Julianna Ainsleigh 
(Historical reconstruction based on true events)
Late 16th-century Scotland.
In late 16th-century Scotland, a healer named Agnes Sampson was accused of conspiring with the Devil to kill King James VI. What followed — the North Berwick witch trials — became one of the darkest episodes in Scottish history, where fear turned faith into fire.
Three days without sleep and the Devil starts to look real.
The Torture Begins
The cold stone wall presses against your back.
No, not presses but pushes. It pushes through your back. Cold. Hard. Unrelenting. Just like them.
Your head throbs. The rope was wound tight. Again and again. Cutting into your scalp until the pain and your skull became one.
It’s a vice. A clamp. A reminder of how much they hate you.
How much you scare them. Anger them. Repulse them.
Your tongue sits heavy in your mouth. Useless.
Trying to move your tongue creates a weird panic in the pit of your stomach.
Four iron prongs pierce your flesh. Two press against your tongue. Two dig into your cheeks. The taste of rust. The taste of blood. This is the scold’s bridle. It’s been fastened to the wall of your cell at Holyrood House for hours now.
Perhaps days.
You’ve lost track.
Everything that made sense before makes no sense now.
Witch.
At first, they whispered it. Then louder. And louder.
WITCH.
The hatred surrounding you has a stench about it. It’s dark. No one tells you hatred stinks. They might say that to coin a phrase, but it does. It smells like sweat and fire.
Agnes Sampson: The Midwife They Feared
Agnes Sampson. A respected midwife from East Lothian.
No wait. Agnes WAS a respected midwife from East Lothian, Scotland.
Women trust you. They’ve trusted you with their most vulnerable moments. You’ve caught newborns in your practised hands. Watched their first breaths. Eased fever and pain.
You’ve brought joy to people who often had a joyless life.
You’ve done good work.
And now you’re accused of trying to murder the King.
How did it go from that to this?
The Accusations Spread
It started with Geillis Duncan. A young maidservant. Her employer, David Seton, grew suspicious. Her healing abilities. Her late-night absences. When she couldn’t explain herself, he had her arrested.
No permission from authorities. No trial.
Just torture.
First, they crushed her fingers with the pilliwinks. Terrible thumb screws that ground bone against bone. When she still refused to confess, they wound a rope around her head. Tighter and tighter. A technique called thrawed.
They stripped her naked. Searched her body for the Devil’s mark.
They found a blemish on her body. A spot where she supposedly felt no pain when pricked with a pin.
Under this agony, Geillis broke.
She confessed to witchcraft. And then, as the torture continued, she began naming others.
Your name was among them.
Your name was mentioned; that’s it. That led to this. How is that even possible?
The accusations are absurd. They say you attended a gathering of two hundred witches at the old kirk in North Berwick. Halloween night, 1590. They say you sailed there in a sieve. Across the sea. Bringing wine and ale.
They say you met the Devil himself in that ruined churchyard by the shore.
They say you kissed the devil’s backside and danced whilst Geillis played a tune on her jew’s harp. They say you helped dig up corpses. Cutting off joints and organs. Attaching them to a dead cat. Throwing it into the sea to conjure storms.
The imagery makes you sob a little; it’s so absurd.
All of this, they claim, was done to sink the ship carrying King James VI and his new bride, Anne of Denmark, back from their wedding voyage.
The King himself believes it.
Yes, the King believes they kissed the devil’s backside.
The King’s Obsession with the Devil
He experienced terrible storms on that journey. Was forced to take shelter off the Norwegian coast for weeks. When Danish authorities began witch trials blaming the weather on sorcery, James embraced the explanation.
The Devil, the witches confessed, considered James his greatest enemy in all the world.
The King found this flattering.
He was that important.
He came to question you himself at Holyrood Palace. You denied everything at first. You’re a healer, not a witch. You serve God and your community.
You’ve harmed no one.
But they won’t accept your denials.
The torture begins in earnest. The scold’s bridle is only the start. They keep you awake. Hour after hour. Day after day. Sleep deprivation is a favoured method for extracting confessions.
After three days without sleep, the mind begins to hallucinate.
Reality blurs. You see things that can’t be there. You hear voices. Your thoughts tangle and break apart.
Between the bridle and the sleeplessness, they wind the rope around your head. Again and again. The pain is exquisite. Relentless. You feel your sanity slipping away. Pulled down by exhaustion and agony into a place where up seems down and truth becomes impossible to grasp.
The Confession and Execution
There are fifty-three indictments against you.
Fifty-three.
They say you caused death by enchanted cloths. By image magic. By consulting with the Devil. They say you attended eleven separate meetings with Satan.
They say you plotted against the King.
In the end, your mind fractures.
You confess. All of it. Every impossible, fantastical detail they suggest to you. Yes, you were at North Berwick. Yes, you met the Devil. Yes, you tried to sink the King’s ship.
Yes, yes, yes to everything they want to hear.
The confession saves you nothing.
It Brings Death Closer, Faster, and Now that Seems Like a Better Option.
They lead you to the execution site. Your body is broken. Your mind is shattered from torture and sleeplessness. You can barely walk.
The crowd gathers to watch.
This is public entertainment. A lesson to others who might consort with darkness.
The executioner places the rope around your neck first. This is supposed to be mercy. In Scotland, they strangled condemned witches before burning their bodies. It’s meant to spare you the agony of burning alive.
Though mercy seems a strange word for any of this.
The rope tightens.
Your lungs strain for air that won’t come. The world darkens at the edges. You think of the babies you delivered. The fevers you cooled. The good you tried to do in this world.
That was your reason for living. To do good.
You think of Geillis Duncan. That young girl whose gift for healing damned her. Damned everyone she named under torture.
Your final thought, before the darkness takes you completely, is bitter and clear.
You never met the Devil.
You were a midwife.
A Fire That Burned for Centuries
After you’re dead, they’ll burn your body anyway. The flames will consume your corpse whilst the crowd watches. Satisfied that evil has been purged from their midst.
Fear makes people do crazy things.
King James will use your confession. The confessions of seventy others. He’ll write his book Daemonologie. A manual for identifying witches. He’ll fuel witch hunts across Scotland and later England for over a century.
In the hundred and fifty years following these trials, nearly four thousand people will be accused of witchcraft in Scotland.
Most will be women.
Most will be healers. Midwives. Or simply women who lived alone or spoke too freely.
An estimated sixty per cent will be executed.
All because a King believed storms were personal attacks. And torture was the path to truth.
Your body burns in 1591 at the stake in Edinburgh.
But the fire King James lit with your death will burn far longer. Consuming thousands in its wake.
You were Agnes Sampson.
You were a healer.
And when they killed you for witchcraft, the only real evil was the one they committed in the name of God and the King
Keep the Fire Burning
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