Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 Read Online Free PDF

if only to get it over with. He settled on the narrow bed, just a few inches away from the young woman. He could hear her breathing, but she gave no other sign of life. Abraham sat nearby, gazing apprehensively at nothing in particular. It had been an arduous day and David felt tired, but there was no danger of him falling asleep—he felt far too tense.
    Suddenly the Wescots’ youngest daughter cried out in another room. David sat up in alarm and glanced down at Kate; thank-fully, she was still asleep. Abraham crept out to investigate and returned a few minutes later. Nothing more than a bad dream, he reported, and her parents were calming her down.
    When the time came for David to be relieved, he carried a light into the adjoining room, where he paced to and fro, unable to relax. All of a sudden he heard Kate scream and rushed back into her room. There he found Abraham sitting up on the bed, deathly pale, with Kate lying across his feet in what seemed to be a dead faint.
    “She cried out,” Abraham said, “and when I looked up I saw a ball of fire as big as my two hands pass across the room to the hearth, and then it disappeared.”
    Minutes later Kate came to her senses and they asked her why she had screamed. A woman had come into the room, she said, a woman with fiery eyes.
    Once Kate settled down again, David took another turn lying beside her. Abraham, still shaken, lay on a chest nearby. Not long afterward David felt a pricking in his side that caused him to start. Abraham asked what had happened and he answered, “she pricked me.”
    “No, I didn’t,” Kate retorted, “it was Goody Crump.”
    Before either man could ask who that was, Kate held her hand over the side of the bed, palm open, and said, “Give me that thing that you pricked Mr. Selleck with!”
    She then closed her hand. Abraham took hold of it, opened it up, and found a pin, which he removed. Kate’s hand had been empty when she stretched it over the side of the bed, he would swear it. Both men were now completely unnerved.

    A few nights later, Ebenezer Bishop, another of the Wescots’ neighbors, was sitting beside Kate’s bed when she suddenly called out: “Goody Clawson! Goody Clawson!”
    Staring intently at what seemed to be an empty corner of the room, Kate declared, “Goody Clawson, turn head over heels!”
    After this she had a violent fit and cried out at the top of her voice, “Now they’re going to kill me! They’re pinching me on the neck!”
    Ebenezer took the light, leaned over from where he was sitting, and examined the young woman’s neck. He could see a red mark about the same size as a large coin. Shortly afterward Kate cried out that they were pinching her again and pointed to her shoulder, where he could now see another red patch.
    A few hours later both marks turned black and blue as though she had been bruised. But who or what had done this to Kate? Ebenezer had been sitting right beside her. He knew that no visible force had caused those marks. Any doubts he may have had that Kate was under an evil hand faded as he observed the marks on her neck and shoulder darken to a stark, menacing color while she slept fitfully.

    Joseph Garnsey offered to spend time at the Wescots’ house while Mister Wescot was away in Hartford, partly as a gesture of neighborly support but also because he was curious to see the maidservant’s fits for himself. How could he not, after hearing the descriptions of Kate’s torments that were circulating through the neighborhood? Abraham Finch had told him of the fireball. And the stories of her physical contortions were equally amazing. Samuel Holly, another neighbor who had watched over Kate, told Joseph that the young woman’s breasts inflated like bladders and then suddenly collapsed into her body, soon afterward filling out again. “And there was a great rattling in her throat as if she was choking,” Samuel added. “Believe me, all that I saw was beyond nature.”
    Mister Wescot