The Trickster Spirits of Early New England
The early New England colonies were, in large part, intended as a utopian experiment to establish a model Christian society in preparation for Judgment Day. To guide this lofty vision the founding patriarchs cobbled together a social blueprint based on archaic Old Testament precedents and stern Calvinist church-state doctrine. The resulting “biblical commonwealths” of their design were, in stifled reality, highly regimented settlements ruled by a strict religious order and moral code. Enforced church orthodoxy dominated civic life. Neighbors regularly turned on neighbors in righteous condemnation, with even minor infractions inviting swift and often cruel punishments by authorities. And those who transgressed the established order could expect no less than to be banished, tortured or hanged.
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
“The awful hand of God now upon us, in letting loose of evil Angels among us to perpetrate such horrid Mischiefs; and the suffering of Hells instruments, to do such fearfull things as have bin scarce heard of...” – Increase Mather, Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1693)
“Poltergeist” is a German word, roughly translating to “noisy ghost.” The term was first popularized in sixteenth-century religious and folkloric texts. However, the phenomenon it describes traces back to ancient times if not beyond. Distinct from typical hauntings, poltergeist activity is expressed through manifested disturbances – including unexplained loud noises, foul smells, spontaneous fires, objects moving on their own, rocks thrown, and violent physical assaults. Mischief always appears to be the motivating factor, with no clear understanding of it's source.
At the time of the Johnson case, the town of Wethersfield was embroiled in religious controversy and social instability. It was also still reeling from the trauma of the Pequot War, which included the massacre of nine people in a brutal native attack on the town a decade earlier. A number of families fled to newer settlements and those who remained struggled to maintain order. It was in this uncertain climate that Reverend Samuel Stone, a Puritan minister known for administering dubious “spiritual cures” that bordered on exorcisms, pressured Mary into confessing that she had made a pact with the Devil – who, it was claimed, provided “a familiar” to help with the household chores and torment her demanding master.2
The correlation between poltergeists and witchcraft seemed obvious to the Puritan colonists, but not all reported cases resulted in execution. In New Haven, the sharp-tongued widow Elizabeth Godman found herself at the center of some preternatural activity that rattled the community. It was claimed that cheese wheels rolled away on their own, beer casks spontaneously burst open, food spoiled, and furniture lifted off the ground in her presence. She was further accused of eccentric public behavior that included conversing with unseen figures and unprovoked outbursts, with fears that she was actively bewitching the townspeople. In 1655, Godman was brought to trial on charges of witchcraft but managed to escape a death sentence when the spectral evidence against her was rejected by the court.
As with the Mary Johnson case, it is important to note the social context that surrounded Godman's rumored witchery. Of all the early New England colonies, New Haven was the most rigid in it's theocratic rule. It was also the furthest outlying English settlement, bordered by rival Dutch traders and hostile native tribes with rumored anti-English conspiracies ever-present. By the 1650s, obstructed trade and economic slump additionally led to fracturing internal tensions as the “language of mutiny and sedition” could be heard in the streets. If there was a community ripe for witch panic and claims of paranormal mischief, it was here.3
To the north, the Massachusetts Bay colony also had it's share of spectral disturbances. In the town of Newbury (modern-day Newburyport) the household of an elderly shoemaker named William Morse was shaken by poltergeist activity, starting in December 1679. The northern frontier at this time was still unnerved by a series of native raids that left a trail of atrocities and devastation along the Maine coast, a short distance from Newbury. Incited by King Philips War, the Abaneki tribes remained in open rebellion right up until the year prior to the dramatic events at the Morse residence. Amid this tense backdrop the family found themselves under siege – not by bands of native warriors, but unknown malevolent entities.
Heavy barrages of stones and bricks were thrown at the house by unseen hands in what was identified as an early colonial case of lithobolia, a word with ancient Greek origins that came to describe the mischievous actions of “stone-throwing devils.” Additionally, leather-working tools disappeared only to later be dropped down the chimney. Hats, shoes, and dinner trays flew across rooms. Blankets were ripped from beds. Furniture moved on it's own. And the family's hog was found in the kitchen during the night, despite the doors being locked. At the height of these disturbances, neighbors also reported that their livestock had been sickened without explanation.
As with previous colonial poltergeist events, a town investigation concluded that witchcraft was to blame. Suspicion first fell on Caleb Powell, a local seafarer, who Morse accused of being “a wizard.” However, he was acquitted of any wrongdoing. Attention then turned to William's wife Elizabeth, a reputed healer who also apparently dabbled in fortune-telling. Dangerous skills for a woman in Puritan New England. Seventeen neighbors testified against her, convincing a jury of her guilt. She was initially sentenced to hang but the governor later granted her an indefinite reprieve.4
News of the Morse haunting soon spread, as did similar cases involving “stone-throwing devils” across the region. The influential Puritan minister Increase Mather included reports of these events in An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, a work dedicated to deciphering unexplained phenomena – both miraculous and malevolent – in New England. In addition to the Morse case, he noted various other residences “mollested by Daemons” at this time. The most famous instance took place on Great Island (present-day New Castle), just off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The property of George Walton, a wealthy tavern-owner and practicing Quaker, was besieged by thousands of stones throughout the summer and fall of 1682. Stones rained down on the roof, smashed through windows, and spontaneously manifested indoors as they were hurled between rooms. When gathered up and collected, according to one witness they were red hot to the touch “as if the unseen thrower had snatched them from a fire.” Household items also disappeared, inexplicably reappearing at the far reaches of the property or else dropped down the chimney. Strange noises were heard. Crops were destroyed. The fence gates were repeatedly torn from their hinges. And there were reports of ghostly “witches” who danced in the fields at night. The events gained international notoriety when Richard Chamberlaine, a London merchant who was a guest at the tavern, published a popular pamphlet entitled Lithobolia: or, the Stone-Throwing Devil (1698).5
Simultaneously, in nearby Kittery, Maine, the Hortado family experienced their own spectral assaults. One evening, Mary Hortado heard strange voices outside. When the front door was opened to investigate, she was hit in the face with a stone that appeared out of nowhere. A few days later another large stone dropped down the chimney and a cast-iron pan hanging by the fireplace loudly clanged on it's own. Mary began to see ghostly figures around the residence. She was also bitten, scratched and bruised by an unseen attacker. And struck with more stones. Hoofed prints were found throughout the nearby fields, despite the Hortados owning no cattle. It was feared that the Devil was making his presence known. Witchcraft was suspected, but no one appears to have been charged with the crime.6
The following year, in Hartford, Connecticut, more paranormal mayhem unfolded. An elderly man named Nicholas Desborough – who, years earlier had served in the Pequot War and participated in the “Mystic Massacre” that resulted in hundreds of native men, women and children being burned alive in their fortified village – was reported to have been “strangely molested by stones, pieces of earth, cobs of Indian Corn, and other such things, from an invisible hand.” Sometimes the attacks happened in his home, other times in his shop, or else the barn, or in the fields. He couldn't seem to escape the poltergeist's wrath. It is alluded that the attacks began over a property dispute between Desborough and his neighbor – and, once resolved, the troubles ceased.7
For those who interpreted portentous wonder in this upswing of paranormal activity, it appeared that a cosmic rupture had taken place and a great evil had been unleashed upon the land. The reports served as effective Puritan propaganda, underscoring the need for repentance among back-sliding colonists. However, given the frontier anxieties, rigid social structures and repressed nature of the times there is an entirely different paradigm based in parapsychology and myth that is worth considering.
THE TRICKSTER IN MIND AND MYTH
“In so far as archetypes do not represent mere functional relationships, they manifest themselves as daimones, as personal agencies. In this form they are felt as actual experiences and are not “figments of the imagination,” as rationalism would have us believe.” – Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation (1912)
When the famed Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung composed his Septem Sermones ad Mortuos – or, The Seven Sermons of the Dead – over the early months of 1916, his residence was overtaken by what can only be described as a poltergeist haunting. There was unexplained knocking on the walls. Strange smells in the air. The doorbell mysteriously rang by itself. And shadow figures were seen moving throughout the house. At a crossroads in his career, Jung admits to something of a mental breakdown during this period. One that may have tapped into a deeper mode of consciousness. The resulting texts he produced are steeped in mysticism, using supernatural and mythological language to explore some of the heady concepts that later came to define his life's work: the deep unconscious, the balance of opposites, synchronicity, archetypes, and the nature of the human soul. Jung, himself, understood his paranormal experiences to be “the exteriorized effects of the unconscious complexes” – that is, physical projections of the unconscious mind. Given his heightened emotional state and focus of thought at the time, perhaps he unlocked – or else, invited – something with his disassociated psyche?8
Folklorist and mythologist Joseph Campbell expanded further. In his seminal work, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959), Campbell refers to the trickster as “an ambiguous, curiously fascinating figure” that can be identified across the beliefs systems of nearly every culture, spanning both the globe and the ages. Dualistic in nature, the trickster embodies the basic elements of curiosity and imagination in human nature that are an essential catalyst to creativity, gained knowledge, transformation and progress. Conversely, it also represents the unpredictable, the disruptive, and the chaotic. It is both “the culture-bringer” and “the principle of disorder.” In the oral traditions of pre-modern societies, the trickster manifested as a cunning or mischievous animal, be it a raven, hare, fox or coyote. In the myths of antiquity, “he was Hermes, the shapeshifter and master of the way to the land of the dead, as well as Prometheus, the fire-bringer.” And in Puritan New England, it made itself known through restless apparitions, the demonic familiars of witches – and, on occasion, “he appears as the devil.”10
The Puritan worldview was grounded in a strict biblical literalism. However, the early colonists remained steeped in the folk beliefs of their day regarding the supernatural. Older English traditions spoke of faerie lore, where the trickster spirit found expression in various amorphous entities that crossed into the physical realm from “the otherworld” through liminal thresholds. Storied encounters portrayed these metaphysical beings as mischievous, unpredictable – and, at times, downright frightening in nature. As their presence signaled a profound disturbance in the natural order, they were also considered to be harbingers of personal misfortune, social disruption or environmental disaster. Within the faerie pantheon there were “boggarts,” malicious spirits that attached themselves to individuals and haunt households with wall-knocking, disembodied voices, moved furniture, thrown objects and physical assaults. The substance of these beliefs remained apart of the collective consciousness well into the early modern era, with the minor pagan deities of old reinterpreted as demons and restless apparitions in the Reformed Christian mind. The puritanical impulse towards disenchantment was limited at best, as author Patrick Harpur notes in his study Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld. The trickster spirits of myth and folklore continued to reveal themselves, as they have always done – appearing “externally as a host of apparitions; and internally, as muses who inspire and devils who possess us and drive us mad.”11
HAUNTED NEW ENGLAND
“Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.” – Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor (2001)
The English Puritan settlers weren't the first residents to run afoul of trickster spirits in the region. It was a landscape that was already haunted by the time of their arrival. In the native Algonquian belief system the liminal boundary between the material and spiritual realms was highly fluid, allowing for regular contact with a myriad of supernatural entities. The ghosts of the dead were known as Chepi, which had a far more complex nature than the spectral apparitions of English lore. It was a class of spirits that interacted with the mortal world as messengers, guardians, guides – or avengers. Through black magic rituals, Chepi could be invoked by powwaws (medicine men or shamans) to harass tribal enemies by means that closely resemble classic poltergeist hauntings.
As with all aspects of death and the underworld, the Chepi were closely associated with Hobbomock, a powerful deity who reflected the darker aspects of the balanced cosmos. Something of a trickster-figure himself, Hobbomock was a shape-shifter who resided in remote swamps or marshlands and appeared as a horned serpent, black spectral stag, or the shadow figure of a man. He further existed in the subconscious, making his presence known in dreams and entranced visions that most often signaled some form of disruptive change in one's life or surroundings. Among the coastal Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes there were also mischievous forest spirits known as Pukwudgies that, if crossed, were prone to play malicious – and sometimes deadly – pranks such as blinding wayward travelers with balls of light or else luring them off of cliffs. They also threw stones.12
Although driven from their traditional lands, the supernatural imprint of the original inhabitants lingered on in the Puritan mind as it became entangled in biblical narratives and common English folk beliefs. The native god Hobbomock was reimagined as “the Devil” and troublesome spirits like the Chepi or Pukwudgies were thought to be demonic entities in his service. Some of the earliest witch trials reflected this cultural blending of dark lore, including the previously mentioned Elizabeth Godman case. In addition to her public outbursts and propensity to attract poltergeist attention, she allegedly boasted that “Hobbomocke was her husband.”13 Likewise, during the Hartford Witch Panic of 1662, a woman named Rebecca Greensmith was accused of having attended a witch's gathering and danced around a large kettle over a fire with “two black creatures like two Indians but taller.”14 Numerous references to native gods and conjured spirits can also be found throughout the later Salem Witch Trials, with Cotton Mather, himself, claiming the “Wigwams of Indians, where the pagan Powaws often raise their masters, in the shapes of Bears and Snakes and Fires” as the likely source for the malevolent forces that plagued Essex County between 1692-93.15
The last decades of the seventeenth-century were a time of cataclysmic change in the New England colonies. As church membership declined, the pious faithful saw signs of providential disfavor in every calamitous event: Attacks on frontier settlements by native tribes and the allied French. Crop failures. Outbreaks of pestilence that ravaged populations. And as fear turned inward, witch panics that increased in scope and severity. These were dark and uncertain times. Worst of all for the Puritans, the English crown had revoked the original charters that ensured the influence of church over state. “The rule of saints” was coming to an end as a decidedly more secular era unfolded in the region.
As a psychological archetype, the trickster disregards rationality, rigidity and stasis. It breaks down existing boundaries and established values, reveals new possibilities, and instigates paradigm shifts. In mythology and folklore, trickster spirits are cast in the same light. Mischievous and unpredictable. Provocative. Subversive. They challenge natural laws and transgress accepted realities. The early New England poltergeist cases certainly fall within this framework, presenting themselves during periods of heightened tensions or anxieties when the cohesive dominion of the Puritan social order was particularly vulnerable. If, as it has been theorized, poltergeist activity can be understood as a cathartic manifestation of a shadowy trickster archetype that resides deep in the subconscious mind, then the godly colonies would have certainly provided the perfect stage for these paranormal events.
1 Cotton Mather, Memorable providences relating to witchcrafts and possessions (Boston: Printed by R.P., 1689), 62-63.
2 Richard S. Ross, Before Salem: Witch Hunting in the Connecticut River Valley (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2017), 197-98.
3 Ross, Before Salem, 172-86.
6 Increase Mather, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences wherein an account is given of many remarkable and very memorable events which have hapned this last age, especially in New-England (Boston: Printed by Samuel Green, 1684), 164-67.
11 Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld (Bedford, IN: Pine Winds Press, 1994), 55-56, 64.
13 Ross, Before Salem, 94.
14 Paul B. Moyer, Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England in Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), 52.
16 Cotton Mather, Decennium luctuosum. An history of remarkable occurrences, in the long war, which New-England hath had with the Indian savages, from the year, 1688. To the year 1698. (Boston: Printed by B. Green & J. Allen, 1699; Digital reprint by Text Creation Partnership: Evans Early American Imprint Collection, 2011), 102-03.
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