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1809: Mary Bateman, the Yorkshire Witch

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It’s the bicentennial today of the unnatural passing of the Yorkshire witch.

Mary Bateman ran her fraudulent fortune-telling business under the name “Mrs. Moore”, and had some years’ success separating fools from their money without running afoul of the law.

In fact, she outlived her fatal crime — plying with poisoned puddings a bilked couple, lest they realize their medium was defrauding them — by months, even continuing to leach money off the surviving husband after her ministrations had killed the wife.

Let’s just say she knew how to pick her clientele.

When the sucker finally got wise to the scam,* the jig was up for Mary in a sensational trial. (It’s recounted at length here — and capped by what must have a grimly comic spectacle when Mary attempted to plead her belly and the women in the courtroom bolted for the exits to avoid impaneling on a jury of matrons to adjudge the claim. The judge ordered the doors shut up before his jury pool could escape.)

Three days after conviction, she was hanged at York Castle before a crowd of thousands, who subsequently paid (.pdf) to see her corpse (and to get cured cuts of her skin as charms: even unto death, Mary had ’em swallowing her snake oil).

After execution, Mary Bateman’s body was given over for dissection in Leeds — remaining a curio worthy of public preservation to this day at that city’s Thackray Medical Museum. (Update: The museum reports that Ms. Bateman’s remains were only on loan from Leeds University, and have since been returned.)

* Source of enlightenment? Not the death of his wife, but the fact that magical financial windfalls promised by the Yorkshire witch had failed to materialize after two-plus years of paying her.

On this day..