Though both the town’s magistrate and minister held power and upheld the law to varying degrees, people more strongly feared the witch pricker, who had more power than either and who would visit towns accusing various people of witchcraft. 

One famous witch pricker, Matthew Hopkins, was born in England in approximately 1620, and was known to have been responsible for more witch trials than all that had previously occurred in Scotland. His job was to prick peoples’ skin to see if it would bleed, and if it did not, they would be accused of having the Devil’s mark in that spot. Hopkins supposedly owned a device that would “fake” prick people, in order to profit more, gain reputation, and ensure that his accusations were never found to be wrong. 

The authors asked historian Mary Craig if she thought Hopkins was a sexual predator, and Craig agreed; she sees Hopkins as someone who did not actually care about finding witches and just exploited the issue for profit and personal gain, while Hopkins’ colleague, John Stearne, was much more interested in the spiritual aspect of it. The authors include an illustration of various devices used as witch prickers, each of which have a handle and a sharp, needle-like metal point.

In Scotland, John Kincaid was a famous witch pricker in the mid-1600s who worked for several years and was known for such cases as that of Beatrix Leslie, who was forced to touch the bodies of the young girls she was accused of killing to see if they would bleed in response; when they apparently did, she was confirmed as a witch. Kincaid enjoyed mass approval by both common people and the elite, and was responsible for dozens of executions. In his 60s, Kincaid was found to be a fraud who was, like Hopkins, using a false pricker and who was never officially made a witch pricker. He was incarcerated and paid a bail equivalent to around $60,000 dollars today.

A woman named Christian Caddell was also a witch pricker, who disguised herself as a man to be able to do the work and likely out of a desire to avoid possible persecution herself. In 1662, Strathglass, a landlord, attempted to remove tenants from his land by accusing them of witchcraft. Caddell was responsible for pricking them to check for marks, but instead she tortured them. It was eventually exposed that the accusations against the family were fraudulent and Caddell was arrested, her gender exposed, and she was sent to live a life of indentured servitude in Barbados. Following the exposure of each of these witch prickers as frauds, the witch pricking era gradually came to an end.

Tituba was the first woman accused in the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts. Little is known about her, other than the fact that she was an enslaved person who came from Barbados and worked on a plantation there, until her enslaver, Samuel Parris, moved to the United States. By 1692, Parris was the Puritan minister of Salem. 

When his daughters seemed to fall into fits after attempting witchcraft, Tituba was blamed for helping them, and made a false confession under torture. She was nevertheless found innocent and released a year later when the trials ended, but her story in the books of history ends there. The Salem witch trials are infamous despite being on a much smaller scale than those in Scotland or other parts of Europe; at the same time, the United States took the approach of maintaining awareness of these events, while many Scottish people are unaware of the trials which took place in their own country.

The authors spoke with the director of education at the Salem Witch Museum, Rachel Christ-Doane, who explained that the idea of Salem became a metaphor for mass hysteria and unnecessary deaths, making it a “critical metaphor” that helps people comprehend the severity of these injustices.

In January 1692, when Parris’s two daughters began having the seizures that led to Tituba’s arrest, a doctor could not determine the cause of their illness and suggested witchcraft may be to blame. The girls also named Sarah Good (who was an unhoused person) and Sarah Osborne (who married a servant and was seen as a disgrace), and while both Sarahs denied being witches, Tituba confessed and announced that there were others in town. Salem had just received a new charter from England and was in a transitory state, and people began accusing one another. 156 people were accused in total, 79 of whom were charged based on accusations of seeing their ghost form. People began to doubt the rate of executions as legitimate, and when the governor of Massachusetts’ wife was accused of becoming a specter, he arranged a new court that refused all “spectral evidence.” Due to this, many were released from jail, though for many others it was too late.

Within 20 years of the trials, they were recognized as a deep injustice, and many of the accused as well as their families called for reparations and their names to be cleared. The last person to be exonerated was Elizabeth Johnson, and not until 2022, because she had no one to advocate for her at the time. A class of 8th-grade children learned about her case and pushed for her exoneration, which the authors call an example of “dark tourism” or fascination with the more horrific aspects of life. Tourism into Salem began almost immediately after the trials and steadily grew until today. Witches and the surrounding culture continue to flood popular media today, along with a growing trend of people identifying as witches. The Salem Witch Museum aims to connect past with present, alerting people to the realities of how fear and desperation lead to scapegoating.

To discover how evidence was gathered and trials took place, the authors sought the work of Robert Pitcairn Esquire’s Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, who wrote on the trials a hundred years after they took place. They learned that trials were rarely done in the High Court of Justiciary, instead being passed off to commissioners who were given permission to have trials by the Privy Council. 

This permission was granted after an accusation was made and evidence was presented, and space was left on the commission forms to add more names of accused persons. Those who confirmed accusations, such as witch prickers like John Kincaid, would sign depositions declaring their findings and their expertise. The authors include one of Kincaid’s depositions, in which he declared the names of those present, as well as what mark he found on the person and where. These documents meant that Kincaid did not have to be physically present at the trial.

Pitcairn included the striking confession of Isobel Gowdie in 1662, whose many confessions appeared to be fabricated due to the fact that they were identical to another woman’s and often repeated information. Isobel confessed to several carnal experiences with the Devil, being marked by him, renouncing her baptism, using effigies, and more. The authors point out how terrifying it must have been to be a woman in this position, knowing she was doomed whether she confessed or not.

The chapter ends with the account of the Paisley Witches, the last major witch trial in Western Europe. In 1697, 11-year-old Christian Shaw saw a servant stealing milk, and the servant supposedly cursed her. Christian began experiencing seizures and other symptoms shortly after, and accused the servant, along with several other people, of cursing her. Christian’s doctor could find nothing physically wrong with her, and seven people were ultimately executed as a result of the accusations.

Before the trial began, a judge would be responsible for examining the charge, the evidence, and the circumstances of the confession. In Isobel Gowdie’s case and most others, records are sparse and therefore it is impossible to tell whether she was tortured, sleep deprived, or otherwise pressed to confess in any of her four separate confessions. 

The judge would then examine the confessions in great detail, and how consistent they were with other confessions of the sort. The judge then had to determine if the accused person actually used witchcraft or was just a witch but had not performed any witchcraft. For people like Isobel, this almost definitely resulted in conviction and sentencing to death. No age group, gender, or other category was excluded from the possibility of conviction.

The authors frequently visit the Howff graveyard, which has been used as a burial ground since the 1500s. The graves of many notable people exist there, along with a stone post that came to be known as the Witch’s Stone due to rumors of it being the resting place of a woman named Grissell Jaffray. 

This chapter focuses on how witches were killed and buried, beginning with the most common method in Scotland, which was strangulation (usually by hanging) followed by a burning of the body, all of which was done publicly before the townspeople. The bodies were burned due to a belief that otherwise, the witch’s corpse would be reanimated by the Devil and return for more wrongdoing. People were occasionally burned alive as well, though this was not the norm as is commonly thought.

The authors argue that despite the gruesome nature of the events, learning exactly how they occurred is important in understanding just how horrible it really was. They consulted an expert on all things fire named Niamh Nic Daeid, who explained what likely would have happened to a body as it burned on a stake. First, it would have happened very slowly, though the person (if still alive) would likely die of smoke inhalation or shock rather than the burning itself. The body would contort as it burned and pieces could fall off, which would then need to be pushed back into the fire. Bodies were sometimes encased in barrels of tar to speed up the process, but this actually just made it take longer. 

The authors assert that connecting these events to the present day, and understanding the injustices that innocent people face at the hands of such extreme ideologies, is essential for remembering and learning from the past.

The chapter opens with the account of Katherine MacKinnon, a woman who showed up at the door of a powerful man named Rudy Mac Iain McDonald in 1747. She was looking for help. He brought her inside and tied her up, then put her feet over a fire and forced her to confess to being a witch. It was the only recorded witch accusation that occurred in the town of Skye, and it was not until seven years later that McDonald was finally named as the person who murdered Katherine, using the guise of witchcraft to justify his sadistic tendencies.

In July 1704, the town of Torryburn was looked after by Reverend Logan, a passionately Christian man who was dedicated to keeping the Devil out of the hamlet. When he got word of witchcraft in the town, he called an emergency meeting, which was followed by a hearing of witnesses. Jean Bissett claimed that she was bewitched one night when she spent the evening drinking with her friends and carting her child around town with her. Jean also happened to owe money to one of the women she accused of witchcraft. Jean’s own husband accused her of lying and simply being inebriated, adding that she drank too much often. Both accused women were deemed innocent and the case was dismissed.

Four years later one of the two accused women, Lilias Adie, was accused by another neighbor named Jean Neilson, of making her sick with some sort of spell. Lilias was an elderly woman, possibly as old as 80 (which was very high for the time) and had what was considered an unconventional appearance; she was over six feet tall, and had an unusually shaped skull. Lilias was brought into custody to await trial, and then supposedly confessed and died during that time, leaving the Reverend with the challenge of dealing with Lilias’s body so that the Devil did not use it to return. He decided to have her buried near the shoreline, with a stone slab on top of the coffin so that it was always below water line (he believed the water would keep her there).

The authors went to visit the grave of Lilias, which had been previously discovered by an archaeologist named Doug Speirs. The authors learned that Lilias’s confession may have been forged, mainly due to the way she delivered it and due to her renouncement of her baptism, which was an extremely significant act at the time. A confession identical to Lilias’s was discovered from the town of Inverkeithing, confirming it was likely fabricated. The authors believe that the reason no further incidents followed in Torryburn is because the Reverend knew the death was illegal, and wanted no further risk to his reputation.