Scotland's witches were innocent but some appear to have believed they'd had sex with 'cold' and 'smelly' Satan – Susan Morrison

A pact with the devil was reputedly often sealed with sex, which seems to have been a bit of a problem for him

Today, October is very much the season of the witch. Hallowe’en decorations are appearing almost as early as Christmas ones, and are just as eye-catching. Houses are swathed in fake glowing cobwebs and supersized spiders. There are witches in the windows. But just what, exactly, was a witch? You’d think the Scots would know. Our king wrote the user guide for witch hunting.

Well, there’s a strong chance it's a woman. Eighty-five per cent of the accused were female. She was perhaps a weaker member of the community, old, poor or just a bit odd. An overwhelming number of the accused were classed as ‘vagrants’, but no class was safe. The wives of lairds and burgesses were charged with sorcery. Agnes Finnie was an Edinburgh shopkeeper. Wealthy Euphame MacCalzean was the daughter of a judge.

Some were known to their communities as healers. Agnes Sampson of North Berwick was described as a midwife and a healer. Quite a few of these local charm women found themselves in the crosshairs of the kirk when their cures didn't work, or babies died.

We would recognise some accused as mentally or even physically ill in some way. In 1662, Isobel Gowdie spontaneously confessed to impossible crimes and told increasingly wild tales of flying on magical horses, turning into a jackdaw and dining with the Queen of the Fairies. Men did get accused of witchcraft. One of the main players in the North Berwick trial was local schoolmaster Dr John Fian, who confessed to being the recorder of the coven. It seems even Satan needed minutes kept of his meetings.

Anyone could be in the firing line for the accusation of witchcraft. And usually, when the finger-pointing started, everyone knew everyone else very well, because they were their neighbours. Scotland was a rural nation then, and a poor one. People lived in small, tight communities and village life wasn’t always cosy. Tempers flared over slights and imagined insults.

Two people in a tiny hamlet might fall out. Now and then they have a right to go at each other. It was best to stay away from the blast zone, particularly if one or both of them were mouthy women. There would be a final confrontation, a very public showdown, with things said aloud that should best remain silent...

Grissell Duff accused her neighbour of killing her rooster and said “Devills take them to hell who killed him”. Someone destroyed the plants outside Elspet Poutie’s house in 1660. She bade “the divell to rug them asunder” and flung about some “abominable oaths”.

A witch, a demon and a warlock fly towards a peasant woman in this circa 1400 image (Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In Dumfries, Jonet McMuldritche had a long-standing feud with Robert Brown. She said he’d run her cattle off some pasture land, which he said was his. She lost her temper and cursed him out. He fell ill, and died. Jonet’s magical powers didn’t do her much good. She was strangled and burned in 1671.

People have lost their tempers and said things they regret since time began, but did Jonet, Elspeth and Grissell really believe they had sold their souls to the Devil in return for him turning up to sort out a bit of neighbourhood bother? In some confessions, they have no doubt. They met the Devil.

It's easy to do. He’s everywhere in Scotland. Of course he is. In the great battle between good and evil, this was the nation striving to be the most godly. We were the front line. You’d expect the Devil to take an interest in our goings-on. He prowled Scotland like a sort of Cold War spy, eager to ‘turn’ souls to his side in the conflict.

He can really get under your skin. He can worm inside the soul of any good Christian and whisper nasty nothings in your ear. He was constantly on the lookout for any tiny breach in the spiritual armour and ready with temptation. He walked abroad freely.

John Corse bumped into him in the street, in 1639 at Balbirnie Mill. Like any good spy, he was a master of disguise. Sometimes he was a ‘dark’ gentleman, or even an animal. In 1684 Elizabeth Blackadder wrote she was “lying into a room alone, and there came into the chamber a great black dog”, which she believed was the Devil.

Several accused witches described the pact that they made with him, often sealed with sex. No one seemed to like it much. He’s cold, they’d complain, and he smells. And some said that in a few cases, sex was a bit of a problem for Satan. He's a shapeshifter precisely because he has no actual body. So in order for him to get it on with his new followers he would visit the nearest kirkyard and reanimate a fresh corpse for the evening. That could explain the whiff.

These are the tales the accused told when they confessed. They sound compelling, but many of these testimonies were squeezed out under torture – sleep deprivation in the main. It’s still used today as an interrogation technique. Exhausted brains can become highly susceptible to ideas being put to them. The all-male questioners took recording all the aspects of witch behaviour very seriously. They might even have suggested a point or two from earlier testimonies, and then carefully included the answers in the new confessions from now guilty witches.

They executed the old, the poor, the insane, and the ones driven mad by torture, but they also burned the ones who really believed they had sold their soul to the Devil. They went to their deaths convinced of their own guilt. Satan had tempted them, and they had fallen. The next time you see the outline of a broomsticked witch in a window, ask yourself who she might really have been, all those centuries ago.