May 6, 2025 • 25 mins
In this bonus episode, we look into the mysterious lore behind Shakespeare's 'Weyward Sisters" from Macbeth. Did you know those three women, the weird sisters, the three witches who prophesied Macbeth’s ascendance… did you know those women really existed?
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Executive Produced by Scott Waxman and Emma DeMuth
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
quite graphic descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for
some listeners. Please take care in listening. When shall we
(00:29):
three meet again in thunder Lightning or in rain? So
begins William Shakespeare's Scottish play featuring the power hungry warrior Macbeth.
But against the rules of most scriptwriting textbooks, our main
character Macbeth doesn't get those iconic opening lines. Those belong
(00:53):
to the three Weird Sisters, although in the original text
they were called the Wayward Sister, which if you say
weird in a Scottish accent you might notice it sounds
a lot like wayward. Still, we know the characters today
as the Witches. The trope of three witches is ubiquitous
(01:14):
throughout history and popular culture, from the Three Muses and
the Three Fates to the three Sanderson Sisters. You can't
really escape the Maiden, Matron and Crone. Shakespeare's Weird Sisters
just happened to be the most iconic, or at least
my personal favorite trio of magical women. They say, if
(01:38):
they hadn't prophesied that he would become king, then he
never would have gotten ambitious and schemed to depose Duncan.
But I think those scholars are probably the same kind
of people who think Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles. Listeners,
you and I know the real stars of the show, right,
(01:59):
But did you know those three women, the weird Sisters,
the three witches who prophesized Macbeth's ascendants? Did you know
those women really existed? Welcome to the greatest true crime
(02:30):
stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, author of the
true crime book Madam Queen, the Life and Crimes of
Harlem's underground racketeer Stephanie Sinclair. Today's episode we're calling the
real Witches of Macbeth. It's a thousand year old story,
(02:51):
which doesn't make it any less interesting, more so, i'd argue,
but it does mean that source material was extremely hard
to come by. I was surprised that there were any
records at all, but they do exist, and so do
the Witches of Forrest. Still, because of the scarce research,
this episode will be shorter than most. I'll tell you
(03:15):
everything I could find right after this quick break. I'm
(03:40):
the kind of person who loves to travel, but I'm
also a complete dork about it. I read everything about
the place I can find beforehand, do as much of
the locals recommendations when I get there, and then write
about it when I get home. In a way, it's
like having the vacation three times. So when we booked
(04:02):
our trip to Scotland in the autumn of twenty twenty three,
I picked up a book called The Lowdown on Witches
by Leonard Low, and I devoured it. The link to
The Lowdown on Witches is in our show's notes. So
don't wreck your car trying to take notes during rush hour, Okay,
just come back when you're at a stopping place. I
(04:24):
learned from I was researching and planning that most tourists
land in Edinburgh and pretty much never leave the Royal
Mile unless it's to golf at Saint Andrew's or hike
to Arthur's seat. Edinburgh was great, especially Mary King's close tour,
but you can't beat the Highlands. We drove on the
(04:44):
wrong side of the road north from the airport to Inverness. Well,
my husband, the transportation engineer, and my fearless friend drove us.
Her husband and I white knuckled the shotgun seat and
I tried to navigate without having a panic attack every
time I looked up from phone. But the Scottish Highlands
are amazing for so many reasons. They're exactly the postcard
(05:07):
worthy landscape they show on Outlander, with the added bonus
that the landscape extends outside the frame, with lush land
like that and the kind of fog that portends King
Arthur's birth. It makes sense that long ago belief in
fairies and other supernatural beings was taken as fact. It
(05:28):
wasn't even a question. I mean, we were in the
car pointing off the shoulder like, hmm, that's a fairy
hill right there. For sure. Hyda kids and hid your
wife or they're going to changeling them. Joking aside. Even
though the worst which hunts of Scotland were in the
sixteen sixties, I would argue sixteen sixty one specifically, if
you asked which trials were ubiquitous long before that. And
(05:53):
the most important thing to remember is this. The trials
were not to determine whether witchcraft was real. Witchcraft was real,
that was never a consideration. The trials were to determine
whether you had committed witchcraft. Shakespeare wrote his Scottish Play
(06:26):
before those trials. It was published in sixteen twenty three,
but he wrote it around sixteen o six. That's just
three years after Queen Elizabeth was succeeded by a new monarch,
that is James the First. Well, he was James the
First of England. In Scotland he was James the sixth,
(06:50):
And with a new Scottish monarch came an English fascination
with all things Scottish. If you're a dramatist, or remember
anything from ninth grade literature class, you might remember that
artists and playwrights, including Shakespeare himself, earned most of their
living based on the donations of wealthy patrons. Yes, ticket
(07:14):
entries helped, but not a lot. As I've said before
in an article I wrote for the Archive, that meant
writers had to sort of sing for their supper. If
your patron liked your play, then they'd probably send you
more money for the next one. Shakespeare had already had
one extremely wealthy patron in Queen Elizabeth the First. You
(07:36):
can see how he catered to her interests by representing
strong fictional women characters and works like Twelfth Night and
Midsummer Night's Dream. He also wrote a lot of his
historical plays under her patronage. My point is Shakespeare knew
how to read the room. And I don't just mean
(08:02):
that he knew how to read King James sixth. It's
true that in sixteen oh one Shakespeare visited Aberdeen as
a guest of James six and he did it specifically
to do recon on his patron apparent. But like I said,
the bar didn't just read his patron well. He knew
his audience. The patrons would be up in the best seats,
(08:26):
the box seats, and those were few. Most of the
audience was a rowdy, drunken crowd of peasants, and Shakespeare
knew this. So imagine Shakespeare, not the man his writing.
(08:48):
Imagine trying to perform Shakespeare to a bunch of drunk illiterates.
And I'm not being funny. Most of his audience would
have been pretty uneducated and ready to take a load
off after a long day's work. And it's not a
raucous LaughFest like The Taming of the Shrew. This is
the Scottish play strategizing for a murderous coup. It's one
(09:11):
of those plots that requires you to wake up and focus,
or you won't understand what happens next. He had to
get their attention somehow, and that's why so many of
Shakespeare's tragedies start off with a supernatural event. Hamlet had
his father's ghost, Macbeth had his witches. I don't know
(09:43):
about you, but I do remember learning that King Macbeth
was a real person, or at least that character was
loosely based on the folklore of a Scottish king from
the Dark Ages. The real guy was not the power
hungry king we all know in love, but he existed,
so did Duncan and Macduff. What I was not ever
taught was that the witches were based on real people too.
(10:13):
Here are the facts, as I was able to reconstruct them,
and this is based on research of my own but
largely guided by the incredible Leonard Lowe. It's the tenth
century King Duff is the king. Alternate accounts call him Duffus,
which my husband actually mispronounced as Dufus when I was
telling him this, but okay. Alternate accounts call him Duffus
(10:35):
as well, meaning son of en Duff. Interestingly, Macduff also
means son of Duff, but there's not a ton of
parallels between this actual guy and the Shakespearean thing of Fife.
So I'm gonna stick with King Duff as his moniker,
just for the sake of easy listening. So King Duff
was King of the Scots from nine sixty two to seven.
(11:01):
In case mental math humbles you the way it does me,
let me explicate that a little King Duff was king
for only five years, and he inherited the crown from
his own father, who had died while defending the Highlands
against Viking invaders. Just a fun little piece of folklore.
(11:30):
Rumor has it that the thistle is Scotland's national flower
because of its history with Viking invaders. The stories say
that Vikings attacked barefoot for the sake of quiet surprise,
but when they stepped on a thistle, they'd cry out,
which gave the Scots warning of the oncoming invasion. Anyway,
accounts do say that King Duff was a great king,
though until he took ill just outside the town of Farres.
(11:54):
Farres is just a few miles east of Inverness for reference,
and King Duff was convinced that the sickness was a
result of bewitching. Let me pause a moment here to
explain what that would mean to a Scottish audience in
the early sixteen hundreds. Scotland at the time of the
(12:15):
play would have been Protestant, specifically Presbyterian, meaning that they
were largely Calvinist. Calvinism is big on predestination. Read The
True Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. If
you want Martis on that hell, you can probably glean
the thesis from the title alone, if not, anyway, one
(12:36):
part of Calvinist doctrine was that everything happened for a reason.
More specifically in the sixteen hundreds, if something good happened
to you, then that was a reward direct from the
hand of God for something you did. If something bad
happened to you, then that was a punishment direct from
(12:56):
the hand of God for something you did. You might
be thinking, but what if I didn't do anything to
deserve a punishment. The fact, as it was accepted by
Calvinists during the initial production of the Scottish play in Scotland,
was this, if you didn't do anything to deserve the
(13:17):
punishment you received, then that punishment was the result of witchcraft.
That's a lot of qualifiers. I know, and I don't
know whether King Duff believed that, but when Shakespeare went
to Scotland and heard this story, he definitely heard it
(13:39):
from people who believed that. So if the good King
Duff fell ill for no reason by the transient property,
there are some witches to blame. In fact, the tenth
century was well before the Malleus Maleficarum was authorized by
Pope Innocent the eighth. That's the Hammer of Witches, by
the way, which was a handbook on both how to
(14:01):
smoke out witchcraft and how to punish it when it
was identified. But according to history, as recorded in Kirkyard
documents and letters, which admittedly could be a revisionist retelling,
King Doth ordered a search. What exactly his guy searched for,
I don't know, and by all accounts it does sound
(14:21):
like the search was conducted by some guys, any guys.
I'm not confident that they knew what to search for. Really.
What these guys found, though, was documented as this. In
the fields outside of Forres, the king's men found three
women and they were playing with a wax effigy of
(14:42):
a king. They were melting him into the fire. Even
in a revisionist perspective in which witchcraft does not exist.
Bacma melting a wax effigy of the King in the
middle of a Scottish Highland field looks like witchcraft. The
women were arrested and they they were carried into far
As proper. I'll tell you what happened to them after
(15:04):
this break. But right now I'll tell you this. There
was no trial. Before the break. I told you that
(15:26):
three women in the field were arrested for witchcraft and
carried into town. And as I told you, there was
no trial. So what does this old wives tale have
to do with true crime? Scotland saw several official witchcraft
acts in legislation up until King James. Each of them
detailed some instances in which witchcraft was punishable by death,
(15:50):
usually though witchcraft was not punishable by death. And then
King James got fascinated with witchcraft. To be fair, he
was absessed with Christianity as a whole. You know the
King James Bible. Yeah, he's responsible for that edition, but
he oversaw that after he wrote the pamphlet entitled Demonology
(16:11):
inform a dialogue divided into three books by the High
and Mighty Prince James. Yes, that's the actual subtitle, y'all,
inform a Dialogue divided into three books by the High
and Mighty Prince James. That pamphlet, which it was three parts,
can we still call that a pamphlet? That pamphlet was
(16:34):
reprinted in sixteen oh three, after James became King of
England in addition to Scotland. I wish I could tell y'all,
I have read the quote unquote pamphlet. But if you
think Elizabethan English is tricky to decipher, try a non
standardized Scott's English from around the same period. For example,
(16:57):
I was looking through some already translated and transcribed criminal
documents for another project and I came across this word. Y'all.
I'm proud of being a good reader, and I did
teach English composition for several years. I'm pretty good at
deciphering misspellings, but this word was different. I'm going to
(17:18):
spell it for you and you tell me what you
think it means. Cunt er foot. I'm literally crying right
now writing and reading this because of what I thought
counterfoot meant. Think about it, counterfoot, Well, here's a hint.
It's not what I thought it meant. It means counterfeit.
(17:39):
What the hell? Oh tears of breath? Oh my gosh,
I have told that story so many times and it
still gets me. Okay, back to the very series. Yes,
(18:00):
no laughing matter at hand. Scholars believe that James's Demonology
pamphlet was a main source of material for Shakespeare too,
But in real life, King James was especially fixated on
Exodus twenty two eighteen, the verse that says thou shalt
not suffer a witch to live, and when he suspected
(18:21):
that he was the victim of an assassination plot by witchcraft,
he tightened up. I'd like to mention as well that
King James's proposed assassination attempt by witchcraft sounds a lot
like the witches afar as When he sailed to Denmark
in fifteen eighty nine to collect his fourteen year old
wife Anne, the journey was racked with storms because James
(18:45):
had done nothing wrong ever in his life. If you
hear my sarcasm, you can go ahead on and give
King James a google. By the way, maybe I should rephrase. Actually,
because King James had inherited the throne by divine right,
he could do no wrong. You see the problem here
without me elaborating, I'm sure in James's mind he had
not done anything to deserve this punishment the storms. He
(19:09):
reasoned that the stormy voyage was the result of a
curse by witches, and this flawed logic resulted in the
notorious North Berwick witch trials. This abomination of an investigation
was as crooked as you could expect. But it leads
to a bigger question. Why were Scotland's witch trials the
(19:32):
most deadly? This is the short answer. Before sixteen oh four,
execution was only used as a sentence if the practitioner
of witchcraft committed a murder. But King James's subsequent Witchcraft
Act of sixteen oh four made hanging mandatory for a
(19:55):
first offense of witchcraft. You think that's bad. During the
time of King Duff, that's back in the tenth century,
things were different. It was five hundred years before the
Protestant Reformation in Scotland, six hundred ish before King James's crackdown.
(20:17):
But the women of Forrests weren't just heretics or witches.
They were attempting to murder the king. That was a
direct attack on the crown. So their crimes chopped up
to not only witchcraft but also attempted murder and assassination,
and the king was sick already because of it. Those
three women were executed brutally and publicly. What comes next
(20:43):
is the reason we give a trigger warning at the
top of every episode. The torture that these women endured
is exceptionally heinous, even for the Scottish witch trials. Each
woman was forced into a herring barrel. Someone is not
who nailed the barrels shut, and they did it with
(21:04):
nails that were far too long for their purpose. Essentially,
they created an iron maiden inside each barrel, and then
they tipped the barrels on their sides, and they rolled
the barrels down Clooney Hill, where each barrel came to rest.
Someone again not clear who piled heather on the barrels
(21:26):
as kindling and set them on fire. The shredded women,
or at least their bodies, were burned inside. After the
blazes reduced the barrels and bodies to ash, each site
was marked with a boulder. Considering how well the creative
extreme torture was documented in the tenth century, it seems
(21:48):
almost intentional that no record Ever mentions the women's names.
It might seem like our story should end here with
the deaths of the accused witches, but of course the
story is far from over. Let's talk about the lore
(22:13):
of those boulders. One of them disappeared. The second of
them seems to have never been moved. It rests in
the corner of a beautiful garden along Victoria Road. The
old Scots, by the way, had a big superstition about
the corner of a garden or field. They called it
the Goodman's croft, and they didn't farm it. They saved
(22:34):
it to placate the devil. The third boulder rests half
in Victoria Road in Farrest. It's protected by an iron
band at the base of the Forrest Police station. Rumor
has it that this boulder was actually moved. It was
taken for a nearby construction project and broken up for materials.
(22:56):
Vin Fever took the person who moved the boulder, and
the other workers put the boulder back. That's why the
iron band holds the three pieces of it together. I
think that's why, even though it's an inconvenient location half
in the street, the stone was not disturbed by its
paving there's actually a retaining wall over this marker, and
(23:17):
now there's a plaque memorializing the murders of the witches.
As far as it reads from Clooney Hill, witches were
rolled in stout barrels through which spikes were driven. Where
the barrels stopped, they were burned with their mangled contents.
This stone marks the site of one such burning. If
(23:45):
you're a Scottish scholar, though, and you know more about
this story, please contact me on Instagram at Mary Kay
macbrayer and tell me more. Also, if you're interested in
seeing that boulder along with the memorial of the witches
burned on Clooney Hill, I have photos of all that
there as well. Piece the charms wound up. The Greatest
(24:29):
True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio.
I'm Mary Kay McBrayer and I hosted this episode. I
also wrote this episode. Our show is produced by Leo Culp,
theme music by Tyler Cash, Executive producer Scott Waxman. And
one more thing before I go. If you haven't already,
(24:49):
I'll love you forever if you pre order my forthcoming
true crime book, Madam Queen, The Life and Crimes of
Harlem's underground racketeer Stephanie Sinclair. There's a link to do
it your favorite retailer in our show's Notes
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
quite graphic descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for
some listeners. Please take care in listening. When shall we
(00:29):
three meet again in thunder Lightning or in rain? So
begins William Shakespeare's Scottish play featuring the power hungry warrior Macbeth.
But against the rules of most scriptwriting textbooks, our main
character Macbeth doesn't get those iconic opening lines. Those belong
(00:53):
to the three Weird Sisters, although in the original text
they were called the Wayward Sister, which if you say
weird in a Scottish accent you might notice it sounds
a lot like wayward. Still, we know the characters today
as the Witches. The trope of three witches is ubiquitous
(01:14):
throughout history and popular culture, from the Three Muses and
the Three Fates to the three Sanderson Sisters. You can't
really escape the Maiden, Matron and Crone. Shakespeare's Weird Sisters
just happened to be the most iconic, or at least
my personal favorite trio of magical women. They say, if
(01:38):
they hadn't prophesied that he would become king, then he
never would have gotten ambitious and schemed to depose Duncan.
But I think those scholars are probably the same kind
of people who think Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles. Listeners,
you and I know the real stars of the show, right,
(01:59):
But did you know those three women, the weird Sisters,
the three witches who prophesized Macbeth's ascendants? Did you know
those women really existed? Welcome to the greatest true crime
(02:30):
stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, author of the
true crime book Madam Queen, the Life and Crimes of
Harlem's underground racketeer Stephanie Sinclair. Today's episode we're calling the
real Witches of Macbeth. It's a thousand year old story,
(02:51):
which doesn't make it any less interesting, more so, i'd argue,
but it does mean that source material was extremely hard
to come by. I was surprised that there were any
records at all, but they do exist, and so do
the Witches of Forrest. Still, because of the scarce research,
this episode will be shorter than most. I'll tell you
(03:15):
everything I could find right after this quick break. I'm
(03:40):
the kind of person who loves to travel, but I'm
also a complete dork about it. I read everything about
the place I can find beforehand, do as much of
the locals recommendations when I get there, and then write
about it when I get home. In a way, it's
like having the vacation three times. So when we booked
(04:02):
our trip to Scotland in the autumn of twenty twenty three,
I picked up a book called The Lowdown on Witches
by Leonard Low, and I devoured it. The link to
The Lowdown on Witches is in our show's notes. So
don't wreck your car trying to take notes during rush hour, Okay,
just come back when you're at a stopping place. I
(04:24):
learned from I was researching and planning that most tourists
land in Edinburgh and pretty much never leave the Royal
Mile unless it's to golf at Saint Andrew's or hike
to Arthur's seat. Edinburgh was great, especially Mary King's close tour,
but you can't beat the Highlands. We drove on the
(04:44):
wrong side of the road north from the airport to Inverness. Well,
my husband, the transportation engineer, and my fearless friend drove us.
Her husband and I white knuckled the shotgun seat and
I tried to navigate without having a panic attack every
time I looked up from phone. But the Scottish Highlands
are amazing for so many reasons. They're exactly the postcard
(05:07):
worthy landscape they show on Outlander, with the added bonus
that the landscape extends outside the frame, with lush land
like that and the kind of fog that portends King
Arthur's birth. It makes sense that long ago belief in
fairies and other supernatural beings was taken as fact. It
(05:28):
wasn't even a question. I mean, we were in the
car pointing off the shoulder like, hmm, that's a fairy
hill right there. For sure. Hyda kids and hid your
wife or they're going to changeling them. Joking aside. Even
though the worst which hunts of Scotland were in the
sixteen sixties, I would argue sixteen sixty one specifically, if
you asked which trials were ubiquitous long before that. And
(05:53):
the most important thing to remember is this. The trials
were not to determine whether witchcraft was real. Witchcraft was real,
that was never a consideration. The trials were to determine
whether you had committed witchcraft. Shakespeare wrote his Scottish Play
(06:26):
before those trials. It was published in sixteen twenty three,
but he wrote it around sixteen o six. That's just
three years after Queen Elizabeth was succeeded by a new monarch,
that is James the First. Well, he was James the
First of England. In Scotland he was James the sixth,
(06:50):
And with a new Scottish monarch came an English fascination
with all things Scottish. If you're a dramatist, or remember
anything from ninth grade literature class, you might remember that
artists and playwrights, including Shakespeare himself, earned most of their
living based on the donations of wealthy patrons. Yes, ticket
(07:14):
entries helped, but not a lot. As I've said before
in an article I wrote for the Archive, that meant
writers had to sort of sing for their supper. If
your patron liked your play, then they'd probably send you
more money for the next one. Shakespeare had already had
one extremely wealthy patron in Queen Elizabeth the First. You
(07:36):
can see how he catered to her interests by representing
strong fictional women characters and works like Twelfth Night and
Midsummer Night's Dream. He also wrote a lot of his
historical plays under her patronage. My point is Shakespeare knew
how to read the room. And I don't just mean
(08:02):
that he knew how to read King James sixth. It's
true that in sixteen oh one Shakespeare visited Aberdeen as
a guest of James six and he did it specifically
to do recon on his patron apparent. But like I said,
the bar didn't just read his patron well. He knew
his audience. The patrons would be up in the best seats,
(08:26):
the box seats, and those were few. Most of the
audience was a rowdy, drunken crowd of peasants, and Shakespeare
knew this. So imagine Shakespeare, not the man his writing.
(08:48):
Imagine trying to perform Shakespeare to a bunch of drunk illiterates.
And I'm not being funny. Most of his audience would
have been pretty uneducated and ready to take a load
off after a long day's work. And it's not a
raucous LaughFest like The Taming of the Shrew. This is
the Scottish play strategizing for a murderous coup. It's one
(09:11):
of those plots that requires you to wake up and focus,
or you won't understand what happens next. He had to
get their attention somehow, and that's why so many of
Shakespeare's tragedies start off with a supernatural event. Hamlet had
his father's ghost, Macbeth had his witches. I don't know
(09:43):
about you, but I do remember learning that King Macbeth
was a real person, or at least that character was
loosely based on the folklore of a Scottish king from
the Dark Ages. The real guy was not the power
hungry king we all know in love, but he existed,
so did Duncan and Macduff. What I was not ever
taught was that the witches were based on real people too.
(10:13):
Here are the facts, as I was able to reconstruct them,
and this is based on research of my own but
largely guided by the incredible Leonard Lowe. It's the tenth
century King Duff is the king. Alternate accounts call him Duffus,
which my husband actually mispronounced as Dufus when I was
telling him this, but okay. Alternate accounts call him Duffus
(10:35):
as well, meaning son of en Duff. Interestingly, Macduff also
means son of Duff, but there's not a ton of
parallels between this actual guy and the Shakespearean thing of Fife.
So I'm gonna stick with King Duff as his moniker,
just for the sake of easy listening. So King Duff
was King of the Scots from nine sixty two to seven.
(11:01):
In case mental math humbles you the way it does me,
let me explicate that a little King Duff was king
for only five years, and he inherited the crown from
his own father, who had died while defending the Highlands
against Viking invaders. Just a fun little piece of folklore.
(11:30):
Rumor has it that the thistle is Scotland's national flower
because of its history with Viking invaders. The stories say
that Vikings attacked barefoot for the sake of quiet surprise,
but when they stepped on a thistle, they'd cry out,
which gave the Scots warning of the oncoming invasion. Anyway,
accounts do say that King Duff was a great king,
though until he took ill just outside the town of Farres.
(11:54):
Farres is just a few miles east of Inverness for reference,
and King Duff was convinced that the sickness was a
result of bewitching. Let me pause a moment here to
explain what that would mean to a Scottish audience in
the early sixteen hundreds. Scotland at the time of the
(12:15):
play would have been Protestant, specifically Presbyterian, meaning that they
were largely Calvinist. Calvinism is big on predestination. Read The
True Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. If
you want Martis on that hell, you can probably glean
the thesis from the title alone, if not, anyway, one
(12:36):
part of Calvinist doctrine was that everything happened for a reason.
More specifically in the sixteen hundreds, if something good happened
to you, then that was a reward direct from the
hand of God for something you did. If something bad
happened to you, then that was a punishment direct from
(12:56):
the hand of God for something you did. You might
be thinking, but what if I didn't do anything to
deserve a punishment. The fact, as it was accepted by
Calvinists during the initial production of the Scottish play in Scotland,
was this, if you didn't do anything to deserve the
(13:17):
punishment you received, then that punishment was the result of witchcraft.
That's a lot of qualifiers. I know, and I don't
know whether King Duff believed that, but when Shakespeare went
to Scotland and heard this story, he definitely heard it
(13:39):
from people who believed that. So if the good King
Duff fell ill for no reason by the transient property,
there are some witches to blame. In fact, the tenth
century was well before the Malleus Maleficarum was authorized by
Pope Innocent the eighth. That's the Hammer of Witches, by
the way, which was a handbook on both how to
(14:01):
smoke out witchcraft and how to punish it when it
was identified. But according to history, as recorded in Kirkyard
documents and letters, which admittedly could be a revisionist retelling,
King Doth ordered a search. What exactly his guy searched for,
I don't know, and by all accounts it does sound
(14:21):
like the search was conducted by some guys, any guys.
I'm not confident that they knew what to search for. Really.
What these guys found, though, was documented as this. In
the fields outside of Forres, the king's men found three
women and they were playing with a wax effigy of
(14:42):
a king. They were melting him into the fire. Even
in a revisionist perspective in which witchcraft does not exist.
Bacma melting a wax effigy of the King in the
middle of a Scottish Highland field looks like witchcraft. The
women were arrested and they they were carried into far
As proper. I'll tell you what happened to them after
(15:04):
this break. But right now I'll tell you this. There
was no trial. Before the break. I told you that
(15:26):
three women in the field were arrested for witchcraft and
carried into town. And as I told you, there was
no trial. So what does this old wives tale have
to do with true crime? Scotland saw several official witchcraft
acts in legislation up until King James. Each of them
detailed some instances in which witchcraft was punishable by death,
(15:50):
usually though witchcraft was not punishable by death. And then
King James got fascinated with witchcraft. To be fair, he
was absessed with Christianity as a whole. You know the
King James Bible. Yeah, he's responsible for that edition, but
he oversaw that after he wrote the pamphlet entitled Demonology
(16:11):
inform a dialogue divided into three books by the High
and Mighty Prince James. Yes, that's the actual subtitle, y'all,
inform a Dialogue divided into three books by the High
and Mighty Prince James. That pamphlet, which it was three parts,
can we still call that a pamphlet? That pamphlet was
(16:34):
reprinted in sixteen oh three, after James became King of
England in addition to Scotland. I wish I could tell y'all,
I have read the quote unquote pamphlet. But if you
think Elizabethan English is tricky to decipher, try a non
standardized Scott's English from around the same period. For example,
(16:57):
I was looking through some already translated and transcribed criminal
documents for another project and I came across this word. Y'all.
I'm proud of being a good reader, and I did
teach English composition for several years. I'm pretty good at
deciphering misspellings, but this word was different. I'm going to
(17:18):
spell it for you and you tell me what you
think it means. Cunt er foot. I'm literally crying right
now writing and reading this because of what I thought
counterfoot meant. Think about it, counterfoot, Well, here's a hint.
It's not what I thought it meant. It means counterfeit.
(17:39):
What the hell? Oh tears of breath? Oh my gosh,
I have told that story so many times and it
still gets me. Okay, back to the very series. Yes,
(18:00):
no laughing matter at hand. Scholars believe that James's Demonology
pamphlet was a main source of material for Shakespeare too,
But in real life, King James was especially fixated on
Exodus twenty two eighteen, the verse that says thou shalt
not suffer a witch to live, and when he suspected
(18:21):
that he was the victim of an assassination plot by witchcraft,
he tightened up. I'd like to mention as well that
King James's proposed assassination attempt by witchcraft sounds a lot
like the witches afar as When he sailed to Denmark
in fifteen eighty nine to collect his fourteen year old
wife Anne, the journey was racked with storms because James
(18:45):
had done nothing wrong ever in his life. If you
hear my sarcasm, you can go ahead on and give
King James a google. By the way, maybe I should rephrase. Actually,
because King James had inherited the throne by divine right,
he could do no wrong. You see the problem here
without me elaborating, I'm sure in James's mind he had
not done anything to deserve this punishment the storms. He
(19:09):
reasoned that the stormy voyage was the result of a
curse by witches, and this flawed logic resulted in the
notorious North Berwick witch trials. This abomination of an investigation
was as crooked as you could expect. But it leads
to a bigger question. Why were Scotland's witch trials the
(19:32):
most deadly? This is the short answer. Before sixteen oh four,
execution was only used as a sentence if the practitioner
of witchcraft committed a murder. But King James's subsequent Witchcraft
Act of sixteen oh four made hanging mandatory for a
(19:55):
first offense of witchcraft. You think that's bad. During the
time of King Duff, that's back in the tenth century,
things were different. It was five hundred years before the
Protestant Reformation in Scotland, six hundred ish before King James's crackdown.
(20:17):
But the women of Forrests weren't just heretics or witches.
They were attempting to murder the king. That was a
direct attack on the crown. So their crimes chopped up
to not only witchcraft but also attempted murder and assassination,
and the king was sick already because of it. Those
three women were executed brutally and publicly. What comes next
(20:43):
is the reason we give a trigger warning at the
top of every episode. The torture that these women endured
is exceptionally heinous, even for the Scottish witch trials. Each
woman was forced into a herring barrel. Someone is not
who nailed the barrels shut, and they did it with
(21:04):
nails that were far too long for their purpose. Essentially,
they created an iron maiden inside each barrel, and then
they tipped the barrels on their sides, and they rolled
the barrels down Clooney Hill, where each barrel came to rest.
Someone again not clear who piled heather on the barrels
(21:26):
as kindling and set them on fire. The shredded women,
or at least their bodies, were burned inside. After the
blazes reduced the barrels and bodies to ash, each site
was marked with a boulder. Considering how well the creative
extreme torture was documented in the tenth century, it seems
(21:48):
almost intentional that no record Ever mentions the women's names.
It might seem like our story should end here with
the deaths of the accused witches, but of course the
story is far from over. Let's talk about the lore
(22:13):
of those boulders. One of them disappeared. The second of
them seems to have never been moved. It rests in
the corner of a beautiful garden along Victoria Road. The
old Scots, by the way, had a big superstition about
the corner of a garden or field. They called it
the Goodman's croft, and they didn't farm it. They saved
(22:34):
it to placate the devil. The third boulder rests half
in Victoria Road in Farrest. It's protected by an iron
band at the base of the Forrest Police station. Rumor
has it that this boulder was actually moved. It was
taken for a nearby construction project and broken up for materials.
(22:56):
Vin Fever took the person who moved the boulder, and
the other workers put the boulder back. That's why the
iron band holds the three pieces of it together. I
think that's why, even though it's an inconvenient location half
in the street, the stone was not disturbed by its
paving there's actually a retaining wall over this marker, and
(23:17):
now there's a plaque memorializing the murders of the witches.
As far as it reads from Clooney Hill, witches were
rolled in stout barrels through which spikes were driven. Where
the barrels stopped, they were burned with their mangled contents.
This stone marks the site of one such burning. If
(23:45):
you're a Scottish scholar, though, and you know more about
this story, please contact me on Instagram at Mary Kay
macbrayer and tell me more. Also, if you're interested in
seeing that boulder along with the memorial of the witches
burned on Clooney Hill, I have photos of all that
there as well. Piece the charms wound up. The Greatest
(24:29):
True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio.
I'm Mary Kay McBrayer and I hosted this episode. I
also wrote this episode. Our show is produced by Leo Culp,
theme music by Tyler Cash, Executive producer Scott Waxman. And
one more thing before I go. If you haven't already,
(24:49):
I'll love you forever if you pre order my forthcoming
true crime book, Madam Queen, The Life and Crimes of
Harlem's underground racketeer Stephanie Sinclair. There's a link to do
it your favorite retailer in our show's Notes
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