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WITCH STORIES

Collected by

E. LYNN LINTON,

Author of "Azeth the Egyptian," "Amymone," Etc.



"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."--EXODUS XXII. 18.







London:
Chapman and Hall, 193 Piccadilly.
1861.

[_The right of Translation reserved._]

London: Printed By W. Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street.




PREFACE.


In offering the following collection of witch stories to the public, I do
not profess to have exhausted the subject, or to have made so complete a
summary as I might have done, had I been admitted into certain private
libraries, which contain, I believe, many concealed riches. But I had no
means of introduction to them, and was obliged to be content with such
authorities as I found in the British Museum, and the other public
libraries to which I had access. I do not think that I have left much
untold; but there must be, scattered about England, old MSS. and unique
copies of records concerning which I can find only meagre allusions, or
the mere names of the victims, without a distinctive fact to mark their
special history. Should this book come to a second edition, any help from
the possessors of these hitherto unpublished documents would be a gain to
the public, and a privilege which I trust may be afforded me.

Neither have I attempted to enter into the philosophy of the subject. It
is far too wide and deep to be discussed in a few hasty words; and to sift
such evidence as is left us--to determine what was fraud, what
self-deception, what actual disease, and what the exaggeration of the
narrator--would have swelled my book into a far more important and bulky
work than I intended or wished. As a general rule, I think we may apply
all the four conditions to every case reported; in what proportion, each
reader must judge for himself. Those who believe in direct and personal
intercourse between the spirit-world and man, will probably accept every
account with the unquestioning belief of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries; those who have faith in the calm and uniform operations of
nature, will hold chiefly to the doctrine of fraud; those who have seen
much of disease and that strange condition called "mesmerism," or
"sensitiveness," will allow the presence of absolute nervous derangement,
mixed up with a vast amount of conscious deception, which the insane
credulity and marvellous ignorance of the time rendered easy to practise;
and those who have been accustomed to sift evidence and examine witnesses,
will be utterly dissatisfied with the loose statements and wild distortion
of every instance on record.

E. LYNN LINTON.

_London_, 1861.




The Witches of Scotland


Scotland was always foremost in superstition. Her wild hills and lonely
fells seemed the fit haunting-places for all mysterious powers; and long
after spirits had fled, and ghosts had been laid in the level plains of
the South, they were to be found lingering about the glens and glades of
Scotland. Very little of graceful fancy lighted up the gloom of those
popular superstitions. Even Elfame, or Faerie, was a place of dread and
anguish, where the devil ruled heavy-handed and Hell claimed its yearly
tithe, rather than the home of fun and beauty and petulant gaiety as with
other nations: and the beautiful White Ladies, like the German Elle-women,
had more of bale than bliss as their portion to scatter among the sons of
men. Spirits like the goblin Gilpin Horner, full of malice and unholy
cunning,--like grewsome brownies, at times unutterably terrific, at times
grotesque and rude, but then more satyr-like than elfish,--like May
Moulachs, lean and hairy-armed, watching over the fortunes of a family,
but prophetic only of woe, not of weal,--like the cruel Kelpie, hiding
behind the river sedges to rush out on unwary passers-by, and strangle
them beneath the waters,--like the unsained laidly Elf, who came tempting
Christian women, to their souls' eternal perdition if they yielded to the
desires of their bodies,--like the fatal Banshie, harbinger of death and
ruin,--were the popular forms of the Scottish spirit-world; and in none of
them do we find either love or gentleness, but only fierceness and crime,
enmity to man and rebellion to God. But saddest and darkest and unholiest
of all was the belief in witchcraft, which infested society for centuries
like a sore eating through to the very heart of humanity, and which was
nowhere more bitter and destructive than among the godly children of our
Northern sister. Strange that the land of the Lord should have been the
favourite camping-ground of Satan, that the hill of Zion should have had
its roots in the depths of Tophet!

The formulas of the faith were as gloomy as the persons. The power of the
evil eye; the faculty of second sight, which always saw the hearse plumes,
and never the bridal roses; the supremacy of the devil in this
God-governed world of ours, and the actual and practical covenant into
which men and women daily entered with him; the unlimited influence of the
curse, and the sin and mischief to be wrought by charm and spell; the
power of casting sickness on whomsoever one would, and the ease with which
a blight could be sent on the corn, and a murrain to the beasts, by those
who had not wherewithal to stay their hunger for a day, these were the
chief signs of that fatal power with which Satan endowed his chosen
ones--those silly, luckless chapmen who bartered away their immortal souls
for no mess of pottage even, and no earthly good to breath or body, but
only that they might harm their neighbours and revenge themselves on those
who crossed them. Sometimes, indeed, they had no need to chaffer with the
devil for such faculties: as in the matter of the evil eye; for Kirk, of
Aberfoyle, tells us that "some are of so venomous a Constitution, by being
radiated in Envy and Malice, that they pierce and kill (like a Cockatrice)
whatever Creature they first set their Eyes on in the Morning: so was it
with Walter Grahame, some Time living in the Parock wherein now I am, who
killed his own Cow after commending its Fatness, and shot a Hair with his
Eyes, having praised its Swiftness (such was the Infection of ane Evill
Eye); albeit this was unusual, yet he saw no Object but what was obvious
to other Men as well as to himselfe." And a certain woman looking over the
door of a byre or cowhouse, where a neighbour sat milking, shot the calf
dead and dried up and sickened the cow, "by the venomous glance of her
evill eye." But perhaps she had got that venom by covenant with the devil;
for this was one of the prescriptive possessions of a witch, and ever the
first dole from the Satanic treasury. When Janet Irving was brought to
trial (1616) for unholy dealings with the foul fiend, it was proved--for
was it not sworn to? and that was quite sufficient legal proof in all
witchcraft cases--that he had told her "yf schoe bure ill-will to onie
bodie, to look on them with opin eyis, and pray evill for thame in his
name, and schoe sould get hir hartis desyre;" and in almost every witch
trial in Scotland the "evil eye" formed part of the counts of indictment
against the accused. The curse was as efficacious. Did a foul-mouthed old
dame give a neighbour a handful of words more forcible than courteous, and
did terror, or revenge, induce, or simulate, a nervous seizure in
consequence, the old dame was at once carried off to the lock-up, and but
few chances of escape lay between her and the stake beyond. To be skilful
in healing, too, was just as dangerous as to be powerful in sickening; and
to the godly and unclean of the period all sorts of devilish cantrips lay
in "south-running waters" and herb drinks, and salves made of simples;
while the use of bored stones, of prayers said thrice or backwards, of
"mwildis" powders, or any other more patent form of witchcraft, though it
might restore the sick to health, yet was fatally sure to land the user
thereof at the foot of the gallows, and the testimony of the healed friend
was the strongest strand in the hangman's cord. This, indeed, was the
saddest feature in the whole matter--the total want of all gratitude,
reliance, trustiness, or affection between a "witch" and her friends. The
dearest intimate she had gave evidence against her frankly, and without a
second thought of the long years of mutual help and kindliness that had
gone before; the neighbour whom she had nursed night and day with all
imaginable tenderness and self-devotion, if he took a craze and dreamed of
witchcraft, came forward to distort and exaggerate every remedy she had
used, and every art she had employed; her very children turned against her
without pity or remorse, and little lips, scarce dry from the milk of her
own breasts, lisped out the glibbest lies of all. Most pitiful, most sad,
was the state of these poor wretches; but instructive to us, as evidencing
the strength of superstition, and the weakness of every human virtue when
brought into contact and collision with it. What other gifts and powers
belonged to the witches will be best gathered from the stories themselves;
for varied as they are, there is a strange thread of likeness running
through them all; specially is there a likeness in all of a time or
district, as might be expected in a matter which belonged so much to mere
imitation.

Scotland played an unenviable part in the great witch panic that swept
like an epidemic over Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. It suited with the stern, uncompromising, Puritan temper, to
tear this accursed thing from the heart of the nation, and offer it,
bleeding and palpitating, as a sacrifice to the Lord; and accordingly we
find the witch trials of Scotland conducted with more severity than
elsewhere, and with a more gloomy and savage fanaticism of faith. Those
who dared question the truth of even the most unreliable witnesses and the
most monstrous statements were accused of atheism and infidelity--they
were Sadducees and sinners--men given over to corruption and uncleanness,
with whom no righteous servant could hold any terms. And then the
ministers mingled themselves in the fray; and the Kirk like the Church,
the presbyter like the priest, proved to be on the side of intolerance and
superstition, where, unfortunately, priests of all creeds have ever been.
And when James VI. came with his narrow brain and selfish heart, to
formularize the witch-lie into a distinct canon of arbitrary faith, and
give it increased political significance and social power, the reign of
humanity and common sense was at an end, and the autocracy of cruelty and
superstition began. It is a dreary page in human history; but so long as a
spark of superstition lingers in the world it will have its special and
direct uses.

The first time we hear of Scottish witches was when St. Patrick offended
them and the devil alike by his uncompromising rigour against them: so
they tore off a piece of a rock as he was crossing the sea and hurled it
after him; which rock became the fortress of Dumbarton in the days which
knew not St. Patrick. Then there was the story of King Duff (968), who
pined away in mortal sickness, by reason of the waxen image which had
been made to destroy him; but by the fortunate discovery of a young maiden
who could not bear torture silently, he was enabled to find the
witches--whom he burnt at Forres in Murray, the mother of the poor maiden
who could not bear torture among them: enabled, too, to save himself by
breaking the wasting waxen image roasting at the "soft" fire, when almost
at its last turn. Then we come to Thomas of Ercildoune, whom the Queen of
Faerie loved and kept; and then to Sir Michael Scot of Balweary, that
famous wizard, second to none in power; while a little further removed
from those legendary times we see the dark figure of William Lord Soulis,
who was boiled to death at Nine Stane Brig, in fitting punishment for his
crimes. And then in 1479 twelve mean women and several wizards were burnt
at Edinburgh for roasting the king in wax, and so endangering the life of
the sovereign liege in a manner which no human aid could remedy; and the
Earl of Mar was at their head, and very properly burnt too. And in 1480
Incubi and Succubi held the land between them, and even the young lady of
Mar gave herself up to the embraces of an Incubus--a hideous monster,
utterly loathsome and deadly to behold; and if the young ladies of the
nobility could do such things, what might not be expected from the
commonalty? But now we come out into the light of written history, and the
first corpse lying on the threshold is that of the beautiful Lady Glammis
(1537).


THE STORY OF LADY GLAMMIS[1]

One of the earliest, as she was one of the noblest, victims of this
delusion, politics and jealousy had as much to do with her death as had
superstition. Because she was "one of the Douglases," and not because she
was convicted as a sorceress, did William Lyon find her so easy a victim
to his hate. For it was he--the near relative of her first husband,
"Cleanse the Causey" John Lyon, Lord Glammis,--who ruined her, and brought
her young days to so shameful an end. And had he not cause? Did she not
reject him when left a widow, young and beautiful as but few were to be
found in all the Scottish land? and, rejecting him, did she not favour
Archibald Campbell of Kessneath instead, and make over to him the lands
and the beauties he had coveted for himself, even during the life of that
puling relative of his, "Cleanse the Causey"? Matter enough for revenge in
this, thought William Lyon: and the revenge he took came easy to his hand,
and in fullest measure. For Lady Glammis, daughter of George, Master of
Angus, and grand-daughter of that brave old savage, Archibald
Bell-the-Cat, was in no great favour with a court which had disgraced her
grandfather, and banished her brother; and consequently she found no
protection there from the man who was seeking her ruin. Perhaps, too, she
had mixed herself up with the court feuds and parties then so common, and
thus had given some positive cause of offence to a government which must
crush if it would not be crushed, and extirpate if it would not be
destroyed. Be that as it may, William Lyon soon gathered material for an
accusation, and Lady Glammis found that if she would not have his love he
would have her life. She was accused on various counts; for having
procured the death of her first husband by "intoxication," or unholy
drugging, for a design to poison the king, and for witchcraft generally,
as a matter of daily life and open notoriety; and for these crimes she was
burnt, notwithstanding her beauty and wealth and innocence and
high-hearted bravery, notwithstanding her popularity--for she was beloved
by all who knew her--and the honour of her stainless name. And once more,
as so often, hatred conquered love, and the innocent died that the guilty
might be at rest.

I must omit any lengthened notice of the trial of Janet Bowman in 1572, as
also of that of a notable witch Nicneven, which name, "generally given to
the Queen of the Fairies, was probably bestowed upon her on account of her
crimes, and who, when 'her collore craig with stringis whairon wes mony
knottis' was taken from her, gave way to despair, exclaiming, 'Now I have
no hoip of myself,' saying, too, that'she cared not whether she went to
heaven or to hell.'" The Record has preserved nothing beyond the mere
fact of the first, while the foregoing extract is all that I can find of
the second; so that I am obliged to pass on to the pitiful tale of--


BESSIE DUNLOP AND THOM REID.[2]

Poor douce honest Bessie Dunlop, spouse to Andro Jak in Lyne, deposed,
after torture, on the 8th day of November, 1576, that one day, as she was
going quietly enough between her own house and Monkcastle yard, "makeand
hevye sair dule with hirself," weeping bitterly for her cow that was
dead, and her husband and child who were lying "sick in the land-ill," she
herself still weak after gissane, or child-birth, she met "ane honest,
wele, elderlie man, gray bairdit, and had ane gray coitt with Lumbart
slevis of the auld fassoun; ane pair of gray brekis and quhyte schankis
gartanit abone the kne; ane blak bonet on his heid, cloise behind and
plane befoir, with silkin laissis drawin throw the lippis thairof; and ane
quhyte wand in his hand." This was Thom Reid, who had been