Spooky tree in fall
The rain and leaves pour down hard as Halloween approaches on a gray October day. The chill in the air is more like November. If you are an archaeologist planning to work around Saratoga Springs, Ballston Spa, or Schenectady on Phase 1 and 2 archaeological surveys, the dreariness of the day lingers with the clouds and rain. This is the season of hauntings and magic. Magic once counted as black (perhaps wrongly) in little villages with ancient traditions, if we are guided by the history of witch trials.
There is a certain claim, made by the physician turned local historian Frank Bertangue Green, M.D, that the last witch trial in New York State took place in Clarkstown, Rockland County, sometime in the early 19th century. He isn’t clear exactly when. Apparently, the details are lost in the mists of a time barely remembered. Indeed, Dr. Green, writing in 1886, was not a witness to these events and provided no documentary references supporting it. He cited witnesses from that time, people who told him what happened, but there are no specific witnesses mentioned, undermining this narrative as an example of oral history. Almost any witness in 1886 must have been very young during the witch trial, although Dr. Green may have been remembering conversations from decades before.
I am going to call this story a legend. I will steer away from another term, “tall tale,” as much as possible (but, by the end, not completely). However, there likely is a true sequence of events underlying this narrative. The supernatural aspect of the story (in Dr. Green’s view) was constructed to explain real misfortunes that occurred some two hundred years ago.
One of the truths of this legend is that it reveals the clash between the medieval tradition of old Dutch New York and the arrival of the modern 19th century world view, powered by education and held by men of the cloth (such as the local dominie) and men of the law (such as the local jurists). They would not have tolerated the behavior of the witch prosecutors. And so, the witch allegation and its prosecution resided with a secretly gathered mob rather than the public offices of morality and justice.
The accused witch was Jane Kanniff, the widow of a Scottish physician (who was probably widowed twice as she had a son, Lowrie, from a previous marriage). The local people named her Naut Kanniff, and she carries this name throughout Dr. Green’s recounting of events. Jane was a medicinal herbalist of eccentric dress and behavior, said to be increasingly anti-social. She became a target of the witchcraft accusations after a series of incidents in which housewives’ butter churned badly, and a cow failed to produce milk after being found standing in a wagon, with no apparent explanation. Moreover, Green states that some housewives found the image of a horseshoe burned on the interior bottom of their butter churns.
A group of “reputable citizens” organized to prosecute the witch trial and appointed a local physician as judge (in an obvious conflict of interest since Jane was an herbalist. She could, therefore, be seen as the doctor’s competition). The “trial” was not the sort in which testimony and defense are heard and a reasoned judgment is made. It was, rather, a trial in a different tradition. In order to determine whether Jane was guilty or innocent of witchcraft, she would be balanced on one side of a scale with a bible used as the counterweight. She was brought to a scale at a local mill for this purpose. If Jane outweighed the bible, she would be found innocent. If the ancient bible, covered with board and bound in brass, outweighed Jane, she would be found guilty.
The outcome of this trial is not really known with respect to accurate details, but there is a recorded result, nonetheless, based apparently on Dr. Green’s witness reports. While tall tales may have crept into other parts of this story, the end resounds with a fantastically tall claim. When the trial by weight was conducted, the verdict was strongly in Jane’s favor. So much so that the bible flew “to the ceiling with a mighty bound.”
Thankfully for Jane, Dr. Green’s witnesses did not need to remember the penalty for witchcraft.
Reference cited
Green, Frank Bertangue, M.D.
1886 The History of Rockland County. A. S. Barnes and Company, New York. Reprinted by the Historical Society of Rockland County, 1989.
