In 1623 Isobel Haldane, who was both a healer and a witch, when asked if she had dealings with the fairy folk, said that one night she had been carried, whether by God or devil she did not know, to a hill which opened. Within it she remained three days, until a gray-bearded man brought her out again.[1] He seems to have been a kind of familiar or ghost, like Thomas Reid and William Simpson, and on later occasions she had invoked his aid. These different ghostly familiars dwelt in fairy-land, according to their own account; the Presbyterian inquisitors gave them another address!
The fairy hill comes into much greater prominence in the trial of Isobel Gowdie of Auldearne, Nairn, in 1662. The evidence in this trial is most copious, and abounds in details of current folk-lore and fairy beliefs and of the methods of witchcraft. Isobel had a lively imagination as well as the gift of the gab, and her clerical judges drank in the vivid accounts given by her of the methods of sorcery, of the Sabbat, of the witch-flight, and of elf-land. On one of her flights she and others had entered the Dounie Hills and came to a "fair and lairge braw room," guarded by elf-bulls, which resemble the water bulls of Highland folk-lore. The devil roughly shaped the elf arrow-heads, and the elf boys wrought them to a finer point within the "elfis howsses." Then the devil gave them to the witches, who, on their flight through the air, "spang" or flicked them from their thumbs at their victims, who fell dead. This method of using the elf-arrows by witches is found in most of the witch trials of this period. They were also shot by fairies in their flight through the air, or they caused a mortal carried off by them in their flight to make a similar use of them. The elf boys are described as small and "boss-backed," and as speaking "gowstie-like," i.e. in a hollow voice, and they suggest the misshapen dwarfs of other lands. The fairy queen, on the other hand, was
- ↑ Pitcairn, ii. 537.
