S4: E8 - True crime Style Witch Trial Story of Bridget Bishop - The 'First Witch Execution' in Salem

In 1692, Bridget Bishop became the first person executed during the infamous Salem Witch Trials. In this episode of The Witchy Woo Podcast, we travel back to colonial Massachusetts to uncover the story of Bridget Bishop, the woman whose death would ignite one of the most notorious witch hunts in history.

Was she truly practising witchcraft, or was she simply an outspoken, unconventional woman living in a society determined to control female behaviour?

Together, we’ll explore the fear, superstition, religious extremism, misogyny and mass hysteria that fuelled the Salem Witch Trials, as well as the accusations, testimonies and events that ultimately led to Bridget’s execution.

We’ll uncover how a woman became a scapegoat, why she was targeted, and what her story reveals about power, conformity and the dangers of collective fear. 

If you love true crime, dark history, witch trial stories, Salem Witch Trials history, women’s history and the hidden roots of the witch wound, this episode is for you!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Witchery Podcast. And today we are having one of our true crime star witch trial stories. And this witch trial story is all about Bridget Bishop. Now this is the first time on the Witchery Podcast that we are venturing across the pond and talking about a case within Salem. So buckle up and let's get into today's case. So for centuries, Bridget Bishop was remembered as the first person who was executed during the Salem witch trials. She was hanged on the tenth of june sixteen ninety two. But beneath that brutal fact was of course the real woman who had already lived through so much grief, through different marriages, through violence, through gossip, through different suspicion and the suffocating judgment of her community that seemed to have already made up their minds and decided that she was this bad person long before she ever stood in court. So the difficult thing with Bridget's story is that we don't have the intimate details. Of course, with all of these stories, they date back so many centuries that there aren't strict documents. But let's go through what we do have. So whilst we don't have her, you know, her childhood memories, her private thoughts, you know, her version of this event, of course, as you know on this podcast, we love to bring a voice to these predominantly women who were persecuted, who suffered at the hands of the patriarchy, that were called out for being witches, for any form of being different. We don't know the details that in my mind matter the most. And Bridget was born Bridget Playfer. Again, we don't know the exact date of birth, but it was probably mid to late 1630s in Norwich in England, and her early life wasn't well documented, which, as we've already said, is so often in this case, especially with women, especially with women who weren't born into money or power. So at some point, Bridget married Samuel Wasselby. I think that's how you say it, but the surname was recorded with different spellings as was quite common in those times. So we don't know the exact spelling, but it looks like Wasselby or something similar. And they had at least one child in England who unfortunately died when they were young, and when Bridget later came to New England, she was carrying another child from that same marriage, and that baby unfortunately also died in infancy in Massachusetts, and by then her husband Samuel had already passed. So before she was ever accused of witchcraft, Bridget had already been a wife, a widow, and a grieving mother to two little babies. And when we look back at women accused of witchcraft, it's really easy to kind of flatten them into symbols, you know, the witch, the victim, the rebel, the difficult woman, the accused, the executed. Which is why I think it's so important to share as much about their life as we possibly can. Because none of us, of course, as we all know, none of us are one thing. We are not one label. We our identity isn't shaped by one thing about us. But anyway, in 1666, Bridget married her second husband, and he was called Thomas Oliver, and he was a widower from Norwich who had also settled down in Salem Town. They lived on a property around what is now Washington Street with orchards nearby, and together they had a daughter named Christian. Now Thomas already had grown children from his previous marriage, which means that Bridget entered into a family. So she also had stepchildren that were Thomas' children. And understandably, with that, there were some tensions, there were different expectations that were placed on different people, and of course, resentments that come with mixing families together. And her marriage to Thomas was clearly very troubled. And unfortunately, in 1678, Bridget and Thomas were both punished after they were accused of fighting and name calling on the Sabbath. And the punishment was public humiliation. Bridget was also sentenced to stand gagged in the marketplace, and the following year in 1679, they were both sentenced to be whipped for fighting. So there are also historical references suggesting that Bridget's face was sometimes battered during her marriage with Thomas, which gives quite a different feeling to the idea that she was simply, you know, a quarrelsome woman who caused loads of trouble wherever she went. And perhaps she did fight or answer back or, you know, could have been difficult times or angry or reactive. Or perhaps she was a woman living inside a violent marriage in a world where her pain would be punished alongside the man who hurt her. And Thomas Oliver died in 1679 without leaving a will, and soon after Bridget became vulnerable in a way that many women became vulnerable in that period, because property, widowhood, inheritance, independence could make a woman visible in all of the wrong ways. So in 1680, Bridget was accused of witchcraft for the first time. And this earlier accusation appears to have been tied to claims made by Juan, who was an enslaved man belonging to John Ingersoll, who said that Bridget's Spectre had pinched him, stolen eggs, and frightened horses. And there was also gossip around the deaths of her husbands, with some suggesting that she had somehow caused them. And there's no record that Bridget was punished for this in 1680, but the damage would have already been done. So once a woman had been called a witch, even if nothing was proven, the word had a way of clinging to her. And you can just imagine the fear, the horror that she must have been feeling at that time. Already known as a criminal and a troublemaker, she now had the label of a witch as well. And by around 1685, Bridget had married for a third time, and this time was to Edward Bishop, a Sawyer. She continued living on the property connected to her second husband, Thomas Oliver, because she had lifetime rights to it, though the property was officially held by Edward. This is one of the important details in Bridget's story because for a long time she was often portrayed as a tavern keeping, scandalous, brightly dressed woman who ran drinking and gambling spaces, who flirted with men, who wore bold clothing and offended Puritan respectability at every turn. And modern historians have questioned this version of her story because it seems likely that some of those details were confused with another woman, Sarah Bishop, who also appears in Salem's Records. And that doesn't mean that Bridget was meek or quiet or that she fitted neatly into what Salem expected a woman to be, but it does mean that we have to be careful to not keep repeating the gossip that helped to destroy her. Obviously, especially on this podcast, our mission is to share the stories of women who lost their voices and unfortunately lost their lives as well. And most of the time it was absolutely not their fault. And well no, all of the time. And for this specific episode, we are purely sticking to Bridget Bishop's story, and perhaps we should do one on the whole of Salem. It would probably be a very long episode. But let me know, reach out to me, let me know if this is something that you would be interested in to have perhaps like a few-part series on the Salem witch trials. That could possibly be an idea. Just thinking aside there, just thinking. So in January of that year of 1692, several girls in Salem Village began having fits and claiming that unseen forces were hurting them. And by February those accusations were being made, and in the months that followed, fear spread like wildfire. And on the sixteenth of April 1692, Bridget Bishop and Mary Warren were newly accused by the afflicted girls, and two days later formal complaints were filed against Bridget, Mary Warren, Giles Corey and Abigail Hobbes. The people claiming to be tormented included Anne Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, and Elizabeth Hubbard. Bridget was arrested on the nineteenth of April by Salem Marshal George Herrick and taken to Ingersoll's Ordinary in Salem Village, where examinations were being held, and the moment that she entered these afflicted girls fell into fits, and this was treated not as theatre as trauma, suggestion, panic, manipulation, illness, but as evidence that they were witches. So Judge John Hawthorne questioned her from the assumption that she must be guilty because of these young girls' reaction, and he asked what witchcraft she was involved in, and Bridget answered by calling the people present to witness that she was clear. She denied even knowing the afflicted girls. She denied ever hurting them. She denied having anything to do with the devil when she was accused of this witchcraft and of hurting her husband, of bewitching him to death, and she said she knew nothing of it. At one point she said I am innocent to a witch. I know not what a witch is. And Hawthorne twisted this against her, asking how she could know what was not a witch if she didn't know what a witch was. And it's one of those exchanges that makes your stomach turn because you can feel that trap closing in around her. And there was no right answer, you know, if she denied it, they treated the denial as deception. If she became angry, they treated the anger as guilt. If she moved her head, her eyes, or any part of her body, the afflicted reacted, those girls reacted to it, and the movement itself became evidence of witchcraft in court. If she stood firm, she was threatening. If she collapsed, perhaps they would have called it confession, but Bridget kept denying it. And she was sent to Salem Jail to await trial held only a short distance from her own home where she lived. And on the twenty seventh of may sixteen ninety two, Governor William Phipps established the Court of Oyer and Termina, and that was a special court that was created to hear witchcraft cases. And on the 2nd of June, Bridget Bishop became the first person tried before that new court. And this was the beginning of the legal machinery that would turn accusation, unfortunately, into execution. And it's thought that Bridget may have been tried first because the court believed that she would be the easiest person to convict. You know, she had been accused before she had a reputation, she had old gossip that was attached to her name. She wasn't the sweet, the soft, the socially protected woman who everyone would rush to defend. She was vulnerable because it was already decided that she was suspicious. And the charges against her claimed that she had used witchcraft and sorcery to hurt, torture, afflict, waste, consume, and torment the afflicted girls, including Mercy Lewis, Abigail Williams, Elizabeth Hubbard, and Anne Putnam. And the evidence against her was a mixture of spectral claims, old grudges, neighborhood stories, and physical superstition. And people claimed that her apparition had appeared to them. They claimed that she had tormented them through the night. And John and William Bly testified that around seven years earlier while helping take down a cellar wall in a house that Bridget had previously lived in, they had found poppets made from rag and hog bristles stuck with headless pins. And Samuel Shattock, a dyer, claimed Bridget had bought him small pieces of lace to dye, which he believed were too small for ordinary use and might have been used intended for poppets. And if any of you are wondering what poppets are, from my understanding they are like voodoo dolls, so dolls that can be used to curse people. So others claimed that she had harmed children, that she had bewitched animals, afflicted people from a distance, and caused strange events simply by looking at things. A physical examination was also carried out on Bridget and several of the other accused women in Salem, and that took place on the 2nd of June. And in that world, marks on the body could be interpreted as a witch's mark, and women's bodies were searched for signs that could be used against them. So even her body wasn't allowed to belong to her. And when we say witches marks, this could be anything like a mole, a freckle, you know, a war, a scar of some kind. And these were said to be markings from the devil where the devil would suckle on this spot or whatever it was, and that's how the witches in their mind, and I'm using my air quotes again, the witches, would pay the devil with their blood. So one of the most horrifying things about Bridget's trial is that so much of this so-called evidence came from stories that had been lying around about her for years, and we all know how things escalate, how when a story gets told it gets exaggerated time after time, and eventually the story becomes something completely different to what it was when it first started out. And yet Bridget didn't ever confess. And this is really important because during the Salem trials, confessions often saved lives. You know, at least even if it didn't save lives long term, it did save them temporarily. And those who confessed could be used to validate the court's belief that there was, you know, a diabolical conspiracy that was at work. And a confession gave the judges exactly what they wanted. But Bridget gave them nothing. She denied all of the charges and she maintained her innocence throughout. She wouldn't make herself guilty just to make them feel comfortable, and so she was convicted really quickly. And on the tenth of june sixteen ninety two, Sheriff George Corwin took Bridget Bishop from Salem Jail and brought her to the place of her execution. The route would have taken her through the town, past people that knew her, people that had accused her, people who had believed all the stories about her, and people who perhaps said nothing. You know, there may have been people that were watching with fear and helplessness and maybe even horror. But it was threatening to them if they were to voice anything. And she was hanged at Proctor's Ledge at Gallows Hill, and the sheriff's return on the death warrant recorded that he had taken Bridget from the jail, safely conveyed her to the place provided for execution, and caused her to be hanged by the neck until she was dead. Bridget Bishop was the first person executed during the Salem witch trials, but her death didn't stop the panic. And instead of her execution shocking people back into reason, back into like sane thinking, it seemed to prove to the court that the process could continue. So what followed were even more accusations, more trials, more innocent people being killed. And in total the Salem witch trials led to the deaths of twenty five innocent men, women and children. Nineteen people were hanged, one man Giles Cory was pressed to death with stones, and others died in prison as they awaited their trial. And Bridget's daughter Christian appears to have died in late 1693, not long after her mother's execution. But we don't know the exact circumstances surrounding her death. Of course, again, going back to the records, the record keeping wasn't as good back in those days, so we don't know how Bridget's daughter ended up dying. And for centuries Bridget's name remained tangled in this myth and this folklore and the judgment and the spectacle of the Salem witch trials, and she became the first. the first witch hanged. You know, the colourful woman, the scandalous one, the difficult one, the easy target, depending on who was telling the story. But she was innocent, and she protested that innocence right until the very end. And in 2001 Massachusetts legislation formally exonerated Bridget Bishop, making her one of the last of the Salem victims to be cleared by name. And obviously that doesn't give her life back. That doesn't give her reputation at the time back. It doesn't undo that walk to the gallows or remove the fear that she must have felt within those final days. It didn't return her to her daughter, to her home, to her orchard, to her own body or to the ordinary future that she should have been allowed to live. But it does matter that we say her name properly now, that it isn't said as a warning against being too loud, too bold, too difficult, all the twos, but we say it as a woman who lived, who endured, who denied, who resisted, and who died because a frightened society chose to make its fear holy. And Bridget Bishop's story is a story about what happens when gossip becomes evidence and when old wounds become public accusation, where women's bodies will search for proof of evil and women's refusal to submit is mistaken for danger. And around her the community decided that a woman who makes them uncomfortable must be guilty of something. So as we remember her, perhaps we can also remember the deeper lessons behind the history that sometimes the women that they call dangerous is simply the woman who won't lie about who she is and that is something that I feel personally proud of Bridget for that she endured all of that and she still wouldn't confess. She still stood strong in her beliefs and she protested her innocence even when it would have been easier to lie and to say that she was a witch and to accuse others. It may have even saved her life but she chose her truth and today on this podcast we are honouring that truth. We are honouring her story and I hope that she can be an inspiration to us all about living in our truth speaking our truth and I would love to hear your thoughts about this case. I'd love to know any additional information that you may have found I'd love to know any feelings that may have arisen and I'd also like to invite you to light a candle with me to say Bridget's name with honour and remember Bridget and to send healing her way and to all of the other women men children who were persecuted who were affected by the witch trials that has led to this huge energy this huge karmic energy that we still feel today that is the witch wound. So as always please know that you can reach out to me you can email me Kylie at witchywoo.net you can find me on Facebook Kylie Anna I would love love to hear from you hear your thoughts and until the next time I'll speak to you soon