For nearly two centuries, fear of witchcraft swept across Scotland. Between the late 1500s and early 1700s, thousands of people, most of them women, were accused of making pacts with the Devil, casting spells and harming their neighbors.
Many were tortured until they confessed. Hundreds were executed, usually by being strangled and then burned at the stake.
By the early 1700s, the panic was fading. Educated people were beginning to doubt that witches existed at all. But in the remote Highlands, old fears still lived on, and one woman would pay the final price.
The Woman Called Janet Horne
In the small town of Dornoch, in the far north of Scotland, lived an elderly woman whom history remembers as Janet Horne. We know very little about her. Even her name may not be certain, because “Janet Horne” was also used in the region as a common name for any witch.
She lived with her daughter, who had been born with twisted, deformed hands and feet. In a superstitious community, that was enough to start rumors.
The Accusation
Janet’s neighbors accused her of witchcraft. Their story was shocking even by the standards of the time.
They claimed she had transformed her own daughter into a pony and ridden her through the night to meet the Devil. There, they said, the Devil had shod the daughter with iron horseshoes, and that was why her hands and feet were crippled.
Today we would recognize the daughter’s condition as a physical disability. In 1727, it was treated as proof of a deal with Satan.
Some accounts suggest Janet herself was confused and frail, possibly suffering from what we would now call dementia. It was said she could not recite the Lord’s Prayer correctly, which in those days was seen as another sign of witchcraft.
A Swift Judgment
Mother and daughter were arrested and brought before Captain David Ross, the local sheriff-depute. There was no proper trial by jury, and no one spoke in their defense.
Ross found them guilty and sentenced them to death.
Before the sentence could be carried out, the daughter managed to escape. Janet, old and weak, could not.
The Burning
According to accounts written later, Janet was stripped, smeared with tar and placed in a barrel. She was then paraded through the streets of Dornoch while the townspeople watched.
At the place of execution, a fire had been prepared. It was a cold day.
And then came the moment people remembered most. As she waited beside the fire that was about to take her life, the old woman reportedly held out her hands and warmed herself at the flames, apparently not understanding what was about to happen.
Then she was burned to death.
The Last of Her Kind
Janet Horne is widely remembered as the last person to be legally executed for witchcraft in the British Isles.
Just eight years later, in 1735, the British Parliament passed a new Witchcraft Act. It no longer treated witchcraft as a real crime. Instead, it punished people for pretending to have magical powers in order to cheat others. The age of witch burnings in Britain was over.
It came too late for Janet.
The Witch’s Stone
Today, in a quiet garden in Dornoch, there is a simple stone marking the place where Janet Horne is said to have died. It is known as the Witch’s Stone. Oddly, the date carved on it is 1722, not 1727, a reminder of how uncertain the records of her death remain.
In recent years, Scotland has formally acknowledged the injustice done to the thousands of people accused of witchcraft. In 2022, the Scottish government issued an official apology to all those who were accused, tortured and executed.
Remembering Janet
Janet Horne was not a witch. She was an old woman, possibly ill and confused, with a disabled daughter, living in a community gripped by fear.
Her story is a reminder of how quickly fear can turn neighbors into accusers, and how those who are different, vulnerable or alone are often the first to suffer when a society looks for someone to blame.