Last year around this time, my neighbor stretched synthetic cobwebs among the branches of her tree. Against this creepy backdrop, she hung a broomstick and a badly made female figure, clearly a witch. The sight made me wince.

How did we evolve to find this display amusing? Our forebears did hang women from trees. I imagine the devastation a time-traveler might feel as she realizes that the appalling circumstances of her death are crudely pantomimed each October.

I may take this a little more personally than some. My own ancestor, Mary Bliss Parsons, faced the accusation of witchcraft in Massachusetts, three decades before the Salem hysteria. The court acquitted her, but neighbors pointed the finger at her a second time, 18 years later. I imagine she never relaxed in the interim, never felt completely exonerated.

When you meet a fellow resident in the narrow lane, and that person averts their eyes because they believe you embraced the Devil himself, you can never again experience community and neighborliness in the same way.

Surprisingly, the courts set Parsons free a second time.

Our stereotype of those days when witchcraft was a common accusation is that once someone was accused, they were sure to hang. But the magistrates were far more reasonable than we might expect, even while living in a world where they accepted that witchcraft existed.

The courts freed more than a quarter of the people accused of witchcraft in 17th century New England, according to "Entertaining Satan" by John Putnam Demos.

Due to luck or power, my ancestor walked past the tree that might have hanged her. Twice.

And what were the charges against her?

She magically killed livestock and found hidden keys. She caused a young boy to hurt his knee when he fell in the woods and made his sickly newborn brother give up on life and die.

At her second trial, a heartbroken widower charged Parsons for the death of his new wife. The wife's brother was the boy whose knee had been injured 18 years ago. A mere slip of a girl at the time of the first trial, her membership in such a family made her eligible for Mary's supposed still-burning anger.

I first learned about Parsons while I was writing a novel about witchcraft, set not in Parsons's New England but in medieval Germany. My mother sent me an e-mail with a link to a Web site about Parsons.

The timing was uncanny. Deep in research on this very topic, I discovered that my 11-greats grandmother had lived it. Writing the novel became a much more personal experience: Instead of fictional townspeople, I thought of my own ancestor fearing that she'd be strung up on a rope for neighbors' misfortunes she couldn't control.

Scholars argue about how many deaths occurred during Europe's 400-year witch hunt. In "The Da Vinci Code," Dan Brown caused great controversy when he put the number at five million, describing it as a relentless effort by the Roman Catholic Church to subjugate women.

Most likely, far fewer died, but this at a time when Europe's population was miniscule and working to repopulate from the cyclical scourges of the Black Death. We do know that two towns in Germany systematically slaughtered their women until only one per town remained.

How much time must go by before horrific tortures and murders ripen enough for children's amusement?

Author James Morrow, in his novel "The Last Witchfinder," slyly and devastatingly mocks Salem, Mass., annual Haunted Happenings. This month-long "festival" capitalizes on the famous witch trials where 19 people hanged at Gallows Hill, one was pressed to death with rocks on his chest and five perished in prison awaiting trial. The Haunting Happenings Web site promises "a month of fun for the entire family."

Today, parts of Africa still persecute witches, with attempted lynchings in Congo as recently as April.

In the western world, it's hard to imagine someone could creep out at night, meet up with Satan and bargain with him, or that she might straddle a broomstick and ride it into the moonlit sky. It's harder still to imagine that that belief was so forceful that it led people to testify against each other, knowing the result could be death.

Next Halloween, please consider the women and men of the past who were not of green tint, with bulbous wart-ridden noses, cackling maniacally while riding a broomstick straight into a tree (another "funny" decoration where the witch breaks her skull in an accident that would not be survivable if real) but who suffered incredibly for the same word: witch.

Erika Mailman, a 1991 Colby graduate, lives in Gilroy, Calif., and is the author of "The Witch's Trinity," a novel containing a detailed afterward about Mary Bliss Parsons. www.erikamailman.com.