Chilling Adventures of Sabrina's Greendale 13, Explained

CBR

By Kevin Melrose

Published Oct 27, 2018

The sad story of some of Greendale's earliest witches looms large on Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and comes back to haunt the town.

WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Season 1, streaming now on Netflix.

Much of Greendale's supernatural past remains hidden from the mortal population of the quirky blue-collar burg, but there's one sorrowful chapter that's known to everyone of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: the Greendale 13.

We're introduced to the town's history in dribs and drabs throughout the first season of the Netflix drama, beginning in the premiere, as as Baxter High teacher Miss Wardwell (Michelle Gomez) tells the strange girl she nearly struck with her car about the witch hunt that occurred in Greendale in 1692. While nowhere near as famous as the witch trials held that same year in Salem, Massachusetts, it nevertheless left a deep mark on the town and its inhabitants that extends into the present.

In Miss Wardwell's telling, 13 witches were hanged in the forest, and their angry spirits have haunted those woods ever since. It would be terrible enough if the story were that simple, but of course, it's not.

The Hanging Tree, where the 13 met their end, looms large in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, as the site of the Dark Baptism intended to welcome Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) into the coven, the Church of Night, and as a haunting, recurring element in the teen's visions. It's also used by Sabrina's rivals, the Weird Sisters, in their deadly hazing rites at the Academy of Unseen Arts, and plays a central role in the season finale.

However, while the Greendale 13 are spoken of with reverence by members of the Church of Night, we learn over the course of the season that it wasn't always that way. Those early witches fled to Greendale from Scotland to escape persecution, ferried across the Atlantic by the pirate Dorothea Putnam, ancestor of Sabrina's friend Susie (Lachlan Watson), when no one else would help them. But instead of peace in Greendale, they found fear, and worse, witch hunters -- the ancestors of Sabrina's boyfriend Harvey Kinkle (Ross Lynch).

The Greendale 13 were imprisoned and tortured, in what's now known as the Witch's Cell, and then hanged in the woods. It was Dorothea who cut their bodies down from the tree, and buried them on the Putnam farm. As sad as that is, the tale gets worse: As we learn in the finale, the other witches in the Church of Night could have united and saved the 13. But instead, as Zelda Spellman (Miranda Otto) relates, they were sacrificed in hopes of appeasing the blood lust of the mortals, for the greater good of the coven. Those who remained "burned their poppets and buried their cauldrons," and went into hiding.

And as we see in the season finale, the actions of those mortals and witches more than three centuries ago nearly doom their Greendale descendants.

Available now on Netflix, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina stars Kiernan Shipka as Sabrina Spellman, Ross Lynch as Harvey Kinkle, Michelle Gomez as Mary Wardwell/Madam Satan, Jaz Sinclair as Rosalind Walker, Chance Perdomo as Ambrose Spellman, Lucy Davis as Hilda Spellman, Miranda Otto as Zelda Spellman and Richard Coyle as Father Blackwood.