re: #105 A Three Hour Tour

Pungo! (*hums opening of “Green Eyed Lady*)

I’m from Chesapeake (Western Branch borough), incorporated in 1963 from Norfolk County joining the city of South Norfolk to prevent annexation from the city of Portsmouth.

Also, the Witch of Pungo (goes to the Virginia History Museum).

Grace Sherwood was the only person convicted of witchcraft in Virginia.

On July 10, 1706, a forty-six-year-old Princess Anne County woman named Grace Sherwood faced an unusual legal procedure. Her hands were tied and she was about to be thrown from a boat into a river as a test to see if she was a witch. For several years neighbors talked of how the midwife, healer, and widowed mother of three had ruined crops, killed livestock, and conjured up storms. Then in January of 1706 Luke Hill formally accused Sherwood of witchcraft. The case passed from the county court to the attorney general of Virginia without any judgment. Finally, authorities in Princess Anne County ordered that the accused be “ducked” in consecrated water to determine her guilt or innocence. By this ordeal, if she sank she would be declared innocent, but if she floated her identity as a witch would be proven. A spot in the Lynnhaven River, off what is today known as Witchduck Point, was chosen, and Grace Sherwood was bound and thrown from a boat. She managed to untie herself and rise to the surface, proving to those present that she was a witch. As punishment for her crime, Grace Sherwood spent seven years in jail. After her release the so-called “witch of Pungo” returned to her home and lived peacefully until her death around the age of eighty.

In 2006, Gov. Tim Kaine gave her a posthumous pardon three hundred years to the day for her conviction of witchcraft.

He sent a letter of the pardon to Mayor Meyera Obendorf of Virginia Beach, which she read aloud during a reënactment of Ms. Sherwood’s witch ducking.

(Ms. Sherwood is the reason Witchduck Road is named the way it is. That is the alleged route she was taken to be ducked for her trial as a witch.)