Devil of Great Island

"e;With deft insights, Tad Baker illuminates a supernatural mystery from seventeenth-century New England . . . a gripping tale well told."e; -Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize-winning authorIn 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 "e;Lithobolia"e; or "e;the stone-throwing devil."e; 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. "e;Enthralling . . . throws a strong light on an American witchcraft episode that has not hitherto received the attention it clearly deserves."e; The Historian"e;Does a fine job of bringing to life a little-known aspect of the tumultuous Puritan era."e; Kirkus Reviews"e;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."e; Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692