Witchcraft Legacy

The legacy of the 1692 Salem witch trials looms large in the American imagination; for some, that legacy is especially personal.



When, as children, Richard Brewster and his brother found a steamer trunk in their attic filled with old family books and papers, they unearthed an ancient book once owned by William Stoughton, the chief judge of the trials. In crabbed, handwritten flyleaf notes, Stoughton described someone being mercilessly haunted and perhaps tortured by "Evil Spirits." To the boys, the Evil Spirits seemed to cast a family curse, long buried in the trunk.



Witchcraft Legacy is a remarkable personal and family memoir in which Brewster tells true stories of love, death-including murder-and life's surprising turns as he traces the history of Stoughton's book and the curse of its Evil Spirits. With tales spanning four centuries, as the book passed from from hand to hand over the generations, Brewster speaks to the reader in a voice that intimately conveys the universal human experience behind every story.