Episode 30: Wise Wives and Witch Hunts

Episode
Written By Stephanie Summar

The Women Scotland Burned

When King James VI of Scotland had trouble getting his 14-year-old bride across the sea, he blamed witches.

What followed was one of history's most notorious witch hunts – the North Berwick Witch Trials – involving contrary winds, royal bedroom gossip, and a terrifying torture device designed specifically to silence women.

The latest episode of Paranormal Pajama Party covers a dark chapter of Scottish history, unpacking how fragile masculinity and religious patriarchy combined to create a perfect storm, if you will, of misogynistic violence.

 

  • Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.

    When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.

    This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as discussion of historical witch trials, including accounts of torture, sexual assault, and state-sanctioned violence against women. We'll be exploring themes of patriarchal oppression, systemic misogyny, and gendered violence. Please listen with care.

    This episode also includes international witch conferences full of people whispering powerful secrets to one another. The next time you find yourself at a convention, please recommend this podcast to your magical friends. I think they’ll like it!

    [Pause]

    The ship rocked uneasily, its sails hanging limp in the still air. Anne of Denmark stood by the rail, the hem of her gown damp from the sea spray that clung to everything. She glanced toward the horizon, her fingers clutching the wood until they ached. There was no land, no escape, only an endless expanse of water that mirrored the leaden sky above.

    Behind her, the ship’s deck was a flurry of frustrated activity. Sailors muttered prayers under their breath as they worked, their movements hurried but fruitless. Her new husband paced near the helm, his broad strides meant to project confidence, but she could see the tension in his shoulders.

    “We are tested, Anne,” James said, his voice carrying over the silence. “The devil himself seeks to thwart our union.”

    Anne didn’t reply. This wasn’t the first attempt to leave Denmark-Norway for Scotland, and her transformation from a princess to a queen had already claimed too much. Storms had scattered every ship her father sent away to her new home, drowning her courtier Jane Kennedy and endangering Anne herself. Now, a contrary wind had becalmed the ship, trapping it in an eerie limbo.

    Upon hearing the word devil, the sailors’ whispering increased in intensity. Their voices low but urgent, they repeated claims she’d heard in court, too. The storms were no accident, they said. Witches had cursed the king, and now they sought to claim him and his new bride at sea.

    Anne shivered, pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders. She didn’t believe in witches – or at least, she didn’t want to. But the fear in the sailors’ eyes was infectious, and her fortune did seem to have turned of late.

    The ship gave a sudden, shuddering groan, a sound so deep it seemed to come from its very bones. Anne straightened, her fingers tightening on the rail.

    “What is it now?” James demanded, his voice sharp with irritation.

    No one answered. The sailors moved to the edges of the ship, peering over the sides. Anne hesitated, then followed their gaze. The water below was black, its surface strangely smooth.

    And then she saw it.

    A shadow, deep beneath the surface. It shifted and writhed, its edges impossible to define. For a moment, it looked like a hand – a claw – reaching upward towards the hull of the ship. But then it was gone, melting back into the darkness.

    “Do you see?” one of the sailors hissed. His face was pale, his hands trembling.

    Anne’s breath caught in her throat. She squinted into the water, trying to make sense of what she had seen. Was it a trick of the light? A reflection?

    The ship groaned again, the sound vibrating through her chest. This time, it was followed by a faint, scraping noise, as if something were dragging against the hull.

    “It’s them,” another sailor whispered. “They’re trying to pull us under.”

    “Fear not!” James stood near the helm, one hand gripping the hilt of his sword. “God tests us, but He will deliver us.”

    Anne glanced at him, his rigid posture and booming voice a thin mask for the panic she saw in his eyes.

    The scraping grew louder, more insistent. Anne felt her heart pounding. She gripped the rail tightly, staring into the water. The shadow appeared again, closer this time, its shape shifting and uncertain. It could have been anything – a fish, a trick of the current – but the terror in her chest whispered otherwise.

    The sailors crossed themselves, their prayers rising in a desperate chorus.

    And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the sound stopped. The ship stilled, the silence even more unnerving than the noise had been.

    James lowered his sword slowly, his breathing heavy. “You see?” he said, his voice trembling but triumphant. “God has protected us.”

    Anne turned away from the rail, her stomach churning. She didn’t share James’s confidence. Whatever had happened, it didn’t feel like deliverance.

    He strode towards her and placed a hand on her shoulder, his grip firm and possessive. “We will reach Scotland soon, my queen,” he said, his tone softening.

    Anne nodded, forcing a smile. But a heavy fear lingered. Whatever shadows haunted the sea, she suspected they would follow them long after the voyage ended.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

    You may not know it, but you’ve almost definitely seen tonight’s pyjama party guests before – or at least a dramatised homage to them. I’ll give you a hint: “Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble”.

    [Pause]

    Great guess, fellow Millennial women, but it’s not Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in the hit 1993 movie Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, in which they try to trick Cloris Leachman out of a fancy enchanted rock. That was a great movie, and one I will not be watching again just in case I find out otherwise.

    I’m actually talking about something a little more high-brow. Tonight’s guests served as part of the inspiration for the three Weird Sisters in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Like the writers of Law & Order, the Bard’s stories were ripped from the headlines. Agnes Sampson, Gilleis Duncan and Euphame MacCalzean – known to their friends, and now us, as Anny, Gilly and Effie – were the real-life witches brought to Billy’s attention via a 16th-century pamphlet titled “Newes from Scotland”, or a similar publication.

    When I say real-life witches, of course, I absolutely just mean regular women, just like you and me, who were some of the earliest victims of not one, not two, but five massive witch-hunts that swept Scotland from 1560-1736. During this time, nearly 4,000 people were accused of witchcraft, resulting in 2,558 executions, usually by strangulation followed by being burnt at the stake. And 84% of those convicted “witches” were women. This was state-sanctioned femicide.

    And it all started with the wedding between the 23-year-old King James VI of Scotland – soon to simultaneously become King James I of England – and his 14-year-old bride, Anne of Denmark. If you think you’ve been to a bad wedding… it’s got nothing on this one.

    James brought a lifetime of complicated relationships with powerful women – and his own masculinity – into the North Berwick Witch Trials that kicked off after these nuptials. Unfortunately, this resulted in him channelling patriarchal norms into a campaign of gendered violence.

    The aftermath of what happened to Anny, Gilly, Effie, and their fellow victims still haunts Western culture, from the King James Bible to our enduring stereotype of witches. But understanding them can help us break the spell, if you will – enabling us to see, then destroy, the modern systems that perpetuate violence and injustice against women.

    Before I get into all of this, I’d like to give a particular shout-out to one of my main sources for today’s episode, which was a chapter from Marion Gibson’s book, “Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials”. It’s one of those books that briefly sends me into a cycle of despair and makes me question why I’m even doing this podcast when other women are tackling these topics in such a fabulous way. So… thanks a lot, Marion. (But like, genuinely, thanks a lot.)

    And a shout-out to podcast listener Dr Pete Lentini for recommending Marion’s book to me a few months ago. Thanks, Pete!

    To understand the North Berwick Witch Trials, we need to zoom out and look at the powder keg of Scottish politics in the late 16th century – that wasn’t meant to be a Gunpowder Plot pun, but here we are. This was a kingdom torn between old and new, Catholic and Protestant, with power shifting constantly beneath everyone's feet.

    James VI was born into chaos. His father was murdered when he was just an infant – possibly in a scheme cooked up in part by James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots. She went on to marry the chief suspect in the murder plot, so… eyebrows were raised.

    Meanwhile, the religious landscape was a minefield. The Scottish Reformation had violently transformed the country. Catholics were viewed with deep suspicion, seen as potential traitors to the new Protestant order.

    Unluckily for Mary, who you may remember from our episode about Green Ladies and Glaistigs, she was a Catholic Scottish monarch reigning right next door to the very anti-Catholic Elizabeth I. Mary was forced to abdicate in 1567, becoming a political prisoner of Protestant rebels and leaving the one-year-old James on the throne as a baby king.

    As adorable as that sounds, it’s not great for the rest of the country. Scotland went through a series of regents who were killed or banished for various reasons, and James never saw his mother again.

    For the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic Mary was a constant threat. When Mary fled to England in 1568 seeking her powerful cousin’s protection, she instead found herself under house arrest.

    By 1587, the political tension reached its breaking point, and Elizabeth signed Mary's death warrant. This was especially awkward because James and Elizabeth were cousins, and he was the most logical heir to the English throne since she was, famously, a childless virgin. So James had to stand by as his mother was executed by his future predecessor. And you thought your family dynamics were complicated.

    James’ personal life was complicated, too. By age 23, there were whispers around the Scottish court questioning his ability to produce an heir, and that’s because he was gay. His intense attachments to various male courtiers and apparent disinterest in women led to speculation that he might die childless, which was a problem because his primary duty was to secure the royal lineage.

    So, as is the case with most royal pairings, his marriage to Anne of Denmark wasn't a love match – it was a chess move. The Protestant Denmark-Norway, which was one country at the time and had a longstanding relationship with Scotland, represented a crucial alliance he was eager to solidify.

    But even their wedding journey was fraught. Multiple attempts by the Danish-Norwegian court to bring Anne to Scotland failed, with ships leaking and storms preventing safe passage.

    In a surprising move designed to emphasise his masculine courage and assertiveness, James announced that he would go get her himself, despite the danger. He left another cousin, the Earl of Bothwell, on the throne in his place. James was sure that God had his back – after all, kings were the most direct connection humans had to God. Throughout his life, James made it very clear that he believed he was the divinely ordained personal representative of God himself.

    Regular Paranormal Pajama Party listeners will remember that just a few decades earlier, Dominican-monk-slash-super-gross-incel Heinrich Kramer had incited a witch-hunting fever with the publication of his infamous book, the Malleus Maleficarum.

    Like me, James was more of an indoor cat – much more into reading than athletics or hunting. He was well-versed in religion and in the intellectual pursuits of the day. And by the late 16th century, the demonology popularised by Kramer and his creepy brethren had become essential knowledge for European rulers.

    When James arrived in Norway, where Anne’s fleet was stuck, the entire continent was gripped by a paranoid vision of supernatural warfare. The Danish-Norwegian court was particularly obsessed, with bishops openly calling for witches to be, quote, “hunted down like wolves.” One Danish bishop wrote with too much enthusiasm about burning convicted witches “to glowing ashes with skin and bones, flesh and body” – language that sounds more like a modern 4chan troll than a religious leader.

    The storms that beset Anne’s ships were too much for the court’s collective imagination. And to James, they felt personal. They were an attack on him as a man and as a king, and therefore, an attack on God. The cause was obvious to everyone: Clearly his cousin, the Earl of Bothwell, had treasonously conspired with witches to kill James and Anne so he could keep the Scottish throne and eventually the English throne, too. Duh.

    So when James returned to Scotland, he needed to prove himself. He chose witch trials, conducted in parallel with those in Denmark-Norway, as his stage. He personally led these prosecutions, partially because he was curious, but also to demonstrate his strength, his divine connection, and his ability to root out evil – and for some reason he mostly saw that evil embodied by women.

    (I obviously don’t know if his relationships with his possibly murdery mother and his definitely murdery cousin Elizabeth were factors in all of this. As we discussed in the Malleus Maleficarum episodes, women were popular scapegoats at the time for a lot of different reasons. But I also suspect someone like Sigmund Freud would’ve found this whole thing very interesting.)

    The first domino to fall in the North Berwick trials was Gilly Duncan, a young maidservant of the wealthy Seton family. Gilly was a talented healer who seems to have had some knowledge of plants and herbs, and she’d sometimes disappear in the evenings. You know, like a person with a life outside of work might do.

    But remember, this was a time when anything a woman could do without male permission was suspect, and Gilly was so good at healing that her cures seemed downright miraculous. Miracles? Unless you’re Jesus Christ himself, that’s Catholic shit. And to her boss David Seton, tasked by the Protestant king to keep a weather eye out for witchy behaviour, Catholic shit was a big old red flag.

    David illegally tortured poor Gilly, tying a rope tightly around her head and subjecting her to pilliwinks, which sound cute but are actually thumbscrews designed to crush victims’ fingers. Bizarrely, Gilly didn’t confess to being a witch.

    No, it took sleep deprivation, isolation, and more sustained – and, again, very illegal – torture to break her. Finally, unable to stand any more, Gilly confessed to her involvement with an enormous coven of witches that plotted to send the deadly storms against Anne and the King. She began to name her co-conspirators – starting with Agnes Sampson.

    Before she became a witch in the eyes of the court, Agnes Sampson, also called Anny, was known as the “Wise Wife of Keith” – a respected healer, midwife, and community caretaker. 

    Unlike Gilly, her healing wasn't just about herbs and knowledge. It was emotional labour in the most literal sense. She would arrive at sickbeds and literally take on her patients' pain, praying with them to transfer it to her own body, and then wrestling with it until she could banish it while they slowly recovered.

    While it would scare the hell out of me if my GP started using this technique, it’s apparently not unusual in faith healing. From Anny’s perspective, what she was doing was extremely Christian. She claimed her powers came from prayer and knowledge she learned from her father – who would’ve been Catholic. To James and the court, that was straight-up witchcraft.

    We don’t actually know if Gilly and Anny even knew each other, but clearly Gilly knew of Anny. She was a spiritual celebrity at the time, and her clients included nobility.

    Agnes, too, was imprisoned and tortured. Her head was also bound tightly with rope, and she was fastened to her cell wall with a newfangled local invention, the scold’s bridle. This instrument of punishment was sometimes called the “witch’s bridle” or “gossip’s bridle,” and you’ll note that those are some pretty gendered names. That’s not a coincidence – it was used as a tool to humiliate and silence women.

    The scold’s bridle was an iron cage that enclosed the head, although sometimes it was more of a mask over the face that was made to look like someone suffering. It had a plate that slid into the victim’s mouth and some versions, including the one Agnes wore, had a spike pressing down on the tongue and sharp pieces poking into the cheeks. If the wearer tried to speak or use her mouth at all, it would pierce her tongue.

    The women forced to wear it were being punished for being rude, nagging, or even just outspoken. Once it was on, they would sometimes be paraded around by a man to send a public message to other women: “Speak out of turn, and this is what happens.” Sometimes there was even a bell on it. Women might also be forced to stand in the centre of town and tied to a post with the bridle on, until the patriarchal authorities decided they’d been properly chastened.

    But even the bridle wasn’t enough to get Anny talking. Not that she could if she wanted to while wearing it. She was subjected to the same torture as Gilly and held her tongue. Finally, her jailers stripped her and shaved her for an invasive search of her body. They were looking for a witch’s mark, which their trusty demonology books told them was left behind by the Devil when he licked witches to brand them as his own. They found the mark they were looking for near her genitals.

    The sexual assault on top of everything else seems to have been the last straw for Anny, or maybe she just realised that it didn’t matter what she said or didn’t say – she was being railroaded. It’s really easy to find evidence against someone if you’re just making it up.

    In her forced confession, she claimed the devil offered her money. As an impoverished widowed mother sharing a miserable hovel with her children, who could blame her for listening?

    Anny claimed that she and Gilly, along with hundreds of other women and men, participated in a number of international witch meet-ups that make modern conventions look mundane. Anny said witches gathered from Scotland and Denmark-Norway across the two kingdoms, meeting to plot against King James. The devil himself – described as a Black man in black clothes – would preside over these meetings, which scandalously took place in a church, the ultimate inversion of holy space.

    Marion Gibson points out that Anny was probably trying to envision the inverse of a Protestant church mass. In Scotland, God was served by a white man in white vestments. Satan would, naturally, enjoy the exact opposite.

    Her most politically charged accusation involved the royal ships. Anny claimed she and her fellow witches had caused the storms that threatened King James's wedding journey. She said they used a charm that included the body parts of a dead man to float demons in barrels over the sea to attack the ships. She described how they created a weather working so specific that the king's ship experienced contrary winds while other ships sailed smoothly, which is indeed what happened. It’s also… not an unusual weather pattern for the area.

    [Sigh]

    All of this was a little too wild, even for King James. Anny mentioned, for example, that she’d travelled to one of these witch Sabbaths across the sea in a sieve, which is another detail Shakespeare picked up to add to Macbeth. The King was sceptical of her claims until she mentioned one particular detail.

    She told him that she had been present on his wedding night by magical means, and then she repeated something he’d said to his new wife – something he swore no one could have heard him say but Anne. Anne and… probably any nearby servants, who hardly counted as people and certainly wouldn’t spread that kind of hot goss around, right? Right.

    Why would Anny say such a thing? Surely she recognised the danger she was putting herself in by claiming to have magically been in the royal bed chamber – the bed chamber of the people she was being accused of personally attacking with witchcraft.

    She said it because she was talking to the king. The KING. God’s earthly representative. Gibson writes that every suspect told James exactly what he wanted to hear. And why wouldn't they? Anny and Gilly were poor, uneducated women brought before the most powerful man in the kingdom. These were women socialised from birth to defer to authority, and to placate men, to survive.

    James’ presence at the trials was a problem. It put pressure on people to find witches, on the accused to confess, and on the courts to convict and throw the book at each defendant. The king himself was thrilled to be there, but he was – I hope unknowingly – the cause of mass injustice.

    The women had no choice. Their confessions were inevitable.

    The only one of our party guests who stood a ghost of a chance against this misogynistic machine was Euphame MacCalzean, known as Effie.

    Effie was no ordinary woman for her time. Far from being poor and powerless, like her fellow accused witches, she came from an influential family and was her father’s only heir. As was common, when she married, her husband actually took her last name so it wouldn’t die out.

    Effie was known to be outspoken, and she’d had a number of conflicts with male relatives over land rights. When her nephew died after one of these arguments between Effie and an uncle, the witch talk began.

    She was accused by James’ court of various witch-related schemes, particularly of plotting the death of her own husband, her father-in-law, and various extended family members on his side. She’d also, according to Anny, been one of the Wise Wife of Keith’s more notable customers.

    After birthing at least five children, Effie knew a thing or two about the brutal reality of childbirth. She supposedly approached Anny for a charm to ward off the pain of her impending labour, and Anny confessed to having supplied her with a mysterious powder, a stone with a hole in it and the body parts of a dead man to keep under her pillow. She also told her to store one of her husband’s shirts beneath the bed to ensure her labour was quick and pain-free.

    But in 1591, pain wasn't just expected during childbirth, it was considered a divine punishment. It was a social contract between women and God that said women must suffer.

    These days, we mainly associate King James with the King James Bible, the go-to text used by Christian fundamentalists. Commissioned after he succeeded Elizabeth to become the King of England, too, the King James Bible wasn't just another translation – it was a deliberate political and theological project.

    He was trying to create a definitive English-language biblical text that would consolidate religious and political power. Unlike previous translations that were often tied to specific religious factions, this version was meant to be a unified religious text that could support the emerging absolute monarchy he envisioned.

    And by carefully controlling the translation process, James ensured that the biblical text would reinforce the social hierarchies of the time. This crops up in verses like Genesis 3:16, where God’s just discovered that Adam and Eve have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and has started cursing everyone involved.

    “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

    This was a spiritual text, and also a social model. The language about women's suffering and subservience was a calculated theological justification for existing patriarchal power structures.

    In fact, when a rabbi translated that same verse from Hebrew in the 19th century, he gave the more accurate English translation as “labour” – as in, uterine contractions, and not sorrow at all. That was a very deliberate word choice.

    So when Effie MacCalzean approached Agnes Sampson for a charm against the pain of childbirth, she wasn’t just seeking a little relief. She was going against God.

    On January 27, 1591, Agnes Sampson was found guilty. She was strangled beside the stake, her body then burned – the standard punishment for witchcraft. The same thing happened to Gilly Duncan that December, even though she recanted all her accusations and pointed out they’d been given under extreme duress. She was executed alongside another woman, Bessie Thompson, Agnes’ daughter.

    Despite their wealth and influence, Effie’s family was unable to save her from an even worse fate. In her case, she was accused of committing petty treason. Not against the King, but against her husband, her lawful sovereign as a woman. The punishment was being burned alive at the stake.

    The North Berwick Witch Trials lasted for two years and resulted in the arrests of more than 100 suspected witches. Eventually, the Earl of Bothwell, who’d fled Scotland when he heard James was back and thought he was conspiring with witches, returned to the country and was put on trial. But he was rich, and noble, and a man, and nothing happened to him.

    Scotland fell into four more witch-hunting panics after the North Berwick trials wrapped up. The second kicked off in 1597, the same year King James published his own book on demonology, cleverly titled Daemonologie. The timing doesn’t seem that coincidental.

    During the 1597 hunts, a woman named Margaret Aitken, known as the Great Witch of Balwearie, told her torturers that she would help them find other witches in an effort to save her own skin. She claimed she could identify her fellow practitioners just by looking them in the eye. 

    Eventually, after hundreds of people had been accused, and some executed, someone thought to test her by having a group of people she’d already judged placed before her again, this time in new clothes and a different order. Margaret failed to recognise them, accused some she’d previously exonerated and vice versa, and was exposed as a fraud.

    This was bad news for Margaret, who was executed anyway, but a woman named Marion Walker, an outspoken critic of Protestantism and the witch trials, leaked her confessional testimony – including the part where she threw a Puritan minister named John Cowper under the bus.

    Marion spread the testimony among her Glasgow resistance network, helping to turn the tide of public opinion against the witch trials… for a while. By the 18th century, Scotland executed as many as five times more people per capita than any other European country.

    Back in 1597, Cowper, who’d sentenced many of the accused witches to death, tried to pass a law ruling that anyone who blamed Glasgow’s ministers for the recent executions had to spend time in the scold’s bridle. Marion kept talking anyway.

    And the good news is that following her example, women were never silenced again! Haha. Just kidding. There’s an entire feminist theory about communicative injustice and the many, many ways women and other minorities are still demeaned and punished for speaking up. But that’s for another time.

    The news of the Scottish witch trials spread, and as I’ve already mentioned, William Shakespeare was inspired to include three witches in a now-classic play about a Scottish laird who was too big for his kilt. His Weird Sisters have basically colonised our entire cultural imagination of what a “witch” looks like, not to mention the ingredients for their spells.

    Anny’s descriptions of midnight meetings with her coven and magical travel were basically the first draft of Macbeth’s witch scenes. There was nothing more frightening to the public imagination than a group of women who gather secretly, who know things they shouldn't, and who can influence powerful men's destinies, and Billy S. knew it.

    And wow, did that archetype stick. From cackling witches in cartoons to the more complex magical practitioners in modern fantasy, we're still basically working with the same template Shakespeare created.

    I should probably do a whole episode on Macbeth one of these days, actually. A play where the antagonist is just some guy’s ambitious wife, and that’s what makes her evil? Lady Macbeth, you’re one of our kind.

    As for King James, well. After he ascended to the English throne in 1603, you'd think things would calm down a bit. Finally, he had the power to pursue his dream of uniting Scotland and England under the banner of Great Britain. It wasn’t exactly a hit. Centuries of rivalry and mutual disdain don’t just vanish because a king says so.

    And just when it seemed like things couldn’t get more chaotic, along came Guy Fawkes, who led a group of Catholic conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Trying to restore Catholic power in England, they attempted to blow up Parliament—and James along with it. Their plan failed spectacularly, and James’ government spun it into a PR win, cementing his image as a divinely protected monarch. But the plot also exposed the deep religious divisions that plagued his reign.

    As I said, these days, more people know about James for his bible translation than for his role in the witch trials or his complicated royal maneuvering. The King James Bible became the standard English version of the Christian Bible for centuries. Those carefully chosen words about women's suffering and subservience in Genesis? They've echoed through Western culture for over 400 years. Ironically, his version of the Bible also has some strong words to say against homosexuality, which is pretty rich coming from a King with multiple male favourites.

    We're still unpacking the damage of those translations today, and they’re fuelling the religious fervour of movements like the Christian nationalists, and some members of Trump’s proposed 2025 cabinet. Kinda makes you wish Guy Fawkes or the witches had gotten their man.

    On International Women’s Day in 2020, two women kicked off a campaign called Witches of Scotland, which pursued justice for the victims of Scotland’s witch hunts in the form of a pardon, an apology, and a monument in their honour. There was precedent for this as Scotland had recently acknowledged the harms caused by other historic laws on its books.

    In 2022, Nicola Sturgeon, then First Minister of Scotland, delivered this apology:

    “Firstly, acknowledging injustice, no matter how historic is important. This parliament has issued, rightly so, formal apologies and pardons for the more recent historic injustices suffered by gay men and by miners.

    “Second, for some, this is not yet historic. There are parts of our world where even today, women and girls face persecution and sometimes death because they have been accused of witchcraft.

    “And thirdly, fundamentally, while here in Scotland the Witchcraft Act may have been consigned to history a long time ago, the deep misogyny that motivated it has not. We live with that still. Today it expresses itself not in claims of witchcraft, but in everyday harassment, online rape threats and sexual violence.”

    Anny, Gilly and Effie were just three of the women caught in a patriarchal machine designed to crush female power, knowledge and autonomy. Their stories aren't just historical footnotes, though. From the scold's bridle to our voices being left out of global decisions, from witch trials to the modern courtroom, the mechanisms change but the core impulse remains the same: control women. But if you can figure out how a machine works, you can find its weaknesses and you can tear it apart.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. After all, if we’re going to dismantle the patriarchy, we need our beauty sleep.

    To learn more about the victims of the North Berwick Witch Trials, the Scold’s Bridle, and when we finally stopped burning women at the stake for asking for painkillers during childbirth, check out my sources in the show notes.

    Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.

    The holiday season and all its madness is approaching and I’ve got to take a little break, so Paranormal Pajama Party will return in January with all new episodes. Have a wonderful end of the year celebrating however you celebrate, and thank you so much for making this first year of the podcast such a blast. You rock.

    I’ll see you in a few short weeks. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

A king's insecurities spark a witch hunt

James VI wasn't your typical 16th-century monarch. Gay, bookish and haunted by complicated relationships with powerful women (including his maybe-murderous mother Mary Queen of Scots and his very murderous cousin Elizabeth I), he had a lot to prove.

When storms repeatedly prevented his new bride, Anne of Denmark, from reaching Scotland, James saw it as a personal attack – not just on him as a king, but on his masculinity and his divine right to rule. His solution? Launch a massive witch hunt to demonstrate his power and connection to God.

The first domino to fall was Gilly Duncan, a young maidservant with an unfortunate talent for healing. Her knowledge of herbs and plants made her successful at curing the sick – too successful. In Protestant Scotland, where Catholic-style miracles were viewed with deep suspicion, Gilly's healing abilities caught the attention of her employer David Seton.

After subjecting her to illegal torture, including the crushing of her fingers with thumbscrews and binding her head with rope, Seton extracted a confession that would doom dozens of others.

Among those named was Agnes Sampson, known as the Wise Wife of Keith. A respected midwife and healer, Agnes’ approach to medicine was intensely spiritual – she would literally take on her patients' pain through prayer, wrestling with it until she could banish it from their bodies. While she saw her work as deeply Christian, her Catholic-influenced practices made her an easy target.

After being stripped, shaved, and subjected to invasive searches for a "witch's mark," Agnes broke under torture. Her confession included elaborate tales of international witch conventions and magical eavesdropping on the royal bedchamber.

James was sceptical until Anny repeated private words he'd spoken to his bride on their wedding night, which convinced the king of her supernatural powers.

The scold's bridle: medieval misogyny's greatest hit

Among the many torture devices employed during the trials, none quite captures the period's systematic oppression of women like the scold's bridle, which was used on Agnes during her imprisonment.

This iron cage for the head featured a spiked plate that would pierce the tongue if the wearer tried to speak. Women were forced to wear it as punishment for being rude, nagging, or simply outspoken. Some were paraded through town with bells attached – a public warning to other women who might dare to speak their minds.

Gilly, Agnes, and the many other women and men accused of witchcraft and brought to trial before the King told James exactly what he wanted to hear, as Marion Gibson notes in her book “Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials.” What choice did they have? These were poor, uneducated women brought before God's earthly representative, socialised from birth to placate powerful men to survive.

Their reward for playing along was being strangled and having their bodies burned at the stake.

Divine punishment and the politics of pain

Perhaps most chilling was the case of Euphame MacCalzean, who committed the apparently unforgivable sin of seeking pain relief during childbirth.

In the eyes of James's court, this wasn't just witchcraft – it was a violation of God's natural order. Women's suffering during childbirth wasn't just expected; it was a sacred covenant between women and God.

The King James Bible, commissioned later by James, would cement this view by translating a word in Genesis 3:16 as “sorrow” and establishing childbirth pain as divine punishment for all women. In fact, when a 19th-century rabbi translated the same verse from Hebrew, he noted that the original text referred specifically to labour and uterine contractions, not spiritual suffering.

This wasn't just about accurate translation – it was about control. The King James Bible wasn't merely another version of scripture; it was a calculated political and theological project designed to consolidate religious and political power and reinforce existing social hierarchies, particularly regarding women's subordination. The same verse continues with “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” – language that provided theological justification for patriarchal power structures.

For more than 400 years since, these carefully chosen words about women's suffering and subservience have echoed through Western culture, fueling everything from opposition to medical pain relief in childbirth to modern Christian nationalist movements.

By attempting to circumvent her divinely ordained suffering, Euphame was challenging the very system that kept women subservient. Her punishment was fitting for such defiance in the eyes of the court. Rather than the usual strangling before burning, she was burned alive at the stake for committing petty treason – not against the King, but against her “rightful” ruler – her husband.

The legacy lives on

While the witch trials eventually ended, their influence echoes through Western culture to this day. From Shakespeare's Weird Sisters of Macbeth to modern Christian fundamentalism's use of the King James Bible, the fears and prejudices that drove the North Berwick trials continue to shape our world. As Scotland's former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon noted in her 2022 apology to witch trial victims, the deep misogyny that motivated these persecutions hasn't vanished – it's just found new ways to express itself.

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Sources

Stephanie Summar
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Episode 29: Monsters and morals