Hampton, New Hampshire: Goody Cole and the Witch of the Seacoast

The town you are passing through, Hampton, New Hampshire, is one of the oldest English settlements in North America, settled in sixteen thirty-eight by Puritan settlers from Massachusetts Bay who were drawn north by the rich salt meadows along this coast. The Pennacook people had lived here for thousands of years before them, fishing the tidal river and planting corn in the upland meadows. Reverend Stephen Bachiler arrived with his congregation that same year and they began building a town they first called Winnacunnet, which was incorporated as Hampton the following year, a Pennacook name meaning "land of many waters."

Hampton's most haunting story, though, belongs to a woman the town could not forget no matter how hard it tried. Her name was Eunice Cole, though everyone called her Goody Cole. She was elderly and poor and disagreeable, and in sixteen fifty-six, more than three decades before the Salem witch trials convulsed Massachusetts, the county court of Norfolk charged her with witchcraft. She was found guilty, whipped, and imprisoned in Boston.

Over the next twenty-four years the town dragged her into court three times. She was convicted once, imprisoned, and eventually released only to return to Hampton, where the townspeople despised her. They accused her of cursing a shipwreck that killed several Hampton men, of taking the form of animals, of causing children to fall ill. She died alone sometime around sixteen eighty, and legend holds that her neighbors drove a stake through her heart before burying her.

Three centuries later, in nineteen thirty-eight, the town of Hampton formally declared Goody Cole innocent, the first such act in New England witch trial history. A bronze urn in the town center memorializes her. This small seacoast town carries more American history than its size suggests.