The Devil of Great Island

“With deft insights, Tad Baker illuminates a supernatural mystery from seventeenth-century New England . . . a gripping tale well told.” —Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

In 1682, ten years before the infamous Salem witch trials, the town of Great Island, New Hampshire, was plagued by mysterious events: strange, demonic noises; unexplainable movement of objects; and hundreds of stones that rained upon a local tavern and appeared at random inside its walls. Town residents blamed what they called “Lithobolia” or “the stone-throwing devil.” In this lively account, Emerson Baker shows how witchcraft hysteria overtook one town and spawned copycat incidents elsewhere in New England, prefiguring the horrors of Salem. In the process, he illuminates a cross-section of colonial society and overturns many popular assumptions about witchcraft in the seventeenth century.

“Enthralling . . . throws a strong light on an American witchcraft episode that has not hitherto received the attention it clearly deserves.” —The Historian

“Does a fine job of bringing to life a little-known aspect of the tumultuous Puritan era.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Thoroughly fascinating and fascinatingly thorough . . . In learning about life on Great Island, at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, readers also learn much about a part of New England that does not fit our standard Puritan stereotypes and thus about a diverse aspect of our collective past that will now become better known.” —Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692