Synopsis

On 18th of March 1763, in Quebec, a young woman convicted of the murder of her husband is hung. Such news should normally have sunk into oblivion, but the special measures taken by the authorities for the remains of the condemned have made history. The corpse was locked in a cage and displayed in a public space for almost 40 days, as to show the merciless severity of the new British Regime. Along the generations, oral tradition has used this simple legal case as the foundation of supernatural narratives where the suspected murderer becomes a witch and a living dead. Overused by storytellers and their eloquence, these fairy tales have inspired writers, artists and folk singers who have elevate this woman to the status of one of the most symbolic characters of Quebec's folklore : La Corriveau.
In 2011, an incredible discovery comes to merge myth into reality: Corriveau's cage was involuntarely found in the storage area of an American museum. A rigorous expertise led by the Musée de la civilisation de Québec then allowed to corroborate the info. The documentary relates this unique artefact's journey, tells the tragic story of at the origin of its construction, and deals with a lot of the myths that have guaranteed Corriveau's posterity in Quebeckers' collective imagination.