Today in Salem: Another urgent petition lands on the governor’s desk, this time for the shorn Dorcas Hoar. But this petition isn’t signed by friends and family. It’s sent from two prominent ministers and two schoolmasters. Can Dorcas Hoar’s execution be delayed for one month?
Shockingly, Dorcas has confessed, even after pleading innocent during trial. She’s sentenced to hang tomorrow, but cannot bear to meet God with a lie on her heart and witchcraft in her soul. She’s in “great distress of conscience” says the petition. More important to the ministers, she’s also begun revealing other witches they hadn’t known about until now. If she had one more month, she might fully repent for her sins. It also might set an example for others who were condemned, and induce them to confess as well.
As a warning, if her specter has afflicted anyone during the month she would be hanged immediately.
The governor is still in Maine, fighting the Indian wars. But the Lieutenant Governor – who is also the court’s Chief Justice – grants the delay. It’s a small thing, and could prevent much greater evil.
Today in Salem: The jail keeper clenches his jaw and closes his eyes as the fire in the hearth gutters and flares. It’s nighttime, cool with an early autumn breeze, and while normally it would be a pleasant enough evening, the jail keeper is too distracted to notice.
Just yesterday, the 77-year-old Mary Bradbury was found guilty and condemned for witchcraft. But she is distinguished, and her husband’s family is connected to English royalty. Given her station, she was allowed to roam freely during the day, as long as she returned by night. Now it’s obvious she isn’t coming back. She’s escaped, disappeared, vanished like smoke from a fire.
Dorcas Hoar grasps at straws
In a basement cell, the fortuneteller and now shorn Dorcas Hoar cries and rubs her hand over her nearly shaved head. Lying is a terrible sin, and God will surely punish her for it. But confession is the only way she herself can escape the noose. So she asks to see the judges, and tells them that she does, indeed, practice witchcraft. What’s more, she can identify other witches. I can help you, she cries.
Her performance is less than convincing, though, and the judges leave her in her cell, condemned as before.
A list is finalized
In his rooms, Chief Justice Stoughton signs the death warrants for all six of the women tried this week: the gospel woman Martha Corey, the pious Mary Esty, the shrew Alice Parker, the nurse Ann Pudeator, the fortuneteller Dorcas Hoar, and the elderly and distinguished Mary Bradbury.
Today in Salem: Chairs are crashing to the floor as the fortuneteller Dorcas Hoar stumbles, struggling to break free of one bailiff while another pulls her back by her hair.
Her neighbors, and even her former minister, have just testified that she can predict illness and death by looking at the lines in a person’s face. Children, teenagers, adults, even her own husband had died after she’d foretold it, just by looking at them. No one is inclined to testify in defense. She’s been robbing people for years. Money, food, sheep, clothing – nothing has been secure from her pilfering. She’s even stolen a pearl necklace from her minister, one pearl at a time.
Her hair is the final piece of evidence, the thing that sets her apart from the other accused witches. She hasn’t cut or even combed it in nearly ten years, and keeps it hidden under a large cap. But the bailiff has pulled the cap away, and now a black mat of tangles, four and a half feet long, has fallen like ropes onto her back.
Everyone knows what they are. “Witch’s locks” they’re called, snarls of hair that evil imps and demons can hide in. The locks are protected by the Devil, and impossible to cut. Now the judges have ordered that test, and while one bailiff holds her back, the other grasps a hank of hair in one hand and shears in the other. He cuts through the hair and drops it to the floor before grabbing another fistful and cutting it off as well. Despite her keening, it’s not long before Dorcas Hoar’s head is closely shorn, as closely as a man’s.
This is not what the judges expected, and it suggests that she is not a witch after all. It was hard to to cut, though, suspiciously matted, and long enough to touch the back of her legs. That plus her face-reading prophesies are enough to convince the judges. Dorcas Hoar is guilty and sentenced to death.
Today in Salem: A man is carrying a sack for his grandmother, the fortuneteller Dorcas Hoar, who’s been in jail for six weeks. Without him, she’d be suffering like the other prisoners, eating little besides bread and water, and wearing petticoats that were wet with unimaginable filth. It’s impossible to make her entirely comfortable, but he and the others in her family try to bring provisions as often as they can.
In particular, Dorcas is always in need of a fresh cap. Hers are larger than most, specially made to hide her dark hair. It stretches down her back and past her hips, a tangled, bristling mat that’s longer than four feet. Letting it show would be a disastrous piece of evidence against her.
“Who?” she asks, when her grandson passes her the sack. Her voice is tremulous. “Who will speak against me in court?”
“No one,” he says. “There are no grudges against you.” He considers the Hoar family’s reputation of dishonesty, and the many people still fuming over the family’s brazen thefts. Dorcas herself had orchestrated them, even stealing from a local minister. It was 14 years ago, but the people of Salem have a long memory. There’s no sense in reminding her, he thinks. She knows as well as I do.
LEARN MORE: Why was long hair taboo? Puritan women were required to grow their hair long, but not too long. In European folklore, extremely long, severely matted hair was called witches-locks, or elf-locks. It was firmly believed that mats like that could only be caused by evil forces tangling and twisting the hair at night. By day, the hair – impossible to comb – provided a convenient hiding place for a witch’s familiars and other small evil beings.
Because witches-locks were evil, it was supposedly impossible to cut them. So it became a test of innocence. If the hair could be cut, it was possible that the accused person was innocent. If not, she was guilty without question.
Today in Salem: 23 people are languishing in jail, some in Salem, and the rest – the overflow – in Boston. None has had a trial yet, but the judges aren’t thinking about that when they write arrest warrants for six more people.
The first is a woman in the nearby town of Amesbury; someone they haven’t even heard of. But the powerful Putnam family has filed a complaint against her, so they just write the name “Martin” and leave a space for her first name, which they fill in later: Susannah, and then cross out her station of “widdow,” even though she was one.
They know the second person well, though: the Reverend George Burroughs, the former minister of Salem who’d left two dead wives and a string of debts in his wake. They write his warrant in a decisive hand, but knowing that he can’t be fetched from Maine for an examination in two days, order the Marshall to “Convay him with all Speed to Salem before the Magestrates there, to be Examened, he being Suspected for a Confederacy with the devil.”
Others: the fortune teller and leader of a burglary ring Dorcas Hoar, one of her widowed neighbors, the rich merchant Philip English (whose wife is already in jail), and the widow Lydia Dustin, from the nearby town of Reading.
WHO was Dorcas Hoar?
A late-1890s photo of Dorcas Hoar’s house. It was torn down in the early 1900s.
Age 58. A widow who was also a fortune teller and leader of a burglary ring, which included six of her children and numerous servants in households around town. Among her victims was a local minister whose servant stole an abundance of money, jewelry, clothing, and food, funneling all of it to Dorcas Hoar. Once captured, the burglars’ only sentence was to pay the costs of what they stole, a light sentence indeed, but one that was still resented by the Hoar family, who beat two of the minister’s cows (one to death) in revenge.
Dorcas Hoar’s hair was four feet, seven inches long, a so-called “elf lock” where evil spirits could hide. During her trial, the suspicious court ordered that her hair be cut off, a devastating blow. Her execution was delayed when she confessed.
After the trials, she moved in with her son-in-law and died in poverty. Case files: Dorcas Hoar
WHO was Susannah Martin?
Susannah Martin’s memorial bench in Salem
Age 71. Depending on you you asked, she was either “one of the most “impudent, Scurrilous, wicked creatures in the world” (Cotton Mather), or an “honest, hard-working Christian woman and a “Martyr of Superstition” (her historical house marker).
We do know that her past included six unsuccessful lawsuits to inherit her father’s estate. She had also appeared in court as a defendant numerous times when her neighbors accused her of a variety of offenses, including calling one of them a liar and a thief. She was accused twice of witchcraft the Salem hysteria, with the charges eventually dropped.
During Martin’s examination, she laughed at her accusers. When asked if she had compassion for the afflicted, the forthright and hardened Martin replied, “No. I have none.”
At her later trial, at least nine (perhaps as many as 24) traveled by horse for nearly three days to Boston just to testify against her. Among their grievances: she’d caused one man’s oxen to drown themselves, her specter had stalked a farm hand, she’d bitten another man’s hand, she’d driven a neighbor mad, and she’d been seen at witch meetings. Case files: Susannah Martin
