Old Betty Booker is a sorceress who appears in a handful of tales from Maine folklore, particularly lore set during the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. Old Betty’s reputed powers over weather make her a fearsome foe to fishermen in these tales. In one of the best-known stories, Old Betty is snubbed by a fisherman, Skipper Perkins, who refuses to bring her back some halibut from his fishing expedition until she pays in advance. Old Betty meets his rejection with a foul look and shakes “Her wicked head, with its wild gray hair / And nose of a hawk, and eyes like a snake” at him. Later that day, while on the water, his boat takes a beating and he catches very little. When he returns to shore, Skipper Perkins learns that Old Betty is not through with him, but intends to place a “witch’s bridle” on him and “ride him to York [Maine]” on the first stormy night to follow. Despite copious efforts by Perkins to prevent Old Betty from reaching him, the witch rides in on the wind with her coven in tow, cackling “Bring me a bit o’ hal’but, skipper!” The witches strip the Skipper naked and place the bridle in his mouth, and then ride him like a steed all over the countryside. One account of the tale states that the witches rode Perkins “some twelve miles” before finally retuning home. They bring him back to Kittery “before cock-crow, more dead than alive.” Old Betty leaves the Skipper with a winking warning that he should treat people with greater charity in the future (Botkin 1947).
Benjamin Botkin theorizes that the legend of Old Betty Booker may have been inspired by the actual practice of witchcraft in the York area, or at least in the practice of maritime folk magic. He notes that when one of the Kittery houses was torn down a “witch-bridle” was found inside, composed of horsehair, tow, and yellow birch. Witch-bridles were thought to be a tool similar in design to a horse’s bridle, which a witch could slip over the head and into the mouth of a person or animal to force it to do her bidding. Accounts from both sides of the Atlantic describe situations in which witches use the bridles to force someone, or in some instances a neighbor’s horse or other livestock, to become a mode of transportation for the witch. In almost all instances, the victim remains aware throughout the ride, but his or her memories of the event quickly fade in the morning, leaving only bruises and a battered, weary body as proof of any supernatural occurrence. The folk phenomenon of “hag riding,” which has been associated with sleep apnea and sleep paralysis in modern medical diagnosis, may offer some teleological explanations of the stories behind the malady. A person under the control of the witch-bridle felt no control of his or her body, but remained lucid and felt the pressure of someone on top of him or her. In the medical phenomenon of sleep paralysis, sufferers report a feeling a great weight on their bodies and an inability to control their limbs, which very much resembles the conditions described in the folklore (Baughman motif G241.2 “Witch rides a person”).
Weather magic would also have been common in seafaring communities. Women, like Old Betty, frequently sold outbound sailors magical charms to raise winds or prevent drowning. One common charm was called “buying the wind” and involved tossing a coin of small value over the side of the ship when it became becalmed. Sailors always admonished caution with this practice, as a coin of higher value could buy too much wind with disastrous results. Knotted cords could be used to raise winds as well, and dried cauls (amniotic sacs that sometimes surround a baby’s head after birth) taken from newborn infants allegedly protected sailors from drowning. Widowed women and social outcasts were particularly vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft, but in some instances witches were seen as a form of moral enforcement. In the tale of Old Betty and the Skipper, for example, Old Betty punishes the sailor for being miserly, and the structure of the narrative blames the skipper for bringing evil on himself. Maine witches in other stories often have righteous retribution as motivation for their occult activities. Another tale involving a witch named Emma Alley and a curse upon a stingy fisherman is very similar to that of Old Betty Booker. Other tales of Old Betty, however, attribute diabolical motives to the witch’s curses. In one story, she dances with the devil to fiddle music on moonlit nights out on the village green. Additionally, she was believed to release tempests out at sea with a “weather-pans,” a device that people believed witches used to control the weather.
Old Betty is associated with several other witches who lived in the “Brimstone Hill” area of Kittery, namely Mary Greenland and a woman named Aunt Polly Belknap. Her name may also have evolved in folklore to include such variations as Betsy Booker, Easter Booker (also referred to as Esther Booker), or Black Dinah, who reputedly used weather-pans and dowsed for buried treasure. According to George Alexander Emery, Old Betty’s home was on the land between Kittery and York, marked by “a stone wall extending north-west and south-east,” where she and a companion raised a meager patch of vegetables and some chickens. He also notes that she resembled the biblical figure of the Witch of Endor, who raised the spirits of the dead for King Saul, although his basis for comparison is speculative. An 1896 article in the Boston Evening Transcript recounts the Skipper Perkins story, but attributes the storm-raising and the captain’s subsequent torments to a witch named Hetty Moye and relocates the narrative to within fifty miles of Boston. Many of the features from Old Betty’s tales can be found in other tales as well, especially in tales imported from the British Isles. Fairy stories about witch-bridles, for example, appear in the collection of Irish lore assembled by William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, as well as in some Scottish collections. George Lyman Kittredge’s Witchcraft in Old and New England contains an account of a man bridled in the same way as Skipper Perkins.
Folklorist Horace P. Beck explains that many of the stories told of witches in Maine shared common elements and themes with stories told throughout New England, particularly in Massachusetts. Given that Maine and Massachusetts were united as a single commonwealth until 1820, connections between the tale of Booker and other New England witch stories seem convincing but are hard to prove. While some evidence suggests that the legends of Old Betty might have a thin basis in a historical local figure, the numerous tales built up around her clearly draw from a variety of Old and New World sources.
Cory Thomas Hutcheson
See also Aunty Greenleaf and the White Deer; Bell Witch; DeGrow, Moll; Good Luck Charms; Old Granny Tucker; Weather Prediction Myths
Further Reading
Beck, Horace P. 1957. The Folklore of Maine. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Bliss, William Root. 1893. The Old Colony and Other Sketches. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Botkin, Benjamin, ed. 1947. A Treasury of New England Folklore. New York: Crown.
Dorson, Richard M. 1964. Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Emery, George Alexander. 1873. The Ancient City of Georgiana and the Modern Town of York (Maine) from its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. Boston: G. A. Emery.
Gregory, Isabella Augusta, and William Butler Yeats. 1988. A Treasury of Irish Myth, Legend, & Folklore. New York: Gramercy.
Kittredge, George Lyman. 1956. Witchcraft in Old and New England. New York: Russell & Russell.
“Witchcraft Today: The Belief in Supernatural Feats in a New England Town.” 1896. Boston Evening Transcript, October 10.