Ann Cole and the Hartford Voices

Long before Salem, Hartford had its own witch panic, and one of its best-known documents is the story of Ann Cole. She was the daughter of John Cole, a neighbour of Nathaniel and Rebecca Greensmith. In 1662 she began to suffer violent fits in which, as contemporaries described it, a voice or voices spoke through her lips, held long discourses and named people. Increase Mather retold her case in his Remarkable Providences (1684) and it became one of the standard New England examples of what Puritans called “afflictions.”

Cole named neighbours, including Rebecca Greensmith, as the cause of her troubles. The accusation spread in a community already tense after the death of eight-year-old Elizabeth Kelly in March 1662, which her parents blamed on another neighbour, Goody Ayres. According to the History.com account and to Wikipedia’s summary of the Connecticut trials, Rebecca Greensmith is reported to have confessed to having dealings with the devil and to have named others, her husband Nathaniel was convicted despite protesting his innocence, and both were hanged in January 1663 (1662 by the calendar then in use); Mary Sanford and Mary Barnes were also hanged during the panic. Goody Ayres fled, and Elizabeth Seager was convicted in 1665 before the governor reversed the verdict. Cole is reported to have recovered after the executions.

It is a case about voices, not a classic ghost story, but it belongs on a haunting site because it shows how supernatural claims were once treated as evidence in court. The surviving trial records are thin, and historians have noted that much of what we know comes from Mather’s later book and a 1682 letter by the Hartford minister John Whiting, so details differ between tellings. Modern readers look to explanations such as hysteria, fear of neighbours, grief, local rivalry and the effects of severe distress on a young woman, and the people who were hanged were real members of the town, named in the record.

Violent fits, and voices said to speak through Ann Cole’s lips in long discourses naming neighbours, reported by clergy and neighbours in 1662.

Around the homes of the Cole and Greensmith families in the town of Hartford in the Connecticut Colony.

The case appears in histories of New England witchcraft, in nineteenth-century Connecticut colonial records edited by Hoadly and in modern articles on the Hartford panic that predated Salem.