Pyewacket
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Pyewacket was one of the familiar spirits of a witch detected by the "witchfinder general" Matthew Hopkins in March 1644 in the town of Maningtree, Essex, UK. Hopkins claimed he spied on the witches as they held their meeting close by his house, and heard them mention the name of a local woman. She was arrested and deprived of sleep for four nights, at the end of which she confessed and called out the names of her familiars, describing the forms in which they should appear. They were:
Holt "who came in like a white kittling"
Farmara "who came in like a fat spaniel without any legs at all"
Vinegar Tom "who was like a long-legg'd Greyhound, with an head like an Oxe"
Sacke and Sugar "like a black Rabbet"
Newes "like a Polecat"
Ilemauzer, Pyewacket, Pecke in the Crowne and Griezzel Greedigutt, described as imps
Hopkins says he and nine other witnesses saw the first five of these, which appeared in the forms described by the witch. Only the first of these was in the form of a cat; the next two were dogs, and the others were a black rabbit and a polecat—so Pyewacket was presumably not a cat's name. As for the other familiars, Hopkins says only that they were such that "no mortall could invent." The incident is described in Hopkins's pamphlet "The Discovery of Witches" (1647).
Pyewacket is also the name of a children's book, written by Rosemary Weir. First published in 1967, this centers around the destruction of a series of row houses from the viewpoint(s) of a resilient alley cat (Pyewacket) and his friends that stay on the property and adapt to a new life.
In the movie Bell, Book, and Candle Gillian Holroyd's cat is named Pyewacket, but the cat itself was a Siamese cat, not a black cat — the type most commonly associated with witches. The name has become a fairly popular one for cats because of this movie, but relatively few know its origin.
Pyewacket is also the current name of a MaxZ86 class sailing yacht commissioned in 2004 by Roy Disney, former CEO of the Walt Disney Corporation, designed by Reichel-Pugh along with an identical sister ship named the "Morning Glory," and built in the Cooksons shipyard in Auckland, New Zealand. The boat is a modern turbo sled, equipped with a hydraulically equipped canting keel which allows it to shift its keel-ballast during full sail in order to reach previously unbelievable speeds. The boat was recently donated to Orange Coast College in hopes of a full season of record breaking racing by amateur student sailors.
