Island Path Road

Eunice "Goody" Cole, the only New Hampshire woman convicted of witchcraft, lived on Island Path Road. Drivers still see a figure in the marsh fog.

Eunice Cole is the only woman New Hampshire ever formally convicted of witchcraft, and when she died sometime around 1680 on what is now Island Path Road, Hampton tradition holds that neighbors dug her body back up, drove a stake through her heart, and buried her in unconsecrated ground near her cabin. That is the short version. The longer one is worse.

Cole, called Goody in the Puritan custom, moved to Hampton with her husband William in the 1640s. She was in her forties. She was loud, poor, childless, and cantankerous enough that neighbors started complaining early. The first witchcraft charge landed in 1656, based on testimony that she had cursed a neighbor's livestock and threatened a local child. The court sentenced her to be whipped and imprisoned in Boston. She was released temporarily in 1671 to care for her dying husband, then re-arrested after neighbors accused her of turning into a cat and an eagle and trying to lure a child into her home. That 1673 trial ended in what the court called a suspicion of witchcraft, a conviction in everything but name. She was fined and confined.

When she died, destitute, sometime between 1673 and 1680, the town buried her quickly in a shallow grave. Then, by the story that got passed down, they went back. The stake was practical theology. Puritan New England believed a witch could return as a revenant, and a wooden stake through the heart kept her pinned. They left no marker. For three hundred years nobody knew exactly where she was.

The stretch of Island Path Road where her cabin once stood runs through salt marsh between Hampton Beach and the Hampton River. It is flat, empty after dark, and popular with drivers who have heard the story. The reports repeat: a figure in the marsh fog walking the shoulder of the road, objects knocked off car hoods in the parking pullouts, a sound that either resembles weeping or wind through reeds depending who is telling it. A 2012 Only In Your State survey ranked Island Path Road the second-scariest road in New Hampshire.

Hampton spent three centuries carrying her conviction. In 1938 the town voted unanimously to exonerate Goody Cole, making her the first American accused witch to be officially cleared. A 1963 memorial stone was placed on the Tuck Museum lawn. In August 2013, after historians located what they believe is her actual burial site near the old cabin on Island Path, the town gave her a proper grave, three hundred and thirty-three years late.

They spent a long time owing her.