Geillis Duncan

Geillis Duncan was a teenage Scottish maidservant whose coerced confession in 1590 triggered the horrific North Berwick Witch Trials under King James VI. Suspicious of her sudden healing abilities and nighttime absences, her employer, David Seton, subjected her to brutal torture using thumbscrews and head-cords until a supposed "Devil's mark" was discovered on her throat. Under immense duress, she confessed to conspiring with a massive coven to summon a catastrophic storm intended to sink the King’s wedding fleet. Although she bravely retracted her entire confession moments before her death, declaring it was completely fabricated to escape agonizing pain, her plea was ignored. On 4 December 1591, she was strangled and burned at the stake at Castlehill in Edinburgh.

Her tragic real-life ordeal has deeply permeated historical literature and inspired popular fiction, most notably featuring as the namesake for the complex, time-travelling antagonist Geillis Duncan in Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling Outlander series. Long before modern fiction, her story was first sensationalised in the gruesome 1591 contemporary pamphlet Newes from Scotland, which detailed her alleged crimes and her forced performance on the Jew's harp for the King. This tract, alongside Duncan's harrowing testimony, heavily informed King James VI’s own landmark 1597 demonological treatise, Daemonologie, a text that later served as a primary source for William Shakespeare when he penned the supernatural elements of Macbeth. More recently, her historic trial has been explored in historical non-fiction works like The North Berwick Witch Trials by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, cementing her legacy in both literary history and modern pop culture.

In Naomi Kelsey’s The Burnings, in 1589, Scottish housemaid Geillis Duncan and Danish courtier Margaret Vinstarr occupy opposite positions in a society where women can be destroyed by an accusation of witchcraft.