Marie-Josephte Corriveau was born in 1733 in Saint-Villier, a small town in what is now Quebec. Marie married young, wedding a farmer named Charles Bouchard at the age of sixteen. The couple had two daughters and a son before Charles died under mysterious cirumstances. Marie was known to be a beautiful woman but was very jealous. Marie’s second husband was a doctor who had a lot of female clients and suspected that he was cheating on her with one of them. One night, Marie gave her husband poisoned her husbands food. The coroner concluded that the doctors death was accidental due to her claiming that she unknowingly poisoned her husband. According to the legends, Marie Corriveau may have had as many as seven husbands and all of them died under Mysterious circumstances. Her last husband lead to her demise. Marie remarried, to a man named Louis Etienne Dodier. The marriage was not a happy one, and both Marie and her father Joseph Corriveau were known to be on bad terms with Dodier. it was rumored that dodier was killed by one of his horses and people began to grow suspicious after she didn’t grieve as much widow would.
In 1763, the British took official possession of France’s North American territories, they were eager to make an impression on the local colonists as a force for order, so they decided to hold an inquiry into the death. The inquiry opened on March 29th, around two months after Dodier’s death, at the Uruline convent in Quebec City. The inquiry took 11 days, with most of the Corriveau’s neighbours testifying, and at the end of it they decided that Joseph Corriveau had murdered Louis Dodier, that Marie had been an accessory, and that Isabelle Sylvain (a cousin of Marie’s) had perjured herself to protect them. With the force of martial law behind them, they immediately passed a sentence of death on Joseph, while Marie and Isabel were sentenced to be whipped and branded.
The story did not end there, however. Before the sentence of death was due to be carried out, Joseph made a confession to his priest that his daughter Marie had actually been the one to kill Dodier, and he had simply helped her. Whether it was Joseph or his confessor who passed this on to the authorities, they decided to hold a retrial. At this Marie pleaded guilty to the charge of murdering her husband. Her father and her cousin were both released without charge (her father receiving an official royal pardon), but Marie was sentenced not just to death, but to death and exposure. Because by the laws of England Marie was not just guilty of murder, but of the more serious charge of Petty Treason.
Marie lived on in legend, however. Stories soon started that she was a witch. Like all witches, she vowed that the grave would not hold her, and her corpse did not rest easy in the cage at the crossroads. According to the legend, her last words were “I shall be avenged!” Rather than standing for two months and then getting a Christian burial, instead she was said to have hung at the crossroads for years before disappearing, claimed by the devil himself. people said that anytime they walked on the crossroad, it would feel as though her corpse would follow their movement. Some even claimed that her corpse would “hug” them. Other stories had her ghost float around, still bound within the cage, clinging to the backs of lone travellers and demanding that they carry her across the Saint Lawrence river.
This local folklore received a major boost in 1849. The cage was exhibited in Montreal and New York, awakening interest in the local tales that had sprung up over the previous century.
The motif of La Corriveau in her cage continued to drift through Quebec’s culture, inspiring novels, ballets, painting and music. Even to this day she is referenced, such as in the song “La corrida de la Corriveau” by Mes Aïeux, released in 2001. The cage stolen from the church in Lévis was considered lost – legend had it in “Barnum’s Boston Museum”, with a placard simply reading “From Quebec”, though Barnum had never had a museum in Boston, and no such exhibit could be found in the city. It was assumed it had been lost in a fire, until 2011. That year the Lévis Historical Society discovered it exactly where you would expect to find the cage of a legendary witch – Salem, Massachusetts. The Peabody Essex museum, which had been storing the cage in a back room, loaned it to the city of Lévis for two years, and it remains there today.