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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the possessors of these hitherto unpublished documents would be a gain to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