Haunted Cemeteries by Tom Ogden

Author:Tom Ogden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493036639
Publisher: Globe Pequot Press
Published: 2018-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

The York Village Witch

Just because hundreds of people were falsely accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, that doesn’t mean the Dark Arts weren’t being performed in New England. A hundred years later, the apprehensive citizens of a Maine hamlet spread such rumors about one of their own. Has she returned to plead her case?

York Village, also known as Old York, is one of four small communities that make up the popular summer resort town of York, in the southeast corner of Maine. (The others are York Harbor, York Beach, and Cape Neddick.) But in the 1600s it was just another tiny British settlement trying to make a foothold in the New World.

Along with everything else came the foibles and prejudices of the day, including the fear of witchcraft. York Village was far from alone. That infamous bastion of seventeenth- century intolerance, Salem, Massachusetts, was only forty-six miles down the road.

Cindy, an aficionado of ghost stories and tales of the supernatural, had visited the few Salem sites remaining from the days of its witchcraft trials. But now, on holiday with her family in York Beach, she decided to take an afternoon to visit the carefully preserved historical buildings at old York Village—as well as the grave of Mary Nasson, who was suspected of being a witch.

Cindy didn’t believe in witchcraft. Yes, she knew there was a Mother Earth–centric religion called Wicca, but that was something else entirely. What she disputed was whether the clichéd “pointed hat–ride on a broomstick” kind of old crone popularized by fairy tales ever really existed.

What she did believe was that people throughout history have been persecuted for thinking or acting in unorthodox ways that made them a threat to the status quo. Beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Catholic Church began to charge those who didn’t blindly obey its doctrine with heresy. Imprisonment, torture, and executions were approved under the Holy Office of the Inquisition, legalized by papal bull. Before long, the concept of witchcraft as a person being in league with the devil was cemented in the public’s mind.

Many of the people who were accused had no quarrel with the Church and were completely innocent. Among them were the wizened country healers whose deep understanding of herbs, potions, and poultices in an age before modern medicine made them suspect by the superstitious uneducated. Even after the end of the Inquisition, “granny nurses” were often the target of whisper campaigns. And in eighteenth-century New England, one such victim was Mary Nasson.

Mary was one of those goodly rural curers, what some called a white witch. She may not have been universally liked, but she was never publicly condemned for her practice. In fact, villagers frequently sought her services, for everything from love amulets to natural (what are now called homeopathic) medicines. At one point she was asked to perform an exorcism!

Mary didn’t fit the conventional stereotype of a witch. She was young, pretty, and happily married with at least one child. And when she died in 1774, she was only twenty-nine.

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