Did the belief of witches ever cease to exist? If someone thought a girl was a witch, how might she be treated? Would someone hold their breath around a "witch" for example or do any other sort of weird behaviors?
Belief in witches survived well into the 20th century in Scotland. There are a few main categories of story recorded in the 20th century:
The word "belief" applies in different ways to each of these cases. For example, someone telling a story about their parent or grandparent meeting a witch may believe that the older relative literally believed the story, but may be more skeptical about it themselves. Other times storytellers relate a story as if it is "a true story" but may be doing so with a shared cultural understanding that this is a way to embellish a particularly good tale. Nevertheless, I'm going to try to pick out some examples of what we might call true belief in witches in 20th century Scotland.
The main resource I'm using is Tobar an Dualchais, the online archive of the School of Scottish Studies Archives. Fieldworkers started travelling around rural Scotland for the School in the 1950s, recording stories and folklore and other pieces of local interest. Folklore collecting had already been going on in Scotland for some time, but this was the first institutionally organized effort to make recordings of "folk culture" in Scotland. Most of the contributors interviewed by fieldworkers were born in the late 19th or early 20th century. So with that in mind, I'll go through what these oral history archival sources can tell us about beliefs about witches in the early 20th century in Scotland.
People who believed they had encountered witches themselves
The contributor who talked the most about personal encounters with witches is Stanley Robertson (1940-2009). Robertson was born to a settled Traveller family in Aberdeen. Scottish Travellers are a distinct ethnic group within Scotland who are traditionally characterized by a peripatetic lifestyle, work in tinsmithing, and seasonal work in fishing and farming. Robertson became a renowned storyteller during his lifetime as well as a collector of Traveller stories and songs. In 1979, he told fieldworker Barbara McDermitt that his mother was a spaewife. A spaewife or henwife is a benevolent witch. Robertson said his mother had the power of prophecy, which is commonly attributed to witches in Scottish folklore. Most spaewives he knew were old unmarried women who would tell him stories as a child. He made a sharp distinction between women like these and people who practiced "black magic", which he said was still very prevalent in 1979. These included things like saying the Lord's Prayer backwards or desecrating churches.
Stanley said that he had had witchcraft performed on himself but that he had never actively practised it. However, he did relate a story about unintentionally summoning a witch. He and his sister and cousin were working in a fish house (where fish were filleted) in Aberdeen around July 1975. While discussing the prevalence of witchcraft in Scotland, Robertson drew the sign of a witch (which he does not describe in detail). Three seconds later, the fish house turned dark and his cousin Janet gasped. Stanley looked over at the door of the fish house and saw a cloaked figure in the doorway, their head obscured by the door. The cloak was thick and dark in spite of the heat of the July day. The figure wore pointed black shoes tied with laces. Stanley wondered whether the figure was a customer or a monk or nun. After 10 seconds the half-open door swished, Janet screamed, and the figure disappeared. Stanley ran out to look for them, but there was no sign of anyone.
Stanley's aunt, Jeannie Robertson (1908-1975), was another famous Traveller known for her storytelling and singing. She and her daughter Lizzie Higgins (1929-1993) were interviewed by Hamish Henderson, one of the founders of the School of Scottish Studies, in 1974. They discussed a woman called Mrs Martin, "the Witch of Tarland" (Tarland being a place about 30 miles from Aberdeen). Henderson recalled that when Mrs Martin heard the folk collectors were coming in 1955 to interview people, she hid from them as she thought they were from the government. However, once they met with her she allowed them to interview her. Robertson and Higgins discuss how the men in town would regularly threaten her and that she was known to have paralyzed a man for trying to hurt her. Mrs. Martin died the next year in 1956, being in her 70s at the time.
In a later interview, Lizzie Higgins goes into greater detail about Mrs. Martin, who partnered with a man known as the wizard of Tarland. The witch and wizard were friends of her family, and her father knew them well. The wizard of Tarland was abnormally short. He did not marry the witch, who was an old woman by then, but helped her take care of her children. The witch could turn into a hare and turn invisible. Higgins was 12 years old when she first met the witch and wizard. She says that her own mother, Jeannie Robertson, was not a witch but was very knowledgeable about herbs and had a gift of clairvoyance. Higgins asserts that although she is a devoted Christian, she has people very dear to her who practise "the black magic".
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