Edinburgh's Witches, Wh*res & Wayward Women

Come walk the Old Town with me and meet the women Edinburgh filed under as witch, wh*re, and wayward—and ask yourself who exactly was doing the filing.

For roughly three centuries, this city burned women as witches, hanged them for hiding pregnancies, sold their corpses to medical students, locked them up for "hysteria”, and then, decades later, pelted the ones trying to become doctors with mud and a live sheep. Progress, as ever, took its sweet, undead time.

Everything here comes from somewhere real—trial records, old pamphlets, case notes, forgotten memoirs—plus a few genuinely excellent novels that resurrected (pun intended) these women before I did. I'm weaving it together into one walk, not reciting it off a plaque.

Disclaimer: This walk covers execution, sexual exploitation, the corpse trade, and the historical abuse of women in psychiatric care—much of this can be genuinely upsetting, while also feeling absurdly hilarious. Expect gallows humour. Literally, in at least one case.