Connecticut River Valley List: (and sister lists) How many of you know that there was a witchcraft frenzy in Springfield,Hampden County,Mass in 1650/1.......40 years before the Salem witchcraft trials ? "Ironically 2 women of the same name: Mary Parsons was involved. One was Mary Lewis who married a Hugh Parsons The other, Mary Bliss who married Joseph Parsons Mary(Lewis) was tried in 1651. She was a Catholic who had been separated from a previous husband for 7 years and got permission to remarry, and the 2nd husband was Hugh Parson who owned a sawmill and was a brick mason. Mary and Hugh had 2 children who died in infancy. It's suspected that the 2nd death drove Mary out of her mind. She accused Hugh of witchcraft and murder. Hugh was also accused by another woman in town who was convienced that Hugh put a spell on her. Mary later broke downand confessed to consorting with Satan and to killing her own baby, and was sent to Boston for trial. At the time,according to Picard, a historian at the Storrowton Village in West Springfield, there had been several stories of mothers in Connecticut smothering their babies and the courts took a hard line on them. Mary Lewis Parsons was condemned to death, not for witchcraft but for infanticide. When the jailers came to take Mary to the scaffold, she was so ill she couldnt move, they came back the next day and she was dead ( doesnt say how). In the meantime, Mary's husband Hugh had been in jail for a year and the jury convicted him of witchcraft but the court in Boston acquitted him in 1652. The other Mary(Bliss)and her husband Joseph Parsons, lived in the area what is now Longmeadow. This Mary apparently was high handed and haughty. Her speech was "forcible and she had domineering ways". When they lived in Springfield, Mary had walked around at night, and exhibiting other odd behavior. She would fall down, dead in her tracks and wake up failing around and not know where she was. (today she probably would be diagnosed as epilepsy or sleep walking but in those days..) Mary and Joseph moved to Northampton in 1656 and lived to regret it. Stories began to circulate about Mary from a visitor from Springfield. Before long, Mary was tried for witchcraft. after her acquittal, Joseph sued for slander the woman most responsible for spreading the rumors about his wife.....that woman was SARAH BRIDGEMAN, who was arrested, fined 10 pounds, and ordered to retract her statments. But the bitterness continued to simmer between the Parsons and Bridgeman families, flared up again in 1672 when Sarah's daughter died after only 2 years of marriage...Sarah had been dead for 2 years by then but the bereaved bridegroom seized the chance to accuse Mary(Bliss)Parsons of witchcraft for a second time. Mary was in Boston prison for 3 years before she was brought to trial, she spoke on her own behalf and was acquitted. By the time Salem was swept up in the witchcraft horror of 1692, Springfield had grown out of the witch scare. The 2 Marys are buried in the old cemetery in Hadley , lie near the judge who acquitted them. Mary "Molly" Webster , of Hadley, whose sour disposition was probably aggravated by the poverty that had befallen her and her husband. She was accused in 1683. in 1685, a gang of boys in the community decided to take matters in their own hands. They dragged Webster out of her house in winter, hanged her until she was nearly dead, rolled her around in the snow, buried her in it and left her for dead. Incredibly, Molly Webster survived and lived another 11 years...maybe out of sheer crankiness." There is much more but due to copyright laws, I just took sections of the story . If anyone wants to read the about it, the sources are listed below. Many early settlers of Springfield are in the books. Resources: Springfield Union-News: Aug 18,1999 (newspaper) Meadow City Milestones by Alice Manning: no date given A History of Springfield for the Young: 1923 Cynthia listmanager Ct-River-Valley