Witches Among Us
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
June 10, 1692. Bridget Bishop is loaded into a two-wheeled cart and brought from her Salem jail cell to a pasture on a hill, where a rope is hanging from freshly-installed gallows. A crowd forms around her: law officers to read the death warrant, ministers to offer last rites, and onlookers, curious to see a witch in the flesh. Bishop’s execution raises doubts that could have stopped the Salem witch trials in their tracks. But instead, it became the first in a deluge of convictions, trials, and hangings that made the summer of 1692 go down in infamy. What happened that summer to cause a witch hunt? And what can we learn from the story of 19 supposed witches condemned to death?
Special thanks to our guest, Marilynne Roach, author of The Salem Witch Trials: a Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:06.0 | History this week, June 10, 1692. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:14.0 | Bridget Bishop wakes up in shackles in a stone wall jail cell in Massachusetts. |
| 0:20.0 | Later that morning, a man comes to open the door. |
| 0:24.0 | He takes off her shackles, a relief, and loads her into a two-wheeled wooden cart. |
| 0:30.0 | The outside air probably feels all the sweeter after the time she's spent in prison. |
| 0:36.0 | The cart is open on the sides so people on the streets can look at her as she passes. |
| 0:42.0 | After all, her case is meant to be a warning. |
| 0:46.0 | She passes down prison lane to Main Street, with a procession of marshals and constables in tow. |
| 0:52.0 | The cart stops in a spot of pasture on a hill where a rope is hanging from freshly installed gallows. |
| 1:00.0 | There aren't any eyewitness accounts of Bridget Bishop's hanging, but as she climbed up the ladder to the gallows, |
| 1:07.0 | she would have seen a panoramic view below her, fields, inlets, the shimmering Atlantic Ocean. |
| 1:14.0 | And there would have been a crowd. |
| 1:16.0 | Law officers there to read the death warrant. |
| 1:19.0 | Ministers to offer last rights. And onlookers who were just curious to see a witch. |
| 1:27.0 | According to some villagers, there were other worldly beings present at Bishop's hanging too. |
| 1:33.0 | One woman said she saw the devil help a man find a perch on the gallows. |
| 1:37.0 | We don't know what Bishop herself said or thought as she walked up to the gallows, |
| 1:42.0 | but we know she would have denied up and down that the devil helped her get there. |
| 1:47.0 | She insisted on her innocence until the very last moment. |
| 1:51.0 | Finally, a bag is placed over Bishop's head. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.