In midsummer 1688, four children in John Goodwin’s Boston household began suffering episodes that their father and Cotton Mather understood as witchcraft. A dispute involving missing linen preceded the first child’s illness in Mather’s account. Suspicion fell on a neighbour known as Glover, who was tried and executed. The reported disturbances continued after her death. Mather’s Memorable Providences, published in 1689, preserves both his observations and the father’s account, but its accusations and supernatural explanations are not established facts.
The household and the beginning of the account
Mather places Goodwin, a mason, in the southern part of Boston. The household had six living children, of whom four were principally affected. In the 1914 documentary edition, historian George Lincoln Burr identifies them as Martha, John, Mercy and Benjamin, using genealogical and Boston records. Those identifying details come from the later editor’s note, rather than a contemporary list of all their names in Mather’s opening narrative.
Mather says the eldest affected daughter questioned a washerwoman over linen thought to be missing. The washerwoman’s mother responded angrily. The daughter’s unusual illness then began, followed by similar episodes in a sister and two brothers. Mather links the sequence causally to the quarrel. The account establishes that he reported this connection; it does not establish either that linen had been stolen or that anyone had caused illness through supernatural means.
The father’s separate statement likewise dates the onset to midsummer 1688. He describes the first daughter’s bodily distress together with anxiety about her religious condition. As more children became affected, he interpreted the household’s troubles through his own duties, sins and relationship with God. His testimony gives access to a distressed parent’s response, rather than an independent test of the minister’s explanation.
What the adults reported
Mather describes episodes of impaired hearing, speech or sight, painful postures and alternating stiffness and unusual flexibility. He also reports that the children sometimes complained of being struck by unseen assailants. These descriptions belong to a seventeenth-century observer’s narrative. They should not be treated as instrumentally measured injuries or grounds for a confident retrospective medical diagnosis.
The account is not one of uninterrupted illness. Mather says the children usually obtained relief around nine or ten at night and generally ate and slept reasonably well. Goodwin also remarks on their sleeping well. Those intervals are part of the record and should remain alongside the dramatic daytime descriptions. Omitting them would turn a variable sequence into a different kind of claim.
A physician, Thomas Oakes, was consulted. Mather reports that Oakes attributed the condition to witchcraft when ordinary assistance failed. That is a historical medical opinion within the source, not a finding that a supernatural cause had been demonstrated. The surviving narrative does not provide a modern clinical examination, diagnostic tests or a sufficient basis to assign one definite present-day explanation.
Glover’s trial and the language problem
Goodwin complained to the authorities about the suspected neighbour. Mather calls her Glover and recounts imprisonment, trial, examination and a death sentence. He says small rag figures were brought from her house and that the children reacted when one was placed in her hand. His account reads those reactions as confirming the accusation. They do not, by themselves, establish that the object could cause illness.
The source also exposes substantial problems with its own interpretation. Mather says Glover answered chiefly in Irish, her native language, and that two interpreters mediated the trial. When he visited her, he himself could not understand Irish without an interpreter. He relates an ambiguity between words translated as spirits and saints, yet interprets the conversation within a framework of dealings with devils.
He identifies her as Roman Catholic and describes tests of her ability to recite prayers. Those tests, and his hostile descriptions of her religion and character, cannot establish criminal or supernatural guilt. His claim that her responses amounted to confession reaches readers through an accusatory narrative and translation. The article therefore treats those statements as Mather’s report of the proceedings, not an unqualified confession in Glover’s own preserved voice.
Mather records that physicians examined her mental condition and returned a judgement of soundness before she was sentenced. That procedural judgement does not resolve the reliability of the accusation, the interpretation of translated answers or the justice of the execution. Her death is a documented outcome in the narrative; the claimed witchcraft remains unproved.
The disturbances did not end with the execution
Mather explicitly says three children continued to suffer after Glover’s death. In his explanation, this meant others were involved. It is not evidence that further unnamed people committed witchcraft. The continuing episodes also prevent a simple story in which executing the accused woman immediately cured the household.
Prayer meetings brought together Boston ministers and a minister from Charlestown. Mather and Goodwin both describe improvements after some of these gatherings, while also recording later difficulties. The father rejected proposed remedies outside the religious advice he accepted. His statement shows how neighbours and ministers helped the family and how religious commitments shaped the choices available to them.
Martha in Mather’s house
To observe the eldest affected child more closely, Mather took her into his own home. He says she was initially well for several days, then suffered a renewed episode on the morning of 20 November. This is an identifiable date within the 1688 sequence. His intention included obtaining eyewitness evidence against disbelief in spirits; he was both an involved caregiver and an advocate of a particular interpretation.
Among his observations are reading tests. He says she could read some books readily while other religious texts provoked distress, and that the same scriptural words could be read in one book but not another. The narrative gives detailed claims about those differences. It does not describe concealed, randomly assigned books or a procedure that would establish that neither child nor observer knew which response was expected.
Mather himself adds a qualification: a child’s ability or inability to read was not a test by which religious truth could be determined. That caution belongs beside his confident interpretation of other episodes. It demonstrates that even within the original narrative, the significance of a striking response required argument rather than following automatically from the observation.
Two statements with different closing dates
Goodwin signed his contribution on 12 December 1688. He expressed gratitude for help and improvement while still asking for prayer to complete the children’s relief. Mather’s postscript describes further trouble, including a boy’s relapse after returning from Watertown, and later recovery attributed to prayer. The postscript is marked finished on 7 June 1689.
Those dates distinguish stages in the source. The father’s December statement is not a report written after every development described in the June postscript. Similarly, 1689 is both a publication year and a year in the continuing account, while 1688 remains the stated beginning of the household’s troubles. The case should not be silently shifted to the later Salem proceedings.
Evidence, accusation and uncertainty
The sources preserve a family’s distress, reported bodily episodes, attempts at relief and the lethal consequences of an accusation. They do not supply an independently verified supernatural agent or a sufficient record to settle the children’s experiences through one modern diagnosis. Mather’s sincerity and proximity matter, but neither removes his theological purpose, his dependence on reports for some events or the difficulties of interpreting Glover’s translated words.
Burr’s edition also reproduces a later criticism by Robert Calef, who challenged the proof against Glover and Mather’s handling of the child. That is evidence of historical disagreement, rather than a replacement eyewitness record of every episode. Reading the case critically requires keeping the household’s reported experiences separate from the unjustified conclusion that an accused neighbour possessed supernatural power.
Location and sources
The map uses a broad Boston city reference rounded from the U.S. Census Gazetteer. It does not identify Goodwin’s former house, Mather’s house, an execution site or any present private address. The account’s reference to southern Boston is historical and should not be confused with a precise modern neighbourhood pin.
The principal text is Cotton Mather’s 1689 Memorable Providences, especially sections I–XXI, the closing postscript and John Goodwin’s signed contribution. These were read in George Lincoln Burr’s 1914 documentary edition, printed pages 99–114 and 123–131, with its editorial notes distinguished from Mather’s text. The lead image is from the original 1689 printing. Coordinates derive from the 2025 Census Gazetteer. Sources checked 10 November 2026.