The case comes from Saducismus Triumphatus, the collection of witch and apparition stories issued after Joseph Glanvill's death in 1681. It prints a letter from a Mr G. Clarke describing events in the house of Widow Stiff at Welton, near Daventry, in 1658. A Victorian writer on Northamptonshire witchcraft retold it in A Brief History of Witchcraft.
Widow Stiff had two daughters. The younger began vomiting water and kept at it until, in less than three days, she had brought up three gallons, to the great admiration of onlookers. She then vomited a vast quantity of stones and coals, some a quarter of a pound in weight and so large she could hardly get them out of her mouth. This is said to have gone on for about a fortnight.
In the same period the household goods were said to misbehave. Flax would not burn on the fire, bed clothes sprang off the beds, a sack of wheat would not stand up after the room was shut on it, goods in the hall spun about when no one was looking, milk was spilt by an unseen hand and pellets of bread were thrown about. At last, according to the letter, some women who had long been suspected of being witches were examined and one was sent to gaol, where the letter adds that she still played her pranks, but that it was of doubtful credit. Widow Stiff saw and heard very little afterwards.
The account is a seventeenth century letter published by a man who wanted such stories to be true, and it is retold here from a nineteenth century summary. It reads as a poltergeist type disturbance blamed on witchcraft. No names of the suspected women are given in the retelling.
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