Funny Occult Books Tumblr Text Post
Jane "Naut" Kanniff: The Witch of West Nyack
by John Scott (1916 – 2005)
Historian Emeritus, The Historical Society of Rockland County
© The Historical Society of Rockland County
www.RocklandHistory.org
South of the Mountains, Vol. 49; No. 2 (April – June, 2005)
The traditional tolerance toward religion and witchcraft practiced in Holland carried over into the Dutch settlements in America. New York did not suffer the dreadful witch craft persecutions as did New England. Nevertheless, superstition, especially in the fifty years after the Revolution, was pervasive in the lower Hudson Valley where many of the Dutch lived.
An old woman who lived alone and had odd characteristics was often suspect, especially during a period of unexplained happenings: a cow acting strangely and refusing to give milk, butter that would not churn properly, seizures, strange illnesses and accidents. Jane "Naut" Kanniff, the widow of a Scottish physician and a stranger to Clarkstown, fit the mold perfectly. She became known locally as a sorceress, and was thought to be influenced by the devil, therefore causing much mischief in the hamlet known today as West Nyack.
A chronicle of the widow's travails is found in Green's History of Rockland County, written in 1886. According to Green and other historians, Naut Kanniff, who moved to Clarkstown prior to 1816, was the last person brought to trial for witchcraft in New York State. Frank Bertangue Green was himself a physician, making house calls in the mid-nineteenth century. Also a good journalist and historian, he inter viewed people who either witnessed the event or were in the vicinity of Clarkstown at the time of the trial.
Green wrote of the widow Kanniff: "Jane, or as she was called in the vernacular of the Clarksville people, Naut Kanniff, seems to have been exceedingly eccentric, a person who would now be regarded by alienists as insane; but her vagaries at the worst took a harmless form. She was odd in dress, preferring parti-colors of wondrous diversity, queer in the fashion of arranging her hair. She was unsocial in a neighborhood where everyone knew each other; and morose or erratic when forced to meet people. With these traits and habits, she combined one other. From her deceased husband she had gathered a smattering of medicine, and now, when placed where she could get at the herbs known in her Materia Medica, she made wondrous decoctions with which she treated such as came to her for aid, and I have been informed by those who knew her, with most excellent results." Naut lived with her son Tobias, who, like his mother, was eccentric and reticent. The two, with their only companions a black cat and a talking parrot, occupied a small wooden, unpainted building just above the burial ground that adjoined the old Dutch meeting house church on Germonds Road.
It is not surprising that Naut became a prime suspect in the minds of the rural people that fateful season, when various unexplained phenomena and happenings occurred in the neighborhood. Tiny suspicions and whispered innuendos led to a wave of accusations.
Green carefully avoided naming any of the accusers except to say that "only reputable citizens were permitted to act in the matter." The judge selected was "the resident physician and the jury was composed of farmers in the neighborhood." The prominent resident physician in Clarkstown at that time was Dr. Abraham Cornelison, who, in 1798, bought seventeen acres and an old stone house-earlier the Pye home-directly across from the De Clark-Polhemus Mill. A huge man weighing more than 300 pounds, he became the first president of the Rockland County Medical Society and died in 1835 at 80 years of age.
The site chosen for the trial was the De Clark-Polhemus Mill at the center of the hamlet. Arthur S. Tompkins describes events leading up to the trial in his Historical Record of Rockland County, published in 1902: "Prominent citizens of the neighborhood, men and women, held a secret meeting in a fulling mill …. Here it was agreed to put 'Naut' to a test …viz: Bind her hand and foot, throw her in the mill pond. If she floated she must necessarily be a witch, but if she drowned then her innocence would be established beyond a doubt… "Then other counsels prevailed. Instead of the water test, it was decided to take 'Naut' to Auert Polhemus's grist mill…" where large flour scales were available.
The commonly accepted belief was that a witch was always lighter in weight than a large family Bible. Naut's ordeal included this conclusive test when a large Dutch Bible was produced. She easily outweighed it and was exonerated.
Naut's persecutors were them selves threatened by legal action for their doings, according to Tompkins. The matter was settled, however, before it came into the courts, and Naut was allowed to return home.
"Thus ended ingloriously to the actors at least, the last trial for witch craft in New York State," Tompkins wrote. Naut, however, had her revenge. Shortly after the trial, according to Tompkins, a son of the owner of the fulling mill, where the secret meeting was held, was crushed at the mill by a large wooden hammer. "This was attributed to 'Naut' for the brutal treatment she had received from her Christian neighbors, "Tompkins wrote. Another account of the young boy's death places the incident 40 years before the witchcraft trial. And, there are those who believe that the trial itself did not measure up to the stories told about it. "That the Clarkstown incident happened cannot be doubted," wrote historian Wilfred Blanch Talman in How Things Began …in Rockland County and Places Nearby. "To be utterly fair, the 'trial' of Clarkstown's 'witch' should at least be referred to in quotation marks ….Like wine, it has improved with age, as such stories do."
In 1976, 60 volunteers created two large United States Bicentennial quilts celebrating important events in Rockland County history. One embroidered scene, entitled "West Nyack's Witchcraft Trial," depicts the interior of a mill, a Dutch Bible, a black cat and "Naut" fleeing from a hangman's noose suspended from the rafters.
Perhaps the most outrageous and erroneous distortion of the event appeared early in the twentieth century, when a picture postcard bearing an excellent picture of the Polhemus Mill was published and distributed. Beneath the picture is the inscription: "The Old Mill, West Nyack, N.Y. George Washington had his wheat ground for his army there. There also was burned at the stake the last witch in Rockland County."
—For a full account of Jane "Naut" Kanniff and the "witchcraft trial," read:
Historical Record to the Close of the Nineteenth Century of Rockland County, New York, ed. Arthur S. Tompkins, Nyack, N.Y., 1902, pages 444-446.
The History of Rockland County, by Frank Bertangue Green, M.D., reprint of the original 1886 edition, The Historical Society of Rockland Co., New City, N.Y., 1986, pages 418-419.
How Things Began …in Rockland County and Places Nearby, by Wilfred Blanch Talman, The Historical Society of Rockland County, New City, N.Y., 1977, pages 274-276.
Source: https://rocklandhistoryblog.tumblr.com/post/100465214040/jane-naut-kanniff-the-witch-of-west-nyack-by-john
0 Response to "Funny Occult Books Tumblr Text Post"
Post a Comment