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 short years before had themselves hanged, pressed to death, and burned witches at the stake in Salem, Massachusetts. They were all people, whether Catholic or Puritan, who knew that evil itself was all too real; that spirits were all too real and that Satan was deeply involved in the everyday lives of ordinary people just like themselves--especially at night.

These were the people living in the colonial Maryland hamlet of Leonardtown, in the County of St. Mary’s,  who had banished Moll Dyer--the Witch--to the frozen woodlands outside of town where she was certain (they all prayed!) to meet her death.

Less than a year earlier a deadly plague had sprung up in the close-knit religiously divided community of Leonardtown.  Today, most historians believe that this was a case of influenza that had been brought to the shores of Maryland by immigrants from mainland Europe, but at the time, in the spring of 1697--this plague seemed like a curse from the devil.  It ravaged the town and took the lives of dozens of children and babies.  Once the plague was finished it began to rain, and rain and rain--another curse of near Biblical proportions.  This led to unprecedented crop failures around Leonardtown, and as summer turned to winter in 1697/98 the townspeople teetered on the brink of famine.

Recreation of 17th Century town in Maryland

Local leaders and citizens--religious clerics, deacons, mothers whose babies had died in their arms unable to breathe, farmers who felt the pangs of hunger and the well-to-do alike met one February night in the local dry goods store--the largest building in town--to discuss how best to deal with the evil in their midst.

As the crowd debated what to do, a farmer who lived just south of Leonardtown, and whose entire livelihood had failed due to the torrential rains earlier in the year stood up and shouted, “I know it’s her!  Moll Dyer the old lady who lives by herself--she’s a witch!”

When he had proclaimed that there was a witch in their midst a hush fell over the boisterous crowd because this man was her neighbor.  He continued, “It’s true by all the saints!” the farmer declared.  “Why just last night I overheard her call upon the devil himself to bring terror down upon all of us!”

The crowd became noisy once again a cacophony of voices broke out all at once, each chastising the old lady Moll Dyer who lived on the outside of town and each one accusing her of some unpardonable sin--not going to mass, conjuring evil spirits, defacing Bibles, cursing the poor children of Leonardtown--a chant went up from the crowd, “Burn her!  Burn her!  Burn her!”

And as darkness fell on that February night in 1698 the mob marched out of the dry goods store in Leonardtown, Maryland, with torches held high and headed towards the shack on the outskirts of town that was home to Moll Dyer, the accused witch, who they all believed needed to be burned out of her home and engulfed in flames.

Moll Dyer could hear the angry mob approach her home.  She saw their flaming torches held high and just as the crowd began to surround her home, the old lady--the accused witch--bolted out the door, into the freezing cold night and got lost in the dark and dense woodlands of the Maryland countryside.

Obviously fearing for her life, Moll Dyer ran and stumbled through the woods until she could no longer breathe and her legs gave out.  It was said that she ran for miles even despite her age.  The townspeople, fearing what evil lurked in the forest, and after burning her house to the ground, soon gave up the chase most likely figuring that the old witch would probably die from exposure anyway on that frigid February night.

Unable to go any farther, just before sunrise it was said, Moll Dyer crawled toward a large boulder in a futile attempt to shelter her dying body from the howling winds.  She placed her right hand upon the rock and raised her outstretched left hand toward the moon.  And just before she died Moll Dyer looked up at the night sky and in the name of Satan called down upon the people of Leonardtown a curse for all time.

A week later the townspeople found the body of the accused witch--Moll Dyer--frozen to the stone where she had died with her arm still outstretched toward the moon.

Thus began the legend of the Dyer Witch, Maryland’s most well known and infamous folktale--the historical basis for the found footage Hollywood horror movie of 1999 The Blair Witch Project.  For over three centuries now, the story of Moll Dyer has made for great Halloween horror and has been retold over and over again on the big screen and in print.  It is part of the fabric of the folklore and identity of those who live in the Maryland countryside.  But, is any of this--the story of the Dyer Witch--true?  Or is it all simply fireside fiction that has been scaring the faint of heart for more than three-hundred years?

 Most everyone is familiar with the famed Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s that cut across all of Puritan New England and left a black mark on colonial American history forever, but what most people don’t know is that Maryland had its own series of witch trials which lasted much longer from roughly 1655 to 1710.  These trials came about at a time of great religious fervent and strife in the Maryland colony.  Maryland, from whence its name is derived, was created as a safe-haven in the New World for England’s Catholics who faced persecution from Protestants at home.  But, as the Puritan population in Colonial America increased, these Puritans soon gained administrative control of the once solely Catholic run Maryland colony which inevitably sparked tension and resentment between the two groups.  At one point, less than twenty years prior to Moll Dyer’s banishment, Puritan leaders went so far as to even ban the practice of Catholicism in the Maryland colony altogether.

Location of Leonardtown and St. Mary's County

Well, obviously most Marylanders were not willing to simply denounce their Catholic faith on a whim just because some earthly Puritan authority had ordered them to do so and Catholic worship went on in secret during the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century in Maryland.  This would explain why the citizens of Leonardtown met in a dry goods store, and not in a Catholic Church, to denounce Moll Dyer as a witch because, most likely, the dry goods store was where the townspeople held their Catholic masses in secret.

With Protestants spying on Catholics; Catholics worshipping in secret and religious tension everywhere throughout the Maryland colony conditions were ripe for suspicion and accusations of witchcraft in the year 1698.  

We know that dozens, if not even hundreds of mostly women, were condemned to death or banishment from society at the hands of would-be witch hunters throughout the Maryland colony between the years of 1655 and 1712 because those supposed witches were given criminal trials in which so-called “spectral” evidence, or evidence from the Spirit, was deemed admissible in Maryland court under Puritan laws.  It is entirely possible then that a woman by the name of Moll Dyer was condemned to death as a witch in Leonardtown, Maryland in February of 1698 although, unfortunately for historians in an ironic twist of fate, the St. Mary’s County archives were burned to the ground in a fire in the year 1831 and any court records prior to that date which would have contained detailed transcripts of her witch trial have been lost.

So, in order to prove the historicity of the folklore behind the story of the Dyer witch historians have been left to attempt to piece together what may or may not be true using scant concrete evidence.  There do still exist historical records that show that a Mary Dyer, and a Marge Dyer, were transported from Ireland to Maryland during the 1670s as indentured servants--a common fate for single women seeking passage to colonial America from Ireland and it is entirely possible, though in no way definitive that since Moll can be used as a nickname for either Mary or Margery, or Margaret that one of these two Irish ladies was the Dyer Witch of 1698 in question.  And, the Maryland State Archives do refer to a “Great Epidemic” which ravaged the colony in the years 1697/98 though the archives in no way specify what that great epidemic may have been.  

The first recorded mention of Moll Dyer in print comes to us from folklorist Joseph F. Morgan who wrote in the Leonardtown local newspaper, The St. Mary’s Beacon, that, “Moll Dyer lived in the area for many years…her cottage was burned to the ground in the time when Cotton Mather held sway over the Puritans,” which would have been in alignment with the date of 1698, but Morgan’s reference was published in August of 1892, two-hundred years after the events in question, so it in no way can be considered an accurate primary source for proof of Moll Dyer’s existence one way or the other.  But, trial records do still exist for a witch named Rebecca Foster who was hanged in a neighboring town only three years prior to the supposed death of Moll Dyer in 1695, which definitely lends credence to the plausibility behind the Legend of Maryland’s Dyer Witch.

Moll Dyer's Rock

Today, on the outskirts of Leonardtown a road runs through the Maryland countryside.  It is called the Moll Dyer Road and is rumored to be cursed and the site of many unexplainable supernatural occurrences.  For centuries, Moll Dyer’s Road which began as a dirt path and has since been turned into a paved county road was said to run past the location where the accused witch died with her arm outstretched toward the moon cursing the local townspeople.  But for nearly three-hundred years no one could seem to locate the famed rock where she had placed her hand before she died.

But then in 1968 a reporter for the Washington Evening Star named Philip H. Love after reading about the Legend of Moll Dyer sought to locate the infamous stone.  He interviewed dozens of people who lived in the backwoods of Maryland and finally stumbled upon a grocer who told him that he knew the stone’s location and that the boulder had been basically, in his family’s backyard for his entire life.  He led the reporter from the Washington Evening Star to the site of Moll Dyer’s Rock.  

In 1972 the Maryland National Guard moved the nearly 800 pound limestone boulder nearer to the side of Moll Dyer Road and erected a small plaque that reads, “Moll Dyer Rock circa 1697”.  Locals believe that anyone who touches Moll Dyer’s Rock is likely to fall ill and that their family will suffer generations of misfortune and some say that if you look hard enough you can still faintly see a handprint and the outline of a dying woman’s body imprinted forever upon Moll Dyer’s infamous rock.  The Legend of the Dyer Witch lives on to the present day.