My Ancestors Called the Salem Accusers "Witch Bitches" And Paid the Ultimate Price PLUS a family recipe for pain relief

What does it mean to discover that witchcraft runs in your blood? For Enid Baxter Ryce, it isn’t a metaphor, she is a direct descendant of three convicted Salem Witches, and comes from a long family history of natural magical practices. This is the story of how she found them.

Every family has its skeletons, but some are buried deeper than others. My peculiar mother left behind a series of mysterious boxes, secreted under an 18th-century house in the woods with a stream running through its basement. As I painstakingly research each hidden object and document to piece together our family’s bizarre history, I stumbled upon a single, shocking word in an incomplete Daughters of the American Revolution application: Witch.

While my father casually claimed our ancestors were “Puritans,” the historical record reveals a far darker, more chaotic truth. We weren’t the pious Puritans of New England lore; instead, we were Celts, rebels, and outcasts. Drawing on primary sources and genetic data, I discovered that my sixth great-grandmother, Margaret Jacobs, was a convicted Salem Witch. Her mother, father, and grandfather were also convicted.

But it was my eighth-great-grandfather, George Jacobs Sr., who truly defined our family’s defiant spirit. He and his family dared to laugh at the powerful teenage accusers, mockingly calling them “The Witch Bitches”, a sarcastic rebellion that would ultimately cost him his life on the gallows.

Below is the untold story of Salem’s most defiant family, a cowardly father who abandoned his newborn to flee the constables, and the historical troll who exposed the hypocrisy of the witch hunts.

The Trial of George Jacobs, August 5, 1692 by Tompkins H. Matteson, 1885.