Skin Medicine

The preceding evidence was more than sufficient for Magistrate Corey to form a Court of Oyer and Terminer, much like others that had governed over many another witch trial. Elizabeth Hagen was first examined by Dr. Lewyn. Though a man possessed of scientific reasoning, it did not take him long to give the court the very thing it wanted…physical evidence that the Widow Hagen was indeed a witch. For three inches below her left armpit was found an extra nipple…the so-called “Witches Teat”, the seal of a pact with the Devil. Through this nipple, a witch supposedly fed her familiars.

No one was more shocked than Lewyn.

He told the court that supernumerary nipples weren’t unknown in medical annals, but his argument was flaccid at best. Even he didn’t seem to believe it. And nothing he could say could allay what came next-Elizabeth Hagen was tortured to elicit a confession or, as it was popularly known, “put to the question”. During the next week she underwent the ordeal of the ducking stool and the strappado, the heretic’s fork and the witch’s cradle. She was burned with hot coals, cut, beaten, hung by her feet and thumbs. The needed confession came within a few days…a might too quick for the court’s henchmen.

But come, it did.

She admitted freely to the practice of witchcraft, of hexing the village, of conjuring storms and blights. It was enough. The morning of the trial she was dragged from her cell, wrists bound and tied to the rear of a farm wagon. She was pulled by oxen through the streets in this way, her jailer lashing her with a whip the entire way through those muddy streets to the courthouse. The locals lined up to pelt her with rotten fruit and stones. On her belly then, she was dragged up the steps and before Magistrate Corey and his associates, Magistrates Bowen and Hay.

She was bloody and broken, sack dress hanging in strips, her back raw from the whip, her face slashed open from “the blooding”, her scalp missing patches of hair from “the knotting”. A metal cage known as a Scold’s Bridle encircled her head. The jailer removed it, tearing the bit from her mouth that pressed her tongue flat.

She begged for water and was given none.

She begged for food and was ignored.

She begged for mercy and the assembled crowd laughed.

Then the questioning began. The court had already assembled a lengthy list of evidence, not all of which was found in the Widow’s shack. People, certain now that she had been emasculated by the law, came forward with tales of horror and wonder. A young woman named Claire Dogan admitted that Widow Hagen had tried to seduce her into the “cult of witchery”, promising her riches and power. Dogan claimed that she had witnessed Hagen mixing up “flying ointment” which was applied to a length of oak, upon which, Hagen flew through the air, dipping over treetops and harassing livestock in the fields, laughing all the while.

A farmer named William Constant claimed that, in order to gain control of his neighbor’s holdings, he contracted Widow Hagen to “witch” the man. He said he watched her tie the series of knots in rope known as the “witch’s ladder”…and soon after, his neighbor was taken ill, dying shortly thereafter. Another farmer, Charles Goode, said that he-“while bewitched by the old hag”-had asked her to kill his shrewish wife. Hagen had taken a bone covered with decaying meat, sprinkled it with unknown powders, said words over it “which withered my soul upon hearing them”. The bone was buried beneath his wife’s window and as the meat rotted from it, so did the flesh melt from his wife’s skeleton. She died soon after of an unknown wasting disease.

A group of village children admitted that the Widow had taught them how to avenge their enemies: another group of children who had teased and tormented them. She showed them how to gather hairs from the other children and press them into dolls made of mud and sticks. The words to say over them. And whatever they then did with the dolls happened to the children in question. When one doll was thrown in the river, one of the offending children drowned. When a doll was thrown into a fire, its namesake’s cabin burned to the ground. The court recognized this as sympathetic magic. The children also said that when Mr. Garrity chased them bodily from his apple orchards, they said “strange words” taught to them by Widow Hagen and Garrity’s prize milking cow keeled over dead on the spot.

And more than one farmer came forward to say that there was always trouble during midsummer. That it was the time of the Wild Hunt-the legendary flight of the witches. That Elizabeth Hagen and her fellow witches would take to the air with a coven of demons and evil dead and by morning the unwary had been carried off and livestock went unaccounted for. That on nights of the Wild Hunt, wise men stayed indoors for it could be heard coming-a barking and hissing, screaming and churning.

So the evidence, as such, was not lacking.