Today in Salem: It’s been nearly two weeks since the Proctors’ servant, Mary Warren, said publicly that the other girls were lying. People believed her. She’d been afflicted herself, but after beatings and harshness from her masters, she’d been ”cured,” and posted a note of gratitude on the meeting house door.
The other girls, her former friends, had stood back and listened as she spoke about them. And they’ve shunned her since. But now Mary’s specter is afflicting them, and it’s clear why she said they were lying: she herself is being deceptive. She’s guilty of witchcraft, and using the guise of an innocent person to inflict torment. So today, finally, four of the girls accuse her of using her specter to inflict harm.
Also accused: a Town woman that many had heard of but few in the Village had met: the unruly Bridget Bishop. She’d been in and out of court several times over the years for fighting, calling her husband names on the Sabbath, stealing brass from a local mill owner, and was accused of witchcraft when her abusive husband died and she inherited his large estate (with almost nothing left for their children). That had been several years ago, but the stain has never left her, and now her specter has come back to life.
WHO was Bridget Bishop?
Bridget Bishop, age 60, was an unruly woman who, 20 years earlier, had been brought to court with her husband for fighting. Both of them were fined and ordered to be whipped if they didn’t pay the fine on time. Eight years later they were still fighting, and Bridget was brought to court for calling her husband names like “old rogue” and “old devil” on the Sabbath Day (never mind that he deserved it). This time they were ordered to stand back-to-back in the public marketplace, gagged, with pieces of paper labeled with their offense and fastened to each of their foreheads.
Bridget’s husband died a short time after that, and she inherited his sizable estate, worth about £70. But her daughter and two stepsons received only twenty shillings each. Immediately her stepsons accused her of bewitching their father to death.
Her notoriety continued when repairmen knocked down a cellar wall and found “several poppets made up of rags with hogs’ bristles with headless pins in them with the points outward.” The repairmen never actually produced the poppets – something like today’s voodoo dolls – but their testimony alone was evidence of black magic.
Five years later she was accused by the afflicted girls of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, but history doesn’t tell us what brought her to their attention. The important thing is that no one was surprised, and she quickly became the person the court was most focused on.
NOTE – Bridget is often described as a tavern owner who let loud, young people drink and play “shovel board” until the wee hours. This actually refers to her daughter-in-law, Sarah Bishop, who was also accused of witchcraft.