The Salem that wasn’t: Elizabeth Knapp, Samuel Willard and the Groton possession crisis of 1671.
Part One.
Willard and the Knapps.
Two decades before the Salem witchcraft panic, the new town of Groton, Massachusetts, had its own brush with the devil. The case began with eerie similarities: a young girl, in the household of the town’s minister, showed signs of demonic possession – and accused neighboring women of tormenting her. Yet Groton and Salem Village took drastically different courses. Different communities and different circumstances surely influenced the readiness of each town to accept the accusations. But much also hinged on individual decisions and judgments. Groton may well have been saved from calamity, and the possessed girl herself from disgrace and death, by the minister’s cautious insistence that the lying devil might falsely implicate the innocent.
Willard was then thirty-one years old, a promising preacher in his first pulpit, living respectably with his wife and two small daughters.(1) About September 1671, a local girl, sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Knapp, joined his household as a maid.(2) Within weeks, her increasingly odd behavior would mount into a full-blown “demonic possession.” Willard’s detailed account of the case – sent in manuscript to Boston sage Cotton Mather – provides the only evidence for these disturbing and revealing events.(3)
Elizabeth’s father, James Knapp, had overcome a checkered early history to become a respected founding settler of Groton in 1662, a substantial farmer and frequent town selectman.(4) Her mother, Elizabeth Warren Knapp, had apparently suffered a mental breakdown in 1658 (months after the death of her infant son, Elizabeth’s only sibling), jailed for railing and troublesome behavior; “sometimes weeping tears, she could, out of herself, speak not a word to any; sometimes weary others with much speaking.”(5) These symptoms curiously prefigure he daughter’s later “fits” – a sign, perhaps, of hereditary mental instability.
Elizabeth was about seven years old when her family moved to Groton and began to prosper. Scattered hints in Willard’s narrative tell us what little we know about her life prior to her “possession.” At one time, she attended school at Willard’s home; a girl would most likely have been taught basic reading, but not how to write or sign her name. At some point, probably when she was in her teens, her parents sent her out to work. She lived as a maid in nearby Lancaster, seemingly in the house of Willard’s father.(6) About September 1671 – some “few weeks” before the end of October – she joined Samuel Willard’s own household, again as a maid. Evidence from her fits strongly suggests that she did not care for a servant’s lifestyle.
The possession begins.
In mid-October, some two weeks before her behavior spun truly out of control, Elizabeth began acting strangely: her expression sometimes grew odd; she would shriek, then make weak excuses; she would laugh wildly, even to the point of falling down. Willard thought she might be ill, and inquired repeatedly. She insisted she was well, which made him “wonder.”
Full crisis erupted at the end of October 1671, when Willard himself was away from home. The timing may not have been mere chance. Puritan New England had suppressed All Hallows’ Eve (October 31) and All Saints’ Day (November 1), with their pagan echoes – the days when the worlds of the living and the dead drew nearest. But folk superstitions persisted in spite of Puritan doctrine, and might have influenced Elizabeth.
Sitting by the fire before going to bed, on the evening of October 30, she suddenly cried out in pain, clutching at her legs and breast, then declared she was being strangled. The next day, as the household fell into growing confusion and alarm, her behavior was still more bizarre: crying, laughing and gesturing strangely, she began claiming to see people who were not there; once, she hailed an unseen figure with “what cheer old man?” Seized by a severe fit in the nighttime, rousing the entire family, she had to be forcibly prevented from throwing herself into the fire. A string of violent outbursts followed, as three or four others had to struggle to hold her down. Amidst her writhing shrieks, she gave the first clues to the inward chaos behind her shocking behavior: she cried out about sin, misery… and money – fears and temptations.
In 17th century New England, such crazed behavior raised immediate fears of demonic possession. The furtive, spectral appearance of an “old man” would instantly call to mind Satan himself. Two decades later, alarmingly similar outbursts would spread from the minister’s house in Salem Village.
Groton vs. Salem Village.
In New England’s belief system, possessions were the devil’s recruiting tool. He would attack the vulnerable, seeking to bully or bribe them into his service. Key questions at once arose in such a case. Was the devil trying to sway Elizabeth into his service – or had he already done so? Had the girl already signed the devil’s book, swearing a covenant with Satan? Was this a direct demonic attack – or was another witch, already won by Satan, trying to increase his ranks by attacking this girl on his behalf? Was this, in short, the start of a fresh Satanic incursion, or did his agents already lurk in the community, putting the godly under siege?
Twenty-one years later, the swelling cast of accusers in Salem Village would notoriously settle on the last alternative, accusing a mounting list of neighbors of consorting with Satan. There were many reasons why such claims resonated so easily in 1692. Salem Village itself was a deeply divided community, split – as was its church – between a revanchist Puritan faction and a rival group with greater ties to commerce and modernity.(7)
And there were broader issues that help explain how easily that panic took hold and swept across Massachusetts. The massive destructive trauma of King Philip’s War (1675-76) was still fresh; it had been widely interpreted as divine punishment for the province’s declining piety – and opinions differed, after the war ended, on whether God was still angry.(8) Many still feared that the colony was losing its religious identity, as commerce waxed and church membership waned. And then, after the 1689 deposition of Edmund Andros and the Dominion of New England, following England’s rising against the authoritarian (and Catholic) James II, Massachusetts was left with no formal government. Agents had been dispatched to England to secure a new charter. But what would the colony look like once the new monarchs made their decisions? Would its religious identity be destroyed once and for all? Had James’s Catholic threat truly been repelled? In this state of crisis, doubt and fear, the prospect of an all-out Satanic invasion, a massive demonic recruitment amidst the fallen godly, seemed all too plausible to a great many people.
In Groton of 1671, the ground was clearly less fertile for such a panic. Yet witchcraft outbreaks were still possible even in less charged environments. In 1662, a Hartford, Connecticut woman began to suffer “diabolical possession.” She accused another local woman of attacking her on Satan’s behalf. The community believed it, others backed up the charge, and a panic erupted. Accusers multiplied, accusations spread; in the end, eight people were accused, and three were executed.
Knapp’s first explanation: her neighbor is a witch.
The crucial moment came very early in the Knapp case. On November 1, during a “time of intermission” in her fits, she was questioned as to the “the cause or occasion” of her condition. This was her first chance to state the cause of her afflictions. She had, as yet, given no sign that she had personally given herself to Satan. Her credibility was surely at its peak. And at once, she turned down the same road taken at Hartford nine years before, and at Salem Village twenty-one years later.
Knapp, as Willard later described it (he himself was still away), “seemed to impeach one of the neighbors,” claiming that “she, or the devil in her likeness and habit, particularly her riding hood, had come down the chimney, stricken her that night she was first taken violently, which was the occasion of her being cast into the floor.”
Such claims were not to be treated lightly. The accused neighbor was asked to come, and subjected to a traditional test. Though the woman entered the room without Knapp’s knowledge (her eyes were almost always closed during her fits), Elizabeth “knew her very touch from any other, though no voice were uttered, and discovered it evidently by her gestures, so powerful were Satan’s suggestions in her.”
The time-honored touch test seemed to confirm the charge. Yet there was a reluctance, clearly, to accept the implications. Willard was still away, but when he recorded the incident, he noted that the accused woman was “a person (I doubt not) of sincere uprightness before God.”
Willard claimed that the disproof of the accusation in turn came from God: “Yet afterwards God was pleased to vindicate the case and justify the innocent, even to remove jealousies from the spirits of the party concerned, and [to the] satisfaction of the bystanders.” For after Knapp “went to prayer” with the accused neighbor, “she confessed that she believed Satan had deluded her, and hath never since complained of any such apparition or disturbance from the person.”
It seems most unlikely that this outcome was mere good fortune. The witnesses (Willard, unfortunately, gives no clue who was present) clearly resisted even the positive touch test. Willard suggests the woman had a godly reputation. Perhaps Elizabeth had simply fixed on the wrong target: someone she personally disliked or feared, but whose guilt did not seem credible to the community. Willard does not tell us what providences appeared to “vindicate the case” – but such subjective measures surely suggest that the onlookers were seeking an excuse to drop an unwanted suspicion. Likewise, Elizabeth surely did not go to prayer with her would-be target on her own initiative: she doubtless was guided, even pressured into that action. However befuddled her wits, she must have realized that this accusation was not going to stick.
Willard himself evidently approved of this outcome upon his return – and his description of the events contains a crucial note of warning about such accusations in general (a warning he would repeat publicly, and to his own cost, when the Salem panic spread across the province). When he describes Knapp’s original accusation, he has her claiming that the neighbor woman “or the devil in her likeness and habit” had come down the chimney and attacked her. Willard was not even present to hear her own words. It seems highly likely that this crucial qualification is Willard’s own: that the lying devil could assume the appearance of an innocent person as part of his deceptions.
Whatever the precise sequence of events, the Grotonites gathered around Knapp’s bedside had prevented a dangerous escalation – so far.
Knapp begins to turn against herself… but still tries to accuse others.
Her efforts to shift blame outside herself thwarted, Elizabeth began to turn her angst and anger against herself. Her fits continued even after the neighbor was cleared. Pressed for “the true and real occasion,” she now evaded, claiming she would speak to this or that “young person” (presumably her friends), then insisting on someone else when that person came.
But finally, on the night of November 2, she broke into “a large confession in the presence of many,” naming herself as the demonically compromised one.
She said that the devil had often appeared to her, urging her to sign “the treaty of covenant” (the pledge of her service to him), and offering “such things as suited her youthful fancy, money, silks, fine clothes, ease from labor to show her the whole world, etc.” Such temptations point rather obviously to frustration with her lot in life: indeed, she claimed the devil had first appeared three years before, “occasioned by her discontent.” At first he came only rarely, but in “those few weeks” she had dwelt with the Willards, “she seldom went out of the room into another but he appeared to her urging of her.”
Even self-accusation gave Elizabeth another chance to widen the net. Others, she now said, had signed Satan’s book of covenant, in blood – and the devil had named various persons to her. This time, however, her accusations seem to have been drawn immediate skepticism. When Willard drafted his account, he mentioned her naming of names with an uncharacteristic hint of amusement, noting that “(of some whereof we hope better things).” No steps seem to have been taken on her dubious information.
Elizabeth’s despair increases her self-accusation.
This fresh attempt at accusation having failed, Knapp turned even deeper into self-recrimination. She listed crimes the devil had urged upon her: to murder her parents, her neighbors, or Willard’s children, especially the youngest, whom she was told to throw into the fire or oven. Sometimes the temptations were minor, if revealing: once, she said, the devil had offered, if she would serve him, to bring the chips to stoke the fire – a task she plainly resented. She refused, but was terrified to find them already waiting by the hearth. Willard, indeed, remembered telling her to lay them on the fire, and seeing her turn away “in an unwonted manner.”
As her will weakened, the devil put a billhook into her hand with which to kill Willard himself, and she even went to do it when the devil told her the minister was asleep; but meeting Willard on the stairs instead, she panicked. Willard believed this, too, had happened. He remembered meeting her, her expression strange as she tried to hide something from him, though no such dire explanation had occurred to him. The devil had also urged her to kill herself. Once, he tempted her with such alluring sights down the well that she almost jumped; but she “was by God’s providence prevented.” There is a sad pathos in this statement, as she tried to convince her listeners – and herself – that God still considered her worth saving.
Willard quipped that her full confession was “too tedious to recollect”: this outpouring of adolescent angst, both self-pitying and self-accusatory, evidently grew wearying to her audience. Driving in on the key point, they pressed “whether she had not consented to a covenant with the devil.” She denied it “with solemn assertions,” insisting she had “never so much as consented to discourse with him” through his many appearances, and had only once before that night offered him the greeting “what cheer, old man?”
Yet her claims became ever more confused. She said that by God’s providence the devil always appeared “frightful” to her. But she also said that when she came to Willard’s house for school, before she dwelt there, she delayed going home in the evening until it was dark – which Willard indeed remembered – because the devil had persuaded her to let him accompany her home, and she could not resist going to him. Willard noted that this “seemed contradictory.”
In mid-October, Willard remembered, Knapp and another maid both saw a man with a great white neck cloth looking in at the window, and ran off in a fright to tell the others; when one went to look, the man was gone. Knapp now admitted it was the devil coming to her. She said her shrieks over the last two weeks came when he suddenly appeared to her, that he made her give the lying excuses she had offered, and pushed her into her bouts of forced laughter.
Knapp still denies the ultimate crime: giving herself to Satan.
Elizabeth’s self-loathing seemed to deepen as her fits continued. She accused herself of “many sins”: disobedience to her parents and to ordinances, attempts to kill herself and others. But still, she firmly denied signing a covenant with Satan. Willard cautiously observed (still by second-hand report) that this insistence “seemed fair, especially in that it was attended with bitter tears, self-condemnations, good counsels given to all about her, especially the youth then present” – a hint that she had made herself the center of attention for her peer group – “and an earnest desire of prayers.” With Willard still absent, she asked for the minister she knew from nearby Lancaster, who gave her counsel and prayers; but the fits continued.
Willard returned home on Friday November 3, and found Knapp in this state. He could get nothing from her through Saturday; she fell into fits any time he approached, continuing to harp on money and sin. Yet afterwards she could recollect everything said to her. Willard found this “noteworthy” – presumably as it showed a mind still conscious beneath the afflictions, unlike a purely physical seizure. Pressed to explain her outcries, she said the devil proffered temptations to woo her, and sin and misery to terrify her; and she was surrounded by hideous devils.
Physical, or diabolical?
On Sunday, a physician came. Her attendants had already twice doubted her accusations of others. The doctor went further, doubting supernatural explanations entirely. He “judged a main part of her distemper to be natural, arising from the foulness of her stomach and corruptness of her blood, occasioning fumes in her brain, and strange fantasies.” She was moved home to her parents’ house, and treated with “physic” for the next week. Her fits became less violent, and there was some hope she might recover.
But Willard was unconvinced by the doctor’s explanation, and far from sure Elizabeth was recovering. A fast day was held with her, but he feared it had not much helped. She “expressed hopes that the devil had left her,” but Willard found “little ground to think so,” as “she remained under such extreme senselessness of her own estate.”
She continued in “some moderate fits” until November 15, when a day of prayer was held with her. But her fits then increased: her tongue now pressed so hard to the roof of her mouth, for hours at a time, that others could not pry it loose with their fingers. That, of course, was ominous. If she grew worse after prayer, Satan could only be fighting their efforts. For over a week, Knapp continued like this, only adding the fresh confession that she had traveled twice from Groton to Lancaster with the devil, who took the form of a black dog with eyes in its back.
Still, she continued to insist that the devil was angry with her because she had refused to sign his covenant. One morning, she declared that “God is a father,” and the next that “God is my father.” But Willard suspected trickery. These “(it is to be feared) were words of presumption, put into her mouth by the adversary” – by Satan.
Willard’s fears grow, and Knapp’s denials weaken.
Elizabeth had repeatedly denied pledging herself to Satan. But as her symptoms failed to abate, Willard grew more doubtful. Even if, as she said, she had not signed the devil’s book, he “pressed whether she never verbally promised to covenant with him”; she still “stoutly denied” it. But she did now admit “that she had had some thoughts so to do.” Her defenses were beginning to weaken.
Severe fits returned on Sunday the 26th; six persons were barely able to restrain her. She ran about the house yelling and sighing despairingly. The nonplussed physician now “consented that the distemper was diabolical”; he broke off further treatment and advised “extraordinary fasting.” More ministers were sent for. On Monday and Tuesday morning the girl began barking like a dog and bleating like a calf. She barked when anyone passed the house, even if those within heard nothing – her attendants believed, in short, that she had acquired not only the sound but the extra senses of the animal, something surely beyond human agency.
Elizabeth began to speak again on Tuesday the 28th. Finally expressing “a great seeming sense of her state,” she bitterly lamented her sins and begged prayers. Willard again pressed whether she had omitted anything about her relations with Satan, but she insisted she had told all. She claimed that in her fits the devil had “assaulted her in many ways,” chasing her down, sitting on her breast, offering her “ease and great matters”; he had told her she had already gone so far that she had best serve him, and that her time was nearly done unless she did. Once she urged her attendants to “make our peace with God and use our time better than she had done. The party advised her also to bethink herself of making peace, she replied, it is too late for me.”(9)
Three other ministers attended the next day, but Knapp “returned to a sottish and stupid kind of frame” despite all attempts to rouse her. Her fits faded, but she subsided into melancholy after a day or two, lamenting that such pains were taken for her yet did her no good.
Elizabeth, despairing, edges closer to the final confession.
Self-pitying despair seemed to mark a descent into still deeper self-accusation. On Monday December 4, she began to relate more “to some neighbors there present” about her dealings with the devil. She now said he had first appeared to her five years before, and had gradually built from apparitions into dreadful assaults. And she now declared “that after many assaults she had resolved to seal a covenant with Satan, thinking she had better do it than be thus followed by him.” With a final shred of self-justification, she attributed this fateful resolve to harassment, not her own desire.
She said that once, when she lived at Lancaster, Satan appeared to her and desired her blood – and that she would have complied but had no knife. By the providence of God, Willard’s father (in whose house, it seems, she was then a maid) had twice interposed and prevented her gaining the blade. Afterwards, she saw it sticking in the top of the barn (where the devil, she presumably meant, had left it in a fit of pique).
Elizabeth “declared against herself her unprofitable life… and how justly God had thus permitted Satan to handle her;” her attendants, she lamented, “little knew what a sad case she was in.” Willard later queried her about these latest revelations. She expressed hope the devil had left her, but Willard, unsatisfied, again pressed whether there was a covenant. Moving a step further, she now claimed that she had been ready to commit, but she earnestly insisted the providence of God had prevented it.
A final attempt at accusation.
That same day, now on the cusp of full self-destruction, she made one last and desperate attempt to cast the blame on another. Going into new fits, probing about the room and peering out the window, she claimed to see a witch, first in the form of a dog with a woman’s head, then in the form of a woman – whose “shape and habit” she described – that went up the chimney and away. Willard reserved judgment on her claim of a paw mark left by Satan in the chimney’s clay, “though something there was, as I myself saw, in the chimney in the same place where she declared the foot was set to go up.”
She continued in fits for two more days, claiming to be under assault; observers sometimes feared she would be strangled. Finally, she declared that if the woman she had seen going up the chimney were apprehended, she would be relieved of all her troubles – adding the ominous detail that the devil appeared with this woman in the form of a little boy. One the night of December 7, Elizabeth’s father went and fetched “the woman impeached by her.” Willard, “being desired to be present,” observed that Elizabeth “was violently handled, and lamentably tormented by the adversary” – Satan – uttering “unusual shrieks” the instant the accused woman entered the room, even though her eyes were closed fast.
Willard had clearly approved of those that had rejected Elizabeth’s first accusation of a neighbor, at the start of the crisis and before his return. Now he remained cautious: “but having experience of such former actings, we made nothing of it but waited the issue.” They appealed to god “to signify something whereby the innocent might be acquitted or the guilty discovered; and he answered our prayers, for by two evident and clear mistakes” the woman accused “was cleared, and then all prejudices ceased.”
Unfortunately, Willard did not elaborate on these “mistakes,” but his choice of words suggests that he and the others found inconsistencies and contradictions in Knapp’s charges. Again, it seems, they were strongly predisposed to disbelief – they were looking for such errors. Knapp gave up her attack on the woman, and “never more to this day hath impeached her of any apparition.” A similar caution in Salem Village – a belief that the devil might impersonate the innocent while attacking the possessed – would have changed the course of history.
But Elizabeth Knapp, her accusations thwarted, had no one left to turn upon but herself.
To be continued.
Notes:
(1) Willard was born in Concord in January 1640; a 1659 graduate of Harvard College, he came to Groton in 1663 and was ordained in 1664. (Biographical details on Samuel Willard and the Knapp family derive from John Demos’s search of early public records; Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 111-115.)
(2) Elizabeth Knapp was born in Watertown, Massachusetts in April 1655. She relocated with her family to Groton at its founding in 1662.
(3) Willard never published his narrative, but it survived in Mather’s papers. Mather himself published a summary of the case in one of his own books, but Willard’s description remains the only primary account. A full transcription appears in David D. Hall, ed., Witch-hunting in Seventeenth Century New England: a Documentary History, 1638-1693, second edition, Northeastern University Press, 1999, pp. 197-212.
(4) James Knapp was born c. 1627 in England, and brought to Watertown, Massachusetts as a small child. He married Elizabeth Warren in Watertown in 1654. James was accused of adultery in 1656, though not convicted; he confessed to drunkenness in 1657, and was implicated (though not charged) in thefts committed by his older brother. He was elected a selectman almost every year from 1665 to 1692.
(5) Elizabeth Warren Knapp was born in England, c. 1629. Her father became prominent in Watertown, but his standing declined after 1650 due to trouble with the law for nonconformist religious views, including opposition to infant baptism and sympathy towards Quakers, whom he was accused of harboring. Elizabeth Warren Knapp gave birth to a a son in May 1657, but he died at the age of four months. “About 1658,” a Boston diarist described the disruptive behavior and imprisonment of a woman named Knapp. He recorded no first name, but John Demos was able to locate only three other female Knapps in eastern Massachusetts records at this time – Elizabeth’s mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law, none of whom left any record of mental aberration. Also, the diarist reported that her railing sometimes ranted against Quakers, sometimes pleaded for them, a likely echo of Elizabeth’s father’s legal difficulties involving members of that then-detested sect. Demos, Entertaining Satan, p. 113, and n. 92, p. 439.
(6) Willard’s father moved to Lancaster about 1665, when Elizabeth was ten. Willard’s narrative does not tell us at what age she began working, but it seems to suggest that she resided in Lancaster shortly before moving to Willard’s own house.
(7) This pattern, famously identified by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: the Social Origins of Witchcraft (Harvard University Press, 1974), has been challenged as oversimplified, but an element of truth is undeniable.
(8) The lingering trauma of King Philip’s War is a particular focus for Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, Knopf, 2002, which traces many links between the Salem Village participants and the 1675-76 massacres. Her central claim that the “blackness” of the devil in the Salem accusers’ accounts refers to American Indians is more debatable, as is the supposedly special linkage of the devil and dark-skinned figures in 1692; as shall be seen below, when the “devil” spoke through Elizabeth Knapp in 1671, he referred to himself as “a pretty black boy.”
(9) As was often the case in Puritan New England, people in everyday life seemed to forget the Calvinist “Covenant of Grace,” whereby damnation or salvation were determined by God before the individual was born. The rejected notion that salvation could be earned or lost through one’s actions nonetheless crops up regularly, and seemingly instinctively. Even a minister like Willard seemed not to notice.