The Massachusetts Review
Anna Smith
October 15, 2019
Mary Webster’s troubles started not long after what non-native historians typically refer to as Metacom’s (or King Philip’s) War—America’s most devastating civil war if judged in terms of deaths per capita. This conflict included an attack on Hadley in 1675, and it seems likely that the witchcraft scares were at least in part related to fears stemming from these conflicts. You don’t have to be a trauma expert to imagine that settlers in Massachusetts, just a decade later, might have still been a bit unhinged.
It is in Hutchinson’s history, written some years after the actual events, that we first hear of the hanging of Mary Webster. He writes that a group of “brisk lads” went to her house, hanged her till she was near death (did they believe she was dead?), then cut her down, rolled her into a snow bank, and left her there.
But Hutchinson ends on a cheerful note, “It happened that she survived and the melancholy man died.”
Apparently, she lived another eleven years and became known as “Half-Hanged Mary.” In 1985, Margaret Atwood dedicated her novel The Handmaid’s Tale to Mary Webster, her ancestor, and ten years later, wrote a poem to “Half-Hanged Mary.” The resurgent popularity of Atwood’s novel and its Hulu series, as well as the anticipation around the release of the novel’s sequel, tell us that this noxious strain in our collective consciousness is still in need of healing. We’re a long way from understanding everything about misogyny, groupthink, and terror.
If people already think you’re a witch, it’s hard to imagine what surviving a hanging would do for your reputation. I like to envision that first encounter with her neighbors. And yet, Judd tells us she “died in peace.”
You can watch her story here
