MARY WEBSTER (b. circa 1624, England) was a Puritan woman who resided in Hadley, Massachusetts. Due to her fiery and spiteful temper, she was despised by her neighbors, who later began calling her a witch. One account describes an incident in which a chicken fell down a chimney into a pot of boiling water. When Mary was found with fresh scald marks on her body the next day, they were assumed to be the witches’ mark.
When a local man named Philip Smith was on his deathbed, the residents of Hadley were shaken up, as Smith was an active, well-respected member of the community. The townspeople could not believe that such an upstanding man could fall so deathly ill and blamed it on Mary Webster. Just a year earlier, Mary had been in Boston on trial for witchcraft (based on incidents including the aforementioned witches’ mark), of which she had been found not guilty. With their rage targeted at Mary, a group of young men dragged her from her home. They brought her to a nearby tree where they hung her and, when her body stopped moving, buried her in the snow. Believing that Mary’s death would heal Smith of his illness, they waited for his symptoms to fade. Unfortunately for the townspeople, the next morning Smith was found dead, beaten yet still warm despite the chill of the New England winter. Later they would discover that though Philip Smith had died, Mary Webster had not. Somehow surviving the beating and hanging she took at the hands of her own neighbors, Mary lived 11 more years.
Though there are no records to confirm she had any children, Canadian author Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) believes that she is a descendant of Mary Webster. Atwood’s poem Half Hanged Mary is written from the point of view of the alleged witch. The novel The Handmaid’s Tale, also by Atwood, is dedicated to Mary Webster.
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