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# Connecticut Hanged a Woman for Witchcraft 45 Years Before Salem. The Accusation Against Her Is Lost.
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/alse-young-was-hanged-for-witchcraft-in-1647-the-case-against-her-vanished/
- Published: 2026-10-29T10:01:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-29T10:00:59.000Z
- Description: History kept the epidemic, a dying girl's talk of Satan and a daughter accused decades later. It lost the one thing that explained the gallows.
- Author: Corpus
- Tags: History, Halloween Week, New England

Windsor town clerk Matthew Grant kept a diary list of people who were hanged. Her entry reads, in full: "May 26 47 Alse Young was hanged." That's nearly all that survived.

Alse Young was hanged in Hartford on May 26, 1647, probably at Meeting House Square, where the Old State House now stands. She became the first person on record executed for witchcraft in the American colonies, 45 years before Salem became the name everyone remembers. The case explaining why she died is almost entirely gone. Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop Sr. did slightly worse than Grant: he noted that "one \_\_\_\_\_ of Windsor" had been executed, leaving a blank where her name should have been. That is the contemporary documentary record. Both of it.

Windsor suffered an influenza epidemic that year, and the town's death rate more than quadrupled. Modern historians have identified the outbreak as plausible context for Young's accusation. Next door, the Thornton family lost four children. According to Cotton Mather, one of them, Priscilla, said on her deathbed that Satan had been troubling her. Young's only child survived. It makes a compelling scapegoating scenario. But it is reconstruction, not documentation. The trial records are simply gone.

Young was the first of 11 people Connecticut hanged for witchcraft by 1663\. More than 40 faced trial. Her daughter, Alice Young Beamon, was herself accused of witchcraft roughly 30 years later in Springfield, Massachusetts. She was not executed.

Connecticut passed a resolution acknowledging the injustice on May 25, 2023, the eve of the 376th anniversary of Young's hanging. It cannot supply the accusation.

Nearly 380 years of research have produced a plausible mechanism and an exoneration. They have not produced a case.

**Read the full story at** [Windsor Historical Society, October 20, 2023](https://www.windsorhistoricalsociety.org/two-of-windsor-accused-and-exonerated-of-witchcraft/?ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** Windsor's death rate quadrupled from a disease nobody in 1647 could explain, and the colony settled on a cause it could hang. Salem got the haunted houses and *The Crucible*; Connecticut got a blank where her name should be.