In 1750, long after Scotland’s last formal witch trials, men in Obsdale near Alness still turned to blood and blades to “break a spell.” The Presbytery of Tain met in this church to hear how neighbours were dragged from their beds, cut across the face, and forced to swear secrecy at swordpoint. Drawing on their records, this article revisits that night of terror and shows how the belief in “witch-cutting” lingered in Easter Ross into the nineteenth century.
The story of the 1750 “witch-cutting” at Obsdale comes from the records of the Presbytery of Tain, printed in Church Life in Ross and Sutherland from the Revolution. I have tried more than once to write about what happened but have found myself reluctant to put it into words. Behind the formal phrases lies what must have been a night of terror in Easter Ross: neighbours dragged from their beds at midnight, cursed as witches, and cut until their faces bled.
It began on the night between 22 and 23 May 1750, “about or after midnight,” when most of Obsdale was likely asleep.
Three men—John Munro of Obsdale, Hugh Munro of Culcraggie, and John Munro of Kilistree—came to the house of John Fraser, tenant in Obsdale. They carried a candle and swords, and they brought something colder than the spring night: a conviction that their neighbours were witches, and that John Munro of Obsdale’s wasting illness was the work of their ill-will and witchcraft.
Inside, the Fraser family were in bed. The men forced their way in and, as the record puts it, “having lighted a candle which they had brought with them, dragged out of bed John Fraser’s wife—Margaret Mackenzie—an aged woman who has been for some years in a most infirm and languishing state of health, and Katherine Fraser, her daughter, a girl about 17 years old.”
They were thrown onto “the hard and cold floor,” given no time to dress beyond their shirts.
On the floor, half-naked and terrified, mother and daughter were met not with questions but with curses. The men used “most horrid cursings and imprecations, calling them witches and devils.” Two of them, swords drawn, held the women down while the third—John Munro in Obsdale—“scored and cut their foreheads with an iron tool to the effusion of blood, calling them witches.”
Seventeen-year-old Katherine, shaking with fear, was mocked in words the record still preserves: “How the devil trembles,” Hugh Munro said, as he held her.
At some point, John Fraser himself managed to pull on some clothes and step forward. The men turned on him. Hugh Munro took a naked sword, “put… between his eyes, holding each end of it with his hands,” and swore that he would “cleave his body” if he did not promise secrecy. For fear of his life, John Fraser swore not to reveal what had been done to his family. His wife and daughter were forced to do the same, and made to declare that they had no “ill-will or hatred” against John Munro of Obsdale, under an imprecation in the chilling form:
“The devil make a tanned hyde of your skin, if you have ill-will or hatred to John Munro, tacksman in Obsdale.”
As they left, one of the men—John Munro of Kilistree—is recorded as saying simply:
“The devil be with you.”
Other doors, the same terror
The three Munros did not stop at one house.
They next went to the home of Isobel Mackenzie, a widow, and her daughter Katherine. Once again, the door was broken up “violently”. The women were dragged from bed in only their shirts and thrown onto a hard floor, and their foreheads “scored and cut… to the effusion of their blood, calling them witches.” To let John Munro do the cutting, Hugh Munro held the daughter’s head “so fast between his knees that it was thereby much pained and endangered.” As he did so, he again mocked her terror:
“Oh, but the devil is trembling.”
From there, the party went on to the home of Hugh Fraser and his wife Annie Bain. The pattern repeated: a forced door, a candle lit, swords drawn. When Hugh Fraser cried out “God sees this,” he was answered by Hugh Munro:
“He does not, you devil; if the devil be in you, we will drive him out.”
Hugh too had his forehead cut “to the great effusion of his blood,” and he and his wife were forced to swear secrecy. This time, however, the men also made their purpose brutally explicit. With swords drawn, they tried to force Hugh to repeat an oath tying his words directly to the health of John Munro of Obsdale:
“The devil, your master, take you sure, if you have hatred or ill-will against this sickly man, or against his effects, or any of his relations within the tenth degree.”
Hugh refused to say the words “the devil, your master,” but the pressure shows what the attackers believed they were doing: trying to cure a “sickly man” whom they thought bewitched.
When Annie Bain tried to protest, one of the men told her, “You are as ill as themselves,” then lifted her off the ground and threw her on her back on the hearth, beating her with his fists. With a sword at her naked breast, she fainted. While she lay senseless, John Munro of Obsdale cut her forehead as well.
Their servant, Florance Munro, was seized, but escaped the blade by screaming “I’m a Munro” — a desperate appeal to shared kin that, this time, worked.
The consequences for Annie were lasting and severe. As she later told the Presbytery, she was a nursing mother, and after the attack, “being a nurse, she lost her milk”; she was “much disordered in her mind, and was haunted with violent temptations to destroy herself,” and continued to suffer “disturbances in her sleep” and “severe stitches in her sides.”
A company in the dark
Although only three men entered the houses and did the cutting, the victims were certain they were not alone. Isobel and Katherine Mackenzie told the Presbytery that, as the attackers left and they looked after them, “there appeared to be seven or eight of them in company.” Hugh Fraser and Annie Bain said that when the three Munros went out to rejoin the others, “there seemed to be about eight of them in all, and that they went off with much sport and laughing.”
For those left bleeding on the floor, one of the last sounds of the night was their attackers’ laughter.
Cutting to cure
Behind the violence lay a folk belief that went back centuries: that if someone was wasting away from illness, it might be caused by the ill-will or witchcraft of neighbours — and that the way to break that power was to draw the suspected person’s blood.
In this case, John Munro of Obsdale was said to be in a “consumptive” state. Later, before the Presbytery, Hugh and John Munro of Alness confessed that they not only held victims while their faces were cut, but also that they
“did cut a piece out of their shirts or other clothes of the persons so scored and cut, as being advised that it was necessary to do so in order to counter the supposed witchcraft.”
The ministers who heard the case were clear about what they thought of this. The Rosskeen Kirk Session described the whole affair as “most grievous scandal” — not only for the physical assault and the stealing of reputation from “old women or maidens,” but also for resorting to “diabolical means and methods, so contrary to the faith of Christians,” and for the “most profane and wicked oaths, curses, and imprecations” that had been forced on the victims.
A light sentence, and a long shadow
Despite the confessions, the men were not excommunicated, nor was the case pushed into the civil courts. After “spending a considerable time” dealing with the culprits, the Presbytery decided it would not be “for edification” to use the Church’s highest censure. Instead, they ordered Hugh and John Munro of Alness to be publicly rebuked before the congregations of Rosskeen and Alness. They urged all involved “to be reconciled, and to live as becomes Christian brethren and neighbours.”
It is hard to avoid the sense of imbalance. What had happened in Obsdale was not an argument at a kirk door, but a night of armed break-ins, assault, and terror. Yet the whole affair remained within ecclesiastical discipline. The Presbytery could rebuke, admonish, and exhort; it could not imprison, fine, or repair what had been done. No sheriff is mentioned, and no civil court ever appears in the record.
John Munro of Obsdale, the man believed to be ill, was reported too sick to attend; his case was postponed to “a more convenient season,” which never came. He died of consumption in 1751.
No one was burned, and no one was hanged. But in this quiet corner of Easter Ross, in 1750, people were still being dragged from their beds at midnight, called “witches and devils,” cut across the face with iron, and forced to swear silence at swordpoint, while their attackers went off into the darkness “with much sport and laughing.”
They were not witches. They were neighbours — and they lived with the memory of that night long after the ink dried in the Presbytery book. And although the ministers condemned witch-cutting as “most grievous scandal” and “diabolical means and methods,” the belief behind it did not die there. As late as 1845, on the coast at Portmahomack, a fisherman would once again cut an old woman’s forehead to “break a spell” — a reminder that this old terror lingered in Easter Ross for generations.