Nearly a half-century before the infamous Salem Witch Trials of the late 17th century, hysteria over alleged sorceresses was raging in Connecticut.
Award-winning author Beth Caruso, whose historical fiction works include the books “One of Windsor,” “The Salty Rose” and “Between Good & Evil,” is a co-founder of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project. She spells out the history of the witch trials in Connecticut and discusses the efforts of the families who are working to exonerate their loved ones centuries later.
We sat down with Caruso who talked about the history of the witch trials in Connecticut and the continuing efforts of the families to exonerate their loved ones centuries later.
This story has been edited for length and clarity. For more, watch our full segment for Rhode Island PBS Weekly here.
Author-historian Beth Caruso said that Connecticut, and not Massachusetts, was the first American colony to execute people accused of being witches. There were 35 people indicted for witchcraft in Connecticut and 13 were convicted. Of those convicted, nine women and two men were hanged.
“Many people in Connecticut do not even know about them,” Caruso said.
Caruso added that people in New England targeted for witchcraft in New England were mostly women and healers.
“Many were people who spoke up for themselves, who did not take flak, who did not fit into the Puritan box of what it was to be a good woman,” Caruso said. “It also had to do with women’s roles with fertility. Those women who did not have as many children were viewed with suspicion that they would be jealous of the other women.
“There were men who were sometimes accused of witchcraft as well, but they were often associated with women, so it was largely due to misogyny of the time, or it was due to some type of community panic, an epidemic, animals dying and the community didn’t understand it and was looking for someone to blame.”
Caruso said there are several differences between the witch trials in Connecticut and Massachusetts. The Salem witch trials have been well-documented and studied. She said that Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, “The Crucible,” “really brought attention” to the events in Massachusetts.
In a 1996 interview with The New Yorker, Miller said he studied the witchcraft trials while attending the University of Michigan in the 1930s. But it was not until he read an 1867 book published by Charles W. Upham — who at the time was the mayor of Salem — that he felt compelled to write about the trials.
Upham “opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy,” Miller said.
Connecticut, however, has been overlooked, Caruso said.
“There has been no such play or any type of movie like that in Connecticut. The history of those trials hasn’t been as well known among the populace itself,” she said. “It hasn’t been taught in schools as much.”
Alice “Alse” Young, the subject of “The One Windsor,” was the first person executed for witchcraft in the U.S. colonies, Caruso said. She was a resident of Windsor, Connecticut, but was hanged in Hartford on May 26, 1647.
“It happened during the time of an influenza epidemic and during that epidemic, it just so happened that there were children living right next door to Alice Young who died that year while Alice Young’s only daughter lived,” Caruso said.
After Young was executed, “the witch accusations flew up and down the Connecticut River Valley.”
In Connecticut, the first seven people accused of witchcraft were indicted and later hanged, she said.
“So seven-for-seven, it was pretty brutal,” Caruso said.
Caruso said that “we need to learn from our history,” but lamented that it is currently repeating.
“There are conspiracy theories that abound—Pizzagate, QAnon, that talk about certain targeted groups drinking the blood of children, satanic connections,” she said. “All these things are lies. All these things are untrue, and they follow the same energy, the same pattern of those witch hunts back in the 1600s.”
Caruso said that the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project that she co-founded wants to “fight the unjust reputations” of the people who were alleged to be witches.
“Most of these people are descendants of the people who died for witchcraft crimes, and their ancestors have had to deal with stigma for many decades, many centuries,” she said. “They want the historical record corrected through exoneration in Connecticut.”
Caruso also has a personal stake in setting the record straight. Her husband is related to Lydia Gilbert, a witch trial victim who was hanged in December 1654.
“And so for my sons and for my husband, it’s important for me that her story gets out and that people understand she wasn’t a witch,” Caruso said.
