(Witch's head), was described by German settlers as a
place of nightly gathering for weird women, who whirled about its top in
"linked dances" and sang in deep tones mingled with awful laughter. After
one of these women, in Williams township, had been punished for
enchanting a twenty-dollar horse, their sabbaths were held more quietly.
Mom Rinkle, whose "rock" is pointed out beside the Wissahickon, in
Philadelphia, "drank dew from acorn-cups and had the evil eye." Juan
Perea, of San Mateo, New Mexico, would fly with his chums to meetings in
the mountains in the shape of a fire-ball. During these sallies he left
his own eyes at home and wore those of some brute animal. It was because
his dog ate his eyes when he had carelessly put them on a table that he
had always afterward to wear those of a cat. Within the present century
an old woman who lived in a hut on the Palisades of the Hudson was held
to be responsible for local storms and accidents. As late as 1889 two
Zuni Indians were hanged on the wall of an old Spanish church near their
pueblo in Arizona on a charge of having blown away the rainclouds in a
time of drouth. It was held that there was something uncanny in the event
that gave the name of Gallows Hill to an eminence near Falls Village,
Connecticut, for a strange black man was found hanging, dead, to a tree
near its top one morning.

Moll Pitcher, a successful sorcerer and fortune-teller of old Lynn, has
figured in obsolete poems, plays, and romances. She lived in a cottage at
the foot of High Rock, where she was consulted, not merely by people of
respectability, but by those who had knavish schemes to prosecute and who
wanted to learn in advance the outcome of their designs. Many a ship was
deserted at the hour of sailing because she boded evil of the voyage. She
was of medium height, big-headed, tangle-haired, long-nosed, and had a
searching black eye. The sticks that she carried were cut from a hazel
that hung athwart a brook where an unwedded mother had drowned her child.
A girl who went to her for news of her lover lost her reason when the
witch, moved by a malignant impulse, described his death in a fiercely
dramatic manner. One day the missing ship came bowling into port, and the
shock of joy that the girl experienced when the sailor clasped her in his
arms restored her erring senses. When Moll Pitcher died she was attended
by the little daughter of the woman she had so afflicted.

John, or Edward, Dimo