The Witch is a dual-timeline gothic thriller set in Woodhaven, Massachusetts, around an old family estate called Pemberton. One timeline follows Julia, a twenty-seven-year-old woman in the present day who returns to the house she has avoided since childhood. The other follows Caroline Eldridge in 1692, a young woman who lived at Pemberton and was supposedly executed as a witch.
Julia arrives at Pemberton because her life has collapsed. She has lost her job tutoring children at a nonprofit, run out of money, and given up her Manhattan apartment. Her father asks her to stay with her grandmother Letitia, whom Julia calls Gram, because Gram is showing signs of dementia. Gram’s sister Ethel is also living at Pemberton, along with the elderly groundskeeper Mick Wheeler. The house is huge, ancient, dirty, and frightening, with a bear-shaped knocker on the front door, a grandfather clock, hidden corners, strange attic stairs called witches’ stairs, and almost no phone reception. Julia sees a flash of peacock-blue in the attic window before she even enters, though nobody else seems to be up there.
From the beginning, Pemberton feels wrong. Gram mistakes Julia for several different people: Ethel, Barbara, Celia. In Julia’s room, there is an antique vanity with coral-blue combs arranged on it. Gram panics when Julia tries to touch them, saying “she” does not like the combs moved. Julia soon learns from Ethel that the room once belonged to Caroline Eldridge, Archibald Eldridge’s second wife, who was burned for witchcraft in 1692 and buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the backyard. Archie later married Molly Howe, the servant in the house, and Archie and Molly became Julia’s respected ancestors.
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