Welcome to lore legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books. So if you're ready, let's begin. Life is a lot of things, but there's at least one constant descriptor. Life is chaotic, and truth be told, it always has been.
Think about it, for millennia our ancestors struggled their way through a world that seemed to throw a little of everything at them, seasonal changes, erratic weather, animal populations that were always on the move, and mysterious illnesses that brought death and loss before vanishing without explanation. And all of it left us looking for reasons. Now humans are great at adapting, so we learn to predict the unpredictable. We study the stars and found patterns in the year.
We found rhythm in the seasons. We even made sense of the migration patterns and waves of sickness. Because while life might be chaotic, humans are great at finding answers. Now some of those answers were rooted in observable fact.
When the snow fell in the land around us, it was winter, right? But often we had to invent reasons for the things we experienced. The gods were displeased with us, or we hadn't made the proper offering. Or as was the case with an Irish farmer back in 2020, the damaged standing stone was to blame for floods and lost livestock.
But when we started to grow up, we had to make a solution. He brought in a pair of modern druids to make things right. Fingers crossed that they were able to help. Like I said, life is chaotic.
And over the years, one of the most common ways we've explained that turmoil is by blaming a local outsider, someone who behaves suspiciously and broke the rules. And more often than not, it was someone who had a skill that seemed an awful lot like witchcraft. From barren fields and dead livestock to extreme weather and household death, witches were blamed for just about every bad thing that happened to a community. And these accusations often destroyed their reputations, their livelihood, and sometimes even their lives.
Yet, some of those social scapegoats fought back in spectacular fashion. And in doing so, they left everyone else asking a horrifying question. What if the rumors were true? I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore Legends.
We've all made mistakes. Looking back, one of the darkest blemishes on our collective history is the concept of the witch hunt. From the 15th through the 18th centuries, Europeans committed atrocity after atrocity in the name of fear. Between the rapid expansion of kingdoms making life there more and more complex, and the Protestant Reformation essentially kicking the old authorities out of many communities, Europe was struggling.
Throw in the new wave of global exploration, which introduced people to a seemingly never-ending firehose of strange and unusual discoveries, along with industrialization and scientific discovery. It's no wonder many people felt their worldview was being rocked to its core. And to keep everyone in line, the church found an enemy to rally people against. The Devil.
As a result, people were scared. And as you'd expect that paranoia drove neighbors to turn on each other every time something went wrong or failed to meet their expectations. When no logical explanation existed, it was sometimes easier to just accuse someone of casting spells against them. Now, witch hunts happened all over Europe, but France, Germany, and Switzerland were the worst offenders.
And no summary of the age of the witch hunts would be complete without mentioning everyone's favorite author to hate. A German Catholic named Heinrich Kromer. Real quick, back in 1486, Kromer published a book that he called the Malius Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches. It was a textbook that literally taught people how to spot witches in their own communities.
But of course, identification was only part of the equation. The book also contained instructions for conducting inquisitions. And worst of all, how to use torture to get confessions out of the accused. And for over a century, the Malius Maleficarum was the second most popular book in Europe, and only to the Bible.
There were other titles as well, though. Johann Weyer, a Dutch physician, published a book Defending Witches, while a French legal scholar named Jean-Boudin wrote one on the subject of witches who had made packs with a devil for their powers. And together, this trio of texts was used by many in their search for alleged witches. Now, as most of us know, women bore the brunt of these allegations, even when they had done nothing wrong.
This was an era when simply wishing another person harm was enough to get you tried before a judge. Even the folks who claimed to use their magic only for good, such as healing or providing comfort, found themselves under suspicion. Meanwhile, across the pond in North America, the colonies had their own puritanical hands full with witch hunts of their own, as seen in the case of a woman called Goody Mose, an older woman who lived in Massachusetts in the early 1800s. According to one story, her neighbors believed that she had cursed them in different ways.
They claimed that she had hexted their creams so that it wouldn't turn the butter, and that she blew out all their candles during nightly gatherings, leaving them in the dark. And yet another story, they claimed that Goody Mose had bewitched a beetle that invaded a nearby party. Once there, it flew into the faces of guests, disrupting their fun until someone finally caught it and crushed it underfoot. And at that very moment, they say, Goody Mose fell down the stairs of her home, injuring her head.
Goody Mose was only one of many colonial American women affected by the power of rumor. And if the legends are true, the horror they faced at the hands of their accusers was the stuff of nightmares. Will not Red was known to her community as Mammy. She was born in New England sometime in the early 17th century and eventually married a fisherman named Samuel Red.
Together, the couple lived in a small house beside Old Burial Hill in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Now, much of their life is a mystery to historians, but there are two things we do know. First the couple did not make a lot of money, and to supplement her husband's meager income, Mammy Red sold homemade butter. Unfortunately, her food was not well received.
Many of the people who tried it, loved it and bought it, claimed that it tasted sour once they brought it home. And second, it seems that she had no problem with putting people in their place. According to one historian, whenever someone insulted Mammy Red, she would turn around and insult them right back. She was independent and vulgar, not exactly a welcome combination in 1600s Massachusetts.
And so it should come as no surprise to learn that the people of Marblehead didn't like her. And because of that, they started spreading rumors that she was a witch. In particular, they believed that she could conjure up bloody cleavers the parents would find embedded in their children's credals. They whispered that whenever one was found at a house, death would soon come knocking for the children inside.
Mammy Red was also accused of ruining her neighbor's food. They said that she curdled their milk as soon as it hit the pale, and that she turned their butter into wool. After a while, whenever something terrible happened in Marblehead, it was automatically believed to be her fault. Her powers were rumored to be so strong, in fact, that she could make dead men walk on water after they'd been buried and cause entire ships to disappear at sea.
Ultimately, though, it wasn't the people of Marblehead who had her arrested and put on trial. No, it was a group of women from somewhere else entirely who had developed a reputation for causing trouble in their community. The Village of Salem. Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, Anne Putnam, and Mary Walcott had already accused a number of local women of being witches, but soon enough their attention turned toward Mammy Red.
After all, she was known throughout the area as being unpopular and outspoken, making her the perfect target for a witch hunt. Mammy was arrested on May 28 of 1692 and immediately taken to the Ingersoll's Tavern in Salem Village. Her arrival there sparked controversy immediately. As soon as she crossed the border into town, the four girls fell to the floor and began convulsing, and all the while they continued to accuse her of witchcraft.
A touch test was administered, in which Mammy red placed her hands on the girls to see whether or not it would affect them, and lo and behold, the moment she touched them, their convulsing stopped. To everyone in the room, the evidence was damning. She was every bit the witch they thought. Four months later, on September 14 of 1692, Mammy Red was brought to trial.
Three Marblehead residents came to testify against her, while no one stood in her defense. Among the claims, these witnesses said that she had afflicted a neighbor with constipation, and after a girl who'd been staying with her was accused of stealing from a neighbor, Mammy apparently cast a litany of curses upon that neighbor. In the end, Wilmot, Mammy Red was found guilty of a witchcraft and sentenced to death by hanging. One of eight victims who were taken to Gallows Hill on September 22, and just like every other victim executed for witchcraft in Salem, she was buried in an unmarked grave.
Of course, legend states that she's not completely gone. It's been said that the sound of her cackling can be heard among the headstones on Old burial hill near her former home, and if you recite an old chant, you might even be able to summon her yourself. But of course, even though Salem is the best-known location for witch trials in America, it's far from the only one. For a long time, other towns on the east coast held their own trials, but for some of those targets, the rumors and accusations were far worse than the trials themselves.
Out of the south, down the Atlantic coast from New England, the English established settlements in what is now the states of Maryland. It wasn't as much of a hotbed for witchy activity as Salem though. In fact, there are the 1600s and early 1700s. Only 12 people were persecuted for witchcraft there.
But of all the locations in that area, Leonard Town in St. Mary's County saw more activity than most. All told, there are three cases of witchcraft on the county's historical record, and one of them is perhaps the most tragic of them all. Her name was Moll Dyer.
Although there are no records of a woman with that exact name, a family of Dyers did live in the area during the 17th century, and there's an entry for a woman named Mary Dyer, and Moll, if you didn't know, was a common nickname for Mary. Moll Dyer was born in Devon, England in 1634. She and her brother first traveled to the West Indies in 1669, where she served as an indentured servant for eight years before moving to Maryland. Her home in St.
Mary's County wasn't much more than a rough cabin. Not a kind of placement for someone as beautiful and polite as Mary, they say. But even though she had very little money, she did her best to help her neighbors whenever she could. She often ventured into the woods for herbs, which she would use to create medicine.
Although rumor has it, she also had other tricks up her sleeve when necessary. It seems that Moll Dyer knew some healing spells, which she would cast on those in need of something stronger than her plant-based treatments. And for 30 years, she healed people and mostly kept to herself. But then, in the winter of 1697, everything changed.
According to the story, that was when a blizzard blew into town, causing the temperatures to plummet. Sheep and cattle froze to death in the fields, while colonists died of unknown illnesses. And because of the panic that caused, the people of St. Mary's County needed answers.
Looking back, we can speculate that it might have been influenza, but back then they were driven by fear and paranoia, and at the center of those feelings was Moll Dyer. Rumors quickly spread that the harsh winter was a result of a curse by her on the community. Why they didn't say. But after some deliberation, the people decided that it was time to put a stop to her so-called white magic.
They didn't arrest her, though, or drag her into a courtroom to defend herself. Instead, with torches clutched in their hands, like some sort of 1930s horror film, The Angry Mob marched to her shack in the woods and set it on fire. And Moll was left to die. A literal trial by fire.
But little did her neighbors know, Moll got away. She fled into the woods and vanished. Days later, her fate was finally revealed. A young boy had been out searching the woods for some runaway cattle when he came across a horrifying sight.
Moll's frozen body. She had been kneeling on a rock, with her arm reaching angrily toward the sky. In the years following her death, farmers in the area noticed that their crops had become almost barren as though Moll had cursed them with her dying breath. It's been rumored that her ghost also haunts the woods where she died, usually seen on the coldest nights of the year, a night just like the one that claimed her life.
For centuries, the true location of the rock where she had died remained a mystery. But it was finally found in 1968 by writer Philip H. Love and a local grocer. And despite weighing nearly 900 pounds, the boulder was moved to the grounds of Tudor Hall, the home of the St.
Mary's County Historical Society. And today, it sits under thick plexiglass for protection. But it's not the rock that needs protecting from the elements. Now, the cover is set to protect visitors from the rock.
They say the stone still bears the imprints of Moll Dyer's hands and knees, and anyone who places their hands in those same spots will become sick or injured soon after. In 2021, Leonard Town declared February 26th the beat Moll Dyer Day, a day to not only honor the legend, but also to help spread kindness and put an end to bullying. A lesson, I think, that Moll Dyer's neighbors should have learned. Humans love finding scapegoats.
Whenever life hands us chaos or confusion we have, for as long as we've been around, gone looking for someone to blame. And all too frequently the excuse we've used is our fear of evil individuals. In an era when the yield of your crops was literally a matter of life or death, or when illness constantly took the lives of children and adults, it was so very easy to be afraid. Life seemed to teeter on the edge of an abyss, and any ill wind might send us over.
The more I learned about history, the more confident I am that we shouldn't necessarily blame people back then for being afraid. But how they use that fear? Well, that's another story, especially when it drove them to destroy the lives of the people that made easy targets. And it wasn't just isolated to New England.
In fact, talk to anyone in the South and you'll probably hear a bit of bitterness that Salem gets all the attention from students of which trials, because there are plenty of stories down there to keep us busy. Take for example one final legend that comes to us from Yazu, Mississippi. Yazu was founded in 1826 and named after the river it's situated alongside of. And if the stories are to be believed, it was also home to a witch known creatively as the Witch of Yazu.
And her story goes a little something like this. She lived near the river and used to lure the local fishermen to her huts where she would torture and kill them before hiding their bones inside. But on May 25th of 1884, the sheriff showed up and discovered the grisly evidence of her crimes, so she fled into the swamp. When the authorities finally found her, she was trapped in sinking and quicksand.
But her final words weren't a cry for help. In 20 years, she told them, I will return and burn this town to the ground. Her body was retrieved and buried in Glenwood Cemetery, and large chains were wrapped around her grave, perhaps to keep her spirit contained. And as one might expect, life moved on for the people of Yazu, and they mostly forgot about her.
Many years later, on a windy spring morning, a fire broke out, and everything seemed to go wrong despite their best efforts. The blaze had spread before the volunteer fire team could even mount a defense. The water system failed. The winds were erratic.
And soon enough, most of the city was lost. Over 200 homes were reduced to ash that day, although thankfully, only one resident lost their life. But the most chilling change was noticed when someone ventured over to Glenwood Cemetery. It seems that the large chains that surrounded the old witch's grave had been snapped into.
And that was when someone noticed the dates of the fire and the significance it held. It was May 25th of 1904, 20 years to the day, since the witch of Yazu's tragic death, and the curse, she cast upon the town. I truly hope you enjoy today's exploration of the dark legends found at the intersection of desperate people and deep superstition. While witch accusations often feel like a European thing, it's clear that they take root wherever humans go.
But we're not done just yet. I've got one last tale to tell you about tragedy at the center of supernatural scapegoating. Stick around through this brief sponsor break, to hear all about it. Johannes Unius didn't have a chance.
It was no surprise that someone as rich and powerful as him would fall victim to the German witch hunt obsession of the 17th century. No one was safe from the loneliest servant to the head of the state. Unius had no enemies and was well liked by the people of Bamberg, where he served as mayor for 20 years. Maybe it was the fact that he'd been a landlord, or perhaps it was because his wife had been accused and executed for witchcraft only months earlier.
After all, the local prince slash Bishop, a guy with the incredibly long name of Gottfried Johann Georg Fuchs von Dornheim, was a benevolent presence in town. And that's why he was known by a much shorter and more sinister nickname, the witch Bishop. From 1626 to 1631, just five years, somewhere between 300 and 600 people were accused and executed for witchcraft in Bamberg under von Dornheim's orders. The surrounding area had already suffered greatly from years of military conflicts, as well as famine, plague, and crop failures.
The Bishop didn't blame the politicians responsible for those wars, and he didn't understand how a deadly disease like the plague could spread so quickly. Instead, he assumed that the culprit behind his people's suffering was witchcraft. And to combat this scourge of evil sorcery, von Dornheim employed full-time torturers and executioners to extract confessions from the accused. He also ordered the construction of the Drudin House in 1627, a prison specially designed to hold all of the accused witches of Bamberg.
So Unius languished within the Drudin House, quickly understanding that his days were numbered. But he couldn't die without getting a message back to the one person he loved more in this world than anyone else. His daughter, Veronica, had only two weeks before his scheduled execution, so on July 24 of 1628 he wrote a letter in secret to his daughter. But he didn't confess to crimes of witchcraft.
Instead, he reaffirmed his innocence and explained how he had been tortured for a confession. They employed thumbscrews, which rendered him unable to use his hands for a month. They also assaulted him with leg screws, dislocated his shoulders and ligaments, and strung him up naked, only to release him and let him fall to the ground over and over again. And still, he never renounced God and said that he knew nothing of witchcraft, but it wasn't enough to stop the torture.
The executioner actually bent him to confess, even if it would have been a false confession. According to the letter, he told Unius to invent something for you cannot endure the torture which you will be put to, and even if you bear it all, yet you will not escape. At the end of his letter, Unius told Veronica that everything that had been said about him had been a lie. Six people had accused him, but only after being tortured themselves into doing so.
A sympathetic guard snuck the message out of the prison and delivered it to Veronica. But it didn't matter, because even the strongest will couldn't have endured the level of torture that had been inflicted upon Johannes Unius. It had taken only five days to break him, after which he confessed that he'd been approached in 1624 by a demon disguised as a woman. She had insisted he renounced God for the devil.
Unius had done his best to resist her, but more demons soon followed until he finally relented. After that, he started attending witches' sabbaths and participating in other supernatural rituals. According to Unius, he thought that this would have pleased the bishop and the court, but they would only accept his confession if he also named other witches who had attended those same sabbas. Unius refused at first, but it didn't take long for the tortures to work as intended.
He relented and gave them a list, praying that the individuals named would forgive him someday. He ended his letter to his daughter with what I can only imagine was a tearful goodbye, a resignation that these would be his final words to her. He wrote, Goodnight, for your father Johannes Unius will never see you more. And he was right.
One month after his confession, the Unius was burned as a witch in a public execution. He was only 55 years old. If history has proven anything to us over the years, it's that witch hunts certainly were successful at ruining their targets, but it wasn't black magic or demonic power that was destroyed. No, it was something far more precious.
The lives of innocent people. This episode of Lord Legends was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Harry Marks and research by Jamie Vargas. Don't like hearing the ads? I've got a solution for you.
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