The couple were arrested for witchcraft in February 1651, and in the midst of the turmoil, their third child, an infant, died suddenly. Under house arrest, Mary was questioned about his “murder” and did not deny it. Moved to a Boston jail, Mary and Hugh were held under horrific conditions. At the same time, Pynchon himself fell under suspicion, having published a religious tract espousing heretical views on salvation. Denounced as blasphemy by Boston authorities, Pynchon’s apostasy, alongside the witchcraft crisis, transfixed all of Springfield. Gaskill’s story is so deliciously suspenseful that it doesn’t seem fair to reveal the outcome. Suffice it to say that Mary and Hugh both came to remarkable ends.

Malcolm Gaskill shows us with filmic vividness the daily life of the riven, marginal community of Springfield, where settlers from a far country dwell on the edge of the unknown. His attention to their plight - material, psychological, spiritual - goes far to explain, though not explain away, the alien beliefs of a fragile, beleaguered community, torn between the old world and the new. The clarity of his thought and his writing, his insight, and the immediacy of the telling, combine to make this the best and most enjoyable kind of history writing. Malcolm Gaskill goes to meet the past on its own terms and in its own place, and the result is thought-provoking and absorbing. -- Hilary Mantel Gaskill combines first-rate historical research with a driving narrative in this captivating study. A riveting reading. This portrait of early America fascinates.” – Publishers Weekly When peculiar things begin to happen in the frontier town of Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651, tensions rise and rumours spread of witches and heretics. What follows is a web of spite, paranoia and denunciation – a far cry from the English settlers’ dreams of love and liberty at the dawn of the New World. The historian Malcolm Gaskill retells this dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in The Ruin Of All Witches. The Ruin of All Witches by Malcolm Gaskill is a great nonfictional account of a witch hunt involving Mary and Hugh Parsons in 1651 New England. It was fascinating.In the middle of the 17th century a witch craze burnt across New England. This is a study of one town in the Connecticut Valley. Life in 1650s Springfield, Massachusetts is far from the Puritan idyll its townspeople might have hoped. Beset by freezing winters and withering summers, smallpox, typhoid and an unfathomably high infant mortality rate, they relied on homespun remedies – “a drink made from boiled toads… powdered sheep’s horn for sores” that to the modern reader might themselves sound like witchcraft. Gaskill never belittles the experiences of those immersed in witchcraft or passes it off as mere hysteria or hyperbole. Instead, he grounds the strange events and occurrences in the context of the times and expertly dissects the causes and implications of witchcraft.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. A contextually rich history of the first witch panic during a tumultuous time in Massachusetts in 1651.

The story of Mary Parsons, and her husband Hugh, both tried as witches following a witch hunt panic in their village ahead of the Salem witch trials. This was an interesting journey into the lives of Hugh and Mary Parsons, who both lived in Springfield, America, and how they both met terrible consequences, die to their unpopularity within the village and because accused of performing witchcraft. This book has been structured well, and Gaskill has obviously done his research on the history of Springfield, and the surrounding areas.