Historical Society of the NY Courts

10/23/2026

Today, we’re seeking witches in New York history. Three cases from 1658 to 1670 show how courts here handled the charge – arguably, more responsibly than Salem.

In February 1658, sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Gardiner Howell of East Hampton accused her neighbor Elizabeth Garlick of witchcraft in her last hours. East Hampton then deferred to Connecticut’s court in capital cases, so the town sent Garlick to Hartford for trial. Governor John Winthrop Jr. reported that “there did not appeare sufficient evidence to prove her guilty.” He asked East Hampton to treat the Garlicks “neighbourly and peaceably.” They went home.

In 1665, Setauket’s officials charged Ralph and Mary Hall with killing a neighbor and an infant by sorcery. Witchcraft was not then a statutory crime here, so the indictment charged murder. On October 2, the Court of Assizes read depositions against them. No witness testified in person. The jury found “some suspitions” against Mary but “nothing considerable of value to take away her life,” and “nothing considerable” against Ralph. The court bound Ralph, body and goods, to produce Mary at every session as long as they stayed in the colony. In 1668 Governor Richard Nicolls released them, noting “no direct proofes nor furthr prosecucion.” By then they lived on what is now City Island.

Katherine Harrison came to Westchester in 1670. A Connecticut jury had convicted her of witchcraft, but the colony’s court freed her on condition she leave Wethersfield. Neighbors complained within two months. Governor Francis Lovelace first ordered her out, then referred the case to the Court of Assizes. That October the court found “nothing appears against her” and gave her liberty to stay.

In a 2025 paper, our President Emeritus and longtime student of court history, the Hon. Albert Rosenblatt, traced New York’s accusations mainly to Long Island towns settled by New Englanders. Of prosecuting witches, he wrote, “The Dutch had no stomach for it.”

Read more here: https://tinyurl.com/hsnycwitch

10/22/2026

Our week on witch trials as a legal process moves to Massachusetts. Salem is the case everyone knows, and its core legal problem was evidence. While the trials were still underway, New York’s clergy weighed in on what a court should accept as proof.

In Salem in 1692, a witness could testify that the defendant’s specter had attacked her, and the court treated it as evidence. Judges reasoned that the Devil could not borrow a person’s shape without permission. If your specter was seen, you had agreed to it.

Governor William Phips created a Court of Oyer and Terminer that May to clear crowded jails. In June, Massachusetts ministers advised that spectral evidence alone should not convict. The court kept going. It hanged nineteen people between June and September. Giles Corey refused to enter a plea, and authorities pressed him to death under stones. At least five more people died in jail.

On October 5, 1692, Joseph Dudley sent questions about witchcraft to four New York ministers. Dudley had been the first chief judge of New York’s Supreme Court of Judicature. Three of the ministers were Dutch Reformed: Henricus Selyns, Godefridus Dellius and Rudolphus Varick. Pierre Peiret served the French church. All four signed Latin answers. Witchcraft could exist, they wrote, but the apparition of a person who had shown no prior malice and made no threats was “not enough” for a just conviction. Cotton Mather later said the Dutch and French ministers of New York had influenced the governor’s reprieves.

Phips halted the court at the end of October. A new court in 1693 refused to admit spectral evidence. It convicted three people, and Phips pardoned all three. Some of the acquitted stayed in jail until they paid their fees.

In 1711 Massachusetts reversed the convictions of 22 people. Its governor, now Joseph Dudley, authorized £578 12s in compensation for survivors and families. The last conviction stood until 2022, when the state Senate cleared Elizabeth Johnson Jr.

10/21/2026

What can Lanah Sawyer’s story teach us about the law’s response to violence against women, and how far have the courts come since the 1790s?

Join the Historical Society of the New York Courts on October 28 for “One Woman’s Voice for Justice: How the Courts Have Responded to Violence Against Women from the Revolution to Today.”

The program will feature John Wood Sweet, author of The Sewing Girl’s Tale, sharing Lanah Sawyer’s remarkable fight for justice. A distinguished panel featuring Roberta A. Kaplan, Esq., Partner at Kaplan Martin LLP and Society Trustee, Kate Mogulescu, Professor of Clinical Law and Director of the Criminal Defense & Advocacy Clinic at Brooklyn Law School, Hon. Michelle Weber, Judge of the New York City Criminal Court, New York State Unified Court System, and moderator Susan Harper, Esq., Law Office of Susan L. Harper, will examine the progress made since Sawyer’s case and the challenges that remain. Opening remarks will be delivered by Hon. Dianne T. Renwick, Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division, First Department.

📅 October 28 | 6:30 PM
📍 New York City Bar Association, 42 West 44th Street, New York City
💻 Also available via livestream

Free and open to the public. NY CLE credits pending, available only to Society members.

Register Now – Don't Miss Out!
https://history.nycourts.gov/events/one-womans-voice-for-justice/

Presented by the Historical Society of the New York Courts HYBRID EVENT • FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC At New York City Bar Association (42 … More One Woman’s Voice for Justice: How the Courts Have Responded to Violence Against Women from the Revolution to Today »

10/20/2026

This week we are looking at witch trials as a legal process. Courts had to decide what counted as evidence and who would pay. New York’s colonial courts heard witchcraft cases too, and they reached very different results. We start in Europe, where the hunts ran largest.

Europe’s witch trials belong to the early modern period, and they ran on written law. The Holy Roman Empire’s criminal code of 1532, known as the Carolina, defined witchcraft as a serious crime. The empire was a patchwork of Catholic and Protestant states with their own laws, so enforcement varied widely.

Courts in the empire could use torture to get a confession. In the worst hunts, they kept torturing confessed witches until they named accomplices. Each name opened a new case. In Bamberg in the 1620s, a special witch commission ignored even the Carolina’s limits on torture. The names it collected reached city officials, including the mayor, Johannes Junius. In a letter smuggled to his daughter, he wrote that the executioner urged him to invent something, because the torture would not stop until he confessed. Roughly 1,000 people died in Bamberg’s trials.

Someone also had to pay. The accused’s estate or family usually covered the costs. In Toul, France, the family of a woman known as the Mayoress Etienne received an itemized bill. It charged twenty francs for the torturer and one franc for the woman who shaved her. In Offenburg, courts could bill defendants for the judges’ banquet after each session. In Aberdeen in 1596, authorities billed two convicted witches for the peat, coal and tar barrels that burned them.

Outcomes varied sharply by jurisdiction. The Dutch Republic stopped executing witches in the early 1600s and became a refuge for people fleeing persecution in neighboring lands. In the Habsburg lands, Maria Theresa banned witch trials in 1768.

10/16/2026

Luther R. Marsh trained in Daniel Webster’s law office and became one of the wealthiest lawyers in New York. By 1888 he was elderly, and his Madison Avenue house was filling up with paintings by the dead.

They came through Ann O’Delia Diss Debar. She said the spirits of past artists turned blank canvases into finished work in her presence. The New York Tribune reported that Apelles, court painter to Alexander the Great, had sent medallion portraits of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras and Archimedes. Believers and skeptics crowded into the house to see them. Marsh gave her a few hundred dollars, and then the house and everything in it.

Her own history was harder to pin down than the paintings. She said she was the daughter of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and the dancer Lola Montez. She was probably born Ann O’Delia Salomon in Kentucky, and her family said she had run away to France as a girl. She had moved among spiritualists, including Victoria and Tennessee Claflin, and was a disciple of Madame Blavatsky. When a brother surfaced, she denied knowing him. He said he “would not believe her under oath in any circumstances.”

She went to court in April 1888. The New York Times described her as “the noted and notorious Ann O’Delia Diss Debar, of many aliases, a number of husbands, and several prison terms.”

The prosecution’s key witness was David Carvalho. In front of the court he unrolled a sheet of blank paper, went over it with a wet sponge, and brought up a portrait. “It is merely a chemical change,” he said. “It is no trick.” The Evening World ran the quote on April 26.

In June of that year, Diss Debar was convicted of fraud and sentenced to six months on Blackwell’s Island.

📸: Ann O’Delia Diss Debar, 1909. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Bain Collection.

10/15/2026

P.T. Barnum and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln walk into a Manhattan courtroom. Only one of them took the stand.

The year is 1869. The defendant is William Mumler, a spirit photographer with a studio at 630 Broadway. Mumler started out as a Boston jewelry engraver. In 1861 a faint figure turned up on one of his self-portraits. He told friends it looked like a dead cousin. Spiritualists took it from there. He charged about five times the going rate. Spirits were not guaranteed.

New York’s photographers were not amused. Members of the American Institute’s photographic section complained, and the matter reached Mayor A. Oakey Hall. Marshal Joseph Tooker went undercover as “William Bowditch” and bought a portrait. On April 12, Mumler was arrested for “swindling credulous persons by what he called spirit photographs” and held in the Tombs.

The hearing opened April 21 before Judge Joseph Dowling. Elbridge T. Gerry prosecuted. John D. Townsend defended.

Barnum testified for the prosecution. He had commissioned photographer Abraham Bogardus to make a picture of Barnum himself with Lincoln’s ghost at his shoulder, to show how easily such photos could be faked. He also said Mumler had once written him letters admitting fraud. Unfortunately, the letters burned with his museum. Townsend accused him of lying.

The defense had ghosts of its own. One client identified his late wife in his portrait. Another identified her late son. Former judge John Edmonds told the court the spirits were “charmingly pretty.”

Mumler took the stand and denied any trickery. Judge Dowling said he was “morally convinced” of “fraud and deception.” Then he let Mumler go. The prosecution had never shown how the pictures were made.

Mumler left New York owing thousands in legal fees.

10/14/2026

The Kreischer Mansion on Staten Island looks almost suspiciously well suited to October. Built in the nineteenth century with towers, deep porches, elaborate woodwork, and the kind of asymmetry that practically invites a ghost story, it began as something much more ordinary: a monument to industrial success.

Balthasar Kreischer, a German immigrant who made his fortune manufacturing brick, helped build the surrounding community once known as Kreischerville. The surviving mansion was one of two associated with the family and remains an unusually elaborate example of nineteenth-century residential architecture, with enough Gothic atmosphere to have encouraged generations of stories about who, or what, might still be living there.

Some of those stories grew around genuine family tragedy. Edward Kreischer died in 1894, and later accounts connected his death with reports of footsteps, voices, apparitions, strange lights, and objects moving without obvious assistance. The origins of individual tales are difficult to establish, which is often the way with haunted houses. The landmark record is considerably easier to verify than the ghosts.

The mansion eventually returned to the headlines for reasons that were very real. In 2005, Robert McKelvey was murdered on the property by Joseph Young, who was then living there as caretaker. Young was later convicted in federal court of murder in aid of racketeering and related crimes. By that point, the house had acquired an unusual collection of legal identities: private property, designated landmark, crime scene, and evidence in a federal murder prosecution.

Landmark law can tell us why the mansion matters as architecture and restrict what its owners may do with it. Property law can trace who possessed it. Criminal law can establish what happened there in 2005 and hold someone responsible for it. Those are questions courts and public agencies are quite comfortable answering.

Whether Master Kreischer or anyone else remains in residence without appearing on the deed is another matter.

10/13/2026

Grace Brown has never entirely left Big Moose Lake, at least not in local memory. For more than a century, visitors to the Adirondacks have told stories of a young woman seen near the water, walking the shore or appearing through the mist. She is usually identified as Brown, who was twenty years old in 1906 when she traveled into the Adirondacks with Chester Gillette, a fellow worker at a Cortland skirt factory with whom she had been having a relationship. Brown was pregnant, and when the two rented a boat on Big Moose Lake on July 11, only Gillette returned.

Her death produced one of the most closely watched murder trials of the period. Prosecutors argued that Gillette had struck Brown and left her to drown, while Gillette maintained that her death had been accidental. Brown’s letters were read aloud to packed galleries, newspapers covered the proceedings in extraordinary detail, and courtroom artists recorded the scene. A Herkimer County jury convicted Gillette of first-degree murder, the New York Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment, and Gillette was executed at Auburn Prison in 1908.

The case kept moving outward from there. Theodore Dreiser drew heavily on it for his 1925 novel An American Tragedy, which was later adapted for stage and screen, while publishers had already turned the trial itself into popular entertainment by selling pamphlets that paired accounts of the murder with “Grace Brown’s Love Letters.” Brown, who had spent most of her life known only to family, friends, and coworkers, became part of one of the twentieth century’s most famous American crime stories.

That cultural afterlife eventually produced another lawsuit. Brown’s mother sued over a film adaptation of Dreiser’s novel, arguing that its portrayal defamed her. By then, the events at Big Moose Lake had passed through a murder prosecution, an appeal, literature, film, and another round of litigation.

Local folklore added one more layer, with stories that Grace Brown could still be seen near the water where she died. The courts had determined what happened to her, but New York memory was apparently less willing to close the file.

10/07/2026

How do you regulate telling the future or speaking to the dead?

Under Penal Law § 165.35, it is a misdemeanor to charge someone money while claiming or pretending to tell fortunes, use occult powers to answer questions about personal matters, or “exorcise, influence or affect evil spirits or curses.” The statute is unusually expansive. You do not actually have to predict the future to run afoul of New York’s fortune-telling law. A sufficiently entrepreneurial relationship with curses will do.

The law does, however, contain an exception. Fortune telling performed “solely for the purpose of entertainment or amusement” is excluded from the offense. That means New York law has attempted, with admirable confidence, to distinguish between occult powers offered as theater and occult powers offered as a professional service.

That distinction has occasionally required the courts to get involved. In People v. Ballard, decided in 1988, a defendant accepted money while claiming that he could influence evil spirits and curses. The conviction was upheld because the jury found that his promises were knowingly false and made with fraudulent intent. The court rejected the argument that invoking religious belief insulated deliberate fraud from prosecution.

The statute therefore occupies a peculiar corner of New York criminal law. It is concerned less with whether ghosts, curses, or occult powers exist than with what someone may claim about them while collecting a fee. The law is less confident as to the metaphysics allegedly involved, only their mundane expression.

📸: John Sloan’s 1905 etching “Fun, One Cent” captures New Yorkers gathered around penny fortune-telling machines, where a glimpse of the future could be had for the price of a coin. The scene makes a fitting companion to New York’s fortune-telling law: even the supernatural, it seems, has long had a business model.

10/06/2026

The facts, as courts like to say, are unusual.

Helen Ackley owned a Victorian house in Nyack. She also maintained, publicly and repeatedly, that the house was haunted. Over the years, she described its spectral residents in the local press and in Reader’s Digest, and the house eventually appeared on a local walking tour as a “riverfront Victorian (with ghost).” This was all apparently common knowledge in Nyack. It was not common knowledge to Jeffrey Stambovsky, a New York City man who agreed to buy the house for $650,000.

Stambovsky learned about the ghosts before closing and, perhaps feeling that three bedrooms, river views, and several undisclosed incorporeal occupants were more house than he had bargained for, tried to get out of the contract. Ackley refused. Litigation followed.

The resulting 1991 decision, Stambovsky v. Ackley, is one of those rare cases in which the judicial opinion seems to be enjoying itself almost as much as everyone who has cited it since. New York’s Appellate Division held that because Ackley herself had cultivated the house’s supernatural reputation, she could not deny it when the reputation became inconvenient. Thus, for purposes of the lawsuit, the court concluded that the house was “haunted as a matter of law.”

The judges were not finished. Applying ordinary caveat emptor too rigidly, the court observed, might require prudent homebuyers to arrive at inspections accompanied not merely by engineers and exterminators, but by a psychic or medium. It warned attorneys against transactions that might later “come back to haunt” them and suggested that certain precedents deserved to be exorcised.

Beneath the ectoplasm, however, was a real property-law problem. A physical defect can often be discovered through inspection. A notorious reputation, especially one created by the seller herself, may not be so easily detected by an outsider. The court therefore allowed Stambovsky’s claim for rescission to proceed.

Spectral evidence, regrettably, was not deemed admissible.