ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Local author Katherine Howe, a descendant of an accused Salem witch, holds an iron pitchfork made by her ancestors in the 1800s.
By BRIDGET TURCOTTE
MARBLEHEAD — Inspired by the story of her ancestors accused of witchcraft, Katherine Howe has kept a new generation fascinated by the history that unfolded in their own backyards.
“The people who lived in that time, they weren’t crazy,” said Howe. “They weren’t uneducated. They were reasonable, rational people who felt like they were doing the right thing.”
The idea of magic being as real as the colonists believed it was inspired her to write her first novel, she said.
Howe, a Marblehead author, was a teenager when she learned of her relation to Elizabeth Howe and Elizabeth Proctor, both accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials in the 1690s. While researching the family’s geneology, her aunt confirmed the longtime family legend.
It wasn’t until after Howe wrote her novel “The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane” that she learned she is also related to the woman she chose to base the main character of her story on.
“I’m moved and intrigued by the fact that the story continues to fascinate people,” she said. “I feel like there’s a real hunger out there for people to understand what happened.”
Compared to the others who were accused, there is little information on record about Dane, which gave Howe more freedom to create an elaborate, fictional story.
“By all accounts, Elizabeth Howe, she was sort of a difficult person,” Katherine Howe said. “Which is true of a lot of people who were accused of witchcraft during this century.”
Elizabeth Howe was among the first group accused of witchcraft and publicly hanged in July of 1692, along with Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Sarah Wildes and Susanna Martin.
Elizabeth Proctor and her husband John Proctor were both convicted of witchcraft. John was killed, but his wife’s execution sentence was postponed because she was pregnant. In 1693, the governor, Sir William Phips, freed 153 prisoners, including Elizabeth.
Howe has spent many years researching the trials.
She edited The Penguin Book of Witches, which is a compilation of real-life accounts of witchcraft. It includes everything from a collection of manuals for witch hunters written by King James in 1597 to court documents from the 1692 trials.
“So many people are interested in learning about witchcraft,” she said. “They want to read some of the crazy, original sources that I read. It’s hard if you don’t know where to look for them.”
In 2012, she hosted the Expedition Week special “Salem: Unmasking the Devil” on the National Geographic Channel.
Her book “Conversion” is a Young Adult novel published by Penguin Books. It’s a story about a girl, Colleen, who is a senior at a high-pressure preparatory school. One girl becomes unexplainably ill with a mystery illness, only for her close group of friends to follow suit. The girls suffer from seizures, violent coughing and hair loss.
Colleen realizes that Danvers, where the story takes place, was once Salem Village. She makes the connection that hundreds of years ago, a group of girls exhibited bizarre behavior and were accused of witchcraft.
Everyone’s attention is on the town to try to come up with an explanation for what is causing the illness. Everything from pollution to stress is considered before the realization is made that the girls are suffering from a hysteria outbreak.
“There is something uniquely stressful about being an adolescent girl,” Howe said. “That has been true for hundreds of years. I thought I would approach the Salem story on the teenager’s perspective.”
Those accused had something in common, she said. They didn’t always conform to the social norm.
“They made other people uncomfortable,” Howe said. “They read too many books, they probably couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Certainly, I feel a deep sense of solidarity. I feel that I, myself, have those qualities too. A lot of us have those qualities. I have solidarity and sympathy for women who had those qualities at a time when their culture really could not permit them to have those qualities.”
It’s something people don’t want to think their own culture is capable of, she said.
“These people were put to death by the state for a crime that a generation later was held to be imaginary,” she said. “Salem continues to be conscious of human rights issues as result of that fact.”
Bridget Turcotte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @BridgetTurcotte.