Mystic, Que., has some witchcraft in its history and locals are celebrating the spooky stories
Witch stories reveal people’s fears at the time, says heritage group
A community of frustrated farmers suspects something sinister is stopping their cows from giving milk. One of them returns to his barn and finds a hare staring at him. He fires at the animal, clipping its ear, but it escapes. Later, when elderly Peggy Green is on her deathbed, the locals notice something strange about her ear: a gunshot-like injury.
Grant Myers, president of the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN), tells the story that has been passed down from generation to generation in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec.
"They surmised that she was a shape-shifter and that she was using magic to stop the cows from producing," said Myers.
After Green died, the cows continued to have trouble producing milk.
"The local farmers returned to the grave of the elderly woman and built a wall around it. And when they walled-in the grave, then the cows began to produce milk," Myers said, who also points out there is not much proof Green ever existed — in any shape or form.
It is said to have happened along New Mexico Road, between what is today Cookshire-Eaton and Mont-Mégantic, Que.
The story, he says, is a retelling of similar supernatural stories told in northern Europe, hearkening back to a precarity of certain foods — specifically milk — and the challenges posed to livelihoods, possibly even starvation, when those staples became scarce.
But it is not the only witch story in the Eastern Townships to survive from centuries past, with local history buffs looking to preserve their local lore and trace the roots of the stories settlers came to share about the women suspected of witchcraft.
Elsewhere in the townships, the aptly named hamlet of Mystic — just off the road between Farnham and Bedford, Que., — has its own old witch tales to share.
"Mystic, Quebec is actually known as Saint-Ignace-de-Stanbridge now but for the locals we still call it Mystic, and we don't really know why it was called Mystic except that it has these magical mystical stories attached to it," said Heather Darch, project manager at QAHN.
The municipality used to be called Clapperton, says Darch, a former curator of the Missisquoi Museum.
WATCH | Tracking down the legends of Mystic, Que.:
The Clapper brothers, a dutch-speaking trio loyal to the British crown, immigrated north after the American War of Independence and established themselves as the first European presence in the area.
"They not only brought all of their wives and children and what they could carry on their backs, but also their superstitions," she said.
"The Clappers believed that witches lived along the main road and would grab travellers as they went by and pull them into the woods and you would never see them again. That must have been terrifying to think that there were witches living out in the woods."
Darch says she heard these stories from Frances Walbridge — the granddaughter of Alexander Solomon Walbridge, the industrialist who in the 19th century built much of the community that still stands today.
Then Darch came across a 1877 book by Erastus Chandler about the Clapperton witches and traced the story's origins to oral traditions of the past. Chandler wrote that on Oct. 31, when the veil between the living and dead thinned, the witches would come to Clapperton to cause supernatural mischief.
"The witches of Clappertown would come into the village and take the seventh son of the seventh son, drag him through a keyhole, and ride him like a horse up to witch hill and tie him to his stake. And there they made him watch all of their witchy incantations and revelries, and before the rooster crowed in the morning, they would canter him back home and put him back to bed," she said.
Myers and Darch underscore that these kinds of witch stories often single out people on the margins of society, sometimes scapegoating an elderly woman or someone else for the community's misfortune.
"When you poke around in the story, you find that they really do occupy marginal positions within the communities that they live in for whatever reason, whether it's origin or socioeconomic status [or] what they do for living," said Myers. "They become magnets for all sorts of accusations of evil activity."
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