The Stratford Witch

Twenty-three year old Ruth Paine, known for the short period of her life as Goodwife "Goody" Bassett, was railroaded through a witch trial in the spring of 1651 in Stratford, Connecticut, a land once called Cupheag by the Pootatuck Indians that lived and farmed there.  The Puritan fathers had found her guilty of lycanthropy, among other Satanic crimes, and she hung to death on a granite outcropping of the Pootatuck (now Housatonic) River, according the Claude Clayton Smith, author of the semi-fictional book "The Stratford Devil."  It wasn't until nearly 50 years later that witchcraft trials became the hottest, new meme in Salem, Massachusetts.

Today, there are no longer any wolves to conspire with in Connecticut and the Pootatuck tribe with whom Goody had been acquainted, are also extinct.  There is the "Goody Bassett Olde-Fashioned Ice Cream Shoppe" in the Stratford town center which sells a nine-scoop treat named "Goody's Cauldron."  The old Center School building is a few doors away from the ice cream shop and is where horror author Stephen King wrote some of his first fiction.  In his memoir, "On Writing," King states that his elementary school burned down which is only partially true.  The building was gutted by fire but currently still stands as the Stratford Board of Education. 

The Metrolink commuter trains stops a short distance away from Goody Bassett's Ice Cream and Center School at closeby Stratford Train Station; Stratford is a whistle stop about halfway between New Haven and New York City.  In the book, "First Words," editor Paul Mandelbaum describes how Stephen King may have seen a friend get hit by a train and, as described by his mother, "had come home in shock." Mandelbaum doesn't say where this incident happened but I, too, have seen such tragedy on the line between New Haven and New York and I can understand why, if this is where King saw such a tragic sight, he has been haunted to write volumes of horror fiction as an adult.