THE WITCHCRAFT DELUSION IN COLONIAL CONNECTICUT; 1647-1697; BY JOHN M. TAYLOR; 1908

GOODWIFE KNAP

This case is one of the most painful in the entire Connecticut list, for she impresses one as the best woman; how the just and high minded old lady had excited hate or suspicion, we cannot know.” Connecticut as a Colony

Mr. Dauenport gaue in as followeth—That Mr. Ludlow sitting with him and his wife alone, and discoursing of the passages concerning Knapps wife, the Witch and her execution, said that she came downe from the ladder (as he understood it), and desired to speak with him alone, and told him who was the witch spoken of. New Haven Colonial Record

Shortly after this, a poor simple minded woman living in Fairfield, by the name of Knap, was suspected of witchcraft. She was tried, condemned and sentenced to be hanged. SCHENCK'S History of Fairfield

This was one of the most notable of the witchcraft cases. It stands among the early instances of the infliction of the death penalty in Connecticut; the victim was presumably a woman of good repute, and not a common scold, an outcast, or a harridan; it is singularly illustrative of witchcraft's activities and their grasp on the lives of the best men and women, of the beliefs that ruled the community, and of the crude and revolting practices resorted to in the punishments of the condemned, and especially since in its later developments it involved in controversy and litigation two of the great characters in colonial history, Rev. John Davenport, one of the founders of New Haven, and Roger Ludlow, Deputy Governor of Massachusetts and Connecticut.[I] Goodwife Knapp of Fairfield was suspicioned. That was enough to set the villagers agog with talk and gossip and scandal about the unfortunate woman, which poisoned the wells of sober thought and charitable purpose, and swiftly ripened into a formal accusation and indictment.

Pending her trial the prisoner was committed to the house of correction or common jail for the safe keeping of refractory persons and criminals.

What terrors of mind and spirit must have waited on this “simple minded” woman, in the cold, gloomy, and comfortless prison, probably built of rough logs, with a single barred window and massive iron studded door, a ghost haunted torture chamber, in charge of some harsh wardsmen.

Knapp was duly and truly tried, and sentenced to death by hanging, the usual mode of execution. No witch was ever burned in New England.

From the day sentence was pronounced until the hanging took place, out in Try's field beyond the Indian field, in view of the villagers, whose curiosity or thirst for horrors or whose duty led them there, this prisoner of delusion was made the object of rudest treatment, espionage, and of inhuman attempts to wring from her lips a confession of her own guilt or an accusation against some other person as a witch.

The very day of her condemnation, a self-constituted committee of women, with one man on it,—Mistress Thomas Sherwood, Goodwife Odell, Mistress Pell, and her two daughters, Goody Lockwood, and Goodwife Purdy,—visited the prison, and pressed her to name any other witch in town, and so receive such consolation from the minister as would be for her soul's welfare.

Mistress Pell seems to have been the chief spokeswoman, and each member of the committee served in some degree as an inquisitor, or exhorter, not to repentance, but to disclosures. Baited and badgered, warned and threatened, the hapless prisoner protested she was innocent, denied the charges made against her, told one of the committee to take heed the devile have not you, and also said, I must not render evil for evil.... I have sins enough allready, and I will not add this [accusing another] to my condemnation. And at last in agony of soul she made that pathetic appeal to one of her relentless tormentors, “neuer, neuer poore creature was tempted as I am tempted, pray, pray for me.

But even after death on the scaffold, the witch-hunters of the day did not refrain from their ghoulish work, but desecrated the remains of Goodwife Knapp at the grave side in their search for witch marks. All the facts during the imprisonment, execution and burial are set forth in some of the testimonies herewith given, in a chapter of related history (the evidence at the trial not being disclosed in any present record), and all of them marked by a total unconsciousness of their sinister and revolting character. No case in the history of the delusion in New England is more replete in incidents and apt illustrations, due to their fortunate preservation in the records of a lawsuit involving some of the prominent characters in that drama of religious insanity.