June 10, 1692 – First Woman Executed for Witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials

Bridget Bishop was the first person executed for witchcraft during the Salem witch trials in 1692. Altogether, about 200 people were tried. An online history of the trials reports that “from June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft; dozens languished in jail for months without trials until the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts subsided.”

Bishop, as depicted in a lithograph, via Wikipedia

The hysteria over witches began with a group of young girls in Salem who began experiencing fits and convulsions, which a local doctor declared to be signs of witchcraft.

[In recent decades a number of medical explanations have been advanced to explain this behavior, including a fungus infection that produces symptoms similar to the drug LSD; encephalitis spread by birds; and Lyme disease spread by ticks.]

In June 1692, a special Court convened in Salem under Chief Justice William Stoughton to judge the accused. The first defendant was Bridget Bishop. Bishop was considered to have a dubious moral character, having been married three times. Her first two husbands died, and with her third husband, she helped run two taverns. In this role, she wore exotic clothes and bright colors, both anathema to this Puritan town.

Bishop was accused of “sundry acts of witchcraft,” including bewitching the group of girls who had suffered from fits.

Her trial lasted eight days, and was recorded by Cotton Mather, a New England Puritan clergyman and a prolific writer. Mather wrote of a number of accusations made of Bishop, mostly centering on her supposed ability to strike down anyone by a mere glance.

In the end, Mather noted, “there was little occasion to prove the witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders.”

Bishop was sentenced to death and hanged. She was recorded to be the first woman to die from hanging in the colony.

An extensive analysis and links to resources about the Salem Witchcraft Trials, presented by the UMKC School of Law, is online here.