Pyewacket: A Familiar Spirit with Origins in New England

Matthew Hopkins was a notorious witch-finder who terrorized the East Anglia region of England from 1644 to 1647. His short but infamous career happened during the English Civil War, when there was a lot of social unrest, and Hopkins made money by charging different towns to find the witches who supposedly caused it. It is estimated he was responsible for the deaths of 300 innocent people.

Hopkins died at the age of 27 in 1647 from tuberculosis, but before his death he published an influential witch-finding manual titled The Discovery of Witches (1647). In the book he claims he got started in the witch-finding business because there were several women in his home town of Manningtree who were witches. Here (writing about himself in the third person) he explains what happened:

... In March 1644 he had some seven or eight of that horrible sect of Witches living in the Towne where he lived, a Towne in Essex called Maningtree, with divers other adjacent Witches of other towns, who every six weeks in the night (being alwayes on the Friday night) had their meeting close by his house and had their severall solemne sacrifices there offered to the Devill...

Hopkins goes on to write that he heard one of the witches calling out to her familiar spirits. Familiar spirits were allegedly magical entities that witches commanded to do their bidding. They often appeared in the form of animals, and many people believed they were demons loaned to witches by the Devil and that they nourished themselves by sucking the witches' blood.

An illustration from The Discovery of Witches

Hopkins wrote down the names of the familiar spirits the Manningtree witch called. Those names were Holt (who appeared as a white kitten), Jarmara (a fat legless spaniel), Vinegar Tom (a greyhound with the head of an ox), Sack and Sugar (a black rabbit), and Newes (a polecat or ferret). She summoned other familiar spirits as well: Elemanzer, Peckin the Crown, Grizzel Greedigut and Pyewacket. It's quite a list of names, and in case you suspect Hopkins just made them up he writes that their names were such as "no mortall could invent."

I don't think he's quite right. I think Hopkins or his associates actually did invent most of those names, but he didn't invent the name Pyewacket. That's the name of a Native American tribe that lived in New Hampshire and Maine in the 17th century. Matthew Hopkins never visited New England, but he probably did hear about the explorations of Darby Field.

Darby Field was an Irishman who came to New England in the 1630s and settled in New Hampshire around 1638. Many of the colonists were focused on work, family and God, but Field apparently had a more inquisitive spirit. Although he worked as a ferryman he could also speak the local Alonquin dialects and was interested in exploring the area around him. In 1642 he decided to climb the White Mountains and hired some local Native guides from a village called 'Pigwacket' to help him. Pigwacket was Field's rough English transcription of Pequawket, a name of one of the Abenaki groups that lived in New Hampshire and Maine. 

Field's mountain-climbing expedition was well-known at the time and appears in both Massachusetts governor John Winthrop's journal and in a book by the explorer Ferdinando Gorges. It seems likely that Matthew Hopkins heard the name Pigwacket and incorporated it as "Pyewacket" into The Discovery of Witches. The Puritans erroneously believed that Native Americans worshipped the Devil so it makes that Hopkins would use a Native American word as a demon's name.

The Pequawket sadly no longer exist as a distinct group - they've merged with other Abenaki tribes - but the name Pyewacket continues on long after Hopkins's death. Pyewacket is the name of Kim Novak's cat in the movie Bell, Book and Candle (1958), has appeared as a character in several novels, and is the title of a recent horror film. I searched Tumblr and saw a lot of photos of animals named Pyewacket, while Instagram has over 7,000 posts with the hashtag #pyewacket. The dominant colonial culture's use of the word has outlived the actual indigenous people who inspired it. 

I don't think Pyewacket's origins in New England (and in Puritan xenophobia) is well-known. I just stumbled on it recently in Emerson Baker's excellent book A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and The American Experience (2015). There's always something new to learn about our region's weird history. 

Mary Toothaker and the Devil's Protection

Although it is warm and sunny out I am in the mood for witchcraft stories. Honestly I am always in the mood for witchcraft, but this month is always the busiest period at my day job, and I think I crave tales of the bizarre and supernatural as an antidote.

So here's a story, which is lurid, upsetting, and weirdly ironic. It comes from the Salem witch trials. The more I read about those dark days the more strange stories I find. This particular one is about a woman named Mary Toothaker, a woman whose life was saved by her confession.

Mary Toothaker lived in Billerica with her husband Roger and daughter Martha. Roger had a reputation as a folk-healer and bragged that he could fight witches with magic. When the witch trials broke out he was naturally accused of witchcraft - it's a fine line between white and black magic, after all - and eventually died in jail. In the summer of 1692 Mary was accused of witchcraft as well.

In addition to being accused of tormenting the usual gaggle of afflicted Salem girls, Mary was also accused of bewitching Timothy Swan of Andover. There was bad blood between Swan and Mary's family. In 1687 he had been accused of raping her relative Elizabeth Emerson, holding his arm against her throat so she could not cry out for help. He was acquitted of rape, but the court still ordered him to pay child support for the child Emerson conceived after his assault.

Swan later contracted a mysterious illness (which eventually killed him in 1693). During her trial, Mary Toothaker confessed that she had hurt Swan using witchcraft, and in particular that her specter had "squeezed his throat." An eye for an eye, I suppose. But revenge (according to her confession) was not the sole reason she had become a witch. The Devil had promised her safety.

It's hard to imagine now, but in 1692 Massachusetts consisted primarily of small rural villages. The colony was merely decades old, and its future was uncertain. The biggest threat came from the local Indians, who were allied with the French. Indian raids were a constant concern for English settlers in Massachusetts, and this concern was only magnified in the 1690s when Essex County was flooded with refugees fleeing Indian attacks in Maine. Billerica is now a cute bedroom community, but when Mary Toothaker lived there in the 1600s it was a frontier settlement whose residents feared for their lives.

So when Mary gave herself to the Devil, she asked for safety from Indian attacks for her and her son, a war veteran who had been wounded in a skirmish with Indians. The Devil, who appeared as a man with a dark complexion, agreed. Mary signed away her soul on a piece of birch bark.

At least that's what she confessed. No one who confessed during the Salem trials was executed, so it was the smart thing to do on Mary's part. After hearing her initial testimony the judges sent her to Salem's jail until they determined her sentence.

Two days later, on August 1, 1692, an Indian raiding party attacked Billerica. Most of Mary's neighbors were killed. It's very likely that if she had been home she would have died as well. Several days later the Indians returned and burned down the Toothaker farm, which was unoccupied.

In 1693 Mary was declared innocent of witchcraft and released from jail. She returned to Billerica with her 12 year old daughter Margaret. A few years later, on February 1, 1695 another Indian raiding party attacked Billerica. Mary was killed. Her daughter taken away as a captive and disappeared from the historical records.

I found this story in historian Emerson Baker's new book A Storm of Witchcraft. Baker speculates that Mary may have actually thought herself a witch. Her family did practice magic, and perhaps she thought Timothy Swan's suffering was caused by her own hatred of him. That's hard to determine, but her fear of Indian attacks was shared by most English settlers, and it's interesting that the Devil appeared to her as a dark-skinned man and that she signed a piece of bark rather than the more traditional European style book that is mentioned in other accounts. It makes sense to ally yourself with what you fear. Her confession provides a good window into the mindset of the time.

I don't think there was any unusual supernatural agency at work here, but it's odd that Mary was safest when she was locked up in jail. She got her wish for protection, even if only for a while.

Mary Hortado's Demonic Assailants

The horror movie The Conjuring was quite successful at the box office this summer. I think one reason for its popularity is because it's supposedly based on a true story. True stories of the supernatural always seem more powerful than fictional ones, and it's probably been that way since people started to tell stories.

Increase Mather. Thanks Wikipedia!

In early New England there were of course no movies, so people read stories of supernatural events. Reverend Increase Mather's 1682 book An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences was chock full of them, including the following one about Mary Hortado of Salmon Falls, Maine and her Portuguese husband Antonio. Mather titled it "A Brief Narrative of sundry Apparitions of Satan unto and Assaults at sundry times and places upon the Person of Mary the Wife of Antonio Hortodo, dwelling near the Salmon Falls: Taken from her own mouth, Aug.13, 1683."

Or, as we would say in the 21st century, "based on a true story."

Mary's troubles started one day in June of 1682. The sun was setting, and Mary heard a voice at her door, but when she opened it no one was there. Weird, but nothing particularly creepy. Maybe Mary thought it was just a prankster, but an hour later when she was standing in the doorway an unseen hand punched her in the eye. Yikes!

The odd occurrences continued that week. A large stone was thrown into the house by invisible hands and then disappeared. Shortly afterwards the Hortados' frying pan rang like a bell, loud enough for the neighbors across the river to hear it.

Perhaps it was good that the assailants were mostly invisible, for the glimpses the Hortados caught of them were a little unnerving. For example, one day Mary and her husband Antonio were canoeing across the river when they noticed that something was swimming in front of them. The creature had the "head of a man new-shorn" and the tail of a white cat. They couldn't see the rest of its body and the creature vanished. It reappeared and followed them again when they returned home across the river. Another apparition appeared twice to Mary in the shape of a woman dressed for travel, once brandishing a fiery brand and laughing silently at her. I think the implication here is that the woman was a witch's spirit, probably from a distant town or city (hence the traveling clothes).

Image taken from this blog about 17th century American women.

The spirits also continued to invisibly assault Mary. She was struck by a stone thrown by unseen hands, bitten on the arms ("the impressions of the Teeth being like Mans Teeth"), and scratched on the breast. Her husband Antonio also experienced strange things, but to a lesser degree. He heard footsteps on the second floor of their house when no one was upstairs, and found large sections of their fence thrown down. Perhaps most troubling, he found large hoof prints near the ruined fence, though no cattle were in the area. Was a demon (or Satan himself) responsible for leaving the prints?

The situation became so bad that the Hortados abandoned their house to live on the other side of the river. Before they did, they tried to keep the spirits away by placing bay leaves at the entrances of their house. Increase Mather writes:

I am further informed, that some (who should have been wiser) advised the poor Woman to stick the House round with Bayes, as an effectual preservative against the power of Evil Spirits. This Counsel was followed. And as long as the Bayes continued green, she had quiet ; but when they began to wither, they were all by an unseen hand carried away, and the Woman again tormented.

Although as a Puritan minister Mather disapproved even of protective magic, it seems like bay leaves were the anti-witchcraft herb of choice in the 17th century seacoast area.

By the next year the invisible assaults stopped, and the Hortados' life returned to normal. As Mather writes, "Since when said Mary has been freed from those Satanical Molestations." (I really wanted to use the phrase "Satanical Molsestations.")

I enjoy these stories for their creepy details (I find the cat-tailed creature particularly spooky) and for their insight into the mythic world of witchcraft our ancestors believed in. However, I can understand that some people want an explanation about what was happening in Salmon Falls during 1682. Increase Mather certainly thought it was an authentic case of demonic assault, and I suppose that explanation is sufficient if you believe in demons.

If you want a more scientific explanation you can find one Emerson Baker's book book The Devil of Great Island. Baker, a historian at Salem State, claims that "a close reading of the story indicates that the attacks covered up a serious case of domestic abuse."

Domestic abuse was a major crime in Colonial New England, and one of the few recorded cases that went to trial actually involved Mary's brother-in-law Moses Worcester. Baker bases his argument on the claim that Mary was alone (or perhaps only with her husband) when the attacks happened. He may be right, but I don't think the text is really detailed enough to make that deduction. You can read An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences for yourself and decide. I'd suggest you keep the lights on, because some of the stories are pretty creepy.