NORTHAMPTON — “There’s wickedness in this place!”

“I am innocent and God knows it!

“Goody Parsons, I am not the source of your despair — you have been entertaining Satan in Northampton!”

The shrieks pierced the air inside the ballroom of Hotel Northampton Saturday as events of 1657 came to life, and the Parsons family, some 80 strong, leaned in.

The Parsons were everywhere this weekend. Descendants of the earliest English settlers of Northampton, they were in town for the 100th Parsons Family Reunion, coming from far and flung, with two things in common: their shared lineage with pioneers and their bond with each other.

As any Parsons will tell you, this is a story of a husband, fur-trader Cornet Joseph Parsons, carving out success and prosperity in a Northampton wilderness, along with a wife, Mary Bliss Parsons, who managed to birth 13 children despite being accused (repeatedly) of consorting with the Devil.

If “Goody” Parsons had a healthy brood of kids along with accommodating livestock, “Goody Bridgman,” Parsons’ neighbor Sarah Bridgman, blamed her dead children and even her dead cow on the “witchcraft” of Mary Bliss Parsons. There were things you couldn’t ignore, like strange noises that prefaced horror and yarn that inexplicably became knotted.

The play, “Circling Suspicion,” by Talya Kingston, one act of a three-parter to be staged at the Parsons House, headquarters for Historic Northampton, came from Plays in Place with actors Linda Tardif, Christine Stevens and Bill Stewart.

“How do you explain eleven healthy children?” pleads Mary Parsons (Stevens), asserting that good fortune comes from God and not the Devil.

“You have so much milk — who knows what else you’re suckling!” comes the accusing tormentor. (Tardif)

The family

Deanna Simons of Binghamton New York is in her 14th year as Parsons Family Association president and a 19th generation Parsons.

“My father was on the committee forever,” she said. “My brother, my sister, my son, all here. You grow up with it. I feel for other folks who have work to uncover ancestry; we have the privilege of knowing where we’re from.”

Though Northampton has served as the site of the reunion numerous times, the first one, in 1923, was held in Boonville NY, where Cornet Joseph had property. and others took place in Syracuse, Laconia NH and as far away as San Francisco. In 1942 a bronze tablet was dedicated at the Parsons Homestead here, and a fund to care for the homestead was established at the reunion of 1944. The museum’s Co-Executive Director Laurie Sanders brought the crowd up to date on ongoing renovations funded by the Community Preservation Act.

“I’m so into my genealogy; it’s my drug of choice,” said PFA Vice President Elizabeth Parsons Patton of Washington, D.C. “I think of them coming here in 1654, conditions horrible, having 13 children here and flourishing.”

Patton held her grandson, Spencer Gordon, 3 months, “the youngest of the Parsons, so far,” she said. “I had very few cousins growing up — now I feel so connected.”

As for Mary Bliss Parsons and the charges of witchcraft, “It was all about jealousy,” said Patton. “She never had a child die. She was an herbalist, ‘Here, this root can help.’ I’m like that too. People looked down on that. I would have been accused of witchcraft too.”

Rymn Parsons flew in from Vancouver, Washington.

“My dad was a longtime member, Jim Parsons. I was vice president in my 20s, then had a long hiatus,” he said. He came back when his sister Deanna became president. He has a daughter living in Virginia but the bug hasn’t bitten her yet. “No, I have not placed the mantel of family lineage on my daughter,” he smiled.

“I’ve been in Northampton before, but it was on the order of 45 years ago,” said Parsons. “I remember a few things, definitely the Parsons House.”

But the Northampton of today or 45 years ago bears scant resemblance to the one of 1657.

Slander

Jealousy? Mary Bliss Parsons was said to be beautiful, and rich, and somewhat haughty. She did display odd behavior, like wandering around town “unattended” and suddenly flailing on the ground, sometimes in a nightgown. But she was never known to cackle or turn anyone into a newt.

Nevertheless.

“SATAN is controlling your thoughts!”

“Your endless accusations play tricks with my mind!”

You think you got trouble? Try appearing before the Judges of Witchcraft.

Six Massachusetts women were hanged as witches years before the Salem Witch Trials and its 19 executions, and Mary Bliss Parsons came perilously close.

Magistrates searched her body for “witch’s teats” where “imps” were said to suckle, found nothing of the tell-tale variety and still stuck her in a Boston jail for 10 weeks awaiting trial. She defended herself — none of the God-fearing fellas were going to touch this with a 10-foot pole — and was acquitted. The Bridgmans had to pay a fine.

But Northampton tongues continued to wag and bony fingers pointed.

“The summer air is thick with insects and rumors!” cries Mary, eager to head downtown and set things right.

“NO!” shouts Joseph (Stewart) “It will make trouble for us, walking into town so soon after the trial!”

But 18 years later one of Bridgman’s sons said his wife died “by means of some evell instrument,” namely Goody Parsons, and here we go again.

“Oxen bitten by a rattlesnake — conjured by you!”

“I was acquitted!”

“By a jury consisting of your husband’s friends!”

So why couldn’t a man with the pull of Cornet Joseph Parsons better protect his wife? (Cornet, by the way, denotes his military rank, not his prowess with a horn.)

“She was a woman,” said Karen Vorbeck Williams of Rumford, Rhode Island, author of “My Enemy’s Tears; The Witch of Northampton.” “She gave her husband sons, which was expected of a wife, while people around her were losing babies. This one woman had so much tragedy.”

“In those days people didn’t have science so the way they explained everything was either through God or the Devil. Why did we have an earthquake? Because God was angry. Eclipses? Get on your knees and pray!”

The Salem hysteria died down as reason slowly crept back in. “It was such a disastrous thing for that whole community,” said Williams. “They faced the fact that they got it wrong. Such a brutal thing.”

Ultimately, the bad vibes from Northampton did the Parsons in.

“Mary, we have no choice but to leave.”

“You allow them to drive us from what we have built?”

The couple returned to Springfield, from whence they came. Son Jonathan got the house, great-grandson Nathaniel Parsons built a new one in 1719, the present day homestead, on the southern tip of the original Bridge, Market, Union Streets settlement. Long-widowed Mary Bliss Parsons died in 1712, always suspected but never tried again.

Passed-down genes?

“Everyone here is related to those two people,” marveled Nancy Campbell of Amherst, longtime art professor at Mount Holyoke College, now retired. “They come from far and wide; I just came over the river.” She says it’s unlikely she’ll cross the country to be at one of these. “I feel like this is the home of the Parsons. They traveled here from Springfield by oxcart. They say Joseph was very good with the Native Americans in the sale of hides but ‘very good’ probably means he was swindling them. He was a person on the move, that’s for sure.”

Campbell feels a particular bond with Mary Parsons. Witchcraft? “No, but I have the ability to know things before they happen. I’ll only tell you one,” she said, and told of her love of aircraft, not to fly them, just to watch them land, including the unusually-shaped A-10. “Twenty-five years ago I had a horrible nightmare. An A-10 was approaching a treeline, it’s gonna hit the trees! A huge explosion and I wake up. I could hardly breathe. Did the pilot get out? Next morning, my husband yells up the stairs — listen to this! He had the radio on. An A-10 crashed in upstate New York. Hit the trees at dusk, pilot safely ejected. They said it was a Velcro failure; his goggles fell and sent the plane into a dive.”

“No, not witchcraft, but I wouldn’t have admitted any of that in the 1600s,” laughed Campbell. “And not all of my premonitions are disastrous.”

Parsons family members were gifted with cutting boards crafted by Northampton builder and poet Jonathan Wright, which were constructed from wood taken from the actual maple tree that used to tower over the Parsons House for close to 200 years. The 150-ton behemoth was beginning to muscle into the building itself, threatening to wreck the museum’s foundation.

“It had to come down,” said Wright, who speaks with wonder about trees. “What has it witnessed? The floods of ‘36 and ‘38, all of Calvin Coolidge’s careers, the birth of Smith College, and the last Connecticut River log drive, where five drivers died.”

“So the tree lives on in the heart of the maker, and in the hearts of each of you,” said Wright, “... and to mark your amazing anniversary with something entirely and completely made in Northampton.”

Of the many activities offered Sunday, many family members opted for the Bridge Street Cemetery tour, led by Mary Parsons Bliss herself. (Kathy-Ann Becker of Wendell, author of “Silencing Women”) The place is loaded with long-resting Parsons.

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