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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dauber, Jeremy, [date]– author.

Title: American scary : a history of horror, from Salem to Stephen King and beyond / Jeremy Dauber.

Description: First edition. | Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2024027916 (print) | LCCN 2024027917 (ebook) | ISBN 9781643753560 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781643755977 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Horror tales, American—History and criticism. | Horror films—United States—History and criticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Film criticism.

Classification: LCC PS374.H67 D38 2024 (print) | LCC PS374.H67 (ebook) | DDC 813/.0873809—dc23/eng/20240708

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024027916

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024027917

ISBN 9781643755977

E3-20240827-JV-NF-ORI

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INTRODUCTION: RED, WHITE, AND BLACK

SHOW ME WHAT SCARES YOU, and I’ll show you your soul.

It goes for nations, too, not just people: you can write America’s history by tracking the stories it tells itself to unsettle its dreams, rouse its anxieties, galvanize its actions.

Sometimes those stories are flickering on the screen of a darkened movie theater. Sometimes they’re printed on the well-thumbed pages of a massive paperback novel with the author’s name embossed on the cover. Sometimes they’re told around campfires by scout leaders. And sometimes they’re in the teasers for your local news at eleven, or in tweets that go viral, embers of concern fanned into flame.

What I’m going to do here is tell you the American horror story, from its earliest days to our current nightmares. Our guiding light is the not-so-simple question, simply put: What’s scared the crap out of us?

Telling that story means taking in Puritan preachers’ threats of eternal damnation and Jordan Peele’s tales of demonic racism and most everything in between. Household names like Stephen King, Ryan Murphy, and Shirley Jackson next to horror-fan favorites like Robert Bloch, Tananarive Due, and Robert Eggers. Pulp magazines and comic books like Weird Tales and Tales from the Crypt side by side with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Edith Wharton, classic writers who made no bones about working these veins.

So to speak.

All side by side, because the history of American horror, like any cultural history, is that of links in a chain: writers incorporating their predecessors’ technical tricks and creative innovations in the art of scaring the bejeezus out of their readers, then cranking it up a notch or playing it in their own chilling key. And how that music plays depends, of course, on the medium in which these tales of terror appear. Horror is like water, it seeps in everywhere (leaving things that grow, dark and clammy, in its wake…), and so with every new movement, every new invention—the nationally syndicated newspaper; movies; the radio; television; the Internet—the way the classic themes appear is transformed, sometimes dramatically, sometimes softly, sometimes monstrously, and that’s part of the story, too.

Story, singular; because, at its dark heart, American horror, for all its variety, despite the stamp of differing times and places and approaches, comes down to a fear with two faces. (What’s a horror story without an uncanny double, after all?) And almost everything we’ll see in our story sups of, or shuttles between, the two of them.

The first: the fear of something grand, something cosmic. Whether it’s an angry God that consigns sinners to the fire and brimstone, Lovecraft’s creatures from out of space and time, or the ticking time bomb of global warming, we, as humans, are constantly trying to bat away the specter of our own ultimate insignificance. And one flavor of horror reminds us of our fragility, and often, our failure to transcend it. Its geography is a map of thin places, locations where the veil between the world we live in and another one entirely is slender, where these reminders pop up with teeth: places like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, where no mind can long stay sane, and Stephen King’s Derry, where It prowls the sewers with balloons and claws—two twentieth-century examples from a long, blood-stained list.

The other fear is the flip side of the first: it’s the monster located right next door. Fear of the other, constantly present, constantly malleable, is our second great thread: and we’ll trace it as it swirls and cycles around most of the traditionally frightening cards in the American deck. Indigenous tribes. Black people. Immigrants. And always, always women: witches and sirens, painted as emasculators in so many different stripes. All reminding the audience of the ugly monster that lies within themselves, from the monstrous double of Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” to Penn Badgley’s Netflix serial killer series, titled, simply, You. Not to be confused with Jordan Peele’s 2019 meditation on the horror double, called Us.

As far back as Aristotle, horror fiction—and what’s Greek tragedy if not a catalog of horror?—has been understood as a way of taking your fears for a walk; playing them out on the amphitheater stage, purging them as you emerged, blinking, into the light. Catharsis, in other words, and there’s no better recipe for it than the allegories of fearsome fiction, where real terrors play themselves out in impossible settings.

But that’s not the whole story, is it? Sure, we’ll track how monstrous symbols shift and blur over the centuries—how the zombie moves from colonialist critique to racist callout to consumerist satire to epidemiological echo; how the vampire can speak to both crumbling empires and the AIDS epidemic; how the alien from outer space can be a Communist missile or a Christian allegory or sometimes, even, both at once. But we need to cut deeper, too. Closer to home. Not just fictional material that speaks to American reality in disguise—albeit often not a terribly good disguise; that Halloween mask sometimes slips a bit. Or a lot. We’ll see a lot of true horror stories, too.

Like the unconventional nineteenth-century bed and breakfast where people checked in… but didn’t check out. And the “murder castle” located just a few miles from a World’s Fair. And the Lonely Hearts Murderer. And the Plainfield Ghoul. Which, in turn, influenced some of the most important American horror fiction ever made.

And many, many more.

Because, in the end, all we have are the stories. Hundreds of them, new delights, old favorites, that fit together into a long, and not always distinguished, story.

Which I hope you think about.

When you’re all alone.

ONE

In the Hands of God and the Devil

OUR STORY BEGINS, LIKE ALL good horror stories should, in the dark.

The northeastern part of the land that would eventually become known as the United States of America was covered in woods. Deep dark woods, a natural setting for tales told by firelight.

Those who walked those woods for centuries, those whose lands they were, had their explanations for the shadows that multiplied at the edges of their campfires, and tales of the creatures that dwelled within those shadows. Much of that rich and varied folklore was, and often remains, orally transmitted; and though assuredly certain details have altered and evolved over the years, and tales differed from tribe to tribe, the rich interchange between tribal cultures and the overlapping landscape and milieu that many of the tribes shared allowed an overarching set of themes and characters to emerge.

Not all those tales were tales of fear; but some of them were. Some, like those of the Algonquian nation’s savage wendigo, seem to us to be the transmogrification of the natural landscape, of the ravening beasts that would hunt, were they not hunted. Others, like tales of Coyote, the trickster, or Snake, or Iktomi, the spider, partake of the universal concern that the gods and creatures greater than ourselves were hardly beneficent—but could, should the occasion arise and their quasi-cosmic amusement persist, see fit to be swayed for a time, at least.¹ But what persists most is the sense of the land, of its balance between bounty and blight, between kindness and horror. Its promise, and potential.

The men and women who landed on those shores in the seventeenth century—those who came by choice, at least—are often characterized by their hopes and dreams, of new worlds and shining cities on a hill, and this is true enough; but, and to our point, their dreams were also shrouded in fear. As refugees (whether by necessity or in their own self-conception doesn’t matter much for the state of mind we’re discussing), they brought with them a world they felt was steeped in devilishness, witchery, and diabolism.

Most of those sailing from England across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century wouldn’t have held much truck with the theater; more precisely, they considered it a hotbed of heresy, scandal, and obscenity run riot. But had they ventured to the theater in the two decades before the first ships set sail, they might have encountered a brace of works that sum up, for us, fundamental aspects of that worldview.

“Ay, heaven will be revenged of every ill / Nor will they suffer murder unrepaid,” Hieronimo says in Thomas Kyd’s late sixteenth-century Spanish Tragedy, and that sense of violent consequence marked this as an example of the “revenge play” then in fashion. The ghost of a murdered man and the allegorical spirit of Revenge are constantly onstage: and when the dead bodies litter the stage at the end, the ghost remarks, “Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul.”² His soul, not heaven’s desire, one might suspect, and not just his: “When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good,” goes a line in The Revenger’s Tragedy, published a decade later, and wrapping lust for violence and gore in a cloak of piety to please the very human demands of a bloodthirsty audience will hardly be unfamiliar to modern-day moviegoers.³

By the time The Revenger’s Tragedy appeared, Elizabeth I had died, and King James VI of Scotland headed south to become king of England, first of his name; and the united kingdom’s new monarch was passionately interested in the magical and maleficent, having authored a book, Daemonologie, on the subject in 1597, after some personal involvement in some late sixteenth-century witch trials. James, who firmly believed he’d seen actual witches in the flesh, was writing in no small part to respond to an increasingly skeptical take on witches, which held it was society’s way of demonizing old women and other beings they feared. To James, this position was just further proof of the devil’s sway (the “old and crafty serpent being a spirit, he easily spies our affections, and so conforms himself thereto to deceive us to our wrack,” he wrote),⁴ and so it’s hardly surprising two emblematic plays of the time took that line.

Kyd’s roommate Christopher Marlowe, a man constantly being charged with heresy (and a probable spy for Queen Elizabeth), may have written his Doctor Faustus as an attempt, in part, to reestablish his pious credentials. Taken as it was from an allegedly quasi-true German bestseller about a man named Johannes Faustus whose alchemical dealings led to a pact with the devil for magical powers—putting him on the wrong side of Martin Luther—it’s a story we’ll see over and over again: man dabbling with What He Is Not Meant to Know and earning damnation as a result. But the play’s unsettling energy comes from something else. Milton’s Paradise Lost, a few decades later, would establish the convention that the devil gets all the best lines; but the process got a good kickstart from Faustus’s Devil, Mephistophilis, who jokes and mugs and grows serious by turns. The Devil, in this telling, provides forbidden knowledge in return for a soul: and the knowledge he gives, intriguingly, is that the devil is in pain, grieving over his distance from the Divine since the Fall, and thus walks the earth, bringing hell with him. “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” he tells Faustus, inviting us to look at our landscape and find inferno—including the hell we make ourselves.

Compare this to a second play about the unnatural walking the earth, produced just a few weeks later. Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, had slotted neatly into the revenge play tradition of Kyd and Marlowe. But Macbeth, one of his later plays, is about ambition, the haunting of a guilty conscience, and witchery, and how the visions and prophecies the latter affords are both made and unmade by human decision and understanding. Macbeth, after all, might have had a different end if he’d understood from the beginning that Birnam Wood really could come to Dunsinane. Thomas De Quincey, the nineteenth-century English writer whose On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts is right up our alley, said about Macbeth: “Another world has stepped in… both [Macbeth and Lady Macbeth] are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed.”⁵

To seventeenth-century playgoers, that other world is very much Scotland: a country that, despite being the home of their current monarch, few Londoners had ever seen, and whose bonnie banks and braes were considered home to marvels and wonders of more mysterious, darker sorts, echoed in folktale and fairy story. The unnatural occurrences counterfeited on the stage of the Globe couldn’t really happen here, playgoers could assure themselves (though some undoubtedly remembered that story about a production of Faustus where one more devil appeared on the stage than there were actors supposedly playing them). But Scotland? All sorts of mysterious and frightening things could happen there. Or on any of the whiter, blanker spaces of the map. And the New World would very much prove no exception to the rule. But, of course, Macbeth’s was also the world of the diabolic possibilities of the human heart, far more resonant to us than Marlowe’s alchemical devil—always with us, no matter how far you sailed.

The Puritans well understood this, to their fear and dismay. Revenge playwright John Webster, Shakespeare and Marlowe’s contemporary, was characterized by T. S. Eliot as “much possessed by death” and seeing “the skull beneath the skin.” The Puritans had a similar sensibility. Death and the devil were all around them; the question was what forms these took, in this World they claimed was New.

ON MARCH 17, 1679, INCREASE Mather strode to the lectern of Boston’s Old North Meeting House to preach a sermon. Facing his congregation of the Second Church, he thundered:

New England differs from other outgoings of our nation, in that religion was the design of our fathers in transporting themselves and families into this vast and howling wilderness. But, men are now pursuing a worldly interest, with their whole hearts.… The Lord hath fallen upon us of late, and rendered his rebukes in flames of Fire…⁶

Mather wasn’t speaking only metaphorically about those “flames of fire”: he’d lost his own home in the conflagration that had enveloped Boston just two years before. But for Mather and his Congregationalist coreligionists, the earthly inferno was a sign of a metaphysical one: just another example of the theological battlefield on which they struggled constantly, one that shrouded the world in the prospect of salvation and the reality of hellfire.

By the time Mather preached this sermon, this idea, and his family’s centrality in propagating it, was deeply rooted in the history of the new American colonies. The family story starts in the 1620s with John Cotton, a long-standing English nonconformist. Faced with the prospect of inquisition at the hands of Bishop of London William Laud, Cotton went underground, assisted by the clandestine Puritan network. Contacted by members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who asked him to come minister to them, Cotton sailed with his family in the summer of 1633. A contemporary biographer described his flight as “Providence Divine shutting up the door of service in England, and on the other hand opening it in New England.”⁷ That place: the First Church of Boston, founded just three years before, in 1630.

What, exactly, did Cotton profess, in that small, windowless Boston meetinghouse with a thatched roof? That the world, for all its seeming immensity, was simply a narrow lifetime’s span, a battlefield between the Prince of Peace and Satan. Or, as 1662’s The Day of Doom, a poetic collection by Michael Wigglesworth of “phenomenal popularity” among the Puritans, put it in “A Short Discourse on Eternity”:⁸

The lofty sky is not so high

Hell’s depth to this is small;

The world so wide is but a stride

Compared herewithall.

Mather insisted his congregants must fight that battle by establishing theocratic rule here, government by God.⁹ A little-known settler named Thomas Tillam expressed that sense of New World’s promise and its threat in his poem “Upon the First Sight of New England, June 29, 1638”:

Here you shall enjoy

My Sabbaths, sacraments, my ministry

And ordinances in their purity.

But yet beware of Satan’s wily baits;

He lurks among you, cunningly he waits

To catch you from me. Live not then secure

But fight ’gainst sin, and let your lives be pure.¹⁰

Such a worldview would be dramatic and frightening enough. But according to the theology of predestination Cotton preached, there was nothing you could do to save yourself; your only option was just to give yourself over helplessly to God’s grace. The combination of an emphasis on the precariousness of one’s immortal soul, and the inability to do anything about it, was a prescription for a constant state of congregational terror. People were therefore invariably on the lookout for anything that could be interpreted as a sign of the absence, or the withdrawal, of that same grace. A comet appeared shortly before Cotton’s death in 1652, and when asked the significance of it, his biographer notes that Cotton thought “it portended great changes in the churches.” Signs of Satan’s hand, and his handmaidens, were plentiful; much could be interpreted in that fashion.

John Cotton’s widow, Sarah Hankredge, remarried the widower Richard Mather; and thus Mather’s son by his first marriage, Increase Mather, becomes entwined with the Cottons and their legacy. Increase was born in Dorchester, England, in 1639, his odd first name the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Hebrew for “Joseph.” His mother, who died when her son was around fifteen and whose “holy” memory, according to a contemporary biographer, “was valued by him as long as he lived,” died with the following words on her lips: “Eye hath not seen, Ear hath not heard, nor have entered into heart of man, the Things, which God has prepared for them that love him.”¹¹ The idea of the world beyond, of salvation and damnation beyond the limits of perception, stayed with Increase, who arrived in New England in the fall of 1661.

By this time, the city of Boston had grown extensive enough that a second Congregationalist church was needed in the North End. And so what was known as the Church of the Mathers was founded, and Increase became its spiritual leader. He’d also married Maria Cotton, John’s daughter and—by dint of his father’s marriage—his own step-sister, a woman who, that contemporary biographer noted, was “much addicted to Prayer, often setting apart whole Days, for Fasting and private Devotion.”¹²

Mather himself, on the evidence of his son and his writings, struggled with the grand theological questions, including publishing a book called There Is a God in Heaven (you wouldn’t need to publish a book called this, after all, if you hadn’t at least considered the alternative). Certainly one might be tempted to curse, or deny, the Divine when one sees one’s own home go up in smoke: Mather’s repeated insistence in his own account of the “dreadfull fire” of God’s “remembred mercy”—mostly that he was able to save most of his books¹³—seems a genuine effort to remind himself of goodness in the midst of disaster. But the temptations and trials Mather must have had in mind went beyond the lure of ascribing disaster to random chance or to sin, or even the opportunity to display unlikely gratitude. At least one other supped of a very different kind of horror story Mather and his congregants were encountering, leading to another volume vying for the crown of America’s first bestseller.

IN 1676 BENJAMIN THOMPSON DIAGNOSED New England’s Crisis via a wordy subtitle: “A brief narrative of New-England’s lamentable estate at present, compar’d with the former (but few) year of prosperity: Occasioned by many unheard of crueltyes practised upon the persons and estates of its united colonyes, without respect of sex, age or quality of persons, by the barbarous heathen thereof: Poetically described.”

“Poetically” is something of a stretch, given the quality of the verse, but Thompson’s presentation of the native American as not merely heathen but hardly different from the animals of the American landscape—except, perhaps, in their cunning and ingenious malice and barbarity—was certainly vivid. “Indian spirits need / no grounds but lust to make a Christian bleed,” wrote Thompson:

In dark meanders, and these winding groves

Where bears and panthers with their Monarch moves

These far more cruel slily hidden lay,

Expecting English men to move that way…

Death would a mercy prove to such as those

Who feel the rigour of such hellish foes.¹⁴

Hellish, indeed: like in Macbeth, both the natural and religious landscape work together as a site of fear. Everywhere a settler went was ripe for ambush, with those “Indian spirits” waiting to jump out and swallow you up. This hadn’t always been the case—a letter by Edward Winslow in 1621, trying to soft-soap the Pilgrims during their first year in America, noted that “We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us, very loving and ready to pleasure us”¹⁵—but that had been a half-century ago, and things were different now.

Thompson’s manifesto, after all, was written in the heat of what’s now known as King Philip’s War but was once better known as the First Indian War: a heated conflict between the Indigenous peoples of the territory becoming known as New England, particularly from the Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes, and the colonists of, particularly, Rhode Island and Massachusetts Bay. The war was deadly on both sides, bloodier, in percentage terms, than the Civil War; over a tenth of the men of Plymouth and Rhode Island colonies were killed. But there was no question about the eventual victors, and the barbarity involved in the victory. Over a third of the local Indigenous population was killed.¹⁶ The Wampanoags were dispossessed from their tribal lands, with hundreds killed or enslaved. The body of the Wampanoag leader, Metacomet—known as King Philip to the English—was drawn and quartered; his head was then placed on a pike and publicly displayed in Plymouth, remaining there for a quarter of a century, long after his wife and son had been sold into slavery in the West Indies.¹⁷ History, or its literature, is not only written, but also circulated, by the victors. So it’s not surprising this range of issues was less poetically, but far more famously, captured by that second American bestseller, which gave the account of a woman ambushed by Native Americans, “removed” into captivity (to use her phrasing), and returned to tell her tale.

Mary Rowlandson was living in Lancaster, Massachusetts Bay, in 1676, the same year of Benjamin Thompson’s plaint. During King Philip’s War, colonial cities were regularly attacked by Native Americans, and Lancaster was no exception; a raiding party of Narragansetts, Wampanoags, and Nashaway tribal members carried away her and her three children. Her six-year-old daughter Sarah died in the first week from injuries she received during the raid; Rowlandson and her other children hung on for the better part of three more months, until they were ransomed, for the sum of twenty pounds, by a subscription taken up by the women of Boston.

In 1682, six years after her ordeal, she published her account of it. The first edition’s title page insists it is “A True History” by “A Minister’s Wife in New England”; that she had originally written it “By Her Own Hand, for Her Private Use” and was now making it public “At the Earnest Desire of Some Friends, for the Benefit of the Afflicted.” An addendum running in smaller type at the bottom of the page indicates the work includes a sermon “of the Possibility of God’s Forsaking a People That Have Been Near and Dear to Him”: it is, the addendum informs us, preached by her husband, “It Being His Last Sermon.” Joseph Rowlandson had died in 1678; and Mary, grieving, with this familial loss coming hard on the heels of her earlier trauma, had, like so many others before her, turned to writing to play it out, to gain some sense of control, and to wrestle with the all-important theological questions posed in its wake.¹⁸ So it’s not surprising, for someone seeking answers in faith, that her message—to herself first of all, and only then, if the frontispiece is to believed, to a wider community clearly in the grip of these same questions—is one not just of burden, but of release; not just of captivity, but restoration, of (as the work was titled in New England) The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. It was published in twenty-three editions over the next 150 years.¹⁹

Rowlandson’s account doesn’t pull punches when it comes to depicting the circumstances of her captivity (“knocked in the head” seems to be the seventeenth-century equivalent of “bashed his brains out”): “One of my elder sisters’ children, named William, had then his leg broken, which the Indians perceiving, they knocked him on [his] head. Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels.” Rowlandson listens to “the roaring, and singing and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell”: her captors’ otherness is seen throughout her narrative as an extension of the natural landscape, yes, but they are also pictured, following Rowlandson’s view of them as representatives of the Arch-Deceiver, as essentially cruel and deceitful beings.²⁰ “There is not one of them that makes the least conscience of speaking of truth,” she tells herself after asking one of her captors about the fate of her son and receiving the answer that “his master roasted him, and that [he] himself did eat a piece of him, and that he was very good meat.” And so it’s unsurprising Rowlandson views falling into their clutches as the wages of sin. On the first Sabbath of her captivity, for example, she recalls “how careless I had been of God’s holy time; how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent, and how evilly I had walked in God’s sight.”²¹

But if these travails are divine punishment, they are also simultaneously the irruptions of cataclysm that must be weathered in order for the exercise of faith to truly matter: “the Lord renewed my strength still, and carried me along, that I might see more of His power… as he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other.” It is this faith in God’s goodness and power she credits, for example, in keeping her sane and unwilling to succumb to suicide after lying “down by my dead babe, side by side all the night after.” In this sense, then, the Indigenous peoples of America are not autonomous agents but simply instruments: and thus, in themselves, do not matter. “I can but admire to see the wonderful providence of God in preserving the heathen for further affliction to our poor country,” she writes.²² Which is, of course, one step away to their being easily, and understandably, disposable.

Who convinced Rowlandson to share her story, and her message, with the world? One central figure: our old friend Increase Mather. While King Philip’s War raged, he had taken “occasion to reprove, in the most public Manner, those Miscarriages, which he judged had provoked God to execute the Punishment of War on the Land,” employing theories of theological cause and effect similar to Rowlandson’s.²³ After the war ended—certainly after having spoken with Rowlandson, maybe even after having read a private draft of her work—Mather preached that 1679 sermon of his in the Second Church, calling for parishioners to act so “we may be pure from the sins of the times, even those provoking evils that have brought the Judgements of God upon New England.”²⁴ For Mather, those recommended actions included disseminating, in print, the kind of fears—and the religious means of allaying them—that Rowlandson exemplified. Most scholars think he authored the “Preface to the Reader” that accompanied the original edition; some even suggest he helped compose the work itself.

Ultimately, though, Rowlandson’s book focuses inward, not out: on the demonic sin and doubt within, rather than on the Indigenous peoples who are demonized while, simultaneously, being marginalized as simple, even bestial, instruments of God’s will, without agency or character.

And so Mather turned his attentions to witches.

TWO YEARS AFTER INCREASE MATHER helped publish Rowlandson’s narrative, he published a book of his own. An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (later sometimes called Remarkable Providences) is a work of theological scholarship that records remarkable providences everywhere showing signs of the Devil: not least in New England. He describes the maid in Groton who, in October 1671, wept and roared “hideously, with violent motions and agitations of her body… her tongue was drawn out of her mouth to an extraordinary length,” a tongue that went on to blaspheme most horribly; in 1679, he writes, the house of William Morse in Newberry was “strangely disquieted by a demon” engaging in what we’d call poltergeist activity, throwing stones, bricks, and a cat, among other objects.²⁵ “So many things were done and suffered by the Agency of invisible Beings, as to leave no Room to doubt the Existence of Spirits,” Mather’s son writes of his observations.²⁶

By this point, Macbeth is almost a century old, but witchcraft accusations were back in style, both in England and Massachusetts: between 1647 and 1664, seventy-nine people had been accused of witchcraft in New England, and fifteen of them were hanged.²⁷ Mather’s own concern—shaped by the idea that the Indigenous peoples next door could, in his eyes, be the devil in human flesh—was with a combination of the characters of witches and Macbeth, so to speak. Our friends, our lovers, our fellow householders, could be witches, sinful devils in disguise—like Macbeth, who offers seeming hospitality but has murder in his heart. The devil is, after all, the grandest deceiver of all. And so what is there to be done about it by the person of virtue but to attempt to unmask them?

The climax of the whole thing, of Puritan fear and hysteria at its most feverish pitch, started, arguably, with laundry.

In 1688 the oldest child of John Goodwin, a Boston mason, had stolen linen from local washerwoman Ann Glover. Bad behavior, to be sure; and Goody Glover was right to complain—but as an old woman and an Irish Catholic to boot, she was already something of a double pariah; and in Mather’s world, where the devil walked and seduced, it was easy enough to blame Goodwin’s child’s malfeasance on something otherworldly. And that’s what happened: Glover was tried for witchcraft and executed. “In the Massachusetts theocracy,” a modern scholar writes, “there was no conceptual distinction between crime, sin, and sheer deviance from the norm.”²⁸ Still, the single case might not have spiraled into a craze, but for two things. The first was the “disease of astonishment” that soon affected four of the six Goodwin children, including neck and back pains, loud outcries, and the propensity to flap their arms like birds. The second was the involvement of Cotton Mather, Increase’s son.

Cotton, under the considerable shadow of his considerable father, decided to follow in that father’s footsteps in every way, including the title of his own book. Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689) rehearsed the Goodwin case, spreading it far and wide, speaking of “unaccountable stabs and pains” experienced by the children, among other factors.²⁹ A generation later, preaching in Boston on a passage from Revelations, he made a linguistic correction to the translation of the Biblical text, one which bespoke his own expanded sense of the devil-haunted world:

The Greek term Hades ought to be translated, The Invisible World. Hell, or the Prison of the Damned, is but a very little part, and only the wretched part, of the Invisible World… We look to the Things which are not seen.³⁰

And certainly, in Salem Town, in February of 1692, it seemed like Hell had come to stay among them, invisible, but with its traces everywhere; and it was a Christian’s job to make it visible, to make public the fear that lurked in everyone’s heart. Macbeth, yes, but also Marlowe’s Mephistophilis.

You can tell different stories about the trials, their underlying causes, and the actors’ motivations, many of them, of course, complementary. You can tell it as a story of different families feuding with each other over status and property. You can tell it as a story of leftover trauma from the “Indian Wars” of 1675 and 1687, which touched the areas, and lives, of this and surrounding communities; some of the events in Salem even took place on anniversaries of massacres of colonists, and certainly the “Puritan belief that Indians and witches were synonymous” might well have played a role and created, essentially, PTSD in the children and adults.³¹ But for now, let’s tell it as a seventeenth-century horror tale, plain and not so simple.

Imagine yourself there, then, Salem 1692, as one Samuel Parris, a reverend, a man of God; and in your house—your own household!—your daughter and your niece are assaulted by the invisible world. They each scream and throw things and make strange noises, “stretching up her arms as high as she could, and crying ‘Whish, whish, whish!’ several times,”³² and complain of being pricked by pins, though there are none to be seen, and “bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way, and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect,” John Hale wrote a decade later. Others whom Mr. Parris asked to consult “concluded they were preternatural, and feared the hand of Satan was in them.”³³

And then, helpless, terrified, confused—the doctors have reported no physical ailments—the epidemic spreads through the town. The young girls and women even interrupt the church service; they shout, and act out, in the house of God, making the stakes of the rebellion clear. Parris, preaching a sermon on March 27 to his congregation, said: “the devil hath been raised amongst us, and his rage is vehement and terrible, and when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows.”³⁴ Cotton Mather, in a book he wrote the following year, Wonders of the Invisible World, would put it more bluntly:“a supernatural conspiracy [was] abroad in the land… Behold, Sinners, behold and wonder, lest you perish: the very Devils are walking about our Streets, with lengthened Chains, making a dreadful Noise in our Ears.”³⁵ But if this is rebellion, conspiracy, there must be rebels and conspirators; and the community looked to the outcasts, arresting a poor woman, a lackadaisical churchgoer, and—first of the three—a woman of color.

Tituba has often been called an “African,” but this isn’t true;³⁶ the original sources refer to her as an “Indian,” which probably meant she came to Massachusetts Bay from the West Indies, the Caribbean. She came unwillingly, enslaved, almost certainly sold in Barbados and taken to New England by Parris; she was in the Parris household at the time of the trials, and the original complainants named her as a pincher and pricker. And she confessed. Under duress, true, and after a beating, but she confessed to witchcraft, which fanned the flames of belief. Now there was proof, you see.

She’d made a “witch cake,” she said, and had spoken with the devil, whom she described as “a thing all over hairy, all the face hairy, and a long nose.”³⁷ But, she claimed, she was hardly the only one. Did the magistrates think the devil was so weak he was only at Salem’s outskirts? And then, as the behavior spread to other young women, so, in the next months, did the accusations: against skeptical Martha Corey (who, when she referred to herself as a “gospel woman,” “the afflicted persons told her, ah! She was a gospel witch,”)³⁸ and against faithful Rebecca Nurse and pregnant Elizabeth Proctor and her husband John and dozens of others, “being suspected to have confederacy with the devil in oppressing sundry persons,” in the words of one of the accused.³⁹ They were all dragged to face magistrates, including John Hathorne, whose descendant we will meet in the next chapter. The arrests of supposed witches took place in a variety of towns in Massachusetts Bay Colony, but the trials themselves took place in Salem Town: they were interrogated, encouraged to confess, and generally, convicted.

Evidence included depositions by the “afflicted,” who could tell quite skin-freezing narratives, like Ann Putnam’s testimony of the appearance to her of George Burroughs’s first two wives, deceased, “in winding sheets and napkins about their heads,” who insisted that Burroughs had murdered them; one “pulled aside the winding sheet and showed me the place” he’d stabbed her under her left arm.⁴⁰ In Wonders of the Invisible World, Cotton Mather noted sights of such “apparitions of ghosts of murdered people” were “a frequent thing,” and that they frightened “the beholders more than all the other spectral apparitions,”⁴¹ and so we see the spirit of Macbeth once more—here as a cover for the return of repressed sin and guilt more generally. Another piece of famous “evidence” rings similarly (proto-)Freudian, where one accused witch, attempting to recite the Lord’s prayer, said “Hollowed be thy name,” rather than “Hallowed”: “this was counted a depraving the words, as signifying to make void, and so a curse rather than a prayer,” a contemporary source concludes. “Proceeding in this [type of] work of examination and commitment, many were sent to prison.”⁴² Prison meant the jails of Ipswich, Salem, and Boston, “perpetually dark, bitterly cold, and so damp that water ran down the walls… They enclosed as much agony as anywhere human beings have lived.”⁴³

Some died in prison. Nineteen were duly hung, according to the second capital law of the 1684 Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, which read: “If any man or woman be a witch, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death.” One, who would plead neither guilty nor not guilty, was pressed to death.⁴⁴ Doubts and unease grew, as the hangings continued. Boston merchant Thomas Brattle wrote in a 1692 letter: “This Salem philosophy, some men may call the new philosophy; but I think it rather deserves the name of Salem superstition and sorcery, and it is not fit to be named in a land of such light as New England is.”⁴⁵ When George Burroughs, who’d been allegedly accused of his wives’ murders by their ghosts, was executed (the same day as John Proctor), he spoke of his innocence so powerfully it “drew tears from many (so that it seemed to some, that the spectators would hinder the execution).” But a recent arrival on the scene—Cotton Mather—“being mounted upon a horse, addressed himself to the people,” arguing that the devil is famous for pretending virtue, that he has “often been transformed into an angel of light… this did somewhat appease the people, and the executions went on.”⁴⁶ Proctor, for his part, expressed his innocence by precisely reversing the nature of the devil’s deceptive power: people must be “so much enraged and incensed against us by the delusion of the devil,” he wrote, “by reason we know in our own consciences, we are all innocent persons.”⁴⁷

The question of whether the devil was actually doing it, not just making people do it, wasn’t just John Proctor raising reasonable doubt. The question of what was termed “spectral evidence” was taken up by none other than Increase Mather himself. In an autobiographical entry for May 14, 1692, he wrote he “found the Countrey in a sad condition by reason of witchcrafts and possessed persons,” and one essential question was whether the devil could, in Cotton’s description, “appear in the Shape of an innocent and virtuous Person, to afflict those who were under particular Molestations.”⁴⁸ He dedicated a book to the subject. Though his answer was in the affirmative, he also wrote in the work, Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits, that “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person should be condemned,”⁴⁹ and he came out strongly against using such ambiguous evidence in any proceedings. It was hard, in other words, to determine whether the devil came from without or within—a question that would persist for centuries.

Increase Mather would later write, quasi-modestly, that by his work’s publication “(it is sayed) many were enlightened, Juries convinced, and the shedding of more Innocent blood prevented.”⁵⁰ But he may have been overstating his influence. His son’s recollection was that eventually “Some, who had with great Vehemence maintained, that the Devil could not afflict in the Shape of a good Man, were confuted by having their own Shapes thus Abused…”⁵¹ This tells another story: the story of a panic expanding to consume its own ringleaders, and the panicked grabbing for new narratives when resistance finally gains traction. There is no better proof of this than two later mea culpas. The first, a collective letter by several witchcraft jurors, insisted on their incapability to understand, or withstand “the mysterious delusions of the powers of darkness” and begged God for forgiveness, praying He “would not impute the guilt of it to ourselves, or others.”⁵² The second was by one of the young girls who’d started it all, Ann Putnam. “It was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time,” Putnam wrote in 1706, now grown. “I can truly and uprightly say, before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan.”⁵³

Some moments of American horror firmly attempt to implicate their observers and participants, morally; others provide relief by pushing it onto others. The first tragedy of Salem is the victims. The second is the unwillingness to learn from their suffering.

The devil made me do it, indeed.

JUST A FEW SHORT YEARS after the witches were hung at Salem, Daniel Defoe wrote one of the first modern horror tales in British literature, one that encapsulated a regnant worldview on both sides of the Atlantic.⁵⁴ “This relation is matter of fact,” begins the preface to 1706’s “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal” “and attended with such circumstances, as may induce any reasonable man to believe it.” It’s extremely possible, in fact, Defoe believed it to be true himself, and thus it’s a work of journalism, not fiction: opinion’s divided, and it wouldn’t be the last work of imagination to wrap itself in a shell of verisimilitude. Either way, Cotton Mather’s invisible world is on full display; and, like Mather’s work, it comes complete with moral: “to consider, that there is a life to come after this, and a just God, who will retribute to every one according to the deeds done in the body.” Everything is ordered; everything has a clause, and a consequence, and the order, both physical and metaphysical, visible and invisible, all works together.

And then came the plague. Defoe’s 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year provides a pointed depiction not just of the misery raging in London, but how people there turned to the irrational for succor in times of stress, as they did in Salem and do to this day. “The apprehensions of the People were likewise strangely increased by the Error of the Times… I must be allow’d to say… I hope without breach of charity, that they heard Voices that never Spake, and saw sights that never appear’d; but the imagination of the people was really turn’d wayward and possess’d.”⁵⁵ Plague itself seemed—seems—a symbol of irrationality, disorder: who it smites and who it spares; the chaos, personal and metaphysical, it leaves in its wake. And unsurprisingly, depending on the person, it can subvert, or succor, religious belief. It hardly seems coincidental that within a few years a new Great Awakening began to make its way across Britain and the Americas, a revivalist religious movement focusing on passion, emotion, and, yes, imagination (although its participants might not have put it that way), one that both insisted on and struggled with the invisible iron laws of theological predestination.

One of the greatest ambassadors for the Awakening was a Massachusetts preacher in his early thirties named Jonathan Edwards, who had worked assiduously to use what he’d learned from his studies of natural philosophy in order to continue his own investigations into the religious wonder behind it all.⁵⁶ Edwards preached in Northampton, which had become, in the mid-1730s, an epicenter and exemplum of the Awakening: a place with so much evidence of grace, it seemed, that illness had substantially decreased in the community. His description of the process, in his 1737 A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, describes a process of salvation that is—although he didn’t use the term—psychological. Individuals try to do good works and study to avoid sin; then despair at their inability to live up to what they believe to be necessary; and then, as a result, go into the emotional state of “converting grace”—where they understand that Jesus saves those who have faith in his possibility of forgiveness—and then move into a state of joy and a desire to spread the word.

The work brought Edwards international recognition; and what’s important for us about this approach is that it follows the same trajectory of fear and cathartic relief as do many horror stories: a monstrous threat vanquished on the way to a happy ending. Despite Edwards’s undoubted emphasis on grace (and belief, therefore, that not everyone can in fact be saved), the point he makes is that in fact humans do have at least some agency, that agency being the capacity for meaningful and transformative faith and belief, with an emphasis on the salvific power of the emotions and imagination. Although this is a universal approach—you can see it in stories of fear ranging from Peter Pan to It—there’s something about it that feels very American: an individualistic and intuitive gospel of success. But not everyone could participate, and one of the people who felt left out, Edwards’s uncle, committed suicide soon after the account was written, convinced he was damned inexorably. Edwards blamed Satan.⁵⁷

Ironically, perhaps, Edwards doesn’t seem to have been overly emotional himself, which is surprising for those who know him best from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, often considered a classic of the “fire and brimstone” genre of sermon, and designed to spread the word, and work, of the Awakening. In fact, that same year, in another sermon, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, he suggests that too much emotion—the “bodily effects” of swooning, outcries, convulsions—isn’t a sign of the Divine spirit. Perhaps it was simply a matter of personal inclination: Edwards himself, apparently, wasn’t a shouter in his sermons; he didn’t even raise his voice. But he does say, in that same work, that you can use fear and terror, if necessary, to instruct; and Sinners certainly does that: when he preached it in Enfield in 1741, he “brought the congregation to such an intense emotional pitch that he could not finish the sermon because of the wails and shrieking of those overcome by their terrible plight.”⁵⁸

Sinners presents a world in which the possibility of one’s fall into damnation is ever-possible and ever-present—“You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder,” he says, at the sermon’s rhetorical climax⁵⁹—and in fact he suggests that, once made conscious of that terrifying possibility, in some sense we’re actually sharing in that torment even now.⁶⁰ Fear, in other words, constant fear, is both the condition and the punishment: and while the sermon clearly is aimed at the immortal soul, it focuses on—and elicits—the contemplation of emotions, of mood, in the now.

This type of emphasis was only accelerated by one of the most influential poems of the colonial period. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard,” published almost a decade after Edwards’s sermon, set the tone for dozens, if not hundreds, of poems and writers in the decades to come, some loosely known as the Graveyard Poets.⁶¹ Yes, the “Elegy” was composed in England, but colonial newspapers very much relied on, and disseminated to colonial readers, material from the motherland. (Take, as just one example, Boston’s The American Magazine and Historical Chronicle, which in 1744 published “The Frighted Farmer: A Tale,” out of London Magazine, a story in poetic form about a farmer’s encounter with a ghostly thing.⁶²) While the poem feels like an elegy, insofar as it’s written from the perspective of someone mourning the dead—it’s set in a graveyard and, ultimately, focuses its attention on a particular grave—it turns out the speaker doesn’t know much about the grave’s inhabitant. As a result, the poem is, largely, about the way the haunted atmosphere makes him feel.

The first stanza tells the tale:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

What matters, ultimately, are not the facts of nature and the world but the way in which the poet takes them in: not so far, as it turns out, from Edwards’s theology. Fear—of death, or, as much of the rest of Gray’s poem makes clear, the insignificance that comes with it, as in any classic memento mori—is omnipresent. But there’s an odd, brilliant, paradoxical catharsis at the end of the poem, where the speaker himself imagines an elegy spoken over him by a local: that he was someone who “melancholy mark’d […] for her own,” who never reached the fame that perhaps his talent suggested.

That portrait of the melancholy, death-obsessed ghostly figure would resonate within the colonies. In the year 1760, a twenty-four page pamphlet published in Philadelphia would contain a poem halfway through entitled: “The Address of a Gentleman’s SCULL, to its Male Visitants”:

Too late I found all earthly Riches vain.

Disease, with Scorn, threw back the sordid Fee,

And death still answered—“What is Gold to me?”

“Yet know I feasted but to feast a Worm!”

And then, four pages later, the Lady’s skull gets her turn:

Survey me well, ye Fair Ones! And believe

The Grave may terrify, but can’t deceive.

That pamphlet was called Poor Richard’s Almanack; its author, who had clearly imbibed some of the ethos of Gray, if rendering it in a slightly more melodramatic key, was a young printer named Benjamin Franklin, who in the decades to come would go on to bigger and better things.⁶³

ON MARCH 12, 1754, THE Pennsylvania Gazette reported that Robert Foyle, of Augusta County, Virginia, “together with his Wife and five children, the youngest about ten Years old, were found all murdered and scalped the 4th of last Month, supposed to have been done by the Indians about two Months before.” In a speech the following week, the governor of Virginia, addressing the state’s general assembly, first reported one Major George Washington’s finding French construction of a fort on the Ohio River, a violation of treaties between France and England. He then went on to tell Foyle’s family story far more vividly than the Gazette, in terms reminiscent of Mary Rowlandson’s earlier account:

Think you see the Infant torn from the unavailing Struggles of the distracted Mother, the Daughters ravished before the Eyes of their wretched Parents; and then, with Cruelty and Insult, butchered and scalped. Suppose the horrid Scene compleated, and the whole Family, Man, Wife, and Children (as they were) murdered and scalped by these relentless Savages.

The governor’s vivid scene-setting had a broader agenda, though. Assuring the assembly that “these Insults on our Sovereign Protection… make deep Impressions on my Heart; and I doubt not, as you must hear them with Horror and Resentment,” he hopes they will enable him, “by a full and sufficient Supply, to exert the most vigorous Efforts, to secure the Rights, and assert the Honour and Dignity of our Sovereign; to drive away these cruel and treacherous Invaders of your Properties, and Destroyers of your Families.”

In other words, he wanted more money contributed for military support. And it wasn’t just to protect against Native invasion or sovereign insult: that juxtaposition with the news of the French fort was hardly coincidental. A popular work by Peter Williamson published just a few years later, in 1757, French and Indian Cruelty, Exemplified in the Life and Various Vicissitudes of Fortune of Peter Williamson,⁶⁴ made the connection plain: fears and anxieties about Indigenous tribes were caught up in the warring of colonialist powers. A small part of Williamson’s work’s extensive subtitle—which, after featuring Williamson’s captivity and escape at Native hands, featured him serving “as a volunteer and soldier against them”—expressed the popular formula for how to be a (white) colonial in the country.

The idea that you just weren’t safe—that you were the plaything of fortune, at risk of losing bodily and geographic autonomy at any moment, and that those horrors could be turned into catharsis via taking up arms against those that served as the focal point for those terrors—had its seductions. Which were, at times, acted upon. In 1767 the Pennsylvania Gazette quoted letters from Silver Bluff, on the Savannah River, that “a number of the people called Crackers, who live above Augusta, in the province of Georgia” had plundered the Native settlement at Okonee, carrying off “everything of any value” that they could, “and then burnt every house in it.”

The correspondents’ objections seem to have been largely utilitarian, concerned that the Native Americans would take it as “a formal declaration of war, and that dreadful consequences may be apprehended.” Their parting shot, though, was to note that “in which case, those people that committed such a violent outrage, would be the first to run away,”⁶⁵ suggesting a small kind of emergent moral sympathy, different from Mather’s vitriolic characterization of them as “the children of Hell” or “doleful Tawnies.”⁶⁶

And a fascinating account quoted in the same paper two years earlier went even further, reflecting currents of thought just coming into vogue. Excerpting General Bouquet’s account of his “late Expedition against the Ohio Indians,”⁶⁷ an editor suggests the scene he reprints, of the return of colonists from Native American captivity, is, rather than Rowlandson’s opportunity to display God’s providence, the chance for “the Philosopher to find ample subject for his most serious reflections; and the Man to exercise all the tender and sympathetic feelings of the soul.”

After recounting the understandable rejoicing at the prisoners’ reunion with their families, Bouquet notes the behavior of their previous captors, shedding “torrents of tears over them, recommending them to the care and protection of the commanding officer,” and suggests the behavior “challenge[s] our just esteem” and “should make us charitably consider their barbarities as the effects of wrong education, and false notions of bravery and heroism,” and their virtues “as sure marks that nature has made them fit subjects of cultivation as well as us.” A classic sentiment of the Enlightenment, in other words: an emphasis on toleration and (comparative) humanity, the sense of humans as clean slates that can be blotted by improper education. And complemented, to be sure, by a side of white man’s burden: “we are called by our superior advantages to yield them all the helps we can in this way,” the account continues, superior advantages, it helpfully explains, like “the light of religion,” which the “easy and unconstrained” Native life “could never be put in competition with.”

But if the settlers’ fears of the Indigenous peoples were increasingly wrapped up in colonial great games—and anxieties about their own behavior toward them, in the face of Enlightenment-oriented egalitarianism, assuaged by pats on the back about cultural moral superiority—it might be worth noting one last point General Bouquet makes about the Native perspective on their captives. “No child is otherwise treated by the persons adopting it than the children of their own body,” he writes. “The perpetual slavery of those captivated in war, is a notion which even their barbarity has not yet suggested to them.”

The barbarity of perpetual slavery, indeed. Slavery was part of the American story from the beginning, and of course, it is a horror story. Olaudah Equiano, a man abducted from West Africa, recalls that he believed, upon his kidnapping, “that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and they were going to kill me… [and asked] if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, and faces, and long hair.”⁶⁸ And, after a fashion, he was correct, And any guilt and fear the enslavers felt in their own criminality, their own monstrosity, even as they utterly failed to grapple with its enormity, emerged from their consciences, as nightmares do, in twisted and altered form. The specter of the enslaved revenging themselves, in ways large and small, played itself out throughout the colonies.

Writ large: In the spring of 1741, Manhattan—which possessed, at the time, a very large population of enslaved people—saw a series of fires, first concentrated in lower Manhattan, then throughout the island. Many New York City residents believed there was a conspiracy, among enslaved people, free Blacks, and some lower-class whites, to set the fires, and then, under its cover, to rob houses and kill the inhabitants. The belief stemmed, in no small part, from a concocted story told, by an indentured servant eager to avoid close questioning from a grand jury, alongside that of another woman, a resident of a tavern with a great deal to hide. The accused named names; those named then named names of their own (in the case of Black people, often because it was made clear to them it was the only way to escape the noose); and the hysteria spread:⁶⁹ One of the judges, Daniel Horsmanden, referred to it as “this most horrible and detestable piece of villainy, a scheme which must have been brooded in a conclave of devils, and hatched in the cabinet of Hell.”⁷⁰

Certainly the Slave Insurrection of 1741 (as it’s now better known, or the New York Conspiracy) is less well known than Salem. A century after the fact, a reviewer of a book on American criminal trials noted that:

in every particular the New York Negro Plot runs parallel with the witchcraft trials—in the absurdity of the delusion, in the ferocity of the popular excitement, in the violence that was done to common sense, reason, and the law, and in the bloody and awful results of the proceedings.

And yet, he further notes, “the world has been willing to forget the New York Negro Plot, while every child is taught” about Salem and “the horrors and follies of witchcraft.”⁷¹ Structural inattention to Black history is certainly part of the American story, and part of the reason. But another part may be because it’s hardly clear such a conspiracy actually existed. A letter to a future lieutenant-governor of the province by a resident of Massachusetts Bay makes certain parallels clear: “this occasion puts me in mind of our New England witchcraft in the year 1692… [and] makes me suspect… that negro and spectre evidence will turn out the same.”⁷²

What matters is less the underlying truth than the result: 172 arrested and tried on very flimsy evidence. Thirty-four men were killed, and thirty of them were Black. Seventeen were hanged and thirteen burned at the stake; eighty-four others were transported to the Caribbean. And a more ironic result as well: in the words of one historian, the event “aroused such a fear of negro slaves in the city that slavery became unpopular, and from that time the number of negroes held in bondage in New York steadily decreased.”⁷³

But what also matters greatly to us here is the nature of the conspiratorial belief: it must have been true, members of the enslaving population might have said. Given the circumstances—which they well understood, deny it to themselves as they might—who wouldn’t want to burn it all down? Certainly the rules and measures implemented by the colony even prior to 1741—like the one requiring “all Africans, slave or free, to carry a lighted lamp whenever they walked in the town after dark so as to alert whites to their presence”—were the literal definition of asserting a group’s fearful, predatory, haunting nature.⁷⁴

Writ small, and tantalizingly incomplete, and entirely lacking the voice and agency of the enslaved individual involved, is the case, in 1751, of an enslaved young woman named Phillis, who was put to death in Boston for the crime of poisoning one of her master’s children with ratsbane, or arsenic. At least one; it was eminently possible she’d killed one or two of his other children, too. The case was notorious enough for a printed sermon to be published on the subject; its preacher identified Phillis with King David—a fairly incongruous parallel, except that the horrors of white supremacism allowed him to charge her with David’s conventionally understood motives in the Bathsheba story, an idleness that allowed evil temptation to rule. “GOD has blessed you with a religious Education,” he wrote. “Like David you have been distinguished among your Nation by peculiar Favours of God. And now, what Improvement did you make of your Advantages? What returns did you make to the good God that distinguished you?”⁷⁵ Again, we’ll never know the full facts or actual motives; but as a window into the white understanding of the perspective of the enslaved individuals who lived with them and took care of their children, it seems almost bafflingly wrong-headed. Or, perhaps, wish-fulfillment: a fantasia in the face of a horrific story that illustrated the anxieties about the possibilities of rebelling against an unconscionable system in the most terrible of ways.

Phillis’s voice goes unheard in the record: it was vanishingly rare, given the systems of supremacy, for the enslaved to have that possibility, and so it is we have more testaments to the proofs of white fears about the system than from those who suffered from it. And even when it did happen, those voices are suffused, and shot through, with fear. Another woman with the same first name, Phillis Wheatley, was taken from Africa as a young girl, probably around the age of seven or eight; purchased by a Boston family, she was encouraged in her literary talent enough to produce a book of poems published in London in 1773. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were concerns that readers would doubt an enslaved person could have authored such works; accordingly, “her publishers enlisted twelve of the most distinguished men in Boston—including John Hancock and the Reverend Charles Chauncey—to swear that she had.”⁷⁶ Reading her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, you can see that attempt to just fit in, to do what the majority demands of you, in “On the Death of a Young Gentleman,” with its seemingly conventional lines about soothing parents’ anguish:

To still the tumult of life’s tossing seas

To ease the anguish of the parents’ heart

What shall my sympathizing verse impart?

Where is the balm to heal so deep a wound?

Where shall a sov’reign remedy be found?⁷⁷

On the other hand, it might be worth thinking about Phillis’s parents, or the parents of so many other young people torn away from their homes and forced to endure the horrors of the Middle Passage; those “tossing seas” weren’t just metaphorical, and the wounds—which would require, at best, a sovereign’s remedy to heal—were not easily found, if at all. Wheatley addresses her personal circumstances in a poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,”⁷⁸ which begins so surprisingly the entire brief poem is worth quoting here:

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

The poem’s sentiments may well be honestly expressed: it’s certainly not implausible that Wheatley, as a Christian believer, would be grateful in the work of Christianity in achieving her salvation. But even if they are, the poem itself betrays all sorts of fears and anxieties: about expressing these pieties in order to fit in; that the ultimate arbiter of worth is not the pearly gates but the Christians who walk the earth; that the “diabolic die” will remain the powerful force, not the belief in the “angelic train.” Certainly her later life might have given her cause to believe that was the case: despite being emancipated after her book was published and receiving plaudits from, among others, George Washington, she lost her patrons once she was free; her husband was imprisoned for debt; and she died at thirty-one, a scullery maid.

One could say Wheatley’s words were read, but her words unheard; and the words most pressing to her and others like her—adding insult to grievous injury—would be appropriated as a metaphor for something else: the subjection of the Colonies to a tyrannical king.

THE FIRST (AND ONLY) ISSUE of the Constitutional Courant, published in September 1765 in the wake of the Stamp Act, was, like many other papers, not pleased with this new example of British taxation, especially since it targeted printed matter, like, well, newspapers. It raged:

It has been undeniably demonstrated… that these colonies are not in any sense at all represented in the British parliament… What then is to be done? Shall we sit down quietly, while the yoke of slavery is wreathing about our necks? He that is stupid enough to plead for this, deserves to be a slave.⁷⁹

This is not, at least explicitly, a call for revolution: writing a decade before the Declaration of Independence, the author insists he “cherish[es] the most unfeigned loyalty to our rightful sovereign,” insisting the “wisest of kings” may simply be “misled.” But to those who refuse to assist in correcting that wise sovereign, who support the current policy of taxation without representation, he is less diplomatic: “Ye blots and stains of America! Ye vipers of human kind!… Your crimes shall haunt you like spectres.”

But as the tensions ratcheted up, what seemed increasingly haunting was the shadowy presence of that same sovereign and his representatives, intrusive and yet simultaneously more and more distant: a recipe for strengthening rebellious sentiment and, on the other side, a temptation for increasingly forceful repression.

And then, of course, there was a massacre.

What’s important to us about the murder of eleven colonists by British soldiers on March 5, 1770, better known to Americans as the Boston Massacre, is less the actual historical facts than what was made of them by prorevolutionary forces. By the end of March, Paul Revere’s famous engraving became a best-seller; The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or, The Bloody Massacre featured blood spurting from “visible holes” in the dead and wounded, “pouring from the rent waistcoat of one victim, staining the forehead of another.” The engraving was colored, the bright red British uniforms echoing the blood.⁸⁰ Soon after the events, James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren, and Samuel Pemberton produced the equivalent of an after-action commission on the events.⁸¹ While stopping short of taking on the crown directly—they blame governmental “representations… [which] have occasioned his Majesty’s faithful subjects of this town and province to be treated as enemies and rebels,” they assert British soldiers “seem to have formed a combination to commit some outrage upon the inhabitants of the town indiscriminately.”⁸²

The “short narrative”—which isn’t actually so short—reads like a full forensic report, complete with interviews, examinations of crime scenes and bullet trajectories. It is the interviews, though, the voices of people who were there, that add the chilling, piercing touch:

Jane Usher declares, that about 9 o’clock on Monday morning the 5th of March current, from a window she saw two persons in the habit of soldiers, one of whom being on horse back appeared to be an officer’s servant. The person on the horse first spoke to the other, but what he said, she is not able to say, though the window was open, and she not more than twenty feet distant: the other replied, He hoped he should see blood enough spilt before morning.⁸³

In other words, malice aforethought.

John Wilme provided a deposition on March 21, 1770, testifying that a British soldier “about ten days before the late massacre… did talk very much against the town… and said that the blood would soon run in the Streets of Boston” and that a soldier’s wife offered that “if any of the people were wounded, she would take a stone in her handkerchief & beat their brains out.”⁸⁴ During the actual shooting, Samuel Condon reported that, despite seeing “no violence offer’d the soldiers,” he saw dead people who had been “inhumanly murder’d by them, the blood then running from them in abundance”; and when a “person asked the soldier who fired first, the reason for his so doing, the soldier answer’d, damn your bloods you boogers, I would kill a thousand of you!”⁸⁵

The following year, a sermon entitled “Innocent blood crying to God from the streets of Boston” was preached by John Lathrop at Boston’s Second Church—that same church once led by the Mathers—and the rhetoric had heightened. “We have seen the gloomy time,” Lathrop thundered, when “our most public streets were deeply dyed with innocent blood.… our fellow-citizens shot to death—their garments rolled in blood, and corpses wallowing in gore.”⁸⁶ Lathrop transforms the scene explicitly into a horror show for his listeners—“to behold their mortal gasps, and hear their dying groans—but I desist—the rehearsal of these things is too much for me. Who can reflect on the horrors of that night without shuddering!”⁸⁷ He insisted it was “pretty evident from several plain testimonies… that a number of the troops, with other sons of Belial, were determined to murder the inhabitants,” and, raising the stakes, asserted that “The cry of innocent blood cannot be allayed, but by the death of the guilty!”⁸⁸

The year after that, a sermon by Boston’s Joseph Warren went even further, linking the need to remember to the fifth of another month, a Guy Fawkes day for the colonists of America: “The FATAL FIFTH OF MARCH 1770, CAN NEVER BE FORGOTTEN… Language is too feeble to paint the emotions of our souls, when… our eyes were tormented with the sight of the mangled bodies of the dead… when our alarmed imagination presented to our view… our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion.” That “alarmed imagination” does a lot of work here. We move from a factually terrible occurrence to something apocalyptic, involving specters of rape (alongside, in other parts of the same paragraph, suicide and arson): none of which occurs except in the colonists’ imaginations, but imagination is where the work of fear, outrage, and horror is most done. Unsurprising, then, that by 1775, Warren’s oratory had evolved into a full-on ghost story:

The baleful images of terror crowd around me—and discontented ghosts, with hollow groans, appear to solemnize the anniversary of the FIFTH of MARCH!… APPROACH we then the melancholy walk of death!… Take heed, ye orphan babes, lest whilst your streaming eyes are fixed upon the ghastly corpse, your feet slide on the stones bespatter’d with your father’s brains.⁸⁹

How to quiet these ghosts, haunting the colonies? In 1772, beholding “the authors of our distress parading in our streets,” he had approved of—and clearly encouraged—armed resistance. “Our hearts beat to arms; we snatched our weapons… to avenge the death of our SLAUGHTERED BRETHREN, and to secure from future danger, all that we held most dear.”⁹⁰ Three years later, he suggests independence is not their aim; that Britain and the colonies “may, like the oak and ivy, grow and increase in strength together,”⁹¹ as long as Britain gives the colonies their rights—while commending those who fight for those rights. Was this simply a fig leaf for protection from prosecution? Or was it a genuine fear and concern, as one British politician put it, about “the horrors of a civil war”? Or, as an article put it in the Virginia Gazette in 1775, the current situation, “if not soon happily terminated, must end in such scenes of trouble, bloodshed, and devastation, which, in contemplation alone, shock us with horror.”⁹² But it became clear, as “Sylvia” wrote in June 1775’s Pennsylvania Magazine, a few weeks after Paul Revere’s ride and the Battles of Lexington and Concord, that “With mournful steps retires the cherub Peace, And horrid War with all his train appears.”⁹³

The horrors were approaching, reflected not just in the pulpit, but in imaginative poetry. Philip Freneau, who would become the most important literary figure of the American Revolution, was New York City–born and Princeton-educated (where he graduated class of 1771 and became friends with James Madison). Over the next few years, he began to publish poems, some taking a very particular political angle. A Voyage to Boston (1775)—a city that had seen a great deal of combat that year—directed its protagonist, “led by Heaven’s supreme decree,” to invisibly, undetectably, go and “view the dire effects of tyranny.” In doing so, he sees General Thomas Gage, then the commander-in-chief of the British army in North America and the governor of Massachusetts Bay, who’s characterized as:

A second Cortez sent by heaven’s command,

To murder, rage, and ravage o’er our land…

E’en Cortez would our tyrant’s part disdain;

That murder’d strangers; this his countrymen.⁹⁴

But Freneau saves his most savage indictment for those colonists who don’t take up the cause of liberty, imagining a bloody fate for those he calls monsters:

What is a Tory? Heavens and earth reveal!

What strange blind monster does that name conceal?…

I by the forelock seize the Stygian hound;

You bind his arms and bid the dragon down.

Surgeon attend with thy dissecting knife,

Aim well the stroke that damps the springs of life…

Lo! mixt with air his worthless ghost has fled,

Surgeon his paleness speaks the monster dead.⁹⁵

The battle lines, in short, had been drawn. Americans, as they would for centuries to come, weren’t just finding the demons of war in an outside threat. They were seeing them in those who lived right next door.

IN APRIL 1777, AFTER WASHINGTON’S survival through a brutal winter suggested this would be a long, sapping campaign for the British at the very least, Benjamin Franklin wrote to Paris’s English ambassador about the “barbarous treatment” of newly declared American prisoners in Europe, sending them to “Africa and Asia, remote from all probability of exchange, and where they can scarce hope ever to hear from their families… [it] is a manner of treating captives, that you can justify by no other precedent or custom.”⁹⁶ Something ironic there, savoring of a sort of moral relativism that presumably Franklin hadn’t intended: the enslaved people in the Americas would have liked a word. As they would have with the slave-holding Thomas Jefferson, who wrote a Declaration suffused with grievances that—in the words of his pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, “too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”⁹⁷ One of the grievances Jefferson levied against George III in the Declaration of Independence, it’s worth recalling, is that “he has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions,” allowing us to consider another turn in a history of fear we’ve seen before, another atrocity story in a war whose groundwork was laid by, among other things, those narratives of atrocity.

In early September 1777, Continental Army Major-General Horatio Gates wrote to British lieutenant general John Burgoyne, asking how it could be that “the famous Lieutenant General Burgoyne, in whom the fine gentleman is united with the soldier and the scholar, should hire the Savages of America to scalp Europeans and the descendants of Europeans; Nay, more, that he should pay a price for each scalp so barbarously taken.”⁹⁸ That account, in the Hartford Courant, went on to suggest the need for authentication; but other American journals, like the Pennsylvania Gazette, carried much more specific—and gory—accounts of the atrocities; in no small part, one suspects, to whip up outrage and enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause, just as those increasingly graphic (and increasingly fictionalized) accounts of the Boston Massacre did, earlier in the decade. In fact, Boston’s Independent Chronicle, on August 14, 1777, ran this poem, called “Proclamation… by John Burgoyne”:

I will let loose the dogs of Hell,

Ten thousand Indians who shall yell,

And foam and tear, and grin and roar;

And drench their maukasins [sic] in gore…

They’ll scalp your heads, and kick your shins,

And rip your guts and flea your skins.⁹⁹

Perhaps the most famous instance of such treatment was the case of Jane McCrea, which had occurred in New York just a few weeks prior to the poem’s publication; although the details of her actual murder are slightly obscure, the version of it that spread—that she was kidnapped and scalped by Native American allies of Burgoyne and, as the story gained momentum, in her bridal dress on her wedding day, no less—“quickly crystallized all the misgivings and resentments against the English” and turned into “a banner propaganda coup.” Ironically, McCrea was actually a Tory who’d come from New Jersey to meet an officer in Burgoyne’s army.¹⁰⁰

In 1779, for example, the collection Poems on Several Occurrences in the Present Grand Struggle for American Liberty contained an entry entitled “The Tragical Death of Miss Jane McCrea.” Passing through the wood, its speaker, hearing “a doleful noise… shrieks and dying groans,” witnesses a scouting party:

Some British troops, combin’d with Indian bands,

With swords, with knives, and tom’hawks in their hands,

They gave a shout, and pass’d along the wood,

Like beasts of prey, in quest of human blood.

Moving toward the source of the groans, he says, “a bloody scene salutes my eyes,” complete with “an aged man, roll’d in his gore, And from his hoary head his scalp is tore,” and a “slaughter’d infant on a clod, Its head all bruis’d, and face besmear’d with blood.”¹⁰¹

Similar accounts preponderated. In the summer of 1778, “distressed Refugees from the Wyoming settlement on the Susquehannah, who escaped the general massacre of the inhabitants,”¹⁰² gave an account of “villanous Tories who had stirred up the Indians, and had been with them in fighting against us”; despite, apparently, some original recalcitrance by the Native population to engage in hostilities. On July 1, the report stated, almost 1600 combatants—three hundred “thought to be Indians, under their own chiefs, the rest, Tories, painted like them, except their officers, who were dressed like regulars”—began hostilities; the correspondents found some of their own dead “killed, scalped, and mangled in the most inhuman manner.” Three days later, they took Fort Wilkesbury, “inhumanly butchered” about seventy members of the continental service, “with every circumstance of horrid cruelty; and then shutting up the rest, with the women and children, in the houses, they set fire to them, and they all perished together in the flames.” The report concludes hoping that “speedy and effectual measures will be taken to punish and extirpate these monsters in human shape, from the face of the earth.”

The report also expresses the hope that this “will be the concluding scene of the tragedy acted by the British tyrant and his late kingdom, which he has justly forfeited, and which is now forever departed from him.” By this time, the calculations had changed, in other words: France had entered the war a few months earlier; the British had evacuated Philadelphia a few weeks before. It was by no means over, especially in the South; but the tide seemed to be turning, and so it was crucially important to drum up local colonist support by painting the Tories in demonized ways. And not just the Tories, of course: in one of the intriguing productions of the day, they enlisted a ghost to help.

The late eighteenth century saw a vogue for the posthumous exchange of opinions by figures of differing opinion called “the dialogue of the dead,” and Revolution-era writers partook: in 1780,¹⁰³ the Pennsylvania Gazette printed “A DIALOGUE between PENN, MONTGOMERY, CHATHAM, and an AMERICAN LADY,” in which the deceased British leaders, priding themselves on “the moderation and the humanity of the British nation,” witness a “tumult… around the boat of Charon” in the form of “a woman clothed in funeral crape… bound with a bloody scarf.” The woman in question, an American, disabuses the British of their illusions; after telling the bloody circumstances of her death, Chatham mutters, “It is done: The English are degenerated, the national character is degraded, I have no longer a country.” The ghost, for her part, responds that “the excesses to which the British give themselves, raise the spirit of our fellow patriots, and I thank heaven for my death, if it can hasten the deliverance of America.”¹⁰⁴

The value of propaganda, plainly (if spectrally) put, was apparent. While it was hardly only these ghostly and fearful narratives—of gore on the streets of Boston; of atrocities committed by Indigenous peoples in partnership with, or as pawns of, Tories or British forces; of a king so tyrannical he would enslave (white) people monstrously—that led to American independence, they certainly provided an emotive heart to it: the blunt prose of war turned into rhymed poetry, fervid oratory, dramatic symbol. Three years after Yorktown, in an oration delivered in Boston on July 4, a speaker would note in terms very similar to that ghost that “while we rejoice at our envied acquisition, let us not forget the price at which it was purchased.… the horrors of war, in minds unaccustomed to such dreadful scenes, excited emotions which cannot be expressed.”¹⁰⁵

And yet express them, in rhetoric and imagination, to excite emotion, is exactly what writers of every stripe had to do; and as they grappled with their new Republic, what it was and what it meant, they would continue to grapple with the specters of the past even as they looked to the future. Those fears of wrath from above. Those anxieties about the demons next door. The guilt of their own crimes turned outward. How would those be expressed, in the work of a new Republic?

Uneasily.

¹⁰⁵ 