Six Women of Salem (4 page)

By January 1670 the couple’s quarrels involved the neighbors and even the county court. Several times one or the other of the Olivers had called for their neighbor Mary Ropes to come witness the other’s bad behavior. On these occasions Goodwife Ropes saw, as she testified, Bridget’s “face at one time bloody and at other times black and blue.”

But Bridget did not take such punishment meekly. Thomas also complained to Goody Ropes “that his wife had given him several blows.” The county court ordered the contentious couple be whipped ten stripes apiece or pay a fine within a month. Presumably they paid the fine. (The same Quarterly Court heard several cases of Salem, Beverly, and Marblehead men living apart from their wives, some of whom had evidently not emigrated yet. Bridget may have preferred such a situation.)

However, the fines made no permanent improvement in the Olivers’ relationship. In 1677 her husband so exasperated Bridget that she was heard even on the Sabbath calling him “many opprobrious names.” Where shocked neighbors could hear she shouted, “Old rogue!” and “Old devil!” In those days, when a good name counted for everything, a person’s reputation was taken seriously. What Thomas might have said or done on his part to make Bridget erupt or what the four neighbors summoned as witnesses might have said was not recorded when the matter reached court. However, they were
both
sentenced to stand for an hour “back to back, on a lecture day in the public market place,” each gagged and each wearing a paper about their foreheads clearly inscribed with their offense.

Lectures
were optional sermons that local ministers delivered in rotation at the various area meetinghouses on Thursday afternoons, a custom evolved from the lectures given in England by clergy who were forbidden to preach by Church of England authorities. In New England these lectures became something of a social occasion (that occasionally interfered with work), in which eager listeners traveled to sample preaching styles. Salem could anticipate a crowd on such days, and anyone made to stand in public as punishment could expect a sizeable audience to pity or jeer them. Thomas’s daughter Mary (now married to her second husband, William West) paid a twenty shilling fine to release her father from the impending humiliation. The stepdaughter, however, did not offer to spare her stepmother. Bridget had to stand at the crossroads by the meetinghouse and the town pump under the gaze of passersby, with the label pinned to her cap, stewing and steaming behind the cloth gag.

Name calling was taken seriously, but sentences varied. The same court that sentenced the Olivers also heard the case of Thomas Cooper, who had called Charles Phillips’s wife “a blare eyed witch” and threatened to beat out Phillips’s eyes. This case, however, was dismissed. Thomas Cooper likewise had called Samuel Eborne Sr. an “old rogue and old knave” and had threatened to “cuff his chops.” The court only admonished Cooper “to order his tongue and carriage more regularly for time to come.” And Richard Holman was fined for making “opprobrious speeches against Elizabeth Hooper” before several witnesses, “calling her base old baud and spiteful old witch.”

Despite the similarity of “opprobrious speeches” with Bridget’s outburst and the potentially fatal accusation of witchcraft, none of these men were subjected to public humiliation
—
only Bridget. She had insulted her husband, after all, whereas two thirds of the other cases had affronted only women.

Some people were already wondering if such a turbulent woman as Bridget might be a witch as well.

Samuel Gray had nightmares about her specter appearing in his room at night around the time his baby daughter sickened and died. Likewise, William Stacey, ill from small pox, was surprised by the concern Goody Oliver showed when she visited and “professed a great love for this deponent,” as he later phrased it. Once he was well again, she paid him three pence for some work he did for her, but the money vanished from his pocket almost immediately. Not long after, when he encountered Bridget on her way to his father’s mill, she asked if he thought his father would grind her grist, “Because,” she had to explain, “folks counted her as a witch.” He replied that his father would do the job, but the conversation caused him to wonder
—
especially when his wagon’s off wheel suddenly slumped into a hole and stuck. Another man helped him dislodge it, but later he never could find the hole
—
as if it had simply disappeared. One midnight that same winter Stacey felt a pressure on his mouth and woke to see the form of Bridget sitting at the foot of his bed and the room as bright as if it were day. The specter then hopped about the room and vanished, leaving him in darkness. William did not keep the incident to himself, so the real Bridget confronted him, demanding to know if he had been telling such fanciful tales about her. He admitted to telling several people about the encounter and dared her to deny that it had indeed happened. Furious, she stalked away without replying; William took her silence as an admission of guilt.

By the summer of 1679 Bridget’s life had improved
—
to the extent that her belligerent spouse Thomas died. He left no will, so the court granted the widow administration of the estate and allowed her use of the house during her lifetime, not just during her widowhood, as was more common. She was, however, responsible for paying his outstanding debts: £30 owed to parties back in England (as Thomas had admitted on his deathbed),plus sums due locally to the town, to Dr. Swinnerton, who had attended his last illness, and for his burial. There were also bequests owed to Thomas’s children: twenty shillings each to the two sons of the first wife (no mention of daughter Mary) and twenty shillings to daughter Christian. The inventory, taken the summer before, included the house and its half-acre lot (big enough to include apple trees, a chicken run, and a pig sty) plus ten acres across the river in Northfield. The personal goods were sparse enough: Thomas’s clothes, a rusty sword, and old bandoleers; a small bed with its bedding; one table and “three or four old chairs”; an iron pot and kettle, brass skillet, earthenware dishes, a few pails, tubs, odds and ends; and two pigs. The whole was estimated to be worth £76:8:0. Debts and bequests amounted to at least £39:0:11
—
a penny shy of £40.

In November 1679 the same court session that fined Goody Dicer for calling Mrs. Hollingworth a “witch and a thief” granted Bridget administration of her late husband’s estate. But by February 1680 Bridget herself was arrested for witchcraft. Once again she had to stand before the county court and listen to the accusations, this time as John Ingersoll’s slave Juan blamed her for spooking a team of horses out by Norman’s Rocks and for making them run, sledge and all, into the swamp by Fish Creek. Then Juan told how he saw her specter, perched on a beam and holding a stolen egg, in his master’s cow house. The apparition vanished when he tried to strike it with a pitchfork, he declared, but “it was the shape of Goody Oliver, as she now stands before the court.” (Later at dinner he saw a spectral black cat and felt several painful pinches in his side.)

Other men, who had seen the panicked horses run into the swamp, commented that the animals seemed bewitched, but only Juan’s testimony remains. The court ordered Bridget to be presented to the next Court of Assistants at Boston—the upper house of the legislature that tried capital cases. Meanwhile, she was to be jailed or to pay a bond as promise to appear. Bridget paid the bond, thus adding to her heavy debts. There is no further record of the case, suggesting that Bridget was not tried on the given evidence.

Nevertheless, Samuel and Sarah Shattuck thought she was a witch, especially after their son began to suffer seizures and act in a distressingly distracted manner in 1680. Bridget had brought some articles to Shattuck’s dye works and paid him two pence for the work. Samuel passed the money to his assistant Henry Williams to put away, but soon afterward the coins were nowhere to be found. Henry
insisted
he had put the coins in a purse with other money and had locked it all in a box—only to have both purse and money vanish from the box “he could not tell how.” They never did find it, and Samuel, rather than suspect Henry of theft, concluded that magic was behind the disappearance.

Hearing gossip that the Shattucks suspected she had a hand in the vanishing money, Bridget confronted Goodwife Shattuck in order to clear her already-tarnished name. She said Henry Williams should be beaten, but Sarah Shattuck preferred to believe her husband’s ­assistant. Bridget left, muttering in a manner that Sarah thought sounded threatening.

Soon after, their son Samuel Jr., as normal as other children, was “taken in a terrible fit: his mouth and eyes were drawn aside and [he] gasped in such a manner as if he was upon the point of death.” As the fits continued with crying jags, young Sam’s “understanding decayed” and he became “stupefied and void of reason.” After a year and a half of this terrifying ordeal, with the boy no better, a “stranger” advised Shattuck (as he later described it) that the boy must be bewitched. The stranger offered a way to break the spell: folklore suggested that scratching a witch “below the breath” and drawing blood would neutralize whatever spell was being cast.

Consequently, the stranger barged into Bridget’s home, asking for a pot of cider as if she ran a tavern, in order to confront her. She replied curtly that he would have none there and snatched up a spade to make him leave. Following him outside and spying young Sam, she assumed that Shattuck had sent the two of them to plague her. Bridget smacked the boy’s face, which bled. That she had drawn blood—­instead of being bloodied herself—seemed all the more ominous to the Shattucks, especially as Sam’s fits worsened. Now, if he were not lying as if dead, their son was rushing about and liable to fall into fire or water—a constant worry for his parents.

Nevertheless, schoolmaster Daniel Epps helped Bridget financially. In the summer of 1681 she sold him “two poles, or rods, more or less” of land between their houses in exchange for a sturdy fence, ten shillings in money, and other “considerable expense and cost, which Epps hath been at for said Oliver’s use, amounting in all to five and thirty shillings which added to the former makes up the full and just sum of three pounds, ten shillings.” Bridget consented to the arrangement and made her mark on the deed in the presence of Magistrate John Hathorne “in order to the further payment of debts which the estate of Thomas Oliver is liable to pay, and also for the present supply of my own necessities.” She had already sold the Northfields lot the year before.

As time passed, more people suspected her of theft and witchcraft. Around 1682 Goody Whatford accused Bridget of stealing a spoon and felt threatened by Bridget’s forceful reply. Goody Whatford then became unbalanced, “a vexation to her self, and all about her.” She also thought the specters of Bridget Bishop and another woman named Alice Parker attacked her at night. (Might Bridget and Alice have been acquaintances or friends? They would both share a reputation for witchcraft. By 1685 the Shattucks suspected Goodwife Parker of worsening young Sam’s fits.)

Bridget married for a third time around 1685 to Edward Bishop, a sawyer. Bridget still had lifetime rights to Thomas Oliver’s property, and the couple appear to have demolished the old house and built a new one on the Oliver lot. They evidently hired John Bly and his son to remove the old structure. Although the workmen said nothing to her at the time, they may have regarded Bridget uneasily, for they found poppets enclosed within one of the cellar walls (as they would later relate), and everyone knew witches used such images to cast diabolical spells on their victims. (The poppets, if real, had more likely been built into the house when it was new, and Oliver had owned the place before Bridget immigrated to Massachusetts.) Perhaps the Blys gossiped about their find, for around this time several more local men had nightmares about Bridget creeping up on them in the night.

One of these was John Louder, the hired man at the Gedney family’s Ship Tavern, which abutted Bridget’s property. The Gedneys had already argued about Bridget’s fowls getting into the Ship Tavern’s orchard, and after the night apparition, John and Mistress Susanna Gedney spoke to Bridget about it over the back fence. This failed to improve Bridget’s temper. John found her response menacing, followed (as he later testified) by daylight encounters with imps.

In May 1686 Bridget’s daughter Christian married Thomas Mason, a mariner.

Bridget’s own marriage to Bishop, meanwhile, although more peaceful than her marriage to Oliver, was not without problems. Edward sold a sow to John Bly (the man who had found poppets in the Oliver cellar) and had Bly pay the asking price to a third party to whom Edward owed money. Such involved transactions were not uncommon, but Bridget considered the pig and, therefore, the money, to be hers, even though husbands controlled their wives’ property. She went to Bly’s house and quarreled with him and his wife, but she could not correct the debt. Soon afterward the sow gave birth but refused to suckle her young or even eat, instead jumping and lurching about as if deaf and blind, foaming at the mouth. A neighbor advised a folk remedy, which eventually seemed to work but only after a frantic two hours, during which the sow bolted up and down the street between the Blys’ and the Bishops’ houses “as if she were stark mad.”

Bridget’s grandchild Susanna Mason was born on August 23, 1687, the same month that brought yet more trouble.

According to Bridget, she and her daughter were weeding her garden “by the northwest corner of her house” when Christian noticed a brass object on the ground. Not knowing what it was, Bridget asked her daughter to show it to pewterer Edmund Dolbier “when she went into town about any business.” Two or three weeks later Christian did so, leaving it at Dolbier’s shop to be evaluated. According to Dolbier, when he asked where she got it, Christian replied “that the said brass had lain about the house some years before her father died.” Dolbier recognized the item as a “mill brass,” a bearing in a mill’s mechanism. Thomas Stacey (William Stacey’s father), who operated the mill on the South River at the edge of Fish Flake Point, had told Edmund in July that one had gone missing and to keep an eye out for anyone trying to sell such an item for scrap. As agreed, Dolbier informed Stacey, who came to the shop, declared that the brass was indeed his, and took it back.