of his mother. Eventually, Hugh and Mary would be standing in court together and the people of Springfield would watch the horrifying and frankly depressing sight of a husband and wife vigorously accusing one another of witch.
[00:13:50] But he was starting to realize that while his wife was standing there as a child murderer, the biggest evidence against him was that he wasn't upset when Samuel. [00:14:00] So hug started explaining to the court that he had deliberately held his sorrow back because he didn't want to upset his wife, who was clearly in a fragile mental and spiritual state, and he didn't want to act unmanly in front of his neighbors.
[00:14:14] So he had kept his tears in deliberately. And so Hugh was put in the position where he basically had to make the case to the court that he actually loved and cared for his dead son, Samuel. And it was very, For the neighbors to share how distraught he'd been on that first night when Samuel couldn't breathe, when he had been sobbing and crying, looking for help.
[00:14:34] This trial became so complex that it was time to move the proceedings to somewhere better equipped Boston. And so at Sunrise on the 24th of March, Mary and her husband Hugh sat together in a card, both with their hands tied and they were taken to Boston. Which was known as a place of despair and anguish.
[00:14:56] And then the court proceedings began in a bigger and more established [00:15:00] location. And with that move came a change in perception. The folksy superstitions that had terrified the Springfield residents came across as less credible here in Boston. And people were more skeptical about the witch claims, or at least they wanted much stronger proof of witchcraft.
[00:15:17] And finally, after all the evidence was presented, the jury retired to deliberate and then they delivered their decision to the foreman who read the verdict out in court For Mary Parsons. On the count of witchcraft, she was found not guilty. There was, they said insufficient evidence of sory. However, on the second count in infanticide, she was found.
[00:15:44] And she accepted the guilty verdict and so she would face the gallows, but she never got there. Gaskell writes this of the year, 1651 on a day that passed unrecorded [00:16:00] sometime between the 13th and 29th of May. She died alone and uncomfort in prison on a scatter of filthy straw. Mary was in her late thirties perhaps.
[00:16:14] She hadn't seen her five year old daughter, Hannah, since she left Springfield two months earlier. Nor in that time had she seen anyone she knew. Apart from the few witnesses in the courtroom, the only mercy that would can hardly have been a consolation was that she had been spared the ordeal of assorted, brutal public hanging.
[00:16:34] What happened to the body? We can only. She may have been buried within the prison grounds or in some far corner of the burying ground in nearby Tremont Street. There she would've been tipped and ceremoniously into a pit, her final resting place, unmarked and visited Unremembered. This was the wretched end of Mary Parson's arduous journey from the [00:17:00] Welsh marches to the American wilderness through two abusive marriages.
[00:17:06] The loss of two babies and a twisted thicke of delusion, resentment, and remorse.
[00:17:16] Hu Parsons was still in Boston jail, having lost his home land, his wife, his three children, and after three months of captivity, a decision was made about his fate too. The court found that while there was indeed a good reason to suspect witchcraft, there was insufficient evidence to prove it yet again.
[00:17:35] His case was passed on to the general court, and Hugh was sent back to the prison where he stayed for seven months. And finally a decision was made on Hugh Parsons. And this time they found him guilty of witchcraft. And yet, in a final twist, the court relooked at the testimonies against Parsons and realized that the key witnessed against him, his wife was now dead.
[00:17:59] And while they [00:18:00] suspected Parsons of witchcraft, they decided in the end not to charge him. It was the 1st of June, 1652 when Hugh Parsons was finally. From prison in which he had lane for 15 horrendous months, and he was reunited with his daughter Hannah, who was now six years old. They did not return to Springfield, but they stayed in Boston and eventually he moved to Portsmouth where life started looking up.
[00:18:28] He acquired some land and was even remarried to widow, called Elizabeth becoming a stepfather to her daughters. And after a life of terrible tragedy, frustration, and. Hugh prospered until his death on the 18th of June, 1685. In the wake of the Parsons case, accusations of witchcraft in the community continued Springfield even saw another woman called Mary Parsons accused of witchcraft, but.
[00:18:57] People were starting to become more skeptical of the witch [00:19:00] hunts. In 1654, a female witch was hanged from the gallows, for example, but a woman in the crowd came up to the hanging copes who had been her neighbor, and she looked under the skirt. She turned around and said, if these be the marks of a witch, and she was one herself.
[00:19:18] And so were half the. In the town. But despite the growing skepticism in the bigger cities, in the more rural towns, fear of the witch felt more vibrant, more real. And in 1692, a witch trial would begin, that would become the most notorious of the all in Salem, Massachusetts, A case so shocking that it would become one of the final gasps of the witchcraft craze.
[00:19:46] And after that, no more witch. Would ever be hanged again in New England.[00:20:00]
[00:20:07] Our lives are built on stories. We love to hear them for entertainment or education, but stories are much more pervasive. We live a story. Our lives become a journey, a narrative in which we are the main character working through whatever quest we've chosen. Like Mary Parsons, who after being abandoned by her husband in Wales, saw a new story for herself in the exciting new world of America.
[00:20:35] And yet as we write the stories of our lives, we cannot help but cast the characters and some are hero. But there always tends to be a few, or maybe at least one enemy. For those early settlers in America. Their story had an enemy out there in the woods, the Native American Indians with their stranger and seemingly blasphemous religion and beliefs.
[00:20:58] But have you noticed how as [00:21:00] we paint our stories, we're not always content with an enemy out there. Sometimes we start to cast them much closer to. Hugh and Mary Parsons moved to America, and that took incredible faith and courage and resilience. And then they found one another in Springfield and in this backdrop of a strange new world on their wedding day, married before God.
[00:21:26] They dare to hope that they might be writing an exciting new chapter of their story, but the folk tales and the superstitions were always close at hand so that when. Inevitable and brutal stresses of pioneer life came round. The hardships came to signify much more than just bad luck, much more than just harsh conditions.
[00:21:51] Things got so bad it seemed that the devil himself was stepping into their story. What I find so arresting about Gaskell's book on [00:22:00] Springfield, and so heart wrenching is that when we write our stories where the devil is somewhere out there in the mysterious wilderness, Can sometimes and gradually bring that devil into the village, into our home, and then even into a marital bed.
[00:22:21] There are many moments in Gaskell's book that have stayed with me, but I think the image that haunts me the most is the idea of Mary Parson sneaking up to Hughes bed at night, sneaking a look under the covers to see if he had the witches mark. And the thought of him doing the same to her, demanding that she strip off her clothes to reveal her mark, the thought of those sorts of exchanges just leaves me so, so heavyhearted, especially when you see where the seeds of these suspicions and the painting of one another is witches would lead to.
[00:22:58] To them both being transferred to the [00:23:00] Boston Court in the same horse and cart, perhaps thinking, how did our story end up here? And then for Mary to be tipped into an unmarked graven, forgotten how important it is then to have historians like Gaskell, who care enough to uncover and unravel these historical stories.
[00:23:21] Which of course become all the more poignant because at some point along the line we remind ourselves they're not stories. They are real people, a real man, a real woman, real children, a real house. And as we leave Springfield tonight, perhaps we do so with a word of caution that as we write the tales of our.
[00:23:49] Let's just be aware of how easy it can be to miscast the devil into our stories. And Peter Laws [00:24:00] standing alone in the British woods, and you've been listening to the story of Hugh and Mary Parsons, the Witches of Springfield.[00:25:00]
