Angol
On May 25, 1885, a seventy-two-year-old widow died in her bed in Burrillville, Rhode Island. The town weekly gave her four lines. Not one word of them hinted at scandal.
Almost a century later, a supermarket tabloid claimed she had killed her own child with a nail, as an offering to Lucifer. Today the story says it was a needle, and a neighbor's baby. In 2013, a movie turned her into a Satan-worshipping witch who hanged herself on the farm on Round Top Road.
Bathsheba Sherman never lived on that farm. She lived two houses down. She buried three of her four children, like so many mothers of her time, and no archive holds a complaint, a trial, or a verdict against her.
This book does not rule on what the Perron family lived through in that house. Drawing on censuses, deeds, the newspapers of the day, and the family's own books, it reconstructs how the accusation was manufactured: who put each piece in place, in what year, and at whose expense.
Her headstone has been broken so many times that it had to be hidden.
