Witchcraft trials and executions were facts of life in colonial Maryland. From Southern Maryland to the Eastern Shore and as far north as Anne Arundel County, historians have documented at least 12 cases of people prosecuted or persecuted for allegedly practicing witchcraft in the 1600s and early 1700s. There wasn't the same sort of hysteria in Maryland as in Massachusetts, where 19 men and women were executed and many others imprisoned for witchcraft in 1692. But the Free State and neighboring Pennsylvania and Virginia all had witchcraft trials, historian John Nelson told rapt listeners at a Sept. 28 lecture. Two of the earliest witchcraft cases in the Maryland State Archives involve executions aboard ships bound for Maryland from England. Two men who recently had arrived on the Charity of London told colonial officials in St. Mary's City in 1654 that the ship's crew had hanged an old woman named Mary Lee and thrown her body overboard after she was accused of sorcery and allegedly confessed. Her supposed crime: summoning a relentless storm that some on board blamed on "the malevolence of witches." The ship's captain, John Bosworth, escaped blame by showing that he was in his cabin when Lee was killed. The second shipboard execution involved George Washington's great-grandfather, John Washington of Westmoreland County, Va. He accused ship owner Edward Prescott in 1659 of hanging Elizabeth Richardson as a witch.
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if only they believed in jesus and stuff... oh well! I would love to meet one! 