Nathan Parker died and left his land to his wife. There were four women in Andover named Mary Parker. The court picked one and hanged her.
Nathan Parker died on the twenty-fifth of June 1685. He left an estate of two hundred and twenty-five acres in Andover, Massachusetts, to his wife Mary and their children. Mary received a third of the house and lands. She was a widow with property in a community that would, seven years later, find a use for both facts.
She was not the woman they were looking for. She knew this and said so.
In the summer of 1692, the Salem examinations had reached Andover. The afflicted girls from Salem Village had been brought to the town to identify witches by touch, and the confessions had begun accumulating the way confessions do when a community understands that confession is the instrument of survival.
A warrant was issued for her arrest on the first of September after an accusation from a local girl. Mary Ayer Parker, widow of Nathan, was caught in the net with her third of the house and lands and her seven years of independent widowhood. She was examined on the second of September.
At her examination she told the court directly: I know nothing of it. There is another woman of the same name in Andover.
She was telling the truth. There were three other Mary Parkers in Andover, including a sister-in-law whose severe mental instability was a matter of public record. Worse, a fourth Mary Parker down in Salem Town possessed a notorious criminal record for fornication. The name itself was a magnet for community suspicion. Mary Ayer Parker stood in the dock and gave the court the information it needed to look.
The court did not look. Instead, they accumulated more spectral evidence to secure a conviction. On the ninth of September, a fifteen-year-old boy named William Barker Jr. confessed to witchcraft and claimed a Goody Parker had ridden to a witch meeting with him. He did not specify which one. The court simply pinned the boy's words to the woman they already had in a cell.
She was tried on the sixteenth of September 1692. She was convicted on the testimony of the confessors. She was hanged on Gallows Hill on the twenty-second of September, less than a week after her trial, alongside seven others. It was the final mass execution of the Salem hysteria.
She had been examined, indicted, tried, and hanged inside a single month.
After her death, Sheriff George Corwin sent an officer to seize her estate. The officer reported that she had left no estate to seize. Corwin sent the officer to her sons instead. The officer took their cattle, their corn, and their hay. Corwin then demanded six pounds for the return of the goods.
Her sons paid the six pounds. They filed a petition. There is no record that the court responded.
In 1710, eighteen years after their mother was hanged, her sons petitioned the legislature for restitution. In 1711 the legislature awarded them eight pounds for her attainder and the property taken in its wake.
Eight pounds. Nineteen years later. For a woman who had stood in the dock and given them the answer and been hanged anyway.
The record does not say which Mary Parker the boy meant.
It only records the one they chose.
