Image © Kaitlynn Copithorne
We are the granddaughters of the women you weren’t able to burn. Such is the rallying cry of modern witches, of which I’m one. It isn’t historically accurate, but it’s useful, as so many fantasies are. It’s more likely that many of us are descended from those who tortured and killed women accused as witches. If we are looking for ancestry, those men in power left a much better paper trail. The accusers wrote the records of the trials. Of the women who died, almost nothing remains. They had no voice, and the secrets and revelations of their lives went to the fire with them. Many of us have claimed these women as our ancestors, to mourn them properly. We watch Hermione and Nancy Downs for a glimpse of power, something real and lost.
According to the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, the overwhelming number of people accused of witchcraft in Scotland in the 17th century were women. Those found guilty were sentenced to strangulation, their bodies burnt to ash. The witch hunts in Scotland lasted for over a century, terrorising generations of women. There are no remains. Our ancestors were thoroughly erased, but we have stories. This is a story of bones, of a skull gone missing from the village in Scotland where it was once buried deep in a revenant grave.
The skull once belonged to a woman. Tides washed over her for a century until she was dug up by hired rouges who carved her coffin into a walking stick for Andrew Carnegie. The phrenologist Joseph Neil Paton paid these men to open her grave. According to Douglas Speirs, the archeologist who discovered her grave, Paton kept her remains in his personal museum and proclaimed her “animal-like” as all witches before her. The skull became a prop in the fantasy of the witch that persists, even now in our witch-wave zeitgeist. This phrenologist’s museum is no more, even the memory of it is flattened beneath a Tesco car park. The skull isn’t there. It isn’t in the anatomical collections at Saint Andrews University where it was photographed in 1910, posed in a flattering three quarters profile. The photo documents her prominent cheekbones and the high bridge of her nose, the white teeth as singular as a thumbprint. In 1938 people queued at the Empire Exhibition to see the witch, her skull displayed as part of the History of Scotland. Her last appearance was at this exhibition hall in Glasgow. Then war began. Decades went by and her memory was buried under the rubble of a new collective trauma, sunk deep like her grave in the tidal mudflats of Torryburn.
For the past year I’ve been trekking across muddy fields, dodging bulls and barbed wire, reading marker stones obscured with lichen, pouring over old Presbytery session records written in Scots, searching for our common ancestors burnt as witches. I’m driven by their stories, our stories. The shift in power we see now, the grotesque death throes of patriarchy, has witches at its heart. The established roots of power for men like Trump, Weinstein and others lies deep in this systemic, mass killing of women. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft claims the witch hunts in Scotland claimed over four thousand lives. In the UK, these women’s stories are dusted off in newspapers at Halloween. The special interest pieces include salacious details of sex with the devil along with stock photos of green faced hags with warts on their chins. This cliched image of the witch is fantastical, but like any myth there is some truth in it. Those dragged to the stake to be strangled and burnt had greenish bruises over their faces from beatings. Most of the women accused were old, and they would have been shaved and strip-searched for the tell-tale mole or “devil’s mark.”
My research started with the face of a woman killed in 1704. Her features were as clear as an Instagram selfie in night mode staring back at me from my iPhone. I have kept this image of her, this woman named Lillias Adie, on my laptop. A forensic artist named Christopher Rynn created her face from the photo of the skull. She has been the tutelary spirit of my work. When I tell people about it, they ask, “were they really witches?” When I say “no” I can see they’ve lost interest. They’re no Glendas, Gellises nor Willows. Stevie Nicks wasn’t singing as American Horror Story’s coven, in their nugoth OODT, prepared to do battle: not a Prue, Piper nor Phoebe among these dead, our dead. Before Gellis was a time traveller carried out writhing to her death on the show Outlander, Gellis Duncan was a Scottish healer tortured in front of King James the VI, killed for the thought crime of witchcraft. Nothing is left of her, save a distorted version of her life and death in a 16th century witch hunting propaganda pamphlet, Newes from Scotland.
According to her confessions, Lillias Adie claims she had been meeting the devil since the previous witch hunt in Torryburn. Women must have seen these public executions over the course of their lives, even if they weren’t subjects of the hunts themselves. Midwives and healers need not be singled out. No one was immune to accusation; this is how terror works. Lillias must have seen the fate of others as a young girl. The interrogation went on. She met with a coven of “twenty or thirty,” all now dead. She stated that she could name others who she had seen, but they were “masked like gentlewomen.”
As with all confessions extracted under torture, one must read beyond what is written. In this detail of others being dead or masked, we glimpse Lillias’ courage. Her interrogators wanted names, and she initially provided none. In her further confessions she elaborated that the devil had come to her hundreds of times and “lay with her carnally.” His flesh was cold. Though he promised her much, he gave her only poverty and misery. Hours before she died, she affirmed that her confession was “…as true as the sun shines on that floor, and dim as my eyes are, I see that.” Frustratingly, the records don’t mention the cause of her death, but here we glimpse that she was either going blind or her sight was dimming because she was dying.
Much can be made of the more fantastical things she said under duress. Other confessions have been the inspiration for many fictional witches, like the most recent incarnation of Sabrina. The playful world building on the show is a subversive version of the demonic pact elaborated in these confessions from the witch hunts of the 17th century. While some interrogation records reveal fragments of an authentic folk magic, Lillias’ records are nothing more than the confessions of a woman who wished to hasten death, naming as few others as possible.
The pattern of interrogation at Kirk sessions was laborious. Simply saying, “yes, I made a pact with the devil” wasn’t enough. The interrogators wanted the confession to be personal, to ring true. The accused were repeatedly called before the ministers and prosecutors. In Lillias’ case she was held for a month before she died. The most common form of torture in Scotland was called “waking” the witch. The accused were constantly monitored and denied sleep. Scottish witch trial scholar Christina Larner found there are records of this form of torture being used in nearby Dunfermline. Sleep deprivation caused hallucinations and could be one source of the fanatical elements of the confessions. The session record of Lillias ends with a note from September 3rd, 1704. “Lillias Adie was buried within the seamark at Torryburn.”
When I began my research I saw a picture of her grave in a local Fife online paper, The Courier. It was an older story from Halloween. An archeologist named Douglas Speirs knelt in the mud over it. Speirs explained that this grave was expensive and time consuming for the 18th century town council. Those in power were terrified of her. They buried her in unconsecrated ground at a distance from the place of her trial, beyond a stream she couldn’t cross should she return. A slab of sandstone seals her grave, preventing her from returning to torment the living.
What is a witch? Lillias Adie was not one and would never have identified herself as a witch under less dire circumstances. The witch hunts and hundreds of years of demonisation have distorted this word, but the current movement to reclaim it is a powerful one. Anarchic and feminist, it resonates with me; I grew up going to punk shows and writing fanzines. I had my first tarot deck in 1984, a garish Coleman Smith Deck, with me on this path for over 30 years. I am, like others who claim the word witch as their own, dazzled by Instagram accounts with their picture perfect altars and crystal grids, the GIFs of candles forever burning, incense dancing on repeat. The lifestyle fantasy is seductive, but I’m an old witch, a crone. I know what it’s like to work without glamours. But what of the women gone before, the folk healers, midwives, and grandmothers who died so that we may walk this path freely?
In my work I’ve found women who lived and died in a nightmare we can’t imagine, not even with our nightly dose of witches dying and coming back to life on television. In most cases, the only evidence of their singular lives is a confession extracted under torture, written down by men who wanted to kill them. For most, there is no memorial to mark their sufferings and death. Some accused witches did not exist at all, yet they have a cenotaph. One such woman is Maggie Wall. Hers is perhaps the best known monument to a woman in Scotland. It is imposing, marked with “Maggie Wall Burnt Here 1657 as a Witch” in bold white letters. Her cross-topped cairn is famous on the internet, probably because of the drama of its presence and mystery. No remains have been excavated from this site and Maggie Wall probably never existed.
There is a pub in Glasgow called the Saracen Head that has a woman’s skull in a case above the bar. The pub’s legend has it that this is the “skull of the last witch burned at the stake,” and that it’s Maggie Wall’s.
There’s no truth in it. There are no remains left from those burned at the stake, but when I read this I wondered, what if the skull did not belong to Maggie Wall at all but to Lillias Adie? The evidence of her skull ends in Glasgow and it would be distinct enough that I could recognise it from my research.
The Saracen Head is a football pub in Glasgow’s East End, known to locals as the Sarry Heid. I tried to visit it in hopes of seeing the skull for myself. I walked from the Tollbooth tower and the Mercat Cross, which is in the centre of a crossroads. It is said witches danced here at their sabbats. I followed Gallowgate to the Saracen’s Head. Its name is a throwback to the days of the crusades when “saracen” was the term for an Arabic Muslim. The Saracen’s Head pub is old, but not that old. I visited at 4pm on a Thursday and it was locked up tight.
I emailed Douglas Speirs who has written to every anatomical collection in the UK, searching for Lilias Adie’s bones which might have been traded as curios, with no leads. I forwarded a photo I had found online of the skull in the pub. He said that its dark colouring is typical of skulls that have been in numerous anatomical collections, the result of repeated handling, and that the skull shows some similarity to Lillias’. He also cautioned that it might be “too good to be true.” It was. The skull isn’t hers, but it is a woman’s skull, probably from a medical school.
I imagined her there, the shadowed sockets of her frail bones staring out above the hoard of men, gathered to drink and roar at the flickering screen where other tiny men run and kick a ball. After the place is closed and emptied out, it’s dark. Like a trophy from a forgotten war, whoever is in that case waits.
Lillias’ story has gone viral. If her skull is found, the country would need to decide what it wants to do with it as an object that was once a person, and in that decision rests a larger question. What will we do with this history of atrocity and ancestral trauma? Do we keep it in a dusty case, ushering the fantasy of the witch out at Halloween to exploit the suffering it represents, or do we finally remember and pardon these souls, giving them the dignity and peace they deserve?
The sea was rising as I walked out to Lillias’ grave in this liminal zone between the low and high tide. It was Samhain and I was with local Councillor Kate Stewart, the fiery woman behind the search for Lillias. We stood in mud, the horizon blotted out by a wall of cold, white humidity that sunk into my bones. Lillias’ grave is doorstop sized, wreathed with black seaweed. Kate Stewart and Douglas Speirs have asked for her grave to be a protected site. She asked me, “What would you do with her, if we found her? Would you put her back in the mud?” No, I would not. I dream of a long-awaited justice finally come. This story will have a proper end, and we witches can bury our dead.