![]() ![]() Another was Goody Miller, whom Kate claimed had a “ Devil’s mark”-an extra breast below her arm from which she fed animal familiars with her own blood. ![]() One was Elizabeth Clawson, a woman with whom the Wescots had publicly quarreled in the past. The Wescots, as well as their friends and neighbors, kept nightly watch over Kate, who slowly began to describe and name the women who visited her in her dreams. ![]() Kate began to complain of nightly visits from a group of women who could transform into cats and encouraged her to sign her life over to Satan. ![]() They called on a midwife, Sarah Bates, to determine the cause of Kate’s fits, but none could be ascertained. Similar fits had plagued the Wescots’ daughter Joanna years ago, so the Wescots were on high alert. In April of 1692, Katherine Branch-the 17-year-old servant girl of Daniel and Abigail Wescot, a prominent Stamford couple-began experiencing strange, frightening, and painful fits. Though not as well-known as the infamous Salem witch trials, which happened around this same time in Massachusetts, Godbeer suggests that the little-known history of the Stamford trials is just as important, as it epitomizes the strict social and gender norms that governed 17th- and 18th-century Puritan communities across New England. In Escaping Salem, historian Richard Godbeer tells the story of the Stamford witch trials of 1692. ![]()
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