The Margaret Rule Possession: Cotton Mather, Robert Calef and the Levitation in Boston's North End

Boston, 1693. The year after Salem. Margaret Rule was about seventeen, "of a healthy countenance," in Robert Calef's words. Her parents, John and Emma Rule, were refugees from Saco, Maine, who had fled the fighting with Native peoples. She belonged to Cotton Mather's North End congregation, the Second Church. The New England Historical Society says the trouble began after a scolding from an older neighbour, a woman once accused of casting spells. Then came the Lord's Day, 10 September. During public worship, Margaret fell into "odd fits." She was carried home.

"The Young Woman was assaulted by Eight cruel Spectres," Mather wrote, "whereof she imagined that she knew three or four." Sometimes a short Black Man came with them. They called him their Master. They pushed a book at her and demanded she set her hand to it, or touch it at least.

The standers by saw the rest. Invisible pinches left black and blue marks. Pins were found stuck into her neck, back and arms. When something invisible was poured down her throat, the whole house would "scent so hot of Brimstone that we were scarce able to endure it." From 10 to 18 September she kept an entire fast. Yet she looked fresh, lively and hearty. A white spirit in bright, shining garments came to help her. It told her to regard the minister as her father.

Then the tormentors lifted her. Mather wrote that they "pull'd her up to the Cieling of the Chamber," before a very numerous company of spectators, who "found it as much as they could all do to pull her down again." Samuel Aves swore she was lifted from her bed "wholly by an Invisible force." Thomas Thornton saw her rise "so as to touch the Garret Floor." Robert Earle, John Wilkins and Daniel Wilkins certified they had seen it several times. William Hudson backed Thornton.

More than five weeks in, on the last day of the week, the spectres gave up. "Go, and the Devil go with you, we can do no more." They left her "extream weak and faint."

Robert Calef, a Boston cloth merchant, came on 13 September. About 30 or 40 people filled the room. He wrote down what he saw. Mather asking whether a great many witches sat upon her. Mather rubbing her stomach, her breast not covered with the bedclothes. A living thing felt in the bed. On 19 September the attendants said her head could not be moved from the pillow. Calef tried. He "found no more difficulty than another Bodies." Margaret Perd smelled brimstone. Calef did not.

To him it was imposture. She calmed when men attended her. The affidavits never said how many people pulled her down, or whether she was then bound.

Mather called it a false representation and complained that it made people "believe a smutty thing of me." Calef was brought before a justice on a warrant for scandalous libels. Neither Mather appeared at the Sessions. He was discharged. Mather, for his part, kept the names Margaret gave private, and no accusations were made. Calef's book, More Wonders of the Invisible World, was printed in London in 1700. Tradition says Increase Mather had it burned in Harvard Yard, though S. G. Drake found no record of it in the College books.

The argument never settled. Upham and Poole fought over it between 1867 and 1869. Chadwick Hansen later called Calef a liar over the bedclothes, a reading critics say misunderstood the word. Allen Putnam, writing in 1881, saw genuine mediumship in the levitation and the White Spirit. Margaret's own story survives only in the book where two men fought over her.