The Possession of Elizabeth Knapp

Groton lay about 32 miles northwest of Boston. Its minister was Rev. Samuel Willard. In his household lived Elizabeth Knapp, a servant of 16, born in Watertown.

About a fortnight before the trouble, she had sudden shrieks and fits of laughter. Then came the night before Thanksgiving. October 19, 1671. Knapp and another maid saw "the appearance of a mans head & shoulders, with a great white neckcloath, looking in at the window."

In Willard's words, "the tragedye began to unfold itselfe upon Munday, Octob. 30. 71." Sitting by the fire, she cried out about pain in her legs, breast and throat. The next evening she said she saw two persons in the cellar and spoke to an "old man." Then she was thrown to the floor. The family had to keep her from the fire.

The fits grew. In them "she leaped & skipped about the house proforce roaring, & yelling extreamly." At first she was "scarce to bee held in bounds by the strength of 3 or 4." By November 26, "6 persons could hardly hold her." For about 48 hours "shee barked like a dog, & bleated like a calfe."

In December, something new. Willard described "a grum, low, yet audible voice," and wrote that "her throat was swelled formidably as big at least as ones fist." Her lips did not move on the sounds B, M and P. It told Willard: "oh! you blacke roague, I doe not love you." It crowed like a rooster, and fell silent at prayer.

Knapp described the devil as an old man in a meadow. She cut her finger. He took her blood and guided her hand as she signed his book for seven years. He offered money and ease from labour. He urged her to murder her family and Willard's children. Twice her father stopped her from using a knife.

A physician first judged the illness natural and prescribed purges and bleeding. After the long fit he withdrew and pronounced it diabolical possession. Mr. Rowlandson of Lancaster came to pray with her. Knapp accused a neighbour woman of tormenting her in the devil's shape, then retracted. No court met, and no one was charged.

Willard judged the fits real and diabolical, and believed the devil spoke through her. On the covenant he would not rule: "Whither shee has covenanted with the Devill or noe, I think this is a case unanswerable, her declarations have been soe contradictorye." He ended: "Shee is a monument of divine severitye."

Knapp later said most of her apparitions "were but fancies, as images represented in a dream." In 1692 Thomas Brattle cited the Groton case as a caution against trusting the Salem accusers. Samuel A. Green, who printed Willard's letter in 1883, reportedly saw hysteria. John Demos read real distress shaped by a servant girl's powerlessness. Elisabeth Ceppi read it as resistance to servant labour.

Cotton Mather retold the case in Magnalia Christi Americana in 1702. In 1692 Willard preached against spectral evidence. Knapp married Samuel Scripture in 1674, raised a family, and died in Groton around 1720 or 1721.