Mary Webster of Hadley, Massachusetts, was acquitted of witchcraft in 1683. She was subsequently blamed for the illness of Philip Smith, a prominent townsman whose death was described by Cotton Mather as the result of witchcraft. The surviving accounts combine legal proceedings, reports of disturbances around a sickbed and later descriptions of violence against Webster. They establish a history of accusation and belief, rather than proof that she caused a supernatural attack.
The prosecution before the illness
Sylvester Judd’s History of Hadley, read here in its 1905 edition, reproduces records of Webster’s prosecution. In March 1683, the county court at Northampton considered suspicions and testimony against her, then ordered her sent to Boston for further examination. The record identifies Philip Smith as one of the men sitting on that county court. The later illness therefore occurred within an existing local history of suspicion, rather than creating Webster’s reputation from nothing.
The Boston proceedings continued in May, when a grand jury indicted her. The accusation included an alleged covenant with the Devil, an animal familiar and supposed bodily marks. These were the prosecution’s claims, not established facts about Webster. They should not be repeated as an account of actions that historians have verified she performed.
The decisive entry is the trial of 4 September 1683. Webster pleaded not guilty, the evidence was placed before the jury, and the jury found her not guilty. Judd also reproduces the colony’s expenses for transporting her, maintaining her in prison and returning her to Hadley. Those administrative details reinforce that this was an actual prosecution, but an acquittal rather than a conviction.
The legal outcome is essential to the later story. Webster’s subsequent treatment cannot be described as the lawful execution of a convicted witch. Nor does an acquittal, by itself, explain everything reported during Smith’s illness. The prosecution and the sickbed narrative answer different questions and need to remain distinct.
Smith’s illness and its date
Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences, published in 1689, supplies the principal early account of Smith’s illness. It introduces him as about fifty, a church deacon, public representative, county-court associate, selectman and militia lieutenant. This list of offices explains his standing in the community and Mather’s presentation of him as an especially virtuous victim.
Mather refers to the winter of 1684 and then to illness beginning in January. Judd places Smith’s death on 10 January 1685 and prints the January period as 1684–5. The year difference reflects the historical dating of the winter episode. This article uses January 1685 for the illness and death while retaining the source’s older year wording where its chronology is discussed.
Mather describes an unnamed woman dissatisfied with Smith’s dealings over assistance for her poverty. He says Smith feared that she would harm him. Judd identifies this woman with Mary Webster. The earlier text does not name her in that passage, so identifying her should be attributed to the later local history rather than silently inserted into every line of Mather’s narrative.
According to Mather, Smith first suffered pains, became increasingly unwell and eventually delirious. He voiced fears about the woman and described seeing people in the room whom he blamed for his condition. Mather also reports rapidly changing tones of voice and speech thought to resemble different languages. The qualification matters: the account supplies no linguistic examination demonstrating unfamiliar languages.
Reports around the bed
The narrative includes a cluster of physical and sensory claims. Smith complained of pricking pains as though many pins were involved, but Mather says a search found only one. He describes an unexplained musk-like smell, including an apple at the fire that became disagreeable enough to discard. The single pin and reported odour cannot be expanded into recovered evidence of the much larger attack imagined by the witnesses.
Other claims concern an emptied medicine pot, scratching near the bed while Smith’s limbs were held and an appearance of fire on the coverings that disappeared when people discussed it. People reportedly felt something moving beneath the bedclothes, comparable in size to a cat, but found nothing when they tried to grasp it. A woman also described being pinched by something she could not see.
Mather adds a doctor’s attempt to steady himself against a shaking bedhead and a contrast between difficulty moving Smith at one moment and the apparent ease of lifting a bed and occupant later. These are striking reported experiences, but the account does not preserve measurements, controlled searches or independently comparable records of the events. An inability to find the cause during the episode is not a demonstration that no ordinary cause existed.
The narrative continues after Smith’s death with descriptions of the body, retained warmth, later discoloration, movement of the bed and noises resembling furniture being moved. It does not document a return to life. Mather interprets the combination as witchcraft; the bodily observations and sounds do not independently establish that conclusion or identify a person responsible.
The violence against Webster
Mather says that people repeatedly went to disturb the woman whom Smith blamed and that he slept while they were doing so. He presents the apparent timing as significant. The record provides no controlled comparison establishing that harming or frightening the woman changed Smith’s physical condition. It is especially important not to turn that asserted association into a justification for what followed.
Judd quotes Thomas Hutchinson’s later history for a much more explicit account of the violence. Hutchinson describes townsmen dragging the woman from her house, nearly killing her by hanging and leaving her in the snow. In his account she survived while Smith died. These details belong to a later historical narrative; they should not be represented as wording from the 1689 report or as a newly inspected contemporary assault deposition.
The essential distinction is between prosecution, acquittal and an alleged extrajudicial attack. Webster did not die through the lawful sentence of the Boston court. Judd states that she survived until 1696 and refers to the inventory of her modest estate. The survival story should not itself be presented as paranormal immunity or evidence of witchcraft.
Judd also records stories about Webster stopping teams, disturbing animals and affecting an infant. He labels these as traditions passed down by old storytellers. They are evidence of the local folklore that accumulated around her name, not additional court findings or independently investigated incidents. This case groups the connected Webster–Smith episode rather than multiplying each later anecdote into a separate event.
Reading the sources together
Mather’s purpose was openly religious. His account starts from the proposition that exceptionally good people could suffer through witchcraft and ends by treating that interpretation as certain. It does not show him personally testing each sickbed event. Reading his account as a neutral modern investigation would strip away the very framework through which its reports were selected and explained.
Judd writes much later and is openly critical of witchcraft persecution. His reproduction of court entries is useful for the legal chronology, while his quotations from Mather and Hutchinson reveal separate stages in the story’s transmission. Their repetition does not create several independent witnesses to each supernatural claim. The accounts must be weighed according to what each actually supplies.
The outcome is Insufficient evidence for the alleged supernatural cause of Smith’s illness and the associated disturbances. Webster’s acquittal is a documented legal result. Mather’s accusation of witchcraft murder remains an interpretation, and the material reviewed does not securely identify a complete medical or physical explanation for every reported detail. That uncertainty leaves no evidential basis for assigning guilt to Webster.
Location, image and sources
The map uses an approximate Hadley town reference in Massachusetts. It does not mark a current private house or present the incident as an invitation to visit a residence. The image reproduces a page of the early illness account in a credited public-domain source edition, making its language and interpretation visible without pretending to depict the events.
Sources are Cotton Mather’s 1689 account, reproduced in George Lincoln Burr, Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases (1914), pages 131–134, all four pages visually reviewed, and Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, 1905 edition, pages 229–231, including the transcribed court entries and attributed later history. Coordinates use the 2025 Census Gazetteer. Sources and image rights checked 13 November 2026.