Recently, TikToker Kaelin (@whatsinthekoolaid) found out that her oldest known ancestor is a woman who was convicted of witchcraft in 1665. She had been accused of witchcraft three separate times over the course of three years.
“She was acquitted on the first two, and on the last one was convicted and sentenced to death,” said Kaelin. “But she was not executed. She actually was the first person in the Western world to be convicted of witchcraft and not die.”
Her name was Elizabeth Seager. When she was 21 years old, she married Richard Seager, who was 54 at the time. Richard was born in England in 1595.
At 38 years old, he came to the colonies as an indentured servant to Thomas Hooker, a minister and founder of the state of Connecticut. He and Thomas Hooker were distant relatives.
Thomas was a Puritan fleeing religious persecution from England. Richard left behind a wife and kids in England. He married Mary Crone when he was 20 years old.
When he followed Thomas Hooker, he became an indentured servant in exchange for passage to the New World. Back then, the normal timeframe for indentured servitude was four to seven years. Somehow, it took Richard 24 years to gain his freedom. He finally became a free man in 1657.
He married Elizabeth in 1649. They had five kids in six years. Elizabeth was 34 years old when she was accused of witchcraft for the first time.
During her second witch trial, she was convicted of adultery. At the time, the punishment for adultery was execution, but she was not executed.
Elizabeth was described as rude, blasphemous, and having a quick wit and sharp tongue. She was found guilty of witchcraft in June 1665 during the Connecticut Witch Trials, which occurred 40 years before the Salem Witch Trials.
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“Witch trials were never about convicting real witches of doing witchcraft,” Kaelin pointed out. “It was a tool used by oppressive societies in order to execute people who had different ideologies from them, women, or people who were othered in the community that they wanted to get rid of.”
Elizabeth first appeared in the documents for the Connecticut Witch Trials during someone else’s trial in May 1662. That trial was for another woman in town named Judy, and it was used against Elizabeth just a few months later.
Judy had been accused of using witchcraft to kill a child named Betty. After Judy made her drink hot broth, Betty kept waking up in the middle of the night, screaming at the top of her lungs. She blamed Judy for her behavior and even told her parents that Judy was threatening her.
Then, one night, she died under mysterious circumstances. Her father, John Kelly, went around town blaming Judy. He kept making accusations against her until she was finally put on trial for Betty’s murder in May 1662.
As Judy was standing there, listening to people give their evidence for her witchcraft, she burst out, “This will cost me my life!” Elizabeth motioned to her to be silent and told her to “Hold her tongue!”
There was a 16-year-old girl named Ann Cole who accused many people of being witches, including Elizabeth. She would have seizures or fits and then blame an innocent woman for causing them.
During Elizabeth’s first trial, the jury ultimately decided there was not enough evidence to take away her life. In July 1663, she was arrested for witchcraft and was convicted of adultery.
The third time, she was actually convicted of witchcraft and escaped death because the governor, John Winthrop Jr., pardoned her. He had been away in England for a few years and was not happy when he returned to find a chaotic witch hunt going on. He convinced the jury to have a retrial. He kept pushing the date back.
At some point, John Winthrop outlawed spectral evidence, which meant that a dream or vision could no longer be used as evidence to convict someone of a crime. On May 18, 1666, Elizabeth was released from jail. In 1667, Elizabeth and Richard moved to Rhode Island.
“We know that they were in Rhode Island because in 1668, the people of Stonington, Connecticut, wrote a petition to the Hartford court…saying basically that something needed to be done about the corrupt people over at the Rhode Island colony,” said Kaelin.
In 1669, Elizabeth and Richard’s second-youngest child died by drowning at the age of 16. Richard died in 1687 at the age of 92. Elizabeth would have been 59 or 60 at the time.
He was buried somewhere in Hartford, Connecticut. After that, there was no more record of Elizabeth, so it is unclear when she died or where she was buried.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
