Mary Webster lived another 11 years after surviving her hanging, but the townspeople took her survival as a sign of being a witch and continued to disturb her for the rest of her life. In 1985, Margaret Atwood dedicated her novel 'The Handmaid's Tale' to Mary Webster, her ancestor.

3am
wind seethes in the leaves around
me the tree exude night
birds night birds yell inside
my ears like stabbed hearts my heart
stutters in my fluttering cloth
body I dangle with strength
going out of me the wind seethes
in my body tattering
the words I clench
my fists hold No
talisman or silver disc my lungs
flail as if drowning I call
on you as witness I did
no crime I was born I have borne I
bear I will be born this is
a crime I will not
acknowledge leaves and wind
hold onto me
I will not give in
6am
Sun comes up, huge and blaring,
no longer a simile for God.
Wrong address. I’ve been out there.
Time is relative, let me tell you
I have lived a millennium.
I would like to say my hair turned white
overnight, but it didn’t.
Instead it was my heart:
bleached out like meat in water.
Also, I’m about three inches taller.
This is what happens when you drift in space
listening to the gospel
of the red-hot stars.
Pinpoints of infinity riddle my brain,
a revelation of deafness.
At the end of my rope
I testify to silence.
Don’t say I’m not grateful.
Most will have only one death.
I will have two.
8am
When they came to harvest my corpse
(open your mouth, close your eyes)
cut my body from the rope,
surprise, surprise:
I was still alive.
Tough luck, folks,
I know the law:
you can’t execute me twice
for the same thing. How nice.
I fell to the clover, breathed it in,
and bared my teeth at them
in a filthy grin.
You can imagine how that went over.
Now I only need to look
out at them through my sky-blue eyes.
They see their own ill will
staring then in the forehead
and turn tail
Before, I was not a witch.
But now I am one.

By the Student,
This is such a powerful poem as it takes a look at the emotional transformation of an innocent woman who turns bitter and evil after being almost killed by fear-driven citizens. It reminds me a little bit of how Stephen King writes by combining what is happening around her with the stream of throughts playing constantly, which creates a creepy and surreal poem. You're following this woman as she approaches death. What she's feeling, what she's seeing, how much strength she has left...It makes you feel sorry for her, but not quite sympathize since she turns into a bitter witch at the end, which is rather hard to like or sympathize with.

By a Young Girl,
Dear Diary,
It's been a month or two since I've written...I can't remember how long, really. We were greeted with a letter of condolences a week ago saying that Father had been killed in combat. Ironic, isn't it?
This woman gets a second chance at life after being called a witch, while Father dies trying to spread the word of God. Heh.
Maybe she was a witch. Everyone who I have seen hanged has died.
I do not know what killed father, nor do I wish to know. He is up in heaven now and mother may be seeing him soon. She has fallen very ill from grief and there is nothing that anybody can do. I have been taking care of the house, but I need her help. Please, God, do not take away both of my parents and leave me an orphan.
Maybe it would be like having two deaths. Maybe I will become Half-hanged Mary, the bitter girl who came into hatred through no fault of her own.
The funeral was two days ago. There was a closed casket.
God have mercy,
Mary

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“Most will only have one death.
I will have two.”
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Nine years before the Salem witch trials would begin, Mary Webster became known as “Half-Hanged Mary” after surviving a lynching. She was born in England around 1624, and her and her family migrated to Massachusetts in 1670. Mary supposedly had a bit of a temper and reportedly spoke rather harshly, which made people not too fond of her, and eventually her neighbors began calling her a witch and abused her. She also had a pretty bad scar from spilling a pot of boiling water and people began saying she had “the witches’ mark”.
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She was accused of witchcraft and brought to trial in Boston in 1683 and was believed to be collaborating with the devil, but she was found “not guilty”. As years passed, a prominent citizen in her town,Philip Smith, died painful death. Sure enough, the blame was put on Mary. They dragged her out of her house, hung her until she was nearly dead, let her down and rolled her in the snow and buried her in it. Somehow, she survived.
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Mary lived another 11 years after this incident, and in 1995 Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood wrote a poem dedicated to her. Her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, is actually dedicated to her.

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It’s in the early 1680s. Some of Hadley’s farmers are claiming they can’t drive their cattle and horses past old Mary Webster’s house. (By “old,” they mean a woman of fifty-one.) As a remedy, men would enter her home and “disturb” her—because she’s a witch, obviously.

What is meant by “disturbing witches” isn’t precisely defined. In the case of Mary Webster, however, historians Samuel Drake and Sylvester Judd have written that the farmers “would enter the House, beat her, or threaten to do so, and then she generally let them pass.” Turns out they made a practice of disturbing witches in seventeenth-century New England. Apparently when witches are being “disturbed,” they can’t disturb you. (Years later in Salem, the practice would also be thought effective… with consequences more generally known.)



At the Hadley Historical Society in June, 2017, Bridget Marshall, an American Studies professor from UMass Lowell, spoke to a rollicking, almost entirely female gathering about our town “witch.” As she told it, New Englanders of the time believed that witches, devils, and demons dwelled among them. This was fun to think about at high noon, in a roomful of women.

Many months later, in the middle of the night, as I google my way through insomnia, bouncing back and forth between historical documents and an inbox of campaign fundraising appeals, I imagine how Mary Webster would have been treated today. Would they have even needed to go into her house to “disturb” her? Imagine the Twitterverse: “Hang her!!! #witchofhadley.”

Has a jury of trolls ever acquitted anyone? Think of our past decade of “disturbances”: Gamergate, Pizzagate—or any average day with our Disturber-in-Chief.



What happened here in Hadley in the late 1600s? Now a place where permaculture and pollinator habitat coexist with fields of corn and industrial hemp, yet the past never seems far away—it bleeds into the present like last night’s dream or the first sketch on a painted-over canvas. This is good: our highly-wired present can learn from meditating on the earlier years of this place we call Hadley.

Mary Webster’s troubles started not long after what non-native historians typically refer to as Metacom’s (or King Philip’s) War—America’s most devastating civil war, if judged in terms of deaths per capita. This conflict included an attack on Hadley in 1675, and it seems likely that the witchcraft scares were at least in part related to fears stemming from these conflicts. You don’t have to be a trauma expert to imagine that settlers in Massachusetts, just a decade later, might have still been a bit unhinged.

According to Judd, Mary Webster lived in a “town-house”—i.e., housing for the poor—in “the Middle Highway,” a meadow. Her husband and his brother were the sons of one of Hadley’s founders, John Webster, a former governor of Connecticut, yet they had somehow lost their property and fallen into indigence. Thus, the Websters were now socially vulnerable (as were many people accused of witchcraft) and dependent on the town for their survival. Judd writes that Mary’s temper, “which was not the most placid, was not improved by poverty and neglect, and she used harsh words when offended.”

Here’s some of the evidence against Mary: A chicken went down someone’s chimney, fell into a cauldron of boiling water. Shortly after that, upon examination (nowhere near the site of the chimney/chicken incident), “it was found that Mary Webster was suffering from a scald” on her torso. The examiners—“men of faith”—reached the conclusion that she had been acting in the form of a “familiar” in order to spy on her neighbors.

What other conclusion is possible?

In April, the court in Northampton sent her to Boston to be tried as a witch. I wonder how her neighbors felt when, on June 1st, a jury judged her innocent and shipped her back to Hampshire County?

One answer, we know, is that Mary’s story didn’t end there. And so, a year and a half after Mary’s acquittal in Boston, during the winter of 1684-85, enter Lieutenant Philip Smith.

Cotton Mather practically gushes when presenting the Lieutenant: “Mr. Philip Smith, a man of about Fifty years, a Son of eminently vertuous Parents, a Deacon of a Church at Hadley, a Member of our General Court, a man of their County Court, a Select-man for the affairs of the Town, a Lieutenant in the Troop, and, which crowns all, a man for Devotion and Gravity, and all that was Honest, exceeding exemplary” (Magnalia Christi Americana).

It does seem difficult to compete with that.

As it turns out, Smith isn’t an entirely new character in our story. He was also a member of the court in Northampton that in April of 1683 sent Mary Webster to Boston to be tried for witchcraft. A year and a half after her acquittal, the lieutenant was dying, and the stories of what happened around his death are seriously spooky.

Apparently the two had had a difficult encounter. Mary had been begging, and she was less than thrilled with the Lieutenant’s offering. As any exemplary Puritan would, Lieutenant Smith then decided that Mary had bewitched him, causing his illness. According to Mather, Smith’s “[p]rivities were wounded or burned,” and “bruises, pricks, or holes were found on his back.” Also, “people actually felt something often stir in the bed, at a considerable distance from the man, it seem’d as big as a cat, but they could never grasp it.” (What could it be, if not Mary’s “familiar”?) Others in the sick room “beheld fire on the bed,” but it would disappear when they started to speak of it.

To relieve their friend’s suffering, a group of young men decided to “disturb” Mary Webster. Mather tells us that “all the while they were disturbing of her,” Lieutenant Smith “was at ease, and slept like a weary man.” Mather tells Philip Smith’s story in a couple of his books, though he never uses Mary’s name—he seems content to refer to her as the “wretched woman.” A later historian, Thomas Hutchinson, referred to Smith as “an hyponchondriak person” who “fancied himself under an evil hand.”



It is in Hutchinson’s history, written some years after the actual events, that we first hear of the hanging of Mary Webster. He writes that a group of “brisk lads” went to her house, hanged her till she was near death (did they believe she was dead?), then cut her down, rolled her into a snow bank, and left her there.

But Hutchinson ends on a cheerful note, “It happened that she survived and the melancholy man died.”

Apparently, she lived another eleven years and became known as “Half-Hanged Mary.” In 1985, Margaret Atwood dedicated her novel The Handmaid’s Tale to Mary Webster, her ancestor, and ten years later, wrote a poem to “Half-Hanged Mary.” The resurgent popularity of Atwood’s novel and its Hulu series, as well as the anticipation around the release of the novel’s sequel, tell us that this noxious strain in our collective consciousness is still in need of healing. We’re a long way from understanding everything about misogyny, groupthink, and terror.

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