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Blogged Around Philly: Farewell Edition
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The Witch... That Wasn't!
During the witch crazes that once swept the planet, to have been a person harboring clairvoyant talents, or mystical knowledge must have been something akin to a dire curse. As many women during the 1600s were killed if found "guilty" of being possessed by dark forces, reading today as spectacularly spooky tales of evil and sorcery even if the truth is less strange than the fiction.
In 1683 a woman named Margaret Mattson was accused of being a witch by her neighbors in the Wissahickon Creek Valley, a case that would become Pennsylvania's only witch-hunt, and also, rather uniquely, one that was concluded without death. For indeed, according to local rumor, Margaret had bestowed a curse upon several cattle and also bewitched several folk, during a time when it was considered a crime to work on a Sunday, let alone dabble in the black arts. The 1924 book A Guide Book of Art, Architecture, and Historic Interests in Pennsylvania speaks of Mom Rinker's Rock, one of the first mentions of a local and mysterious witch, but the case of Margaret Mattison, despite the local witch-hunt, never came to fruition despite a court case.
They called Margaret Mattson the witch of Ridley Creek and a Provincial Council had been constructed in Philly to judge the woman and her alleged evil powers. Some locals claimed Margaret was in fact a knife-wielding supernatural hag who had condemned the calves of Ino Symcock to Hell, but due to the defendant's inability to speak English, as she was Swedish, she had an interpreter at the court who stated: "The prisoner denyeth all things, and saith that ye witnesses speake only by hear say".
After much deliberation the council stated that although Margaret Mattson had the "common fame" of a witch, she, "...was not guilty in manner and forme as shee stand indicted," and so the trial ended with a fine of fifty pounds, for good behavior of six months.
Most certainly a bizarre conclusion regarding the only witch to have ever haunted Philadelphia.
Photo Credit: Flickr user riptheskull
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