Escaping Salem

William Jones, Connecticut’s deputy governor, was a member of the special court assembled to try the accused witches of Stamford and Compo. In the summer of 1692, Jones drafted a memorandum outlining the procedure for prosecuting an accused witch—Jones knew he had to tread carefully presiding over two cases that carried the death penalty, especially cases in which most of the evidence was circumstantial or based in hearsay. Thought magistrates worked hard to ensure that they were considering only concrete evidence, in many witch trials, the public felt that circumstantial stories and anecdotes were more than enough to prove that a woman was a witch.

Jones’s detailed memorandum, Grounds for Examination of a Witch, offered up instances in which a person could be tried as a witch. These included “notorious defamation by […] common report,” “mischief,” illness, or death following a quarrel or a cursing. Evidence of a person having “the Devil’s mark,” or an extra breast or nipple, was also sufficient. Because Goody Disborough and Goody Clawson were both commonly reported to be witches—and because they had, it seemed, cursed their enemies’ livestock—there were grounds for their examinations.

Both women were also reported to have a “Devil’s mark,” and so the court appointed a group of women to inspect both Goody Clawson and Goody Disborough for extra breasts. Goody Clawson was reported to have no abnormalities after all—but Mercy Disborough was found to have “a teat or something like one in her privy parts, at least an inch long, which is not common in other women.” Further and later examinations by different groups of women revealed conflicting reports about what “marks” the women did or did not have—and whether those marks were natural or supernatural in nature. The court ordered repeated searches of the women’s bodies, determined to find the “hard evidence” that only the presence of the Devil’s mark could provide.

The second part of Jones’s guide provided methods of “proving” that a person was a witch. Some outdated “proofs” included burning a person with an iron or scalding water to see if they reacted; if they did not, they were a witch. While this method was considered barbaric by the 1690s, “ducking”—or tying a person up and submerging them in water to see if they floated, proving their status as a witch—was still more or less accepted. Goody Disborough and Goody Clawson both enthusiastically agreed to being ducked. Both women were ducked—and both floated. Jones, however, felt that because ducking was not mentioned in the Bible, it was an invention of the Devil. He did not trust the “evidence” that ducking provided.

Katherine Branch’s claims of having seen both women appear to her as specters in the night were also suspect. The court perceived these “cunning” apparitions to be unreliable because they were “received only on the Devil’s authority.” Only voluntary confession from the accused witch, or the testimony of two trustworthy witnesses who had observed the accused witch consorting with the Devil, were regarded as sufficient proof of witchcraft. 

Godbeer writes that the reasoning for such strict parameters for evidence was rooted in the fact that people who accused their neighbors of witchcraft were not primarily concerned with the “spiritual betrayal” of a person consorting with the Devil. Rather, they were concerned with the “practical menace[s]” associated with witchcraft: curses that took the form of illness, famine, or the death of livestock.

In light of little reliable evidence supporting Katherine Branch’s claims about Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough—and the many layers of suspicion surrounding witchcraft cases—William Jones likely began to worry about whether someone was urging Katherine to make these accusations. The inconsistencies in the findings of marks on the women’s bodies—as well as both Goody Disborough and Goody Clawson’s claims that they themselves were being tormented by the Devil while locked in their cells—further obscured the truth.

The last bastion of evidence that could be used against the women was proof that they used the Devil’s powers to predict the future or summon ghosts. Fortune-telling and weather prediction were skills attributed to “cunning folk” throughout New England—many of whom were seen as healers and benign predicters of the future by their neighbors, even if their actions raised the suspicions of the local clergy. If evidence could be found of Goody Clawson or Goody Disborough using “cunning” powers, they might be convicted yet—but William Jones was increasingly worried about what the women’s accusers would have to say if their “cunning” could not be proved.