In 1662, Ann Cole of Hartford, Connecticut, experienced fits and spoke words which local ministers attributed to a possessing spirit. Names uttered during the episodes became entangled with witchcraft accusations, confessions and executions. The surviving source trail is unusually revealing: John Whiting later acknowledged that he could not find his original notes and reconstructed the account from memory. It is a record of a consequential historical belief, rather than proof that a spirit identified guilty neighbours.
A report written twenty years later
The fullest source reviewed here is Whiting’s letter to Increase Mather, dated 4 December 1682 and reproduced in The Mather Papers in 1868. Whiting had been a minister at Hartford during the events. His report identifies Anne, or Ann, as John Cole’s daughter and places the original episode in 1662, while she was living in her father’s household.
At the end of the letter, Whiting explains that he had delayed sending an account because he could not locate the papers on which he had written her utterances. He had therefore gathered the main substance for Mather and allowed him to use all or part of it without changing its meaning. This is an explicit limitation from the informant himself. The surviving letter is not his missing verbatim transcript from 1662.
Increase Mather published a condensed version in his 1684 Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences. That version is read here in George Lincoln Burr’s 1914 source collection. Burr’s notes identify Whiting’s letter and distinguish parts of the later narrative from the original recollection. The letter, Mather’s adaptation and Burr’s editorial notes are different documentary layers, not three independent investigations of possession.
The fits and the attributed conversation
Whiting describes Cole as troubled about her spiritual condition before the reported episodes. During fits, she supposedly held extended conversations through which hostile beings discussed how to harm her and others. She was said to know nothing of these utterances afterwards. The narrative’s attribution to the Devil is Whiting’s interpretation of speech through her lips, rather than an independently established speaker.
The conversations reportedly threatened her body, reputation and prospects of marriage. After a period of intelligible speech came unintelligible muttering and then what the ministers called a Dutch tone. This has sometimes become a claim that Cole miraculously spoke a foreign language. The source is more limited: it describes English pronounced with a supposedly Dutch accent.
Samuel Stone, another Hartford minister, is reported to have regarded that accent as remarkable because he thought Cole had no familiarity with Dutch people. No transcript of a linguistic test, Dutch vocabulary examination or recording survives in the materials reviewed. His assessment is evidence of what he found convincing, rather than a controlled demonstration of knowledge beyond normal learning.
The account also links the speech to another woman’s reported sufferings, including pinching in darkness. Whiting distinguishes that woman, who lived beside a Dutch household, from Cole’s own situation. Combining the two households into one address or treating every complaint as a separate verified supernatural attack would distort the letter’s structure.
Whiting says Samuel Hooker and Joseph Haynes were present at the first episode and that Haynes wrote down the words. He himself arrived after the conversation had begun and also took notes. That qualification matters: he was a participant and informant, but did not claim to witness the whole initial occurrence from its beginning. His later inability to find his papers further limits reconstruction of the exact speech.
Household distress and public worship
The letter describes violent bodily movements which alarmed people who saw them. Cole and two other women with fits also reportedly disrupted worship, and Whiting recalls one observer fainting during a special prayer gathering. These details show that the crisis extended beyond a private conversation and was interpreted in public religious settings.
They do not, however, supply a modern clinical examination. Whiting’s judgement that Cole was pious and sincere formed part of his confidence in the story. Character testimony may explain why neighbours trusted her, but cannot establish the physical source of unusual speech or movements. Nor can those observations safely be converted into a retrospective medical diagnosis from a short historical narrative.
Cole’s own reported lack of awareness is also important. The ministers understood this as evidence that another agent used her tongue. That inference does not follow automatically from the statement. The records preserve the belief and the reported experience, but no method by which readers can independently establish an external personality or identify its supposed targets as responsible for her illness.
Accusation and the Greensmith confession
Whiting’s account says that a woman already imprisoned under suspicion of witchcraft was implicated by the utterances. The court asked Whiting and Haynes to read what they had written in her presence. He reports that she then confessed to familiarity with the Devil, while distinguishing a promise to accompany him from a formal written covenant that she said had not yet been made.
Mather identifies the woman as Greensmith. Burr’s notes give her name as Rebecca and identify her husband as Nathaniel. The narrative includes supposed meetings, animal appearances and promises of a later covenant. These are allegations and reported confession material in a witchcraft prosecution, not observations independently establishing the existence of such meetings or transformations.
The account also records further questioning on the following day. The prisoner was said to have resisted admitting guilt before the written accusations were read. Neither Whiting’s description of a willing confession nor Mather’s conviction that it was persuasive removes the pressures inherent in imprisonment, accusation and religious examination. The surviving narrative does not provide a basis for treating a supernatural confession as literal proof.
Mather says that both the woman and her husband were executed, although the husband did not confess. Burr places the Greensmith executions at Hartford in January 1663. That date is the prosecution’s aftermath, not an alternative date for the onset of Cole’s fits. Others named in the accusations reportedly escaped to another part of the country.
Recovery and what it can establish
Whiting says Cole’s sufferings diminished after some accused people were executed and others left. He also reports that she later joined the church, married, had children and remained well for years. Mather presents a more compressed account of restored health. Both connect the improvement with the prosecution’s aftermath through their religious understanding of the events.
That chronology cannot demonstrate that the accused caused the illness or that their removal broke a supernatural influence. The letter supplies no comparative medical records or evidence isolating a cause. Treating a later improvement as retrospective proof of guilt would reproduce the very inference that made the accusation dangerous.
Mather additionally relates a water ordeal involving two people mentioned in the speech. He explicitly says that this was not legal evidence against them. The episode belongs to the wider response to the accusations, rather than a controlled test confirming possession. Its inclusion demonstrates the range of contemporary reactions and the need to distinguish them from the court’s stated evidential basis.
The outcome is Insufficient evidence for the alleged possession and its supposed supernatural disclosures. The accounts establish that ministers reported fits, attributed speech and consequential accusations. Missing original notes, retrospective reconstruction and an absence of independent tests prevent a secure determination of the underlying cause. The historical executions do not establish that those condemned practised witchcraft.
Place, image and sources
The map uses a rounded Hartford town reference. No current private address or precise household site is identified. The lead image is a public-domain page of Mather’s account in Burr’s source edition, with its publication date and editorial context stated. It illustrates the documentary record, not the claimed phenomena.
Sources are John Whiting to Increase Mather, 4 December 1682, in The Mather Papers (1868), pages 466–469, read in full, and Increase Mather’s 1684 account in Burr, Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases (1914), pages 18–21, visually checked with its editorial notes. Coordinates use the 2025 Census Gazetteer. Sources and image rights checked 13 November 2026.