today we go all the way back to 18th Century Scotland, and a woman who was sentenced and put to death, but lived through it all to win the nickname “Half-hangit Maggie.”
In happier times she was known as Maggie Dickson; she was a fishwife in Edinburgh.
There are a million versions of her story, and I’ve just told you about the only details that are the same in all of them.
In the 1720s her husband left: he might have deserted her, or he was impressed into the Navy, or he went to work on fishing boats.
Whatever it was, the practical effect was that Maggie Dickson had to leave the city and find work.
She moved south to the area known as the Scottish Borders, where she got a domestic job at an inn.
At some point she realized she was pregnant by the innkeeper’s son, which was scandalous enough that she hid the pregnancy for as long as she could.
Eventually she gave birth, and according to Maggie Dickson’s testimony the baby was stillborn, or it might have lived for just a few days.
But she insisted the child was not alive when she either set its body near, or in, the river Tweed, perhaps hoping that no one would know about her pregnancy at all.
That’s not what happened; people found the child’s remains, and eventually traced them back to Maggie Dickson, who was charged and convicted, either with murder or concealment of a pregnancy.
The sentence was death by hanging; she was sent to the gallows and she was pronounced dead afterward, but when her family received the coffin, they were stunned when their late relation sat up, poorer for the experience but still living and breathing!
She had survived the hanging; maybe the hangmen of the time didn’t always have the best ropes, or use those ropes effectively, or some people love to claim that Maggie Dickson seduced her executioner so he’d literally cut her a little slack.
Since she had legally been pronounced dead, the authorities couldn’t go after her again.
Not only did Maggie Dickson live, she even reunited with her husband (hopefully eventually getting the truth about wherever that guy had gone), and it’s said they had several more children together.
Though her story couldn’t help but spread so that when people saw her out and about, they’d stop and point at the women they called “Half-hangit Maggie.”
In 1995, two officers with UC-Berkeley Police caught two men who had escaped from a minimum security prison in Utah.
They got suspicious when each man claimed “I’m from Frisco,” which people from the San Francisco area don’t use because they loathe it.
Half-hangit Maggie: The Scots woman who survived hanging (The Scotsman)
“Frisco’? You’re under arrest (SFGate)
