Half-Hanged Mary is one of the strangest true stories in New England, and most folks have never heard of it. Long before anybody in Salem started pointing fingers, a poor, sharp-tongued old woman named Mary Webster of Hadley, Massachusetts, was tried for witchcraft, found not guilty, and then hauled out into the snow by her own neighbors anyway. They left her for dead. She didn't die. That's how she got the nickname that stuck for more than 300 years: Half-Hanged Mary, the Witch of Hadley.
Welcome back to New England Myths & Legends, where we dig into the weird, spooky and flat-out unbelievable stories from all six states. This one's got a jury in Boston, a famous Puritan preacher, a mystery illness, a cat-sized "something" in a sickbed, and a modern twist involving one of the most famous novels of the last fifty years. Grab a blanket. It gets chilly.
Who Was Mary Webster?
She was born Mary Reeve in England, sometime around 1617 to 1624 depending on who's counting. Her family ended up in Springfield, out in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1670 she married William Webster, and the two of them settled in the little Puritan town of Hadley, about 20 miles up the Connecticut River from Springfield. He was 53. She was around 46.
The Websters were dirt poor. They lived in a small house and sometimes needed help from the town just to get by. And Mary, by every account, did not suffer fools. Sylvester Judd's old History of Hadley says she was "despised and sometimes ill-treated," that she "was soured with the world, and rendered spiteful towards some of her neighbors," and that "they began to call her a witch." In a 1600s Puritan town, being poor, old, mouthy and female was a dangerous combo.
The Hadley Rumor Mill
Once the witch talk started, the stories piled up the way stories always do in a small town. According to local lore, Mary could put a spell on cattle and horses so they flat-out refused to walk past her house. The drivers' solution? Go knock on her door and rough her up until the animals moved along. Real neighborly.
Another tale says that when Mary walked into a neighbor's house, a hen tumbled down the chimney and landed right in a pot of boiling water. Mary supposedly had a scald mark on her body afterward, which folks decided was proof. In their eyes it wasn't a burn, it was a "witch's mark." You can see how this was going to go.
On Trial in Boston, 1683
On March 27, 1683, the county magistrates over in Northampton examined Mary Webster "on suspicion of witchcraft." They decided the case was above their pay grade and shipped her to Boston, where she sat in jail waiting for her day in court.
In May 1683 she went before Governor Simon Bradstreet, Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth and the colony's assistants. The indictment accused her of making a covenant with the Devil, who supposedly visited her "in the shape of a warraneage," a word for a black, cat-like animal of the woods, and of having "imps" and marks on her body. Spooky stuff on paper.
Here's the thing, though: the jury didn't buy it. On June 1, 1683, Mary Webster was found not guilty and sent home to Hadley. Case closed, right? Not even close.
The Strange Sickness of Philip Smith
About a year and a half later, in the bitter winter of 1684 into 1685, one of Hadley's most important men got very sick. Lieutenant Philip Smith was about 50 and wore every hat in town: church deacon, member of the General Court, county justice, selectman and lieutenant of the local troop. Part of his job was looking after the town's poor, which put him in regular contact with, you guessed it, Mary Webster. They didn't get along, and Smith let it be known he was afraid she'd do him harm.
When he fell ill in early January, he blamed her. And according to the accounts that came later, his sickroom turned into something out of a ghost story. Pots of medicine emptied themselves. People heard scratching around the bed while his hands and feet were being held still. Some swore they saw fire on the bed that vanished when they started talking about it. Others felt something moving around in the blankets, "as big as a cat," that nobody could ever grab.
The Night the "Brisk Lads" Came
A group of Hadley's young men decided that if Mary was the cause, then "disturbing" her would give Smith some relief. The Puritans had a belief that harassing a suspected witch could break her spell. So they went to her house, more than once. Cotton Mather later claimed the only times Smith slept peacefully during his whole illness were while those young men were bothering her.
Colonial governor and historian Thomas Hutchinson described what happened in his history of Massachusetts Bay, and it's chilling: "a number of brisk lads tried an experiment upon the old woman. Having dragged her out of the house, they hung her up until she was near dead, let her down, rolled her sometime in the snow, and at last buried her in it, and there left her; but it happened that she survived, and the melancholy man died."
Read that last line again. She survived. He didn't. Philip Smith died in January 1685, and Mary Webster climbed out of a snowbank and went right on living.
A Body That Wouldn't Cool Down
The legend didn't end with Smith's death. The jury that looked over his body reported a swelling on his chest, bruises on his back and several holes "that seemed made with awls." Witnesses said that even though he died on a Saturday morning in one of the coldest winters anybody could remember, his body was still warm on Sunday afternoon. By Monday his face was discolored, and people said they heard strange noises in the room where he lay. In Mather's words, the whole thing "filled all those parts of New England with astonishment."
Enter Cotton Mather
If that name rings a bell, it should. Cotton Mather was the Boston minister who became one of the biggest cheerleaders of the Salem witch trials. He wrote up Philip Smith's death in his 1689 book Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, and printed it again in his giant 1702 history, Magnalia Christi Americana. Mather named Smith but never named Mary. He didn't have to. Everybody in the Connecticut River Valley knew exactly who he meant.
That 1689 book came out just three years before the panic in Salem, where 20 people were executed in 1692 and 1693. Historians still argue about how much books like Mather's helped light that fire, but it's hard to read the Hadley story and not see the sparks.
Eleven More Years in Hadley
Here's the part that makes Mary Webster a legend instead of just a sad footnote. After being tried, jailed, acquitted, attacked and left in the snow, she kept on living in Hadley for about eleven more years. She died in 1696, around the age of seventy, and the nickname Half-Hanged Mary followed her the whole way. You've got to respect it. That is one tough old Yankee.
It's also worth knowing that western Mass had its own string of witch accusations before Salem. Over in neighboring Northampton, Mary Bliss Parsons was accused in the 1670s and also cleared. Mary Webster's case is one of the best-documented of the bunch, mostly because of how wild the Smith story got.
The Handmaid's Tale Connection
Now for the twist. Canadian author Margaret Atwood grew up hearing family stories that Mary Webster was her ancestor. Atwood once joked that "on Monday, my grandmother would say Mary was her ancestor, and on Wednesday she would say she wasn't... So take your pick."
Either way, Atwood took it seriously. She dedicated her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale to Mary Webster, and in 1995 she published a poem called "Half-Hanged Mary," written in Mary's voice through that long night hanging in the cold. So the next time somebody's binge-watching the TV show, you can tell them it's got roots in a little farm town on the Connecticut River.
Legend vs. History: What's Actually True?
Unlike a lot of the legends in this series, the bones of this one are real and on the record:
- True: Mary Webster was examined in Northampton, tried in Boston and found not guilty in 1683.
- True: Philip Smith died in January 1685 after blaming her for his illness, and Cotton Mather wrote it up as witchcraft.
- True: Hutchinson recorded that young men hanged her, buried her in snow and left her, and that she survived and lived until 1696.
- Folklore: The cattle spells, the hen down the chimney, the fire on the bed and the cat-sized thing in the blankets are stories told by scared neighbors, not proof of anything.
The real horror isn't a witch in the woods. It's a whole town deciding an old woman was guilty after a jury already said she wasn't.
Rep the Legend
If you love New England's spooky side as much as we do, our Wicked Witch Hat Sign T-Shirt is basically made for people who tell this story at parties. Want something you can wear all year to the corn maze, the haunted hayride, or just the Dunks drive-thru on a foggy morning? Grab the Wicked Spooky Witch Skyline T-Shirt.
And if you're hungry for more witchy history, don't miss our post on the Witch of Wellfleet and Black Sam Bellamy out on the Cape, or the tale of the Bristol Witches.
The Witch Who Wouldn't Stay Down
Mary Webster never cast a spell, as far as anybody can prove. What she did was survive: poverty, gossip, a witch trial, a mob and a New England January buried in a snowbank. That's why, three centuries later, folks in the Pioneer Valley still tell the story of Half-Hanged Mary. Some legends are about monsters. This one's about a stubborn old woman who just wouldn't quit.
Stay wicked spooky, Massachusetts,
Ryan & the Chowdaheadz Crew