Episode 7: Half-Hanged

In 1724 Margaret Dickson was sentenced to death for alleged infanticide, hanged from a gibbet in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, pronounced dead—and then woke up a few hours later complaining of a sore neck. She was scorned in street ballads and cheap printed broadsides, only to be celebrated in verse in our own time. She was known as “Half-Hanged Maggie.”