The Ghost of the Witchfinder General: From 17th-Century Hysteria to Modern-Day Hunts

17th Century Witch Hunter Matthew Hopkins

The year was 1500. In Copenhagen, a young woman named Merona was tied to a stake. The accusers called her a witch, and her punishment was fire. This tragic event was not an isolated act of medieval brutality; it was the kindling for a fever that would sweep across Europe. It was the beginning of a contagion of fear, a paranoid hunt for the "other" that would stain the centuries to come. My book Labyrinth of Shadows: The Witch's Rebirth Part I inception began with this part of history.

That fever found its most infamous champion in England over a hundred years later. As religious upheaval and civil war tore at the fabric of society, a new kind of terror emerged from the shadows of East Anglia. His name was Matthew Hopkins, a lawyer who, with chilling ambition, anointed himself the Witchfinder General.

Hopkins was not a man of justice, but a merchant of fear. Alongside his assistant John Stearne, he began his crusade in 1645, turning communities against themselves. He didn’t need evidence; he needed suspicion. He named as many as 300 women as witches, preying on the most vulnerable—the poor, the elderly, the social outcasts. Under statutes born of paranoia and fueled by Hopkins’s own reign of terror, roughly 500 people were executed. Those were different times, we tell ourselves. We are enlightened now. We would never hunt our neighbors based on fear and suspicion.

But history almost always repeats itself. Sometimes, it just dons a new uniform.

The name Matthew Hopkins fills me with a particular dread, not just for the historical horror he represents, but because his spirit feels chillingly reincarnated in our own time. He reminds me of a present-day hunter, one who will stop at nothing to remove anybody he deems not a citizen. Just as those accused of witchcraft were innocent, so too are many American citizens—young and old—being torn from their homes, half-dressed, and taken to unknown places to await a decision on their fate.

This modern-day reign of terror is presented as a necessity. We are told to fear the knock on the door, just as the people of East Anglia were told to fear the old woman living alone. We are told to judge them, to be afraid. "They are murderers, rapists, and they deserve to be removed." The script is tragically familiar. It is the same playbook used by Hopkins: dehumanize the target, stoke the flames of paranoia, and present the hunt as a righteous act of purification.

Many immigrants who come to this country, much like the wrongly accused in Salem, are simply innocent and hardworking people. They come seeking refuge, seeking opportunity, seeking a better life, only to be met with punishment. They become the scapegoats for our anxieties, the witches of our age.

What have we become?

For generations, America offered a different answer to that question. We proclaimed it to the world in the bronze words of Emma Lazarus, sonneted on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Those words were a covenant. A promise. But today, as families are hunted and doors are kicked in, that promise feels like a ghost. There is no lamp beside the golden door. Not for those who fled violence and poverty, only to find a new kind of terror. Those who came to America for a better life will now be hunted much like the witches of old.

The Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins is long gone, his body turned to dust. But I fear his method, his mindset, his cold and calculated cruelty, has been reborn. It has been reincarnated into the Alien Hunter, a figure far worse than any before, armed not with a "pricking needle" but with the power of the state. The fires are different now, but the fear is the same.

The Great UNRAVELING HAS BEGUN.