The Witches of Paisley

Four years after the events in Salem in Massachusetts, the United States, that saw the execution of nineteen innocent victims charged with witchcraft, one of the last witch trials of western Europe began in a town called Paisley, near Glasgow in Renfrewshire, central Scotland. It started with Christian Shaw, the eleven-year-old daughter of the wealthy landowner named John Shaw of Bargarran, accusing Catherine Campbell of witchcraft. Several weeks earlier, Christian had caught Catherine, who was one of her family servants, stealing a drink of milk. When Christian reported the incident to her mother and was duly reprimanded for the theft, Catherine flew into a rage and cursed Christian wishing that the Devil would “haul her soul through Hell.” Shocked by Catherine’s words, the god-fearing Christian actually took ill with violent seizure and convulsions much like those described in the Salem witch trials a couple of years before. Contemporary records describe her fits as strange, “sometimes blind, sometimes deaf and dumb, the several parts of her body sometimes violently extended, and other times as violently contracted.” After eight weeks of suffering, Christian was taken to the eminent Glasgow physician Matthew Brisbane, who could find no cause for her symptoms. For a while, her symptoms abated and the girl appeared to recover, but ten days later “the fits returned with increased violence. She would become as stiff as a corpse and be senseless and motionless.” This time, Christian began to pull out balls of hair from her mouth and vomited up all sorts of trash including straw, coal, gravel, egg shells, bones and chicken feathers. She was also reported to have spit out lumps of coal cinders the size of a chestnut and too hot to touch. At times she appeared to converse to an invisible Catherine Campbell, pleading for a return to their former friendship.