Goody Cole of Hampton

Eunice Cole was born in England around 1590 and lived in Hampton, then part of the Massachusetts Bay colony, with her husband William. Neighbours knew her as “Goody” – short for Goodwife – and the town historian Joseph Dow later called her ill-natured, artful and malicious, while stressing that she was certainly not a witch. After accusations of witchcraft and ill-wishing she was imprisoned in Boston. Sources differ on the exact legal outcome, but the record shows proceedings against her in 1656 and 1673, and a further accusation in 1680 in which a jury found “just grounds” for suspicion but did not convict her. Her husband died while she was jailed, and the town paid for her keep for years before it stopped.

She lived out her last years alone in a hut near Hampton’s Rand’s Hill. By custom the town’s families supplied her with food and fuel, and when her chimney stopped smoking in October 1680 the supplies were found untouched at her door. She was buried hastily in an unmarked grave whose location has never been fixed. Local legend adds that a stake was driven through her body and a horseshoe hung upon it to guard against her ghost – a story that historian J. Dennis Robinson calls speculation drawn from European folklore and Salem-style tales.

In the twentieth century Hampton set out to make amends. Ahead of the town’s 300th anniversary, citizens organised what became known as the Goody Cole Society in 1937. On 25 August 1938 the Portsmouth Herald reported that more than 300 residents at a town meeting had voted without opposition, under Article 16, to declare that she had been wrongly accused and to restore her standing as a citizen. Certified copies of her court papers were to be burned and the ashes mixed with soil from her reputed grave and home site in an urn, which was meant to be buried beneath a monument. The urn was never buried and is kept at the Tuck Museum. In 1963 a large erosion stone was set outside the museum on the presumed site of the Cole farm.

The ghost story attached to her is much younger than the case. Robinson reports that after the 1938 ceremony people said they saw a mysterious old woman wandering the streets of Hampton. The reports are anecdotal and mostly unnamed, so they are best understood as the afterlife of a famous local scapegoat. Goody Cole remains one of the few accused witches of New England to have been formally cleared by her own town.

Locals have spoken of a mysterious old woman seen wandering Hampton’s streets since 1938, whom they took to be Goody Cole. There are no named witnesses or detailed accounts.

The streets of old Hampton, the Meeting House Green and the Tuck Museum, near the presumed site of her farm; her real grave site is unknown.

Goody Cole appears in studies of New England’s early witchcraft cases and in Seacoast folklore and ghost tours. In 1937 a doll in her likeness was made and sold locally during the campaign to clear her name, and the Tuck Museum tells her story.