The Youghal Witch
About this time, too, or rather two years before old Julian Cox had been seen flying in at her window in full proportion, one Florence Newton, of Youghal, was overhauled for her misdeeds towards Mary Longdon. Mary was John Pyne’s servant, and deposed that one day Florence came to where she lived and asked her for a bit of beef out of the powdering tub, to which Mary would not consent (these witnessing servants were always so moral and honest!), saying she had no right to give away her master’s beef. The witch, being angry, muttered, “Thou had’st as good have given it me,” and went away grumbling. A few days after, meeting with Mary going to the water with a pail of cloth on her head, she came full against her, and violently kissed her, and said, “Mary, I pray thee let thee and I be friends, for I bear thee no ill will, and I pray thee do thou bear me none.” Mary does not give her reply, but says that she went home, and in a few days after “saw a Woman with a Vail over her Face stand by her bedside, and one standing by her like a little old Man in silk Cloaths, and that this Man, whom she took to be a Spirit, drew the Vail from off the Woman’s Face, and then she knew it to be Goody Newton; and that the Spirit spake to the Deponent, and would have had her promise him to follow his Advice, and she should have all things after her own Heart; to which she says she answered ‘That she would have nothing to say to him, for her Trust was in the Lord.’” After this Mary Longdon was taken very ill, vomiting pins and needles and horse-nails and stubbs and wool and straw, while small stones followed her about the room, and from place to place, striking her sharply on her head and shoulders and arms, then vanishing away. She was also strangely put upon by beds, and other such assailants. Sometimes she was forcibly carried from one bed to another; sometimes taken to the top of the house, or laid on a board betwixt two sollar beams, or put into a chest, or laid under a parcel of wool, or betwixt two feather beds, or (in the day time) between the bed and the mat in her master’s room. All of these pranks done by Florence Newton’s Astral Spirit, by which Mary maid was bewitched. Florence Newton also bewitched to his death David Jones, who had constituted himself one of her watchers while she was in “bolts” in prison. David took great pains to teach her the Lord’s Prayer, but Florence, being a witch, could not repeat it correctly; at last she called out to him, “David! David! come hither; I can say the Lord’s Prayer now.” Not that she could, for when she came to the clause “Forgive us our Trespasses,” she skipped over it, or boggled at it, or got round it in some way or other that was not holy; then seizing David’s hand between the bars of the grate she kissed it thankfully; and thus and there possessed him, so that he died fourteen days after of that strange languishing disease known to all the world as a bewitchment.