Possessed by the Devil The Real History of the Islandmagee Witches and Ireland’s Only Mass Witchcraft Trial

In 1711, in County Antrim, eight women were put on trial accused of orchestrating the demonic possession of young Mary Dunbar, and the haunting and supernatural murder of a local clergyman’s wife. Mary Dunbar was the star witness in this trial, and the women were, by the standards of the time, believable witches – they smoked, they drank, they just did not look right.With echoes of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and the Salem witch-hunt, this is a story of murder, of hysteria, and of how the ‘witch craze’ that claimed over 40,000 lives in Europe played out on Irish shores.

Andrew Sneddon is a history professor and the foremost expert on the history of witchcraft in Ireland. He is the author of Witchcraft and Whigs.