About This Location
A road along Hampton Beach where Goodwife Eunice Cole once lived, the only woman convicted of witchcraft in New Hampshire.
The Ghost Story
The only woman ever convicted of witchcraft in New Hampshire still walks Island Path Road, more than three centuries after her neighbors drove a stake through her corpse. Eunice "Goody" Cole arrived in Hampton around 1640 as an indentured servant of Matthew Craddock, a wealthy London merchant who paid ten pounds for her and her husband William's passage to New England. The Coles settled in Hampton, but Eunice's sharp tongue and combative personality quickly made enemies among the Puritan townspeople. In 1656, she was formally charged with familiarity with the devil after neighbors testified she had caused mysterious illnesses, killed livestock through unknown means, and appeared in the form of a gray cat that attacked people around town. The court found her guilty and sentenced her to whipping and imprisonment -- though notably stopped short of ordering her execution.
Eunice endured years of cycling between prison and precarious freedom. Released around 1660, she was imprisoned again by 1662 and held until sometime between 1668 and 1671. A second formal witchcraft accusation followed in 1671, and she was charged yet again before her death. The most serious allegation linked her to the drowning of several Hampton sailors -- townspeople believed she had cursed their voyage. She died around 1680, alone and despised, in a small dwelling near what is now Island Path Road.
But death did not end Eunice Cole's persecution. Local legend holds that her neighbors disinterred her body and drove a stake through her heart, then hung a horseshoe on the stake for good measure -- a double precaution against what they believed was her malevolent power. Other accounts suggest that kinder neighbors eventually gave her a proper burial near the Meeting House Green, though the exact location of her remains has never been confirmed.
Island Path Road, the stretch where Eunice lived and died, has been a site of paranormal reports for generations. Drivers describe a spectral figure materializing in the fog along the road -- a hunched, dark-cloaked woman who appears at the edge of headlight beams and vanishes when approached. Objects move on their own in nearby homes. Unexplained lights have been seen drifting through the marshes adjacent to the road. The activity is most intense in autumn, when the coastal fog rolls thick off Hampton Beach and the boundary between the living and the dead seems to thin.
In 1938, as Hampton prepared for its 300th anniversary, the town formed "The Society in Hampton for the Apprehension of Those Falsely Accusing Eunice (Goody) Cole of Having Familiarity With the Devil." At a town meeting on March 8, 1938, Hampton officially cleared Goody Cole's name and restored her as a citizen in good standing -- 258 years after her death. A memorial boulder now marks her approximate burial site near the Meeting House Green. But the exoneration seems to have done nothing to settle her spirit. Whether Eunice walks Island Path Road out of anger, habit, or simply because no one ever properly put her to rest, the fog along that road still carries something that feels distinctly like a grudge.
