Haunted Apples and Bewitched Beer

By Erik Ofgang

Connecticut’s history is fascinating. From aerospace to Indigenous history, the state and its people have played an important—if sometimes overlooked role in New England, U.S. and global history. In honor of Halloween and autumn, here are two tales. The first is, as hard as it is to believe, completely true; the second is folklore with some disturbing real-life inspirations.

Bewitched Beer 

To understand just how tragically comic the witch hunt scares of colonial Connecticut were, you need look no further than the story of Elizabeth Goodman. Goodman, who was sometimes called Godman as well, was an unmarried woman without close relatives. She worked and lived in the household of Stephen Goodyear, the deputy governor of New Haven in the mid-1650s. In the summer of 1653, a neighbor complained that Goodwin bewitched some of the neighbor’s chickens and caused them to die of worms. This strange accusation led to Goodman’s imprisonment and trial—but things would soon get much stranger.

During the trial, others came forward accusing Goodman of witchcraft. Among them was an accusation from a reverend that she had bewitched his beer. According to the reverend, during the summer she had come by his house and asked if she could have some of his freshly brewed beer. He refused to give her some of his fresh batch but did offer her some he had previously brewed. Goodman didn’t want the other beer and walked off muttering to herself. The next day the reverend’s beer had soured. He concluded that Goodman had placed some type of curse on it.

“The Goodman case shows us that women in early Connecticut could even be blamed in the guise of witchcraft for a batch of beer souring, or chickens dying and filled with worms,” says Beth Caruso, author of “One of Windsor,” a historical novel about Connecticut and America’s first witch hanging. The court didn’t sentence Goodman to death but put her on the colonial equivalent of probation. Goodman was lucky. “She could have lost her life for these seemingly trivial things,” Caruso says.

Connecticut’s witch scares lasted between 1647 and 1663. During that time, 34 people in the Connecticut and New Haven colonies were indicted for witchcraft and 11 were executed. Most of these witch hunt victims were women.

“These women were outside gender norms for their time,” states Caruso. “Their accusations were largely based in misogyny. They were childless troublemakers who people did not like.”

Goodman and the other accused witches in Connecticut were pardoned last year thanks to Caruso and other Connecticut witch hunt victim advocates who lobbied for years to have Connecticut officially clear the names of these wrongfully accused individuals. Despite the exonerations and all the progress society has made since Goodman’s time, Caruso stresses that misogyny against women—particularly childless women — continues today. “We still have many lessons to learn from the Connecticut witch trials and many hurdles to get past before misogyny loosens its ugly grip upon society.”

A Haunted Apple Story with A Hint of Truth

One of folklorest Stephen Gencarella’s favorite Connecticut legends is the story of Micah Rood and his haunted apples. Gencarella, a Connecticut resident and professor of folklore at the University of Massachusetts Amherst investigated the legend for his book “Spooky Trails and Tall Tales Connecticut: Hiking the State’s Legends, Hauntings, and History.” Tracing the origins of the story down through the years, he found the seeds of a true story that is in many ways much grimmer and more disturbing than the better-known legends. Before we get to its real-world inspiration, here is the legend. There are, of course, different versions of the tale but the main one goes more or less like this.

In the mid-1700s, there was a Franklin farmer named Micah Rood. We don’t know much about him other than that he hated the French because his father was killed by them during the French Indian War. As the war was still raging, a foreign-born peddler visited Rood’s farm. Rood believed this man was a French spy. Because of this and due to his hatred of the French, he murdered the man and buried him under an apple tree on his farm. The next year the apple tree’s blossoms were red instead of white. More disturbingly, the fruit of the tree had changed. Now, when Rood bit into each and every apple, he found a red speck in the center of its flesh. As these strange apples arrived, so too did a letter from friends of the peddler asking if anyone has seen him. The letter revealed that he was German and not French. Consumed by guilt over the awful thing he had done, Rood hanged himself from his now-cursed apple tree.

While researching this story, Gencarella learned that it has been told for more than 200 years in and around Franklin. There was a real Micah Rood who lived in what is modern-day Franklin in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and he had a farm.  But he was not guilty of a crime, though according to Gencarella, there is a plausible reason he was “chosen as a character for a grim and shocking fantasy.” The reason was his father, Thomas Rood, who was convicted of incest and executed in 1672—the only official execution for this crime in what would become the United States.

But this isn’t the only kernel of truth in the tale. By the 1800s, there is documentation in eastern Connecticut of a popular apple variety called the “Mike Apple,” which did in fact have red flecks or specks. One theory is that over time the apple’s original name “Micah” became “Mike.” Gencarella isn’t certain. “It is entirely plausible that the real Micah Rood developed such an apple on his farm,” he notes. “It is just as possible that a different farmer developed the variety, and its appearance inspired or coincided with a local legend.”

Erik Ofgang is a Connecticut freelance writer and author. He has written for The New York Times, Smithsonian magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Forbes as well as appeared on the History Channel’s “Food That Built America.” He teaches writing in WCSU’s MFA Program.