They Were Siblings Who Married for Power — But Their Twin Children Were Born Deformed

Along the jagged shoreline of Massachusetts, the Atlantic pushes its tides against rocks that have swallowed more bodies than history remembers. Here, beneath veils of rolling fog, a solitary stone marker stands in a clearing no fisherman will dock near, and no historian will linger beside. It is not ornate, not even large; just a block of weathered granite, leaning with age, the surface carved by centuries of salt and wind. It bears no epitaph, no scripture, only two words and a date: Ezekiel Harrington, Judith Harrington, 1687.

The inscription has outlasted the people it condemns, but what it represents is darker than any grave. Locals say the stone is cursed, that animals shy away from it, and that at night the fog gathers thicker here than anywhere else along the coast. Some whisper that if you press your ear against the cold granite, you will hear voices—children’s voices, faint, almost gasping, as though calling for release. It is easy to dismiss such folklore as Puritan superstition, relics of an era obsessed with witches, devils, and divine punishment.

Yet, when investigators peel back the layers of local myth, they find records, court transcripts, property ledgers, and diaries that point to something far more disturbing. Not sorcery, but systematic murder; not divine judgment, but calculated cruelty that rivaled the worst excesses of Europe’s witch trials. The Harrington siblings did not practice witchcraft. They practiced something colder: the art of weaponizing fear for profit.

Over the span of two decades, Ezekiel and Judith Harrington manipulated communities into condemning neighbors, orchestrated false accusations of witchcraft, and seized the lands of the dead. Fifty-seven lives were extinguished through their schemes. Entire families were destroyed, with wealth and property funneled into their hands. But their story did not end with profit. It ended with the birth of children so malformed and yet so intelligent that contemporaries could only explain them as divine retribution. These children, hidden in the Harrington Manor like shameful secrets, would become witnesses, conspirators, and avenging minds determined to destroy the parents who created them.

The stone marker does not tell this story. It does not need to. The silence of the site, and the fear etched on the faces of those who pass it, carry the weight of what happened here. To approach the stone is to approach the legacy of a family that pushed human greed beyond the boundaries of morality until even their own blood turned against them.

The origins of the Harrington legend trace back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1660s, an environment primed for paranoia. Small settlements clung to survival on rocky soil and meager fishing grounds. Religion was not simply faith but law, dictating every action, every suspicion. The line between natural misfortune and supernatural punishment was dangerously thin. Crops failed, children sickened, cattle died, and whispers of witchcraft spread faster than flames.

It was in this atmosphere that Ezekiel Harrington, a man of sharp features and sharper ambitions, and his younger sister Judith, striking in her severity, began their ascent. Unlike most of their neighbors, the Harringtons could read. Their late father had taught them law and property rights—subjects most colonists never touched. When both parents died of fever, the siblings inherited debts and a modest farmhouse. To most, it would have been ruin. To Ezekiel and Judith, it was an opportunity.

Their first victim was a widow in Milford, accused of blighting the harvest. The evidence was fabricated, the witnesses coached, and the outcome inevitable. She was hanged, her property seized, and the Harringtons paid handsomely for their service to God. The pattern repeated across eight communities, each accusation carefully selected to target those with assets worth taking. In 15 years, 57 innocents were executed, and the Harrington siblings grew obscenely wealthy.

But wealth breeds suspicion. Colonial law required careful navigation of inheritance and ownership. If Ezekiel or Judith married outsiders, their fortune could be claimed by others. If they died without heirs, distant relatives—or worse, the Crown—might seize everything. The solution they chose crossed a line from cold pragmatism into outright corruption of the natural order. In 1675, they married each other in secret.

What began as a business arrangement soon produced an even darker consequence. Judith conceived, and in March of 1677, she delivered twins unlike anything seen in New England before. Gabriel and Raphael: conjoined, twisted, their bodies grotesquely malformed, yet their eyes unnervingly alert. Even in infancy, they displayed intelligence beyond comprehension—reaching for objects, mimicking sounds, and learning with a speed that terrified the midwives. The Harrington siblings named them after archangels, but their condition whispered a different interpretation: divine punishment.

The twins never left the Manor. Officially, this was to protect them from cruel superstition. In reality, it was to keep the truth hidden. Ezekiel and Judith could not risk anyone linking the children’s deformities to their incestuous union. But confinement bred awareness. From their cribs, from their shared bed, the twins overheard every whispered conversation, every ledger counted, every plan laid for the next accusation. By the time they were eight, Gabriel and Raphael knew everything. They knew their parents’ wealth was built on murder. They knew their own bodies were proof of that corruption. And they knew that if they remained silent, they would die in the shadows of the Manor, just another secret buried under centuries of fog.

The stone marker on the Massachusetts coast is all that remains of the Harrington empire. But it is not a grave. It is a warning. Because when children born into suffering choose to fight back against the very hands that created them, the outcome is never ordinary justice. It is retribution.

To understand the Harrington case, we must first step back into the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 1660s, a society balanced uneasily between survival and damnation. These were not bustling towns of cobblestone streets and markets. They were fragile outposts, clusters of wooden houses clinging to rocky soil, hemmed in by pine forests that seemed endless and hostile. Every harvest was uncertain. Every illness, every fire, every stillborn child felt like a divine message. Religion governed not only the soul but the law. The Puritan doctrine of the time preached vigilance against Satan’s influence at every turn. To fall ill, to lose livestock, to see your crops wither—these were not merely misfortunes. They were signs, warnings, proof that someone in the community had invited evil in.

In such an atmosphere, suspicion was both weapon and shield. Communities like Wickham’s Harbor or Milford were barely 300 souls strong, bound together not by trust, but by necessity. Each man’s labor fed his neighbor. Yet each neighbor’s misstep could condemn the entire settlement to ruin. Whispers spread as quickly as fire across dry brush. A woman’s sharp tongue, a child’s deformity, a field that thrived when others failed—any anomaly could be twisted into evidence of witchcraft. Fear was the colony’s most abundant crop.

It was into this world that Ezekiel Harrington, age 28, began shaping his destiny. He was not a man of warmth. Witness accounts describe his face as all angles and shadows, with eyes the color of steel that seemed always to judge, to measure. His sister Judith, three years younger, matched his severity in form and spirit. Her beauty was austere, her demeanor cold. Where Ezekiel commanded with presence, Judith manipulated with whispers. Together they were more than siblings; they were a partnership.

The Harringtons were not born into power. Their father had been a failed merchant from Boston, his debts mounting until fever took him and his wife within weeks of each other. What he left behind was meager: a farmhouse, a handful of books, and the education he had forced upon his children. While their neighbors struggled to sign their names, Ezekiel and Judith could read, write, and more importantly, navigate the labyrinth of laws regarding inheritance and property. That education became their weapon.

The colony had recently embraced a new figure of authority: the Witchfinder. These were men—sometimes self-appointed, sometimes sanctioned by local councils—who claimed to possess the knowledge to detect Satan’s servants. They commanded fees, respect, and most lucratively, shares of confiscated property. The Harringtons recognized the potential immediately. Where others saw divine duty, they saw a business model.

Their first test came in Milford, a settlement cracking under the weight of crop failures and dead livestock. Here they presented themselves as protectors: Ezekiel, the learned investigator; Judith, his assistant with a keen eye for hidden marks of the devil. They chose their target carefully: Constance Fletcher, a widow who had inherited a grain mill, a rare woman of independence. Her property was coveted by neighboring men. The case unfolded with chilling precision. Neighbors remembered her muttering strange words, coached by Judith’s subtle suggestions. Mysterious welts appeared on her body after a forced examination—marks the Harringtons themselves had inflicted. Worst of all, her mill still thrived when others failed, a fact easily painted as unnatural. On November 15th, 1664, Constance Fletcher was hanged. The Harringtons received a portion of her mill as payment for their “righteous” service.

What had begun as an experiment became a blueprint. Over the next 15 years, the pattern spread like a contagion. Eight communities, 57 deaths. Each victim was carefully chosen not for supposed sins, but for assets: a blacksmith with a thriving forge, a midwife with valuable land, a farmer with rich soil. The Harringtons transformed grief and paranoia into wealth, one accusation at a time. By 1675, they controlled assets worth more than £15,000—an empire by colonial standards. They owned land across the Bay Colony, held mortgages over dozens of struggling families, and maintained meticulous ledgers of their dealings.

But with power came a new problem: how to protect it. Marriage outside the family meant risk. A husband could claim Judith’s fortune. A wife could pry into Ezekiel’s secrets. Distant relatives, or worse, the colonial government, could seize their wealth if they died without heirs. The solution they chose was not born of desire, but calculation: a marriage between brother and sister. The ceremony took place in secret, in the cold basement of their Manor, witnessed only by a corrupt minister they had compromised during a Salem trial. There was no celebration, no joy—only signatures, vows, and silence. The union was a contract of security, sealing their empire in blood.

From that point on, the Harrington siblings moved as a single force, hiding behind facades of piety while constructing a dynasty built on the screams of the innocent. But beneath the surface, cracks were already forming. The communities they exploited grew uneasy—too many accusations, too many convenient transfers of land. And within the Manor itself, shadows deepened. For when Judith’s pregnancy began in early 1676, the outcome would change everything.

First, it seemed ordinary. A skilled midwife was summoned, the best food and medicines imported. But by the seventh month, something felt wrong. The movements inside Judith’s womb were not like other pregnancies. They were violent, coordinated, as though the unborn fought each other. Whispers of divine punishment began to creep even into the Harrington household.

What emerged in March of 1677 was not a blessing, but a reckoning. Twin sons, Gabriel and Raphael, children whose bodies bore the mark of their parents’ corruption. Limbs twisted, skulls misshapen, flesh unnaturally joined. Yet behind their deformities, their eyes shone with an intelligence far too keen for newborns. Ezekiel dismissed it as superstition. Judith clung to her children as heirs, however malformed. But the servants, the midwives, even hardened physicians fled in horror. The Harringtons sealed the Manor, hiding the twins from public view. Officially, it was to protect them from cruelty. In truth, it was to conceal the fact that the siblings’ empire was cursed from within.

The colony saw only the wealth, the influence, the expanding reach of the Harrington name. But behind closed doors, in a house sealed by secrecy, two children listened. They listened to their parents’ schemes, their confessions, their crimes. And as they grew, so too did their understanding. The danger was no longer outside—not in the forests, not in the whispers of witches. It was inside the Harrington Manor, waiting, watching, and planning.

By the winter of 1675, the Harrington siblings had achieved everything their neighbors could envy and fear. Their empire stretched across towns. Their influence in courtrooms seemed unshakable, and their ledgers recorded a fortune built upon the condemned. Yet for Ezekiel and Judith Harrington, wealth was never enough. They wanted permanence, security, and control that would outlive them. That ambition carried them across a line even hardened criminals rarely dared to cross.

On December 21st of that year, the night of the winter solstice, Ezekiel and Judith were married in secret. The vows were not of love; they were of calculation. To the world, they remained a bachelor and spinster dedicated to rooting out witchcraft. In truth, their marriage was a shield. When Judith’s pregnancy began in the early months of 1676, it was seen by the siblings as validation. An heir—or better yet, heirs—would bind their fortune to their blood alone.

They spared no expense. A renowned midwife, Sarah Whidam, was summoned from Boston and paid a sum that could have purchased an entire farm. But behind the locked doors of the Manor, Sarah Whidam began to notice signs that chilled even her seasoned hands. By the seventh month, Judith’s womb moved with an unnatural violence. Kicks and rolls were expected, but these were coordinated surges, as if the unborn twins fought each other. “I have never felt such motion,” Sarah confided to her young assistant, Emma Prescott. “It is as though they are trying to harm one another.” Judith dismissed the words. Ezekiel ordered silence. But the midwife’s unease grew.

The birth began on March 15th, 1677, and lasted for nearly two days. Witnesses later recalled screams that never ceased echoing through the halls. When at last the midwives emerged, their faces were ashen. The twins that lay in the bloodied cradle were unlike any infant Sarah Whidam had seen in her 30 years of practice. Their limbs twisted at unnatural angles. Their skulls bore ridges and protrusions like bony crowns, and their torsos appeared fused by bridges of flesh and cartilage. They were grotesque, fragile, and yet alive. Alive and aware.

The infants’ eyes tracked movement almost immediately. Their hands grasped objects with uncanny precision. When one cried, the other fell silent, as though the sounds were a private language. By the time the midwives cleaned the blood from their skin, it was clear these were not ordinary children. Ezekiel named them Gabriel and Raphael, invoking archangels as if words might shield the family from whispers of divine judgment. Judith, pale and trembling, clutched them with desperate pride. But Sarah Whidam left the Manor broken. To her dying day, she would tell only fragments of what she had seen: that the children’s gaze unnerved her, that she feared not for their lives, but for what they might become.

The Harrington twins did not die. They grew. By their first birthday, they displayed intelligence that far exceeded their physical forms. They reached for books. They imitated sounds, not in the babbling tones of infants, but with deliberate mimicry. At age four, they read. By age five, they calculated sums that would have challenged merchants. And all the while their bodies betrayed them: twisted limbs, fragile bones, dependence on others for every need.

To the world beyond the Manor, Gabriel and Raphael did not exist. Ezekiel and Judith told neighbors that Judith had miscarried. Servants were threatened into silence. The twins lived in confinement, their rooms barred, their windows shuttered. But secrecy is not silence. Children listen. Children observe. And the Harrington twins, deprived of freedom, developed gifts their parents could not imagine. They learned to hold their breaths, to feign sleep, to still their movements so completely that adults spoke freely in their presence. They heard the rustle of ledgers, the mutter of plans, the laughter of their parents as they calculated profits from another neighbor’s hanging. Every crime, every deception, every murder—the children recorded it all in memory, their young minds sharper than steel traps.

As the years passed, the Manor became a prison not just for the twins, but for their parents’ secrets. Ezekiel and Judith believed themselves untouchable. They saw in their children only deformity and dependence, never intelligence. Their arrogance blinded them. By the twins’ eighth birthday, the truth had crystallized in Gabriel and Raphael’s minds. They were not victims of chance. Their broken bodies were the direct result of their parents’ incestuous greed. Their suffering was the price of bloodlines kept too close, a vow spoken in darkness to protect an ill-gotten fortune.

That knowledge hardened into something the Harringtons could not foresee: hatred. The twins did not scream or rebel. They did not weep. Instead, they planned. They studied their parents’ patterns, memorized their words, and waited for the moment when knowledge could become a weapon.

Outside the Manor, suspicion toward the Harringtons grew. Then, in 1679, they orchestrated the death of Thomas Caldwell, a blacksmith whose forge had become vital to his community. His daughter Margaret, left destitute, would later find her way to the Harrington Manor as a servant. And there, under her careful eye, the twins would find their first ally.

The story of the Harrington empire was no longer a tale of two siblings exploiting superstition. It was now a duel of generations: parents versus children, corruption versus truth. What began as a secret marriage to protect a fortune had birthed the instruments of their undoing.

By 1685, the Harrington twins were eight years old. Eight years confined to the same rooms. Their bodies crippled but their minds sharpened like knives. Eight years of overhearing confessions whispered between parents who believed them too broken, too dependent, too simple to understand. They understood everything. Gabriel and Raphael knew the names of the 57 who had died by rope because of their parents’ accusations. They knew which properties had been stolen, which witnesses had been bribed, which officials had looked away. And they knew they could not survive much longer if they remained silent.

The first sign of hope entered the Manor in the summer of 1685. Her name was Margaret Caldwell, a young woman with no family and no fortune, desperate for work. To the Harringtons, she was nothing—another servant to clean the Manor and obey in silence. To the twins, she was an opening. They recognized her name: Caldwell. The same name they had heard whispered in their parents’ study years before, on the night their father planned the downfall of Thomas Caldwell. Margaret was his daughter, though she did not know that the siblings she now served had engineered her father’s death.

The children did not reveal this to her immediately. Instead, they tested her. A scrap of paper slipped beneath her cleaning cloth. A smudged word left on a windowpane. A piece of chalk writing on the underside of a table. Each message was simple at first: Look behind the wall. Check the study. Do not tell them. Margaret found hidden ledgers tucked behind false panels in Ezekiel’s study—lists of victims, names, values of property, even calculations of profits earned from each execution. She stared at the pages with growing horror, realizing that the twins were guiding her toward the truth.

The risk was enormous. If Ezekiel or Judith discovered her knowledge, her fate would be the same as the others: accusation, trial, and a rope around her neck. But the evidence was undeniable, and the silent pleas of two crippled children compelled her to act. Margaret turned to the one man she believed might understand both the danger and the gravity of what she had found: Father Benedict Thorne, a Jesuit priest newly arrived from France. Unlike the Puritan ministers of the colony, Thorne possessed training that combined theology, law, and natural philosophy. He had witnessed cruelty in Europe and had studied the psychology of those who manipulated fear for power.

When Margaret approached him, she spoke cautiously. She did not accuse the Harringtons directly. Instead, she showed him copies she had made of their ledgers. The priest listened, his expression darkening as each page revealed more. For weeks, Thorne investigated in silence. He gathered testimony from survivors, subpoenaed financial accounts, and even extracted a confession from Marcus Fletcher, a former accomplice who admitted to planting evidence on victims at the Harringtons’ command.

Every thread Margaret and the twins had uncovered led to a web of corruption wider than he had imagined. And yet, the priest’s most crucial step was still ahead: meeting the children themselves. Father Thorne arrived at the Manor in October of 1685 under the guise of a pastoral visit. Ezekiel and Judith welcomed him with calculated politeness, confident they could manipulate him. But Thorne was not so easily swayed. He asked to see the children. The Harringtons hesitated, citing fragile health, but refusing outright risked suspicion. Reluctantly, they allowed the priest to enter the twins’ chamber, believing Gabriel and Raphael too disabled to pose any threat.

What Thorne encountered defied all expectation. The twins were frail, their limbs grotesquely malformed, their bodies riddled with pain, yet their eyes locked on him with clarity and purpose. When the signal Margaret had arranged—a subtle gesture, a shift of light through the window—passed between them, they began to act. The children communicated in fragments, their voices broken but deliberate. They confirmed the ledgers. They recited names. They described conversations held in the very rooms where their parents believed them deaf and dumb. Their testimony was as precise as any deposition. Father Thorne understood immediately: these were not helpless children. They were witnesses.

The discovery changed everything. For the first time, the Harringtons faced a threat they could not control with bribery or accusation. Their own children had become the living archive of their crimes. But danger ran both ways. Ezekiel was beginning to notice signs of intrusion—scratches on hidden compartments, dust disturbed where none should have been. When Margaret stumbled under his interrogation, her knowledge betrayed her. Yet even then, Ezekiel and Judith did not suspect the true source of their undoing. They did not see the children as capable of betrayal. That blindness would destroy them.

In the weeks that followed, the Manor became a silent battlefield. Gabriel and Raphael left coded messages where Margaret could find them. Margaret ferried copies of documents to the priest. Father Thorne compiled evidence into a case strong enough to topple even the most respected colonists. But Ezekiel and Judith sensed danger tightening around them. They began to speak of escape, of relocating south to the Carolinas, and in quieter moments, they whispered of something darker: disposing of their children before suspicion could grow.

The twins overheard everything. What followed was a shift as chilling as it was inevitable. No longer were Gabriel and Raphael content to record and reveal. They began to plan. Their parents had perfected the art of turning fear into profit. Now the children would perfect the art of turning knowledge into retribution. They studied their parents’ escape plans. They marked which weapons were hidden in the Manor. They loosened floorboards, tampered with locks, and even sabotaged firearms with fragments of metal. Every adjustment was precise, hidden, deliberate. The stage was being set. By December of 1685, the lines were drawn.

December 21st, 1685: the 10th anniversary of Ezekiel and Judith Harrington’s secret wedding. A date they marked every year in silence, locked within their Manor, reviewing ledgers of profit and victim lists as if they were sacred scripture. To them, it was not a night of sin; it was a night of triumph. But this year, the walls themselves seemed to lean inward with suspicion. The twins had spent months preparing. Margaret Caldwell had made her quiet copies. Father Benedict Thorne had gathered witnesses, clerks, and colonial officials. The pieces were in place. The Harrington siblings believed they were celebrating their unholy partnership. In reality, they were walking into the jaws of a trap set not by neighbors or officials, but by the very children they had hidden away.

The evening began as it always had: a fire in the study, ledgers spread across the table. Judith’s thin fingers traced names of the dead, her voice steady as she read aloud. Ezekiel, whiskey in hand, muttered calculations of future ventures. Their ambitions stretched southward. But upstairs, in the chamber where they had imprisoned their sons for eight years, Gabriel and Raphael lay awake. Tonight the routine would shatter.

Shortly after 7:00, a knock echoed through the Manor’s front door. Father Thorne had arrived. The priest’s entry was calm. He carried himself as any minister might, offering words of blessing for the winter season and a request to pray with the family. Ezekiel, irritated but confident, allowed him inside. Judith stood close by, watchful. Thorne was not alone; behind him stood two colonial officials sworn to discretion and a clerk with blank pages ready to record.

The moment of truth arrived when Father Thorne requested to see the children. Ezekiel’s first instinct was refusal, but Thorne pressed gently. To deny him outright would appear suspicious. In the end, arrogance won. Believing their sons incapable of speech, the Harringtons agreed. The chamber door opened. Father Thorne entered, Ezekiel and Judith close behind. The twins lay motionless, but when the priest gave the signal—a subtle motion of his sleeve—Gabriel and Raphael stirred.

Their voices were strained, their words broken, but their testimony was clear. They began to recite dates, names, places. The night Thomas Caldwell was framed. The silver coins given to Marcus Fletcher. The poppet planted in the forge. The poison used to kill livestock. Each phrase struck like a hammer. Ezekiel froze. Judith paled. The officials glanced at one another, their pens scratching furiously. The Harrington siblings had silenced neighbors and bribed ministers, but they had never imagined betrayal from the mouths of their own children.

When Ezekiel finally broke the silence, it was not with denial, but with rage. His hand shot beneath his coat, drawing a pistol. He aimed at the priest, but the weapon misfired. The barrel burst in his grip, shredding flesh and bone. He howled, collapsing to the floor. The twins had sabotaged the gun weeks earlier. Judith, shrieking, lunged for a knife concealed beneath her gown. She never reached her target. The floor beneath her groaned, boards splintering. She crashed through a weakened section—a trap the twins had prepared with painstaking precision, loosening beams until the structure itself became an accomplice.

Panic erupted. The Manor’s walls seemed to close in. The air filled with dust and cracking wood. Beams collapsed where the Harringtons stood. In the study below, ledgers spilled across the floor as the ceiling buckled. Fire from the hearth caught the pages, flames licking through the room where so many lives had been condemned in ink. The final collapse came with a roar. Rafters snapped, stone groaned, and the central hall caved inward. Ezekiel and Judith were buried beneath the wreckage. But in a sheltered alcove, exactly as the twins had planned, Gabriel, Raphael, Father Thorne, and the officials survived. The children had engineered their own deliverance.

When the dust settled, the scene was undeniable. Dead beneath the ruins lay Ezekiel and Judith Harrington. Around them, exposed by the collapse, were hidden compartments, crates of stolen goods, and skeletal remains of the long-vanished. And in the center of it all were two crippled children, bruised but alive, their eyes burning with the clarity of victory.

The officials began collecting what evidence remained, but the most powerful testimony was already secured. The words of Gabriel and Raphael. Within weeks, the colonial courts issued convictions against Ezekiel and Judith Harrington on 57 counts of murder, alongside charges of fraud, conspiracy, bribery, and judicial corruption. The ramifications were immediate. Towns across New England reopened past cases. The Harrington scandal planted the first seeds of doubt that would in time bring the entire witch-trial system down.

The financial aftermath was staggering. Properties worth more than £25,000 were identified as fraudulently seized. The courts created new legal procedures to dismantle the Harrington estate and restore land to surviving families. It was restitution, but incomplete. Yet out of that wreckage came something more enduring: the twins.

Under the care of Dr. William Harvey, a royal physician brought from London, they received proper treatment for the first time. Their twisted limbs were tended, and their minds were finally allowed to flourish. By the age of ten, Gabriel was writing essays on law and evidence that startled magistrates. Raphael displayed an aptitude for medicine. The very children born as symbols of corruption grew into architects of reform. Gabriel became a respected legal scholar, his work laying the foundation for the first protections of vulnerable testimony in American law. Raphael devoted his life to medicine, opening one of the first schools in the colonies for children with disabilities.

The ruins of Harrington Manor were never rebuilt. Instead, the site was declared a memorial. A stone marker was placed, inscribed not with names of victims or scripture, but with words commissioned by the twins themselves: Evil is not supernatural. It is human choice. Justice survives only when silence is broken.

For centuries, travelers who pass the fog-shrouded coast have stopped to read those words. Some say the ground still feels heavy, as if the soil remembers the weight of crimes committed there. The Harrington case remains one of the most chilling episodes in early American history—not because it involved sorcery or curses, but because it did not. The siblings’ empire was built on ordinary human greed, sharpened by intelligence, shielded by superstition. And in the end, their undoing came not from ministers or magistrates, but from the very children they sought to control. Children broken in body, but unbroken in will.