Yes, but was she a Witch?

Sir Vladimir: How do you know she is a witch?
Peasant: She looks like one!

The people of Quebec have a story about a ghost-witch who haunts a road by the river (which she frequently crosses to attend witch meetings). La Corriveau they call her, and she has been known to terrify passersby: touching them with bony fingers, whispering their names, landing on their backs and demanding they carry her over the river.

I suppose many ghost stories are based on real people. This one certainly is. The tale is a bit more complicated (read more here or here) but the “bare bones” (if you’ll pardon the expression) summary is this: La Corriveau in life was known as Marie-Josephte Corriveau, a girl from New France who married at 16, and a dozen or so years later, confessed to murdering her second husband (she claimed he was abusive). She was tried (not by a jury of her peers but by a military tribunal) and found guilty. In April 1763, she was hanged, and her body exhibited “in chains” at Point-Lévis (Quebec). Several weeks later, she was buried, gibbet cage and all, in unconsecrated ground.

There’s more to say about all of this, but let’s jump forward to the after-death part when Marie, dead at 30, becomes Terrifying: Through the magic of oral tradition, she came to kill the first husband, too. S.E. Schlosser, who generously shares this tale from Spooky Canada on the fabulous American Folklore site, says Marie was bored and had his horse trample him.

But Scary for Kids is also juicy: Marie was so insanely jealous, she killed her first husband by pouring melted lead into his ear.

Actually, Marie had several husbands (seven is a popular number), and killed them in a variety of gruesome ways: poison, choking, stabbing. One she boiled alive, one she hit on the head with an ax, and another got a pitchfork in the stomach.

Of course, says the version at the Occultrix site, Marie was a Witch. In life, she made herbal remedies and before she died, vowed to be avenged (two classic proofs). So even though the Devil himself came to collect her hanging body, she attacked anyone walking past the crossroads where her corpse had been exhibited.

Almost 100 years after the execution, Marie’s gibbet was accidentally unearthed, which led to more (and expanded) tales of La Corriveau — this time in writing. Not only does she attack unlucky travelers (as in Les Anciens Canadiens [1863] by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé) but (as in The Golden Dog [1877] by William Kirby) she is a professional poisoner, descended from another famous poisoner.

Well, La Corriveau is a pretty good ghost story. Especially the part about ghostly fingers and witchy whisperings– sure to get your listeners jumping and shrieking.

The real tale is horrifying in a different way, though — and far less dramatic. Marie lived in New France at the tail-end of the Seven Years War when the about-to-be-victorious English took over most French possessions in the Great Lakes region. Perhaps embarrassed because they had first convicted Marie’s father of the crime and certainly eager to demonstrate English authority, the Army “made an example” of Marie not just by executing her, but exhibiting her dead body in an apparatus called a Gibbet.

A Gibbet is an iron body-suit which holds the corpse inside (by chains). The process was often called “hanging in chains” and the gibbet itself called a “cage” (which might explain why some of the illustrations of La Corriveau depict something that looks like a bird cage).

In any case, Gibbeting was nothing to be sneezed at (even pirates feared it, I hear) and only the most dreadful criminals were so punished.*

More important to Marie’s story, though, is that Gibbeting was mostly an English practice, and while the French historically were not above displaying the occasional corpse, that hanging cage may well have been (as Ciaran Conliffe expresses it) “an unprecedented experience” for the inhabitants of Point-Lévis (Quebec).

Imagine the horror and revulsion of Marie’s fellow French colonists –who had never seen such a thing before– watching a corpse supported by iron bands so as not to crumple, pecked by birds and other “decomposers” while it was still recognizable, as it slowly dissecated and rotted away.

Since gibbets were meant to deter, that grim content is strictly for the onlookers, not the criminal. The Cage was hung high and in a public place where it could be seen and smelled and heard — and not easily taken down by friends, relatives, or members of the Clean-Up the Crossroads Squad. Even if you averted your eyes or avoided walking past the decaying corpse in the first place (difficult), or held your breath indefinitely (impossible), on a quiet night, you’d still hear the cage clanking like a grotesque bell — and (eventually) the bones rattling in the wind.

Small wonder, then, that over the years, Marie’s neighbors and their descendents re-fashioned her as La Corriveau, part witch and part spirit, whose story grew in the telling until the two are now separate entities.

In the end, Marie was just a young woman with terrible luck and awful timing, subjected to a punishment more severe than a murder conviction might have warranted, living amongst unsophisticated residents who had the decency to be horrified by the gibbet — but couldn’t resist the gossip.

So have good fun with a great scary Halloween story — but say a prayer for that poor girl (and her husbands — however many there were).

And anyway, Happy Halloween

HomeSchool Go 2 Postscript
What can you do with this story?

Research one of the most famous people to hang on a Gibbet: Captain Kidd

Give a speech defending a position on any side of this question: Do punishments like Gibbeting deter crime?

Marie Corriveau isn’t the only woman the English accused of being a witch and then executed. Take a look at Joan of Arc and/or Anne Boleyn. Why were they accused? How did they die? And where do their ghosts wander today?

Learn more about New France and/or Explorers like Cartier and la Salle and/or the 7 Years War.

Choose one of the women hanged during the Salem Witchcraft Trials (1692) and write a Scary Tale OR create a Scary Picture (or sculpture) of her haunting the town. Remember how the bare bones of Marie’s story were exaggerated (7 husbands, lead in the ear) and infused with elements of horror (ghostly touches and flying cages)

Read Elizabeth George Speare’s TheWitch of Blackbird Pond

*Finally, if Gibbeting was a fate reserved for serious crimes, why was Marie (who killed one person she said had been abusing her) given such a sentence? Look further into the charge of “Petty Treason” in English Law