Witches are a staple of Halloween, and donning a pointy hat to become a witch is the classic I-forgot-to-get-a-costume-for-this-party maneuver. Witches have been treated fairly kindly by comparison to other staples of the horror genre, and this raises the question: did witches ever really belong in that pantheon in the first place?

While fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel” and movies like The Blair Witch Project present terrifying witches, modern cinema has offered just as many comical, sympathetic, and heroic witches. With their hexes on neighbors, deals with demons, and periodic eating of children, witches offer plenty of scares, but there’s also a long history of neutral and good witches, whether in folktales or in modern media like Bewitched, Charmed, Harry Potter, and Sabrina: the Teenage Witch. Even The Wizard of Oz, with its iconic Wicked Witch of the West (arguably the definitive “scary witch”), still included a good witch, and the film’s green-skinned antagonist later got sympathetic makeovers in both Wicked and Oz the Great and Powerful. While other creatures like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster only get the occasional sympathetic turn, witches have a fairly consistent positive presence in media, but why?

Historically, witches were a frequent scapegoat in European and late Puritan society. In those eras, unexplained natural phenomena (drought, illness, livestock disease, etc.) led superstitious people to suspect their neighbors might be secret witches who were magically inflicting harm on them. The result was an infamous series of witch, warlock, and werewolf trials that tragically ended thousands of lives over the centuries. (And yes, though less famous, werewolf trials were a thing. More on that in next year’s Halloween series.) Of course, the charges against them were famously false, giving us the term “witch hunt” to describe a baseless investigation. The more we delve into the medieval European and later Puritan beliefs about witches, the more sympathetic those falsely-accused “witches” become, and modern media reflects this by regularly casting witches in a positive light.

Looking back on the historical witch hunts, there’s a consistent theme: ignorant people using horrific means to blame innocent women for natural phenomena. So many of the supposed offenders had done nothing wrong, and their only crimes were being women in an era of paranoia. In truth, being accused of witchcraft is a far scarier matter than being bewitched.

And that’s why Puritans are scary (while so many witches aren’t).