Unraveling Rose Red: Piecing together the puzzle of history and “coincidence” in Rose Red.

The winter of 1814 was particularly harsh in Dutchtown, Tennessee. The small, young community of modest farms - at the center of which was a tiny village hub consisting of nothing more than a general store and a church - was in danger of dissolution. Starvation was a very real possibility and by late February one third of the town’s population had moved away, primarily relocating to family elsewhere or wandering further afield to seek a new, more forgiving life.

Normally the people of Dutchtown would survive a winter with their stores filled with grains and other staples. Most farm owners had at least one cow and several chickens. The majority also owned pigs for pork. But a terrible harvest in the fall of 1813 left many with their pantries bare of all but what goods they’d preserved in jars, and smoked meats. Any oats and wheat they did have they sacrificed to their animals. It was often in vain; more livestock perished that winter than any other, frequently due to slaughter for food, even if they weren’t fattened. Elsewhere in Tennessee a drinking song containing the lyric “Lock your barns boys, gather round / no horse is safe near wee Dutchtown”* (referencing the fact that the most desperate people in Dutchtown killed and ate their horses) became cruelly popular.

The devastating winter of 1814 set into motion two extremely important events in the history of Dutchtown, events that would make it legendary, and eventually lead to its demise.

With the abandonment of several farms in the Dutchtown area, property was available cheaply. Few dared to relocate to a town that was in such hard times, but two women did. They were a strange old woman whose name was Martha Williamson and her middle-aged daughter Anne Williamson.

Anne was by all accounts mentally challenged, though no one is sure precisely what her diagnosis would be in today’s terms. Martha was a shrew who protected Anne fiercely. Anne, on the other hand, was friendly and seemed to yearn for freedom – the kind of basic freedom we all take for granted. Rarely did Martha let Anne travel anywhere beyond her sight, which meant Anne spent much of her time indoors. The Williamson property was surrounded on all sides by rye fields, and while even at their most robust the crop wasn’t so high that Martha could lose sight of Anne, extreme arthritis in Martha’s knees meant she couldn’t follow Anne into the thick of the rye.

The relocation of Martha and Anne to Dutchtown was the first event that shaped the town’s fate.

The second event was set in motion in spring, 1814, though its effects were not felt for months. When the winter thaw finally occurred, late and messily, Dutchtown’s farmers scrambled to sow crops – primarily wheat, corn, and cotton. They were well aware the harvest might be bust. The ground was very wet and cold, and ill-prepared due to the length of that winter’s severe weather. Come fall 1814 their worst fears were mostly realized. The harvest was not as bad as that of 1813, but it wasn’t enough to replenish what had been lost during 1814’s brutal winter.

And yet one farm had managed to do well over the summer of 1814. The Williamson farm grew solely rye, and rye is somewhat forgiving of cold and moisture. But two factors Martha Williamson could not have known or predicted came into play. First, the land had been used exclusively for rye for many years, making it more susceptible to ergot infestation. Second, that ergot took hold of her 1814 rye crop and spread like wildfire through her fields, thriving in the particular chill and dampness the earth provided it.

Martha Williamson couldn’t tend the fields herself, and neither could Anne. So she enlisted the help of the Briars, her nearest neighbors, who lived a couple miles away. The Briar family was large. John and Mary Briar had ten children. Three died before the age of four, but of the survivors, five were boys. John Jr. (18), Joshua (16), Jonas (12), Jackson (10), and Jesse (9) all worked part time on the Williamson farm, bringing the family some much-needed income. They had been hit hard by the loss of their 1813 crops, since their 1812 harvest was also stunted by a blight. John Sr., Mary, and their two girls Mary Jr. (17) and Sarah (11) tended to their unsuccessful wheat crop with the help of paid farm hands.

Anne seemed to relish the presence of the Briar boys. Company other than her mother was clearly something the woman had been long missing. Joshua Briar would later tell tales of how Anne Williamson sat on the porch of her mother’s farm house and wept bitterly at the end of the day when the Briar boys left. And she didn’t even have much contact with them; they were busy in the fields, but simply watching them and exchanging the occasional pleasantry seemed to make Anne incredibly happy.

In her diary Mary Sr. described Anne as:

“[...] a plain woman, perhaps a year or two my junior but sadly afflicted with a poor mind. She is strong of build and looks of healthy stock, at least in body. It is my opinion she would have made a highly suitable wife if her mind was able. She has long blond hair, often unruly, reaching down to her trim waist. Her blue eyes appear jolly, though Joshua informs me she weeps with distressing frequency. Overall, she is not a woman men would burn to know, but had Providence granted her a better mind, she would have struck someone’s fancy in her early years.”

(It is believed that by the phrase “not a woman men would burn to know”, Mary is referring boldly to the “Biblical” know, i.e. physical intimacy. It’s a brazen thing for a woman of the time to write, but Mary had a reputation for saying whatever she wanted whenever she wanted.)

Over the summer of 1814 Anne did indeed strike someone’s fancy. Precisely whom is not something even the most learned Dutchtown experts know. There are many theories, from John Jr. or Joshua Briar (which would have been a shockingly inappropriate age difference – the custom of men with much younger women was more acceptable than women with much younger men) to the town’s pastor. General consensus, however, is that it is unlikely her “lover” was either of the teenage Briar sons. Whoever he was, and however he managed to pry her from her mother’s watchful gaze, Anne’s suitor left her – through courtship or force – pregnant.

When the diagnosis of pregnancy was made by the local doctor in early autumn, 1814 Martha seethed with anger, but could not afford to vent her ire on the oldest Briar boys, either of whom she suspected to be the father. They were busy harvesting her rye, which had made it through the summer seemingly in good condition. But neither the Briar children nor the Williamsons had grown rye before. They did not notice the affliction that was about to spread with terrifying fury through Dutchtown. And in those days, days before a great infusion of science in farming and days before necessary advances in medicine, even experienced rye farmers may have missed the signs of impending tragedy.

Martha Williamson found herself with two pressing issues to juggle. First, the pregnancy of her mentally challenged daughter, which weighed heavily on her. The prospect of caring for a baby at her age (she was 69 at the time, Anne was 38) was daunting, yet she knew her daughter couldn’t care for the child on her own. She was also determined to find the perpetrator and bring him to justice for what she considered a gross violation of her daughter’s person.

But the second issue was her harvest. With the rest of Dutchtown disappointed by their paltry crops and frightened of facing another fast-approaching winter without sustenance, Martha was approached by townspeople to sell or barter her rye. With her rye they would have bread and could store the flour for the winter months. Martha certainly didn’t distribute her crops out of any kindness or concern for the people of Dutchtown. She kept some for herself, and sold the rest at a handsome profit, sometimes taking the last pennies neighboring families had to their names, and bartering for their livestock. All told she ended up with a dozen pigs to fatten for meat in addition to the monetary income from her 1814 harvest.

By late November 1814 Anne was showing. Martha kept her locked in their house, completely cut off from society. It was no secret that Anne was pregnant. But the worry and shame was more than Martha could handle; having Anne exposed to anyone who happened to wander by their farm was beyond her limits. However, Martha would not have to worry for her daughter and unborn grandchild for long. On November 28th, Anne miscarried. The resulting bleeding was virtually unstoppable. Martha and Anne were alone on the farm. The old woman had no choice but to leave Anne in the house, clamber with her painful knees onto their horse, and ride to the Briars’ home for help. Mary Briar Sr. had been through labor ten times before; Martha hoped to appeal to Mary Sr.’s charity and beg help to save her daughter’s life. Sadly, by the time Martha and Mary Sr. returned to the Williamson farm, Anne was dead. She had managed to crawl from the house, down the porch steps, and across the drive to the nearby field, where she died laying amongst the refuse from the rye harvest. Mary Sr. would later write of the horror of the scene, as Anne left a thick trail of blood behind her on every part of ground she covered.

Wild with grief, Martha Williamson initially raged. She pulled out clumps of her own hair, fell to the ground and rolled around on the soil beside her daughter. She cursed God with the coarsest of language. She could not be consoled. When John Sr. and John Jr. arrived a few hours later to check on the situation, they found Martha clutching Anne in the field, and Mary Sr. bundled in blankets on the porch watching them, impotent to pry Anne from Martha’s grasp. Father and son together managed to extricate the corpse and escort Martha into the house, John Jr. carrying Anne close behind. Martha entered an almost catatonic state, while Mary Sr. took upon herself the task of cleaning the house and washing and laying out Anne’s body, her miscarried child swathed in a burial sheath beside her.

Out of respect for the woman whose rye would see them through the winter – despite the fact that she charged them heavily for the crop – Dutchtown residents trickled by the Williamson farm to pay their respects. Martha responded to no one, but Mary Briar Sr. and her daughter Mary Jr. received the guests. The following day the Briar men dug a grave near an old willow tree on the edge of the Williamson property and buried Anne there. Her mother, still unresponsive, wouldn’t budge from her chair within the house. She never saw her daughter buried.

 

Merrily the townspeople ground the Williamson rye into flour and packed it for winter storage. All were encouraged that the winter of 1815 would be a peaceful one. In their own way, they blessed Martha Williamson’s arrival. She was something of a savior.

But that initial impression began to wear off as 1814 waned and 1815 arrived. The first symptoms of ergot poisoning began to arise, as ergot-tainted bread was consumed in households across Dutchtown.

Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye and thrives in cold and damp. Ergotism, the result of consuming ergot, is much like the effect of the drug LSD. In fact, ergot and LSD are related. Ergotism is marked by a number of horrific symptoms including: hallucinations and delusions, uncontrollable fevers, seizures and convulsions, unconsciousness, dry gangrene and loss of limbs due to constricted circulation, searing pain in extremities, nausea, and intense uterine cramping. Ergot is difficult to detect in ground rye, since ground ergot would only appear as dark flecks in the flour. Had the townspeople known what to look for, they would have been able to identify the ergot fungus on the heads of rye.

Ergot is a likely explanation for the hysteria during the Salem Witch Trials. Many of the behaviors that manifested in the so-called witchcraft “victims” could be easily explained by ergotism. There are also theories that the vanished colony of Roanoke Island suffered mass ergotism. There have also been claims, frequently disputed, that the doomed village of Dudleytown in Connecticut was at least in small part affected by ergotism.

Ironically, a medicine derived from ergot, Methergine, was eventually developed to stop postnatal bleeding. The very curse on Martha Williamson’s harvest would one day become a likely cure for Anne’s condition, something that could have prevented her death.

But the people of Dutchtown would experience no positive effects from Martha Williamson’s rye. Initially, as people ate contaminated bread, they complained of mild symptoms similar to what we’d call the “flu” - muscle pains, headaches, and fever. Of course, the effects of ergotism vary from person to person, so no two cases were precisely alike. Also due to the disparate locations of the Dutchtown farms, people didn’t congregate in any one place to complain about their symptoms. They saw each other in groups only at church, where minimal word spread. The only person aware of the trend was the doctor, who’d been called to three farms with people complaining of similar, but not identical symptoms.

With luck, the first time one consumes ergot the symptoms are not very strong. The second time, however, brings more severe symptoms. With continued consumption the symptoms grow exponentially, and may lead to death. Martha’s rye was the only source of flour many of the Dutchtown residents had during the winter of 1815. They had no choice but to unintentionally poison themselves time and again.

Of all the households hit with ergotism, the two that suffered the most were the Bleekers (the founding members of the town; Dutch immigrants who carved their corner of the New World in the wilds of Tennessee in the early 1800s, soon to be followed by a small community that would become Dutchtown) and the Briars.

Little is known about the arrival of the Bleekers in America. Although it’s evident they came from Holland, the precise date and method of their emigration is not clear. What is clear from the few existing letters of Tappe Bleeker’s, the family patriarch, they desired the challenge of starting fresh in the bounty of America’s natural resources. What they were escaping in Holland is unclear, but tales of dubious activities like murder and highway robbery abound – unsupported by facts.

Tennessee was a newly-ratified state, having become part of the United States in 1796. The attention this drew to Tennessee made it a target for Tappe Bleeker’s ambitions, and he settled what would soon become Dutchtown in 1804. He was 38 and his wife, Natalie, was 40.

They had no children, but in 1812 following a disastrous earthquake in northwestern Tennessee they took in a young artist who, having no family and his home destroyed by the natural disaster, came south in search of a new life. The artist, Jeremiah Taylor, was 23. He became something of a son to the Bleekers, and in 1812 to show his immediate gratitude for their charity, he painted the miniature portraits of Natalie and Tappe seen below.

The Bleekers made a stable living growing cotton. But the harsh weather in 1814 wreaked havoc with their livelihood. They too availed themselves of Martha Williamson’s rye, paying her handsomely for it.

In late December, 1814 Tappe made an arduous journey north to meet with a fellow cotton farmer who was experimenting with a hardier strain of cotton plant. While he was away, in mid-January, 1815 the Bleekers’ beloved “adopted son” Jeremiah was struck with a sudden and violent illness. He convulsed and vomited for days, a far worse reaction than any of the other townspeople had experienced from their first taste of the tainted rye. His fever ran so high Natalie Bleeker spent day and night, forgoing sleep herself for 3 full days, trying to cool him with wet cloths that had been chilled in the winter air. Commenting somewhat flippantly on the situation, author Douglass Varga wrote in his book Dutchtown’s Demise, “If we take as truth the detailed account of extreme heat wafting from Jeremiah’s diseased body, details given by Natalie’s house slave Phoebe, Jeremiah’s brains would have rapidly boiled beyond repair.” Jeremiah Taylor died on January 23rd, one month shy of his 26th birthday. Then-51 year old Natalie was overwrought. Tappe returned at the end of January to find Jeremiah gone and Natalie in a state of profound grief.

But Natalie was not the only mother in grief. On her farm, Martha Williamson grieved the death of her daughter Anne without a single moment’s relief from the intensity of her emotions. What’s more, in the winter weather she could not walk the distance to the edge of her property where Anne and her ill-fated child were buried. She became a total recluse, not once receiving Mary Briar Sr. who on two occasions made the journey to Martha’s farm to see how the woman was coping. Mary Sr. abandoned the idea of tending to Martha and turned instead to tending her own household, where strange things were beginning to happen.

Here is where reality collides with urban legend, and because Martha Williamson was completely concealed in her house and kept no diary, we can’t say for certain what her life was really like. But according to legend, she began to place curses on the Briar family – whom she blamed not only for Anne’s pregnancy but for burying her too far for Martha to reach.

In reality, the Briar family was consuming ergot-tainted rye. It’s likely Martha was too, since she kept some of her crop for herself. But with the symptoms of the ergotism it’s easy to see how the scary story of the Briar Witch was born. Add to the ergotism some coincidental natural occurrences and some difficult-to-dismiss genuinely supernatural elements, and a full-blown American legend took hold.

The first signs of Martha’s “curse” in the Briar household began in mid-winter, 1815 after Mary Sr., having heard Martha chanting unintelligibly through the door on her second and final visit, returned home to find her youngest son Jesse in the throes of an enormous tantrum. Jesse, then 10, was flat on his back, pointing at the ceiling and shrieking in terror. He writhed and screamed, and only after hours of holding him still and stiff as a board could Mary Sr. calm him. She put Jesse to bed, where he stayed for two full days, too weak to lift his head to receive the broth and milk Mary Jr. routinely fed him. No one knew what frightened him into such a state. Now we’d suggest it was an episode brought on by ergotism. But then it was something beyond any normal explanation. It was, to the Briars, truly unnatural.

They did not call the doctor because his visits cost money, and even with the income from tending the Williamson farm, the Briar family had to be frugal. In reality he would not have been able to do anything for the boy anyway. After two days rest Jesse began to recover his strength. Things were far from improving in the Briar house, however.

The day after Jesse’s episode the youngest girl, Sarah, began to complain of seeing intimidating shadows in the corners and doorways, even in broad daylight. She woke the family with an ear-piercing scream in the middle of the night, claiming one of the shadows had took hold of her in her bed, and pressed itself so tightly to her chest that she could not breathe. Ultimately it was Sarah who would suffer the worst of the Briar Witch curse, but her episodes came in fits and starts. Within a week of the beginning of the shadowy apparitions, Sarah stopped seeing them.

Mary Jr. took ill two weeks later. It was her illness that first prompted Mary Sr. to write in her diary of a sinister curse that she felt was emanating from the Williamson property. As it was, Mary Sr. was deeply affected by the sight of Anne Williamson lying dead and bloodied in the field, and often wrote how the image would not leave her mind. It wasn’t such a leap from that to what her daughter Mary Jr. began to experience. Being 17, Mary Jr. was already menstruating. It so happened that her monthly menstruation coincided with what experts believe was an attack of ergotism, causing extreme uterine cramps in addition to the bleeding. Mary Sr. described what she beheld as looking like nothing short of childbirth, yet Mary Jr. was not with child. She bled unusually heavily and was nearly paralyzed by the pain for five days, until her menstruation ended. The attack seemed to drain the life from Mary Jr., who convalesced in bed for months while the rest of her family disintegrated around her.

Jesse’s tantrum returned with violent force on March 9th, 1815. Unfortunately for poor John Sr. and Mary Sr., already at their wits’ end with the whole situation, Sarah’s visions began again at precisely the same time. Jesse could not be calmed, and the convulsions were far worse than they had been the first time. To complicate matters further, he began to run a fever. The Briars had experienced enough; they sent for the doctor, who was shocked by the ferociousness of the little boy’s unchecked temperature. He ordered the child be taken outside immediately, where he was doused repeatedly with frigid water from a nearby stream, which had only just thawed from winter’s freeze.

While outside her parents, the doctor, and John Jr. tended to Jesse, inside Sarah confided in Mary Jr. that the shadows she was seeing were taking solid form. And the form they took was undeniably that of an old woman, hobbling as if she could hardly walk, exactly the way Martha Williamson walked. She said she saw the figure shuffling towards her bed at night, and everywhere she turned the shadowy woman waited for her in corners and dark spaces. Sarah, who’d live to tell the tale, later revealed that Mary Jr. said weakly “I am possessed with Anne, I feel it; I feel as one who already lies in her grave.” It was one of the last things Mary Jr. ever said; less than a day later she slipped into a state of deep unconsciousness, which we now know to be a coma.

Jesse’s fever, much like Jeremiah Taylor’s, could not be controlled. The doctor had run out of options. He told John Sr. and Mary Sr. to bring the boy indoors and make him comfortable. By that point Jesse had at least stopped screaming. In the middle of the night, not long before Mary Jr. entered her coma, Jesse suddenly began to choke, then seize, then finally die – all in one horrific span of a few minutes.

When Mary Jr. wouldn’t wake up the following morning, Sarah frantically told her parents that she was seeing the spirit of Martha Williamson everywhere, staring at her as if willing some harm to come to her. What’s more, she told her parents that Mary Jr. said she felt the spirit of Anne. With one child dead, another child unconscious, and a third child seeing terrible visions of a vindictive old crone, the Briars began to believe, and believe firmly, that they had been cursed.

Jesse was buried in the graveyard beside Dutchtown’s church. Appropriately, his plot abutted that of Jeremiah Taylor’s. March wore on, Mary Jr. still unresponsive but alive and wasting away, and Sarah still plagued with visions of Martha Williamson. Mary Sr. wrote in her diary that her only consolation was that none of her other children or her husband were affected, but that consolation wouldn’t last long.

In late March while exploring the edge of their eastern field, which gave way to lightly forested land, John Sr. heard a growl from somewhere amongst the trees that set the hairs on the back his neck bristling. He said it sounded like a dog, but not a dog he wished to encounter. After hurrying back home he told his wife what he’d heard. Sarah, overhearing the conversation, calmly informed her parents it was “the hound of hell”. Mary Sr. wrote in her diary that night:

“Sarah informed us with no emotion nor expression but an eerie calm upon her face that what John encountered in our easterly field was the hound of hell. She said she had seen the beast before, prowling the property in the depth of night, its eyes glowing like fire. When we tried to furnish her a rational explanation, Sarah shook her head and repeated it was the hound of hell, and it obeyed only one master: Martha Williamson, who fed it the body of Anne’s infant in payment for harassing our family. John and I felt a horrible shock at such morbid imaginings emanating from our sweet daughter’s lips.”

The next morning John Sr. woke to find four of the five piglets his best sow had given birth to weeks before were mutilated, their bodies mostly consumed, and what wasn’t consumed was strewn about their yard. They had been carefully locked in the barn, but the barn door was open. By some miracle the rest of the animals had not wandered off, nor been harmed by whatever caused such a terrible scene.

Gray wolves were not uncommon in Tennessee, and they are the most likely explanation for what happened with the livestock on the Briar property. The piglets were not the only victims. On three more occasions the Briars found remains of their pigs on the property, and the barn door ajar. The only mystery is how the barn door came unlocked, but rationalists explain that with enough nudging and teamwork, a pack of wolves could easily unlatch a barn door if the latch was unsecured or damaged. However, the amount of livestock killed doesn’t suggest a pack of wolves was to blame, but rather a single wolf. A lone wolf broken from its pack and either unable or unwilling to find prey in the wild. It’s possible the wolf was injured, and therefore unusually aggressive and taken to killing easy prey. John Sr. would have one more experience with the “hound of hell”, another growl – this time in the dark of night, coming from behind his barn.

April came, and with it came a sharp decline in Mary Jr.’s health. She had languished for longer than most can endure prolonged starvation and dehydration. Her breathing became labored and irregular. For two days she was in respiratory distress, but not awake to express it. On the afternoon of April 4th, 1815, Mary Jr. died. She was buried beside her brother Jesse in the family plot (which also contained the three other children the Briars had lost, prior to any notion of a curse or the tainted rye).

While the rest of the Briar family and several townspeople mourned at the graveside ceremony, Sarah slipped away. Unseen on the other side of the church, she found a sharp point of slate and dug it into her fingers time and again, until they bled. Then, in her own blood, she wrote the words “there will be stones” on the side of the church. Her family and the pastor discovered her there, standing next to her handiwork, gazing transfixed as if it was a work of tremendous art. At some point she had wet herself, and when they got her home, she began to convulse and swear in foul language as if possessed.

As stated before, Mary Sr. was not above using coarse language herself. So it’s likely that young Sarah had picked up the words she spoke from her mother’s private conversations, or from reading her diary. But it was a fright for the Briar family to hear an otherwise innocent 12 year old girl screaming filth as she writhed. It was not long before her cussing gave way to cries of pain, and Mary Sr. quoted Sarah as complaining her hands and feet were burning, “My hands, my feet, they’re on fire! The old woman has put the fires of hell inside me.” Searing sensations in the extremities is a symptom of ergotism, and it is nothing short of amazing that Sarah was still alive after such a long period of episodes.

Paranormal enthusiasts who understand the ergotism theory append a supernatural concept of their own. They believe Sarah survived attack after attack because she was a harbinger, the bearer of news that a curse truly had been placed on Dutchtown. For Sarah’s warning “there will be stones” came true, and the case still puzzles experts and scientists to this day.

In mid-April, 1815, while Dutchtown was busy working its fields, a curious thing began to happen in the middle of the town. The owner of the general store reported a rain of pebbles fell upon his establishment. It sounded like heavy rain, but when he investigated, he found no water. It was a clear sunny day and all around were strewn pebbles of all shapes and colors.

The situation escalated from there. In the middle of the night on April 20th, Sarah Briar again woke screaming. She screamed that the spirit of Martha Williamson was going to kill the Bleeker family. She said that Jeremiah Taylor’s grave had already been smashed to pieces. In the morning, John Jr. and Joshua rode to town and found that a large rock had indeed fallen on Jeremiah’s grave, splitting the headstone in several places.

John Sr. went immediately to the Bleeker house to give them the news. He was reluctant to share with them Sarah’s prediction, but they already knew too well something terribly dangerous was happening on their property. One of their two barns had been hit by falling rocks. Neither of the Bleekers witnessed it, but found stones ranging from the size of potatoes to the size of large pumpkins had smashed through the barn’s roof and also lay around the structure. John Sr. confessed to Sarah’s prediction, and having had his fill of tragedy in the town he helped to found, 49 year old Tappe Bleeker decided to form a party to pay Martha Williamson a visit. After all, since the woman’s arrival, nothing but misery had come to Dutchtown.

Tappe Bleeker and John Briar Sr. amassed a group of eighteen men by nightfall. Tappe, John Sr., John Jr., and Joshua all took part. What they didn’t know is while they were in the process of assembling their posse – including the town pastor – the worst of the stones fell on the town’s church. Large rocks smashed through the roof and windows, and damaged the graveyard extensively. Inside the church, pews were wrecked, and the simple crucifix knocked to the ground.

While the men marched on Martha’s house, in the Briar home Sarah placed herself in a corner and refused to budge. Her mother and brothers resorted to picking her up and placing her in a chair, but the moment she freed herself from their grasp she ran back to the corner. Facing away from them, she whispered words over and over, words that Mary Sr. couldn’t quite make out. Sarah rocked wildly from her heels to the balls of her feet and back again, over and over, while she chanted. Eventually her mother and brothers gave up trying to control her, and simply observed with fright.

Mary Sr. wrote that as the night drew on, Sarah became more agitated. The entire family knew that the men were going to raid Martha’s house at any moment. Mary Sr. observed a most curious thing; outside, a sound like gentle rain upon the roof, but in the morning they would find it wasn’t rain but sand. Sand is, after all, stone ground down to a minute size. It was as though Sarah’s prophecy came true at her own home, yet in a way that would purposefully do no harm to the house or her family.

Jonas and Jackson Briar then became ill, complaining of nausea and stomach pains. Mary Sr. put them to bed and tended to them as the night progressed. All the while she checked periodically on her strange daughter, rocking back and forth in the corner, chanting away. But Mary Sr. later wrote that she finally heard the words Sarah had been saying all that time, which had previously been inaudible to her. “Anne rots in her grave, no one will be saved,” Sarah chanted for hours. It was then, her mother remembered, Sarah said Martha Williamson appeared most often in corners. If Mary Jr. had thought herself possessed by Anne’s spirit, could it have been that Sarah was possessed by Martha?

For when the men reached Martha’s home and, finding her unwilling to open the door, broke in, they discovered her dead – long dead, by the look of it. Although no one can be sure exactly how she died, it’s likely she died from ergotism from her own rye. But the strangest thing, evidence that has made it an open and shut case of the supernatural for believers, is that her body sat in her chair surrounded by rocks of all sizes. Rocks were even in her corpse’s lap.

Martha had been dead a long time, and Sarah had been seeing her ghost and was now speaking her words. When she heard the news of Martha’s death, Mary Sr. was overcome by a profound fear that her daughter was possessed with the spirit of Martha Williamson, and that it was her daughter who unleashed the “hound of hell” upon their farm, and rained the rocks upon the community of Dutchtown.

In a small town news travels fast. The story of Martha’s death, coupled with the already-known tales of Sarah’s odd behavior and the destruction of the town church, led to many fingers pointing at the Briar house as the source of the misery. Despite the fact that the Briars had suffered more than any other family, losing two children and having to deal with a third who seemed to be going insane, the locals referred to Sarah as “The Briar Witch”, and shifted any blame from Martha Williamson to Sarah Briar. Martha Williamson was buried beside her daughter Anne beneath the willow tree, where their graves remain today.

Sarah was a pariah. Throughout the rest of the spring and early summer of 1815 she continued to have episodes and fits, and this was disconcerting to the townspeople. Several families, despite already having sown their crops, hastily packed up their worldly belongings and moved away. Farm by farm, Dutchtown was becoming a ghost town. The doctor and the pastor both moved on to other places, leaving Dutchtown devoid of religious and medical care. The town was dying, and John Sr. and Mary Sr. felt responsible.

In mid-summer, 1815 they wrote to Mary Sr.’s sister Etta, who lived on the coast in Virginia. They said that Sarah had been suffering terrible health and felt the change in climate would do her good. They purposefully left out the most unpleasant details of Sarah’s illness and the Dutchtown events, and of course Etta welcomed Sarah to her home with opened arms. John Sr. and John Jr. saw Sarah safely north, and aside from the exchange of a few letters, Sarah and the rest of the Briar family neither spoke nor saw each other again.

After moving to Virginia – and no longer eating the tainted bread – Sarah’s condition improved immensely. She never had another acute attack, although she did sometimes have terrible nightmares. Perhaps because of the constricted blood flow caused by the ergotism, she permanently lost sensation in the pinky, ring, and middle finger of her left hand. She is fortunate that she did not develop gangrene, but unfortunate in that she never felt the sensation of her husband Daniel Lee slipping her wedding ring on her finger in 1822. Sarah was 19.

Sarah spent the rest of her life in Virginia with Daniel, giving birth to a daughter named Eleanor in 1835. Like Martha Williamson, she had her child later in life – Sarah was 32 when Eleanor was born. Martha was 31 when Anne was born.

Eleanor was said to be her mother’s spitting image and strangely so, as if someone had plucked a younger Sarah from some cosmic memory and placed her in Eleanor’s form. And in the existing photos of Eleanor today one can see her mother’s enigmatic smile, almost a smirk; an expression made nearly sinister by the history of Sarah’s tormented childhood.

Sarah died in 1870, followed by Daniel in 1871. Eleanor lived until 1915 when, at the age of 80, she died on April 4th – exactly 100 years after her aunt Mary Briar Jr. died from ergotism, or the curse of The Briar Witch.

There are two interesting connections between the case of The Briar Witch and Rose Red. The first is obvious: the stones that fell on Dutchtown are not so unlike the stones that Annie rained down on the Stantons’ house and on Rose Red. The stones Annie controlled were much larger, but the concept is similar.

The second connection took more sleuthing but is, I think, a very exciting discovery.

John Briar Jr. lived in South Carolina until the age of 62. After the Briar Witch incidents, he moved and married into a wealthy family in Charleston. (It was something of a controversy at the time: that a well-to-do southern belle should fall for a penniless, mysterious farmer’s son from Tennessee, but the girl had her mind set on marrying John Jr. and eventually her parents capitulated.) He fathered six children, all girls, all of whom survived to adulthood.

One of those girls, Susanna Briar, born in 1845, married a man named Thomas Jaymes of Atlanta, Georgia and had two girls of her own. One of Susanna’s girls, born in 1878, was none other than Joyce Reardon’s great-grandmother, Mary Jaymes. Mary married Abel Reardon in 1898. The couple relocated to the northwest, where they had a son named Robert Reardon, Joyce’s grandfather, who was born in 1902. Robert Reardon married a Seattle woman named Eunice Richardson, and had a son Robert Jr. - Joyce’s father - in Seattle in 1930. Joyce was born in 1960.

I think this is an extremely compelling connection. Here we have direct lineage between Joyce Reardon and the Briar family. One of the most puzzling and frightening chapters in rural American history, that of the Briar Witch, can be connected by blood relation to the woman whose fascination with the occult was so strong that it claimed her life.

Or more accurately, claimed her life as she once knew it.

* Beyond the Briar Witch: The True History and Tragedy of Dutchtown, J. Thomas MacMillan

1 Comment »

1. [...] 11 page tome that was my research on the Briar Witch took up a fair chunk of my week, so I really didn’t have the energy or time to write a [...]

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