What the gossips did to Mary

GORDON DANIELS Bridget Marshall, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, has pieced together the story of Mary Parsons of Northampton, who was tried for witchcraft in 1656. Part of her research involved sifting through nearly unreadable handwritten court documents.

What about the story that a child whose mother didn't get along with Parsons had been hurt?

How else to explain the rumors that Mary Parsons could wade into water without getting wet? That she was known to wander about outdoors at night? That she could always find something like a lost key, when no one else could?

There was a reason these things happened, according to some of the people who lived in Northampton in the mid-17th century: Mary Parsons was a witch.

So pervasive were the accusations that Parsons stood trial for witchcraft in 1674. And even though she was acquitted, the suspicions about her unusual powers followed her until the end of her days.

Though the story of Mary Parsons' trial is centuries old, it is currently being ushered into the Internet age.

Historic Northampton, where the Parsons family homestead is located, is spearheading an effort to create a Web site about Parsons. Still a work in progress, the site is being designed with help from local teachers to make it a resource for area schools.

The hope is that the materials students find there will help them make sense of how people lived in a long-ago time and place, says Barry Wadsworth. A fifth-grade teacher at the Smith College Campus School in Northampton, Wadsworth is one of several teachers involved in the project.

A lesson to learn

The Parsons story is a window to another era, says Kerry Buckley, Historic Northampton's executive director.

It was a time when the devil was considered an active part of everyday life, a time when witchcraft was a way to explain life's mysteries and tragedies, and a time when whispered suspicions of supernatural powers could turn neighbor against neighbor.

What happened to Mary Parsons, Buckley says, is a reminder that "the people who populated our earliest settlements were human beings like the rest of us... with hopes, desires, jealousies and squabbles."

Though an account of her story had appeared in Yale historian John Putnam Demos' book "Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England," Buckley wanted to make it more accessible to people who live in the community where it happened.

In Bridget Marshall, Buckley found the perfect person to make that happen.

Drawn to the macabre

Marshall, a 28-year-old graduate student and teaching assistant in the English department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, came to Historic Northampton as an intern two years ago.

She has, she says quite cheerfully, been drawn to the mysterious, the macabre and the bizarre for a long time. Her doctoral dissertation is on British and American Gothic novels. The decor in her Amherst apartment includes a poster of witches hovering over a cauldron. And her favorite holiday of the year is Halloween, when she's been known to teach her classes dressed as a vampire in a long black velvet dress and cape.

Buckley suggested that Marshall might be interested in researching the Parsons case.

In addition to using materials already at Historic Northampton, Marshall turned to the footnotes in the John Demos book as a guide to records of the court cases and other related documents. The references took her to the Hampshire County Registry of Probate and to Forbes Library, both in Northampton, to the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum in Springfield and to East Cambridge, where she found transcripts of the court proceedings. The idea, funded with a grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, was to pull together and transcribe as many of the original documents as possible.

The job of reading them was a challenge, to say the least.

"The handwriting was horrifying," Marshall says, often small, to conserve valuable paper, and, in places, faded with time. Archaic spellings and word usages added to the difficulty. Marshall says she often found the first hour or so of her work "unbearable" as she labored to decipher every word. Once immersed, though, it got easier - and more rewarding.

"Transcribing these documents at times was an absolute nightmare," she recalls, "but it was also thrilling to see the pieces of evidence start to make sense.

"I hope students will also see this - that the work historians do involves a lot of detective work, and a lot of interpreting."

Family feud

Mary Parsons' story begins in England. Soon after she was born, probably in 1628, her family came to this country, living first in Hartford, then in Springfield.

Marshall says it was in Springfield that Parsons' name was first linked with the devil's doings. There, an unrelated woman with the same name was accused of witchcraft and convicted of murder in 1650, after her infant child died.

It may be, according to Marshall, that the reputation of one rubbed off on the other. It was while scrutinizing court records that she realized there were two women with the same name - and that some earlier historical accounts had mistakenly assumed they were one and the same person.

In 1646, Mary married Joseph Parsons, who prospered as a merchant and tavern keeper. The couple had 11 children, nine of whom lived to adulthood.

After moving to Northampton in 1654, the Parsonses became embroiled in a feud with another family in town - the Bridgmans.

While the Parsons thrived, the Bridgmans struggled. Money was scarce. Unlike the Parsonses, who raised a brood of children, the Bridgmans lost several babies.

Marshall felt sympathy for Sarah Bridgman. "I think she had a very hard life," she says.

Those layers of hardship and jealousy, she says, may explain why Sarah Bridgman apparently began spreading gossip about Mary Parsons - gossip that perhaps took hold because of her already questionable reputation. It was Sarah Bridgman who suggested that Parsons had caused a serious injury to Bridgman's child's knee.

Parsons did not, says Marshall, have a reservoir of goodwill to draw on. "She was prominent in the community, but she was not liked," she says. Parsons, according to John Demos, was a woman of great beauty, but haughty manner.

Upset about the rumors and innuendo, Joseph Parsons filed a slander suit in 1656 on behalf of his wife against the Bridgmans.

Marshall believes the decision to file suit "had to have been a calculated risk. We don't know how Mary felt about it, but they must have talked about whether to let it [the gossip] go, or try to stop it."

As the documents Marshall read revealed, the slander case drew testimony both for and against Parsons - about half of the families in town took sides.

When all was said and done, the Parsons side won the day. The magistrates who heard the case ordered Sarah Bridgman to either issue a public apology, or pay a fee. She paid, says Marshall, but refused to say she was sorry.

The talk of witchcraft didn't stop, however, and in 1674, Mary Parsons herself went on trial.

Again, the Bridgman family was involved. This time, the intrigue surrounded the death of Sarah Bridgman's daughter, whose husband filed a complaint saying Parsons was responsible for the young woman's death. Parsons was taken to Boston, where she spent weeks in jail, and was then tried. Once again, the judges ruled in Parsons' favor.

But despite their legal victory, the Parsonses, it seems, didn't want to remain in Northampton.

"There was clearly lingering sentiment against her," says Marshall. The family moved back to Springfield in 1679 or 1680, and there Mary Parsons lived out her days.

Marshall found that the work she did on the project deepened her understanding of the allure stories of witchcraft continue to hold.

"I think it's because we want to think it's all over," she says, but the truth is that there are always things that can't be explained. And it's always easy to start rumors, whether the target is a neighborhood woman in the 1650s, she said, or a supposed Communist sympathizer in the 1950s.

Marshall was also intrigued to come across a fascinating postscript to the Parsons-Bridgman feud. As it turned out, Mary Parsons' granddaughter married Sarah Bridgman's grandson in 1711.

What the two grandmothers thought about the marriage is lost to history. But Marshall said she likes to think that "this was a reconciliation" - or at least a sign that they had all finally let go of the past.

Suzanne Wilson can be reached at swilson@gazettenet.com.

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