Olde Witchcraft Revisited

East Hampton Village in 1657 was, needless to say, a very different place from what it is now, but even so, a series of events in February that year that alarmed and aroused residents — a strange case of alleged witchcraft — still holds fascination today.

The case of Goody Garlick, an East Hampton “goodwife” who was accused of putting a hex on a young woman, leading to her death, will be the subject of a daylong forum on Saturday sponsored by the East Hampton Historical Society.

The favored daughter of Lion Gardiner, Elizabeth Gardiner Howell, who had settled in East Hampton Village after coming onto the mainland from Gardiner’s Island with a handful of tenants and servants, died shortly after claiming to see “a black thing” at the foot of her bed.

The married 16-year-old fell ill on a winter night, complaining at first of a headache and a cold. She quickly became feverish.

Some time later, according to an article by Bernice Marshall in the March 1965 Long Island Courant, reprinted in The Star in 1985, in which historical records are cited, the young Mrs. Howell “cried out ‘a witch a witch, now you come to torture [me] because I spoke two or three words against you.’ ”

Her father was sent for. He, Elizabeth’s husband, Arthur Howell, and two friends were keeping watch over the young woman’s bed when she screamed about the “black thing” and began to strike out at it, crying that she was bewitched.

The next day, when her mother arrived, she repeated the claim and said that she had seen Goody Garlick at the foot of the bed. She complained that she was being pricked with pins and said Goody Garlick had come to torment her.

Those gathered by Mrs. Howell’s bedside as she lay unconscious said they began to hear scratching sounds at the bed and the sounds of stones being thrown in the room, but could see nothing. It frightened them, they later testified. Several of the women tending her said that a pin had been removed from her mouth, when no pin had been there earlier, when Elizabeth had been given some food.

Both occurrences, of stone throwing and pinpricks, had been cited in cases of alleged witchcraft in England not long before.

Soon after Elizabeth Howell died, the three East Hampton Town magistrates of the time, Thomas Baker, Thomas Mulford, and John Hand, began to hear sworn testimony about the case and about Goody Garlick.

Goody Garlick was not trusted by the other women of the village, it came out — and she owned a black cat. Hearsay piled up. Those who testified recounted events, some thirdhand, that tied Goody Garlick to unfortunate occurrences, such as the deaths of two infants.

At a town meeting on March 19, 1657, residents decided that the magistrates, who were going to Connecticut to have East Hampton brought under the regional government, should deliver Goody Garlick to the authorities there for a trial before a higher court.

A jury of 12, along with Connecticut’s colonial governor, John Winthrop, and Thomas Wells, the deputy governor, indicted the East Hampton housewife, under penalty of death, but she was found not guilty at a trial in Hartford, Conn., in May of 1658. Records of the testimony survive.

The strange case, which took place only eight years after East Hampton’s founding, has engendered much study and interest over the years, including, in 1996, a modern-day re-enactment of the trial with East Hampton attendees serving as the jury.

The program on Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Session House of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church on Main Street, will feature presentations by Walter Woodward, a Connecticut state historian, Hugh King, an East Hampton historian and the town crier, Loretta Orion, a cultural anthropologist who wrote “Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived,” an ethnography of contemporary witchcraft, and Richard Barons, the director of the East Hampton Historical Society, along with Daniel Cohen and Aimee Webb.

Advance registration for “East Hampton’s Witchcraft Case 1657: A Conference” has been requested through the historical society’s website or by phone. The cost is $50, which includes a hot lunch.