Читать книгу Woodside, the North End of Newark, N.J - C. G. Hine - Страница 15

Sixty years or so ago a stone wall ran from the bend of the Gully road, near the river diagonally to Belleville avenue, across the property now occupied by the cemetery. Beside this stone wall was buried the first person interred on the site of the cemetery—a noted witch, old Moll DeGrow, the fear of whose shade lent greatly to the terrors of the Gully seventy-five years ago.

This witch was used by the elders as a bugaboo to keep the children indoors after dark, and she appears to have been eminently useful and successful in this capacity. The Gully road was as black as a black hat on a moonless night, and one who ventured abroad at such a time never could tell when he or she might be grabbed by the powers of darkness. During the long Winter evenings these farmer and fisher folk were wont to amuse and scare themselves, as well as the children, by relating all manner of ghostly experiences. Mrs. Henry Davis recalls how, as a child, she used to crawl up to bed so terrified after an evening of witch stories that she could hardly move, her one thought being to get under the bed clothes as quickly as possible, where she would all but smother.

Under such circumstances the ghost of a witch was a powerful combination for evil, and particularly so when it was such a witch as old Moll, who was so much a terror to the neighborhood that there was talk of burning her in order to rid the community of her undesirable presence, but fortunately she died before this feeling culminated in a tragedy. Mrs. Henry Davis well remembers hearing her mother (a former Miss King) tell this as a fact.