The Scottish witch trials, and what really happened

This is the material behind The Witching Hour. It is also the part of the show people find hardest, because none of it is supernatural.

Scotland's witch trials ran for roughly one hundred and seventy years, and they were unusually severe. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, compiled at the University of Edinburgh, recorded close to four thousand named people accused. For a country of Scotland's population at the time, that is an enormous number, and proportionally far higher than England managed over the same period.

How it started

The legal machinery was put in place by the Witchcraft Act of 1563, which made witchcraft a capital crime in Scotland. Before that, accusations of magical harm were handled inconsistently and often locally. After it, there was a statute, a process, and a penalty.

Prosecutions did not run at a steady rate. They came in waves, clustered into a handful of intense panics separated by quieter decades. The panics tended to follow periods of hardship: bad harvests, disease, political instability. When things went wrong at scale, communities looked for someone to hold responsible, and the law gave them a way to do it.

North Berwick and the king

The trials that shaped everything afterwards began around 1590 at North Berwick, on the coast east of Edinburgh. A group of people were accused of raising storms to sink the ship carrying James VI and his new wife back from Denmark.

What made this case different was the king's personal involvement. James took an active interest in the interrogations, and the experience left him convinced that a genuine conspiracy of witches had targeted him directly. In 1597 he published Daemonologie, a treatise arguing for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of prosecuting it. A king writing a book on how to identify witches is not a neutral act. It sanctioned everything that followed.

How confessions were produced

The records contain a great many confessions, and they are detailed. People described meetings, pacts, transformations, flights. Read cold, they seem to be evidence of something.

They are evidence of the interrogation, not the crime. The standard methods included prolonged sleep deprivation, which is remarkably effective at producing whatever the questioner wants to hear, and pricking, in which a suspect was jabbed with a long needle in search of an insensitive spot taken to mark them as a witch. There were men who travelled between towns offering pricking as a paid service. Some were later exposed as frauds using retractable needles.

Once someone confessed, they were pressed to name others. That is the mechanism that turns a single accusation into a panic of dozens. The shape of the outbreaks in the records is the shape of that process, not the shape of an underlying conspiracy.

Who was accused

The majority of the accused were women, and a large share were older, poorer, and already at the edge of their communities. Widows. Women who worked as healers or midwives, whose knowledge could be read as helpful or sinister depending on how the last few months had gone. People with a reputation for being difficult, or for arguing with neighbours.

Men were accused too, and in Scotland in meaningful numbers, but the pattern is clear enough. Being a woman without protection made you available for this in a way that other people were not.

How it ended

It did not end because anyone was exonerated. It ended because the educated classes gradually stopped believing prosecutions could be run reliably. Judges grew more sceptical of confession evidence, appeals succeeded more often, and cases became harder to bring. The last executions in Scotland were in the early eighteenth century, and the Witchcraft Act was finally repealed in 1736, replaced by a law that treated claiming magical powers as fraud rather than heresy.

The belief did not vanish with the statute. It simply lost its access to the courts.

Why it belongs in a magic show

Because it is the same subject from the other side. A magic show is an hour of people willingly agreeing to believe something that is not happening. The witch trials were centuries of people involuntarily made to believe something that was not happening, with fatal consequences.

HAUNTED 2.0: The Witching Hour spends its full hour inside this history. The weekly HAUNTED show ranges more widely across the collection, but the same idea sits underneath it: the object in the case is never really the frightening part. The people are.

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