Season of the Witch: Witchcraft and Maleficium in the Catskills

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Brett Barry: Do you believe in witches?

[00:00:04] Samantha Misa: I believe in everything. I definitely think that there were witches, and I think there still are. Having researched this and having been able to find some things that did verify a lot of the stories, I see no reason why some of them can't be true and why that can't still remain true today.

[00:00:18] Brett Barry: Well, yeah, of course, there's witches. According to the National Retail Federation, 2024's top Halloween costumes include ghosts, superheroes, Disney princesses, vampires, pirates, "Beetlejuice" characters, and yes, witches. For children, the witch is ranked number four. For adults, it's the number one costume, and even for pets, a witch costume makes the list somewhere below pumpkins, hot dogs, bats, and bumblebees. Pets aside, though, 12.2 million Americans plan on dressing up as a witch. There was a time, though, that identifying as a witch or being branded as one had truly scary consequences. On today's "Kaatscast," witches and witchcraft in our Catskills past with historian Samantha Misa. We conducted our interview, where else, in a family cemetery in Delaware County.

[00:01:19] Samantha Misa: My name is Samantha Misa. I work at the Delaware County Historical Association here in Delhi, and right now, we are in the Frisbee Family Cemetery out behind the historic Frisbee House. The cemetery is where Gideon Frisbee, the builder of the house, and his family members are buried. We have Frisbee himself... his first wife, Huldah, and his second wife, Freelove, are up here, along with several of their children.

[00:01:40] Brett Barry: Freelove?

[00:01:41] Samantha Misa: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:42] Brett Barry: What span were the Frisbees living here?

[00:01:44] Samantha Misa: The Frisbees lived here from when the house was built in 1797 to actually up until the 1940s and 50s, when the last Frisbee, Jenny Frisbee, sold the house to the Historical Association.

[00:01:55] Brett Barry: So we're on the land of the Historical Association, which encompasses a lot of buildings. Some were transplanted from other parts of the county, but the Frisbee House and grounds are intact, including this family cemetery?

[00:02:08] Samantha Misa: Yeah, so on our site, we have the Frisbee House built in 1797. We also have the family's original barns and the family cemetery. Several of our other buildings were brought here because they were in danger of being destroyed, so they were moved here in order to save them. We have a blacksmith shop, a toll gate, a schoolhouse, a gun shop, and our library and archives building. I first got involved with the Historical Association when I was in high school. I started volunteering, helping out with some of their events, and I eventually became an intern, and now I've been working here ever since, so I've been here since about 2011-2012, almost a little over a decade now.

[00:02:43] Brett Barry: And you teach?

[00:02:44] Samantha Misa: Yes, I also teach Early and Modern U.S. History at SUNY Delhi.

[00:02:47] Brett Barry: Before we get into "The Witches of the Catskills," tell me a little bit about the Frisbee family and their significance to this county.

[00:02:54] Samantha Misa: So the Frisbee family came to Delaware County before it was Delaware County in the 1790s. They came from Connecticut. Gideon Frisbee was a Revolutionary War veteran. He and his wife, Huldah, came here, and they first built a small cabin. While they were living in that cabin, they constructed the Frisbee House and completed it by 1797. Gideon Frisbee and his wife, Huldah, lived there with six of their children. When Huldah died, Gideon married his neighbor, Freelove, and they had six more children, so the Frisbee family was quite large, but the house itself is also very significant, not just due to its age but because it is the birthplace of Delaware County. Gideon Frisbee was a judge and a tavern owner, and in his tavern is where several supervisors met in 1797 to create Delaware County out of the surrounding counties, so it's the birthplace of our county. A lot of people ask me, "Is the house haunted?" and I have to say that depends on when you ask me. If I'm in the house with a lot of people, the answer is "no." If I'm in the house by myself, I definitely think it is. We do offer lantern tours of the house. I've had people tell me that they saw an apparition on the bottom of the staircase that appeared to be dressed in 1920s clothing, and once they looked at it, realized it was something else there, took a second look... the figure had vanished. Most of the stories about the house being haunted take place in the house's nursery, where a lot of people attribute that perhaps to the death of the Frisbee's young son, George, who died in infancy. People have said that they've seen a woman rocking a baby in the rocking chair up there, and a lot of individuals on tours or just taking a walk through the house by themselves have said that they feel a presence in the nursery, and many different people with no connection to one another have said something of a similar sentiment to me that the nursery makes them feel strange or that there's a presence or an entity that exists there that makes them uncomfortable, and that's where a lot of the strange energy seems to emanate from.

[00:04:55] Brett Barry: What inspired "Witches of the Catskills" that was published in 2019?

[00:05:02] Samantha Misa: So when I work at DCHA, a lot of what I do involve is doing research and working with the library and archives and working with our historic materials, and I've always been interested in sort of some of the more offbeat topics, mostly because I find them interesting but also because other people tend to find strange things interesting, so it tends to be the more macabre or different or even occult things... bring a lot of interest. A few years ago, back in 2019, I was going through some volumes we had in our archives. We had old volumes of a magazine called "The Courier" [Courier Magazine], and it was published in the 1950s out of the Delaware County town of Deposit, and there was one issue that actually had a title that was "The Austin Witch of Trout Creek," a real witch haunted a mountaintop farmhouse in the early 19th century, and it was a very interesting story about a 19th-century farmhouse. In the 1860s, there was a farm family in Trout Creek that was plagued by very strange events going on. The family was very well respected, but they had very odd occurrences happening. The woman's dress was found shredded, even though it was in a locked closet. There was an instance where a barrel full of liquid kitchen waste was found upside down, but the liquid waste was still inside. Farm tools would disappear and reappear stuck in the loft of the barn, where, according to the family, no human could have put them, and they blamed witchcraft, and that was the heart of the story, so having read that one and that story and its outcome is included in the book. I was inspired to try to find others—were there other tales of witchcraft in the Catskills, or was that story of the Trout Creek Witch unique—and it turned out there was other tales of witchcraft. Many of which actually did not have a witch that was named. A lot of them were simply strange occurrences where people would blame witchcraft as... as the cause but without having any specific person to pin the blame on.

[00:07:01] Brett Barry: So this led you to do further research and discover many witchy tales in the Catskills, right?

[00:07:09] Samantha Misa: Yes, so I took that, and my goal was to try to not just tell the story but add a little bit more to it, so if... see if I could prove anything or find more of an outcome because a lot of the stories that I would find would be very incomplete, just sort of a reference in a newspaper or very fragmentary tales here and there in a folklore journal or just a small reference, a little thing on a map that would say, "Witches Point" or something like that, so I tried to really round out the stories and do more research with the Trout Creek Witch. I tried to find a little bit more about the family, and I was able to verify that everything they said in that story was true. There was a family. The names were all checked out according to census records. They were there. Burial records... they did exist. The story itself, obviously, still remains a bit of a mystery, but there were plenty of elements of truth in that, so maybe there were elements of truth in other parts of it, but I looked to add more stories of witchcraft. Was that one the only one, and it turns out there was a lot... I was able to find... mostly through newspapers, but also through folklore journals, maps, booklets, anything I could find that would have a reference to witches. The biggest challenge was a lot of search features. If you're looking through old newspapers and they're digitized... you search the word "witch," you're going to find a lot of references and advertisements of people trying to sell you witch hazel as an astringent or a facial cleanser, so it was kind of hard to narrow it down and find the witches that I was actually looking for, but there were tales out there to be discovered. There's not a lot to go on. Everything is so vague, so apocryphal, so... just nebulous in many cases that it makes it very difficult to elaborate more. You want to know more about the tale. Who was that person? What were they accused of doing, and you only have some fragments, little shreds of evidence, little bits and pieces peppering your archives that you can go and try to sew together to make a coherent story out of?

[00:09:01] Brett Barry: It's interesting that those bits and pieces were published in newspapers, though. I don't think that would happen now.

[00:09:06] Samantha Misa: No, and... and actually part of the reason I think newspapers published it was almost because they were poking fun at maybe a continued belief or superstition in witchcraft. There is a current in a lot of them that the people that were doing that were somehow backwards or simpletons or something like that, so a lot of the witch stories are tinged with that almost condescension that there are still people living way out in the backwoods that are putting silver coins under a baby's cradle or nailing a horseshoe above the barn door to prevent witchcraft, and there is some tone of making fun of them for this continued belief when the rest of the world has moved on and embraced modernity.

[00:09:47] Brett Barry: And the witchcraft or the witch-inspired stories—were these real women? Were there real women who they called witches? I know in some of your stories... there were a lot of cats that, I guess, embodied the witch, or were they just strange occurrences that were attributed to witchcraft, or a combination of all three?

[00:10:08] Samantha Misa: Oh, it was a combination of all three. There's a lot of stories where it would just simply be something strange happening or something disturbing, and witchcraft was simply blamed without anybody there to put the blame on, so if somebody's cow wasn't producing milk or crops were failing, it was simply witchcraft that was blamed for it. There's also a couple occurrences where there were women who were blamed. The difficulty with that was... a lot of times they would just be given a simple name like Witch McGraw or Mother... Mother Smith or something very, very simple that would be very difficult to verify with a census, so it's unknown if they were actually real or if this was something that was just given to a certain individual, but a lot of times the blame was placed on someone. A lot of times it was a woman; usually she was older, maybe a bit ostracized from the community, but there were also plenty of instances where it was a male who was blamed for it. There was a murder that took place in Sullivan County, and the man was murdered because he was actually suspected of performing witchcraft by a neighbor.

[00:11:10] Brett Barry: Wow!

[00:11:11] Samantha Misa: We see people immigrating from Europe bringing belief in witchcraft with them, and there does tend to be a very long history of that where witchcraft is not necessarily put on one person. It... it just exists in the Aether... the term a lot of people use to describe it is maleficium, where it's just... there's simply bad energy out there or dark energy, and some people have the ability to harness it and use it to harm others, but it just exists, so it can hurt you without being directed by someone, but usually it is, and that belief in maleficium and witches is something that culturally you can see follow a lot of settlers and a lot of immigrants from the old world if you will... immigrating to North America even in the sixteen/seventeen hundreds, and so we do see a bit of a continuation with that.

[00:11:59] Brett Barry: And the Catskills are a dense and dark place in areas, so, you know, lots of tales come out of the forests of the Catskills, and I guess that might also have something to do with it?

[00:12:09] Samantha Misa: The Catskills are kind of a dark and mysterious land. They were never very densely settled still to this day... pretty light population numbers in several of the Catskill counties... early documentation of the Catskills... talk about it as a dark and howling wilderness that there were scary animals and wildlife and very dense forests around so naturally that kind of lends credence to there being some supernatural entity at place or that this would be somewhere that some type of force like that would be at home. It comes from very early American beliefs following the Puritans, who were very well-known for their belief in witchcraft, that the devil occupied the woods. You were a lot more safe in a civilized area, in a town or a settlement, and if there's not a lot of those around, then the devil has quite a big playing field.

[00:12:53] Brett Barry: Was there anything in your research on these stories that sent a chill down your spine, or did you take everything with a healthy dose of skepticism?

[00:13:02] Samantha Misa: I tried to take things with a healthy dose of skepticism, but I'm also the person that does tours of the Frisbee House at night, the last one to lock up afterwards, so I like to think that I'm receptive to the possibility that anything exists and anything can happen. There were a couple stories in there that did send a little bit of a shiver down my spine. There was one story of a cat that talked and was suspected of being somehow connected to witchcraft, and I've heard this story before. It's kind of made its rounds among folklorists, and I've heard it in several different places, but what really caught my eye about it was... there were a lot of elements of the story that I couldn't verify via census records. The family mentioned in the story did exist, and looking at a map of the area, I was trying to pinpoint where exactly the farm was that all of these strange occurrences with the talking cat happened, and there it was on a historic map, and the family name was right there [Mayham Pond on Mayham's farm in Schoharie County].

[00:14:01] Brett Barry: Hear Samantha Misa's reading of that story, right after this.

[00:14:09] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by... The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie Counties, including brands for the local region such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com; and by Briars & Brambles Books, the go-to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily! For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call (518) 750-8599.

[00:14:51] Brett Barry: And now, here's Samantha Misa with a reading from her book, "Witches of the Catskills." Chapter 6: "Molly Meyers."

[00:14:56] Samantha Misa: In many stories, the mutilation of a cat often led to similar injuries on women in towns suspected of being witches. Cats shot with silver bullets were known to disappear into thin air. When tools such as hatchets ceased to work, a black cat running around was to blame. One popular witch story from the Catskills involves the tale of Molly Meyers, the "witch cat." The story was first related in the 1939 text Body, Boots and Britches: Folktales, Ballads, and Speech from Country New York, written by Harold Thompson and has been subjected to many retellings since. The original tale positions the events in the woods near South Gilboa, Schoharie County. Due to the skittish nature of cows driven through this particular patch of woods, the area gained the moniker "Spook Woods." The story begins with a man identified only as "Mr. Williams," who worked as a hired hand on the Cornelius Mayham farm at an unspecified date. Mr. Williams was walking through Spook Woods one night when he suddenly realized he was not alone. Two cats were walking through the woods, carrying a dead cat between them. One of the cats called out to the farmhand by name stating, "Mr. Williams, tell Molly Meyers she can come home now; old Hawkins is dead." When Williams finally made it back to the Cornelius Mayham farm, he related his disturbing tale to the Mayham family. When Mr. Williams stated "tell Molly Meyers she can come home," the Mayham family's cat ran into the open fireplace and flew up the chimney, disappearing into the night. Cornelius Mayham did indeed live in South Gilboa. Mayham was born on August 16th, 1804. He married Julia Ann Reynolds and the pair had nearly a dozen children together. Mayham died on November 23, 1853 and is buried in the Welchs Corner Cemetery in Schoharie County. One of the couple's sons carried the father's name, and Cornelius Mayham Jr. appears to have carried out his father's legacy on the family farm in South Gilboa. Mayham Jr. was married to a Lucinda Champlin. In 1875, the census lists the couple as living in South Gilboa with their children, listed only as "A.C." and "Kate." In addition, the Mayhams employed a 30-year-old woman named R. Jones as a housekeeper and a 24-year-old farmhand identified as C.I. Montfirt. There are no known records of any Mayham family employing anyone by the name of Williams. Perhaps Mr. Williams worked for the family during a particular time and was never recorded on census records. Or perhaps another worker—perhaps C.I. Montfirt—changed their name when telling the story in order to avoid ridicule from neighbors. There is a lot of connection that we can see between cats, particularly black cats, and magic, superstition, and the occult. We also see just the connection with animals in general, too... a lot of times any trouble or problems with animals were connected with witchcraft, and people suspected of witches were often times suspected of shapeshifting into animals. There's another story where there's a young man attempting to hunt partridges, and despite being a very good shot. He could not hit a single one. When he went back to his family to report his bad luck in hunting, they suspected witchcraft and told him to use a silver bullet next time. Next time the young man went out to hunt the partridges. He shot at them with a silver bullet, and to his surprise, the partridges vanished, and in their place was a woman in town who had been suspected of his witchcraft and other strange behavior, so the implication is that she was shapeshifting into the partridges, and that's why he was having such bad luck getting any. There is one story that I did come across after the book had already been published, and it involves a story that had occurred in Esperance, New York. There was a woman in Esperance who was suspected of doing some strange things. Reportedly, according to her neighbors, she was able to take her apron off, use it as a raft across the river, and once she got to the other side, she would put the apron back on and it would be perfectly dry, so there were some highly suspect things she was doing. According to the tale of the Esperance Witch, her behavior was so concerning to the locals that they shot her and buried her upside down with a stake through her head in order to prevent her from reincarnating or from reanimating and coming back to haunt them, but those details are about all there is to this story. There's not a lot of names or anything verifiable, and as a historian, we like evidence. We like to be able to prove what we say, so it's difficult and a little frustrating to not have much more to go on.

[00:19:46] Brett Barry: Do you believe in witches?

[00:19:47] Samantha Misa: I believe in everything. I definitely think that there were witches, and I think there still are.

[00:19:53] Brett Barry: Just maybe not how they're portrayed.

[00:19:56] Samantha Misa: I think there's... there's just like anything. There's probably good witches and bad witches out there. We'll... we'll go with some "Wizard of Oz" logic and say that there's a little bit of everything, but having researched this and having been able to find some things that did verify a lot of the stories, I see no reason why some of them can't be true and why that can't still remain true today.

[00:20:17] Brett Barry: Is Halloween a big holiday for you? Do you enjoy, I don't know, the... the ability to embrace things that are spooky?

[00:20:22] Samantha Misa: I do really enjoy Halloween. I enjoy the ambiance of it. I enjoy just the time of year. I enjoy the weather in autumn, and I enjoy the fact that it's the kind of [the] season where you can start talking about witchcraft and talk about haunted houses and not... not as many people as usual are going to look at... look at you... askance. There'll always be some, though.

[00:20:46] Brett Barry: "Kaatscast" is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. Production Intern: Olivia Sippel, Transcriptionist: Jerome Kazlauskas, Announcements by Campbell Brown. Sign up for our newsletter at kaatscast.com for behind-the-scenes pictures and additional information like where to find Samantha Misa at her next book signing. Please be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, rate and review so more people can find us, and keep in touch at kaatscast.com. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.