About
Award-winning author and researcher, Beth M Caruso, has been involved in efforts to educate the public about the Connecticut witch trials through her written work and exoneration efforts. She is the author of the Connecticut Witch Trials Trilogy.
Beth’s first historical novel One of Windsor: The Untold Story of America’s First Witch Hanging (2015), tells the tale of Alice ‘Alse’ Young and the beginnings of New England’s colonial witch trials. The Salty Rose: Alchemists, Witches & A Tapper In New Amsterdam (2019) won the literary prize in Genre Fiction (2020) from IPNE (Independent Publishers of New England) and explores John Winthrop the Younger’s influence on stopping the witch trials in Connecticut, also giving an insider’s view of the takeover of the Dutch colony of New Netherland and the Hartford Witch Panic. Her latest novel, the final sequel to One of Windsor, titled Between Good & Evil: Curse of the Windsor Witch’s Daughter, explores the trauma of Alice’s daughter, Alice Young Beamon, and Windsor’s second witch accusations against Lydia Gilbert.
Since 2015, Beth has been educating the public about the Connecticut witch trials through lectures, articles, and social media. Beth co-authored with historian, Dr. Katherine Hermes, the academic article “Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647-1693.” which appeared in the Fall 2022 edition of Connecticut History Review (61:2).
In 2016, she co-founded CT WITCH Memorial with Tony Griego to raise awareness about the witch trials. She is also a co-founder of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project that helped to pass Resolution HJ 34 in the Connecticut General Assembly in May 2023 to acknowledge Connecticut’s witch trial victims. Beth also serves of the board of End Witch Hunts, an advocacy group seeking recognition and justice for witch trial victims of past and present.
Featured Work
One of Windsor: The Untold Story of America's First Witch Hanging
One of Windsor is the first book in the Connecticut Witch Trial Trilogy.
Alice, a young woman prone to intuitive insights and loyalty to the only family she has ever known, leaves England for the rigid colony of the Massachusetts Bay in 1635 in hopes of reuniting with them again. Finally settling in Windsor, Connecticut, she encounters the rich American wilderness and its inhabitants, her own healing abilities, and the blinding fears of Puritan leaders which collide and set the stage for America’s first witch hanging, her own, on May 26, 1647. This event and Alice’s ties to her beloved family are catalysts that influence Connecticut’s Governor John Winthrop Jr. to halt witchcraft hangings in much later years. Paradoxically, these same ties and the memory of the incidents that led to her accusation become a secret and destructive force behind Cotton Mather’s written commentary on the Salem witch trials of 1692, provoking further witchcraft hysteria in Massachusetts forty-five years after her death.The author uses extensive historical research combined with literary inventions, to bring forth a shocking and passionate narrative theory explaining this tragic and important episode in American history and in the life of Alice (Alse) Young, America's first witch hanging victim.
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- 2020 Independent Publishers of New England Genre Fiction Winner for The Salty Rose: Alchemists, Witches & A Tapper In New Amsterdam
