Thaumatographia Pneumatica

Cotton Mather

The Sixth Example

In June, 1682, Mary, the wife of Antonio Hortado, dwelling near the Salmon Falls, heard a voice at the door of her house calling, "What do you here?" and about an hour after had a blow on her eye that almost spoiled her.

Two or three days after, a great stone was thrown along the house which, the people going to take it up, was unaccountably gone. A frying pan then in the chimney rang so loud that the people at a hundred rods distance heard it; and the said Mary with her husband, going over the river in a canoe, they saw the head of a man and, about three foot off, the tail of a cat swimming before the canoe, but no body to join them, and the same apparition again followed the canoe when they returned, but at their landing it first disappeared.

A stone thrown by an invisible hand after this caused a swelling and a soreness in her head, and she was bitten on both arms black and blue, and her breast scratched, the impression of the teeth, which were like a man's teeth, being seen by many.

They deserted their house on these occasions, and though at a neighbor's house they were at first haunted with apparitions, the satanical molestations quickly ceased.

When Antonio returned unto his own house, at his entrance there he heard one walking in his chamber and saw the boards buckle under the feet of the walker, and yet there was no body there. For this cause he went back to dwell on the other side of the river, but thinking he might plant his ground though he left his house, he had five rods of good log-fence thrown down at once -- and the footing of neat cattle plainly to be seen almost between every row of corn in the field, yet no cattle seen there, nor any damage done to his corn, or so much as a leaf of it cropped.