The Pendle Witches: The 1612 Trial and Its Haunted Legacy

On 20 August 1612, nine people from the country around Pendle Hill were hanged on Gallows Hill, outside Lancaster. A tenth prisoner from elsewhere in Lancashire died with them. They had been convicted of murder by witchcraft at the Lancaster Assizes over the two days before. The chief witness against several of them was a girl of about nine, Jennet Device, who gave evidence against her own mother, brother and sister. Four centuries later the Pendle witches are the most famous witch trial in England, and Pendle Hill is known for ghost stories about them.

The trial itself is very well recorded. The court clerk, Thomas Potts, published a full account in 1613. The hauntings are a different matter. This page sets out the documented history first, then what can and cannot be said about the ghosts.

The Historical Background

The Setting

Pendle Hill rises to 557 metres, or 1,827 feet, above the farmland of east Lancashire. In 1612 the country around it was the Forest of Pendle, a district of scattered farms and small hamlets on poor upland ground. Life there was hard, and many people lived close to poverty.

Religion added to the strain. Lancashire was known for its many Catholics in a Protestant kingdom. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was still fresh in memory, and local magistrates were under pressure to show their loyalty. King James I had written a book on witchcraft, Daemonologie, in 1597, and a strict new witchcraft act had been passed in 1604. In that climate a charge of witchcraft could quickly become something much larger.

The Cunning Folk

Some poor families in the district made a living as cunning folk. They offered healing with charms and herbs, protection from bad luck, help finding lost goods, and, people believed, harm to enemies. A reputation for such powers could bring in money and also fear.

Two such families lived near Pendle. One was led by Elizabeth Southerns, known as Old Demdike. The other was led by Anne Whittle, known as Old Chattox. Potts describes them as rivals. The feud went back years, and Potts records that it had been made worse by a break-in at Demdike’s home, Malkin Tower, in which Chattox’s family was blamed for stealing goods.

The Two Families

Old Demdike was very old by 1612. Potts calls her “about the age of fourescore years” and blind. In her statement she said that about twenty years earlier she had met a spirit called Tibb, in the shape of a boy whose coat was half black and half brown, near a stone pit. Her household at Malkin Tower included her daughter Elizabeth Device and Elizabeth’s children, James, Alizon and Jennet. The site of Malkin Tower has never been found for certain.

Old Chattox was also very old and almost blind. She said she had been drawn into witchcraft about fourteen years earlier, and that her spirit, which she called Fancy, came to her in the shape of a man. Her daughter Anne Redferne was accused with her. Another daughter, Bessie, was not tried.

The Spark: 21 March 1612

On 21 March 1612, Alizon Device was walking toward Trawden Forest when she met a pedlar from Halifax, John Law. She asked him for some pins. He refused. Soon afterward he fell and was left lame, a set of symptoms that many modern writers think fits a stroke.

Law’s son, Abraham, later said that Alizon had been begging for the pins, not offering to buy them. A few days after the incident he brought her to see his father. She confessed to causing his illness and asked for his forgiveness. She seems to have believed she had done it. She said a black dog, her familiar, had attacked Law at her bidding.

The Investigation Expands

The local magistrate, Roger Nowell of Read Hall, took up the case. On 30 March he questioned Alizon, her mother Elizabeth and her brother James. Their statements drew in both Demdike and Chattox, who in turn made statements that admitted witchcraft and accused each other. Chattox was charged with the murder of Robert Nutter, and Demdike and others were named in further deaths.

On 2 April 1612, Nowell committed four women to Lancaster Gaol to await the summer assizes. They were Old Demdike, Old Chattox, Anne Redferne and Alizon Device.

The Good Friday Meeting

On Good Friday, 10 April 1612, a group of friends and relatives met at Malkin Tower. James Device had stolen a neighbour’s sheep for the meal. When word of the gathering reached the authorities, Nowell and another magistrate held an inquiry on 27 April. It led to eight more people being sent for trial. They were Elizabeth Device, James Device, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock, Jane Bulcock, Alice Grey and Jennet Preston.

The prosecution later presented the meeting as a witches’ sabbath. It was also said that those present had planned to blow up Lancaster Castle and free the prisoners. The historian Stephen Pumfrey has suggested that the magistrates themselves made up this plot, which echoed the Gunpowder Plot, and that James Device simply agreed to it in his statement.

The Trials

Jennet Preston, who lived across the county border in Yorkshire, was tried at York on 27 July 1612. She was found guilty and hanged on the Knavesmire, now the site of York Racecourse, on 29 July.

The main trial was held at Lancaster on 18 and 19 August 1612, before the judges Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Altham. The evidence was mostly the prisoners’ own statements, the statements of their relatives, and accounts of illnesses and deaths that neighbours blamed on them.

Old Demdike never came to trial. She died in Lancaster Gaol while awaiting it.

The key witness was Jennet Device, then about nine years old. She gave evidence against her mother, her brother James and her sister Alizon, and named those at the Good Friday meeting. Potts records that her mother screamed and cursed her in court and had to be taken out so that Jennet could continue. The rules of the time on child witnesses were set aside, as King James’s own book allowed in witchcraft cases.

The Condemned

Ten people were found guilty and hanged. Their names are known from Potts.

Elizabeth Device, Demdike’s daughter, was convicted of three murders by witchcraft. She was condemned largely on the evidence of her own children. James Device, her son, had confessed to witchcraft and to stealing the sheep for the Good Friday meeting. At his trial he pleaded not guilty to two murders, but he was convicted. Alizon Device, whose meeting with John Law began the case, confessed again in court and was convicted.

Anne Whittle, Old Chattox, confessed to the murder of Robert Nutter and was convicted. Her daughter Anne Redferne was acquitted on one charge, then convicted on a second, the murder of Robert Nutter’s father, Christopher.

Katherine Hewitt of Colne, known as “Mouldheels”, was convicted of the murder of a child, Anne Foulds. John Bulcock and his mother Jane Bulcock were convicted of bewitching a woman to madness. Both had been at the Good Friday meeting.

Alice Nutter stands out. She was the widow of a yeoman farmer and better off than the others. She made no confession and said nothing in her own defence. Why she was accused has never been settled. Some writers have suggested a dispute with neighbours over land, and others that she was a Catholic. Neither idea is proved.

Isabel Robey, of Windle near St Helens, was tried at the same assizes in a separate case and hanged on the same day. Jennet Preston was hanged at York. Alice Grey, who had also been at Malkin Tower, was found not guilty.

The Execution

The nine Pendle prisoners and Isabel Robey were hanged on 20 August 1612 on Gallows Hill, on the moor above Lancaster. Where they were buried is not recorded.

The Hauntings

What the Record Shows

The hill and the trial have plenty of ghost stories attached to them. Very few of them can be traced to a named witness or a date.

The Paranormal Database, a long-running UK archive, has several Lancashire entries tied to the story. Its entry for Lancaster Castle says the castle, a prison until 2011, is “said to hold both prisoners and several ghosts”. Reports include a middle-aged woman with a young girl near a cell, a girl with a haggard old woman, and the grey form of a monk. It also notes an inmate’s report of a shadowy figure in 2008 and a prisoner woken by a shaking bed in 2010. Some people link the woman and girl to the Device family, but the entry does not make that link.

The same archive records the “evil eye” on the tower of St Mary’s Church in Newchurch-in-Pendle, a carved eye said to guard against witches. It also has a 2024 report from that churchyard. A visitor said she saw a black figure standing over a grave and then heard footsteps follow her down the path, with no one there. The entry for Roughlee Hall names it as the home of Alice Nutter, but records no ghost.

Pendle Hill

Pendle Hill has a strong reputation for the uncanny. Many people climb it at Halloween, and in 2012 a record 482 people dressed as witches walked up it. Ghost walks and ghost hunts are run in the area. Stories are often told of lights on the hill and of figures in old dress on the paths.

We could not find any of these hill stories in a source with a named witness and a date. They may well be real experiences that were never written down. But earlier versions of this page quoted campers, villagers and a farmer as if from interviews, and we could not trace any of those quotes. They have been removed.

Malkin Tower and Roughlee

Malkin Tower has never been found, so no ghost can be firmly placed there. Several farms have claimed to stand on its site.

Local tradition links Alice Nutter to Roughlee Hall, a building now divided into private homes. Some historians doubt she lived there, since the hall may have belonged to another branch of the Nutter family. Stories that her ghost walks there are told locally, but we found no dated report.

Newchurch-in-Pendle

St Mary’s Church in Newchurch has the carved “Eye of God” on its tower. In the churchyard is a grave often called “the witch’s grave”. Local tradition links it to the Nutter family, and sometimes to Alice Nutter herself. There is no record that any of the hanged were buried there.

Theories and Explanations

Why Pendle Feels Haunted

The usual paranormal explanation is that great suffering can leave a mark on a place. The Pendle accused spent months in gaol, were tried with almost no defence and were hanged in public. Many people today see them as victims of injustice, and the idea that the unjustly killed cannot rest is very old.

Skeptical Perspectives

Skeptics point to simpler causes. Upland moors are often foggy, and light from walkers, farms and cars can look strange at a distance. Sound carries in odd ways over open ground. Visitors who come expecting ghosts are more likely to read meaning into ordinary sights and sounds. The Pendle story also brings tourism to the area, which gives the legend every reason to grow.

The most solid point is the gap in the record. The trial is documented in detail. The ghosts are almost entirely undated and unsourced. That does not prove nothing has been seen. It does mean the hauntings rest on tradition, not on evidence.

Visiting Pendle

Pendle Hill is open walking country. Most walkers start from the village of Barley, and the climb to the summit is steep but not long. The weather can change quickly, so walkers should be prepared.

Newchurch-in-Pendle has St Mary’s Church and its eye on the tower, as well as a shop themed on witches. Roughlee has a life-size statue of Alice Nutter by the sculptor David Palmer, unveiled in 2012.

Lancaster Castle closed as a prison in 2011. It is now open for guided tours, which cover the cells and the court and tell the story of the trial.

Legacy and Meaning

The Injustice

Historians now see the Pendle trial as a grave miscarriage of justice. Many of the accused were poor, old or both. Confessions were taken from frightened and confused people. A child of nine gave the key evidence, and the accused had no lawyers. The case was also made famous by Potts’s book, which was written partly to praise the judges.

In 1998 a petition asked the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, to pardon the Pendle witches. He refused, and the convictions still stand. A further petition in 2008 sought pardons for Demdike and Chattox.

The 400th Anniversary

In 2012, four hundred years after the trial, the area marked the anniversary. Gawthorpe Hall held an exhibition. The Alice Nutter statue was unveiled in Roughlee. On the side of Pendle Hill, the artist Philippe Handford laid out the numerals “1612” in giant letters made of horticultural fleece. The Bishop of Burnley objected that it made light of an injustice.

The Enduring Presence

The Pendle witches have never been forgotten. Their story lives on in books, in walks and in the life of the villages under the hill. Whether anything of them still walks there is a question the record cannot answer. What it can do is give their names, and tell what was done to them in the summer of 1612.

Sources

• Wikipedia, “Pendle witches” (trial chronology, the accused, pardon petitions and 2012 events)
• The Paranormal Database, Lancashire entries (Lancaster Castle #1122, Newchurch church #3084 and #15471, Roughlee Hall #4674)
• Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (London, 1613)