A second helping from Satan: Elizabeth Knapp’s Possession

Summary

Podcast Summary: "A Second Helping from Satan: Elizabeth Knapp’s Possession"

Podcast: The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall (CBC)
Air Date: December 11, 2025
Host: Sarah Marshall
Guests: Elizabeth Seppi (Chair of English, Portland State University), Carolyn Kendrick (Guest Producer), others

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Overview

This bonus episode centers on the mysterious historical case of Elizabeth Knapp, a 16-year-old servant in 1670s Puritan Massachusetts who was believed to be “possessed by the devil.” Host Sarah Marshall, guest producer Carolyn Kendrick, and academic Elizabeth Seppi dissect Knapp’s story, examining what it reveals about power, gender, labor, and social anxieties in early America. The conversation puts the possession narrative in the context of the later Salem Witch Trials, contemporary and historical “Satanic Panics,” and the ways marginalized groups, especially young women, have come to embody communal fears.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

Introduction and Set-up

• Elizabeth Knapp’s Story: A 16-year-old servant whose strange fits and declared “possession” became a sensation in Groton, Massachusetts (1671), predating the Salem Witch trials.
• The account survives entirely through the perspective of her employer and minister, Samuel Willard, emphasizing whose stories get told and how.

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Who Was Elizabeth Knapp?

[02:48-05:54]

• Source: "Everything we know about her, we know from this narrative written by her minister, her master, Samuel Willard." – Elizabeth Seppi
• Descriptions from Willard include fits, speechlessness, animal-like behaviors (barking, crowing), and eventual claims of negotiation with the devil, including a blood covenant for powers and privilege.
• Her outbursts alternated with episodes of silence, which, as Seppi notes, "the obedient silence that would be expected of a servant becomes in her demoniac form...a sign of being potentially a Satan minion."

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Servanthood, Authority, and Domestic Anxiety

[06:19-09:54]

• Servants in early New England households were “in the house, but not of the family,” creating both physical and psychological anxiety.
• The presence of non-familial young women in homes aroused suspicions and projections of transgression—especially around sexuality and defiance.
  • “There was a discourse around the potential threat of having someone there who might, in a way, act like Satan does, you know, tempting the good child into misbehaviour.” – Elizabeth Seppi [07:12]
• Puritan societal model expected everyone to internalize hierarchical authority—servitude served as both economic reality and “lived metaphor for this relationship to God.”
  • “Everybody was meant to sort of understand that they were both God’s child and his servant.” – Elizabeth Seppi [08:54]

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The Puritans, the Devil, and Projection

[11:18-15:58]

• The Puritan worldview was rooted in the devil’s real spiritual threat; New England itself was a battleground for souls.
  • “New England...is the place that used to be the devil’s territories and people of God have settled on it. And so he’s particularly looking to get it back.” – Elizabeth Seppi [11:50]
• Sarah asks whether belief in the devil was a projection of unacknowledged colonial guilt over displacing native peoples. Seppi references Hawthorne and the way metaphysical evil stands in for collective shame. [12:09-12:24]
• Witchcraft accusations pre-Salem were rare; Salem itself was a “perfect storm”—social conflict, gender tension, and crises of authority.
  • “The one through line has to be the sort of crisis of authority...you can’t dismiss the gender argument, which is, you know, in the history of witchcraft, people think witches were burned at Salem because they were burned for thousands of years...women have been burned as witches.” – Elizabeth Seppi [13:12-14:57]

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Gender, Power, and Ecstasy

[15:58-22:17]

• Most Salem accusers were adolescent girls—modern media tends to age them up or sexualize them for dramatic effect.
  • “The media we have about them ages them up and ages the accused down so we can have as many hot women as possible.” – Sarah Marshall [16:17]
• Puritan and Medieval notions of female embodiment: women as inherently defective, more sinful yet also potentially more pious.
  • “Women are viewed as kind of more sinful, but also more pious.” – Elizabeth Seppi [18:26]
• Knapp’s possession is considered alongside sainthood: being a passive “vessel” for God or Satan as two sides of the coin of female experience in a patriarchal society.
  • “What’s the difference between demonic possession and being ravished by Christ? The idea of a kind of ecstatic, religious experience still does rely on this notion of being a vessel of some higher power’s will.” – Elizabeth Seppi [20:08]

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The Possession as Protest and Public Service

[20:49-23:09]

• Knapp uses her possessed status to “take the stage”—not simply to get attention but to command authority otherwise denied to her as a servant girl.
  • “She just refuses to play the role of the penitent; she says, like, it’s too late for me...and that’s just like a really...form of public service.” – Elizabeth Seppi [21:20]
• Knapp, while possessed, is excused from labor and given a voice—her experience contrasts with the hard, silent work of ordinary servanthood.

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The Devil, Labor, and the Faustian Bargain

[23:39-34:47]

• The devil in Knapp’s tale offers what Puritan society does not: negotiation, leisure, material comforts, and personal agency—however illusory or “dangerous.”
  • “It feels like part of what’s being revealed here is that Satan...it’s a better deal to go with Satan than to be in the roles that society has given you.” – Sarah Marshall [22:38]
• Signing with the devil is also a fantasy of literacy and self-ownership; for an illiterate or powerless servant, this is radical.
• Willard’s authority is boosted by Knapp’s story; after “curing” her, he receives a substantial salary increase from the town, showing how such moral panics can personally benefit patriarchal authorities. [25:41-26:20]
• Discussion of the “Faustian bargain”—the idea that desire for ease or pleasure is pathologized as satanic in Puritan thought, forming the root of American attitudes toward labor and class.
  • “That is to my mind, a kind of secularization of Puritan exceptionalism, of American exceptionalism.” – Elizabeth Seppi [33:07]

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Agency, Inscrutability, and the Legacy of the Case

[35:05-37:16]

• The real Elizabeth Knapp remains unknowable beneath layers of imposed narrative, projection, and historical distance.
  • “You know that there’s a real girl…underneath or hidden behind this writing, and you’re drawn to it because you want to know about her. But then by definition, you’ll never know.” – Sarah Marshall [35:05]
• Knapp’s case offers one of the only glimpses into the lived experience of ordinary servant girls—ironically, through the extraordinary lens of “demonic” behavior.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Projection and Puritan Guilt:
  “That when you have this kind of intense introspection and you believe that you yourself are incapable of doing anything good without...the Holy Spirit working in you, then the default is pride, giving yourself a little bit of credit for being good. Or they were supposed to be suspicious of feeling too assured. That might be the devil whispering in your ear…”
  — Elizabeth Seppi [30:53]

• On Agency and Possession:
  “Elizabeth Knapp kind of makes the most of that opportunity...again, I don’t mean to instrumentalize her or suggest a kind of conscious manipulation...I just think it’s much more complicated, this question of, like, do I think she was faking? Like, I don’t. I think that’s too simplistic...”
  — Elizabeth Seppi [20:49]

• On Labor and Social Hierarchy:
  “The idea that the fruits of our labor properly belongs to somebody else is...one way of kind of acclimating people to wage labor.”
  — Carolyn Kendrick [32:02]

• On Historical Unknowability:
  “You know that there’s a real girl, like, underneath or hidden behind this writing, and you’re drawn to it because you want to know about her. But then by definition, you’ll never know.”
  — Sarah Marshall [35:05]

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Key Timestamps

• 02:48: Introduction to Elizabeth Knapp’s story by Elizabeth Seppi
• 05:54-09:54: Servanthood, household authority, and Puritan hierarchy
• 11:50: Puritan religious worldview: New England as “the devil’s territories”
• 13:12-14:57: The gendered structure and social function of the Salem Witch Trials
• 20:08: Possession versus sainthood: the vessel metaphor for women
• 21:20: Knapp’s subversive agency as a “possessed” girl
• 25:41: Willard’s personal benefit following his “role” in Knapp’s possession
• 32:02-33:14: Puritan labor values’ impact on American capitalism
• 34:06-34:47: The Faustian bargain and desire for pleasure—Satan as societal scapegoat
• 35:05: Limits of historical knowledge: Elizabeth Knapp’s unknowability

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Episode Tone & Style

• Thoughtful, analytic, layered with wry humor and empathy for historical subjects.
• Language oscillates between scholarly depth and approachable, conversational reflections, with frequent allusions to pop culture and personal experience to frame historical material.
• The tone is self-aware about the limitations of historical evidence and critical about the patriarchal structures at play, both past and present.

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Final Thoughts

This episode uses Elizabeth Knapp’s enigmatic case as a lens to explore the anxieties of gender, authority, and labor in early America. The hosts and guests emphasize the enduring power of “Satanic” narratives to both empower and endanger marginalized people, and the difficulty—and necessity—of reading between patriarchal lines for the suppressed voices of history. Ultimately, Knapp’s possession is neither entirely explainable nor dismissible; her story still “haunts” the American imagination, revealing as much about ourselves as it does about her.

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Transcript

[Podcast Narrator]

A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot tv. In the city of Mals in Belgium, women began to go missing. It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them. The murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. Le Monstre Season 2 is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast.

[Sarah Marshall]

Welcome to your bonus episode. This is the devil you know and I'm Sarah Marshall. Today our guest is Elizabeth Seppi, Chair of the Department of English at Portland State University. And my former professor, Elizabeth Seppe is the author of Invisible Gender, Race and the Economy of Service in Early New England, a book about the Puritan power dynamics that shaped American culture all the way back to the beginning. In this episode, which was co conducted by our guest producer Carolyn Kendrick, we talked to Elizabeth Seppe about the strange case of Elizabeth Knapp, a 16 year old servant girl who seemed to have become possessed by the devil. 20 years before the Salem witch trials. The possession of Elizabeth Knapp became one of the hottest news stories in western Massachusetts. And the question of what was afflicting her and what this affliction represented, if not demonic possession itself, has remained unanswered.

[Host/Interviewer]

All we're able to do is speculate.

[Sarah Marshall]

About what happened, why it happened, and ultimately about the human life that got buried beneath this story.

[Host/Interviewer]

We also talk about how the devil.

[Sarah Marshall]

Is always around to answer uncomfortable questions about what life is like for women in a male dominated society. This may seem like a story about.

[Host/Interviewer]

The devil, but at heart, it's a.

[Sarah Marshall]

Story about a 16 year old girl.

[Host/Interviewer]

And in the end, I don't think.

[Sarah Marshall]

Anything could be more interesting.

[Host/Interviewer]

We're rolling. We're rolling on a river. This is so exciting. Liz, you are the first human being to come to my office in a professional capacity, aside from me bringing people up to say, look, I have an office. Isn't that amusing?

[Elizabeth Seppi]

What an honor. I'm happy to inaugurate it.

[Host/Interviewer]

And we're surrounded by wool and the.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Smell of wool, which seems like its own separate entity from the wool just to get us in the 1671 spirit.

[Host/Interviewer]

And I mean getting into the Elizabeth Knapp story. I mean, I wonder who is Elizabeth Knapp and what do we know about her?

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Well, the first thing I want to say is that everything we know about her, we know from this narrative written by her minister, her master, Samuel Willard. But the story he Tells. And so at a certain point sometime, and it seems like some summer or spring 1671, she is sent from her family to live with him as a servant in his home. So at the end of October, he notices that she sort of started acting.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

A little bit strangely, you know, that she.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

She kind of responds strangely when he talks to her. And.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

And then he says a couple of.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Weeks after that, the tragedy begins. He's not there, but he recounts people who observed her sitting by the fire and sort of weirdly saying, like, I am strangled and putting her hands around her neck. And. And so for the next like six weeks, she has these strange fits where she's crowing and barking and bleeding like a calf. Verbal and. And corporeal strangeness, you know, like acting kind of out of bounds. And then she also has these intermissions from those fits where she speaks and she sort of confesses the devil has been tempting her as she's been having these conversations with him, that he. He's been trying to recruit her soul to his cause. And she sort of goes back and forth between saying, like, yes, I did sign this covenant within my blood, you know, agreeing to sort of. She says the devil offers her to make her to enter into a seven year contract with her where for one year she would serve and then for six years he would serve her and make her a witch. During this whole period, Willard still kind of retains this somewhat skeptical. But then at a certain point he says something made. Made him know for sure that this was. The devil actually was inside her. And that is when she starts speaking in the devil's voice. Willard writes these scenes of this, this kind of dialogue where the devil in Elizabeth KN Calling him a rogue and you know, saying like, telling the townspeople, don't listen to him. He tells a parcel of lies and he's this black coated rogue. And Willard writes himself these little speeches where he's like, be gone, you. You know, in the end he, he says she, she ends up being restored to the point where her bodily fits kind of cease the fits and the, the kind of immoderate verbal outbursts are, are alternate with these periods of speechlessness where she's. She's not just silent, she's performing her inability to speak kind of with making these gestures that make it clear that.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

She'S sort of trying to speak and.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Is being prevented from doing that. And so what would be expected that this sort of silence, this obedient silence that would be expected of a servant becomes in her demoniac form becomes speechlessness, which is A sign. Not a spiritually obedient sign, but a sign of being potentially a Satan minion.

[Host/Interviewer]

And speaking of Elizabeth Knapp, this is a servant story, and maybe we can start with servants.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Basically, I think servants are anxious figures in part because, you know, they're in.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

The house, but they're not of the family.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

And we are talking about an early.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Modern family where it's not like the nuclear family.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

This is a kind of time before.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

That where families regularly included people who weren't kin. The family was also like an economic unit and where people could have, like.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Someone ruling over them to kind of train them for being ruled over in the church or being ruled over in the state. And so you did often see whether.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Or not servants actually transgressed the law. There was a discourse around the potential threat of having sex. Someone there who might, in a way.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Act like Satan does, you know, tempting the good child into some kind of misbehavior or, you know, telling them they.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Could talk back to their parents or.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Be saucy or not obey a command or, you know, something like that.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

So it was sort of tricky.

[Host/Interviewer]

Reminds me of my favorite domestic thriller, the Hand that Rocks the Cradle, which was like a rare, like, 90s thriller written by a woman and that understands that, like, the scariest thing that someone can do to you, if they're. They're in your house, they're taking care of your kids, they're ruining your life bit by bit. And that the topper for everything is breastfeeding your baby without your knowledge and getting them to get used to breastfeeding with them. And then you, as the mother, don't understand why your child doesn't want to nurse with you anymore.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Yeah, Breaking that quote, the natural bond, right?

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. And this idea that someone who, within your household, according to this hierarchy, has no power, actually has the potential for, as we can see in these fears, to undermine your most intimate relationships.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

So just to be clear, in Puritan America, there wasn't like a labor exigency. You could think about it this way. Like, at a certain point, we all do have to learn to internalize authority of people who aren't our parents. And so that's kind of how I think about it there. There was an educational component to it.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

As well, at least in its form as domestic service. It wasn't like onerous labor. Everyone worked. You know, it wasn't like our bougie.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Idea of the servant, where the servant is doing work so the people and who employ them don't have to do it.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Also I mean, everybody was meant to sort of understand that they were both God's child and his servant, you know, and I think the. The idea of a servant as a sor. Lived metaphor for this relationship to God and the how everybody was meant to sort of submit and accept their earthly place to which God had destined them, and obey the earthly authorities who are God's emissaries, you know, with that kind of thankful obedience that's so characteristic of Puritanism.

[Host/Interviewer]

The Puritans did invent emotional labor.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

They for sure did.

[Host/Interviewer]

And I'm one.

[Guest Contributor]

What.

[Host/Interviewer]

I mean, what did. What did Puritans do for fun?

[Elizabeth Seppi]

They went to sermons all day.

[Host/Interviewer]

Did they drink? I think they did.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

I think that they believed that God provided pleasures and comforts.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

It certainly wasn't a culture in which.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Pleasure was supposed to be sought as an end in itself. I mean, you were supposed to be thankfully obedient and grateful for. For those things too. But it wasn't. It definitely wasn't without joy, their existence.

[Host/Interviewer]

Okay, so the story we're telling Takes place Dateline 1671, Groton, Massachusetts, which I remember when. So I took your class. It was called Captive Women. It was a very important class for me. And one of the people we talked about was Elizabeth Knapp. And it felt very important to start off by understanding what Groton was and what it felt like. And it's very hard to imagine basically anywhere in Massachusetts being kind of the frontier, but it seems like that's completely what it was, by the way, that we talk about that.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Yeah. So by 1672, you're talking about getting toward the third generation of Puritan settlement. So it was primarily like a farming town, is my understanding.

[Host/Interviewer]

What I wonder about is because I feel like it's hard to think from our perspectives of being alive today of how dark it would have been. I mean, I guess that when I think about monsters and historical ideas of cryptids and stuff, I think about any time I've walked through a forest and how things snag your hair and snag your clothes. And if you were to get scared, then you would very quickly encounter enough physical stuff to feel like something was grabbing you.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Especially if you believe the devil is real.

[Host/Interviewer]

Well, yeah. And let's talk about the Devil. And within this worldview where your faith is the only thing that can save you. Like, how does the Devil fit into that?

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Well, God is the sovereign. Right?

[Carolyn Kendrick]

So.

[Host/Interviewer]

But.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

But the Devil, they're. They're in like a. Locked in immortal combat, like Cotton Mather said, you know, that. That New England, you know, is the place that used to be the devil's territories and people of God have settled on it. And so he's particularly, like, looking to.

[Host/Interviewer]

Get it back, which is fascinating. Cause then, of course, we have the myth of the empty continent that was settled. And so if you're ignoring the fact that you're displacing indigenous people, do you then use the devil as a way to stand in for the repressed knowledge that you've taken something from somebody?

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Oh, I think so, for sure. I mean, that's definitely when you see Hawthorne's sort of representation of it, this sort of projected guilt that gets embodied as metaphysical evil or whatever.

[Guest Contributor]

Right.

[Host/Interviewer]

And so, yeah, so the way it works with Elizabeth Knapp, how. Because I think the modern presumption is that anyone in Puritan America, where everyone was stupid, you point at anyone and accuse them of being a witch. And then the local magistrate or whatever is like, sounds all right to me. Let's burn her. And in reality, what was. I mean, again, I think it's depressing for us to realize that our legal system is probably not better or even worse than what they had at the time.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Yeah. I mean, before Salem, only a small fraction of people were convicted of witchcraft, though. I mean, there were accusations because people thought, oh, my cow died. Yeah.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

But at Salem, everyone was convicted. And there's not like. I can't tell you exactly why.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

I think it is kind of a perfect storm of things. I think the one through line has to be the sort of crisis of authority. Like, one thing that's happening is that it's people's lived experience of larger social.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Turmoil or, you know, disruption in the social order or something like that, where.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

People are expressing their anxiety about things.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Changing or, you know, in Salem, there was a lot of contention over this.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

One minister that people talk about the.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Paris who's like the anti.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Willard, who, like, wanted it to be witchcraft. You know, one.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

They were coercing these confessions. And sometimes the convicted people as witches on the basis of what was called.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Spectral evidence, which was the. The kind of evidence of specters pinching. You know, this kind of unseen. You see the effect, but you can't see the cause.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, I know that there's someone put forth a theory. I think we talked about this in your class, that it's.

[Guest Contributor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

And that there's this fungus that's causing people to hallucinate. And I don't buy that. It seems too simple.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

It's too simple. And it's been. It's been debunked. Somehow. Yeah. They're not all tripping.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

And.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

And even if it was ergotism, I mean, it. Let's say they were.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

There was a kind of biological reason.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Why they would be prone to have this happen. Why would it all take the same form? You still have to count for the. The kind of cultural stories that are available to fit whatever. Whatever experience they're having. And then a lot of other people talk about the kind of political upheavals.

[Host/Interviewer]

The.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

The.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

There was, like, a shift in colonial governance, the relationship to England. It changed their sort of commercial relationships, and there was just all kinds of instability. So a kind of a crisis of political authority. And you can't dismiss the gender argument, which is, you know, in the history of witchcraft, like, people think witches were burned at Salem because they were burned for thousands of years. You know, women have been burned as witches. Yeah, I don't think we can. Even if there are all of these other pressures that Salem is expressing, it is important that it took this form. You know, on the one hand, it's like this. Women bearing the burden of all of the. The, you know, the need to, like, ritually purge or make society orderly again or something like that. But then also, at the same time, at Salem, another thing that was unusual was that these accusers had the power. You know, had this power to make men listen to them.

[Host/Interviewer]

And the accusers were. These were like, young adolescent girls. Right. Like tweens. Tween egg. Which is interesting, too, because I feel like the media we have about them ages them up and ages the accused down so we can have as many hot women as possible.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

This sexually attractive accuser.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. And, you know, and of course, the Crucible is a great play, but it's based on Abigail Williams not being 11 or 12. So that doesn't work. And that one is. I mean. And that's. I don't know. I love the Crucible because it's got. And the story there is that Abigail Williams starts this domino effect of accusations because she's had an affair with John Proctor, in whose house she's a servant. And he denies her and stays true to his wife. And so she has to do something. And so she accuses his wife of witchcraft, and they both go down together. But I always am struck by just. There's a moment, it's such a. The simplest line possible, but he just says, I know you, John Proctor, and this idea, this completely ahistorical idea, but that. It feels like there is some kind of logic to apply that to that Story of women knowing what men really are makes them. That's the danger. And that we're seeing that as a danger that John Proctor is facing. But really like, that's why women and girls in this case are endangered, because.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

They'Re known and seen and sort of made vulnerable by that. Because, I mean, and especially in a culture where quite unlike ours, you know, patriarchal.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

You know, the idea of being.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Haunted by the illegitimacy of that, of your embodiment of that kind of power and authority, you know, or anxiety about.

[Host/Interviewer]

That and this idea, you know, that we're. I feel like probably still very much building on the foundation of in the 17th century, that according to medicine as we understand it, a woman is a man who got gestated wrong and came out sort of fucked up. Like where the cookies that you don't give to the guests, you just eat them in the kitchen. Because we were. I don't know, the temperature was wrong. It's like breeding alligators. And so.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Well, Cotton Mather, the Puritans had a kind of interesting paradoxical view.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

What Cotton Mather articulates, of course, like women because of Eve is all women.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Are types of Eve, that sin is more readily transmitted. This is Cotton Mather, I think, says in through women's milk like that women are more prone to be susceptible, even like bodily vulnerable to being occupied, taken over by Satan. And on the other hand, he looks around the church and he says, I see three Mary's for every John. You know, that like at once women are viewed as kind of more sinful, but also more pious. And I think it's just also the case that women, what power women are thought to have as their power to make men act according to their will.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

And not their own will or whatever. So it's already a kind of circumscribed.

[Host/Interviewer]

Well, and how would you put this in conversation with. Because it feels like looking at the Middle Ages, which is another extremely long period of time that we like to dismiss with a hand wave today. Something I was also fascinated by in grad school and wrote about under Christine Rose was women in sainthood and girls in sainthood. And like sainthood as a way to really not a good deal because you got martyred a lot of the time and got pulled apart or broken on a wheel or whatever, but that you could have this form of power after the fact by being beatified and that you had the power of saying, no, I can't marry this stupid guy because God wants me to not. And you can't Tell me how that compares to demonic affliction and possession.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

I mean, I think what's interesting is, like, the idea that the body, the woman's body, could be a container for a certain kind of ecstatic experience or something like that that was apart from the normal realm of human experience. I mean, I think, you know, what's the difference between demonic possession and being ravished by Christ? The idea of a kind of religious, ecstatic, religious experience still does rely on this notion of being a vessel of some higher powers.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Will.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

And people will.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

People will watch me. People will listen to me.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

They'll take me seriously.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

They won't just tell me what to do.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

But they're. And Elizabeth Knapp kind of makes the most of that opportunity. I mean, without. I don't mean to instrumentalize her or suggest a kind of conscious manipulation on her part, because I just think it's much more complicated, this question of, like, do I think she was faking? Like, I don't. I think that's too simplistic in understanding what's happening. I mean, part of what she says in the narrative in her own voice, not in Satan's voice, is like, she just refuses to play the role of the penitent. She says, like, it's too late for me.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

The people that are at her bedside are praying for her.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

And she basically says to them, don't be like me. Use your time. Well, I misspent Sabbaths, and I made myself, like, susceptible to the devil. You all shouldn't do that. And that's just like a really. I mean, I think of it as, like, a form of public service, you know, like lay public service, where she's genuinely taking the stage that she's crafted for herself to kind of give herself a little bit of a pulpit.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. And I mean, one of the things that maybe seems extremely obvious, but is worth mentioning here, is that if you're a servant who's not being possessed or afflicted, you're, like, on your feet all day long. And if you're possessed and you're providing the service to the town, you get to do it in bed.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Yeah.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

I mean, she's. That whole time she's possessed, she's not.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Doing her servant tasks.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

It's safe to assume, you know, you get a little bit of a taste of what her life is like by. When she's talking about what's so tempting about Satan. Ease from labor and silks and fine things. And he says, we'll show you the whole world, which gives you a sense of like the claustrophobia, maybe. I've heard of her daily experience.

[Host/Interviewer]

It feels like part of what's being revealed here is that Satan just. It's a better deal to go with Satan than to be in the roles that society has given you and that. That causes discomfort if you don't have a better thing to offer than Satan does.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Right. I mean, that he. He talks to her, he negotiates with her, he doesn't listen. Yeah. I mean, when. When she describes the scene where she does sign the covenant, she first says to him, I can't sign my name.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

He says, here, let me help you.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

And is this kind of like fantasy of literacy and something we might all take for granted, which is being able to, like, write our name and, you know, own ourselves in that way?

[Carolyn Kendrick]

It does seem like maybe Willard was supposed to be teaching her to certainly to write, read, and be able to.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Repeat back the catechism and all of these kind of verbal conventions of piety.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

That she would have been expected to do. And whether she was not being taught that or was not able to perform.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

That, that was a key function of the, of the master servant relationship. And I. And so that's why it's significant that.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

That Willard was her master, because the.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Master was supposed to be the little strand of patriarchal authority that.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

That reinforced the power of the patriarch to govern the tongues of his dependents. You know, by default, if you're female, you won't have a public speaker of the kind that nap maps out for her.

[Jess Milton]

Hello, I'm Jess Milton, host of the podcast Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Join us every Friday for funny, fictional, feel good family stories about Dave, his wife Morley, and their kids Sam and Stephanie. And for behind the scenes stories about what it's like to live life out on the road, on a tour bus, living out of a suitcase, traveling across Canada. New episodes every Friday. Subscribe for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[Guest Contributor]

I find Willard so interesting, and I mean, I find him interesting, but I find also his visibility so interesting in context to her invisibility. Not only just in the fact that we know a ton about Samuel Willard, we know a lot about his ministry. We know. We know a lot about the rest of his life. We know about his children, we know where he's buried, we know all kinds of stuff. And we know we don't even know anything about her other than just through the lens of. Through the lens of him. But also, like, I understand it that, like, he had a material benefit from, from writing this paper. Would you mind telling us about that. Yeah.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

So in the aftermath of the demonic possession, so.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

So his.

[Host/Interviewer]

His.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

And this was not totally uncommon.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, The.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

The people in the town were kind of both his congregants and in some ways, his employers.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Yeah, he has this employment contract with the town, and even people kind of.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Dragging their feet about a salary and stuff like that. And he. You'd see in sermons that he preached, he would complain about that.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

In the aftermath of Knapp's possession, he. He preached a bunch of sermons where.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

He did sort of say, you should listen to me.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Look, I banished Satan or whatever.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

And in the aftermath, the town voted to give him, like, a pretty big raise in salary.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

That was sort of unusual. I just. I love you saying we know a lot about Samuel Willard. We're like, kind of a small crowd. But I think what's interesting is that there's a scholar, John Demos, who talks about the narrative as a nap. Has this narcissistic.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

She has a desire for notoriety. And I'm like, well, what about Willard? He totally does all of these things. You think she's doing this exhibitionism and grandiosity and whatever.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

I'm like, yeah, he has it, too.

[Host/Interviewer]

I don't know. Accusing someone of narcissism feels like, very connected to the idea of. Well, teenage girls especially, they just want attention. They're doing it for the attention. And that's, I think, on the face of it, betrays what it's really saying, which is that people require attention in order to survive. And if you have to convince others and perhaps convince yourself that you're being afflicted by the devil, then, like, if that's what it takes, then that. That's what it. And it feels directly connected to the satanic panic where, like, people lack these nutrients and they'll do whatever they have to do to get them.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Yeah, I mean, I think, too, psychoanalysis is a really powerful interpretive tool for those of us who are looking at these events from the past that seem to defy a lot of other ways of explaining them.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Like I was saying, are we ever.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Gonna know exactly why or what caused it? And psychoanalysis, that kind of. It provides a way for us to explain from, like, a secular, contemporary. Contemporary viewpoint, the viewpoint of people who probably don't believe that the devil is real or that there are demons, Although a lot of people do still do.

[Guest Contributor]

Speaking of, like, psychology and in a modern lens, I feel like we keep coming back to this idea of projection quite a lot. Like, not. And I think my ideas of projection are very individualistic. Or at least like my experiences with it in like day to day language are individualistic. But what we kind of keep coming up against is the idea of societal mass projection, I guess, for lack of a better word, where like as a culture you are projecting something. So I'm curious as to if you have any thoughts on how projection plays into not just Elizabeth Knapp's case, but, you know, Salem and Puritan culture in general.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

I mean, what I think is interesting about projection is that, is that it presumes a kind of unconscious mechanism so that you're projecting onto because you don't want to deal with the internal conflict.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

So you have this object that's outside. But I think in a lot of these cases the object is inside. But what I think is a little tricky about projection is that they sometimes.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Seem conscious of doing what they're doing. I mean, I do think that Satan is handy and that Satan, like God.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Is more likely to make Satan to let Satan instrumentalize people.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

The Puritans already deem other or demonic.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

I mean, not exclusively.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Like they did end up thinking that Satan could work on people who are innocent or whatever, but it had this vast explanatory power.

[Host/Interviewer]

Well, and I wonder if in this culture where, you know, you have to worry all the time about the covenant of grace and what's going to happen to you and what you are. If Satan is kind of a useful figure for projection. Because it feels like in a religious tradition where you're kind of encouraged to extreme paranoia about questioning your own motives and your actions and whether you have been chosen or not, that maybe the fear is that Satan's whole thing and the lack of coherency to his character sometimes is like, well, he just loves being evil. He just loves evil. It feels great to him. He's like collecting souls because he's trying to beat God. But really just that like. And we see this in language around what Satanists are allegedly doing in the 80s where it's like, well, pain feels good to them and they cut off their fingers because they like it and just everything is the opposite. And this idea that if you're constantly questioning your own moral compass, then it's useful to have a figure who has his compass pointing toward evil and likes it.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Yeah, I mean, in that sense, Satan is a figure of. Clearly a figure of projection. And that when you have this kind of intense introspection and you believe that you yourself are incapable of doing anything good without. Without the Holy Spirit working in you, then the default is pride, giving yourself a little bit of credit for being good. Or they were supposed to be suspicious of feeling too assured. That might be the devil whispering in your ear like, oh, you are very.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Godly now, aren't you?

[Elizabeth Seppi]

In that sense, the devil does function as a figure that externalizes this really the anxiety of like not knowing, but having to, but, but really proceeding as if you do.

[Guest Contributor]

I'd also love to get into a little bit more of like the legacy of Puritan's idea of labor. So what do you think Elizabeth Knapp's story tells us about capitalism?

[Carolyn Kendrick]

I think we're supposed to internalize the authority of master.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

The idea that the fruits of our labor properly belongs to somebody else is.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

One way of kind of acclimating people to wage labor. And I think our country, even now.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Every time there's a potential strike, maybe I shouldn't do this, but looking in.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

The Oregonian, the way that they talk about organized labor and the way that people are so quick to identify with management and think that people are, should just accept what they're paid because it's just because someone else says so. And even though we live in a country that for a long time I think it's less so now believed that hard work is rewarded and that this is a land of opportunity and it's a place where if you're a bootstrapper, you can start as low as one could imagine and rise as high as one could imagine. That's rooted in a notion of self defense, discipline and being able to be your own master.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

That is to my mind, a kind.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Of secularization of Puritan exceptionalism, of, you know, of American exceptionalism.

[Host/Interviewer]

We've been talking a lot about the kind of the Faustian bargain archetype and how that is something like I first saw that in the wishbone version of Faust and then it just pops up everywhere when you start thinking about it. And like that's the premise of death becomes her and the Little Mermaid and so much other great entertainment. And that like the Faustian bargain or the bargain with the devil is like the bargain that seems too good to be true. And the bargain with God is like, no, you'll just kind of suffer your whole life. And that's so interesting too, that sort of this idea of evil and the pact that ends with you going to hell is about desire for ease from labor and just for like. So like the desire for pleasure, the desire to question authority, like it does make sense to create this kind of all purpose boogeyman that explains why you simply cannot get started down that road at All.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I'm also thinking about how Naps pact isn't a. Isn't a Faustian pact. You know, it's just so she doesn't.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Understand exactly the terms that she's bargaining. It doesn't seem like she's willfully choosing to. To do something. It feels defensive somewhat.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

And then what she wants is so small, you know, I mean, she does say that the devil promises to show her the whole world.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

But I sometimes think to myself, she's.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Thinking about, like, Boston.

[Host/Interviewer]

She'd go to Boston and get some candles. Yeah.

[Guest Contributor]

She'd walk down Mass Ave. Go to Dumpling Palace.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

It's heartbreaking.

[Guest Contributor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

He wants to go to the Filene's basement.

[Guest Contributor]

Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad we have so much. I'm so glad we have so much Boston content in this particular.

[Host/Interviewer]

He just wants to see a Bruins game. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Which is sort of one of the paradoxes about this piece, this account, that makes it so compelling because that. You know that there's a real girl, like, underneath or hidden behind this writing, and you're drawn to it because you want to know about her. But then by definition, you'll never know.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

I know it is. To me, that's the thing that makes it so kind of tantalizing and fascinating. And what you want is sort of like, to know her. Why. You know why. And also, like, what was her. Was she conscious of what she was doing? You know, this. This question of, like, was she faking to get attention? Or was she. She. You know, what kind of our modern lenses would we use to quote, unquote, diagnose her? And just the ultimate impossibility of actually getting there. You can only interpret. But it's also the case that there just isn't that much evidence of the experience of girls like her who were obedient, you know, who. And so we read these accounts of these extraordinary experiences as telling us about ordinary life. What's a servant?

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Like?

[Elizabeth Seppi]

How. How does this demoniac behavior illuminate what it was like to be a faithful and obedient servant in such a household and to have to internalize all of this, all of these different kinds of authority. I mean, to me, it's so poignant that. That Satan is to her not just a captor or like a tempter, but like a liberator.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

So we just don't. We don't know. Of course, I would want to ask her what was.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

What was it like like to have.

[Carolyn Kendrick]

Her read Willard's narrative and say, like.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

Was this what it was like for you? How did you, you know, how did it feel to have this voice coming out of you? I would want to know all of that.

[Host/Interviewer]

I feel like we fade into the ballad of Elizabeth Knapp.

[Elizabeth Seppi]

It's a lot of barking and bleeding and the chorus of robes.

[Host/Interviewer]

That's why we needed the wool here. Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

Thank you for listening to the W know. Our producer is Mary Stephanhagen. Fact checking by Katherine Barner. Production assistants by Nicole Ortiz. I've been your host. Sarah Marshall, our sound designer is Evan Kelly. Roorkhni Nair is our coordinating producer. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is manager of growth for CBC Podcasts. Arif Noorani is director of CBC Podcasts.

[Podcast Narrator]

For more cbc podcasts, go to cbc ca podcasts.