In the Devil's Snare

While the first five individuals accused of witchcraft matched the profiles of those previously accused elsewhere, the next group of the accused did not. Martha Corey and Rebecca Towne Nurse, for example, were respectable matrons. However, before her marriage, Corey had a biracial son out of wedlock, and he lived in her household. Norton speculates that Corey was thus the subject of gossip in the town. Nurse, who was 70 years old, had relatives with a “long-standing dispute with various Putnams over the boundaries of their respective lands” (47), so Norton assumes she was most likely a topic of conversation in the Putnam household. When Corey visited the Putnam household, as the magistrates requested, Ann, Jr., had fits and claimed that there was a yellow bird sucking on Corey’s fingers. This linked her to Good, who supposedly had the same animal familiar. Additionally, Ann, Jr., described an apparition of Corey as a spectral spit, which recalled tales of the Wabanakis roasting English settlers over slow fires.

Mercy Lewis, one of the accusers, had a history that was deeply affected by the wars in Maine. Her parents had fled to Salem Town in 1676, when Lewis was a toddler, following an attack by Indigenous forces.