For over 300 years, history painted Bridget Bishop as Salem's rowdy tavern keeper, the scandalous shuffleboard-hosting troublemaker who naturally drew Puritan fury. That woman was actually Sarah Bishop, a different person in a different town. The real Bridget was a thrice-married 60-year-old midwife from Salem Town who had never met the accusing girls of Salem Village, a fact captured in her heartbreaking deposition: "I never saw these persons before, nor I never was in this place before." This episode dismantles the folklore around the first person executed in the Salem witch trials and reconstructs how lethal gossip, systemic bias, and a centuries-long game of historical telephone condemned an innocent woman twice, once in court and once in the record books.

Her real story is one of relentless tragedy in a society with no concept of bad l ...