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]
origin: imported
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.
The evidence against her would not survive a modern courtroom for a minute. The indictments rested almost entirely on "spectral evidence" — the claim that Bishop's invisible specter, a spirit only the afflicted could see, had pinched, choked, and tormented her accusers. Young women writhed and screamed in the courtroom, insisting her shape was attacking them as she stood before them. Workmen testified they had found "poppets" — small cloth dolls stuck with pins — hidden in the wall of her cellar. A court-ordered physical examination reported a so-called "witch's mark" on her body. None of it was the kind of proof that could be tested or cross-examined; the harm was invisible, and the only witnesses to it were the people accusing her.
Bishop pleaded not guilty and denied everything. It made no difference. The jury convicted her, and Stoughton signed her death warrant. On June 10, less than ten days after her conviction, she was carted to the execution ground — long remembered as "Gallows Hill," though recent scholarship places it at a community pasture known as Proctor's Ledge — and hanged.
Her death did exactly what the prosecution intended. To the court, the conviction of Bridget Bishop proved the witchcraft conspiracy was real, and the trials accelerated: the Court of Oyer and Terminer would go on to convict all twenty-eight people it tried. But her hanging also unsettled some of the men running it. The court briefly recessed, accusations slowed for a time, and Judge Nathaniel Saltonstall — sickened by the methods and especially by the reliance on spectral evidence — resigned from the bench. More than a month passed before the next executions. In the end, nineteen people were hanged and one, Giles Corey, was pressed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea.
The legal reckoning came too late for any of them. Within months, influential voices — including the minister Increase Mather, who warned that "it were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned" — turned the colony against spectral evidence, and the trials collapsed. Massachusetts would spend the next three centuries apologizing: reversing attainders, compensating families, and, as late as 2001, formally exonerating the last of the condemned. Bridget Bishop, who never wavered in her denial, had been right all along. Her June 10 hanging stands as one of the earliest and most enduring American lessons in what happens when a court accepts as proof the things that cannot be seen.