This episode opens with a discussion of the Colonial American Witch Trials, so it's a little grim.

Listener discretion is advised for our youngest strangers.

I'm Lauren Norton, and this is one strange thing.

The show where we search the nation's

news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

Strangers, we've told you about a witch or two over the past 100 or so episodes.

In fact, if you're a premium subscriber, you've just heard a very interesting tale about a curse.

But rarely have we run into a story quite like this one.

But before we can get into the rather charming legend of a woman who was known,

probably as Hannah Kranah, we need to talk about something markedly less pleasant. Witch trials.

Now, when you think of New England and the persecution of witches, which, let's be honest,

likely involved very few practitioners of anything

besides medicine or not being very popular, the usual Puritan crimes. Salem, Massachusetts,

has got to be the town that comes to mind. And that is fair. Though there are misunderstandings

big enough that there's now a cottage industry

of, you didn't burn my witch-grandma t-shirts out there, that's not how things actually went down.

In what would become the United States, witches were executed by other methods, not that they

were any less lethal.

Per pin today, the Salem witch trials lasted just one year.

With 200 accusations and 45 executions, you'd be forgiven for thinking that things

went on for much longer.

What's much less known though was that America's witch panic didn't start

...