Bridget Bishop (1632-10 June 1692) was the first person executed for witchcraft during the Salem witch trials of 1692.
Biography[]
Bridget Bishop was born in England in 1632, and she later imigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and settled in Salem. She was said to have been an alcoholic and an outcast, and, in 1692, she was indicted for bewitching of several people in Salem; she pled not guilty, but, according to Cotton Mather's The Tryall of Bridget Bishop, "there was little occasion to prove the witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders...the Shape of the Prisoner did oftentimes very grievously pinch (the victims), choke them, bite them, and afflict them; urging them to write their names in a book." She was also accused of threatening to drown one of the victims if she did not sign the book, as well as bragging about the "death of sundy persons", that she had extremely tortured the victims through casting her eyes upon them (and reviving them by touching them), and by forcing the victims into painful postures through her own bodily movements. John Cook claimed that, five or six years before the trial, that Bishop hit him on the head and caused an apple to fly out of his hand and into the lap of his mother 6–8 feet from him. Samuel Shattuck testified that, in 1680, Bishop threw his child against stones on the sides of the house, and, that 17–18 years later, a person claimed that the child had been bewitched. The person also pointed out that his neighbor had a falling out with his wife and said that the wife would bring down the pride in the child; Bishop came to associate the described person with Bishop. Later, it was claimed that, as she was under a guard at the Meeting House of Salem, a demon invisibly entered the house, tore down a part of it, and caused a noise to run into the house.