Malcolm Gaskill’s “The Ruin of All Witches” begins with the language of an ominous fairy tale:
Once, beside a great river at the edge of a forest, there stood a small town. Time has erased its every trace, but we can imagine it, quiet and still, settled under a pall of late winter darkness. A man is hurrying home along the main street, to his left a trickling brook and a fathomless bank of trees. … The air is ice-sharp, tinged with smoke and resin, the only sounds the rush of water, the muffled bellows of cattle and the distant cry of a wolf. It feels like the edge of the world, and to those who have settled here it is.
Yet this is no fairy tale. The fathomless trees, the hurrying man and the dread of wolves are real. This is a true story, in which an actual nightmare dreamed by a man named Jonathan Taylor on a night in February 1651 would — along with other, similar incidents — result in charges of witchcraft. Lying beside his pregnant wife, Taylor sees three snakes “slithering” across the floor toward him. He tries to beat them off, but one returns to sink its fangs into his forehead as he lies paralyzed with fear. The snake speaks of “death” in a human voice, which Taylor recognizes. It belongs to one of his neighbors, Hugh Parsons.
The town is Springfield, Mass., which — hard to imagine now — represented the frontier of white settlement in New England in 1636, the year of its founding by William Pynchon, an entrepreneur, amateur theologian and emigrant from England. Pynchon’s trade in furs had brought him the wealth to buy property and become the ruling magistrate over those who worked it.
