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The First Hanging: Why the Court Was Ready to Kill Bridget Bishop
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Bridget Bishop wasn't the most accused or the most feared — yet she became the first person hanged in the Salem witch trials. This episode unpacks the court built to convict, the spectral evidence that made innocence impossible to prove, and why Bishop's profile made her the perfect first victim.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what gets overlooked about Bridget Bishop. She wasn't the most accused.
To understand how Bridget Bishop got to the gallows, you have to understand the machine that put her there. By May of sixteen ninety-two, the Salem witch trials had already been running for three months.
Spectral evidence sounds archaic. It wasn't a fringe idea in sixteen ninety-two.
Bridget Bishop had already been accused of witchcraft once before. That was in sixteen seventy-nine, more than a decade before the trials.
Bridget Bishop's trial moved fast. The Court of Oyer and Terminer was established in May.
The question of why Bishop was tried first, and why she was the one executed first, doesn't have a single clean answer. But the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense.
Bridget Bishop's execution on June tenth changed the trials. Not because it shocked the community into stopping.
Through all of this, the ministers were not silent. Cotton Mather and his father Increase Mather both published work questioning spectral evidence.
The colony didn't recover its conscience quickly. Judge Samuel Sewall publicly apologized in sixteen ninety-seven.
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