Puddings found split, knives that seemed to reappear, a light crossing a garment and a child frightened by an unseen dog all entered the case against Hugh Parsons of Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1651, magistrate William Pynchon recorded neighbours interpreting these events as witchcraft. The depositions also preserve ordinary disputes and Parsons’s replies. They are evidence of accusation and belief, with serious human consequences, rather than demonstrations that supernatural acts occurred.
Reading an examination record
The principal source here is Pynchon’s examination material, reprinted in Samuel Gardner Drake’s 1869 Annals of Witchcraft. Drake’s appendix transcribes testimony and questions, with editorial footnotes added much later. Those layers must remain distinct. A seventeenth-century statement about an event is not the same thing as Drake’s nineteenth-century explanation of why a witness made it.
The printed record warns that the original manuscript’s sheets had been assembled in the wrong order. Some dates are damaged or uncertain, and early-year dates can use the older calendar convention. This account therefore centres on the documented 1651 examinations and the later proceedings, without assigning an invented day to every remembered household occurrence. Several witnesses were recalling things they said had happened considerably earlier.
The sliced puddings
George and Hannah Lankton described puddings which appeared to have been cut lengthways when removed from their cooking bag. Hannah said a visitor threw part of one pudding into the fire. About an hour later, she heard someone at the door, identified by another woman as Hugh Parsons. He asked whether her husband was at home and left without giving his business.
Questioning concentrated on that visit. Parsons said he wanted hay. Other testimony was used to challenge the explanation: he had apparently already been told that Lankton had none to spare, and witnesses disputed whether he had subsequently met and spoken to him. The examination then connected his arrival with the burned pudding through a supposed spirit. No witness described seeing Parsons cut the food by supernatural means. The inference linked an odd household discovery, a visit and an explanation the examiner considered inadequate.
Thomas Burnham described repeatedly raising the pudding story and rumours of saws being sharpened at night. Parsons’s silence became another suspicious feature. Other witnesses supported Burnham’s account of the conversation. The transcript establishes that neighbours discussed these stories and questioned Parsons about them; it does not independently establish the source of every reported noise or the mechanism behind a split pudding.
A dispute over bricks and a strange light
Blanche Bodortha recalled a disagreement involving bricks and a threatening remark attributed to Parsons. Her husband and another witness supported the account of the remark. She then described a light, resembling candlelight, crossing the inside of a red garment as she prepared for bed. She said it appeared three times and that she subsequently tried, unsuccessfully, to reproduce it using the firelight.
That attempt at checking an ordinary explanation is a concrete part of her testimony. She also described a screen between herself and the fire. Her observations explain why she personally rejected that particular cause, but there is no independent reconstruction of the room, lighting or garment in this source. Her prior dispute with Parsons supplied a proposed agent for an experience she found startling.
Bodortha also reported severe pains following childbirth, which she connected with the earlier threat. A woman attending her confirmed that she had been in considerable distress. Corroboration of the distress is not corroboration of its alleged supernatural cause. The historical record does not justify diagnosing the illness at a distance or attributing it to Parsons.
The dog nobody else could see
Another Bodortha account concerned a young child who repeatedly became frightened by a dog the adults could not see. The child initially associated it with one neighbour and then with Parsons; his mother explained the naming through the way he referred to people. She stressed that neither man kept the dog described and that there was no dog in the house.
The parents reported the child’s fear and pointing, rather than their own sighting of an animal. That difference is central. The testimony records adults interpreting a child’s behaviour as a possible hostile supernatural presence linked to an accused neighbour. It supplies no independent animal, apparition or physical trace. The unseen dog belongs to the evidence of contemporary belief in the case, rather than establishing a cryptid or familiar as real.
Missing meat and returning knives
Anthony Dorchester supplied a separate story about a portion of meat which disappeared from a boiling pot. Parsons had wanted that portion when the animal was divided. Dorchester said he was certain he put it into the pot; Mary Parsons checked where it had previously been stored. A disputed gap in Hugh’s attendance at worship then became part of the argument about opportunity.
Parsons denied knowing what happened to the meat. The testimony considered who was present and whether someone could have removed it, but Dorchester ultimately attributed its disappearance to witchcraft. His conviction was an interpretation of a missing item and household circumstances. The source does not show the item disappearing under continuous observation or rule out every ordinary possibility.
Griffin Jones described searching unsuccessfully for a knife, eating with an old rusty one and then finding three knives together after a brief trip outside. Parsons arrived soon afterwards. Jones’s surprise and the timing of the visit became grounds for suspicion. Parsons denied involvement and objected that one witness was insufficient. Drake’s dismissive later footnote offers its own explanation of Jones’s reliability, but it is not contemporary evidence establishing the cause of the incident.
Domestic and working relationships
The examinations repeatedly return to bargains, work and grievances. Thomas Miller’s injured leg was associated with a conversation about Parsons, although another witness’s fear that harm might follow did not demonstrate that Parsons caused the injury. Sarah Edwards connected changes in her cow’s milk with a refused request for more milk. A dispute about bricks for minister George Moxon’s chimneys was linked to illness in Moxon’s children.
Parsons sometimes challenged details or offered an alternative account of what he had said. At other times the recorder emphasised his silence. Those responses show the pressure of an examination in which ordinary conduct could be read in several incriminating ways. Agreement that an argument, illness or injury happened does not resolve the additional claim that one person caused it through witchcraft.
Mary Parsons’s testimony against her husband forms part of this troubled domestic record. Her own case must not disappear into his. Nor should later historians’ speculative diagnoses be mistaken for medical findings made at the time. The surviving legal material concerns people facing accusations, illness, bereavement and punishment; none of those circumstances licenses a confident supernatural or retrospective clinical explanation.
The proceedings and their limits
The scholarly 1961 edition of the Pynchon court record distinguishes local examinations from trials in Boston. It places Mary’s witchcraft acquittal and separate child-murder conviction in 1651. Hugh’s jury conviction followed in May 1652; the magistrates disagreed, and the General Court judged him not legally guilty. This corrects the chronology compressed in Drake’s narrative. Mary’s ultimate fate is not securely established by an official execution record.
This was Hugh Parsons’s wife Mary, not Mary Bliss Parsons, wife of Joseph Parsons, whose later Northampton cases involved different people and proceedings. Similar names have repeatedly confused the histories. Keeping the households distinct is essential to understanding which witnesses and accusations belong to this Springfield record.
Outcome: Insufficient evidence. The examination preserves detailed allegations and some corroboration of surrounding circumstances, but no independently demonstrated supernatural mechanism. A legal finding of insufficient guilt does not identify the cause of every reported experience; equally, neighbours’ certainty did not establish that Parsons produced them. The case is included as a documented history of supernatural accusation and local belief.
Location and sources
Location note: The pin uses a rounded Springfield city reference from the U.S. Census Gazetteer. It represents the approximate locality of the examinations and reports, not a reconstructed seventeenth-century home, private property or a currently accessible visitor site.
Drake, Annals of Witchcraft (1869): primary examination transcripts in the appendix, particularly printed pages 219–235, read directly for the incidents described here. Drake’s narrative at pages 64–70 supplies a later interpretation, not an unqualified authority for legal chronology. The image shows the appendix’s opening page, with its warning about the manuscript’s arrangement.
Colonial Justice in Western Massachusetts (1961), introduction, pages 22–25: used narrowly for court sequence, dates and the distinction between the two Parsons households. The New York Public Library’s original manuscript catalogue was located but returned an access error during this review; the manuscript itself was not independently examined. Sources, image rights and metadata checked 13 November 2026.