The Forgotten “Witches”

By Abigail Giron Marroquin

What is a witch? Some may think of Circe the witch from Greek mythology, others may think of the bubbly Glinda from Wicked, but for the Connecticut puritans of the 1600s, witches were a living nightmare from the devil itself. On Thursday, March 20, 2025, university professor and author, Cynthia Wolfe Boynton, presented a lecture about the first witch trials in North America at UB’s Necessary Voices event.

Boynton is the author of Connecticut Witch Trials: The First Panic in the New World.  Explaining her motives for writing the book, she says, “One of the things that I am very interested in and invested in is telling the stories of people whose lives were forgotten. So that led me to delve into Connecticut witch trials.”

Boynton, on the hunt for witches in Connecticut

For Boynton, one of the difficult parts of this journey was getting the information on the Connecticut witch trials. There is very little documentation that exists from the 1600s in general. Documents specifically on the witch trials are scattered throughout the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Most of these documents are in college repositories. They got there through the relatives of some of the original magistrates who tried the cases.

For the puritans, learning to survive in unfamiliar land was a challenge. They had just come from England, where they'd had different weather, access to food, and security. Out here, the puritans needed to fend off wild animals, produce their own food, and, perhaps most importantly to them, survive against the devil.

“The settlers believed that the devil literally walked the earth. That he was as real as you or I and that he spent his days following us around, mingling around us... He spent his days trying to beguile us in some way, to convince us to either be his minions or to kill us, or to make us sick, or in other ways to make us go down the dark path. As puritans, one of the things that was most important to us was to go to heaven. That wasn’t going to happen if the devil killed us or seduced us into being one of his witches.”

This need to go to heaven ran deep. Puritan laws were based on the Bible. The first capital law of Connecticut Colony was that all needed to believe in God, and the second was that being a witch was forbidden. It is not until the fourth law that the code mentions that one cannot murder another person.

"Capitall Lawes" of Connecticut Colony (from Boynton's book, page 20). Notice that they outlaw witches in Law Number 2 but don't get around to murder until law Number 4.

What especially caught my attention is how the Connecticut witch panic began. Elizabeth Kelly was an eight-year-old girl living in the Connecticut puritan colonies. She had become sick and was only getting worse. On March 26, 1662, her father asked her what had gotten her this sick. Lying on her bed, she said Goody Ayres was in the corner of her room and her spirit was bewitching her; she died as she said these words. Mr. Kelly requested that the magistrates lead an investigation.

The accusation led to the arrest of not only Good Ayres, but also of Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith and Mary and Andrew Sanford. They were all put in jail to await their trial. Nathaniel Greensmith told his wife that she should admit to being a witch so that he would be able to go back to their daughters at home. Unfortunately for him, Rebecca Greensmith accused all of them of witchcraft, saying that the devil would come to them in the form of a fox and lead them out into the forest to dance and have his way with them.

The magistrates were of course mortified and sentenced the group to death. While Goody Ayres was the first to be accused, her husband was able to break her out of jail. They left their two children behind in Connecticut and ran away to Rhode Island, which did not have extradition laws. Thus, the two, though not well liked, were able to live their lives.

To learn about what happened to the rest of the accused, I recommend you read the book Connecticut Witch Trials: The First Panic in the New World by Cynthia Wolfe Boynton. A little spoiler for you: It was not a happy fate for them.

Boynton's book