Today in Salem: Full pots of ink and sharpened quills greet the day as the magistrates begin to take two depositions against the unruly Bridget Bishop. Of all the accused witches, she’s the most likely to be guilty, so hers will be the first trial in the new court. The magistrates have three days to prepare, and they’re determined to cross every T and dot every I correctly. There will be no mistakes, not for this trial.
Now a 36-year-old miller stands before them and dictates his experiences with Bridget. Fourteen years earlier, he’d had smallpox, and Bridget had visited him and expressed great affection for him. He believed her, but later, when she hired him to do some small jobs, the money he gave her disappeared from his pocket. Another time, after a difficult conversation with her, the wheel of his cart sunk into a hole. But later when he went back to look at the hole, it was gone. He was also sure that it was her specter that threw him against a stone wall and down a bank, made him to weak to lift a bag of corn, and prevented his horse from pulling a small load.
Worst of all: He knows she was responsible for his daughter’s death two years ago. The little girl had been thriving. But one day she suddenly began crying and shrieking. It lasted for two weeks until she died.
Next, another man says it was fourteen years earlier (the same time frame as the miller), when he’d woken in the middle of the night and seen Bridget’s shape in his bedroom. His young child was sleeping in the same room and screamed as if he was hurt, but when the man picked him up he couldn’t comfort him or make him quiet. Only hours before, the child had been thriving. But after that he pined away, and several months later died.
The man hadn’t known who Bridget was at the time, but now, by the descriptions of her face and clothing, he knew it was her.