After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Who was the Last Witch of Scotland?

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

With the nights closing in, what better time to re-visit a favourite episode of ours.In 1727, Janet Horne of the Highland community of Dornoch became the last person in Britain to be tried and executed for witchcraft.As the poet Edwin Morgan put it; They tarred her and feathered her, bound her and barrelled her burning in the peat-smoke, while the good folk of Dornoch paused briefly for a look.But maybe the events aren’t quite as black and white as they seem?Maddy Pelling tells Anthony Delaney the story this week.Written by Maddy Pelling. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's 2023 and we're standing on the edge of a small road in the highlands of Scotland. The town is Dornock in Sutherland, less than a mile from the choppy grey North Sea, beyond which in rough parallel lies the top of Denmark. It's a warm June night, and to one side, open grasslands stretches away, covered by a cloud of midges and framed by distant mountains. On the other is a house, perhaps no more than a hundred years old, plastered with grey pebbled ash typical for this part of the world. Its garden is bordered by a low stone wall

and sheltered only by two thin fir trees. But we haven't come for the house or even the setting. Instead, we're here for a small, unassuming stone. stone, upright and covered in lichen, and bedded in the lawn just beyond the front door. Around it, arranged in a circle, are small pebbles, tiny offerings left by tourists and well-wishers. Today, the spot is remarkably quiet, but if you had been here 296 years ago, on another similarly warm June night, the scene would have been very different. In 1727, a woman, afterwards named as Janet Horn, was dragged from a nearby prison to this place, then open land on the edge of an early 18th century settlement.

She was naked. A crowd surrounded her, men, women and children from Dornock, all drawn from their homes to watch the spectacle unfold. some jeered and shouted insults others looked on afraid we can only imagine the terror janet herself must have felt until this point she had endured months in a damp dark cell accused and found guilty at trial of witchcraft now in just a few short minutes should be tied up and burned alive at stake I'm going to be able to be. Hello and welcome to this episode of After Dark, Myths, Misteads and The Paranormal. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And this week we are on the trail of the Last Witch of Scotland.

Now, 1727 is quite late, would you say, for a witch trial? Yeah, I mean, we're into what? Like, the sense of enlightenment should be coming through here. Science is gaining popularity. We have more knowledge that we're accruing. Certainly magic and witchcraft. are dying away. This isn't necessarily something that's reaching.

It's far more kind of a 17th century idea with, you know, demonology after James I. That's definitely the period that we associate which is with in this country, right? And you'd be right in thinking that it's late because the Witchcraft Act, which allowed for the criminalisation and punishment of women and men accused of witchcraft was repealed the decade after this case. So it is quite late, and it's one of those cases that's kind of surrounded in all kinds of mist and murk,

and it's really difficult to get to the heart of it. And it's a case that matters not only because of the date and because of how late it is, but because it can tell us a lot about how people were accused of witchcraft in Scotland specifically. You know, this is taking place in the highlands, in the heart of a really rural community and a really specific community. But also it tells us about how we talk about witches now and how those stories have come to us and how they get kind of twisted and added onto, I guess, and edited over time.

I have two questions, right? First one being, what happened after the repeal of the act? So you mentioned there that the Witchcraft Act was repealed a decade after this case. But what changed after that time? So technically people couldn't be, killed the witchcraft anymore. But of course it's not like that legislation is repealed and then there's no more belief in witches. You know, there is, of course, still an anxiety. These are anxieties

that are deeply rooted, especially in rural communities throughout the 18th century and beyond. And there's still legislation in place in the beginning of the 1800s at the 19th century that, okay, they're not taking the threat of witchcraft seriously, but there are things like, I think it's the vagrant act that outlaws things like fortune telling and stuff like that. And in that case, that's magic that's framed as being fraudulent. So there is an attitude shift happening in the 18th century. You know, we start off, we're still executing people accused of witchcraft. And by the end, it's seen as a fraudulent thing. But these beliefs in this kind of magical thinking and the anxiety around that continues in the 18th century. So this is a landmark case in one way,

but in other ways it is just a symptom of a community and a society that is, I guess, grappling more and more with these issues of is magic real or witch is real and what kind of threat might they pose. But, yeah, it's important and we're going to get into it. But the second question I had then as a follow-up was you mentioned that the witch in this specific case was afterwards called Janet Horn. So who was Janet? So Janet Horn is a term, it's a name that's given to which is generally in Scotland in the 17th and 18th century. So this isn't a specific person. So this is not a specific person.

We don't know her real name. So this is a name that's been given to her in what little written records. I find that quite suspicious, right? Like there's something off about that. Yeah. And it's really difficult to get to any kind of truth about who she was or what she did or really what she was. Or really what she was accused of. there is, like I say, so much kind of murk surrounding this

and it's really, really difficult to unpick. So how does she get embroiled in all of this? Like what brings her to whoever she was, what brings Janet to the attention of the authorities at the time? So the information that we do have about her, and it is sketchy, is basically she was accused of witchcraft along with her daughter. Now her daughter, according to, and this is crucial,

later 19th century sources, and we're going to get into this. Again, something suspicious here. Something suspicious. So the information that we have about her daughter is that she has some kind of physical disability. And within the community, she has othered, she's pushed to the margins. And her mother is accused of potentially causing the disability or changing her daughter's body in some way to suit her own magical purposes and her work in collaboration with the devil. and the pair of them are brought before the local sheriff who is a man called Captain David Ross. He's a local dignitary.

And together they are tried for witchcraft. They're both found guilty. And the daughter escapes from prison. This is the, it's a small line in a 19th century piece of evidence that we have that says that she escaped from prison. We don't know anything else about this. We don't know how old her daughter was. We don't know how she escaped from prison. We don't know anything about how Janet or whoever this one will.

was how she felt about that, whether she helped her daughter to escape and stayed behind maybe as a, you know, to sacrifice herself so her daughter could get away, maybe she desperately wanted to escape to and wasn't able. We just don't have this information. What we do have is a series of retellings of this story that can can give us a lot of information about how this community is perceived as the decades pass after Janet Horn in a voter comments after her death and how the Highlands are perceived, how Scotland is perceived, and how witchcraft is tied into national identities, regional identities in that part of the world.

So we have Janet Horn in custody now, who's been turned in by her neighbours. She is in custody initially with her daughter under the watchful eye of Captain David Ross. So what happens after that? Under the watchful eye of Sheriff Ross, Janet was brought before a rudimental point. higher, a pitch barrel fastened to a tall stake at its centre and surrounded by bundles of

twigs and branches that would provide the kindling. We don't know if she uttered any final words as she was tied in place, her feet and legs inside the barrel and finally set a light. So that's obviously quite a gruesome and impactful and very memorable. And see, this is the thing. I think you can kind of tell. There's doubt in my mind about this source and this source material because we have a lot of detail in one aspect. And on the same side of things, we don't have a name. Absolutely.

So the first report that we have that any kind of execution of a witch has taken place is published in 1755. so she's killed in 1727, and actually there's even debate around that. Sometimes in later records, that date is recorded as 1722. So straight away, we have like a five-year difference. It's so unclear. So in 1755, Edmund Burt publishes a book with a classically boring 18th century title. It's called Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his friend in London. I don't like us.

I mean, it does the job right. It tells you what's in the book. No. No, it's not great. And it's kind of an itinerant tour of the north part of Scotland, and it's written very much for a London audience. We need to bear that in mind right. You know, this is 1755 that is 10, 9 years after the final Jacobite rising

and the Battle of Collodum. And there's still great anti-Scottish feeling in England, in London in particular. There's still anxieties around the Jacobite cause being reignited. And there's a kind of, I guess, a propaganda campaign. to paint the Highlands in particular, which are obviously a Jacobite stronghold as backward, as kind of basic, superstitious, they're predominantly Catholic still, and there's a kind of a tying together in popular imagination of Catholicism and superstition, which of course isn't unique to this period, but it's something that is really in play here.

So this early account gives us like a really brief overview. story that he's heard, presumably secondhand, whilst travelling around Scotland. So do you want to read a little bit of it for us, Anthony? Oh, do I? Yes, I do. I want to read a bit of this from me. Good. He says, so this is, this is a bit of an account that Edmund Burt. And it's really brief. And it's really brief. Okay. In the beginning of the year 1727, two poor Highland women, mother and daughter, in the Shire of Sutherland, were accused of witchcraft, tried and condemned to be burnt. This proceeding was in a court held by the deputy sheriff. The young one made her escape out of prison, but the old woman suffered the cruel death in a pitch barrel in June

following at Dornock. I mean, it's interesting, right? I don't know. Why am I so suspicious of this today? I mean, what I think this is telling us more than about an individual or even about an individual cases about witchcraft in Scotland more generally. Absolutely. Janet Horn seemed to be all Scottish witches almost. Absolutely. She's an every woman in some way. She can be anyone. As far as Edmund Burt's concerned,

she's just providing evidence. He describes him as two poor Highland women and she suffered a cruel death. There's this sense that he wants to paint the community that's put her to death as backward for believing in witchcraft and for treating her in this way. You know, he's suggesting this would never happen

in civilised London, basically. So it's a very kind of anti-Skottish, anti-Gyland, anti-Jacobite account, I think. The other thing that's striking is I'm thinking at the moment that there's been a call recently for a national monument in Scotland to all the women who were, well, actually all the people, but predominantly women who were executed for witchcraft in Scotland's history. Tell us a little bit more about that. How prevalent was witchcraft? What kind of numbers are we talking about? Was it very different to what was happening in England? Yeah, sure. So there's an incredible website that listeners can go to called the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft. And this is the result of years-long study by academics at the University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland amongst other institutions. And it's full of these incredible statistics. And it aims to kind of myth bust, I guess, about how we think about witchcraft in Scotland, how that might be different, for example, from witchcraft in England or, of course, in the United States. States and we all think of the Salem witch trials when we maybe think of like the most famous witchcraft cases. So for example, the survey of Scottish witchcraft tells us that rather than hundreds of thousands of people being killed for witchcrafters, we might maybe

assume, there were 3,837 people who were accused between the years 1563 and 1736. And 1736 is the repeal of the act. So that's why that date's important. And of course, our Janet Horn, who whoever she was, fits into those years. Now, 3,837 people is quite enough to be getting on with. You know, that's a huge, huge amount. Now, 3,212 of those are named, and there are hundreds more who go unnamed in the record, like Janet Horn herself. But the majority are named. Majority are named, and there's some maybe surprising statistics about who they are. So we have 84% of the people who are accused of witchcraft are women, and 15% are men, and the more astute listeners amongst you all realise that's 1% left over,

and they are simply people whose sexes are not recorded in the archive. This is now a maths podcast, by the way. This is now a maths podcast. We are now mathematicians. So we are looking predominantly at women still, but 15% of men not to be sniffed at. And, you know, this is a pervasive problem across the whole of Scotland. I would definitely sniff at 15% of men, probably more percent. But we have this image as well of kind of the old crone.

What is the general age range that we're talking about here? Because in this particular story, there's a daughter, there's a child involved. So that suggests that there's something a little bit more going on beyond older women. Yeah, absolutely. And if you think back to fairytales and stuff, we have this kind of really pervasive image of the old woman, maybe living in a cottage alone in the woods, eating children. And if we look at the statistics, only half of the women who were accused of witchcraft in Scotland were over the age of 40. Many were younger than that, including presumably Janet Horn's daughter in this scenario. We don't know her age.

But the biggest percentage, 31% of people accused of witchcraft, were between the ages of 50 and 60. And of course, for women, that's an age typically of menopause. And I think that's maybe playing a role here. If you think about the experience of women and what we know. about sort of how gender was perceived, the usefulness of women in society. I think there is a marginalisation going on there that we do need to bear a mind. And I think that's potentially at play in the Janet Horn case. You know, we have this sense of her as an almost monstrous mother, someone who has deformed her child in some way or abused her for her own ends. And I think that is

that is coming in there. So there's a lot of layers there about motherhood, about femininity that are kind of sewn into this story. And whether they were relevant as the story unfolded or whether they've been added in later, it's really difficult to unpick that. So the next kind of time that our Janet Horn appears in the archive is in the 1880s. So that's a pretty substantial gap.

It's a really big gap. It's in 1884, and we have a book that is, again, another really exciting title, a historical account of the belief of witchcraft in Scotland. It's a bit more. That's better. I mean, it's more focused, right? I'm going to pick that off the shelf at least than the other one about travels or whatever he was talking about.

As well as being a maths podcast, we're a book review podcast and this account is just, it's like witchcraft on steroids. It's incredibly gothic. It's hyping everything up. It's, you know, absolutely ramping up all of the drama. So we have a different date for the story, which is interesting, 1722, not 1727. So again, straight away, we have questions there about the authenticity of this. It is suspicious. And this account says it describes an old woman who belonged to the parish and among other crimes.

Right. So now she's done other things, yeah. Was accused of having ridden upon her daughter transformed into a pony and shod by the devil, which made the girl ever after lame, both in hands and feet, a misfortune entailed upon her son who was alive of later years. So the daughter that escapes, first of all, we see this version of her where she's been clod like a pony and is being ridden to meet the devil. It's just casual, casual stuff. It's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit of 19th century gothicness coming in there. But we also have her, we have this incredibly tantalizing detail that her son survives and was alive relatively close to 1884 when this book was written.

And I think there's something lovely there about the survival. of that family, even in the face of adversity. But it also makes the history incredibly tangible. I'm going to say one thing. We still have no names. We still have no names. There's something. There's something irking me about this. But again, if we're looking at Janet as a, if we're looking at Janet as a kind of an every witch, let's say, one of the things that happens here, the execution that she undergoes is a burning. Is that typical? Is that something that we're seeing quite a lot? Yes. So women typically are strangled at the stake before they're burned. when they're accused of witchcraft in Scotland.

So they're hopefully unconscious, if not dead, at the point of burning, which we don't know whether that was the case for Janet or not. We know she's put in a pitch barrel. It may be that she was strangled first. It may not be. Leading up to this point, women who are accused and men who are accused of witchcraft are interrogated. And there's a kind of campaign by the people who take them into custody

to gather evidence against them, essentially. So they will be deprived of sleep, they may start to hallucinate, and sometimes they will believe the things that they're accused of, and they will admit to having ridden their daughter who's a pony to the devil. You know, there's, so we don't know whether Janet maybe did admit to some of these crimes that she's accused of. I think it's really hard for us to even imagine what some of those tortures might have been, because I think we probably have some kind of image of, oh, you know, they were taking off nails and they were doing all of this kind of thing, and they may well have been doing that. but that's amongst a plethora of other things. As you say, sleep deprivation, they won't have been given any food or water. But also, think about the consequences of reputation in the 18th century.

I mean, the reputations are potentially already ruined. But the threats that they could be levelling against their family, their wider, you know, people that they're related to, this could really leave a terrible legacy for their family. So the impact for the family could be, the impact could go far beyond a Janet Horn and go into the family, into generations to come.

So you can imagine that they could easily convince these people to say things that they don't necessarily believe. I think so. And you have to remember that a lot of these accusations come from within side the communities themselves, that often it's neighbours who testify against you or even your own family members. So there's a real culture of suspicion and accusation

before you're taken into custody. And beyond that point, your reputation is ruined. You're standing in that community surely is destroyed. And we've got to think as well about what happens when you're in custody accused of witchcraft, there's a sort of ritual humiliation. There's a breaking down of the person, not only are you subjected to sleep deprivation, but you might have your whole body searched for the devil's mark, you know, which would involve stripping all of your clothes off and men, usually searching your body. So there's a sense of

absolute dehumanization here, which I think is happening to Janet. And I think what we can take from the story is, I guess, the joy that her daughter did escape. however that happened, that she maybe wasn't subjected to that in the same way that Janet was and obviously didn't meet the same tragic end. So there's a little bit, there's a tiny, tiny silver lining in what is a really sad and really late story in the history of Scottish witchcraft. So where does that bring us now? What brings us up to date as to how that can, how that is being looked at in the historiography right now, what kind of impact is that having on the historical study of witchcraft? Despite ongoing scholarly research into the experiences of the accused during the Scottish witch trials,

there's surprisingly little documentary evidence about Janet Horn's case. Instead, much of what we know about her comes from later accounts, written by men in the 19th century, and which, of course, come with their own complex layers of context and prejudice. It's hard to get at the truth of just who this woman was, or even to confirm, how and when exactly her death took place. Questions remain, not least about Janet's identity and the legacy of her case, both in bringing about the end of legal prosecution of witchcraft in Scotland and in how we understand this dark period of the past today.

So I think the case of So I think the case of Janet Horne, it's obviously well known today and remembered as being she's potentially the last witch in Scotland to have died because of a witchcraft accusation. But despite the fact that we don't know which about it, I think it tells us so much about how the Scottish Highlands were perceived, something of the experience of women in particular who were accused, and I guess as well, the sort of memorability of these stories,

that we're, as human beings, drawn to them for different reasons across the decades, that the accounts that we have in the 18th century are still, potentially inflected with this, you know, a hint of belief that she really was a witch, even if it's a portrayal of the Highlands that she came from as backward. By the 19th century, you have this kind of hammed up, campy, exaggerated version that I think doesn't take witchcraft very seriously necessarily. But this idea that the Highlands and Scotland as being backward because they believe in witchcraft, that sort of endures into the 19th century.

And there's a, I guess at that point, with the birth of Gothic as a genre of art and literature, there's a kind of a morbid fascination with the goryer details and the fact that she's burned to death. And I think work like the Survey of Witchcraft in Scotland is doing so much to recover the real experiences and to put the human beings in these stories back at the centre stage. And, you know, we mentioned earlier the campaign for, a national memorial. And that's still ongoing in Scotland. There have been steps forward, but it's happening quite slowly. And I think there's something so important about making this kind of trauma, this history, a past in which neighbours can turn on each other like that, and

things can quickly escalate and hate and fear can kind of ignite these situations at a local level, but across a nation. And I think making that visible in the landscape as a reminder is incredibly important. There's something about that. You're talking about kind of monument, you know, that they're campaigning for in Scotland. But there's something about the stone that already exists, right, in terms of its kind of stake on the landscape and how that's, what that's memorializing. And again, it raises very suspicious in this episode, I don't really know why, but it raises a lot

of questions. It raises more questions than I think it contributes answers to because who put that there initially? That wasn't put there in the 18th century. I imagine that it's a 19th century stone. Now, there is a date carved into it, which is 1722, which is potentially the wrong date. The stone is also in someone's garden.

It's not in a public place. You can peer over the person's wall, but it's on private land. And so is it a suitable memorial to Janet Horn? Probably not. Is it even a memorial to Janet Horn? Or is it just a stone in a field? Or is it a memorial to her execution?

Because it's marking the place at which she was executed. Is it a 19th century kind of nod to a moment of historical drama rather than a fitting memorial to a woman who was accused and killed? But here's my thing. And I think this is bringing together all my suspicions potentially. I think potentially it might mislead us that as a landmark. because, you know, when we're working with primary sources, there are certain things that we have in terms of burdens of proof. And for me, the burden of proof falls short here. I don't have Janet Horn. I don't know who she is. I don't know what she's really being accused of because in the 18th century, we're not told specifically what that is. It's not until the 19th century. So I can't believe something that's being said 100 plus years later. So did Janet exist is my question. I mean, Janet's existed. Janet as a figure existed, certainly. But I don't wonder if that's what's being

propagated. And then when you say that this markers on private land, that's suspicious as well. That doesn't really add up to where they would have taken witches for execution. You think it's all a tourist scam. Well, I mean, if you're going to execute somebody, the whole purpose of executing somebody is to do it publicly so that they are an okay, like boundary shift, places are not necessarily, but they would be taking them to the most public place in that area. And it strikes me that what is now somebody's back garden or front garden, who knows, is not, probably wasn't the crossroads of that village. So why is there a stone there? That doesn't mean it's not important though, right? That actually adds to

its importance in a certain way. The absence is as interesting as the presence of evidence here, I think. You know, and it does tell us so much about, as well, the value that these, the accused held in society and the fact that she's not recorded tells us so much about how she was viewed by her contemporaries, I think. Well, I'm going to rush out and buy letters from a gentleman in the south of Scotland to his friend in London because of the snappy title. Rushing out to get that right now. That is, I think that's like one of those food for thought episodes, right?

Like, there are so much there that we don't know. It leaves us with more questions than we have answers. But I think that's still a really worthwhile thing to dig into on After Dark. Thank you for joining us for this episode. And join us again next time. when we shall be exploring more gruesome, creepy, eerie parts of history for your twisted pleasure.