Guest post written by The Curse of the Cole Women author Marielle Thompson
Marielle Thompson is the author of historically inspired gothic fiction that always features a bit of love and a pinch of magic. She holds two master’s degrees in Romantic and Victorian Literature & Society, as well as Creative Writing, both from the University of Edinburgh. Born on New Hampshire’s Seacoast, she has lived in New York City and Scotland before settling in Switzerland, where she currently lives.
About The Curse of the Cole Women: Three generations of women struggle with a curse unfairly placed on their ancestor in this gothic story of magic, queer love, and mother-daughter relationships, perfect for fans of Spells for Forgetting and Practical Magic.
The unknowing, dark expanse of the ocean seems to be the perfect breeding ground for stories. This is true on New Hampshire’s seacoast, even as the smallest sliver of coastline in the country. Growing up in the area, the darkly fascinating folklore of the region has been a constant for me, and in adulthood I began digging into the history that helped to craft these stories. From there, my own story was born; my latest novel, The Curse of the Cole Women, is a love letter to the folklore of New Hampshire’s coast.
Murder, pirates, buried treasure; The Isles of Shoals truly has it all buried in its long history. The Isles of Shoals is a collection of islands off the coast of both New Hampshire and Maine, currently known as a spot for commerce and tourism. But they were once wild, partially inhabited isles, and the stories from those times have persisted.
There was the historical rumor of buried treasure on multiple islands – still unfound to this day, though many have tried. This treasure, of course, was left by a pirate, fabled to be none other than the infamous Blackbeard. Tales also say that Blackbeard abandoned his bride on the isles, where she can still be heard declaring that he will return for her. A ghostly Woman in White is said to appear on one of the isles come nightfall, and the islands, collectively, boast a mysteriously high number of suspicious shipwrecks – allegedly. More haunting, true happenings occurred on the isles too, including a violent double murder that, still, is repeated as lore every time the isles are mentioned.
It’s no surprise that, from childhood, the isles loomed off the coast, a mysterious and fascinating well of stories. But it wasn’t just murdered innocents and buried treasure; the Isles of Shoals were said to be the final resting place for the area’s very own witch.
It was this “witch”, Goody Cole, that enthralled me as a child. Eunice Cole was a seventeenth century woman tried for witchcraft multiple times, yet was never killed for it. Instead, she died of old age, at which time the locals drove a stake through her heart. And rumors, still, abound about what they did with her body from there. Whether she was left at sea by the Isles of Shoals or in an unmarked earthen grave, the stories can’t agree. But they always said that her spirit lingered, a phantom haunting the local beach.
Growing up, I always demanded to hear the story of Goody Cole. So much so that, as a child, I kept my own list of everything I remembered about her scribbled in a journal. When helping clear out my childhood home decades later, I stumbled upon that journal and my curiosity about the “witch” was reignited.
So, I started to research. And what I found wasn’t an evil old witch that tormented the locals. It was a woman mistreated in her own time and misremembered in ours. And as someone whose books are always inspired by interesting bits of history, I immediately knew there was a story here I wanted to tell. The way that women have been accused of witchcraft — and how those accusations are tied to misogyny, ageism, and fear of female independence — is a recurring fascination for me, and a topic that many of my books explore. When I knew I wanted to write about the stories surrounding Goody Cole, there was no other setting I even considered beyond the isles, so rich with their own tales and, in my mind, quintessential to New Hampshire’s Seacoast.
All of these legends around the Isles of Shoals and Goody Cole appear in the prologue of my latest book, The Curse of the Cole Women. The rest of the story follows a fictional lineage of women descended from Goody Cole that face the same prejudices and challenges the real woman did. I think a lot of the lore integrated into the book will be familiar to locals, but hopefully, the truths of prejudice accused witches faced can be recognized by us all. And, most of all, I hope that when some people think of Goody Cole now, they think of a woman, not a witch.
