For centuries, the ghost of Marie-Josephte Corriveau has been haunting the cultural consciousness of Quebec, Canada. To many, the legend of “La Corriveau” is a ghost story, of a woman hanged for murder, her corpse put on display as a gruesome warning.
But the story of La Corriveau and the gibbet in which she was hanged are based on real historical events, and after over a century away, the actual cage has made its way back home. As a result, Corriveau’s legacy has lately been shifting from folk tale to historical tragedy.Marie-Josephte Corriveau was born in 1733, in what was, at the time, a country called New France, which was controlled by the British. “The British forces were completely unorganized,” says Sylvie Toupin, a curator at Quebec’s Musée de la Civilisation, which currently holds Corriveau’s infamous gibbet. “There were many tensions because it was a new government, and the people weren’t happy with what was happening.” Ultimately, Corriveau would become a dire symbol of this frustration and disorganization.
At the age of 16, she was married to a local farmer. He died in 1760, leaving her alone with three children to care for. However Corriveau quickly found another husband, marrying Louis Étienne Dodier, another farmer from her parish, less than two years after the death of her first husband. But he wasn’t long for the world either.
Dodier turned up dead in January of 1763.
Corriveau and Dodier’s marriage was the talk of the town, and not in a good way. Her father, Joseph Corriveau, had a number of very public fights with Dodier over property and business dealings, and Marie had petitioned, unsuccessfully, to leave her husband, on the grounds that he was physically abusive.So when Dodier was found dead in their barn, initially thought to have been the result of being kicked in the head by a horse, the rumors about town soon turned the focus of the investigation to murder. Dodier’s wounds were reexamined and determined to have been caused by something closer to a pitchfork than horse hooves, and both Joseph and Marie were accused of murdering the man.
After an initial trial before the military, Joseph was found guilty of Dodier’s murder and Marie was found guilty of being an accomplice. But when Joseph was sentenced to hang for his crimes, he cracked, telling the court that in fact his daughter had committed the murder, and that he hadn’t turned her in only because trying to keep her from the gallows. When questioned about this shocking turn of events, Marie finally admitted to killing Dodier with a hatchet.
Likely embarrassed by the initial wrongful conviction, and possibly influenced by fresh questions about…
The post The Long Travels of La Corriveau’s Cage appeared first on FeedBox.