ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 22
Benjamin Franklin’s Witch Trial Hoax
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On October 22, 1730, the Pennsylvania Gazette ran a local
news item datelined Burlington, New Jersey, ten days earlier. Nearly three
hundred people, the story reported, had gathered at Mount Holly to witness a
trial by ordeal: two men and two women accused of witchcraft, weighed on a
scale against a Bible and then dunked in a millpond to see whether they would
sink or float. It read exactly like straight reporting. It wasn’t. The article’s
presumed author, a twenty-four-year-old printer who had owned the paper for
less than a year, was having the entire colony on.
That printer was almost certainly
Benjamin Franklin, though even that much comes with some suspicion…
The piece ran unsigned, as Franklin’s satirical pieces in the Gazette typically did, and the attribution rests on circumstantial evidence rather than a signed byline: Franklin owned the paper at the time, the prose carries his recognizable satirical fingerprints, and the nineteenth-century historian John Bach McMaster first assigned it to him in his 1887 book Benjamin Franklin as a Man of Letters, a judgment later editors and biographers have generally accepted. The Yale edition of Franklin’s papers is more careful, noting plainly that his authorship has never been definitively proven, and that the actual Burlington County court records for 1730, which might have settled the question either way, no longer survive. What’s certain, however, is simply that no trace of a genuine witch trial at Mount Holly has ever turned up anywhere else, in any other newspaper, court document, or diary from the period.
The hoax itself is a small
masterpiece of deadpan absurdity, built on testing procedures satirizing real
witch trial practice going back decades. The Mount Holly crowd first weighs the
accused against a heavy family Bible, on the folk logic that a witch, having
renounced her baptismal vows, would weigh too little to balance the book, a
test the article reports every single defendant, accuser included, passing
without incident, undermining the entire premise before the story even moves to
its second act. Undeterred, the crowd proceeds to the millpond for the classic
swimming test: bound and thrown into the water, the accused who floated were
judged guilty, since water, supposedly too pure to accept a witch's body, would
reject them, while the innocent would simply sink, a method whose fatal
unfairness, nobody at the time seemed to notice, offered the accused drowning
as their only route to acquittal. Franklin’s article reports that both accused
men floated “like a Cork,” prompting one of them, newly rattled by his own
buoyancy, to mutter the hoax’s best-remembered line: “If I am a Witch, it is
more than I know.”
Readers at the time had every reason
to take the story seriously, which was precisely the joke's engine. Witch
trials genuinely had been common across the American colonies for most of the
seventeenth century, and the Salem trials, only thirty-eight years in the past when Franklin’s piece ran, remained
a vivid, unresolved national memory, close enough that readers could easily
believe the old superstition was still quietly operating in rural New Jersey.
The hoax worked exactly as intended: it was swiftly reprinted across the Atlantic
in London’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731, presented there as
straightforward fact with no indication anyone involved suspected satire, and
it continued circulating as genuine colonial news for over a century before
McMaster finally traced it back to its likely author.
This wasn't Franklin’s only experiment with planted fiction either, which strengthens the case that Mount Holly belongs to a pattern rather than a one-off. Across his long career he published a string of similar invented news items and open letters, a supposed royal edict mocking British colonial policy decades later among the most famous, consistently using the authority of print itself, the simple fact that something appeared as straight reportage, as the mechanism that made the satire bite. The Mount Holly piece is widely considered one of his very earliest experiments with the technique, written while he was still a young printer only beginning to find the voice that would later make him one of the most quietly subversive journalists in American history.
Importantly, Franklin wasn’t writing
comedy for its own sake; he was using a fabricated news story to make an
argument for reason over superstition at a moment, the early years of the
colonial Enlightenment, when that argument still needed making loudly and
often. The same October 22 issue of the Gazette carried other pieces
touching on similar themes of reason and empiricism, suggesting the witch trial
hoax was a deliberate, coordinated jab rather than an isolated joke. It’s a
strange kind of ancestor for this column to claim: nearly three centuries
before anyone coined the term “fake news” (and a very big “thank you” to Norm
MacDonald for that one!) a future Founding Father built one, aimed it at his
own readers’ credulity, and let it run so convincingly that it fooled an
ocean's worth of people into reporting invented superstition as settled fact,
in the specific service of arguing that people should stop believing in
superstition in the first place.
By Stacy Schiff | Little, Brown and Company
Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
biographer, spent years reconstructing the Salem trials in granular detail,
drawing on surviving court records, personal letters, and parish documents to
rebuild not just the chronology of 1692’s panic but its full psychological and
social texture, the religious anxiety, the land disputes, the genuine terror
that let a handful of accusing girls set an entire colony on fire. What makes
the book essential reading alongside today's post is simple: Franklin’s Mount
Holly hoax only works as satire if its audience already understands,
viscerally, what a real witch trial looked like and how recently one had
actually happened. Schiff’s book is the fullest modern account of exactly that
trauma, the living memory Franklin was counting on his readers to supply.
Critics have praised Schiff’s prose
as genuinely literary rather than merely documentary, and her refusal to
flatten the Salem accusers and accused into simple villains or victims gives
the book real staying power nearly a decade after its 2015 publication. Readers
who finish today’s post wanting to understand why a satirical news story about
scales and millponds could travel as convincingly as it did, reprinted as fact
across an ocean, will find The Witches the single best explanation
available: not because colonial readers were gullible, but because the thing
Franklin was joking about had, within living memory, been devastatingly real.
This is narrative history rather than
a quick reference, dense with named sources and genuine scholarly apparatus,
and readers wanting a shorter entry point might start instead with a focused
essay on the Mount Holly hoax itself. But for readers of this column who want
the fullest possible picture of the fear Franklin was satirizing, Schiff’s book
remains the definitive place to find it.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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