Lithobolia: The Stone-Throwing Devil

Hey Coastal,

Ten years before Salem, something happened on a small island off the New Hampshire coast that nobody has ever fully explained. Stones fell out of clear sky onto a tavern roof. A fireplace tool flew across a room on its own. A colonial official woke up to an 8.5-pound rock coming through his bedroom wall.

He wrote it all down. What he left out, or maybe just didn't see, is the far more interesting story sitting right underneath it.

In the summer of 1682, a wealthy tavern owner named George Walton lived on Great Island, now New Castle, New Hampshire, at the mouth of the Piscataqua River. Walton was a Quaker, unusually rich for the area, and hosted colonial officials at his tavern alongside the fishermen his more devout neighbors considered rowdy company.

On June 11, 1682, according to a firsthand account written by one of those officials, stones began falling on Walton's house. Not thrown by any visible hand. Just falling, against the roof and walls, witnessed by Walton and others standing nearby in plain moonlight, with no one to be seen anywhere.

It didn't stop.

The man who documented it was Richard Chamberlain, secretary to New Hampshire's royal governor, who happened to be staying at Walton's tavern that summer. Chamberlain wrote in the style of a sworn journal, describing events over roughly three months: stones and bricks hurled across the property, tools and household items reportedly vanishing and reappearing, a fireplace spit that leapt into the air and later flew out a window entirely on its own. On June 28, stones reportedly fell on the family as they sat down to supper, breaking the table.

Chamberlain himself wasn't spared. He described being woken in his own room by a tremendous crash against the thin wall, and finding an 8.5-pound stone had struck it. A gate outside was found torn clean off its hinges.

In 1698, sixteen years after it all supposedly happened, Chamberlain published the full account in London under the title Lithobolia: or, the Stone-Throwing Devil. But he wasn't actually first. In 1684, just two years after the events, the prominent Boston minister Increase Mather had already written about them in his own book, meaning the story was circulating among New England's clergy more than a decade before Chamberlain's version ever reached print.

Here's where this stops being a simple ghost story.

At the exact moment the stones started falling, George Walton was in the middle of a bitter land dispute with a neighbor, a widow named Hannah Jones. Walton had received a piece of land through a deeply controversial claims process run by a man named Robert Mason, whose attempts to seize property from settlers who'd farmed it for decades had the entire colony in an uproar. Jones believed the land was rightfully hers. According to Chamberlain's own account, she'd told Walton, with real bitterness, that he "should never quietly enjoy that piece of ground."

That line mattered more than it might sound like it should. Jones's own mother had already been accused of witchcraft multiple times over the preceding decades, and won every single case. When the stones started falling on Walton's property, he didn't hesitate. He publicly accused Hannah Jones of witchcraft. She accused him right back of being a wizard.

But the land dispute wasn't the only thing working against Walton. He was a Quaker in a colony run by Puritans who viewed that faith with real suspicion. He employed Native American servants at a moment of raw regional tension, only a handful of years removed from King Philip's War. And Chamberlain, the very man who documented and published the whole affair, wasn't some neutral outsider. He was a close political ally of Robert Mason, the same land claimant whose scheme was making Walton, and by extension anyone connected to him, deeply unpopular across the colony.

We're not going to tell you which of these was the real cause. Historians who've spent entire books on this case haven't settled it either. What we can tell you is that a man surrounded by religious prejudice, a genuine property feud, and a raging political scandal had, by any account, an unusually large number of real, human reasons for things to start going wrong around him, whether or not a single stone was ever actually thrown by anything supernatural at all.

Walton reportedly carried the injuries from that summer for the rest of his life, according to some retellings, though this dossier could not independently confirm the extent of that claim. The stone-throwing, whatever its true cause, apparently stopped as mysteriously as it started. New Hampshire's political turmoil over the Mason land claims continued for years afterward. And a decade later, in 1692, an entire colony a hundred miles south would descend into the far more famous and far more lethal panic we all actually remember.

Nobody at Salem ever mentioned Great Island by name. But the fears that made both stories possible, suspicion of outsiders, land grudges curdling into accusations of witchcraft, a society primed to believe the worst about its neighbors, were already fully formed a decade earlier, on a small island most people have never heard of.

Richard Chamberlain wasn't the only person in colonial New England reporting stones falling from nowhere.

Around the same general period, similar "lithoboly" incidents, stone-throwing blamed on unseen or supernatural forces, were reported elsewhere across the region, including in Maine and Connecticut. A minister in Kittery, Maine, reportedly traveled to consult directly with Increase Mather about a similar case happening in his own community.

It's a detail worth sitting with. This wasn't one isolated, bizarre event on one unlucky island. It was part of a wider pattern of anxiety running through New England in the years before Salem, communities under real social and political strain, reaching for a supernatural explanation for tensions that, in at least one well-documented case, had a much more human set of causes sitting in plain sight the whole time.

A colony on the edge of political collapse. A land dispute between two people who both, eventually, accused each other of witchcraft. A politically interested witness writing the only surviving account. And, somewhere underneath all of it, three months of stones nobody has ever fully explained.

We don't know what really happened on Great Island in the summer of 1682. We do know it's a much better story once you stop pretending the ghost is the only interesting part of it.

Until Next Tide,

Hey Coastal

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