North Berwick Witch Trials: What Caused Them and What Really Happened

Most people who know one witch trial know the Salem one. It's the name that gets taught, referenced, turned into plays. But almost two centuries before Salem, Scotland had already run its own brutal experiment in mass accusation — and it started, of all things, with bad weather on a royal honeymoon trip. Between 1590 and 1592, in the East Lothian town of North Berwick, more than seventy people were branded witches and put through unimaginable suffering. Some were burned alive. The whole thing traces back to one king's conviction that someone had tried to drown him at sea using dark magic. This is the story of the North Berwick witch trials, and how paranoia at the top of Scottish society trickled down into torture chambers.

That belief is really the hinge the whole tragedy swings on. Once James got home to Scotland, he threw himself into hunting down whoever was responsible. North Berwick became the epicenter, and it wasn't long before accusations of witchcraft started landing on local women, one after another.

The First Accused: Gillis Duncan

The earliest and most prominent target was a young servant woman named Gillis Duncan. She had a reputation for treating sick or injured people using herbs and plants, and by all accounts, her results were unusually good — good enough that people started wondering how she was doing it. That kind of talent, in that climate, wasn't seen as a gift. It was seen as suspicious. People began to whisper that she must be a witch.

When she was taken in, Gillis denied it outright. She said she wasn't a witch, plain and simple. That denial didn't matter. On King James's orders, she was tortured — and the methods used were genuinely horrifying.

According to the source material, devices resembling thumbscrews were used, applying enough pressure that muscle and tissue could reportedly be forced apart. On top of that, a device known as a scold's bridle was strapped onto the head, its pointed edges digging into the cheeks and tongue, causing severe pain. This wasn't interrogation in any modern sense. It was pain applied until a confession came out.

And eventually, one did. Worn down, Gillis confessed to being a witch. A birthmark on her neck got reinterpreted on the spot as the "Devil's mark." She reportedly went further, claiming she healed her patients through witchcraft and that she had sold her soul to the devil. That confession was treated as enough. She was hanged, and then her body was burned while she was still alive.

The Panic Spreads Through North Berwick

Once Gillis had confessed, the town seemed to tip into something close to mass hysteria. Almost anyone could become a suspect after that.

Here's roughly what could get a person accused, based on the source:

• Having red hair
• Having any kind of birthmark
• Being left-handed
• Being an older woman known for practicing herbal medicine

That last group had it especially rough. Older women who worked with herbs and home remedies got labeled witches almost automatically, with barely any pretense of evidence, and were tortured the same way — kept under duress until they, too, confessed to being what their accusers already believed they were.

It's a strange thing to sit with: healing people, in that context, was itself the crime. If you were good at treating illness with plants, that skill became the evidence against you.

The Bigger Names Get Pulled In

The panic didn't stay confined to servants and village healers for long. As King James's obsession deepened, it started pulling in people with more social standing. Agnes Sampson, a physician named Dr. John Fian, Barbara Napier, Francis Stewart, and Euphemia MacLean were all accused and labeled as devil worshippers.

They were tortured just as severely as the earlier accused, and just as with Gillis Duncan, the torture produced confessions. All of them reportedly admitted to participating in witchcraft.

What they supposedly confessed to is where the story tips from tragic into almost gothic. According to their forced statements, they'd met the Devil at North Berwick churchyard and sold him their souls there. Working with the Devil, they claimed to have plotted to kill King James — through poisoning, through sinking his ship, through whatever means the Devil could offer. One particularly vivid detail from the confessions: they said the Devil had them dig up buried corpses, attach body parts from those corpses to a dead cat, and throw the whole thing into the sea. That act, supposedly, was what conjured the storms that battered James's ships on his way home from Denmark.

Following those confessions, all five of them were burned at the stake.

Small detail worth sitting with for a second: connecting a genuinely bad, storm-heavy sea crossing to a dead cat stuffed with human remains is the kind of leap that only makes sense once you've already decided witches are real and out to get you. Once that premise is accepted, almost any story can be made to fit it.

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How Many People Were Affected

By the time the North Berwick trials wound down, somewhere around seventy people had been swept up in the witch hunt between 1590 and 1592.

Zoom out further, and the numbers get even harder to sit with. The source material notes that across a longer stretch of Scottish history — roughly 1560 to 1707 — an estimated three to four thousand people were killed after being accused of witchcraft.

King James VI: A Contradiction

There's something genuinely strange about King James as a historical figure. He wasn't a fool or a simple tyrant across the board — he's credited with founding the postal service, and by most measures he was regarded as a capable, intelligent ruler.

But witchcraft was his blind spot. When it came to that subject, the same king who could run a kingdom competently turned ruthless and, frankly, a little unhinged. He didn't just oversee the trials from a distance either — in 1597, he went as far as writing and publishing a book on the subject, called Daemonologie, laying out his views on witchcraft, black magic, and related topics in detail.

Were They Actually Witches?

Here's where the source material shifts from reporting facts to offering an opinion, and it's worth treating it as exactly that — an interpretation, not a settled conclusion.

The view expressed is that the accused were almost certainly ordinary people, no different from anyone else, and that they hadn't practiced any actual witchcraft. Under torture that severe, the reasoning goes, confessing to whatever your accusers wanted to hear became a way out — not because it was true, but because continuing to endure the torture was worse than accepting death. In other words, the confessions were very likely false, extracted through pain rather than earned through evidence.

It's a grim kind of logic, but it tracks with how a lot of historical torture-based confessions are understood today: people will often say almost anything to make unbearable pain stop, whether or not it's true.

A Belief That Took Centuries to Fade

The mindset behind these trials didn't disappear overnight. It reportedly took around two hundred years for the belief in witchcraft that fueled hunts like this one to fade out of mainstream European thinking.

And it hasn't vanished everywhere. The source notes that belief in witchcraft still persists today in certain parts of Africa and Asia. The person recounting this story is upfront that they personally don't believe in witchcraft, but they acknowledge plenty of people around the world still do — which feels like a fair, honest way to end on the topic rather than dismissing it outright.

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So, Do You Believe It?

That's really the question this whole story leaves hanging. Strip away the torture devices and the burnings, and what's left is a pretty human pattern: fear looking for someone to blame, and a king convinced the sea itself had been turned against him by people he'd never met. Whether any of the accused in North Berwick actually practiced witchcraft, or whether they were ordinary healers and unlucky townspeople caught in a wave of fear, is something historians still debate in different forms today.

What do you think — is there something to the idea of witchcraft, or does this look purely like fear and torture dressed up as justice? Drop your take in the comments.

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