Witchcraft and magic are nebulous and often dangerous concepts. For much of human history, anyone who has seemed to have uncanny powers has either been hailed as a holy person or put to death as a demon.

When some people achieve success, it is deeply galling to their enemies. The only way those individuals can have reached the top is with witchcraft! Here are 10 times that famous people throughout history have been accused of witchery.

10 Anne Boleyn

Few people have had as great an effect on British history as Anne Boleyn. When the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon failed to give the king the male heir he desired, he felt that God had cursed him for marrying his brother’s widow.

Already, the king had strayed from his marriage vows and fathered a number of illegitimate children. So he believed he would be able to produce a prince to follow him if he had a different wife. That new wife was Anne Boleyn.

When the Pope of the day refused to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine, his beloved Anne encouraged him to break with Rome and proclaim himself head of the Church in England. From this act came England as a Protestant nation amid the destruction of the monasteries. Anne was wed and made queen. All was going according to plan.

When Anne gave birth to a daughter and then a stillborn son, Henry again felt cursed. He began to claim that Anne had seduced him using “sortilege”—sorcery and witchcraft.^[1]

The queen’s many enemies were quick to add more flames to the fire by claiming she had witch’s marks like moles and a sixth finger on one hand. Although she was never formally charged with witchcraft, the accusations blackened her reputation and quickly led to her fatal meeting with the executioner’s sword.

9 Joan Of Arc

Joan of Arc achieved remarkable things in her short life. A little too remarkable for some.

Before she was 19, she had ditched her peasant robes for armor and joined an army to break the siege of Orleans. Given visions, she claimed, by saints and archangels, her advice was heeded by kings and nobles.

For her English enemies, however, she was considered an agent of evil. One described her as “a disciple and limb of the Fiend . . . that used false enchantment and sorcery.”^[2]

When she was captured by Burgundians, she was given over to the English. They charged her as a heretic but used her supernatural abilities to paint her as a witch or tool of the Devil.

Accordingly, the voices that she heard were not angelic but diabolical. Her ability to recognize people she had never met before was a gift from hell. And the predictions that led to her military victories were gifts from Satan.

Found guilty of heresy, she was placed in prison as punishment because only those who were convicted twice could be put to death. It was Joan’s habit of dressing in men’s clothes that was her undoing. By wearing military garb while in prison, she had committed heresy again and so was condemned to be burned at the stake.

8 The Clintons

Something about Hillary and Bill Clinton seems to cause people to go witch mad. One website has a multipart series on the couple’s connections to dark forces. It accuses Bill of using Haitian voodoo to win his election, Hillary of being the Whore of Babylon, and the pair of performing bizarre rituals for their own nefarious purposes.

You might think that this was on the outer fringe of beliefs. But at the 2016 Republican convention, one attendee accused Hillary of being a member of the Illuminati and a witch. A photograph of her playfully trying on a witch’s pointed hat was taken as proof positive of her satanic associations.

Another sartorial mistake was wearing a bird-shaped brooch that either symbolized her attachment to the New World Order or was a sign of loyalty to the Antichrist.^[3] Who knew jewelry could have so many meanings?

When Hillary talked about having conversations with figures from history like Mahatma Gandhi, she meant holding imaginary discussions to shape her thinking. Of course, some people took this literally and she was accused of communing with spirits.

7 Backwards Masked Music

Backmasking is a recording method where a message is put into a song that only makes sense when the song is played backwards. This has been used to hide fun Easter eggs for hard-core fans to find, like when Weird Al put “Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands” into one of his tracks. In the past, there have been people with too much time on their hands because they have found hundreds of satanic messages hidden in rock songs.

It was claimed that the Styx song “Snowblind” contained the subliminal and backwards message “Satan moves through our voices.” While Styx found the idea that they were the heralds of Satan laughable, there was enough of a backlash against backmasking that Arkansas passed a bill demanding that records with backmasking be identified as such to purchasers.^[4]

Those looking for Satan in Soundgarden’s songs “665” and “667” will be disappointed. Instead, there is a backmasked song about Santa.

6 The British Royal Family

While some have claimed that the British royal family are in fact shape-shifting reptilian creatures, there is an older tale that links them to demons and witches. The counts of Anjou were one of the great noble families of France. Their might and prowess in battle led people to wonder just where their uncanny knack for coming out on top—and vicious tempers—had come from. The answer was, of course, a demon.

In the 12th century, rumors abounded that an earlier count of Anjou had married a mysterious woman. This beautiful lady always found a reason to absent herself from church and never attended mass.

One day, her suspicious husband forced her to remain for the consecration of the Host. At the holiest moment of the ceremony, she tore off her cloak, levitated in the air, and flew out a window, never to be seen again.^[5]

From this count and his demonic wife came the Plantagenet line of kings. Richard I used to joke about his hellish ancestry: “We come from the Devil, and we’ll end by going to the Devil!” Who knows, there may be a drop of demon blood in the blue blood of the Windsors today.

5 Pope John Paul II

Pope John Paul II, now a saint of the Catholic Church, is held by many to be a heroic figure of the 20th century. Some credit his stand against Communism as among his best acts.

Others have a more dubious view given the sex scandals in the Church that emerged in his last years and still blight public perception of Catholicism. And then there were those who thought he was the Antichrist.

When Pope John Paul II addressed the European parliament in 1988, Ian Paisley, a notoriously loud and vociferous Protestant, greeted the Pope by heckling his speech and declaring, “I refuse you as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist with all your false doctrine.”

While his opposition may have been more symbolic than a real accusation of the Pope, some people see occult signs everywhere around Pope John Paul II. Everything from his birth, supposedly during a solar eclipse, to his funeral rituals have been claimed as signs of his diabolic origin.^[6]

4 Christine O’Donnell

It’s rare for a politician to have to begin a campaign message with the words, “I’m not a witch.” But that is what Christine O’Donnell did in 2010. It followed what some could see as a self-accusation of witchcraft.

In 1999 on the Bill Maher show Politically Incorrect, she had said:

I dabbled into witchcraft—I never joined a coven. [ . . . ] I hung around people who were doing these things. [ . . . ] One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s little blood there and stuff like that. [ . . . ] We went to a movie and then had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar.^[7]

Bill Maher later apologized for making her political run into a joke, but the damage was done. In today’s political climate, it seems that a politician can overcome any scandal except going on TV and saying that he or she is not a witch.

3 Stevie Nicks

Since at least the 1970s, Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac has been associated with witchcraft. “Rhiannon,” a song written by Nicks and recorded by Fleetwood Mac, is about a Welsh witch-goddess. Ever since its release, people have been asking the singer whether she is really a witch.

The song features lyrics like: “Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night, and wouldn’t you love to love her? Takes to the sky like a bird in flight, and who will be her lover?” What else could this mean but a witch riding a broom through the sky?

Flight did have something to do with it. Nicks saw the name “Rhiannon” in a book at the airport and wrote a story about a woman who was free as a bird. Despite this mundane explanation, people looked as Nicks’s long black dresses and decided she really was a witch.^[8]

After years of denying her witchy nature, she embraced it in 2014 when offered the chance to play a fictionalized version of herself in the TV show American Horror Story where she was a white witch.

2 Pope Sylvester II

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but too much knowledge can see you accused of witchcraft. According to legend, Pope Sylvester II was not only a naturally gifted scholar but also a supernaturally gifted one.

Supposedly, he sold his soul to the Devil in return for hidden knowledge. It was said that Sylvester was “the best necromancer in France, whom the demons of the air readily obeyed in all that he required of them by day and night.”^[9]

The greatest achievement of his dark arts was a statue to which he would ask yes-or-no questions and always get the right answer. We are told that Sylvester traveled to Spain, then under the control of the Muslim Saracens, to study with them.

From one of their greatest philosophers, he stole a book of magical spells and learned how to sell his soul to the Devil. Using his new powers, he created his wise “brazen head” and used its guidance to rise to the papacy.

Of course, it seems more likely that Sylvester had studied in Spain with teachers who had access to knowledge unknown in the rest of Europe and that many of his colleagues saw him as compromised by this non-Christian education.

1 Beyonce

To get to the top in the music industry requires talent and a whole heap of good luck. It may also take just a pinch of witchcraft. In 2018, Beyonce was accused by a former drummer of using “extreme witchcraft” against her and conjuring spells of sexual molestation. Allegedly, the singer had also bewitched the drummer’s kitten.

The court filing of Kimberly Thompson was an attempt to get a restraining order placed against the musical icon. Thompson wrote that Beyonce’s actions led to “loss of many jobs, theft of homes, the murder of my pet kitten, magic spells on my lovers, and numerous broken relationships.”^[10]

The drummer’s kitten was apparently cursed to attack her by Beyonce, a “fact” confirmed by two psychics. Thompson also said that Beyonce was able to inhabit other people’s bodies to watch the drummer have sex with others.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the restraining order was not granted. This was either because no one turned up in court to pursue the matter or because Beyonce had once again used her magic powers to win.

Hysterical witch-hunting spread from Europe to the UK in 1590. James VI of Scotland, later to become James I of England, was the most notable royal witch-hunter. He even published Daemonologie (literally, the science of demons) to inflame the passion of witch-hunting zealots. James described witchcraft as “high treason against God”, which meant that all manner of horrors were justified in wringing confessions from the accused.^[1] Many of the precepts that defined the Salem witch trials a century later, were forged in the flames of maybe 4000 witches executed in the relatively tiny country of Scotland.

It seemed that almost any testimony or evidence, however absurd, could be used to convict those considered unpleasant in society. The following are ten of the most incredulous reasons to be condemned as a witch and sentenced to death.

10 Guilty by floating

We start our witch-hunt in the small village of Milton in Bedfordshire, the year is 1613. Two horses pulling a cart of corn to marked were spooked on the road by a black pig. The sow was said to have spun around in the road, and the horses bolted. Servants managed to catch and calm the animals, but on their return the same thing happened! The sow was seen later entering the house where Mother and Mary Sutton lived. Gossip spread quickly, reaching Enger, the landowner. His 7 year old son took it upon himself to throw stones at Mary calling her a witch. Days later the boy died.

Enger blamed Mary and her mother and decided to prove her guilt by swimming. First she was dunked in the dam with a rope around her waist and only sank slightly. Not satisfied with this they tied her thumbs to opposite big toes and swam her a second time. She span around as if caught in a whirlpool and floated^[2] – this proved she was indeed a witch. If we turn a woman into a wheel she’s bound to spin like a wheel! Mother and Mary were found guilty of witchcraft and hanged on 7th April 1613.

9 Witches bridle

Agnes Sampson was a well respected healer and midwife. But in 1592 she became embroiled in the witch-hunt of North Berwick. The return voyage of James VI with his new Danish wife was beset with storms. These were attributed too witchcraft and conspiracy with the devil to assassinate the king.

Torture and sleep depravation were used to extract confession. Sampson was restrained with an instrument called a witch’s bridle: four prongs placed in the mouth, then attached to a device fastened to the wall.^[3] Agnes was one of around 70 people who confessed to witchcraft. (Anyone who’s had a brace fitted can understand that you will say anything to make it stop). She was strangled to death and her body burned.

8 A child’s testimony

Imagine next time your child hates you for limiting their Xbox time, if they had the power to convict you to your death. That’s exactly how 10 people in Pendle, Lancashire met their fate in 1612. Jennet Device lived with her mother Elizabeth, grandmother Demike, older sister Alizon and brother James. Demike was not liked by the villagers not least for her unfortunate appearance of one eye high, one low, looking in different directions. So when Alizon cursed a pedlar who then collapsed, there were many eager fingers pointing at her and Demike.

Jennet Device entered the court where her grandmother Demike and sister Alizon stood accused of witchcraft. Her mother Elizabeth screamed out at Jennet bringing the little girl to tears. Jennet demanded her mother be removed. She then climbed the table and delivered a calm and convincing testimony. “My mother is a witch and that I know to be true. I have seen her spirit in the likeness of a brown dog, which she called Ball”^[4].
The court believed her and convicted her whole family and many of the neighbors of causing death by witchcraft. The day after they were hanged at Gallows Hill.

7 Witchfinder General

There is a heart carved above a window of number 17 Tuesday Market Place, Kings Lynn. This is the place where the heart of Margaret Read struck the wall after bursting from her chest at the moment of death by burning. The heart then beat its way to the nearby River Ouse and sank amidst the wildly bubbling water. Margaret had been convicted as a witch.

In this same part of East Anglia around 1646, some 60 years later, Matthew Hopkins the Witchfinder General^[5] was paid handsomely to clear the towns of witches. Along with torture and sleep depravation, Hopkins also used a spike to test any scar or nipple to see if it was immune to pain. This would indicate the person had suckled the devil. The test was however grossly unfair as the 3 inch needle actually retracted into the spring-loaded handle under pressure. How ironic that a heartless charlatan was paid £20 (at a time when the average workers wage was 2 pence) for condemning the poor – we wouldn’t let that happen nowadays would we!

6 Familiars

We all make judgements of people based on the kind of pet they have, and some owners even look like their pets. But what if your pet is a black cat named Rutterkin, this kind of familiar could get you the label of being a witch. And so it was that the witches of Belvoir in 1690 were convicted for consorting with familiars.

Joan Flower and her two daughters, Margaret and Philippa were employed at Belvoir Castle, until Margaret was dismissed for stealing. Not long after the whole family became sick and the Earl’s eldest son Henry died. The Earl and Countess were convinced that the three women were to blame, and had them taken to Lincoln jail. Joan would not confess and demanded bread and butter be brought so that if she were not innocent she would choke on it. After one mouthful she dropped dead! At which point her daughters quickly confessed to witchcraft involving incantations and the familiar Rutterkin. They were convicted and hanged.^[6] We would suggest a dog for your next pet!

5 Vicious Kiss

On a cold night in Cork, Ireland, an old woman named Florence Newton begged for a piece of bread at the home of John Pyne. She was refused and sent on her way by the housemaid Mary Longdon. A time later Florence caught up with Mary carrying a pail of clothes for washing, she threw the pail from her head and kissed her violently, saying “Mary, I pray thee, let thee and I be friends; for I bear thee no ill will.”^[7]

Mary soon after experienced fits and trances, even vomited up needles, pins, horse-nails, wool and straw. Newton was brought to trial for witchcraft. One of the tests she had to perform was reciting the Lord’s prayer which she struggled to do. Her jailor Davy Jones helped her to learn the prayer, and in gratitude she kissed his hand. A few weeks later Davy died, cursing the kiss.
Records of the outcome are lost, but it’s likely she was sentenced to death.

4 Unable to recite Lord’s Prayer

The last witch condemned to death in England, in 1712, was Jane Wenham, the witch of Walkern. Once again inability to recite the Lord’s prayer was used against her. She supposedly struggled to speak the words “forgive us our trespasses” and “lead us not into temptation” during her interrogation.^[8] Her accusers also pricked her with a pin up to the head, but instead of drawing blood only a watery liquid was produced. This was a sure sign of guilt.

Attitudes were beginning to change and the judge John Powell was particularly skeptical to accounts of witchery. He was sympathetic to the old woman, dismissing accusations of flying with the assertion that there’s no law against that. The jury still found Jane guilty of witchcraft which carried the sentence of death. However Powell suspended the sentence and in time Jane may have been granted a royal pardon from Queen Anne herself.

3 Convicted by roof tile

If you thought you had heard the most absurd tests of witch craft already, how about conviction by roof tile! It was 1586 in Faversham, Kent, when Sarah Cooke’s daughter Jane fell ill. She was instructed to take a tile from the roof of the woman she suspected of being responsible. This tile was to be placed in the fire where it would ‘sparkle and fly round the cradle’. The worried mother took a tile from her neighbor Joan Cason, and the ritual proved positive. To further compound her guilt, a visit by Joan to enquire into the child’s health led to disastrous consequences. Jane died just a few hours after looking Joan in the face.

The jury at her trial attempted to show leniency, acquitting her of murder and only convicting her of conjuring spirits. However a lawyer who was present quibbled the charge of conjuring spirits and Joan was hanged anyway three days later.^[9] Shouldn’t the roofers have been charged for using sub-standard tiles though?

2 Too brave to be a mere woman

Janet Forsyth was a woman with a talent for predicting the weather. But in 1627 this would not mean a glamorous TV career! One morning after a premonition she pleaded with her sweetheart Benjamin Garrioch, not to go to sea. The fisherman however set out despite her warning. A thick fog descended and all were lost. Janet was branded a witch and spent her days increasingly isolated.

Years later a ship was spotted in trouble off Westray. Janet rallied the village for support to go to their aid, however they were more interested in the ship breaking up and leaving its cargo on the beach. Undeterred Janet piloted her small boat single-handed to aid the ship and bring it into safety of Pierowall Bay.^[10] This act of bravery sealed her fate, it was inconceivable that a mere woman could be capable of such an act. Tried and sentenced to death for witchcraft, the story has one last twist. On execution day the dungeon she had been held in was empty. The romantic conclusion is that her lover, thought lost, had in fact been press-ganged into the navy. He had returned just in time to make her escape.

1 Backwards writing

The craze for persecuting witches largely missed Wales, their courts were so full up with felons that prosecuting witches was seen as a luxury. In all there were five executions for witchcraft in Wales.^[11] The first of these was Gwen Ferch Ellis in 1594. Gwen was a woman with a reputation for healing, but could she also use her powers for ill? If she had kept herself to herself she would probably have gone unnoticed.

Her mistake was crossing social boundaries. The offense that brought her to trial was leaving a charm, a poem written backwards, in the parlor of one of the local gentry. It was seen as a sign to inflict harm on the household. She had the chance to flee but was adamant she had done no wrong. Many of the people her charms had helped testified against her. She was found guilty and hanged.

An emerging author currently working on a first novel. Lives in Shrewsbury, England.

Most of us know the drill with witchcraft accusations. Take a community ravaged by drought, sickness, or religious conflict, add some disenfranchised residents searching for a scapegoat, and the spotlight usually falls on a woman who is already seen as a blight on society. Elderly, unpopular, or poor women were common targets. Of course, most large-scale witch hunts involved accusations against men as well as women—but in every case, the vast majority of the accused, tried, and executed were female.

However, nobody could be arrested simply for being a nuisance. How were these women accused? How did their enemies frame them? Which uncontrollable, random, and often tragic circumstances could be used to send a woman to trial—and often, to her death?

Read on for ten absolutely crazy yet true reasons used as evidence that a woman was a witch.

Related: 10 Ways European Witch Finders Tested Their Victims

10 Being Too Sick to Get Out of Bed and Go to Church

In these Covid days, it’s more than just common courtesy to stay at home if you’re sick—in some places, it’s a legal requirement. Unshockingly, the Puritan residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony felt a little differently. Everybody was expected to attend church several times a day, often for hours at a time.

Salem resident Sarah Osburn had already caused a local scandal by marrying her much younger indentured servant after her husband died and then claiming her late husband’s property for herself, rather than handing it to her sons as tradition—and her husband’s will—dictated she should. When Abigail Williams and Betty Parris, the alleged victims of witchcraft and two of the original afflicted girls in Salem, both claimed to have been attacked and injured by Osburn, her scandalous past did nothing to help her—and neither did local observations that she had not attended church for three years.

Aged 49, Osburn was in very poor health and essentially bedridden by the time the trials began. She explained her illness to the questioning magistrates. However, she also disclosed that she had once been visited by a “lying spirit” who instructed her to stay away from the church. She insisted that she had disobeyed the spirit’s orders and continued to attend church until she fell ill.

The magistrates were unconvinced and sent her to jail to await trial. Osburn might have found herself the first accused witch to face the hangman, but the filthy, rat-infested Salem jail was no place for an already sick woman. After nine weeks, Osburn died there before she could be tried.^[1]

9Featuring in Someone’s Nightmare

In 1661, the Scottish witch trials’ last—and arguably the most deadly—wave took seed in the Lothian region. Elderly midwife Beatrix Leslie of Dalkeith, Midlothian, was a perfect target. She was elderly, argumentative, and she was known to use folk rituals and herbal remedies as part of her practice.

When Leslie was suspected of using dark magic to cause the deaths of two young girls who had angered her, a couple for whom she performed midwife duties came forward to testify against her. They stated that following an argument with Leslie, they experienced violent nightmares in which Leslie attacked and ate them.

Thirty years later, when the permissibility of spectral evidence became a central debate point in the Salem trials (ultimately, it was used and sealed many fates), it was Scottish tradition that was called upon to prove the precedent. Victims would often claim that a specter—a vision of the accused witch or an animal into which she had transformed—had visited in a dream to torture and terrorize them.

Therefore, Leslie’s former clients’ statements were enough for the courts to have her examined by infamous witchfinder John Kindcaid, who first pricked her body in search of the devil’s mark and then forced her to touch the corpses of her victims. Kincaid claimed that the bodies had bled under Leslie’s touch. During the ordeal, Leslie offered her confession, admitting that she had met the devil twice and agreed to be his servant. She was executed days later, in September 1661.^[9]

8 Having a Cat Named Satan

Sure, it’s an interesting choice of name, but does that make the owner a witch? In the English town of Chelmsford in 1566, it certainly did.

Elizabeth Francis, an elderly pauper with a poor reputation, was tried for witchcraft three times before being executed. The first time she came before the court, she confessed that she had been given a cat by her grandmother as a child. She claimed that the cat spoke to her, demanding that she feed it drops of her blood. It aided her in killing livestock and humans and instructed her on the use of herbs to induce an abortion after her lover impregnated her.

Unfortunately, the man fell sick and died shortly after Francis consumed the potion, and she was accused of using the cat to kill him. She was found guilty. Stunningly, due to a clerical error, she was sentenced to a year in prison rather than to death. Her sister, Agnes Waterhouse, was not as lucky.

Waterhouse was tried alongside Francis, who claimed that she gifted the cat Satan to Waterhouse. With the cat, Waterhouse also inherited magic abilities, the court claimed. She stood accused of killing her own husband and bringing sickness to several neighbors. Waterhouse admitted that she had instructed Satan to maim a few of her neighbor’s barn animals out of curiosity but denied using the cat, or any black magic, to commit murder.

Her 18-year-old daughter, Joan, who was also on trial, readily testified against her mother to save her own life. She claimed she had heard her mother invoke the devil through the cat and that on several occasions, she herself had tried to exorcise the animal, to no avail. Her testimony earned Agnes an unsavory spot in history as the first woman in England to be executed for witchcraft.^[3]

7 Healing a Sick Child

Anna Goldi, a Swiss woman widely accepted as the last person to be executed for witchcraft in Europe, had been through her share of miseries long before she was accused of witchcraft. She had grown up in poverty, twice been impregnated by men who had not married her, and lost one of the resulting babies in early infancy. She was suspected of killing the child and subjected to public humiliation via a stint at the pillory.

In 1780, Goldi took a servant position in the Glarus home of Johann Tschudi, a wealthy physician of high social status. When his children started to find pins in their food, Goldi was accused of attempting to harm them and was dismissed. Within a week, Tschudi’s young daughter had become violently ill—Tschudi later claimed that the child was vomiting pins—and Goldi was brought back to the family home to defend herself against claims that she had bewitched the child.

Local tradition dictated that only the person who made a child sick could heal them, and she was ordered to do so under threat of torture. Miraculously, the child’s health improved under Goldi’s care, but this proved to her employer that it was she who had harmed the little girl, to begin with. She was arrested and tortured, eventually confessing that she had made a pact with the devil to harm the child as revenge for prior misbehavior. She was beheaded in 1782.

In a particularly sad twist, contemporary rumors suggested that Tschudi and Goldi had been lovers. And Tschudi trumped up the charges against Goldi solely to prevent her from spilling the secret and destroying his reputation.^[4]

6 Being Identified as a Witch by a Child

Children. The people who believe in fairies and Santa. Their testimony was not only welcomed—it was often sought out. Abigail Williams and the other young afflicted girls of Salem are the best-known examples here, but successful accusations by a child were not unusual. Children were often frightened into telling the adults around them what they wanted to hear; at other times, they accused adults who angered them, perhaps not fully aware of the consequences.

Sweden, a country with a relatively short history of witch trials, experienced one major witch panic in the 1670s, during which several hundred people were executed. Seventy-one of these executions took place in the parish of Torsaker—and all seventy-one victims were identified by children. The process of seeking out the witches unfolded between 1674 and 1675 and was overseen by Laurentius Hornaeus, a bloodthirsty priest who instructed two young boys to linger outside the church and identify witches among the entering congregation.

He advised them that witches had a mark on their foreheads, only visible to the eyes of a child. The boys, terrified by Hornaeus’s fearsome reputation, did what was asked of them. Many other women were arrested that day, and over the coming months, many other children helped Hornaeus in his quest.
Not surprisingly, Hornaeus was not afraid to use physical threats and torture to procure accusations and stories. In the coming months, multiple children accused local women of kidnapping them and taking them to meet with the devil. The hunts culminated in a mass trial and execution, in which one-fifth of the parish’s female population was killed.^[5]

5 Being in an Abusive Marriage

Bridget Bishop of Salem was not only argumentative with her neighbors—she argued, frequently and often in public, with her own husband. In Salem, this was a problem. Thomas Oliver was the second of Bishop’s three husbands (this number only added to her problems in the long run) and was widely thought to be abusive. Bishop often fought back. These confrontations occasionally spilled from their home and into public spaces, and although neighbors testified to Oliver’s mistreatment of Bishop, the pair were treated as equally guilty.

After a violent argument occurred on the sabbath day, Oliver and Bishop were each ordered to pay a hefty fine or stand for a day at the pillory. Oliver’s adult daughter paid his fine, but Bishop was subjected to the pillory, ensuring that everyone in Salem was aware of her reputation. When Thomas Oliver became sick sometime later and died, Bishop inherited his entire estate, leaving his children by his first wife with nothing.

Oliver’s children began to suspect Bishop had bewitched and killed him in order to take his property for herself. This was the first occasion on which Bishop faced an official witchcraft accusation, and although she was not found guilty, it did nothing for her reputation. Over the years, she was rumored to be a thief, a drunk, and a bawd, criticized for her bright, elaborate clothing. Her difficult history and her more recent alleged transgressions combined to make her the perfect candidate for the first witchcraft trial. She was swiftly found guilty and became the first victim of Salem’s trials.^[6]

4 Losing a Loved One to a Natural Disaster

On Christmas Eve 1617, a furious storm ravaged the ocean surrounding the tiny Norwegian village of Vardo. The men of the town, fishing in a small fleet, perished in the freezing waves. The women, mourning their family members and spouses, were left to fend for themselves. As the northernmost province of the Nordic Counties, Vardo and its neighboring communities had already drawn suspicion from the ruling authorities. The cruel climate often left the landscape shrouded in freezing mist and snow for months at a time, validating a persistent rumor that the entrance to hell could be found in the mountain range south of Vardo.

The area was inhabited by the Indigenous Sami population, who were non-Christian and known to use folk magic in their belief systems. The men of the town often took extended fishing trips, leaving the women and children alone for long periods. Now, the authorities quickly took note of Vardo, a community surviving without men, and suspected the storm had been caused by witchcraft. John Cunningham, a Scottish naval captain, was established as Governor of Finnmark, to reside at the fortress of Vardohus, from where he was to launch a witch hunt.

After interrogation and torture, Vardo resident Mari Jogensdatter confessed that she and several other women of the town had conjured the storm as revenge for neighborly disputes that had gotten out of hand. Several of the women she named confirmed Jogensdatter’s story under torture, stating that they had traveled with her to a witch’s sabbath, where they drank wine and fornicated with the devil. Many of them identified their wealthy neighbor Kirsti Sorensdatter as the coven leader.

Sorensdatter and Jogensdatter were both burned at the stake, inciting Norway’s first major witch hunt. Ninety other women in the community eventually followed them to the stake. But still, the rumors of witchcraft lingered on—Vardo was the focal point of two subsequent witch hunts, during which several hundred more women were killed.^[7]

3 Having Argumentative Male Relatives

Rebecca Nurse, age 71, the oldest victim of the Salem trials, was an unlikely candidate for accusation. She was regarded as a pious, kind woman, and both she and her husband were respected community figures in both Salem town and village. However, the couple’s decision to move from the Salem Towne to Salem Village, renting a farming property from a local Reverend, drew them into a land ownership feud between some of the area’s wealthier families.

The dispute was focused on the land between Salem Village and nearby Topsfield, with residents on both sides claiming ownership. Thomas Putnam and several of his brothers had made their homes on the disputed land. They were furious to discover that portions of it were being given to residents of Topsfield—including Rebecca’s brother, Jacob Towne.

When Putnam’s daughter, Ann, claimed affliction by a witch, Putnam used her as a mouthpiece to accuse the family members of the Topsfield men. Rebecca Nurse was among his victims. Her family and neighbors immediately flew to her defense, and she was initially found not guilty at trial. After the afflicted girls became hysterical following the reading of the verdict, the jury was asked to reconsider. The jury amended its verdict—Rebecca Nurse was guilty and sentenced to die. Several other women from prominent Topsfield families were also executed, including Nurse’s sister, Mary.^[8]

2 Having Veins in Your Eye

Margaret Aitken, known in her lifetime as the Great Witch of Balwearie, was an unusual but successful Scottish witch hunter. Arrested and accused of witchcraft in 1597, Aitken confessed but persuaded her interrogators that she could not only name other witches she personally knew but also had the power to identify any witch, anywhere. All she had to do was examine the pattern of the veins in a person’s eye.

The notion of the devil’s mark on a witch’s body was nothing new, but the search for it involved removing a victim’s clothes, checking their entire body for suspicious marks, and pricking anything that was found to prove a lack of pain and/or blood. The eye examination was quicker and more efficient.

The authorities, backed enthusiastically by James VI, arranged a national tour of the country and paraded Aitken from town to town, lining up suspected witches for her to examine. Anybody she identified was arrested and tortured into confessing. It is not known exactly how or why Aitken concocted this pretense.

Historians theorize that she was terrified for her own life and seeking to buy herself some time or perhaps escape execution altogether if she was thought to be useful. In the few months before she was revealed to be a fraud, Aitken sent hundreds of women to their deaths. Following her exposure, she, too, was executed.^[9]

1 Having a Parent Who Was a Witch—Even if You Were a Child

The third and final Vardo witch trials of 1661–1662 gained traction through accusations made against the children of women previously executed for witchcraft. Sisters Ingeborg and Karen Iversdatter, aged twelve and eight, were brought to Vardohus for questioning in December 1662. Their mother had been burned only months before.

Accompanying them was twelve-year-old Maren Olsdotter, who had lost both her mother and aunt to witch trials. The children were kept in a cell on the estate known as the “witches hole.” No doubt desperate for release, the girls made detailed confessions involving transforming themselves into cats and traveling with other witches to a witches’ sabbath, where they drank wine with Satan. Maren claimed to have taken a tour of hell with an evil spirit.

Although none of the girls could be executed due to their ages, they helped the authorities immensely by implicating adult women, most of whom were then tried and burned. When two accused witches provided witnesses to state that the girls had been threatened with torture, the children were denounced as liars. Maren, who had told the most fanciful stories, was sent to a workhouse while the other girls were freed.^[10]