Mums Mysteries & Murder · Marti & Cheryl

The Scottish Witch Trials

·1 hr·3 clips

King James hears about 13 women executed in Denmark and decides Scottish witches helped the storm.

Marty and Effie open with summer holidays on the horizon. They talk about school runs, early mornings, and the relief of not having to get up so early every day. Croatia comes up next. The trip sounds exciting, but the fear of flying hanging over it sends the conversation into the kind of open, familiar side chat the show slips into so easily. From there, they move into the Scottish witch trials. Rather than treating the history as one blunt fact, they compare how accusations and executions looked in different places, including Russia, Finland, and Iceland, where the numbers can be strangely counterintuitive. Iceland surprises them. They note that men were executed there at a remarkable rate, which complicates the usual picture of who got labeled a witch. Scotland then takes centre stage. The hosts point out that accusations there were far above the European average and much higher than in England, with the Scottish record landing in a heavily female-skewed pattern. They keep the tone conversational even while the material gets grim. The known records name 3,212 people. Only 305 of those cases preserve the sentence. Of that smaller group, 205 people were executed. The rest were acquitted, banished, declared fugitives, excommunicated, put to the horn, kept in prison, or publicly humiliated. Put to the horn becomes one of those moments. They react the way real listeners do, with disbelief, laughter, and a quick attempt to make sense of the phrase. That mix of warmth and horror is the episode's steady rhythm. Near the end, they drift back to listener messages, sponsorship talk, and a joke about being replaced by AI. Then they sign off for the summer with a warning about ships, dodgy Airbnbs, and bad luck that could end with somebody rolling down a hill in a barrel covered in tar.

As heard by us

A conversational look at Scotland's witch trials, with the numbers carrying most of the weight.

The episode starts in a light, conversational register before settling into the history, and that works better than it first sounds. It traces the Scottish witch trials through the numbers: accusations in Scotland ran five times the European average and well above England,…

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Why you'd press play

You want a chatty route into a brutal witch-trial history with real cross-country perspective.

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