Pendle Hill and the Pendle Witches

Pendle Hill rises alone to 557 meters (1,827 feet) above the mill towns and farming villages of east Lancashire. In the early 17th century the area around it was poor, remote and, to the authorities, suspect: the local abbey at Whalley had been dissolved and its abbot executed, many people quietly kept to the old Catholic faith, and James I — author of the witch-hunting treatise Daemonologie — had recently made witchcraft that caused harm a hanging offense.

In March 1612 a young woman named Alizon Device was accused of laming a peddler, John Law, with a curse after he refused her some pins. Questioned by the magistrate Roger Nowell, she, her family and a rival family accused one another. A gathering on Good Friday at Malkin Tower, the home of the elderly Elizabeth Southerns (“Demdike”), was recast as a witches’ sabbat. Twelve people were eventually charged with murdering ten neighbors by witchcraft; the key prosecution witness was nine-year-old Jennet Device, who testified against her own mother, brother and sister. Demdike died in prison. At Lancaster on August 20, 1612, nine people — Alizon, Elizabeth and James Device, Anne Whittle (“Chattox”), Anne Redferne, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, and Jane and John Bulcock — were hanged; Jennet Preston of Gisburn had already been hanged at York.

The trials are unusually well documented because the court clerk, Thomas Potts, published an account, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613). Historians now read the case as the product of poverty, feuding families of folk healers and beggars, a credulous legal system and a king’s obsession, not of any real witchcraft. Several of those hanged, notably the comparatively well-off Alice Nutter, may simply have been in the wrong place or of the wrong faith. Petitions in 1998 and 2008 asked for pardons; the convictions stand.

Out of that injustice grew a ghost lore. Visitors and residents tell of the witches’ spirits on the hill and in the villages beneath it — Barley, Newchurch-in-Pendle, Roughlee, Sabden — and of oppressive feelings, voices and figures on the slopes after dark. The hill’s reputation surged after Most Haunted broadcast a live Halloween investigation there in 2004, and again in December 2011, when engineers working near Lower Black Moss reservoir uncovered a 17th-century cottage with a mummified cat sealed into a wall, quickly dubbed a “witch’s cottage.” Each Halloween thousands of people climb Pendle or gather at the Nick of Pendle; in 2011 police and local agencies restricted parking and traffic on the hill after years of crowds, fireworks and drink-fueled disorder.

Apparitions said to be the Pendle witches, voices and footsteps on the hill at night, a sense of being watched or of sudden dread, cold and mist, and Halloween-night “energy” reported by visitors, ghost-hunting groups and the Most Haunted team.

The summit plateau and the Big End above Barley; the Nick of Pendle road between Clitheroe and Sabden (the Halloween gathering place); and the villages around the hill — Newchurch-in-Pendle, with its church and the grave said to be Alice Nutter’s family’s, Roughlee and Barley. Most reports cluster around Halloween.

The witches have inspired novels from William Harrison Ainsworth’s The Lancashire Witches (1849) to Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate (2012), a Doctor Who episode, a statue of Alice Nutter in Roughlee, the Pendle Witch Trail to Lancaster Castle, and a yearly Halloween pilgrimage up the hill. Pendle is also where George Fox had the 1652 vision that led to the Quaker movement.