Maryland's Dyer Witch Legend of 1698: Where Folklore and Fact Intersected to Create a Famous Hollywood Horror Film
It was a bitterly cold winter’s night in February of 1698. The wind howled and the ground was frozen solid as she stumbled over tree roots unable to see at all in the dense underbrush; injured and scorned, lost and banished to the woodlands outside of town. There was no one around to help for miles. This time of the year, when night came early and darkness fell across the Maryland countryside like an evil pall, all of the settlers huddled around their hearths, indoors, and prayed so that even if someone had wanted to help her, which they most assuredly did not, they would have been too afraid to come outside on this most inauspicious of winter nights anyway. Every citizen of nearby Leonardtown was a devout Catholic whose ancestors had immigrated to the safe haven of Maryland in order to escape religious persecution at the hands of Protestants in England and western Europe, or they were recently arrived Puritans whose relatives only a few ...