Possessed By the Devil: The History of the Islandmagee Witch Trials, 1711

by Andrew Sneddon

Overview

County Antrim, Ireland, 1711: Eight women were put on trial accused of bewitching and demonically possessing young Mary Dunbar, amid an attack by evil spirits on the local community and after the supernatural murder of a clergyman’s wife. Mary Dunbar was the star witness in this trial, and the women were, by the standards of the time, believable witches – they dabbled in magic, they smoked, they drank, they had disabilities. A second trial targeted a final male ‘witch’ and head of the Sellor ‘witch family’.

With echoes of the Salem witch-hunt, this is a story of murder, of a community in crisis and of how the witchhunts that claimed over 50,000 lives in Europe played out on Irish shores. It plunges the reader into a world where magic was real and the power of the Devil felt, with disastrous consequences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752480879
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	05/15/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	10 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dr ANDREW SNEDDON (BA Hons, MLitt, PhD, FHEA) is a lecturer in history at the University of Ulster. Originally from Scotland, Dr Sneddon pursued his post-graduate and post-doctoral research at the University of St Andrews, Lancaster University and Queen's University, Belfast. He has also worked as an archivist at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), and taught history at Queen's University, Belfast and Glasgow University. Dr Sneddon is the leading expert on the history of Irish witchcraft and magic and has published widely in leading, international academic journals, as well as edited collections, in the fields of British and Irish early modern social, medical and political history (c.1550-1800). In addition to presenting papers at academic conferences (both national and international), he gives talks to local community, heritage and educational groups, and is working with leading practitioners to turn his books into museum exhibitions, graphic novels, VR apps, and video games.

Read an Excerpt

Possessed by the Devil

The Real History of the Islandmagee Witches and Ireland's only Mass Witchcraft Trial

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By Andrew Sneddon

The History Press

Copyright © 2013 Andrew Sneddon,
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8087-9

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CHAPTER 1

A WELL-RESPECTED WOMAN

In the early seventeenth-century, Sir Arthur Chichester gained the freehold for Islandmagee. Co. Antrim, and leased the land there to successive generations of absentee landlords from the Hill family. By the end of the century, the peninsula was a small, rural Presbyterian-Scots community containing around 300 people. Its inhabitants were employed in farming, spinning and fishing. Ships regularly landed at Port Davey from Portpatrick in Scotland, a journey that took just over four hours (see fig. 1, 'Map of Island Maghe', c.1680, British Library, London). More ominously, and perhaps an omen of events to come, Richard Dobbs, later Mayor of Carrickfergus, reported of the place in 1683, 'I have heard surveyors say "they could never get their compasses to answer their expectations here, and thought it was bewitched".'

In September 1710, Ann Haltridge, an elderly widow, was living with her son, James Haltridge, his wife, their two children and their servants in Islandmagee. According to the pamphlet account, Ann epitomised Irish matriarchy as a pious, respected gentlewoman and neighbour:

during her marriage and widowhood she behaved herself Christianly, prudently, and exemplary, so that she, as much as any in her station, deserved the name of a mother of Israel, by engaging, both by advice and example, those she conversed with to fear and serve God. She was a constant attender upon public ordinances, a frequent and devout communicant, charitable, and tender in her walk and conversation.

As the widow of Revd John Haltridge, late Presbyterian minister of Islandmagee, she would have enjoyed an elevated social position within the community and commanded a high level of respect in an era when Presbyterian clergy played leading roles within their communities and were looked to for leadership and direction.

Revd John Haltridge was ordained by the Presbytery of Antrim on 8 May 1672 in a building rented by the congregation in the village of Ballycarry in the parish of Broadisland (also known as Templecorran), there being no such place in Islandmagee at that point in time. Haltridge's congregation eventually built a meeting-house in 1674 in the townland of Kilcoanmore, Islandmagee. Although the meeting-house building underwent considerable alterations in subsequent years, it stood until 1900 (see fig. 2) when it was replaced by the current First Presbyterian Church. The congregation also built for Haltridge a thick-walled, two-storey, thatched manse, which local historian Dixon Donaldson referred to as Knowehead House (see figs 3, 4). Knowehead House was constructed around the same time as the meeting-house, in a similar architectural style, complete with heavy buttresses at the angles of the walls (see fig. 4). The manse stood adjacent to the meeting-house and contemporary accounts suggest the church was 'within musket shot of the house', which in eighteenth-century terms meant around 100 yards. After John Haltridge's death in 1697, his family continued to live at Knowehead House.

Death ultimately ended Haltridge's ministry in Islandmagee, but in 1689 he had fled to Scotland, along with other Ulster-Scots, including many clergymen, to escape the escalating conflict between supporters of Catholic James II and those of Protestant William of Orange. In common with many refugees, Haltridge returned to Ulster and was back preaching in Islandmagee by November 1690. This decision was possibly arrived at after failing to find a position within the Church of Scotland in Galloway.

Between 1680 and 1730 over half of Ireland's Presbyterian ministers were born in Ulster, with around 29 per cent, in common with John Haltridge, being of Scottish birth. The majority of Scottish-born ministers, as well as merchants and gentry, came from the south-west of the country. Presbyterian ministers were highly educated, both through private study and university training, which was usually gained from Glasgow University – Trinity College, Dublin was barred to those dissenting from the Church of Ireland. Haltridge graduated from Glasgow University as MA in 1654 and was later chaplain to Sir William Cunningham, coming to Ireland when he was deprived of his clerical living for non-conformity by the Court of High Commission in Glasgow in 1664. Haltridge had three brothers: Alexander, merchant from Newry, Co. Down, died in 1679; Matthew, graduated from Glasgow University in 1669 and ministered at Ahoghill, Co. Antrim, from 1676 until his death in 1705; and William (died 1691), a successful merchant in Dromore, Co. Down, who owned estates in Scotland and in counties Down and Armagh. Working within the confines of an agricultural economy, early eighteenth-century Presbyterian merchants were largely engaged in the provisions trade, to a variety of locations.

An Unwelcome Visitor

While sitting by the kitchen fire in Knowehead one September night in 1710, Ann Haltridge was hit by a number of stones on her back and shoulders, presumably coming through the open window behind her. Unhurt but frightened, she retreated to her bedroom on the first floor, where she was barraged with more stones, hurled with so much force they caused the curtains to move. As the curtains flew open, Ann felt a presence crawl slowly over her body, starting at the foot of the bed. She then fruitlessly searched the pitch-black room as the windows and their shutters opened and closed repeatedly, apparently of their own accord. Two nights later, Ann's pillow was pulled from her head and her bed- covers and blankets mysteriously removed. Seeking a natural explanation, she woke her granddaughter, who lit a candle and searched the room. Once the candle was lit, quiet descended on the room, but when extinguished the disturbances started once more. As night was widely believed to belong to supernatural entities such as ghosts, Ann must have come to the conclusion that what she was dealing with was not of the temporal world.

In early December, after nearly two months free from supernatural incident, Ann was once more sitting at the kitchen fire when a boy appeared before her and one of the servants, Margaret Spears. The expansion of domestic service in Ireland during the eighteenth century meant that even relatively small households would probably have employed a male and a female servant. We know that Spears was a young adult and from what we know about others in service at that time we can speculate that she was also unmarried and from a poorer, rural background. Her job would have entailed a wide range of demanding domestic chores, from cleaning, to serving food and working in the dairy.

Spears described the boy as being ten or twelve years of age, wearing a torn black vest, a black bonnet and a tattered blanket over his shoulders. Given his ragged appearance, Ann assumed the boy was a 'strolling' beggar looking for something to eat. Beggars were not an uncommon sight in early eighteenth-century Ulster, especially at times of harvest failure, high unemployment, and economic downturn. More unusual was the fact that the boy covered his face with his hand, despite Ann's repeated requests for him to remove it and name himself. He then became agitated, danced frantically and menacingly around the kitchen, before leaping out of an open window and running to the end of the garden and into the cow house. Ann's servants gave chase but soon lost sight of him, only to discover later, when they returned to the house, that he was waiting for them. This charade was repeated around a dozen times before Spears confronted the boy and warned him that, 'now my master is coming; he will take a course with this troublesome creature.' The boy then left Knowehead and the house remained free from supernatural disturbance for the next two months.

On the evening of Sunday, 11 February 1711, Ann was reading a hefty book of sermons on the covenant by Scottish Presbyterian minister, Alexander Wedderburn, to compensate for the lack of a sermon that morning in the meeting-house in Islandmagee. In Presbyterian religious culture the sermon was regarded as the high point of the service, and ministers often encouraged literate women in their congregation to engage in private reading of the Bible and other devotional texts. After reading for a time, Ann laid the book down but when she went back to collect it, it had disappeared. She searched the room thoroughly but could not find it. At seven o'clock the next morning, 12 February, the ragged boy returned to Knowehead and smashed the kitchen window with his hand while clutching a book. He also spoke for the first time, to Spears, a conversation that the pamphlet account records word for word:

Boy: 'Do you want a book?'

Spears: 'No.'

Boy: 'How came you to lie? For this is the book the old gentlewoman wanted yesterday.'

Spears: 'How came you by it?'

Boy: 'I went down quietly to the parlour when you were all in the kitchen, and found it lying upon a shelf with a Bible and a pair of spectacles.'

Spears: 'How came it that you did not take the Bible too?'

Boy: 'It was too heavy to carry.'

Spears: 'Will you give it back? For my Mistress can't ... [wait] any longer.'

Boy: 'No, she shall never get it again.'

Spears: 'Can you read it?'

Boy: 'Yes.'

Spears: 'Who taught you?'

Boy: 'The Devil taught me.'

Spears: 'The Lord bless me from thee? Thou hast got ill lear [learning].'

Boy: 'Aye, bless yourself twenty times, but that shall not save you.'

Spears: 'What will you do to us?'

The boy answered Spears' final question by pulling out a sword and threatening to kill everyone in the house. Spears then bolted the door and took her charge, the eight-year-old son of James Haltridge, to the parlour. Undeterred, the boy followed them, jeering, 'Now you think you are safe enough but I will get in yet.' Spears shouted back, 'What way? For we have the street door shut,' to which the boy replied, 'I can come in by the least hole in the house, like a cat or a mouse, for the Devil can make me anything I please.' 'God bless me from thee,' Spears then stated, 'for thou art no earthly creature if you can do that.' The boy responded by hurling a large stone at the parlour window and vanishing once more.

Animal Sacrifice

The boy re-appeared a short time later, clutching one of the family's turkey cocks. However, the turkey struggled in his arms, causing the stolen book to drop to the ground, which Spears and old Mrs Haltridge quickly picked up. The boy then laid the turkey down and as he raised his sword to kill it, the bird to escaped through the garden hedge. With the valuable book and turkey gone, the boy entered on a new course of action and removed every intact pane of glass (an expensive commodity at the time) from the parlour window. He then went to the bottom of the garden and frantically dug a hole with his sword. When Spears asked what he was doing he replied that he was digging a grave for her master, James Haltridge, whom he claimed had died fourteen days previously in Dublin. When the grave was finished the boy vaulted over the garden wall, as if he 'had been a bird flying'.

Son of Satan

When Spears later related the details of the incident to members of the Haltridge family, they would have suspected that the boy dressed in black and wearing a bonnet was a demon in human form. The Presbyterian Scots Diaspora in Ulster still had strong familial, economic and cultural ties with Scotland, where, in the early modern period, people at all levels of society, from the wealthy to the rural poor, were well aware of the image and the power of the Devil and were constantly reminded of such from the pulpit. Satan, after all, occupied an important position within the theology of Calvinist Presbyterianism in Scotland and Ulster, and it was this Calvinist theology which at least partly explains Satan's relative ubiquity in Scottish witchcraft accusations and trials. The most common form the Devil took on earth was as a man wearing black clothes and occasionally a hat: Alexander Hamilton, who was executed in Scotland in 1630 for witchcraft, described Satan as a dark-haired man in black clothes. In common with all agents of Satan, the little boy displayed an aversion to the revealed word of God, the Bible; a fact implied by his weak explanation that he was unable to pick up the Bible because it was too heavy, even though he was able to lift a turkey cock and several small panes of glass. Furthermore, not only had he told Spears that the Devil had taught him to read but had given him the power to turn into any animal he wished.

Satan was able to spare the demon boy in order to haunt the Haltridge family because it was believed that Hell was literally crawling with demons. They were, for the most part, fallen angels and although the New Testament of the Bible suggested they were legion it did not detail their numbers, allowing demonologists to speculate wildly. The fifteenth-century Spanish theologian Alfonso De Spina argued there were 133,306,668 demons in Hell, while others suggested that six or seven million was nearer the mark. Chief demons were often ranked according to their magical attributes or gifts and how many legions of lesser demons they controlled (each legion containing 666 lesser demons). They were even given names such as Beelzebub, Leviathan, Belial, and Behemoth, some of which were derived from the Bible. It was believed that humans were able to invoke demons and bring them to earth using magical rites, charms and symbols. For example, in Carnmoney, Co. Antrim, in 1672, a young servant, George Russell, was disciplined by Presbyterian ministers and Elders for 'conversing and conferring with that spirit which appeared to him ... and conjuring it by drawing circles and other circumstances att the demand and direct[io]ne of the s[ai]d spirits.' The demon who had tricked Russell into doing its bidding was also responsible for haunting his master, James Shaw, the Scottish-born Presbyterian minister of Carnmoney. Shaw later died after a prolonged illness and his neighbours suspected both he and his wife had been murdered by this demon, conjured up and controlled by the 'sorcery of some witches in the parish.'

Searching the House

After the demonic boy had stolen the glass, dug the grave and disappeared, Ann Haltridge and Margaret Spears alerted people in neighbouring farms, who immediately combed the house for evidence of him. Having discovered nothing untoward, they left Ann and the children alone in the house. Soon afterwards the women and children heard a 'great many stones [and] turf' hitting the walls and windows. Terrified and cut off from their neighbours, because they 'durst not go out', they huddled in one room until the attack ceased eight hours later.

The short period of calm which followed ended on 15 February, when Ann's bedclothes were stripped off the bed and thrown in a heap on the floor. The servants re-made the bed but discovered later that they had been taken off again, folded and placed under a large table which stood in the room. On top of the bedclothes was placed a box belonging to Ann. The bed was made a third time but when members of the family returned to the room, Ann's bolster pillow had been placed vertically on the bed with sheets stretched over it so it resembled a corpse lying in its winding sheet. During these disturbances Ann displayed remarkable fortitude, never neglecting 'her hours of devotion' and refusing to sleep in another room, stating that it was 'not good to give place to the Devil.'

The Local Community Gets Involved

As almost invariably happened in cases of demonic possession and witchcraft in the British Isles, rumours of the disturbances at Knowehead spread very quickly and people flocked to the house. Interested and sympathetic they may have been, but early modern people, especially the educated elite, did not take supernatural events at face value. This is why the Haltridge's neighbours 'took particular notice' to search the house for the demonic boy, 'lest there might be ... [some] trick in it.' Despite close investigation 'they were obliged to own that it was done by some invisible agent', and, as was customary in Presbyterian communities, they asked for the opinion of the local minister, Revd Robert Sinclair. Revd Sinclair had been called to the ministry of Islandmagee in May 1704, the position having lain vacant since Revd Haltridge's death seven years previously. Sinclair ministered in Islandmagee for almost twenty-seven years until his death in January 1731.

It did not take Sinclair, his two Ruling Elders (Randal Leathes and John Man) and 'some other pious Christians and neighbours', long to decide to stay the night in Knowehead to engage in 'prayer and other religious' duties. The use of prayer and fasting to drive a demonic entity from a house or a person had Biblical precedent in the New Testament and was considered acceptable by Protestant non-conformist gentry and dissenting clergy, if not their Church of Ireland counterparts. For example, in Dublin in the 1650s, the Baptist Heirome Sankey suggested his dispossession ceremony had failed because the demon he was attempting to expel 'was of the sort that required fasting as well as prayer.'

Despite the best efforts of Sinclair and his helpers, as soon as night fell the bedclothes were re-arranged into a corpse on Ann's bed. In defiance, Ann retired to her room in the early evening but woke at midnight screaming and moaning. When Sinclair rushed to the room he found Ann convulsed by an unbearable pain in her lower back, so intense it felt like 'something was stuck into her ... like a knife.' Finally defeated, Ann informed those present she was now 'too afraid to stay' in the room 'any longer'.

Tragedy Strikes

Driven from her bedroom by fear and the agonising pain in her back, Ann spent the last seven days of her life tormented by the demonic presence in the house. During her final sickness, however, she often enquired after 'her grandchildren and others in the family, and when she heard they were well, would say it was a great mercy [the] Devil's got no power over them.' Confined to a spare room, she periodically sat up in bed, gazed into the middle distance, sighed, and lay back down again. This bizarre ritual 'gave some ground to suspect she had seen some apparitions or witches, though she did not discover it for fear of affrighting the family.' The end came on 22 February 1711, as Ann Haltridge slipped out of life.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Possessed by the Devil by Andrew Sneddon. Copyright © 2013 Andrew Sneddon,. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Preface,
Author's Notes,
Timeline of Events,
1 A Well-Respected Woman,
2 Arrival in Islandmagee, Co. Antrim,
3 To Catch a Witch,
4 Witchcraft,
5 The Wheels of Justice,
6 All the World is a Stage,
7 Horror at Knowehead House,
8 The Trial, 31 March 1711,
9 A Political Witch-Hunt?,
10 Denouement?,
Notes,
Further Reading,
Index,
Plate Section,
Copyright,