Sheriff George Corwin's official return states that he 'caused the said Bridget to be hanged by the neck until she was dead' on June 10, 1692.[1]
Check the sourcesSalem Witch Trials Documentary Archive (University of Virginia) ↗
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On the morning of June 10, 1692, a Salem jailer brought Bridget Bishop from her cell, loaded her onto a cart, and drove her to a rise of ground outside the village. There, before a gathered crowd, Sheriff George Corwin — by his own official return — "caused the said Bridget to be hanged by the neck until she was dead." She was the first person executed in the Salem witch trials, the first of twenty who would die before the panic ended, and she went to the gallows professing her innocence.
Bishop made an easy target. A tavern-keeper married three times, she was known around Salem for what one account called her "dubious moral character" — she kept late hours, quarreled with neighbors, and dressed flamboyantly by Puritan standards, in a red bodice "bordered and looped with different colors" that scandalized a community that prized plainness. She had been accused of witchcraft once before, around 1680, and escaped the charge, but the suspicion never left her. When the Salem accusations erupted in 1692, more people came forward against Bridget Bishop than against any other defendant.
That was precisely why she was tried first. The Crown had convened a special Court of Oyer and Terminer — "to hear and to decide" — under Chief Justice William Stoughton. Thomas Newton, the attorney organizing the prosecutions, understood that the cases would only grow weaker as they went, and he wanted to begin with a conviction. Bishop, with the most accusers, was his strongest hand. She was examined and tried on June 2, 1692, and the proceeding lasted a single day.