They Didn’t Burn Witches. They Burned Women.

My daughters and son are descendants of Ann Foster, an accused Salem witch. The line runs through my husband’s paternal grandfather, a quiet thread connecting our modern lives to one of the darkest chapters in American history.

Ann Foster was seventy-five when she was accused in 1692. A widow, frail and devout, she lived in a time when fear moved faster than reason. They said she had signed the Devil’s book and bewitched neighbors, cows, and crops. What she really did was live as a woman who no longer fit neatly inside the lines drawn for her.

At first, she denied everything. Then, after days of interrogation and likely torture, she confessed. Her daughter and granddaughter had also been accused. I imagine her in the jail’s damp dark, thinking of them, whispering the words they wanted to hear if it meant sparing the younger women from the same fate.

She died imprisoned in Salem after months in chains. The records call her a witch, but history tells another story, a mother and grandmother who faced impossible choices, a woman caught in the machinery of fear and control.

“They didn’t burn witches. They burned women.”

When I read about her, I think of how her story repeats itself, century after century, each time a woman’s strength or defiance is seen as a threat.

It is October now, the month when ghosts return to our imaginations. Children choose costumes, porch lights glow, and we tell stories of witches and spirits. But for me, this season carries a quieter reckoning. I think about Ann Foster, and about the women who came after her, who survived and bore children until, generations later, their bloodline reached my husband and our children.

Their eyes hold the same spark of intelligence that might once have unsettled a Puritan village. There is something chilling in that recognition.

We like to believe witch trials are relics of a primitive time. Yet the same impulse that condemned women then still lives beneath the surface now. The forms have changed, but the pattern remains. Women are still punished for speaking too loudly, for aging publicly, for owning their power. The tools have shifted from fire to legislation, from accusation to subtle erasure, but the intent is familiar.

It was never about magic. It was about control.

Every era finds new ways to name its fears. The Puritans feared women who healed, questioned, or lived without a man’s permission. Today, we still police women’s autonomy and choices. We still find ways to disbelieve their pain. The witch hunts were not an anomaly. They were a symptom of something older, something that survives whenever power feels threatened.

Sometimes I picture Ann standing in her cell, the straw floor damp beneath her feet. I imagine her praying not for herself but for the next generation, for mercy that might reach beyond her own lifetime.

My children know her story. They know that strength can be mistaken for sin. They know that truth sometimes loses before it wins. When we walk through the leaves each fall, I tell them that courage is not always loud. Sometimes it is the quiet act of enduring what should never have happened and still believing that one day, someone will tell the truth.

As a mother, I feel both pride and sorrow in this lineage. Pride because my children carry the blood of a woman who loved fiercely even in captivity. Sorrow because she had to suffer for it.

Her story feels newly urgent in a time when old fears are dressed in new language. Then and now, control is disguised as morality and punishment as protection. The witch hunts were about maintaining power through fear, and that instinct has not disappeared.

Every generation inherits both the trauma and the resilience of those who came before. I want my children to inherit the resilience. I want them to understand that when a society begins to punish its truth-tellers, its healers, its mothers, it is not protecting itself. It is destroying its conscience.

When I think of Ann Foster, I no longer see her as a victim. I see her as a mirror. She reflects the danger of letting fear decide what is right and the endurance that allows truth to survive even in silence. She reminds me that women’s stories are often buried until another woman decides to speak them.

So I write this not as a ghost story but as a reclamation. My children’s ancestor was called a witch, but I call her a woman of impossible courage. Her strength lives on in every woman who refuses to be silenced, in every mother who tells her daughter the truth about what was done to women like Ann.

We live in a world that still invents new ways to accuse. The fires are metaphorical now, but they still burn. The difference is that we have voices to speak back.

To name her is to honor her. To tell her story is to bring her home.

When my children learn about Salem in school, they will recognize their ancestor’s name among the accused. I hope they feel the weight of that history, and also the power of it.

Ann Foster’s story is one of love and endurance. She confessed not because she was guilty, but because she was a mother who wanted to protect her family. That act of sacrifice carried forward through time into the lives of those who would one day thrive because of her courage.

Her name, once whispered in fear, is now spoken with gratitude. She endured what she did so others could stand in the light.

They didn’t burn witches. They burned women.

And still, her line endures.