Esoteric Edinburgh: witch trials, closes and ghosts

Built on volcanic hills and crossed by narrow closes that drop steeply from the Royal Mile, Edinburgh seems made for ghost stories. Yet its unsettling reputation does not come from atmosphere alone. The Scottish capital was the scene of some of the most important witch trials of early modern Europe and preserves places and objects that document the often dramatic relationship between past society and the world of the supernatural. Retracing them means touching a concrete page of legal and religious history.

The king and the North Berwick witches

In 1563 the Scottish Parliament passed an act that punished witchcraft, and consulting witches, with death. The most sensational case erupted in 1590 and 1591, when dozens of people from the North Berwick area were accused of trying to wreck with magical storms the ship bringing King James VI and his bride, Anne of Denmark, back to Scotland. The king personally took part in some of the interrogations.

Among the accused was Agnes Sampson, an elderly healer, who confessed under torture and was executed. A few years later, in 1597, the king published Daemonologie, a treatise in dialogue form defending the reality of witchcraft and the need to punish it. When in 1603 James also ascended the throne of England, his interest in the subject resonated throughout Britain.

Castlehill and the Witches' Well

Many sentences were carried out on Castlehill, the open ground in front of Edinburgh Castle, where the condemned were usually strangled and then burned. Estimates of the number of Scottish victims over the whole period of the trials vary, and historians speak of several hundred executions, mostly of women. The witchcraft act in Scotland was repealed only in 1736.

On the castle esplanade stands a small cast-iron fountain of 1894, called the Witches' Well, which commemorates the women put to death on that spot. It shows two women's heads entwined with a serpent and an inscription alluding to the twofold nature, beneficent and malign, attributed to the knowledge of the alleged witches. It is one of the few monuments in Europe dedicated to the victims of the witch hunts.

Major Weir and the underground city

In 1670 the case of Major Thomas Weir caused a sensation: an officer regarded as a man of great piety, he spontaneously confessed to very grave crimes and to practising witchcraft. He was executed together with his sister Grizel. His house in the West Bow remained empty for a long time, and popular tradition filled it with apparitions and nocturnal noises, making it one of the city's most famous ghost stories.

Beneath the City Chambers, the former eighteenth-century Royal Exchange, survive the remains of Mary King's Close, a seventeenth-century alley later covered by new buildings and now open to visitors. Legends say it is haunted by the spirits of residents who died of plague in 1645. The National Museum of Scotland also displays several tiny wooden coffins containing clothed figures, found in 1836 in a cavity on Arthur's Seat, whose purpose remains unknown.

Edinburgh thus shows that esoteric history is made not only of symbols and learned texts, but also of real people, collective fears and courts of law. Remembering the victims of the trials alongside the legends of the closes means looking at this past with respect and without sensationalism. In 2022 the Scottish government issued a formal apology for the persecutions.