Post by Joanna on Oct 28, 2014 22:53:37 GMT -5
How to Bury a Witch
Back in 1704 in Torryburn, Fife, Scotland, people had a problem disposing of toxic material – it was what you might call a toxic witch problem. Lilias Adie, a poor woman who confessed to being a witch and having sex with the devil, died in prison before she could be tried, sentenced and burned, so they buried her deep in the sticky, sopping wet mud of the foreshore – between the high tide and low tide mark – and placed a heavy flat stone over her. But why? In previous cases, people wanted to be rid of dead witches as cheaply as possible – dumping them naked in pits at the foot of the gallows. Why go to such bother to bury Lilias?
Terrible relevance. One possibility is that Lilias killed herself. Well into the19th century, suicide victims were buried in this manner on the shore, outside consecrated ground. This seems strange and barbaric now, but it was believed that suicide was a terrible crime against God, inspired by the devil. Worse, it was believed people who died in this way were in danger of becoming revenants – corpses of evil individuals who returned from the grave to torment the living. This has a strange and terrible relevance to witchcraft. Demonologists believed that such walking corpses were real and possessed by the devil, who animated them to do things like have sex with witches and Lilias herself had confessed publicly to having sex with the devil. All her friends and neighbors would have believed this was accomplished by the devil’s animating a decaying corpse, just taken from its grave, to copulate with her. According to folk belief, certain bodies were much more likely to be chose by Satan for this purpose, among them being those executed for crimes, suicides and witches. Accordingly, Lilias was either a suicide, a witch, and possibly both.
Skull taken. She was not only buried as a suicide, but the large stone was placed over her, another folk remedy for revenants to weigh them down so they couldn’t get up and come back. After Lilias was buried, the good people of Torryburn must have breathed a contented sigh of relief much like that of today’s scientists entombing nuclear waste. They had made Lilias safe for the centuries, or so they believed. Unfortunately they hadn't made Lilias safe from them.
During the 19th century, beliefs gradually changed and some enterprising locals dug up Lilias to sell bits of her to antiquarians. Their biggest prize, her skull, went to St Andrews University Museum, where it was photographed more than 100 years ago. The photographs can be seen today in the National Library of Scotland (above) and they demonstrate that poor Lilias, who was probably in her 70s when she died, had extremely prominent buck teeth. But sometime in the 20th century, the skull went missing and all attempts to trace it have failed.
So what’s left on that lonely beach? Armed with 19th century descriptions of the area that mentioned “the great stone doorstep that lies over the rifled grave of Lilly Eadie,” and a rock with “the remains of an iron ring,” a group of locals went in search of the stone. In the small scattering of rocks near the railway bridge, a seaweed-covered stone which fit the doorstep description was discovered.
Curiosity-seekers. Fife archaeologist Douglas Speirs, who examined and cleaned the stone, confirmed the slab was not natural to the beach, but quarried and deliberately placed there. It had in its middle a small dimple which might have been mistaken as the socket for an iron ring. It is believed this is Lillias’s stone, but is there anything left of Lilias? Speirs indicated the 19th century curiosity-seekers were unlikely to have lifted the entire body. In the days when “reading someone’s bumps on the head” was believed to be science, the skull was the thing. Maybe a few other bits were taken too, but it’s unlikely the entire body was removed. And if parts of her are left, the preservation in the area is excellent, she is unlikely to have rotted away.
Absent archaeological investigation, no one can say for sure, but it’s likely this is the only known witch’s grave of its type in Scotland and that parts of Lilias remain in her unorthodox grave.
Sources: Louise Yeoman, BBC News, October 28, 2014; and Scottish Witches.