Grace White was born around 1660, the daughter of John White, a carpenter and farmer of Scottish descent, and his English-born wife Susan. She grew up in Pungo, a rural corner of what is now Virginia Beach, and married James Sherwood, a small-farm landowner, in April 1680 at Lynnhaven Parish Church. Her father gave them land as a wedding gift and left them the rest of his farm when he died in 1681. The Sherwoods were poor, living among other small landholders in an area with no wealthy planter class to set social norms. Grace raised three sons -- John, James, and Richard -- tended her farm, grew her own herbs for healing people and animals, and served as a midwife. She wore trousers instead of a dress while working, a practical choice that made her conspicuous. When James died in 1701, Grace inherited his property and continued farming alone. Her biographer Belinda Nash has argued that neighbors were jealous of Sherwood and that the witchcraft accusations were partly an attempt to seize her land.

The trouble started in 1697 when Richard Capps claimed Sherwood had cast a spell that killed his bull. The court dismissed it by mutual agreement, and the Sherwoods sued Capps for defamation. The following year, neighbor John Gisburne accused her of enchanting his pigs and cotton crop. Then Elizabeth Barnes alleged that Sherwood had transformed into a black cat, entered her home, jumped over her bed, whipped her, and escaped through the keyhole. Each time, Sherwood and her husband fought back with slander suits -- and each time they lost, paying court costs for the privilege. By the early 1700s, as one historian noted, "Princess Anne County had obviously grown tired of Mrs. Sherwood as a general nuisance." In 1705, Sherwood got into a physical fight with neighbor Elizabeth Hill and won a rare legal victory: twenty shillings in damages for assault and battery. The Hills responded in January 1706 by accusing Grace of witchcraft once more -- this time claiming she had bewitched Elizabeth Hill into having a miscarriage.

The courts tried everything to avoid a verdict. Colonial authorities in Williamsburg called the charge too vague. The local Princess Anne justices attempted to empanel juries of women to search Sherwood's home for wax figures and her body for devil's marks; the jurors refused to cooperate. Eventually, a panel of twelve "ancient and knowing women" examined Sherwood and found two marks "not like theirs or like those of any other woman" -- and the forewoman was Elizabeth Barnes, the same neighbor who had accused Sherwood years earlier. On July 10, 1706, with Sherwood's consent, the court ordered a trial by ducking. At about ten in the morning, she was taken down a dirt lane to the mouth of the Lynnhaven River, where crowds from across the colony gathered shouting "Duck the witch!" Bound cross-body -- right thumb to left big toe, left thumb to right big toe -- she was pushed from a boat. She floated. The sheriff tied a Bible around her neck, and she sank, but she untied herself and surfaced again. Just before the ducking, under clear skies, Sherwood reportedly told the crowd: "Before this day be through you will all get a worse ducking than I." As she was pulled from the water, a downpour broke over the spectators.

Grace Sherwood spent up to seven years and nine months in jail. No record of a second trial exists; the charge may have been quietly dismissed. By 1714, she had recovered her property with the help of Virginia Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood and paid back taxes on her land along Muddy Creek. She lived out her remaining years farming quietly, dying around age 80 in 1740. Her will left five shillings each to sons James and Richard and everything else to her eldest, John. Local legend held that after death, her sons placed her body by the fireplace, a wind roared down the chimney, and she vanished in the embers, leaving only a cloven hoofprint. The stories spawned such fear that locals killed every cat they could find -- possibly triggering the rat infestation recorded in Princess Anne County in 1743. It took 300 years for the record to be set straight. On July 10, 2006, Governor Tim Kaine granted Grace Sherwood an informal pardon to "officially restore the good name" of the Witch of Pungo. A statue of her now stands near Sentara Bayside Hospital in Virginia Beach, sculpted with a raccoon at her side and a basket of rosemary in her arms -- a healer, finally recognized.