October 6, 2018 • 40 mins
We're revisiting a 2013 tale of a witch trial. Decades before the Salem trials, an East Hampton woman was tried for witchcraft. Before Lion Gardiner's daughter died, she accused Goody Garlick of bewitching her.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody, and more importantly, at least for me,
Happy October. We have an October appropriate classic today. It
is the trial of Goody Garlic for witchcraft in Sight,
which originally came out on March. This also seems like
a good episode to share because how Stuff Works has
launched a brand new podcast called Unobscured, and its first
(00:24):
season is all about a completely different witch trial, the
Salem Witch Trials. Unobscured pairs narrative storytelling from Aaron Mankey,
who's the host of Lore and Cabinet of Curiosities, with
interviews with historians and you can get it wherever you
get this podcast, So stay tuned at the end of
today's episode and you will hear the trailer for Unobscured.
(00:45):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
My name is Holly Fry and I am Tracy V. Wilson.
And as Women's History Month it is, and we've talked
(01:07):
about some women already this month, but we're going to
talk about some more. Uh. And one thing I think
that always comes to mind for people when they are
thinking about women's history is or women in history is
the Salem witch Trials, which are fascinating in a very
rich tapestry of things to explore. But we're actually going
to turn back the clock a few decades to a
(01:28):
witch trial that happened before the really big onslaught of
um of the Salem witch trials. And it happened in
East Hampton, right, not in quite the New England area
that people associate with witch hunts and that sort of
vindictive implementation of things, but it was sort of the
(01:49):
at the early stage there were other witch trials happening then.
This is in the sixteen late sixteen fifties, but as
you'll see in this story, not as much of a
clear like how to handle it mentality as there was
by the time things really got rolling in the witch
trial arena, when when the witch trials really were underway
(02:12):
in Massachusetts, there was a lot of hanging going on.
And this, fortunately to spoil the ending, does not quite
go in that direction exactly. There are somewhat surprising results
in this one. Uh. And what we're talking about is
Goody Garlic, who who is a woman that lived in
East Hampton. Uh. And this whole story starts in the
(02:33):
spring of sixteen fifty seven or sixteen fifty eight, depending
on which calendar you're using. If you go by the
Julian calendar, it would have been fifty seven. The Gregorian
calendar it would have been fifty eight, because the British
did not switch over to the Gregorian calendar until the
mid seventeen hundreds, and in the Julian calendar, March was
the new year, so these events happened prior to that,
(02:57):
so you'll sometimes see them listed as fifty seven and
sometimes fifty eight. It's just depending on where the source material,
which calendar, which calendar they went by. So um. George
Dewan wrote a really great piece for the New York
Archives uh talking about this particular incident, but also he
characterizes the times, particularly in East Hampton, as it being
(03:19):
a very gossipy, whispery innuendo laid in society. Yes, it
hit into context. It was a tiny, tiny community. There
were thirty four families living in East Hampton and the
time they were relatively isolated. The community was only about
ten years old, still trying to get a foothold really
and established themselves as a community, which had led to
(03:42):
the unfortunate side effect of it also being very back
bidy and gossipy and people being angry at their neighbors
for one thing or another exactly. And if you look
at the town records for this time one you can
get really lost because they just were so wonderfully meticulous
about notating everything that was happening. But you'll see that
(04:03):
there was a lot of discord among the citizens and
they often played out in in the way of official complaints.
They had set up this sort of structure where you
could go and complain that you were shafted and did
not get the right amount of corn that you had
been promised, or you know that this piece of land
that was in dispute um they would officially complain so
(04:25):
that that was all on record, and they really were
very detailed about, you know, including all of these arguments
over property, money, legal claims as part of the town history. Right,
I sort of imagined it is is like a a
long ago version of today's homeowner associations and all the
squabbling that can go on there, with the difference being
that normally the homeowners association is not going to put
(04:47):
you to death if you were found guilty of not
paying your door. The right color would hope. Uh. And
so Goody Garlic was the wife of Joshua Garlic. Her
name was actually Elizabeth Goody. Is that really a term
similar to the way we would use mrs today. Uh.
It's short for good wife, and it kind of is
a way that was often used to refer to normally
(05:11):
married women, um, the wife of the good wife part
being the clue there who were a not particularly high status.
It's not necessarily a derogative term, but it was just
a very common way to refer to any woman. So
as we go through this story, you'll hear a lot
of people being referred to as Goody and that is
what that means. And she was about fifty when this
(05:32):
whole event took place, right, And it all sort of
was catalyzed by one tragic event. And it's interesting and
we'll talk about it a little bit more later that
this event actually doesn't always show up in the tellings
of the Goody Garlic story. One of the historians in
particular that I read a lot of her work around it,
(05:55):
mentions that she got interested because she had gone on
a tour and and heard sort of the really glossy
version of it, and then she knew it seemed like
two sort of easy and packaged, and so she started
looking at various historians accounts of this entire episode and
how it played out, and they there's really a lot
(06:19):
of variety to it. And she draws some interesting conclusions
and will link to her research in the show notes
about why this particular event that really catalyzed it kind
of gets lost. But so it starts out with a
young girl by the name of Elizabeth Gardner Howell. She
was married to Arthur Howell, and she was only sixteen,
(06:39):
and she had recently become a mother. She had had
a daughter, and in the days following the child's birth,
she became quite ill um She in fact had a
fevered episode in which she cried out, a witch, a witch.
Now you are come to torture me because I spoke
(07:00):
two or three words against you. In the morning, you
will come fawning. And that all sounds very odd and
sort of awkward to the modern ear, but that's actually recorded.
It's part of the That quote is part of the
transcripts from the hearings that eventually happened. So a neighbor
saw this happened. Yes, he had come to check on
her she was home alone with the child. He had
(07:22):
actually come to speak to her husband, Arthur, but who
was out and happened to witness this episode. Yes, so
his name was Samuel Parson. He saw it has happened
and became worried that she was bewitched. Yes. Uh. And
in the meantime, Elizabeth's mother, Mary Gardner, who lived very nearby. Again,
tiny community, so everyone kind of lives very close. It
(07:42):
was basically a street with a row of houses on
either side. So when it boils down to yes, and
most accounts will sort of mention the elder Gardener's home
as being just across the street, so she was very close.
So Mary Gardener was ill at the time. And Elizabeth's father,
Lion Gardner, who was very prominent man in town, and
he factors in a lot as the story develops, left
(08:03):
his wife's bedside to go to his daughter's house because
he had been sent for and he was so worried
about her the behavior that was being described, and he
witnessed the frantic behavior and her claims of witchcraft. And
Elizabeth Gardner Howell actually claimed to have seen Goody Garlic,
her neighbor, and a black figure in her room, which
(08:26):
if you were to hear somebody say that that would
be troubling, that they are seeing these visions of a
person and a specter, that the person has brought with
them to torment you in a room, that would be troubling. Yes.
So eventually her mother Mary was well enough to visit.
She crossed the street and started trying to comfort her daughter,
saying that she was having bad dreams. But Elizabeth really
(08:49):
insisted that Goody Garlic had bewitched her. She was quite
sincere on this point. Yes, that was what was going on.
She was adamant, completely believed that was happening. Uh. And
that evening or an evening related to that, three women
of the town were watching over Elizabeth, and Elizabeth started
(09:10):
to address Goody Garlic, who was not with them physically,
as though she were in the room. Yes, and she says, Ah, Garlic,
you jeered me when I came to your house to
call my husband home. You laughed and jeered me, and
I went crying away. Oh you are a pretty one
send for Garlic and his wife. I would tear her
in pieces and leave the birds to pick her bones. Uh.
And she went on because the women that were there
(09:33):
with her watching over her, uh questioned this outburst and
asked her, you know, why is she saying these things?
And she replied to them, did you not see her
last night stand by my bedside, ready to pull me
to pieces? She pricked me with pins, and she brought
a black thing to the foot of my bed. So
she thought not only was she bringing a black specter
into the room that no one else was seeing, but
(09:54):
that the she in the specter were actually pricking her
with pins. Said so slightly troubling again and very adamant.
I mean, she really felt strongly that this was actually
happening to her, right she She later had a coughing fit,
which the women who were looking after her tried to
calm using oil and sugar, which was an alleged treatment
(10:18):
for witchcraft, and at that point Elizabeth allegedly coughed up
a pin. Two different women witnessed that a pin fell
out of her mouth after she had this coughing fit. Yes,
and that does come up later on again they testified
that they saw this happen. There is no clear, definitive
account of how that actually happened, if it happened for real,
(10:41):
if it was slight of hand if the women were
fibbing later on, but there is testimony on the record
that they saw this pin come out of her mouth.
So that night, Goody Simon's stayed the night with Elizabeth.
They they she slept there in the bed with her
to watch over her, and at the same time, Arthur Howell,
the husband of Elizabeth, another neighbor, William Russell, and the
(11:02):
gardener's slave her parents slave watched over the sleeping women.
And they kept hearing weird sounds throughout the night that
we're not explained. There was one in a fireplace, there
was one that was under the bed, but they could
never locate the source of the noise. And Elizabeth would
wake up periodically and claim that she was being pricked
with pins. Uh. And unfortunately Elizabeth did not recover. Ever,
(11:23):
she got worse and worse, her fever horse and and
she passed away on February sixteen fifty seven. Again, if
we're going by the Julian calendar. Yes, her baby, though, survived,
even without her mother there to breastfeed her. Which, uh
did you find whether they were able to find a
wet nurse or I never saw any account of how
(11:44):
the baby was taken care of in that regard. I
know she did legally, the documents were quickly drawn up
to say that she was staying with her father. Uh.
It would be unusual for a baby without a mother
to survive at the time, but she did, and she
went on to lead by all accounts, at pretty standard
normal life. Uh. But yeah, I wondered too, and I
didn't find any any hard evidence or accounts one way
(12:08):
or the other of how the baby was nourished from
that point on, right, it seems most likely that probably
they found someone else in the community who also either
had a child or had had a child, which was
very common, and that will actually come up later in
the story regarding someone else. Yes, Uh so a hearing
was underway pretty much immediately, and by some accounts, the
(12:30):
calendar gets a little weird because I did see some
that suggests the hearing had actually started even before Elizabeth
had passed, but verifying that was a little bit tricky.
The dates don't always match up, but it was within
a couple of days, so it is conceivable that they
could have started investigating these allegations since um claims were
already being made about Goody Yarlic being implicated in the
(12:52):
illness of Elizabeth, But so the investigation had already begun
by the time Elizabeth had passed and really kicked into
high gear, and they wanted to determine at that point
if she had been murdered, and if so, if witchcraft
had been involved, because both of those things were punishable
by death. And I feel like we should do a
quick side note and mentioned again, in modern times we
(13:14):
talk about witchcraft and we look at it as a
quaint belief of times past. But it was a very
real fear for this community at this time. And it
was not uncommon for people in general to be afraid
of the dark arts, so to use the dark arts
to explain otherwise unexplainable things correct, So it it really
(13:35):
was something that was taken very very seriously. When someone
was accused of something like that, it was investigated just
as we would investigate any allegation today of a criminal nature.
(13:55):
This hearing, though, was interesting because it was the first
witchcraft hearing in East Hampton. There had been there's in
New England already, but East Hampton had never dealt with
this subject before on a legal level. Uh. And the
hearing began and three village justices presided over it. They
were John Wolford, John Hand, and Thomas Baker. And there
is also some discrepancy about how many witnesses actually testified.
(14:17):
Most sources cite eleven, but the New York Archives telling
of the story does mention thirteen witnesses, So just keep
that in mind. I just in terms of volume, it
seems like eleven is the more accurate, but the archivists
are usually very careful with their numbers, so it could
just be a matter of someone accounting differently in historical records.
(14:40):
And that's a pretty significant portion of the population of
the town at that time. Yeah, either way, you're close
to a third, whichever number happens. Uh And according to
UH one text, like I said, there were eleven. But
most interesting are that three people that never test to
find that we're very very involved. One is Lying Gardner,
(15:03):
the deceased's father. One is Goody Garlic. She never came
forward to defend herself. She didn't speak up to do so.
I wonder if she was given the options to do so.
It seemed like she was, and she just wasn't interested
in addressing any of these accusations. Uh. And the other
is a woman named Goody Davis, who will come up
again as we go forward. The only person who wanted
(15:27):
to defend Goody Garlic was her husband, which is interesting
you know that no one would come forward to speak
on her behalf because there are some accounts also that
say that she had friends in very high places, which
will figure into the lore as we go forward and
how this kind of gets absolved later on. But if
that were the case, you would think more people would
(15:48):
come forward to defend her. But again, dealing with a
very fearful subject that was not always easily explainable. So
going into this hearing, they used said then point system
of criteria for determining the presence of witchcraft. And this
list is so intriguing to me because so many of
(16:09):
them are are really what we've sort of mentioned a
couple of times. Is something tragic happens that you can't
really explain witchcraft? Yeah, it's like, is it unexplainable witchcraft?
It must be witchcraft. So point one, for example, when
a healthful body shall be suddenly taken without probable reason
or apparent natural cause. So basically, when someone dies with
(16:31):
an obvious cause, it was previously healthy, right, and Samuel
Parsons testimony of Elizabeth. The sudden onset of Elizabeth's illness
easily met this requirement. The next one is when the
afflicted party in his fit tells truly what the witch
or other absent parties are doing or saying or the like.
So again, kind of odd because it's basically at that
(16:55):
point there's no way to verify right there, just saying
it's what someone said, right, You're taking someone's word for it,
who may or may not be ill from fever at
that point or some other affliction. And several witnesses had
heard Elizabeth mentioned the black specters being pricked with pins,
goody garlic being in the room when she wasn't actually
there physically for other people to see, so that was
(17:16):
met very easily. The third was when there was a
supernatural strength such that a strong man or two shall
not be able to keep down a child or a
weak person upon a bed. Arthur Howell described the ways
that Elizabeth would try to strike out at the black
figures and how he couldn't hold her in his grasp
when she tried to do this, so even though she
(17:37):
was very ill, when she was trying to fight back,
against the inspecters that she saw her strength appeared to
be more than it should have been considering her physical
condition at that point. The fourth one is when the
parties shall do strange things or say strange things, and yet,
when out of their fits, know nothing of what they
did or said. So there was plenty of strange behavior
(17:59):
in all of the witness accounts. But according to one scholar,
she makes an interesting point that nevertheless, and I'm quoting
at this point, nevertheless, none of the testimony clarifies whether
her delirium was punctuated by moments of clarity in which
she was unaware of what she had said or done.
So we're not sure if that part of the criteria
(18:20):
was actually really focused on at that point, um, but
we do know that she definitely had fits. The fifth
point when a party doth found it up crooked pins, needles, nails, coal, lead, straw,
hair or the like. Lots of foreign objects in that list,
(18:40):
And we had the two women who we spoke about
previously testifying that they saw a pin fall out of
Elizabeth's mouth after she had a coughing fit. The sixth
is when the party shall see visibly some apparition and
shortly after some mischief shall befall him. Goody Simon's testified
about Elizabeth's visions of black things in the room and
her rapid decline in health was already well established since
(19:02):
many people had witnessed her going from fairly okay to
really really ill in a very brief period of time.
The seventh point was when two or more are similarly
taken in strange fits, so basically, when more than one
person in the community is having the same experience. There
were two witnesses who backed Goody Simon's claimed that she
had had fits after seeing specters, and the Garlics black
(19:26):
cat was implicated as a specter figure. Yes, so Goody
Simons had said she had seen the black cat and
it shortly after either had fits or her fits had
gotten worse after seeing the animal. So all seven of
those criteria were met easily during testimony, and then in
the in the midst of all of that testimony, there
were additional accusations made against Goodye Garlic. So in addition
(19:50):
to those seven criteria having been met by witness testimony easily,
additional accusations were made as part of that testimony, and
they sort of formed a bigger dos c a of
what people perceived to be witchcraft behavior around Goody Garlic. Uh.
It was claimed that she caused four other deaths, one
an unidentified man, one a black child, and two infants.
(20:14):
They said that at one point she poisoned an infant
with cursed milk. Uh. As we had just mentioned, Goody
Simon's claimed that she had fits because of Goody Garlic.
There was a litter of piglets that died after the
sow had a very unusual birth which was attributed to her.
And at one point an ox had broken its legs
(20:36):
suddenly and her husband. Goody Garlic's husband, Joshua, is also
implicated here because he had apparently uttered some threats in
a disagreement with Lyon Gardner, who owned the ox and
was the father of Elizabeth, who had just died shortly
before it happened, So they had had a verbal dispute
and then suddenly the ox's leg was broken. So once
(20:56):
witchcraft was established to have been involved, the next section
of the hearing is um meeting the criteria to prove
that the accused was the perpetrator of that witchcraft. So
there are three rules three criteria that the accused had
appeared to the sick party and his or her fits,
(21:17):
that the afflicted was able to name the suspected witch,
and that the afflicted could describe the witch's actions, all
of which has happened in what we've described so far. Right,
So the existing testimony that met the first seven criteria
also pretty cleanly wrap up this portion of it as well.
So at that point, uh, things are not looking great
(21:38):
for Goody Garlic. Um. So one thing that's interesting is
historian Loretta Orian, who I've mentioned some of her work
previously in this in this episode is that many of
the histories of the East Hampton area mentioned the trial
of Goody Garlic, but Elizabeth Gardner Howell's death is really
not part of it. The charges tend to be pretty
(22:00):
general about Goody bewitching neighbors with herbs, ruining crops, sending
her spector cat after people. They're kind of more what
we would think of today is pretty standard witchy behaviors
of the time, you know, the things that we think
of historically is what people were accused of, And somehow
Elizabeth's death is really not is focused on as the
(22:22):
catalyst for this trial as it was, and orian postulates
that part of that is because the Gardener family was
very very important in the area and they really laid
down a lot of the groundwork for the community, and
that they maybe didn't want their family name associated with
(22:43):
all of this, and that some because there are still
members that Gardener family descendants there that you know, give
tours that are part of this and so o Ryan
is postulating that they just kind of want to keep
the family name out of it. Well. And it was
one of those tours where as we talked about earlier
about you know, hearing the story while on a tour
like that was one of those tours of of one
(23:04):
of the old family properties that uh, that she heard
about this story for the first time. Yeah, that really
catalyzed her interest in it and really sussing out the
truth in all of the various histories. And because the
community was very, very small, the Garlics had dealings with everyone,
and some of them you know, involved disagreements, but all
(23:25):
of them of course came into focus at this time.
And because there is at that point so much information
about it, that's kind of what informs a lot of
the historical writings about it that that give Goody Garlic
more of a general witchcraft accusation rather than the specificity
of a murder. One thing that comes out that's very
interesting as you read this is there is an alternate
(23:48):
villain in this story as we look at it kind
of from our perspective, and that's Goody Davis. Who is
this woman who clearly did not like Goody Garlic and
she felt that she had been personally owned by her,
and much of the testimony against Goody Garlic, even though
Goodie Davis never testified, it kind of came to light
that it could all be tracked back to stories that
(24:10):
Goody Davis had told people. So Goody Davis had lost
her own baby after what she claimed was Goody Garlic
casting the evil eye on it. Uh. The story is
that Goody Garlic had noted that the baby was ill,
saying the child is not well for it grown is
And later after she said those words, the baby didn't
(24:31):
open its eyes or make noise ever again, and it
died five days later. Uh. And Goody Davis her point
of view was that this was an active of witchcraft
or the evil I from Goody Garlic. So an interesting
(24:51):
element comes into the story here regarding the Gardener family,
because allegedly the day that this testimony came up in
the East Hampton hearing involving Goody Davis believing that her
child had been cursed by Goody Garlic, servants of Lyon Gardner,
a good Man veil and his spouse claimed to have
heard Lyon Gardner say and remember this is the father
(25:12):
of the girl who has just died. And I quote
Goody Davis had taken an Indian child to nurse for
a little wampum and had starved her own child to death.
So someone with a pretty serious stake in seeing justice
done or vengeance, if he really believed this woman had
killed his daughter, was actually speaking out against the women
(25:34):
that were accusing Goody Garlic and saying, oh, no, you
brought that on yourself. Although again he did not officially
testify in the trial, these are things that his servants
overheard him saying, and they reported back to other people.
So it establishes Lion is very even tempered and being
a voice of reason, even in you know, the depths
of grief, grief over losing his daughter. And in some
(25:56):
versions of the history it's even suggested that Lyon Gardeners
I actually a friend of Goody Garlic, and that they
have a pretty good relationship and he actually wants to
protect her. We do know that Goody Garlic worked for
him at one point, but there's no real clear documentation
that they were really any more than that, you know,
neighbors and friends. I mean, there are even disputes in
(26:18):
that long public record that I mentioned earlier between the
Garlics and the Gardeners. But really there are disputes amongst
almost every single family, like you could do all of
the possible permutations of family to family amongst the thirty
four that lived there, and each of them have had
some argument at some point in time that was documented.
So right, and I still keep imagining it as as
a seventeenth century condo association and everyone squabbling with everyone
(26:42):
all the time. It did appear to have a lot
of squabbles. And at this point there is an another
interesting development, which is that the case moves on it
The judgment is not handed down there in east Hampton.
Now they decided to send it to Hartford, which had
more experience and dealing with charges like this. There was
(27:02):
some trepidation on the parts of the magistrates about ruling
in a case that had such serious consequences for the accused, which,
considering the lore of witch hunts, is pretty level headed.
Like when you read transcripts of witch trials and sort
of read accounts of UH towns in which a big
witch trial became the central focus, there tended to be
(27:24):
a lot of hysteria and a lot of rush to judgment,
And this is really like, we need to give this
case to someone else who has more experience considering the
ramifications that might come down. Yes, and it it does
make me wonder if some of that is just based
on the fact that it is such a small community
and they do all know each other, like if they
(27:45):
have a sense of the level of import of each
person in that community, or if they just were that
level headed generally, we don't know. So UH Baker in
hand were then dispatched to Connecticut. They were two of
the magistrates that had heard the hearing there in East Hampton,
and they were bringing goody garlic to her trial there
(28:05):
in Hampton or in the Hartford Rather, they were also
finishing up negotiations to make East Hampton part of the
Connecticut Colony. So there was a double intent there in
their travels and Lyon Gardner was actually part of the party,
but records indicate he did not have any involvement in
the Garlic case at that point. He was just there
to assist with the Connecticut negotiations. So there's some haziness
(28:29):
and some inconsistency at this point. There are accounts that
claimed there was no Hartford trial at all, and that
Gardner used his influence to spare the Garlics from what
was likely to happen, which was that Goody Garlic would
be executed. But there are also records of the case
being heard by Governor John Winthrop Jr. And his six
other magistrates, as well as a twelve manajury. So we
(28:53):
mentioned that mostly because there, I mean, there really are
government documents, government records that indicate that this trial did happen.
But again it goes back to that sort of desire
to do very glossy versions of history. There are many
accounts that really seem to firmly believe that that trial
never happened, which kind of interesting. And so the indictment
against Goody Garlic that accompanied her to Hartford reads Elizabeth
(29:16):
Garlic thou Art indicated by the name of Elizabeth Garlic.
The wife of Joshua Garlic of East Hampton, that not
having the fear of God before thine eyes, thou hast
entertained Satan, the great enemy of God and mankind, and
by his help, since the year sixteen fifty hath done
works above the course of nature, to the loss of
lives of several persons, with several other sorceries, and in
(29:37):
particular the wife of Arthur Howell, for which, according to
the laws of God and the established law of the Commonwealth,
thou deservest to die. Yeah, so we we don't really
have a lot of records of what actually transpired in
this court, so we don't know what really happened in
the courtroom. We don't really know if Goody Garlic testified.
(29:58):
We just know that an event happened at which there
was a trial. Yes, there has also never been any
record of whether a witch is mark was ever found
on her, which was pretty common for women who were
jailed as witches to have their bodies searched pretty thoroughly
for such a thing. Uh, And there's never any record
of one of those having been found. We don't know
(30:19):
if that ever happened to her, but it is it
was such a common practice that it would have been
more unusual if it had not happened, for her to
have been pretty thoroughly examined. But here's the interesting thing.
The findings of the court are as such. This was
(30:40):
actually the judgment that they sent to the town of
East Hampton, along with some other documents which we will
talk about in just a moment, and it reads, the
jury doth not find Elizabeth, the wife of Joshua Garlic
guilty according to the indictment Joshua Garlic of East Hampton,
for himself and wife Elizabeth doth acknowledge himself bound this
(31:00):
Commonwealth in a recognization of thirty eleven. We'll come back
to what that is. Uh that he and his wife
shall carry good behavior to all the members of this
jurisdiction until the Court at East Hampton in September or
October next, and that they will then and there personally
appear if he till that time continues his habitation upon
the island, but if he shall remove his dwelling to
(31:20):
the main within this jurisdiction, then they here shall personally
appear at the Quarter Court in Hartford on the first
Thursday of September next. So What that actually means is
that um Joshua actually had to pay a bond to
ensure that his wife would behave going forward. Like, they
didn't find her guilty, but they also found her still suspicious,
(31:41):
So not guilty but still suspicious kind of like they
have to do parole hearings even though she was never
in prison she found great uh and that they had
to check in with the court either in East Hampton
or if they moved off of that island to the mainland,
they would have to go to Hartford from time to time. Uh. So, Yeah,
(32:04):
they didn't find her guilty but also not quite not guilty.
But this was a surprisingly conservative approach. There had already
been which is tried in Hartford that had been found
guilty and had been put to death. So it's very
very interesting that this happened, and the absence of testimony
and the accounts of what actually happened at the trial
(32:25):
has kind of created this nice little hot bed for speculation. Right.
I really wish that we had those because many people
really wish that we had Like when you look at
the criteria and what went on in UH in East Hampton,
it seems like from the point of view of witchcraft
trials at the time to be almost an open and
chet case. Yeah, but done the way those generally went down,
(32:48):
the deck was definitely stacked against her at that point.
So that's one of the reasons kind of this mythology
around Lyon Gardner has grown up through the years, is
that people have filled in those blanks with him, you know,
kind of swooping in almost d a sex Makina like
and doing some wonderful thing that spared her at that point.
(33:11):
But we don't know. What we do know is that
Governor John Winthrop sent a letter to East Hampton along
with that verdict, commending the community for their Christian care
and prudence. And that's a quote in examining and handling
the case. And he also included in that letter the
declaration of acceptance of the town into the Connecticut government,
So the two things that were happening at the same
(33:32):
time got lumped in one letter together. He also included
a bill for the cost of jailing and trying goody Garlic,
which is kind of funny. Uh if you read the letter,
he's kind of like and by the way, find attached
us a little bit of money. Uh. Now in the meantime,
Joshua Garlic actually filed a suit for defamation against Giddy Davis, who,
as we mentioned, a lot of the testimony that came
(33:54):
up was tracked back to gossip and rumors she may
have started. It is worth no day that defamation suits
were pretty common when it came to settling differences at
the time. Like I mentioned, all possible permutations of family
to family had at some point in time had some
disagreement or argument that is recorded in the the the
(34:15):
town records, so it's not completely uncommon. But with sort
of an interesting coda is that Goodie Davis actually died
shortly after this, like within a couple of weeks. Uh,
so she was never really brought to any sort of
accountability for any of her actions. And I you know,
don't think the defamation suit really went anywhere. And it's
(34:38):
sort of become a legend now, as many things do,
a local legend in which the story that people tell
sort of has a kind of glossy finish of what
originally happened, but skips over a lot of pertinent details.
In the legend based tellings of the storyline, Gardner gives
the Garlics a cottage on his own land for them
(34:58):
to live the rest of their lives in. And we
know that the Garlics did return to East Hampton and
they did live out their lives there, But there's a
record of one cottage on Gardner's Island where Goody Simon
actually lived, but there is no such record of a
Garlic house. Uh. However, they did live there in East Hampton,
Goody and Joshua into their nineties, which is so old
(35:22):
for the time. There is a record of Joshua's death,
but there's no written account of his wife's passing, so
we're not sure exactly when she died. I have seen
written that one died at ninety two and one died
at ninety four, but I wasn't able to verify that.
But most historians agree that they did live into Ripe
old Age and presumably died of natural causes there. So
(35:47):
that's the story of Goody Garlic. She's one of the
few people who was tried as a witch and sort
of lived to tell the tale, although she didn't seem
to say much about it, but she did survive it
and go on to lead more or less a normal
life for the rest of her days. Yeah, which is
so unusual, really extremely unusual. But part of that again,
she probably benefited from having been on the early part
(36:11):
of the wave of witchcraft fear and having been in
a small enough community that they really were trying to
take their time with the hearing and and the decision
of it right well. And a lot of the sort
of big name witchcraft trials in the United States happened
a little further about thirty five years later, and a
(36:31):
little bit north north of there, and a little bit later. Hi,
you went down a rabbit hole of of like archival
records with this episode, I went down a rabbit hole
of trying to find out for sure whether Goody Garlic
is the namesake of Magrat Garlic in the Discworld books
by Terry Pratchett. She is a witch who uh factors
heavily into many of the books that they're known as
(36:54):
the Witch Books. There's sort of several plotlines that the
disc World books follows, and one of them is a
out a trio of witches, and Magrat Garlic is one
of them. I love her. I would not be surprised
if there were some inspiration. And he definitely names a
lot of his characters after either historical figures or sort
of a lampooning way of coming up with neat names
(37:16):
for somebody cut me own throat. Dibbler is the like
a shuckster who sells bad stuff, for example. So I
went hunting for whether Goodye Garlic is the source of
Magrat Garlics name and did not find a clear authoritative
source on that. But I'm going to now believe that
she is, and she's a fascinating story. So that is
(37:37):
the tale of Getty Garlic in her trial that went
much better than most it. Thank you so much for
joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar during the
course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now, so
(37:59):
here's our current contact information. We are at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at
Missed in the History. All over social media. That is
our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks
again for listening. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Over three
(38:27):
years ago, the community of Salem, Massachusetts, was rocked by
something that few ever thought possible. It's been called an outbreak,
a wave of hysteria, or the perfect storm at the
confluence of seemingly unrelated ideas, events, and beliefs. Whatever we
try to call it, though we always seem to miss
the mark. The Salem Which Trials is equal parts universally
(38:52):
known and barely understood by most people. It's one of
those subjects we quickly dismiss because of its deceptives implicity.
Beneath that Veneer, however, is a dark and complex tale
of fear. It's easy to lose perspective on history. The
events of Salem took place over three centuries ago. That's
(39:14):
three hundred years of looking back, three hundred years of storytelling,
and three hundred years of preconceived notions about what we
think happened. From where we stand today, we've forgotten more
about Salem than we ever remember. Time has taken it
away from us. That's why this series exists. Over the centuries.
(39:38):
The Salem Which Trials have become obscured by time and distance.
It's mysterious and misunderstood by most people. I want to
clean that foggy window, to leave it clear and understandable,
unobscured by digging deep and shedding light on its darkest moments.
By cutting through the confusion, by let ing the people
(40:00):
and their stories move us forward. That's how we can
truly learn from such a dark moment in history. Each
episode of Unobscured blends my narrative approach to complex historical events,
interviews with renowned historians, and a new, hauntingly beautiful soundtrack
by Chad Lawson. So join me on October three as
(40:22):
we crack open the dark pages of history for the
inaugural season of Unobscured. Learn more and find links to
subscribe over at History unobscured dot com.
Happy Saturday, everybody, and more importantly, at least for me,
Happy October. We have an October appropriate classic today. It
is the trial of Goody Garlic for witchcraft in Sight,
which originally came out on March. This also seems like
a good episode to share because how Stuff Works has
launched a brand new podcast called Unobscured, and its first
(00:24):
season is all about a completely different witch trial, the
Salem Witch Trials. Unobscured pairs narrative storytelling from Aaron Mankey,
who's the host of Lore and Cabinet of Curiosities, with
interviews with historians and you can get it wherever you
get this podcast, So stay tuned at the end of
today's episode and you will hear the trailer for Unobscured.
(00:45):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
My name is Holly Fry and I am Tracy V. Wilson.
And as Women's History Month it is, and we've talked
(01:07):
about some women already this month, but we're going to
talk about some more. Uh. And one thing I think
that always comes to mind for people when they are
thinking about women's history is or women in history is
the Salem witch Trials, which are fascinating in a very
rich tapestry of things to explore. But we're actually going
to turn back the clock a few decades to a
(01:28):
witch trial that happened before the really big onslaught of
um of the Salem witch trials. And it happened in
East Hampton, right, not in quite the New England area
that people associate with witch hunts and that sort of
vindictive implementation of things, but it was sort of the
(01:49):
at the early stage there were other witch trials happening then.
This is in the sixteen late sixteen fifties, but as
you'll see in this story, not as much of a
clear like how to handle it mentality as there was
by the time things really got rolling in the witch
trial arena, when when the witch trials really were underway
(02:12):
in Massachusetts, there was a lot of hanging going on.
And this, fortunately to spoil the ending, does not quite
go in that direction exactly. There are somewhat surprising results
in this one. Uh. And what we're talking about is
Goody Garlic, who who is a woman that lived in
East Hampton. Uh. And this whole story starts in the
(02:33):
spring of sixteen fifty seven or sixteen fifty eight, depending
on which calendar you're using. If you go by the
Julian calendar, it would have been fifty seven. The Gregorian
calendar it would have been fifty eight, because the British
did not switch over to the Gregorian calendar until the
mid seventeen hundreds, and in the Julian calendar, March was
the new year, so these events happened prior to that,
(02:57):
so you'll sometimes see them listed as fifty seven and
sometimes fifty eight. It's just depending on where the source material,
which calendar, which calendar they went by. So um. George
Dewan wrote a really great piece for the New York
Archives uh talking about this particular incident, but also he
characterizes the times, particularly in East Hampton, as it being
(03:19):
a very gossipy, whispery innuendo laid in society. Yes, it
hit into context. It was a tiny, tiny community. There
were thirty four families living in East Hampton and the
time they were relatively isolated. The community was only about
ten years old, still trying to get a foothold really
and established themselves as a community, which had led to
(03:42):
the unfortunate side effect of it also being very back
bidy and gossipy and people being angry at their neighbors
for one thing or another exactly. And if you look
at the town records for this time one you can
get really lost because they just were so wonderfully meticulous
about notating everything that was happening. But you'll see that
(04:03):
there was a lot of discord among the citizens and
they often played out in in the way of official complaints.
They had set up this sort of structure where you
could go and complain that you were shafted and did
not get the right amount of corn that you had
been promised, or you know that this piece of land
that was in dispute um they would officially complain so
(04:25):
that that was all on record, and they really were
very detailed about, you know, including all of these arguments
over property, money, legal claims as part of the town history. Right,
I sort of imagined it is is like a a
long ago version of today's homeowner associations and all the
squabbling that can go on there, with the difference being
that normally the homeowners association is not going to put
(04:47):
you to death if you were found guilty of not
paying your door. The right color would hope. Uh. And
so Goody Garlic was the wife of Joshua Garlic. Her
name was actually Elizabeth Goody. Is that really a term
similar to the way we would use mrs today. Uh.
It's short for good wife, and it kind of is
a way that was often used to refer to normally
(05:11):
married women, um, the wife of the good wife part
being the clue there who were a not particularly high status.
It's not necessarily a derogative term, but it was just
a very common way to refer to any woman. So
as we go through this story, you'll hear a lot
of people being referred to as Goody and that is
what that means. And she was about fifty when this
(05:32):
whole event took place, right, And it all sort of
was catalyzed by one tragic event. And it's interesting and
we'll talk about it a little bit more later that
this event actually doesn't always show up in the tellings
of the Goody Garlic story. One of the historians in
particular that I read a lot of her work around it,
(05:55):
mentions that she got interested because she had gone on
a tour and and heard sort of the really glossy
version of it, and then she knew it seemed like
two sort of easy and packaged, and so she started
looking at various historians accounts of this entire episode and
how it played out, and they there's really a lot
(06:19):
of variety to it. And she draws some interesting conclusions
and will link to her research in the show notes
about why this particular event that really catalyzed it kind
of gets lost. But so it starts out with a
young girl by the name of Elizabeth Gardner Howell. She
was married to Arthur Howell, and she was only sixteen,
(06:39):
and she had recently become a mother. She had had
a daughter, and in the days following the child's birth,
she became quite ill um She in fact had a
fevered episode in which she cried out, a witch, a witch.
Now you are come to torture me because I spoke
(07:00):
two or three words against you. In the morning, you
will come fawning. And that all sounds very odd and
sort of awkward to the modern ear, but that's actually recorded.
It's part of the That quote is part of the
transcripts from the hearings that eventually happened. So a neighbor
saw this happened. Yes, he had come to check on
her she was home alone with the child. He had
(07:22):
actually come to speak to her husband, Arthur, but who
was out and happened to witness this episode. Yes, so
his name was Samuel Parson. He saw it has happened
and became worried that she was bewitched. Yes. Uh. And
in the meantime, Elizabeth's mother, Mary Gardner, who lived very nearby. Again,
tiny community, so everyone kind of lives very close. It
(07:42):
was basically a street with a row of houses on
either side. So when it boils down to yes, and
most accounts will sort of mention the elder Gardener's home
as being just across the street, so she was very close.
So Mary Gardener was ill at the time. And Elizabeth's father,
Lion Gardner, who was very prominent man in town, and
he factors in a lot as the story develops, left
(08:03):
his wife's bedside to go to his daughter's house because
he had been sent for and he was so worried
about her the behavior that was being described, and he
witnessed the frantic behavior and her claims of witchcraft. And
Elizabeth Gardner Howell actually claimed to have seen Goody Garlic,
her neighbor, and a black figure in her room, which
(08:26):
if you were to hear somebody say that that would
be troubling, that they are seeing these visions of a
person and a specter, that the person has brought with
them to torment you in a room, that would be troubling. Yes.
So eventually her mother Mary was well enough to visit.
She crossed the street and started trying to comfort her daughter,
saying that she was having bad dreams. But Elizabeth really
(08:49):
insisted that Goody Garlic had bewitched her. She was quite
sincere on this point. Yes, that was what was going on.
She was adamant, completely believed that was happening. Uh. And
that evening or an evening related to that, three women
of the town were watching over Elizabeth, and Elizabeth started
(09:10):
to address Goody Garlic, who was not with them physically,
as though she were in the room. Yes, and she says, Ah, Garlic,
you jeered me when I came to your house to
call my husband home. You laughed and jeered me, and
I went crying away. Oh you are a pretty one
send for Garlic and his wife. I would tear her
in pieces and leave the birds to pick her bones. Uh.
And she went on because the women that were there
(09:33):
with her watching over her, uh questioned this outburst and
asked her, you know, why is she saying these things?
And she replied to them, did you not see her
last night stand by my bedside, ready to pull me
to pieces? She pricked me with pins, and she brought
a black thing to the foot of my bed. So
she thought not only was she bringing a black specter
into the room that no one else was seeing, but
(09:54):
that the she in the specter were actually pricking her
with pins. Said so slightly troubling again and very adamant.
I mean, she really felt strongly that this was actually
happening to her, right she She later had a coughing fit,
which the women who were looking after her tried to
calm using oil and sugar, which was an alleged treatment
(10:18):
for witchcraft, and at that point Elizabeth allegedly coughed up
a pin. Two different women witnessed that a pin fell
out of her mouth after she had this coughing fit. Yes,
and that does come up later on again they testified
that they saw this happen. There is no clear, definitive
account of how that actually happened, if it happened for real,
(10:41):
if it was slight of hand if the women were
fibbing later on, but there is testimony on the record
that they saw this pin come out of her mouth.
So that night, Goody Simon's stayed the night with Elizabeth.
They they she slept there in the bed with her
to watch over her, and at the same time, Arthur Howell,
the husband of Elizabeth, another neighbor, William Russell, and the
(11:02):
gardener's slave her parents slave watched over the sleeping women.
And they kept hearing weird sounds throughout the night that
we're not explained. There was one in a fireplace, there
was one that was under the bed, but they could
never locate the source of the noise. And Elizabeth would
wake up periodically and claim that she was being pricked
with pins. Uh. And unfortunately Elizabeth did not recover. Ever,
(11:23):
she got worse and worse, her fever horse and and
she passed away on February sixteen fifty seven. Again, if
we're going by the Julian calendar. Yes, her baby, though, survived,
even without her mother there to breastfeed her. Which, uh
did you find whether they were able to find a
wet nurse or I never saw any account of how
(11:44):
the baby was taken care of in that regard. I
know she did legally, the documents were quickly drawn up
to say that she was staying with her father. Uh.
It would be unusual for a baby without a mother
to survive at the time, but she did, and she
went on to lead by all accounts, at pretty standard
normal life. Uh. But yeah, I wondered too, and I
didn't find any any hard evidence or accounts one way
(12:08):
or the other of how the baby was nourished from
that point on, right, it seems most likely that probably
they found someone else in the community who also either
had a child or had had a child, which was
very common, and that will actually come up later in
the story regarding someone else. Yes, Uh so a hearing
was underway pretty much immediately, and by some accounts, the
(12:30):
calendar gets a little weird because I did see some
that suggests the hearing had actually started even before Elizabeth
had passed, but verifying that was a little bit tricky.
The dates don't always match up, but it was within
a couple of days, so it is conceivable that they
could have started investigating these allegations since um claims were
already being made about Goody Yarlic being implicated in the
(12:52):
illness of Elizabeth, But so the investigation had already begun
by the time Elizabeth had passed and really kicked into
high gear, and they wanted to determine at that point
if she had been murdered, and if so, if witchcraft
had been involved, because both of those things were punishable
by death. And I feel like we should do a
quick side note and mentioned again, in modern times we
(13:14):
talk about witchcraft and we look at it as a
quaint belief of times past. But it was a very
real fear for this community at this time. And it
was not uncommon for people in general to be afraid
of the dark arts, so to use the dark arts
to explain otherwise unexplainable things correct, So it it really
(13:35):
was something that was taken very very seriously. When someone
was accused of something like that, it was investigated just
as we would investigate any allegation today of a criminal nature.
(13:55):
This hearing, though, was interesting because it was the first
witchcraft hearing in East Hampton. There had been there's in
New England already, but East Hampton had never dealt with
this subject before on a legal level. Uh. And the
hearing began and three village justices presided over it. They
were John Wolford, John Hand, and Thomas Baker. And there
is also some discrepancy about how many witnesses actually testified.
(14:17):
Most sources cite eleven, but the New York Archives telling
of the story does mention thirteen witnesses, So just keep
that in mind. I just in terms of volume, it
seems like eleven is the more accurate, but the archivists
are usually very careful with their numbers, so it could
just be a matter of someone accounting differently in historical records.
(14:40):
And that's a pretty significant portion of the population of
the town at that time. Yeah, either way, you're close
to a third, whichever number happens. Uh And according to
UH one text, like I said, there were eleven. But
most interesting are that three people that never test to
find that we're very very involved. One is Lying Gardner,
(15:03):
the deceased's father. One is Goody Garlic. She never came
forward to defend herself. She didn't speak up to do so.
I wonder if she was given the options to do so.
It seemed like she was, and she just wasn't interested
in addressing any of these accusations. Uh. And the other
is a woman named Goody Davis, who will come up
again as we go forward. The only person who wanted
(15:27):
to defend Goody Garlic was her husband, which is interesting
you know that no one would come forward to speak
on her behalf because there are some accounts also that
say that she had friends in very high places, which
will figure into the lore as we go forward and
how this kind of gets absolved later on. But if
that were the case, you would think more people would
(15:48):
come forward to defend her. But again, dealing with a
very fearful subject that was not always easily explainable. So
going into this hearing, they used said then point system
of criteria for determining the presence of witchcraft. And this
list is so intriguing to me because so many of
(16:09):
them are are really what we've sort of mentioned a
couple of times. Is something tragic happens that you can't
really explain witchcraft? Yeah, it's like, is it unexplainable witchcraft?
It must be witchcraft. So point one, for example, when
a healthful body shall be suddenly taken without probable reason
or apparent natural cause. So basically, when someone dies with
(16:31):
an obvious cause, it was previously healthy, right, and Samuel
Parsons testimony of Elizabeth. The sudden onset of Elizabeth's illness
easily met this requirement. The next one is when the
afflicted party in his fit tells truly what the witch
or other absent parties are doing or saying or the like.
So again, kind of odd because it's basically at that
(16:55):
point there's no way to verify right there, just saying
it's what someone said, right, You're taking someone's word for it,
who may or may not be ill from fever at
that point or some other affliction. And several witnesses had
heard Elizabeth mentioned the black specters being pricked with pins,
goody garlic being in the room when she wasn't actually
there physically for other people to see, so that was
(17:16):
met very easily. The third was when there was a
supernatural strength such that a strong man or two shall
not be able to keep down a child or a
weak person upon a bed. Arthur Howell described the ways
that Elizabeth would try to strike out at the black
figures and how he couldn't hold her in his grasp
when she tried to do this, so even though she
(17:37):
was very ill, when she was trying to fight back,
against the inspecters that she saw her strength appeared to
be more than it should have been considering her physical
condition at that point. The fourth one is when the
parties shall do strange things or say strange things, and yet,
when out of their fits, know nothing of what they
did or said. So there was plenty of strange behavior
(17:59):
in all of the witness accounts. But according to one scholar,
she makes an interesting point that nevertheless, and I'm quoting
at this point, nevertheless, none of the testimony clarifies whether
her delirium was punctuated by moments of clarity in which
she was unaware of what she had said or done.
So we're not sure if that part of the criteria
(18:20):
was actually really focused on at that point, um, but
we do know that she definitely had fits. The fifth
point when a party doth found it up crooked pins, needles, nails, coal, lead, straw,
hair or the like. Lots of foreign objects in that list,
(18:40):
And we had the two women who we spoke about
previously testifying that they saw a pin fall out of
Elizabeth's mouth after she had a coughing fit. The sixth
is when the party shall see visibly some apparition and
shortly after some mischief shall befall him. Goody Simon's testified
about Elizabeth's visions of black things in the room and
her rapid decline in health was already well established since
(19:02):
many people had witnessed her going from fairly okay to
really really ill in a very brief period of time.
The seventh point was when two or more are similarly
taken in strange fits, so basically, when more than one
person in the community is having the same experience. There
were two witnesses who backed Goody Simon's claimed that she
had had fits after seeing specters, and the Garlics black
(19:26):
cat was implicated as a specter figure. Yes, so Goody
Simons had said she had seen the black cat and
it shortly after either had fits or her fits had
gotten worse after seeing the animal. So all seven of
those criteria were met easily during testimony, and then in
the in the midst of all of that testimony, there
were additional accusations made against Goodye Garlic. So in addition
(19:50):
to those seven criteria having been met by witness testimony easily,
additional accusations were made as part of that testimony, and
they sort of formed a bigger dos c a of
what people perceived to be witchcraft behavior around Goody Garlic. Uh.
It was claimed that she caused four other deaths, one
an unidentified man, one a black child, and two infants.
(20:14):
They said that at one point she poisoned an infant
with cursed milk. Uh. As we had just mentioned, Goody
Simon's claimed that she had fits because of Goody Garlic.
There was a litter of piglets that died after the
sow had a very unusual birth which was attributed to her.
And at one point an ox had broken its legs
(20:36):
suddenly and her husband. Goody Garlic's husband, Joshua, is also
implicated here because he had apparently uttered some threats in
a disagreement with Lyon Gardner, who owned the ox and
was the father of Elizabeth, who had just died shortly
before it happened, So they had had a verbal dispute
and then suddenly the ox's leg was broken. So once
(20:56):
witchcraft was established to have been involved, the next section
of the hearing is um meeting the criteria to prove
that the accused was the perpetrator of that witchcraft. So
there are three rules three criteria that the accused had
appeared to the sick party and his or her fits,
(21:17):
that the afflicted was able to name the suspected witch,
and that the afflicted could describe the witch's actions, all
of which has happened in what we've described so far. Right,
So the existing testimony that met the first seven criteria
also pretty cleanly wrap up this portion of it as well.
So at that point, uh, things are not looking great
(21:38):
for Goody Garlic. Um. So one thing that's interesting is
historian Loretta Orian, who I've mentioned some of her work
previously in this in this episode is that many of
the histories of the East Hampton area mentioned the trial
of Goody Garlic, but Elizabeth Gardner Howell's death is really
not part of it. The charges tend to be pretty
(22:00):
general about Goody bewitching neighbors with herbs, ruining crops, sending
her spector cat after people. They're kind of more what
we would think of today is pretty standard witchy behaviors
of the time, you know, the things that we think
of historically is what people were accused of, And somehow
Elizabeth's death is really not is focused on as the
(22:22):
catalyst for this trial as it was, and orian postulates
that part of that is because the Gardener family was
very very important in the area and they really laid
down a lot of the groundwork for the community, and
that they maybe didn't want their family name associated with
(22:43):
all of this, and that some because there are still
members that Gardener family descendants there that you know, give
tours that are part of this and so o Ryan
is postulating that they just kind of want to keep
the family name out of it. Well. And it was
one of those tours where as we talked about earlier
about you know, hearing the story while on a tour
like that was one of those tours of of one
(23:04):
of the old family properties that uh, that she heard
about this story for the first time. Yeah, that really
catalyzed her interest in it and really sussing out the
truth in all of the various histories. And because the
community was very, very small, the Garlics had dealings with everyone,
and some of them you know, involved disagreements, but all
(23:25):
of them of course came into focus at this time.
And because there is at that point so much information
about it, that's kind of what informs a lot of
the historical writings about it that that give Goody Garlic
more of a general witchcraft accusation rather than the specificity
of a murder. One thing that comes out that's very
interesting as you read this is there is an alternate
(23:48):
villain in this story as we look at it kind
of from our perspective, and that's Goody Davis. Who is
this woman who clearly did not like Goody Garlic and
she felt that she had been personally owned by her,
and much of the testimony against Goody Garlic, even though
Goodie Davis never testified, it kind of came to light
that it could all be tracked back to stories that
(24:10):
Goody Davis had told people. So Goody Davis had lost
her own baby after what she claimed was Goody Garlic
casting the evil eye on it. Uh. The story is
that Goody Garlic had noted that the baby was ill,
saying the child is not well for it grown is
And later after she said those words, the baby didn't
(24:31):
open its eyes or make noise ever again, and it
died five days later. Uh. And Goody Davis her point
of view was that this was an active of witchcraft
or the evil I from Goody Garlic. So an interesting
(24:51):
element comes into the story here regarding the Gardener family,
because allegedly the day that this testimony came up in
the East Hampton hearing involving Goody Davis believing that her
child had been cursed by Goody Garlic, servants of Lyon Gardner,
a good Man veil and his spouse claimed to have
heard Lyon Gardner say and remember this is the father
(25:12):
of the girl who has just died. And I quote
Goody Davis had taken an Indian child to nurse for
a little wampum and had starved her own child to death.
So someone with a pretty serious stake in seeing justice
done or vengeance, if he really believed this woman had
killed his daughter, was actually speaking out against the women
(25:34):
that were accusing Goody Garlic and saying, oh, no, you
brought that on yourself. Although again he did not officially
testify in the trial, these are things that his servants
overheard him saying, and they reported back to other people.
So it establishes Lion is very even tempered and being
a voice of reason, even in you know, the depths
of grief, grief over losing his daughter. And in some
(25:56):
versions of the history it's even suggested that Lyon Gardeners
I actually a friend of Goody Garlic, and that they
have a pretty good relationship and he actually wants to
protect her. We do know that Goody Garlic worked for
him at one point, but there's no real clear documentation
that they were really any more than that, you know,
neighbors and friends. I mean, there are even disputes in
(26:18):
that long public record that I mentioned earlier between the
Garlics and the Gardeners. But really there are disputes amongst
almost every single family, like you could do all of
the possible permutations of family to family amongst the thirty
four that lived there, and each of them have had
some argument at some point in time that was documented.
So right, and I still keep imagining it as as
a seventeenth century condo association and everyone squabbling with everyone
(26:42):
all the time. It did appear to have a lot
of squabbles. And at this point there is an another
interesting development, which is that the case moves on it
The judgment is not handed down there in east Hampton.
Now they decided to send it to Hartford, which had
more experience and dealing with charges like this. There was
(27:02):
some trepidation on the parts of the magistrates about ruling
in a case that had such serious consequences for the accused, which,
considering the lore of witch hunts, is pretty level headed.
Like when you read transcripts of witch trials and sort
of read accounts of UH towns in which a big
witch trial became the central focus, there tended to be
(27:24):
a lot of hysteria and a lot of rush to judgment,
And this is really like, we need to give this
case to someone else who has more experience considering the
ramifications that might come down. Yes, and it it does
make me wonder if some of that is just based
on the fact that it is such a small community
and they do all know each other, like if they
(27:45):
have a sense of the level of import of each
person in that community, or if they just were that
level headed generally, we don't know. So UH Baker in
hand were then dispatched to Connecticut. They were two of
the magistrates that had heard the hearing there in East Hampton,
and they were bringing goody garlic to her trial there
(28:05):
in Hampton or in the Hartford Rather, they were also
finishing up negotiations to make East Hampton part of the
Connecticut Colony. So there was a double intent there in
their travels and Lyon Gardner was actually part of the party,
but records indicate he did not have any involvement in
the Garlic case at that point. He was just there
to assist with the Connecticut negotiations. So there's some haziness
(28:29):
and some inconsistency at this point. There are accounts that
claimed there was no Hartford trial at all, and that
Gardner used his influence to spare the Garlics from what
was likely to happen, which was that Goody Garlic would
be executed. But there are also records of the case
being heard by Governor John Winthrop Jr. And his six
other magistrates, as well as a twelve manajury. So we
(28:53):
mentioned that mostly because there, I mean, there really are
government documents, government records that indicate that this trial did happen.
But again it goes back to that sort of desire
to do very glossy versions of history. There are many
accounts that really seem to firmly believe that that trial
never happened, which kind of interesting. And so the indictment
against Goody Garlic that accompanied her to Hartford reads Elizabeth
(29:16):
Garlic thou Art indicated by the name of Elizabeth Garlic.
The wife of Joshua Garlic of East Hampton, that not
having the fear of God before thine eyes, thou hast
entertained Satan, the great enemy of God and mankind, and
by his help, since the year sixteen fifty hath done
works above the course of nature, to the loss of
lives of several persons, with several other sorceries, and in
(29:37):
particular the wife of Arthur Howell, for which, according to
the laws of God and the established law of the Commonwealth,
thou deservest to die. Yeah, so we we don't really
have a lot of records of what actually transpired in
this court, so we don't know what really happened in
the courtroom. We don't really know if Goody Garlic testified.
(29:58):
We just know that an event happened at which there
was a trial. Yes, there has also never been any
record of whether a witch is mark was ever found
on her, which was pretty common for women who were
jailed as witches to have their bodies searched pretty thoroughly
for such a thing. Uh, And there's never any record
of one of those having been found. We don't know
(30:19):
if that ever happened to her, but it is it
was such a common practice that it would have been
more unusual if it had not happened, for her to
have been pretty thoroughly examined. But here's the interesting thing.
The findings of the court are as such. This was
(30:40):
actually the judgment that they sent to the town of
East Hampton, along with some other documents which we will
talk about in just a moment, and it reads, the
jury doth not find Elizabeth, the wife of Joshua Garlic
guilty according to the indictment Joshua Garlic of East Hampton,
for himself and wife Elizabeth doth acknowledge himself bound this
(31:00):
Commonwealth in a recognization of thirty eleven. We'll come back
to what that is. Uh that he and his wife
shall carry good behavior to all the members of this
jurisdiction until the Court at East Hampton in September or
October next, and that they will then and there personally
appear if he till that time continues his habitation upon
the island, but if he shall remove his dwelling to
(31:20):
the main within this jurisdiction, then they here shall personally
appear at the Quarter Court in Hartford on the first
Thursday of September next. So What that actually means is
that um Joshua actually had to pay a bond to
ensure that his wife would behave going forward. Like, they
didn't find her guilty, but they also found her still suspicious,
(31:41):
So not guilty but still suspicious kind of like they
have to do parole hearings even though she was never
in prison she found great uh and that they had
to check in with the court either in East Hampton
or if they moved off of that island to the mainland,
they would have to go to Hartford from time to time. Uh. So, Yeah,
(32:04):
they didn't find her guilty but also not quite not guilty.
But this was a surprisingly conservative approach. There had already
been which is tried in Hartford that had been found
guilty and had been put to death. So it's very
very interesting that this happened, and the absence of testimony
and the accounts of what actually happened at the trial
(32:25):
has kind of created this nice little hot bed for speculation. Right.
I really wish that we had those because many people
really wish that we had Like when you look at
the criteria and what went on in UH in East Hampton,
it seems like from the point of view of witchcraft
trials at the time to be almost an open and
chet case. Yeah, but done the way those generally went down,
(32:48):
the deck was definitely stacked against her at that point.
So that's one of the reasons kind of this mythology
around Lyon Gardner has grown up through the years, is
that people have filled in those blanks with him, you know,
kind of swooping in almost d a sex Makina like
and doing some wonderful thing that spared her at that point.
(33:11):
But we don't know. What we do know is that
Governor John Winthrop sent a letter to East Hampton along
with that verdict, commending the community for their Christian care
and prudence. And that's a quote in examining and handling
the case. And he also included in that letter the
declaration of acceptance of the town into the Connecticut government,
So the two things that were happening at the same
(33:32):
time got lumped in one letter together. He also included
a bill for the cost of jailing and trying goody Garlic,
which is kind of funny. Uh if you read the letter,
he's kind of like and by the way, find attached
us a little bit of money. Uh. Now in the meantime,
Joshua Garlic actually filed a suit for defamation against Giddy Davis, who,
as we mentioned, a lot of the testimony that came
(33:54):
up was tracked back to gossip and rumors she may
have started. It is worth no day that defamation suits
were pretty common when it came to settling differences at
the time. Like I mentioned, all possible permutations of family
to family had at some point in time had some
disagreement or argument that is recorded in the the the
(34:15):
town records, so it's not completely uncommon. But with sort
of an interesting coda is that Goodie Davis actually died
shortly after this, like within a couple of weeks. Uh,
so she was never really brought to any sort of
accountability for any of her actions. And I you know,
don't think the defamation suit really went anywhere. And it's
(34:38):
sort of become a legend now, as many things do,
a local legend in which the story that people tell
sort of has a kind of glossy finish of what
originally happened, but skips over a lot of pertinent details.
In the legend based tellings of the storyline, Gardner gives
the Garlics a cottage on his own land for them
(34:58):
to live the rest of their lives in. And we
know that the Garlics did return to East Hampton and
they did live out their lives there, But there's a
record of one cottage on Gardner's Island where Goody Simon
actually lived, but there is no such record of a
Garlic house. Uh. However, they did live there in East Hampton,
Goody and Joshua into their nineties, which is so old
(35:22):
for the time. There is a record of Joshua's death,
but there's no written account of his wife's passing, so
we're not sure exactly when she died. I have seen
written that one died at ninety two and one died
at ninety four, but I wasn't able to verify that.
But most historians agree that they did live into Ripe
old Age and presumably died of natural causes there. So
(35:47):
that's the story of Goody Garlic. She's one of the
few people who was tried as a witch and sort
of lived to tell the tale, although she didn't seem
to say much about it, but she did survive it
and go on to lead more or less a normal
life for the rest of her days. Yeah, which is
so unusual, really extremely unusual. But part of that again,
she probably benefited from having been on the early part
(36:11):
of the wave of witchcraft fear and having been in
a small enough community that they really were trying to
take their time with the hearing and and the decision
of it right well. And a lot of the sort
of big name witchcraft trials in the United States happened
a little further about thirty five years later, and a
(36:31):
little bit north north of there, and a little bit later. Hi,
you went down a rabbit hole of of like archival
records with this episode, I went down a rabbit hole
of trying to find out for sure whether Goody Garlic
is the namesake of Magrat Garlic in the Discworld books
by Terry Pratchett. She is a witch who uh factors
heavily into many of the books that they're known as
(36:54):
the Witch Books. There's sort of several plotlines that the
disc World books follows, and one of them is a
out a trio of witches, and Magrat Garlic is one
of them. I love her. I would not be surprised
if there were some inspiration. And he definitely names a
lot of his characters after either historical figures or sort
of a lampooning way of coming up with neat names
(37:16):
for somebody cut me own throat. Dibbler is the like
a shuckster who sells bad stuff, for example. So I
went hunting for whether Goodye Garlic is the source of
Magrat Garlics name and did not find a clear authoritative
source on that. But I'm going to now believe that
she is, and she's a fascinating story. So that is
(37:37):
the tale of Getty Garlic in her trial that went
much better than most it. Thank you so much for
joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar during the
course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now, so
(37:59):
here's our current contact information. We are at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at
Missed in the History. All over social media. That is
our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks
again for listening. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Over three
(38:27):
years ago, the community of Salem, Massachusetts, was rocked by
something that few ever thought possible. It's been called an outbreak,
a wave of hysteria, or the perfect storm at the
confluence of seemingly unrelated ideas, events, and beliefs. Whatever we
try to call it, though we always seem to miss
the mark. The Salem Which Trials is equal parts universally
(38:52):
known and barely understood by most people. It's one of
those subjects we quickly dismiss because of its deceptives implicity.
Beneath that Veneer, however, is a dark and complex tale
of fear. It's easy to lose perspective on history. The
events of Salem took place over three centuries ago. That's
(39:14):
three hundred years of looking back, three hundred years of storytelling,
and three hundred years of preconceived notions about what we
think happened. From where we stand today, we've forgotten more
about Salem than we ever remember. Time has taken it
away from us. That's why this series exists. Over the centuries.
(39:38):
The Salem Which Trials have become obscured by time and distance.
It's mysterious and misunderstood by most people. I want to
clean that foggy window, to leave it clear and understandable,
unobscured by digging deep and shedding light on its darkest moments.
By cutting through the confusion, by let ing the people
(40:00):
and their stories move us forward. That's how we can
truly learn from such a dark moment in history. Each
episode of Unobscured blends my narrative approach to complex historical events,
interviews with renowned historians, and a new, hauntingly beautiful soundtrack
by Chad Lawson. So join me on October three as
(40:22):
we crack open the dark pages of history for the
inaugural season of Unobscured. Learn more and find links to
subscribe over at History unobscured dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.