They were hanged as witches in Connecticut
Why 375 years later their descendants want these ancestors cleared
It was 2020 and deep in the COVID-19 lockdown when Alse C. Freeman decided to dig into genealogical records on Ancestry. com. In this search, Freeman confirmed something that family members had alluded to but were never quite sure of — Freeman’s nine-times great-grandmother was Alse Young of Windsor, the first person ever hanged for witchcraft in the American Colonies.
Freeman, a North Carolina native, had never even been to Connecticut but felt an intangible connection to Young. Freeman chose soon after to go by Alse and dug deeper into Young’s history and circumstance. In doing so, Freeman discovered an online community of people working to clear the name of Young and other wrongly accused “witches.”
Three hundred and seventy-five years after America hanged its first “witch” in Hartford, a multistate coalition of descendants and activists are calling on Connecticut legislators to exonerate the victims of the Connecticut witch trials.
They come from Florida, Minnesota, Indiana, Kentucky and Texas, to name a few, but these activists are all seeking the same goal — a posthumous pardon for their wrongly convicted ancestors.
While other states, such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Virginia, have exonerated their “witches,” Connecticut’s governor lacks the power to pardon and the State Board of Pardons and Paroles does not have a posthumous exoneration process.
With the help of local politicians, the members of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project are hoping to change Connecticut’s posthumous pardon law for the witch trial victims and anyone else whose false conviction was not overturned before death.
For the project’s supporters, this effort is about more
than clearing names. It’s about healing trauma, rectifying the past, educating the public and looking toward the future.
“Only individuals who are connected in this way can comprehend that we actually feel the pain of our ancestors,” said Sarah Esterly, a descendant from Nevada.
Jane Garibay, the state representative for Windsor and Windsor Locks, was introduced to the Exoneration Project by one of her constituents. Garibay said that she will work with the group over the coming months to find a way forward for posthumous pardons in the Connecticut General Assembly.
“I understand their want, their need to have these family members pardoned,” Garibay said. “I can feel their angst over this. … I may not have had one of my ancestors murdered, but you can still feel for the people that went through that.”
This is not the first time witch trial exoneration efforts have been brought up to the state legislature. In the 2007 and 2008 sessions, a group of descendants went before the general assembly, but the exoneration bills ultimately failed.
Garibay said that at this stage in the process, she is looking at why previous efforts in the 2000s failed and understanding the law and how to change it.
“I do hope that if there is a path forward that we will be able to do it next session,” Garibay said.
Despite the storied past, few people know about Connecticut’s witch trials.
Between 1647 and 1697, Connecticut charged at least 46 people with witchcraft. In all, 11 were executed. Statistically, those accused of witchcraft in Connecticut were more likely to face execution than those accused during the infamous Salem Witch Trials, when more than 200 were accused of witchcraft and 25 died.
For Connecticut author Beth Caruso, educating others about Connecticut’s history has been at the forefront of her witch trial exoneration work. In 2015, she published the book “One of Windsor: The Untold Story of America’s First Witch Hanging.” And, in 2016, alongside longtime Connecticut exoneration-activist Tony Griego, Caruso started the Facebook page CT WITCH Memorial.
“Connecticut started it all. People don’t realize that Salem was kind of like the grand finale of all the witch trials in colonial New England,” Caruso said. “When people do hear about [the Connecticut witch trials], they’re appalled by the injustice of it.”
Griego first started fighting for the Connecticut witch trial victims in 2005 after learning about the trials for the first time at a historian’s presentation. He said that the trials should be taught in Connecticut’s schools.
“We need to know that part of our history. It’s not something that should be hidden in a closet,” Griego said. “It’s important to understand how easy it is to criminalize people when you separate them as ‘those others.’ ... I think there’s a lesson to be learned from the witch hunts.”
While Griego and Caruso have led exoneration efforts for years — in 2017 they played a vital role in urging the town of Windsor to pass a resolution to honor the town’s two witch trial victims — Caruso described proudly taking a “step back” as new faces became invigorated by the cause.
In May, after Massachusetts announced it would grant a pardon to the only Salem Witch Trial victim who had yet to be exonerated, Mary Bingham of New Hampshire, a Salem descendant, decided it was time to concentrate on Connecticut.
“I have seen what the exoneration process means to the fellow Salem Witch Trials descendants, and the fact that all of their ancestors have been cleared, and what it means to them, and what it means to the state of Massachusetts to rectify the wrong that was committed so long ago. And to see the descendants now from the Connecticut witch trial victims coming forward to want justice for their ancestors — This is why we’re doing this right now, to gain justice for the ancestors and to, um, just to write that wrong,” Bingham said.
Many of those involved see the exoneration process as a way to honor a forgotten chapter of history that largely targeted women. In Connecticut, nine of the 11 executed for witchcraft were women. The two men who died were convicted and hanged alongside their wives.
Sarah Jack of Colorado is a descendant of both the Salem and Connecticut witch trials. She said that when she learned about her family history, it made sense.
“I personally have this super strong sense of justice. And if things are not fair, it has always been such a hard pill for me to swallow,” Jack said. “A lot of the women descendants are definitely proud. And one of the things that I tend to see is they’ll say, ‘Well, no wonder.’ And they don’t necessarily mean, ‘We’re very witchy in our house,’ but they feel like, ‘Oh, we’re very strong, independent women in my family.’ Well, maybe other people feel that way, but when they find out there’s this [witch trial] history, then they have something to attach that to.”
Caruso and Joshua Hutchinson, an exoneration activist from Arizona, described how misogyny often came into play with witch trials. They said that women were considered spiritually weaker and more likely to give in to the devil’s temptations. If a woman didn’t fit the typical quiet, submissive Puritan housewife model, she was considered suspicious.
Caruso, Hutchinson and others drew connections between the witch hunts of the past and the modern acts of scapegoating, misogyny, racism, homophobia and xenophobia present in America today.
“[The colonists’] behavior is very similar to ours. We really haven’t changed that much,” Hutchinson said. “I think that people are just really connecting with the victims and seeing them as very modern people.”
Violet Ahearn, a former Connecticut resident who now lives in New York, is the seventh-great-granddaughter of Mary Barnes, the last person hanged for witchcraft in Connecticut.
For Ahearn, the exoneration of Connecticut’s witch trial victims is not solely about righting the past, but shaping the future.
“We know history includes lessons to learn by or be repeated,” Ahearn said. “We live our history every day more vulnerable to our past when that past isn’t taught, isn’t loudly declared … and when we can’t point to our future to say it has changed for the better.”