The dying curse of a woman executed as a witch still haunts the grave of the evil man who falsely accused her and had her sentenced too death.
Despite seances conducted by spirit mediums and scientific tests with the most sophisticated equipment available to parapsychologists, who study the occult sciences, no one has been able eliminate the tell-tale imprint of the witches foot from her persecutor’s tombstone.
Colonel Jonathan Buck was a colonial officer and an important and politically powerful citizen in the state of Maine- so prominent, in fact, that Bucksport, the village he found, was named after him. But the exact details of the events surrounding the trail and legal lynching of Comfort Ainsworth are hazy and have been lost by the passage of time since her tragic death during the late 17th century witchcraft hysteria in the New World.
Although the men and women murdered by their neighbors in Salem, Massachusetts, are the most commonly remembered victims of the lethal religious hysteria that swept the colonies during the early years of European settlement in America. Many others also died at the stake, by the noose, or crushed by boulders piled on Their pain-wracked bodies in demented efforts to cleanse their souls of Satan and his demons.
Comfort Ainsworth was one of the innocent victims whose slaying would have gone virtually unknown if not for the agonized curse she pronounced on her tormentor moments before her death.
Discarded Mistress
According to some accounts, Comfort was a beauty who had the misfortune of becoming the mistress of a arrogant and hardhearted Colonel Buck. When her looks began to fade and he tired of her, it’s said, he arranged to have her accused of witchcraft. Defenseless against the enmity of her former lover, she was quickly convicted and condemned to death.
But other tales claim that the victim of the black hearted frontier bigwig was an unattractive crone who was typical of the victims selected for persecution during the wave of witchcraft hysteria. She was old, eccentric, lived alone and without friends or relatives to defend her. Still other legends painted the victim as an Indian woman whose husband had been shot in the back by Colonel Buck during a quarrel. According to some depictions from that era, Comfort was burned at the stake and her former lover personally ignited the wood piled at her feet.
But according to most accounts handed down through centuries Comfort Ainsworth was hanged, All the stories seem to agree, as well, that the last agonized words of the woman executed for witchcraft pronounced a terrible curse on the colonel. “Though you may slay me now, my colonel,” she croaked, “I shall come back and dance upon your gravestone while you roast in hell.”
Powerful Curse
It was a powerful curse, uttered at a moment of extreme emotion and distress, and Colonel Buck didn’t take it lightly. It haunted him throughout the remainder of his life, and members of his family shared his concern. When he died, they took special care to select a perfect stone that was unblemished in any way for his final memorial. They called in the most respected stonemason in the area to shape the stone and carve the name of the family patriarch. As expected, Jonathan Buck’s tombstone was the finest of all those in the little cemetery. It seemed only proper, after all.
Then on the anniversary of the accused witch’s death, a curious thing occurred. The image of a woman’s dancing foot and lower leg first tinged with the color of rust, then with bright red blood began to form on the front surface of the once perfect stone. The good citizens of Bucksport were horrified, but none so much as the family survivors of the Colonel. They ordered the stone sanded and cleaned. But the image remained, so they ordered the sanding to be performed again and again. Eventually the stone was sanded and cleaned more than a dozen times, but always the image returned within a few hours after the work was completed.
At last, Colonel Buck’s heirs gave up on the stone, and ordered a new one erected in its place. A few days after the new tombstone was placed on his grave, the image of the woman’s dancing foot began slowly forming once more.
So the second stone was removed and replaced with another clean rock slab, professionally formed by the best available stonemason and inscribed with the colonel’s name. Within a few days, the mystifying footprint had again formed on the new stone.
This time the family members had conceded that they had enough, and they gave up. The third and final tombstone erected for Colonel Buck still stands in the cemetery at Bucksport today, with the enigmatic form of the dancing foot deeply etched into the front surface directly under his name.
