What makes a witch a witch? In colonial times, it didn’t take much for one to be accused of witchcraft. Such was the case of Moll Dyer, a woman accused of witchcraft in colonial Maryland. She lost her life because of superstition. This is a cautionary tale that’s been remembered for over 320 years.
And for good reason…
This is the story of the witch Moll Dyer.
WITCHCRAFT IN MARYLAND FROM 1650-1697:
Witchcraft was illegal in Maryland in the seventeenth century. It was considered a felony. A book by Michael Dalton called Country Justice laid out that a person could only be convicted of witchcraft if there were two witnesses or a confession by the person in question, but given that witchery is usually done in secret, compelling circumstantial evidence could be enough to convict.
The Witchcraft Act of 1604 said that making a pact with the devil is a sin punishable by death.
Very little could cause someone to be accused of witchcraft. If they did not align with the religious and social customs of the time and area, there was a possibility of suspicion.
Though it wasn’t difficult to arouse suspicion from your neighbors, Maryland began as a place for religious tolerance, so very few witch cases went to trial.
But that doesn’t mean that the people of the Maryland colony were accepting to witches.
THE LEGEND OF MOLL DYER:
According to legend, Moll Dyer was a witch from Saint Mary’s County, Maryland, in the seventeenth century. An older woman, she lived in a small shack south of the Saint Mary’s seat Leonardtown. There’s a road there now called Moll Dyer Road. Her use of herbs and odd customs caught the attention of townspeople, and soon they began calling her a witch.
In 1697, disease broke out in the area. It was an unusually cold winter, and people began falling ill. Probably with the flu. So many died that people started to wonder if something otherworldly was causing this cursed sickness. And back then, being an odd spinster was dangerous. They immediately suspected that Moll Dyer had used some witchery against them. They wanted her gone, and they would stop at nothing to get her to leave.
One cold and eerie night, the townspeople set Moll’s shack on fire. Flames licked into the sky, destroying everything she had in the world. Fearing for her life, she fled into the dark woods, pushing deeper and deeper into the frozen landscape until she could no longer feel her feet, hands, and face.
Meanwhile, the townspeople were thrilled that she’d left. A few days later, a young man searching for his lost animals discovered her frozen body on a rock. Her hand and knees made indentations on the surface of the stone, and one of her arms was held up toward the sky.
Locals then began the lore of Moll Dyer. The witch who cursed the town and now the rock. The people who caused her death would pay.
THE ROCK OF MOLL DYER:
The legend of Moll Dyer has survived for some 320 years. The rock was removed from the woods in 1972 and placed next to the Old Jail in Leonardtown, which is a historic landmark. The faint indentations of where her hand and knees rested can still be seen on the rock today.
While it was being relocated, many people reported strange events. Workers experienced everything from bodily injuries to camera failure and more.
The Weather Channel did a story on Moll Dyer, and in it, local resident Lynn explained how she’d always heard that if someone touched the rock bad things would happen. She claims that only 30 seconds after she touched it, her chest became tight, and her lungs burned. She felt like she couldn’t breathe, and even began coughing up blood. The coughing fit lasted for 45 minutes.
SIGHTINGS AND UNEXPLAINED INCIDENTS ON MOLL DYER ROAD:
The rock isn’t the only thing that seems cursed. People have reported having accidents because of seeing an apparition on Moll Dyer Road. And the area seems to have strange weather that at first appears normal then an eerie storm will emerge from nowhere accompanied by a gut feeling that screams that something isn’t right.
THE MOLL DYER CURSE OF HER PERSECUTORS:
If Moll Dyer were, in fact, a witch, it would stand to reason that she’d left a curse on all those townspeople who caused her death. Many of the decedents of those persecutors attribute some of their family’s tragedies to have been because of Moll’s curse. Author, Lynn J. Buonviri, speaks about how this could have been because of a pang of generational guilt the families feel for what happened to her.
WHO WAS MOLL DYER?
As author Lynn J. Buonviri, in her well-researched book Moll Dyer and Other Witch Tales of Southern Maryland, explains Moll Dyer was born as Mary Dyer on February 19th, 1634 in Devon, England. She and her brothers traveled as indentured servants to the West Indies and then made their way to Maryland in 1677. The author also states that Moll learned witchcraft from the Nevis Plantation, to which she was indentured to and brought that knowledge and practice with her to Maryland.
Mary was the fourth child to parents, William and Elizabeth Dyer. Civil war, unrest, and financial scarcity likely led to Moll and her brothers leaving England in 1669, set out to build a better life.
Mary spent eight years as an indentured servant before traveling to America. It’s believed that there she may have learned many herbal and natural remedies and cures that would later cause suspicion from townspeople unaccustomed to outside practices.
When Mary arrived at Saint Mary’s, she worked as an indentured contract. Her brother and his family also moved there. Part of her payment for working was a small tract of land to live on. She was forty-three years old then. After working off her contract, she stayed in the area living off the land. She likely continued to practice herbal medicine and other domestic jobs. As a Catholic and practitioner of African rituals she’d picked up during her time in the West Indies, she was seen as an outsider in the community. In nearby Massachusetts, a swirl of fear was growing about witches and their effects on the community (Salem Witch Trails 1692-93). People began to wonder if evil lived amongst them, and if so, how could anyone be safe?
Because of the Puritan influence in the area at the time, the women who were usually persecuted for witchcraft were unmarried, elderly, Catholic women. But Maryland had a large Catholic population and embraced religious tolerance. What made Mary or Moll so unique?
THE WINTER OF 1697:
Several events made the winter of 1697 treacherous for Moll. A young girl was in the care of Moll and died unexpectedly. Her parents blamed Moll for the death. Then the town experienced a series of difficulties—crop failure, farm animal deaths, bone-chilling temperatures, and a severe outbreak of influenza.
On March 27th, 1697, the Council of Maryland recorded:
It hath pleased God that this winter hath been the longest that hath been known in the memory of man, for it began about the middle of November, and little sign of any spring yet. It was very uncertain weather, several frosts and snows, one of which was the greatest hath been known.
All these things seemed to overlook Moll, though. She was unscathed by the disasters afflicting her neighbors, which wasn’t a good sign in their eyes. Some believe that in response to their anger and harassment, she began trying to frighten them with spells.
David Thompson, the author of two books about Moll Dyer, explains in an interview that the governor of the time reportedly gave his permission to move forward with removing the witch because his family had gotten sick, as well. Adding insult to injury, a colonial letter mentioned her as being ugly, and Mr. Thompson also said that she was enamored with the Native Americans.
All of this proved too much for the colonists. They wanted Moll—the witch—gone.
If you enjoy tales of witches, check out The Witches of Fife.
THAT FATEFUL NIGHT:
As the elderly woman laid in her bed that icy, cold night, her neighbors were conspiring. As she slept, they approached her humble home with torches. Their fear was masked with anger as they threw fire on the roof and through the windows of her home. Awaking to the smell of smoke, the older woman probably grabbed whatever she had available to keep herself warm—perhaps she wrapped a blanket around her shift and stumbled into the night, hearing their angry voices screaming for her to leave and never come back. Their words of condemnation and dangerous threats sent Moll into the dark woods with nothing but a blanket for shelter. Feet bare and frozen in the snow, she wandered farther and farther away from home into the darkened night, surrounded by a canopy of dormant trees.
The night whispered as it does, voices in the wind, branches creaking, bending, breaking under the weight of the snow. The angry voices still echoed through the empty forest, followed by a howl, and the low hoot of an owl nearby.
Her body shivered, lips turning purple, fingers numb as she held the blanket around her. Curling up on a smooth, freezing rock, she tried to survive, but the cold forest was too brutal.
She died that night in 1697 at the age of 63.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER HER DEATH?
Saint Mary’s and the surrounding areas continued to experience difficulties and tragedies, to which they still attributed to Moll. They believed she’d cursed the whole area because of their part in her death. Perhaps, they subconsciously felt they deserved her curse, who knows? But by attributing bad luck to her for years and years, they kept her memory alive, even naming places significant to her after her.
All these years later, strange things continue to happen around Moll Dyer Run. There are reports of the ghost of Moll herself, roaming in the woods every year on the coldest night. There are also sightings of a white dog, she reportedly wanders around with. Her familiar, perhaps?
PLOT TWIST, MARY BELL THOMPSON:
As if the land Moll lived and died on isn’t historically cursed enough, in the 1940s, another woman by the name of Mary, that is Mary Bell Thompson, lived with John Thomas Thompson, in the same woods as Moll Dyer to escape prejudice. You see, John was a divorced white man, and Mary was a widowed black woman. Neither of them was from the area, but to escape the scrutiny of their home state, South Carolina, they fled to Maryland, where people were more tolerant.
They settled at the end of Moll Dyer Road, where the witch once dwelled 250 years before. The couple planned a beautiful future together. John built Mary a home and even built two tombs for them, a little farther into the woods.
Sadly, Mary would need her tomb far too soon. She died on July 10th, 1942, from kidney disease.
And this is where the story gets a little strange. Historically, nothing odd stands out about these two other than their bravery of being together when the world didn’t yet accept them, but the lore that survived them has morphed into a bizarre tale.
Locals grew up hearing tales of the two. One said that John was so distraught over losing Mary that he would frequently remove her body from the tomb and bring her into the house with him. He was supposedly discovered doing this and was sent to Crownsville State Mental Hospital, where he lived until he died in December of 1969. That’s one story, but who knows what truth there is to it. All that’s known for sure is that he left the area sometime in 1942, after Mary Bell’s death, and died in 1969.
In 1964, local teenage boys robbed Mary Bell’s grave, taking her skull and parading it around the community. They were prosecuted, and supposedly Mary Bell’s skull was returned to her tomb.
The next year, more teenagers open the tomb again and left it open. Even though they didn’t take anything, Mary Bell’s body was open to the elements.
The current owner claims that the tomb has been open since he bought the property in 1979. He says the skull has never been there.
Are the restless spirits of Mary Bell and Moll Dyer roaming the woods? I know I don’t want to find out.
MOLL, THE SURVIVOR:
Moll lived through wars, famine, disease, brutal work, and winters, only to be killed by her own neighbors. She died because she was different in a time when different could mean death. She was independent and strong in a way few of us will ever witness. She survived so much in her life, and she deserves to be remembered as a strong, fearless woman. Much of the same can be said about Mary Bell. These two women defied social norms to live out their lives the way they felt was right.
But you know what they say about a woman scorned. She’ll bring hell to those who cross her.
Music:
Jon Björk: https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/O8Wfif28bA
Christian Anderson: https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/8hoSrSN8qB
Lalo Brickman: https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/v1mvNIvcr6
“Ghostpocalypse – 6 Crossing the Threshold” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
