According to his biographers, Nathaniel Hawthorne once discovered that he had an ancestor, a man named John Hathorne, who had been a judge in the Salem Witch Trials. Draconian even by the standards of the 1690s, Hathorne was known for berating innocent women on the stand until they confessed to so-called “Satanic” transgressions, which quickly led to their execution by hanging. Unlike some of the Salem judges, he never showed remorse. Horrified by the blood on his great-great-grandfather’s hands, the novelist changed his surname, adding the extra “w” to distance himself, and he made Hathorne the template for his villains in works like “Young Goodman Brown” and The House of the Seven Gables. By all accounts, the knowledge haunted him throughout his life.

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