Fascinating Discovery Finds Witch Prison in Medieval Scottish Church

4 A mother and son’s trial became the most famous case of the Aberdeen witch trials

Two members of the same family were implicated in one of Aberdeen’s most famous cases of the 1597 witch trials. Jane Wishart, the mother, was found guilty of 18 counts of witchcraft, including casting spells that caused illness in her neighbors, enticing a mystery brown dog to attack her son-in-law after a quarrel, and dismembering a corpse placed on the gallows to collect materials for her magic.

Wishart’s son, Thomas Leyis, was also convicted of leading a coven of witches who danced with the devil in Aberdeen’s fish market area at midnight. Both mother and son were strangled and burned, and according to municipal records, the peat, tar, and wood for Leyis’ pyre cost “3 pounds, 13 shillings, and 4 pence.

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3 Underneath the kirk

The East Kirk of St Nicholas was the site of a large archeological investigation in 2006 and 2007. The project is called the “Mither Kirk Project,” from the Lowland Scots phrase for “mother church.”

The suspected witches’ bodies were not discovered at the spot. Croly speculated that they would have been buried elsewhere, on “unhallowed land.” However, he stated that the excavations had given archaeologists an unprecedented view into the life of the city’s people from the 11th to the 18th century.

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2 The excavations produced valuable evidence about prior church buildings

Most of the dead were buried before the 1560s when the Scottish Protestant Reformation prohibited burials inside churches. But the practice was profitable and persisted on a small scale until the 18th century, he said.

The excavations also uncovered evidence of prior church buildings dating to the 11th century beneath the existing kirk and the graves of nine babies laid out in an arc beside an 11th-century wall — presumably the victims of a sickness pandemic, according to Croly.

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1 The Mither Kirk Project seeks to bury the dead in a vault on the lower levels

The Mither Kirk Project aims to host a burial ceremony later this year to reinter the dead in a vault beneath the existing floor level now that archaeological studies on the bodies from the kirk have been completed.

The former “witch prison” in St Mary’s Chapel will be redeveloped as a “contemplative space” at a later date, according to Arthur Winfield. He said, “That space will be kept as an area of peace and tranquility — essentially, it is going to be respected for the chapel that it was and will be again.”

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