Original subtitles

- This is the only mass witch trial in Ireland.

- A woman seems to become the trigger of demonic possession.

- She's crying out in pain, whole body tremors.

- The reason the demon is afflicting this person

is because a witch has sent the demon.

- She has tortured herself by ghostly attackers.

It is a haunted place and it's haunted by this witch trial.

[screaming]

[whispering]

♪ ♪

- Islandmagee is in County Antrim.

County Antrim is what is now Northern Ireland.

It sticks out just above Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Ann Haltridge is an elderly matriarch.

She's Presbyterian of Scots descent

and she's also the widow of Reverend John Haltridge.

- Ann Haltridge moved to Islandmagee

in order to spend her last years looked after by

her son's family.

[Andrew Sneddon] Ann lived in Knowehead House.

It was a stone's throw away from the Presbyterian church.

Ann lives there with her son James and his wife,

two children and his servant, Margaret Spear.

[Ronald Hutton] But everything starts to go wrong.

[crow cawing]

♪ ♪

[Andrew Sneddon] Ann Haltridge is reading on her own

and suddenly stones start hitting her.

She can't see where they're from.

They're coming through the window

and bashing her right in the back of the head.

[Ronald Hutton] And the household sees weird things going on.

Bedclothes are disarranged.

Some of them are rearranged in the shape of a

corpse on the bed.

[Andrew Sneddon] She goes to bed that night and what she

starts feeling, terrifyingly, is this presence crawling

slowly up her feet, up her legs and over her head.

She hears them scratching and noises.

So Ann Haltridge is beginning to wonder what's happening.

♪ ♪

- Ann is also haunted by an apparition of a demonic boy.

[Andrew Sneddon] And he is a small boy.

She tells the household they think

is basically a beggar.

[Marion Gibson] She doesn't think so and whether

he's real or not,

he seems to her to be a manifestation of the devil.

[Andrew Sneddon] The main witness is the servant, Margaret Spear.

[Marion Gibson] The boy says the devil has taught him to read.

To people in the 18th century and particularly

extreme Protestants, like the Haltridge family,

they would have thought of it as a demonic phenomenon.

[Andrew Sneddon] This is a Presbyterian Protestant

community where you learn about God.

You learn about your duties to the Christian faith

through reading.

It's very important.

[narrator] Then, as suddenly as he appeared, the boy is gone.

For several months, an uneasy peace falls on Knowehead House.

But on the 12th of February, 1711, the boy returns.

[Andrew Sneddon] He's threatened to kill everybody in the house.

He produces a sword and starts digging a grave.

He says to Margaret Spear, "I'm digging this grave for

your master, James Haltridge.

"He's dead. I've killed him."

We know that that's not the case.

♪ ♪

[Marion Gibson] What Ann and her family are experiencing

is a phenomenon called obsession.

And that's when the devil is trying to possess you,

but actually he's outside your body.

He can't quite get in.

So obsessed people would be people

who would see strange visions, to whom weird things like

stone throwing might happen.

And this was all because the devil was thought

to be controlling their body and their mind externally.

- People could be tormented by demons in various ways.

This so-called demonic obsession might proceed

in some extreme situations into full bodily possession,

whereby the demon ceases merely to menace externally

the victim, but actually enters the body.

Bad spirits could get inside a person through the mouth

or through some other orifice.

[Andrew Sneddon] What starts off as something outside of the body

starts to internalize.

[Ronald Hutton] Ann claims to be the victim of stabbing pains

administered by invisible antagonists,

who are demons as far as the Presbyterians are concerned.

[Andrew Sneddon] With anything like this, where they're being

attacked by a demonic entity, the first port of call

is the local minister, Reverend Sinclair.

He is a leading man in that small community.

His church is at the center of that community.

He believes in witchcraft.

He lives in a community that believes in witchcraft.

Reverend Sinclair comes in and starts praying

for Mrs. Halditch.

If this was a Roman Catholic priest,

he may have performed the ritual of exorcism.

- If you're trying to rescue a possessed person

from the demon that is possessing them,

what you're doing is you're exorcising that person,

commanding the demon to depart.

[Andrew Sneddon] And you're using the sign of the cross.

Sometimes you use a bit of holy water.

[Julian Goodare] Protestants reject all these consecrated objects and they say,

"Well, that's just Catholic superstition. That's wicked."

But as a result, they leave themselves

with a relatively limited range of techniques.

[Andrew Sneddon] They can't command.

What they can do is pray.

[narrator] To ease her terrible suffering,

Reverend Sinclair prays for Ann Haltridge.

But it is not enough.

Her condition worsens.

And on February 27th, 1711, she dies.

The cause of death, unknown.

♪ ♪

[Marion Gibson] You'd expect the period of mourning for her

to be very solemn, to be very quiet.

[Ronald Hutton] But shortly after her death,

another extraneous relative arrives at Islandmagee.

[Andrew Sneddon] James' cousin, Mary Dunbar.

She is from Castlereagh , which is just outside of Belfast.

She's a stranger to Islandmagee.

She says she hasn't been within 15 miles of the place before.

[Ronald Hutton] Mary is around 18 years old and no sooner has

she settled into the household than all the weirdness

breaks out again.

[Marion Gibson] On the 27th of February,

Mary Dunbar finds a fabric parcel.

[Ronald Hutton] An apron that's been tied up in weird knots.

Now, the tying and untying of knots

is a traditional means of working magic by witches.

- Many cultures have elaborate protective magics,

typically a knotting spell will be a way

of trying to set a spell.

You work the spell and at the moment where you say

you conclude the spell, you tie the knot

and the knot acts to fix the spell.

All of this is sympathetic magic.

[Andrew Sneddon] The sympathy's between the intended victim

and their belongings.

So you do one and it happens to the other.

[Ronald Hutton] So it's assumed that because the knots are in a

weird pattern that there's some kind of magic involved.

♪ ♪

Guess what?

Mary Dunbar elects to untie the knots and see what happens.

[narrator] Mary Dunbar pulls at the cursed knots.

The apron unfolds and a curious object falls to the floor.

A bonnet that belonged to the recently deceased Ann Haltridge.

[Marion Gibson] By untying it, Mary seems to have let out

some sort of demonic force, which then fastens on her.

[Andrew Sneddon] And witches use something belonging to the

victim to bewitch it.

Whatever they do to the object belonging to them

happens to the individual.

[Ronald Huttdon] It's now Mary Dunbar who is the apparent

center of the demonic attacks.

[Andrew Sneddon] She's screaming out, caught with a

stabbing pain and then she goes into convulsive fits.

♪ ♪

[Darren Oldridge] Demonic possession was recognized

by well-established symptoms.

Physical contortion, unnatural bodily strength.

Endless fits.

Trances.

[Darren Oldridge] And also a recoiling from holy objects

like blessed water or crucifixes and simply the word of God.

Now one further indication of demonic possession

was that a possessed person would accuse somebody else

of casting a demon into their body.

It's because of this that very often,

demon possession was associated with witchcraft.

[Ronald Hutton] Mary Dunbar claims to be attacked

by the spirits of witches.

[Andrew Sneddon] She starts to go into trances and she starts

to see the images of women attacking her.

[Ronald Hutton] She can visualize their features.

[narrator] In the midst of the spectral attack,

she hears the name of one of her tormentors,

Janet Carson, a local woman unknown to Mary.

[Ronald Hutton] The Reverend Sinclair proceeds to

investigate things as best he can.

[Marion Gibson] There's a test that's been performed

since the 16th century for witchcraft,

which is to bring the suspected witch close

to the supposedly obsessed or possessed person

and see if they react to it, even if they can't see

the witchcraft suspect.

[Andrew Sneddon] The approach of the person who has bewitched you

will make you worse.

Sympathetic magic, the cause and the effect coming together.

[Marion Gibson] So this is done with Janet Carson.

She's brought into the room and of course the

victim does react and that's held to confirm

that she must in fact be a witch.

[narrator] Janet Carson is the first person accused of

witchcraft in Islandmagee, but she won't be the last.

♪ ♪

[Andrew Sneddon] It made perfect sense that the

Haltridge households would be attacked by the devil.

They were pious.

It was a godly household.

It was a light in the darkness.

[birds chirping]

So the question is, why Mary Dunbar?

She's young, she's educated, she's the type the devil

would try to tempt, try to corrupt.

He is after all in the popular mind,

the great corruptor and the great tempter.

♪ ♪

And she's a perfect target, just like Ann was before her.

Mary Dunbar's fits continue.

Convulsive, whole body tremors that were lasting

up to eight minutes and she's able to point

towards two further women.

Janet Liston and Elizabeth Sellor.

They're a mother and a daughter.

[narrator] Mary can even describe the witches.

They're short and one struggles to walk,

but Reverend Sinclair is cautious.

Can he trust these visions?

[Andrew Sneddon] They are living in an era of increasing skepticism.

They know that these symptoms can

and have been faked in the past and they want to make sure.

They don't want to send an innocent person

to jail or worse.

So they continue to test.

[Julian Goodare] There is a passage in the Bible that says,

"Believe not every spirit, "but try the spirits

whether they are of God."

If you encounter a spirit, if you encounter

something supernatural, you have to work out what it is.

If somebody else has encountered a spirit

or encountered something supernatural,

you have to question them to work out what it is.

It could be a good thing or it could be a bad thing.

The good spirits, you've got angels,

bad spirits, the devil and demons.

So if you encounter a spirit, it could well be a demon.

[Marion Gibson] Again, a test is arranged.

A lineup is organized, a bit like an identity parade

and it contains about 30 different women.

It's expected that because Mary Dunbar

is not from Islandmagee, that it will be a

good test of her to see if she can

recognize the women whose names she's already

been mentioning as suspects.

Not only does she pick out the suspects in the lineup,

she actually reacted in a very extreme manner to them.

This is thought again to be proof of their witchcraft.

[Andrew Sneddon] Reverend Sinclair quizzes Janet and Elizabeth

on the Bible, but also to say the Lord's Prayer.

This is a classic test of witchcraft.

[narrator] Janet Liston and Elizabeth Sellor stumble

as they recite the Lord's Prayer.

To the pious, this is a sign.

The devil has their tongue.

[Ronald Hutton] This in the end convinces the Reverend

that there is a case and he then takes it to the authorities.

[Andrew Sneddon] To do so, they have to go to the main legal power

in the local area, Mayor Edward Clements,

he is justice to the peace and they investigate

charges that are serious.

They are responsible for drawing up witness statements

or depositions and for jailing people

to appear in the criminal court.

They are usually gentry.

They're usually of independent means

and they're Protestants and they decide whether

it's worthy of looking into.

In this case, Mayor Edward Clements does investigate it.

[narrator] March 4th, 1711, Mayor Clements arrives

in Islandmagee to launch his investigation.

Here, he is told a new apparition

threatens Mary Dunbar, but only the Christian name

of this elusive witch is known, Catherine.

[Marion Gibson] This time the tests are slightly different.

Edward Clements rounds up all the Catherines in his district

and brings them to Mary to see if she knows

which one is the witch and she does.

She picks out Catherine M'Calmond.

Catherine M'Calmond's house is searched.

[Andrew Sneddon] Edward Clements is following very,

very careful instructions in our Justice of the Peace Manual

that summarizes the 1586 Irish Witchcraft Act

that makes witchcraft illegal in Ireland.

They're governed by English law,

even though they are Scottish Presbyterians in Ireland.

And what the authorities are looking for

are things like wax images into which pins or thorns

might've been stuck in order to afflict

Mary Dunbar and others.

They're also looking for animal familiars.

[Andrew Sneddon] This is an English trope,

but they're looking for it and they can't find anything.

[door creaks shut]

[narrator] Back at Knowehead House, the apparent demonic

possession of Mary Dunbar grows ever more intense.

[Marion Gibson] There's this circus that develops around Mary Dunbar.

She is talking about demonic visions.

[Andrew Sneddon] Five women have been accused.

How many more will be accused?

How many more people will be dragged

from their homes and tested?

[wind blowing]

♪ ♪

[Marion Gibson] Until the early 18th century,

Irish people don't seem to have been nearly as obsessed

with witches as was the rest of Europe.

[Andrew Sneddon] Although there are plenty of accusations,

there are very few formal prosecutions.

There was a famous case of Alice Kyteler,

the Kilkenny in 1324.

She runs away, but her associate is executed.

In 1655, with Marion Fisher, it's quashed and she's let off.

Florence Newton in 1661.

She is accused of bewitching a young servant.

It's assumed she was found guilty and executed.

[trap door bangs open]

[Marion Gibson] Irish people seem to have other ways

of explaining the supernatural, whether that's to do

with fairies or ghosts or supernatural creatures.

[Andrew Sneddon] But in Islandmagee,

you're dealing with a different belief system.

You're dealing with Presbyterians

looking for new lives coming from Scotland.

[Diane Purkiss] The Elizabethan settlement policy

was in full swing in the North, and the idea was

basically to displace the indigenous Irish population,

which was Catholic and Gaelic speaking,

and replace it with an English-speaking

Protestant population, mostly imported from Scotland.

It's that population who are already coming from a culture

where witchcraft beliefs are common

and witchcraft prosecution's normal.

Therefore, it's significant that the Islandmagee trial

happens fairly far north at exactly the part of Ireland

that's been most thickly settled with Protestants.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] They are also Presbyterians, members of the

Scottish Protestant Church, which is far more

radically Protestant than the Church of Ireland,

and in a mutual hostility with it.

It's an island of potential witch hunting

transplanted to a new land.

[birds chirping]

[Andrew Sneddon] They brought a genuine belief in the devil,

and they brought a belief in witchcraft.

[indistinct shoutiing]

But this is the early 18th century,

and the court system that the Justice of the Peace

has to use is an English imposition.

[Marion Gibson] Witch trials had become harder and harder to hold.

Judges were much more resistant to the idea of

holding a witch trial or allowing the suspect

to be convicted.

By that point, people have started asking better questions

about whether witchcraft exists or not.

There were changes in the way that evidence was demanded.

There needed to be more evidence, basically,

before they could be convicted.

[Andrew Sneddon] What they really want is a voluntary confession.

You cannot torture under English common law for a confession.

So the physical evidence of witchcraft

becomes more important.

♪ ♪

So Mary Dunbar. You don't have to look too hard

for the evidence, really.

She is a body of evidence.

The demon inside her doesn't want to hear

the prayers of Sinclair.

So reacts to the prayers, and she goes into

fits and convulsions.

Her teeth have been so tightly clenched together,

they have to feed her through a quill

and open her teeth with a key.

Her spectral visions gets worse.

[♪ discordant music]

She names her further two suspects,

Janet Main and Janet Latimer.

Janet Main is from Broadisland, outside of Islandmagee.

The net of suspects has been cast wider.

♪ ♪

Janet Latimer is unable to answer questions put to her,

and she can't say the Lord's Prayer.

Neither can Janet Main.

Mayor Clements has got enough evidence,

so he puts them in jail to await trial,

which will be in a few weeks' time.

They'll also be put in chains and bolts

to stop them leaving their body spectrally.

Iron is used to counteract magic in Ireland.

It is a very folkloric thing.

It's embedded in the popular consciousness.

It looks strange to modern eyes, but putting them in

chains is very important to the process of

protecting Mary Dunbar.

Because they're incarcerated, because the iron is stopping

them using their magic, Mary Dunbar is

able to rest easy.

[♪ music slowly ends]

[birds squawking]

It should be over.

[♪ uneasy music begins]

But it isn't.

The fits start again.

[distorted noises]

The convulsions start again.

[narrator] After the latest demonic attacks,

Mary Dunbar names two new witches.

Janet Miller and Margaret Mitchell.

[Marion Gibson] It's been asked why Mary doesn't simply

leave the house, if it's become so uncomfortable for her

and she's so afflicted when she's in it.

But she says, and it's proved by her actions,

that every time she tries to leave, she's afflicted again.

She falls down in what appears to be a feint or a trance.

As soon as she crosses the threshold of the house.

[Diane Purkiss] Threshold magic is based on the idea

that a house is something that keeps things out

and also keeps things in.

At the points where there are openings,

whether those are windows, doors or chimneys,

there's always a possibility of something sneaking in

that you didn't want to be in there.

[Ronald Hutton] The main means by which evil can get in,

or good, can be penned in.

If you want to keep somebody indoors,

is to stick a curse on the doorstep.

[Diane Purkiss] It's sometimes just a marking, which can even

be made with chalk.

It could be children's shoes, the skull of a horse,

the body of a cat.

All these are magics that are intended

to make you feel a bit sick and walk away.

And that's what threshold magic is.

And it's very big to this day in Ireland,

and there are very many survivals of it

in the British Isles overall.

[Marion Gibson] So on the 5th of March, local officials dig up

the threshold of the house, and lo and behold, there's

a terrible smell of sulphur.

So they think, well, we've uncovered the

source of the magic here.

Perhaps now Mary can leave the house.

[narrator] Escaping the evils of Knowehead House,

Mary Dunbar finds a sanctuary in the home of a trusted friend

in the nearby town of Larne.

[Andrew Sneddon] Larne is just across the water from Islandmagee.

It's a small town.

You get there by boat from the tip of the

peninsula of Islandmagee.

It's on the way to Carrickfergus,

where the court would be.

When she's going there, it should be an easy journey.

But when she's on the way, she sees Janet Main in a

spectral form, threatening her.

This should be impossible, because she's safely

locked up in jail, and she's chained and

unable to escape her body.

But here she is again...

..having a further attack on Mary Dunbar.

[♪ music intensifies]

[♪ uneasy music playing]

[Andrew Sneddon] How does Main appear to Mary Dunbar?

She's meant to be locked up in jail.

Well, rather than being bolted up all day, which

they should have been, they've been taken out

of jail by the jailer.

She's actually been taken to his house to card and spin linen,

taken out of her bolts and out of prison.

And this allows them to spectrally attack Mary Dunbar.

[narrator] Having spent two weeks safely in Lorne,

Mary Dunbar must make the journey to Carrickfergus.

Carrickfergus, where the accused witches await their trial.

[Marion Gibson] The judges meet Mary Dunbar.

They do so because they're really cautious

about staging the trial at all.

But they must have been convinced that she was

a compelling witness.

They were struck by the fact that she seemed ladylike,

she seemed educated, she seemed respectable,

and she seemed innocent.

And so the trial went ahead.

[Andrew Sneddon] Both in the court and outside of the court were packed out.

It was a big deal.

[Ronald Hutton] They are tried by two professional judges,

but with a local jury deciding the verdict.

[Andrew Sneddon] This trial had 19 witnesses.

They're brought in randomly and it's hard to follow the case.

The range of religious and political might

is against these poor, marginalised women.

You can imagine how frightening this would have been.

But they stood up for themselves.

[Ronald Hutton] None of the women have confessed,

which is quite unusual.

[Marion Gibson] The judges were very concerned to keep stating

the importance of reaching a fair verdict,

and they warned continually about the consequences.

[Andrew Sneddon] And we've got a problem here.

[Ronald Hutton] One of the judges supports the evidence

and the other judge says the evidence is preposterous.

[Darren Oldridge] The kinds of arguments that people were

making against the criminal prosecution of witches

were increasingly accepted by the later 17th century

and the early 18th century than had perhaps

previously been the case.

Many educated people began to accept a model of the world

that operated according to the principles of mathematics

and what today we might think of as natural science.

And that view of the world, for many people,

was incompatible with the idea of evil spirits and bewitchment.

[Diane Purkiss] The Islandmagee case is a perfect example of a

case where the elite don't side with the popular belief at all.

It becomes characteristic of the best-educated people

to be really sceptical about witchcraft

and to set out to disprove it.

Increasingly, people treat people who purport

to be demonically possessed or bewitched as mental cases,

who says this girl is not possessed, she's

simply hysterical and she just needs

medical treatment.

So it certainly becomes possible increasingly

to think of what would once have been regarded

as witchcraft for sure as something else altogether,

something scientific and something entirely secular.

[Ronald Hutton] Trouble is, the jury is Scot's Presbyterian,

which thoroughly believes in the power of the

devil and of witchcraft, and so it proceeds to convict.

[Marion Gibson] They weren't sentenced to death,

but they were sentenced

to a year in prison and they had to make four

appearances at the pillory in local market towns.

Put in a contraption which imprisons the

head and the hands, so you're standing helpless.

The problem there is you can't defend your face

and so if the crowd is against you, and in Islandmagee it is,

they will pelt you and you could be seriously injured.

[Andrew Sneddon] The other punishment is imprisonment for a year.

These prisons are not designed to punish people

for any length of time.

They're there for short stay, so being there for a year

must have been horrendous.

[Marion Gibson] They were dirty, they were full,

overflowing with people, so there was no privacy.

From the smell, the presence of your fellow prisoners,

some of whom would have been quite dangerous.

♪ ♪

[Andrew Sneddon] These women fought with everything they had

against these charges and they didn't have much.

They were poor, they were marginalised,

but they didn't go along with it.

They were fighting against it.

They stood up in court where the great and the good

were ranged against them and they said,

"No, we didn't do it."

None of these women, till the end, admitted it.

And for that, we should be terribly proud of them.

♪ ♪

[Marion Gibson] Even after the conviction of the

eight suspects, the matter was not over for Mary Dunbar.

[Andrew Sneddon] She is still being demonically possessed

when everybody she's accused is in jail.

A man threatens her with a knife, in spectral

form, and stabs her.

[muted screaming]

They have a look at her shoulder.

They can see a physical scar on her shoulder

where she's been stabbed.

[narrator] Mary Dunbar is able to recognise and name her attacker.

William Sellor.

[Andrew Sneddon] William Sellor is husband to Janet Liston

and father to Elizabeth Sellor.

William Sellor is tracked down to a tavern.

Then he is arrested.

But it's not over.

It takes a dramatic turn.

In late April, William Sellor's accuser,

the centre of the whole case, Mary Dunbar, dies suddenly.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

[Andrew Sneddon] We know about the death of Mary Dunbar

because it's reported in the newspaper.

And it's very stark.

It just says, "The person who accused witches

"and the police who were lately tried at Carrickfergus is dead."

It doesn't tell us why.

[Marion Gibson] And that changes the fate of William Sellor,

who is in jail for practising witchcraft against her.

It changes his trial to one which appears to be about

murder of Mary Dunbar.

William is suddenly on trial for his life.

[Andrew Sneddon] Under the 1586 Witchcraft Act,

if you murder using witchcraft, you can be executed.

He is tried and he is found guilty.

We don't know if he was executed.

We can't find his body.

But he was found guilty, so it's assumed it was carried out.

[Ronald Hutton] And if that happened, it would have been a

spectacularly late execution for witchcraft in the

history of the British Isles, one of only three

in Irish history, and an entire generation

after witch executions had ceased in England.

This is an amazing story, and it's so recently discovered,

we haven't really yet got our heads round it.

♪ ♪

[Marion Gibson] It's difficult to say what happened in the

case of Mary Dunbar.

Did she really think that she was being afflicted

by supernatural forces?

[Darren Oldridge] Demon possession was regarded with

some suspicion because, of course, it was possible to fake.

[Julian Goodare] Demonic possession starts to become

more prominent in the later stages of

the great European witch hunt.

There comes to be a sort of shared body of knowledge

as to how a demoniac should behave.

Presumably Mary Dunbar may well have heard about

the other recent cases and known how to behave.

My impression is that there is some psychological disorder

of some kind behind much of this.

These demoniacs are not simply faking the whole thing,

but they're just being encouraged to behave in

certain specific ways to take the symptoms of

their psychiatric disorder in a particular direction.

[Andrew Sneddon] Historians warn of imposing modern medical

diagnosis onto the past because diseases change.

People who are trying to find modern medical explanations

are relying on evidence that is quite sparse.

Now, if it was an illness, did she fake it?

She is a young woman in a very restrictive family.

She has constraints placed on what she can

do and what she can't do.

It's also a way for her to challenge the

restrictions placed on her.

This allows her to behave in ways that would be

otherwise unacceptable.

So this brings her to centre stage.

It's a drama of her own creation.

[Marion Gibson] That still doesn't explain everything, though.

Some of the things that she describes

couldn't have been done by one person acting alone.

She would have to have had help.

[Andrew Sneddon] When you look at Ann Haltridge's demonic obsession...

..Mary's possession...

..one of the people who see it all is the

servant, Margaret Spear.

Mary Dunbar probably needed help faking it

because things happen when she's not there.

It would also explain why Mary could track these people down

through their names and through what they looked like.

It could have came from Margaret Spear.

[Ronald Hutton] Who identified people for her, briefed her

and helped set things up for her.

[Andrew Sneddon] She's from that area.

She may have known these people.

So there is things we can't explain.

But so much can't be.

[narrator] It's most likely these events were caused

by Mary Dunbar and Margaret Spear fighting for attention.

But so much remains unexplained.

What caused Ann Haltridge's possession and death?

How could Janet Main's attack occur

just as she was taken out of prison?

And what was behind the mysterious death of Mary Dunbar?

[Julian Goodare] This is the kind of witchcraft case that

you get in the later stages of the great European witch hunt.

It's very colourful.

It's very dramatic.

It's also controversial.

Either the story is of, yes, she was genuine,

or indeed the story is, yes, she was faking.

These are both stories that people want to tell

and sometimes you see both stories being told

about the same person.

[Ronald Hutton] But her sudden death is an extraordinary event,

presumably a complete coincidence.

But it's the kind of thing of which true melodrama is made.

[Marion Gibson] We'll never really know what happened in the

case of Mary Dunbar, but it does make

a fantastic story and it convinced the

judges at her witch trial.

[narrator] Despite many unanswered questions,

the trials in Islandmagee have ended.

But their horrors continue.

[Andrew Sneddon] The Islandmagee case is unusual in Ireland.

[seagull calling]

Nine people were convicted for witchcraft

and it is the only trial in Ireland

that a man is prosecuted and convicted

and, as far as we know, hung for witchcraft.

When the rest of Europe is stopping prosecuting witches,

this is at the point a trial happens in Ireland.

But in Islandmagee itself, it is a haunted place

and it's haunted by this witch trial.

It haunts the folk history.

People won't go past Knowehead House at night.

There's an old rocking stone that witches are

said to have danced on at night and people

not go near it.

But something has changed by the early 18th century.

In Ireland, there is no more witch trials.

Nobody is formally prosecuted and there's no convictions.

[Julian Goodare] The great European witch hunt does have an overall arc.

It goes up and then it goes down again.

[narrator] Ireland's last ever witch trial is over

and mass trials and accusations of witchcraft

fade away throughout the Western world.

[Andrew Sneddon] We are at a point of change and part of the

reason is an increase in judicial scepticism,

finding it hard to get convincing proof of witchcraft.

In the mid to late 17th century, we start to get judges

and legal writers being more sceptical about

witchcraft prosecutions.

[Diane Purkiss] In order for witch trials to happen

and for people to be prosecuted and executed,

the elite, the top 20% at least, have consistently to believe

that there are real witches and that they are a real threat.

The actual prosecutions stop happening

because the elite no longer believe.

[Ronald Hutton] And when they doubt the evidence,

their trials end because they're pointless.

And when trials end, the laws against witchcraft get repealed.

Then convictions subside.

♪ ♪

The other thing is that witch hunting doesn't work.

It doesn't produce better luck, better weather, better children.

Instead, it disrupts and demoralises

and decimates communities.

And the Protestant and Catholic have failed

to wipe each other out, so they're having to learn

to tolerate each other.

[Julian Goodare] Each side wants to prove that it's more godly

than the other lot.

They both hate witches, but the biggest change is that

they want to stop killing each other for it.

[Marion Gibson] The world is moving towards a change

in the way that people think about society, about each other,

and a belief in greater tolerance, in not

killing each other, and of being more charitable

towards other people.

[Ronald Hutton] So it looks as if God is lightening up.

The weather gets better.

Christian Europe gets stronger and more self-confident

in defeating its enemies.

Epidemic disease recedes for the first time

in hundreds of years.

♪ ♪

[Darren Oldridge] The people who accused others of witchcraft

were afraid of witches.

They were dealing with what seemed to them

to be real dangers in the world, and a genuine desire to

deal with a dangerous but difficult crime.

And that has been lost, because today we don't

believe in bad magic, and with it our appreciation

of the genuine fears of people in the past,

and it prevents us from appreciating truly

the tragedy of witch persecutions,

because if we imagine the people that accused

others of witchcraft as being malicious or

suffering from hysteria, then we won't take the lesson,

which is that well-meaning and rational people

might sometimes make terrible mistakes,

and that seems to me to be a much more

important lesson to take from the age of what we think

of today as witch hunts.

[fire crackling]

[Julian Goodare] The great European witch hunt has gone.

[Marion Gibson] But that's only the story in Western Europe

and North America.

♪ ♪

Around the world today, witch trials still continue.

In Southern Africa, in Indonesia,

parts of the Indian subcontinent and Nepal.

That's perhaps another story.

But it's the story of ongoing witch trials.

We're still in the era of the witch hunt today.

♪ ♪