It is a
story of bloody violence, torture and death – and it all started with a sixteen
year old boy.
In scenes
reminiscent of the 1612 Lancashire Witch Trials and Salem eighty years later, Scotland can lay claim to another appalling miscarriage of justice
perpetrated against the innocent by the superstitious and vengeful. And at
least one of the victims might still be around to haunt the place of her
execution.
Pittenweem
is today a picturesque fishing community in the East Neuk of Fife. Here, in
1705, Patrick Morton, the sixteen year old son of the village blacksmith, began
circulating some wild stories about his neighbours.
He
accused Beatrice Lang, whose husband was a former town treasurer. He said she had
sent evil thoughts in order to torture him when he had heard her mutter under
her breath, clearly angry with him that he could not fulfil her order for iron
nails immediately. He said he became ill shortly after - a direct result of a
witch’s curse.
In that superstitious age, no one thought he
could possibly be telling malicious lies and she was arrested and
imprisoned in a pitch dark dungeon where she spent five long months alone, except
for regular visits to the torture chamber. Unable to make any of the charges
stick, she was eventually freed, but her health was ruined forever, along with her
reputation. No one now believed her innocence and she died soon afterwards,
alone in St Andrews.
Morton
also accused a man called Thomas Brown. He was also arrested and starved to
death in a dungeon.
The third
victim to suffer Morton’s vengeance was Janet Cornfooot (or Corphat). She was
caught but managed to escape her torturers only to be hauled back when a mob
caught her in Pittenweem on 30th January 1705. They beat her and
dragged her, by her heels, to the seafront. Special levels of cruelty were
reserved for her. She was firstly hung up by a rope tied between a ship and the
shore, beaten severely, stoned and finally crushed to death by being placed on
the ground, a door laid over her and increasingly heavy rocks placed on top
until her bones and internal organs were fatally crushed. A particularly vile
method of execution.
Believing
witches had power over death the mob had to be sure she really was dead and a
man drove his horse and cart over her flattened body several times. She was, of
course denied a Christian burial and what was left of her was thrown into a
communal pit at a place known as the ‘Witches’ Corner’.
Morton
continued his reign of terror accusing women and men of all manner of
witchcraft and ensuring they were caught and incarcerated, suffering the most
appalling torture.
All the
prisoners were held at the tollbooth adjoining the Parish Church in Pittenweem
and there, paranormal investigator and author Lenny Low believes he has caught
something on camera that could just be one of the tortured women.
There
have been a number of sightings of a female ghost there over the years but this
time, Mr Low is firmly convinced that his cameras have captured evidence of her
existence. He used up entire memory cards on his infra-red and digital cameras
at the location, leaving motion sensors running on two floors of the tower of
the tollbooth.
Some of
the photographs were extremely dark, but something about this one
stayed
his hand just as he was about to delete it. He enhanced and lightened it and
the image became much clearer. A young woman named Isobel Adam was also tried
as a witch at Pittenweem in 1704/05 and he speculates whether it might be her. The
photograph was taken on the stairs of the tower, in the exact spot where other
visitors have reported seeing a young ghost girl.
Whether
it is Isobel or one of the others, we shall never know. But the evidence is
quite compelling that it is somebody not of this world. In all, during the
Pittenweem witch hunts, sixteen people died by being burned at the stake and
one during torture, but the fact that no lessons had been learned from either
the Lancashire Witch Trials nor Salem, and that anyone crying ‘witch’ and
pointing the finger would still almost certainly have been believed is perhaps the
most sobering and tragic aspect to this whole terrible affair.
As for
Morton, he was eventually exposed as a malicious liar but neither he, nor the
murdering mob, were ever brought to justice or made to answer for their heinous
crimes.
(You can
find The Weem Witch by Leonard Low here.
Click here and
scroll down to watch actual footage shot by Mr Low as described above)
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