Goody Glover, Site(s) of

The story of Irish widow Goody Glover is well-known to Salem witch trials historians, as her 1688 witchcraft accusation, trial, conviction, and hanging in Boston not only preceded the Salem events by a few years, but is a blueprint of sorts of what would occur only a few years later in Essex County. Details of the poor woman’s trail and execution were captured contemporaneously by Rev. Cotton Mather, in his Memorable Providences in 1689, with additional details added to his Magna Christi Americana a few years later. Rev. Joshua Moody, assistant minister at Boston’s First Church, also wrote about the events in a 1688 letter to Rev. Increase Mather, Cotton’s father, while he was in London seeking a new charter for the Massachusetts colony. A third account, by Boston merchant Robert Calef (no friend of Cotton Mather’s) claims to have read the Glover trial notes and criticized Mather’s support of the court’s decision to execute the woman. And finally, Judge Samuel Sewall mentioned the hanging date in his famous diary with the simple line, “The Widow Glover is drawn by to be hang’d.”

The story, as told by Mather: A Boston mason named John Goodwin and his wife had six children. In the summer of 1688, some linen went missing from the Goodwin home, and the eldest daughter questioned their washerwoman, whose name was Glover, suspecting she stole it. The washerwoman’s mother was described by Mather as an “ignorant and a scandalous old Woman in the Neighbourhood; whose miserable Husband before he died, had sometimes complained of her, that she was undoubtedly a Witch … This Woman in her daughter’s Defence bestow’d very bad Language upon the Girl …” Shortly thereafter, four of the Goodwin children began to have fits and agonies, tormented in the daytime but able to sleep peacefully at night. They were sometimes blind, deaf, or dumb; their tongues would be drawn down their throats or “pulled out upon their Chins, to a prodigious length.” Goody Glover was blamed for the bewitchment.

Goody Glover (whose first name is unknown) was arrested and jailed. At her trial, she answered in Gaelic, her native language, although she understood and spoke English well. She confessed to using poppets, to communing with the devil, to sending her specter to torment people, and to being a Roman Catholic. Goody Glover was convicted and hanged on Boston Common on November 16, 1688. She was the first to be executed in Massachusetts for the crime of witchcraft in 32 years – Ann Hibbins in 1656 had been the most recent.

What happened to her daughter, whose first name may have been Mary, is unclear, although there was a Mary Glover in jail a year later.

As if the sensational nature of Goody Glover’s true story was not enough, myths were created about her for years which are repeated and accepted as gospel to this day. She was given the name “Ann” along the way, although there is no record confirming that. An embellishment to her story was created, in which it was claimed that she and her husband were sent to Barbados as Irish slaves by Oliver Cromwell, that Glover’s husband was killed there because he would not renounce his Catholic faith, and that Goody Glover was killed because of her faith – the first Catholic martyr. None of that is true – at least there are no records to back it up. Rather, though her faith certainly did not help her, Goody Glover was a “usual suspect,” an old, widowed, confused woman with no one to defend her. She was hanged by the colony’s leaders who believed she had compacted with the devil. Even today, a plaque on St. Stephen’s Church in the North End still claims her “Catholic martyr” role.

A tip of the hat to Irish librarian and independent scholar Liam Hogan who separated truth from fiction in the Goody Glover story.

If you enter the Boston Common from the Tremont Street side, at West Street, you will come to the Boston Common Visitor Center. Just beyond that, headed toward the Frog Pond, is the plaque noting the location of the Great Elm. This was the site of several important historic events, likely among them the execution of Goody Glover in 1688. The address of St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, where you will see the “Catholic martyr” plaque, is at 401 Hanover Street.