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Ep. 134 the Witch of Pungo: How Grace Sherwood Became the Only Convicted Witch In Virginia and What Her Story Has to Teach Us Now

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 134

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As it sometimes does, this week's topic presented itself to me. Determined to find out why the little known story of a woman most people have never heard of needed to be told so badly, I dug in. Join me to uncover the story of Grace Sherwood for yourself, the only woman ever to be convicted of witchcraft in Virginia. We'll examine the factors that led to Grace's conviction and the "recipe" for witch hunts that has plagued our past and potentially (but hopefully not!) our future. 

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Grace Sherwood ducked into a twisted patch of rosemary on a crisp winter day in 1697. She snapped off sprigs of the aromatic herb and placed them into a woven basket at her hip. Later, she’d hang them in the kitchen window to dry. She paused to adjust the waistline of her rough spun cotton trousers, pants her oldest son, John, had outgown. Grace knew the neighbors talked. A woman in pants? It was preposterous. That simply wasn’t how things were done in the Virginia colony at the turn of the 18th century, not at all. But Grace didn’t care what the neighbors thought. She never had. She worked almost 200 acres of farmland to feed her three boys. No one could convince her to do that in a dress. Grace stiffened as angry shouts floated over the field. That sounded like Richard Capps, a dreadful man. Sure enough, as she squinted into the dull sunlight, Capps emerged waving his arms and shouting like a madman. Apparently his prized bull had died and he seemed to know exactly who was at fault. Grace rolled her eyes and headed for the family’s modest farmhouse. Capps could think whatever he wanted, Grace dismissed, wearing pants doesn’t make someone a bull killer. But little did Grace know then, this accusation would be the first of many that would snowball into a pretty serious situation. In the end, Grace Sherwood would go down in history as the only woman ever to be convicted of witchcraft in Virginia. But why? And what became of her? Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I discuss surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Grace Sherwood came to me this time around. I had a different topic penciled in for this week but she forced her way right on in. I had to drive up to Virginia Beach for something medical recently. If you live where I live you know you pretty much have to go to Virginia for any kind of legit medical attention, yes cross state borders, such is the nature of living on a remote island. And as I was driving the hour and half up there, nearing Virginia Beach, a road sign caught my eye because I had just never noticed it before. It said Pungo, Pungo however many miles. I had never heard of Pungo. It struck me as odd because I’d done this drive so many times but I had never heard of that place, Pungo. Turns out it’s this sort of rural area this rural community in the southern part of Virginia Beach. A week or so later I walked into my favorite local coffee shop, Ashley’s Espresso Parlour shout out if you’re ever on the Outer Banks, and started perusing the drink fridge. They have some fun craft beers in there and what not and, once again, one of them caught my eye. Pungo. There was that word Pungo again. The Witch of Pungo Pumpkin Ale the beer was called. It’s made by Back Bay Brewing Company which is based in Virginia Beach so it all started to make sense. But who was the Witch of Pungo? I’m just hearing about this place for the first time and now I’m finding out they also have a witch? What is going on? 


As I dug into the story, I realized I had to give it a Spooktober slot. So I gave something else the boot until next year and opened the door for Grace Sherwood, the Witch of Pungo, who had come a’nocking and I need to figure out why. I love talking about witches. It’s my favorite history Halloween crossover. My episode from two years ago about Witches is still one of my favorites of all time. Definitely go back and listen to that one if you missed it or if it’s just been a while. It goes very deep into what caused the witch craze that began really in the 1400s in Europe. I just think there are so many valuable lessons to be learned from our witchhunt history. There’s so much important human psychology that goes into it that is still very relevant today. And that will hopefully be obvious in the story of Witch of Pungo. Grace clearly needs you to know this one. 


Before we get too deep into Grace’s story, though, I need to set the stage a little bit for you to better understand the history of witches and women being accused of being witches and specifically witch accusations in America. This is what I go into in detail in the Witches episode, I’m just going to sum it up real quick here. So witches, actual what you might call witches go back to ancient times. They weren’t typically called witches back then though, they were called wise women or sometimes cunning folk and they were really people you would recognize today as healers. So these wise women would have served as healers, caretakers, midwives, herbalists, they would have concocted herbal remedies and whatnot. Their knowledge and skills were incredibly important, although often unnoticed. But despite carrying this sort of invisible load of keeping people alive and ushering in new life, ancient wise women, the original witches would have been highly respected members of society. 


That all changed starting in the 1400s in Europe. There’s a lot of terrible things happening in Europe around this time. They are in the midst of a climate change disaster often referred to as the mini ice age. Temperatures dropped, crops failed, there was a lot of hunger and a lot of sickness and a lot of violence due to competition for resources in times of famine and whatnot. And so this, if you’re real OG and you listened to episode 8 then you know that this sort of upheaval and turmoil and constant anxiety sets the stage for mass hysteria to take root. The catalyst though, in the case of the witch hunts, was the church, or rather the churches. Early 1500s we have the start of the protestant reformation and for the first time in over 1,000 years, the Catholic church is being threatened. Its monopoly on religion in Europe has come to an end. Now, for the first time ever, churches have to use marketing strategies. They have to market their church to maintain their congregations so they don’t switch over to the other church. And here’s how they do that. They play on the fears of the people. Back in the 1400s the Catholic church had sent some friars to go preach in all of these little backcountry towns that were being plagued by actual plague and crop failure and violence and famine and as they roamed around preaching the good word, they were absorbing the fears and superstitions of the people. A lot of these fears had to do with women we once respected as wise women, the women who ushered in babies, healed and cared for the sick. Because times were really really bad. A lot of those babies were dying. A lot of the mothers were dying in childbirth, a lot of the people the women attempted to heal and care for ended up dying anyway. And the people didn’t understand this. They had no concept of science - of bacteria and viruses. Everything was supernatural to them. You know when someone is murdered, you look for the last person to see them alive? Who were they with last? Well in these cases, it was the midwife, the healer, the wise woman. And so they started to suspect these women and this fear, born out of grief, transformed into paranoia that they unloaded on these Catholic Friars. 


Later, in 1486, all of these fears and superstitions were regurgitated into a book written by the Catholic Church in what is now Germany called Malleus Malificarum which is Latin for Hammer of Witches. This was the ultimate guidebook on how to spot a witch and how to remove her from society and it absolutely blew up. Malleus Malificarum was a smash hit. It sold more copies than any other book for 100 years, second only to the bible itself. It became especially popular in the 1500s at the onset of the protestant reformation which, remember, challenged the Catholic church for the first time since the fall of Rome. Both churches start using witch hunts as a marketing ploy. They start stoking this fear of witches among the people and then promising a solution. Only our church can protect you from these women who use the devil’s power to do harm. This resulted in essentially a snowball effect over the next few centuries that led to the deaths of an estimated 80,000 people, mostly women. 


And some of you might be like, here she goes again blaming the church for everything. The reason we know the churches were involved in stoking these fears that led to witch hunts is because the vast majority of witch hunts were happening in countries where the churches were most threatened, countries where the protestant reformation had taken root, like present day Germany. Staunchly Catholic countries like Spain, Ireland, and Italy - suspected witches were not being persecuted there to anywhere near the degree they were in countries where the Catholic Church was being challenged. 


Men were occasionally accused of witchcraft but the vast majority of victims were women. Why women though? Well, women traditionally played these roles in society, these roles as midwives and healers that quite often, in those times anyway, resulted in death. So they were the natural scapegoats when grief sought someone to blame. But also, women were virtually powerless in those days, especially unmarried or widowed women who did not have a man to stand up for them. These women were usually easy targets of witch hunts. We see it in Salem in 1692, episode 84. The first three women accused, Tituba, Sarah Goode, and Sarah Osborne, were all social outcasts. Tituba was enslaved. Sarah Goode was a homeless beggar and Sarah Osborne was greatly disliked by the town for marrying an indentured servant and not attending church regularly. We see it in Grace Sherwood as well as you’ll soon see. 


But another pattern of witch hunts is that, what started as an actual spiritual dilemma, “I think this woman is actually using the devil to do me harm, I need the church to help me,” often spiraled into something far more convenient for the accusers. We start to see people accusing others of witchcraft just to get them out of the way. Maybe they wanted their land. Maybe that person was competition of some kind. Maybe eliminating them meant inheriting something in their place. We see all of these really corrupt motives pop up and this definitely happened in Salem as well. 


Now the Salem Witch trials, in the late 1600s Massachusetts, that was very late for witch hunts. Also, rare to see them in the American colonies where we don’t have as much competition between churches. These were English colonies, England was protestant, end of discussion. They were all Puritans in Salem. It was the whole reason they came over here, so they could be Puritans without anyone messing with them. So the Salem Witch Trials were a bit of an anomaly honestly. And there are reasons for it that I discuss in detail in episode 84 so I’m not going to rehash those here. Let’s go to Virginia though. 


The Virginia colony was much, much less witch happy than Massachusetts for a few reasons. Number one, the church in Virginia didn’t get involved in witch trials like it did in New England. The church played a major role in the witch trials in Salem, not in Virginia. The courts handled court cases in Virginia. The church handled Sunday sermons and baptisms and whatnot. Another difference, people in New England tended to settle in towns, concentrated    like Salem which often resulted in competition for resources. Virginia was more rural at the time. People settled out on farmland in the country, spread out. There wasn’t as much competition between people because they weren’t all crowded into small communities together. They mostly all did their own thing. The courts also just operated differently in Virginia. In Salem, the accused had to prove their innocence which was often impossible. In Virginia, the accuser had to prove the accused was guilty. It’s guilty until proven innocent vs. innocent until proven guilty. There’s a reason we go with the latter these days. Plus the courts in Virginia just weren’t really into prosecuting witches. They saw it as too divisive. It was a slippery slope. And you’ll see that, you’ll see the Virginia courts hesitate hard to do anything about accusations against Grace Sherwood at first. So we see far fewer witch trials in Virginia than in New England. 


Most of them that we do have records of in Virginia, though, come from the southeastern part of the state, what is now Norfolk and Virginia Beach and specifically the surrounding area called Pungo. This was a very rural area. There was a lot of poverty and hardship and we know hardship leads to competition that breeds witch hunts. According to these records, there were only 19 known witchcraft cases in Virginia in the 1600s and all but one of them ended in an acquittal. The one person who was convicted was a man, actually, in 1656. He was sentenced to 10 lashes and banishment from the community. And you might be like, well what about Grace Sherwood? Grace was convicted in the early 1700s so let’s get to that. 


We don’t know a whole lot about Grace Sherwood’s early life. We know that she was born Grace White in 1660 in the Virginia colony, likely in Pungo. Her father was a Scottish immigrant named John White and her mother was an English immigrant named Susan. It’s unclear whether her parents were born in Europe or in the Americas but either way they had emigrated rather recently. In 1680 Grace married a respectable farmer named James Sherwood and they had three sons: John, James, and Richard. Grace’s father had given the couple 50 acres of farmland as a wedding gift or I guess dowry or whatever and then he left them his remaining 145 acres of land when he died a year after the wedding. So you might be thinking, okay, that’s coming up on 200 acres of land. The Sherwoods must have been pretty well off sitting on that much land. No. Not at all actually. They were quite poor. Land in Virginia wasn’t worth all that much in the 1680s. In fact, the crown would give you land for free if you promised to develop it for them, all the better if you turned it into a tobacco farm. This is land that they of course, need I remind you, just determined that they controlled and could dole out at will despite it already being occupied by indigenous people for literally thousands of years, such was the entitlement of the English. So land isn’t worth all that much. You can get land for free if you ask for it right. 


The Sherwoods farmed their 200 acres and barely managed to scrape by. Grace herself worked the farmland, often wearing pants while she worked because, well duh. But that of course was a huge scandal in the late 1600s. Women did not wear pants, would not wear pants for another 250 years. So I think the fact that Grace wore pants while she worked her land says a lot about her personality. She clearly didn’t put much stock in image or reputation. I see a lot of authenticity in this decision. Grace was unapologetically Grace and she didn’t care what you thought about her. Contemporary accounts describe her as tall and attractive with a sense of humor. She was very knowledgeable about herbs. She grew her own herbs which she used to heal both people and animals. She was apparently a huge lover of animals. She also served as a midwife, helping the other women in the area give birth. So, I mean she sounds great to me but we have some serious red flags here in the minds of her contemporaries. Number one, she’s wearing pants which makes her an immediate social pariah and she doesn’t even care. That’s a red flag. Number two she grows herbs and knows how to use them. That’s very witchy. Number three she’s beautiful and funny which is just really unfair. She has all the other husband’s heads turning and that’s a major red flag. Belinda Nash who was like the expert on Grace Sherwood, she co-authored a biography called “A Place in Time: The Age of the Witch of Pungo” which I’ll link in the description. Belinda speculated that Grace’s neighbors may have been jealous of her and that the accusations of witchcraft may have been used as a ploy to remove her from their community. Which, yeah, checks out. The world really doesn’t like beautiful women in pants if you haven’t caught on yet. 


The first accusation against Grace came in 1697. One of her neighbors, a man named Richard Capps, claimed that she had used a spell to cause the death of his bull. He tries to take this to court, to take her to court for witchcraft. The court is like “we don’t wanna get involved. Witchcraft is not really our thing.” They’re like fingers in the ears, “la la la, I can’t hear you.” Cause remember Virginia doesn’t really prosecute witches. They don’t want to anyway. But Richard Capps has been smearing Grace’s name all over Pungo saying she put a spell on his bull or something crazy and she isn’t going to stand for that. Grace loves animals, after all. She won’t be known around town as a bull killer. She files a defamation suit against Capps. She’s going to take him to court for what his false claims have done to her reputation. This was resolved in a settlement. I have no further details on that. I assume Capps had to pay her some amount of money for the defamation of her character. So, Grace 1, crazy neighbors 0. 


The next year, 1698, Grace is accused of witchcraft again by a different crazy neighbor. John Gisburne accuses her of enchanting his pigs and his cotton crop. I for one love the idea of enchanted pigs but Gisburne apparently wasn’t into it. Once again the court wouldn’t even try the case. Grace tries to take Gisburne to court for defamation like she had Capps but it fails this time. The court rules against it. Later that same year another neighbor, a woman by the name of Elizabeth Barnes accuses Grace of witchcraft once again. She claims that Grace had assumed the form of a black cat, so predictable, and that, as a black cat, she came into her home, jumped over her bed, whipped her, and then left through the key hole. And I’m like okay, well if you were in bed honey and that happened, I’m pretty sure you were dreaming. Again the court refused to try the case and again Grace’s attempt to sue for defamation failed. 


So far Grace has evaded 3 witchcraft accusations thanks to the courts in Virginia actually factoring in common sense. But in 1701, her husband James died. Now if you remember I said women without husbands were often much more vulnerable in witch hunt scenarios? Because women weren’t really taken seriously without a man to stand up for them. They didn’t have any rights. They didn’t have a voice. Without a man, a woman was practically nothing. So this is not good for Grace. Becoming a widow in this situation was bad. In 1705 Grace gets in a straight up, like fist fight with her neighbor Elizabeth Hill and Elizabeth’s husband. I don’t know why. I don’t know what this was about but it seems like the Hills were the aggressors here because Grace successfully sued them for assault and battery and, according to court records, received damages of twenty shillings in December of 1705. 


Needless to say, the people of Pungo really do not like Grace Sherwood. At this point, 3 neighbors have accused her of witchcraft and another tried to beat her up. The court has to be getting really sick of hearing Grace Sherwood’s name by now. The Hills though, this lovely couple Elizabeth Hill and unnamed husband, they aren’t done with Grace yet. On January 3, 1706 the Hills accused Grace of witchcraft once again. This is now the 4th time the court is hearing accusations of witchcraft against Grace Sherwood, from 4 different people. So this is getting harder to ignore now. They choose to act. On February 7 the court orders Grace to appear on a charge of having bewitched Elizabeth Hill, causing her to have a miscarriage. And I’m like, girl maybe you shouldn’t have been starting fist fights with neighbors while pregnant. No, I don’t know if she was actually pregnant during the fight or not but it did happen only a couple months before so who knows. Either way she has apparently, supposedly miscarried and is accusing Grace of bewitching her. You can see the just like complete lack of understanding of science at play here. 


So now the court has to find proof that Grace is a witch. Remember in Virginia it was innocent until proven guilty not guilty until proven innocent like in Salem. So they have to find proof of her guilt. They put together two different all female jury panels which had to have been quite rare, juries made up of all women at that time. But this witch stuff, miscarriages and whatnot, this was women’s business. Plus it required a close examination of Grace’s body to look for evidence as laid out in Malleus Maleficarum. Remember this lovely book that was written by some Catholic guys back in the 1480s, well it’s still the book on witches. According to these 15th century crazies, there were a few ways to tell if someone was a witch. You could look for marks on their skin, devil’s marks. These were obviously moles but people deluded themselves into believing that they were teats for suckling demons. No, I am not making this up. I wish I were. Another way to test if someone is a witch, according to the book, is to bind their arms and legs and throw them into a body of water. This was called ducking or trial by water. The idea was that the water would reject a witch, like a reverse baptism. So if she sank, she wasn’t a witch and if she floated, the water had rejected her and she was a witch. 


So first they have to examine Grace’s naked body for devil’s marks. They obviously need women for this. They cobble together one group of women who are supposed to go search Grace’s house to look for waxen or baked figures. I’m assuming this was like a poppet, basically like a voodoo doll situation. This is all, by the way, we know about this because we have the court records, the transcripts from Grace’s trial. I have them linked in the description. So this one group of women is supposed to go search her house. They refuse to do it. They’re like nope, that's stupid. This is why more women should be in charge. The other group of women is supposed to search her body for marks, they refuse at first too. The court shuffles up these juries a bit until they find women who will actually do it. The group that searches her body ends up being led by none other than Elizabeth Barnes. Remember Elizabeth? She was the wacko neighbor lady who had accused Grace of turning into a black cat and jumping through her key hole. So she’s leading the jury. That’s not a conflict of interest at all. Court records refer to this group as quote “ancient and knowing women” which almost sounds like a witch accusation in and of itself. Fine line. Under Elizabeth Barne’s leadership, this group searches Grace’s body for demon suckling teats and they find two quote “marks not like theirs or like those of any other woman,” end quote. Cause, you know, all women have moles and freckles and whatnot in exactly the same places. Everyone knows that. 


So the women find these marks but the court is still sort of dragging their feet. They’re getting advice from the courts in Williamsburg which was essentially the capital of the colony, it was the center of colonial authority. Williamsburg is like “eh, it’s kind of vague. She bewitched her into having a misscarriage? Is that even a thing?” On April 16th word comes from Williamsburg to examine the case more fully. On May 2nd, the Princess Anne County justices who presided over Pungo where Grace lived, noted that there was quote “great cause of suspicion” and arrested Grace. She likely would have gotten out on bail though. On July 5th, the justices ordered a trial by ducking. This is where they throw you in the water to see if you sink or float. They are like pretty considerate about this in Virginia though. Apparently they ordered the ducking to take place but only with Grace’s consent and then they postponed it for almost a week because it was raining and they didn’t want the wet weather to harm her health. So I feel like this is the court knowing that what they’re doing is ridiculous but they just kind of have to do it anyway so they’re doing it but they’re also looking out for Grace’s best interest. They had also agreed that, if Grace sank which would have meant she was innocent, they weren’t going to let her drown. They were going to rescue her. I don’t know if Grace knew this or not. Even if she knew it, I’m not confident she would have trusted them to actually save her. 


So I guess Grace consented to this, I don’t know, I mean that’s what it said “with Sherwood’s consent.” Maybe she just wanted all of this to be over and done with. She was having to travel 16 miles to get to the courthouse for all of these appearances. That’s no small feat in 1706. Before the ducking on July 10th, Grace was taken into Lynnhaven Parish Church, sat on a stool, and ordered to ask for forgiveness for practicing witchcraft. To this she responded quote “I be not a witch, I be a healer.” At around 10 am she was taken down a narrow dirt road that’s now like a 6 lane highway called Witchduck Road in Virginia Beach. They took her to a plantation near the mouth of the Lynnhaven River where a crowd of onlookers had gathered all shouting “duck the witch!” 


Five women from the Lynnhaven Parish church examined Grace’s naked body on the shoreline to make sure she didn’t have anything on her she could use to free herself. Then her right thumb was tied to her left big toe and her left thumb was tied to her right big toe. That’s how she was bound. And she was also covered in a sack. Can you imagine the church ladies doing this to you? They’re like “I’m sorry dear, you come on to bible study after this if you survive, okay?” They put Grace, bound and in a flour sack or whatever into a boat and row her 200 yards out into the water. Reportedly just before she was pushed off the boat she said quote “Before this day be through you will all get a worse ducking than I.” They’re like “yeah, whatever lady,” and they throw her into the water. She immediately floats to the surface. The sheriff then tied a 13 pound bible around her neck to literally try to weigh her down with the bible. The church ladies are like “you go on and bring that with you bible study later, now.” She sinks but manages to untie herself and swim back up to the surface. According to the reports, as she was pulled back into the boat, it started pouring down rain, drenching the onlookers. So that was the worse ducking she had referred to in her ominous declaration before being thrown in the water. They bring her back to shore. Several women examine her naked body yet again and find quote “two things like titts on her private parts of a black coller,” end quote. So she failed the ducking, she floated like a witch. She failed all the visual inspections, was clearly suckling all sorts of demons. The court has convinced itself at this point that Grace Sherwood is in fact a witch. They arrest her and throw her in jail. 


What happens after that is a little unclear because that’s where the court documents that we have stop. Most people believe that she spent some time in jail, probably around 6 years and 9 months. And that time frame is based on, in 1714 she paid back taxes on her property. And they think she likely did that at that time because she was getting out of jail and in order to move back home and live on her land again she would have to pay those taxes she owed from the time she was in jail. In 1708 which, if that back taxes 1714 theory is correct, 1708 would be a couple years into her jail sentence. In 1708 she was ordered to pay a guy named Christopher Cocke for 600 pounds of tobacco. Which is a LOT of tobacco. We don’t know why and there’s no record of her actually paying him anything. I mean I can speculate that Christopher Cocke was likely a tobacco farmer who had a bad crop one year and blamed it on the only convicted witch in town who was ordered to reimburse him for bewitching it or whatever. 


But Grace Sherwood is eventually released from jail. She pays her taxes and moves home where she seems to have lived out the rest of her life, dying in 1740 and the age of 80. You may find that surprising considering witches were usually burned at the stake or hanged or whatever. Virginia never executed anyone for witchcraft. I love how laissez-faire they were about all of it. They’re like “ugh, witch accusations again. Just ignore it, ignore it. Okay they aren’t going away, um, do the ducking thing. Just duck her real quick, make sure she doesn’t drown though. Okay put her in jail for a little bit, I don’t know. We’ll let her go home when everyone forgets about it.” In Salem, on the other hand, they were hanging people left and right. But, they weren’t actually hanging them for being witches. That’s kind of a misconception. They were hanging them for not admitting to being witches. Those who confessed to witchcraft were not executed. They were jailed. They may have lost their land. They were required to name other witches, but they were not killed. The 19 people who were executed in Salem were killed because they refused to confess to witchcraft which means they refused to lie or to defy their Christian faith. So that means they killed literally the most upstanding members of their society. Grace Sherwood was proven a witch by surviving the ducking so she received a witch's punishment - a few years imprisonment. They didn’t burn or hang witches. They burned and hanged women with too much moral integrity to lie to the churches or the courts before God. 





After her death all sorts of legends popped up about Grace in the Virginia Beach area. According to one, her sons put her body by the fireplace after she died. A gust of wind came down the chimney and her body disappeared into the embers and the only clue left behind was a cloven hoofprint. Now, that’s obviously not true. We actually think she was buried in an unmarked grave under a tree in one of her fields which is now near the intersection of Pungo Ferry Road and Princess Anne Road in Virginia Beach if anyone wants to go do a seance or anything. But this rumor went around that the devil had taken her body after she died and this of course freaked people out and snowballed into more rumors. One involved black cats hanging around. There seemed to be an unusually high number of black cats after Grace Sherwood’s death. Apparently, people got so paranoid about the black cats that local men started killing every cat they could find which is SO horrible. Interestingly, there was a massive rat and mouse infestation reported in Princess Anne County in 1743 and this was believed to have been caused by the killing of all the cats which were of course keeping the rodent population in check. Apparently Grace’s farmhouse stood for over 200 years before being burned several times by vandals in the 1900s. By 2002 only the brick chimneys remained and those were bulldozed in November of 2002. So all that’s left there now are some random bricks and part of the foundation. What was once the Sherwood farm is now owned by the Federal Government as part of Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Yes, Back Bay as in Back Bay Brewing Company who makes the Witch of Pungo beer I stumbled upon. But, you know, I think that’s fitting that her land became a wildlife refuge. Grace was reportedly a lover of animals.


There was all that frenzy right after she died with the killing of the cats and whatnot but, eventually Grace sort of faded into obscurity. Not many people knew about her story until a Virginia Beach historian named Louisa Venable Kyle wrote a children's book about her called “The Witch of Pungo.” Eventually, Belinda Nash, who helped preserve the Ferry Plantation and so was obviously interested in local history, took up an interest in Grace Sherwood as well. Belinda petitioned three different Virginia governors over a period of 20 years to get them to pardon Grace Sherwood of her witchcraft conviction. That’s how long it took. I mean I don’t know how much work it is to issue an official pardon or whatever as governor but like, seriously? None of y’all gone pardon this obviously innocent woman? Eventually Belinda convinced Virginia Governor Tim Kaine in 2006 and he finally cleared Grace Sherwood’s name on July 10th, exactly 300 years to the day of her trial by ducking ordeal. You’ve likely heard of Tim Kaine, he was Hillary Clinton’s Vice Presidential running mate in the 2016 presidential election and is currently a US Sentaor. But back in 2006 he was the Governor of Virginia. Kaine wrote in a letter to the Virginia Beach mayor to read at a re-enactment of the ducking on the day Grace was pardoned quote “With 300 years of hindsight, we all certainly can agree that trial by water is an injustice…” Uh, duh Tim. He goes on to say quote “We also can celebrate the fact that a woman's equality is constitutionally protected today, and women have the freedom to pursue their hopes and dreams,” end quote. Okay now we’re getting to the meat of it, thank you Tim. The ducking isn’t the tragedy here. The ducking is whatever. The tragedy is the three hundred year period of time where innocent women were used as societal scapegoats and something like 80,000 lost their lives. The tragedy is human weakness and corruption and sheer stupidity for which mostly women, who were secretly upholding that society through selfless acts that no one acknowledged or fully appreciated, took the fall. That’s the real tragedy.


I think the history of witch trials screams at me so loudly because it sits on this dangerous precipice still, this history is at such a high risk of repeating itself because of the recipe, because of what it takes for this sort of thing to happen, these certain conditions, ingredients if you will. Now, I don’t think it’s witches we have to worry about next time. I think women are mostly safe from being wrongly accused of witchcraft these days thanks to our improved understanding of science, like why women miscarry, why crops fail, why animals die, etc. And women’s positions in society, in most cultures anyway, their rights and equality, have also improved greatly as Tim Kaine said. But, this same phenomenon, this witch hunt phenomenon can and has been applied in other areas. 


We saw it in the 1950s McCarthy era, the communist witch hunts, when innocent Americans were being accused left and right of being communists or even just being sympathetic to communists. I was personally accused of being a communist in a recent History Fix review which I find borderline comical. Still waiting to be called a witch. McCarthyism was driven by mass fear and hysteria during the cold war just as the witch hunts of the 14, 15, 1600s were driven by fear and hysteria during times of suffering. But that’s not enough. Fear and hysteria alone aren’t enough. There’s another ingredient. You need someone, an institution really, a respected institution, to stoke those fears. In the case of witch hunts it was mostly the churches. In Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts the US Federal Government did the stoking. Both proceeded to remove due process. Due process means that the government or the church or whatever has to give people a chance to defend themselves with a fair hearing, a fair trial, emphasis on the fair part. A removal of due process means guilty until proven innocent, like in Salem. If you’re already convinced, or you’re even just strategically pretending to be convinced, that a person is a witch or a communist, witches don’t get due process. You can’t very well trust anything a witch says. Communists don’t get due process. They are unamerican and therefore not entitled to the due process guaranteed by both the 5th and 14th amendments. But here’s the thing, once you remove due process, you can accuse anyone. You can accuse a highly respected member of the church congregation of witchcraft. You can accuse an upstanding American citizen of being a communist. Because they’ve lost the right to defend themselves. It’s your word against theirs and their word means nothing now. 


The witch hunt phenomenon occurs when the right ingredients come together: hard times, fear and paranoia of the people because of those hard times, and a powerful institution taking advantage of that situation to better its own position that is willing to remove due process because they’ve already convinced themselves that the accused does not deserve it. You’re worried about witches? We can get rid of the witches. You’re worried about communists? We can get rid of the communists. You’re worried about immigrants… dare I even say? We can get rid of the immigrants. Without getting too political here, because I’ve apparently ruffled some feathers of late, not my intention, I urge you to consider some of the policies in place in the US right now concerning immigrants within the context of the witch hunt phenomenon. Just consider it. I’m not going to share my own opinions on this but I think it’s something we need to be paying attention to because, objectively, the pattern is there. The pattern is recognizable if you’re familiar with the history. And as we know from studying history, from the stories of witch hunts, from the story of Grace Sherwood, the Witch of Pungo, the witch hunt phenomenon tends to repeat itself and, when it does, it’s an all too slippery slope.  


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 


Information used in this episode was sourced from the Virginia Historical and Philosophical Society, the Salem Witch Museum, ferryplantation.org, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, the Washington Post, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.