File:It's a Great Island (3525383482).jpg

New Castle NH, of which Great Island is a part, and the previous name. A town with a "ghostly" past. Beginning on June 11, 1682, Great Island experienced a supernatural event—a Lithobolia, or "Stone-Throwing Devil," recorded in a 1698 London pamphlet by Richard Chamberlain. On a Sunday night at about 10 o'clock, the tavern home of George Walton, a planter, was showered with stones thrown "by an invisible hand." Windows were smashed, and the spit in the fireplace leapt into the air, then came down with its point stuck in the back log. When a member of the household retrieved the spit, it flew out the window of its own accord. The gate outside was discovered off its hinges. Rev. Cotton Mather took an interest in the phenomenon, reporting that:

"This disturbance continued from day to day; and sometimes a dismal hollow whistling would be heard, and sometimes the trotting and snorting of a horse, but nothing to be seen.... A man was much hurt by some of the stones. He was a Quaker, and suspected that a woman, who charged him with injustice in detaining some land from her did, by witchcraft, occasion these preternatural occurrences. However, at last they came to an end."