“She must be made dead,” screamed Mary. “She’s torturing us.” Mary spoke of Hannah, who, by chance, had seen Anne and her dancing naked about a bonfire in the woods. The two girls feared Hannah would tell their secret to the Puritan community. Mary also bore a second grudge against Hannah. She thought Hannah had stolen her onetime suitor, Jonathan Wood, a rich merchant, who had paid her attention, but as of late had faded away. Mary told Ann of her suspicion and recruited her to join in a plot to eliminate Hannah, which would eliminate her competitor and protect their devilish secret. Their mothers saw both girls vomiting soon after they had finished a meal. Mary persuaded Anne that they were too fat to be attractive to men, and that may have been the reason Mr. Wood had turned his attention to the thinner Hannah.

The girls, confronted by their parents about wasting God’s gifts of food, claimed that were being compelled to do it by Hannah’s specter. Her specter made them force their fingers down their throats and regurgitate anything that they had consumed. They said that Hannah’s specter was trying to starve them to death. When the husbands heard the girls’ stories, they both became both fearful and enraged. The two fathers met the next night and together decided that the torture of the girls had to be stopped. They went to seek the advice of James Harden, the Puritan minister for the village. He counseled that there could be only one cause for the torment, and that was because they were under a spell cast by a witch. He said that the only way the girls could be free of the curse was to burn the witch.

Late at night when no moon had risen, the four, and the minister, broke the door down to Hannah’s cabin and pulled her from her bed. Anne and Mary entered behind the men screaming, “Witch! Witch! You torment us!” Wrenching Hannah from her bed, the Minister Harden tore her nightdress from her shoulders searching for the witch’s teat from which the devil supposedly suckled when he came to the bed of his faithful servants at the witching hour. No devil’s mark could he find. Yet the two red-faced girls kept screaming, “Burn the witch! Burn the witch!"over and over again.

The fathers responded to their daughters’ pleas and dragged Hannah out the door and bound her to a small oak tree. They piled branches about her feet and lit a fire. The blaze caught Hannah’s night dress enveloping her as she screamed, “I’m not a witch!” and attempted to say the Lord’s Prayer, but the flames consumed her before she could finish. Her ashes swirled from the fire up toward a large elm limb, where they turned into two black ravens. The ravens cackled a gurgling croak, slowly rising in pitch. They swooped down and plucked out the eyes of Mary and Anne.