Supposed
witch (1605-1692?). Like many women accused during the
witch trials in
New England, Keziah Mason was an
elderly woman who lived
alone and had
eccentric habits. She had never married, refused to attend the local
church, threw rocks at children who came near her home, and had been suspected for years of setting
fires in the fields of local
farmers who displeased her.
However, unlike other accused women, Mason is considered by history to be a truly
malign person. There was strong
circumstantial evidence that she had
murdered several children who had made
pests of themselves. Two had thrown rocks through her windows and
vanished less than two weeks later. Another made up
insulting songs about her and was found stabbed to death in her bed just two nights later. A fourth drew chalk
caricatures of her on the walls of buildings near her house. He vanished before the week was over and wasn't found for over five months. He was discovered in a field outside of
Arkham, Massachusetts, that was owned by Mason. The boy had been
decapitated and
dismembered. His limbs and torso were arranged in a five-sided
pentagon, with his head in the middle.
Mason was accused of
witchcraft in the early summer of 1692. Unlike other witches, she
confessed happily and without
torture, bragging that
Satan had given her a new name,
Nahab, taken her to
evil rituals in
Boston,
France,
England,
Spain,
Africa,
China, and a country called
Leng, and helped her
defile churches,
corrupt maidens, and infect dozens of people with
consumption, or
tuberculosis. She claimed that the
Devil (whom she insisted on calling the
Black Man in the Woods) had taught her how to travel great distances by drawing certain combinations of
lines and
angles and that he had given her a special
familiar -- a
rat with a
human face, which she named
Brown Jenkin.
Mason was, obviously, convicted and
condemned to death, but she somehow managed to
escape from her cell, leaving nothing behind but a few
mysterious lines and angles drawn on the
wall of her cell. She was never re-
captured.
Sightings of Keziah Mason and Brown Jenkin persist to the present day. She has been blamed for almost a dozen deaths since the 1700s.
"The Dreams in the Witch House" by H.P. Lovecraft
Encyclopedia Cthulhiana by Daniel Harms, p. 131