On 18 August 1612, a nine-year-old girl named Jennet Device was lifted onto a table in a Lancaster courtroom so that the jury could see her face. Her mother, Elizabeth, was standing a few feet away in the dock, accused as one of the Pendle witches. When Elizabeth heard her daughter begin to speak, she screamed. Jennet asked the judge to have her removed.
He did. And Jennet Device continued.
By the time she stepped down from that table, she had named her mother, her brother James, her sister Alizon, and six of her neighbours. Within forty-eight hours, ten of them were dead.
Pendle Hill stands where it always has — a broad, wind-flattened ridge above the Ribble Valley in Lancashire, unremarkable in the way that only genuinely old places can be. Four hundred and thirteen years have passed since the hangings at Gallows Hill. The hill has become a destination: walking trails, heritage signs, a pub in Barley that does a reasonable Sunday lunch. Tourists come for the witches. They take photographs from the car park. Most of them have never heard of Jennet Device.
That seems like the right place to start.
The Lancashire witch trials of 1612 are among the most documented in English history, which is both their distinction and their problem. We know what we know because a court clerk named Thomas Potts wrote it down — and Potts was writing for an audience that included King James I, a man who had published his own treatise on the dangers of witchcraft and was not looking to be disappointed. The record is vivid. It is also, historians now agree, shaped at every turn by the needs of powerful men. What it preserved, and what it obscured, is the more interesting question.
The Pendle witches were poor. They were old. They were women — mostly — living at the edge of a community that had already decided what they were. The hill above them was just a hill. What happened in its shadow was not supernatural. It was something considerably more familiar, and considerably harder to exorcise.
The Place
Pendle Hill is not a mountain, though it carries itself like one. It rises to 557 metres above sea level at its summit — a broad, flat-topped ridge of millstone grit and blanket bog that dominates the skyline across a wide stretch of east Lancashire. On a clear day, standing at the trig point on top, you can see the Lake District to the north, the Yorkshire Dales to the east, and the sprawl of Greater Manchester dissolving into haze to the south. On the days when the cloud sits low and the wind comes in off the moors, you can see almost nothing at all, and the hill becomes a different kind of place entirely.
The villages below are what give it context. These are not tourist constructions — they are working communities built in the same gritstone as the hill, connected to it in the way that upland settlements always have been, by necessity as much as geography. The Forest of Pendle, which in the seventeenth century referred not to woodland but to an area of royal hunting ground, stretched across this whole landscape. It was a place defined by its distance from authority, its reliance on subsistence, and its deep suspicion of strangers — which made it, in 1612, exactly the kind of place where what happened could happen.
The History
The story that became the Pendle witch trials begins, as so many catastrophes do, with something small.
On a March morning in 1612, a young woman named Alizon Device was walking near Colne when she encountered a pedlar named John Law. She asked him for pins — a common enough request; pins were a practical commodity and Alizon was a beggar by necessity. Law refused. Shortly afterwards, he collapsed in the road, his left side suddenly paralysed, his speech gone. By the standards of modern medicine, it was almost certainly a stroke. By the standards of early modern Lancashire, it was a curse.
Alizon Device was brought before the local magistrate, Roger Nowell, and did something that set the entire machinery of 1612 in motion: she confessed. Not under torture — England did not routinely use torture in witchcraft cases the way continental Europe did — but apparently of her own accord, with what Thomas Potts would later describe as apparent remorse. She told Nowell that her grandmother, Elizabeth Southerns, known throughout the district as Old Demdike, had taught her how to use a familiar spirit. She named names. And Roger Nowell, an ambitious magistrate operating in the long shadow of the Gunpowder Plot, understood immediately that he had something worth pursuing.
Old Demdike was already known. She had lived in and around the Forest of Pendle for decades, occupying a position that pre-modern rural communities both needed and feared — the cunning woman, the healer, the one you went to when the physician was too expensive and the priest too far away. She was elderly, partially blind, and had been regarded locally as a witch for the better part of fifty years. Her rival, Anne Whittle — Old Chattox — occupied a similar position with a similar reputation, and the two families had maintained a bitter feud for years, each accusing the other of various misfortunes across a long history of mutual suspicion and poverty.
Both women were arrested. Both confessed. In the logic of 1612, confession was not the end of an investigation — it was the beginning of a wider one.
The event that escalated a local matter into a mass trial was a gathering at Malkin Tower on Good Friday, 1612. Elizabeth Device — Alizon’s mother, Old Demdike’s daughter — held what appears to have been a meeting of family, friends, and neighbours, the precise purpose of which remains disputed. Potts presented it as a witches’ sabbat, a conspiracy to blow up Lancaster Castle and free the prisoners already held there. Historians now read it as something more likely mundane: a gathering of poor people, some of them already frightened, eating a stolen sheep and discussing what to do. The distinction did not matter to Roger Nowell. Within weeks, the attendees had been identified and arrested. By summer, twenty people in total had been accused, drawn from the same tight web of poverty, kinship, and local enmity.
The trials were held at Lancaster Assizes in August 1612, presided over by judges Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Altham. The accused were denied legal representation. They were denied the right to call witnesses in their defence. What they were given, in abundance, was the testimony of others — neighbours, acquaintances, and, most devastatingly, family members.
The youngest witness was Jennet Device. She was nine years old.
Jennet’s testimony across two days of trial was, by any measure, extraordinary. She named her mother Elizabeth as a witch and described the familiar spirit her mother kept. She named her brother James. She named her sister Alizon, already convicted. She stood on a table in the courtroom — she was too small to be seen from the floor — and identified, one by one, the people she said she had seen at the Malkin Tower gathering. When her mother screamed at her from the dock, begging her to stop, Jennet asked the judge to have Elizabeth removed. He complied.
The legal mechanism that made this possible was King James I’s Daemonologie, published in 1597. James had argued that in cases of witchcraft — as in cases of treason — the normal protections around witness testimony could be suspended. A nine-year-old could condemn her family to death because a king had decided that some crimes were too serious for ordinary rules of evidence to apply. The precedent set at Lancaster in 1612 would later travel, in the form of the magistrates’ handbook that cited it, to the colonies. It was on the table at Salem eighty years later.
On 20 August 1612, ten people were hanged at Gallows Hill above Lancaster. They were Old Chattox, Ann Redfearn, Elizabeth Device, Alizon Device, James Device, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock, Jane Bulcock, and Isobel Robey. Old Demdike had died in Lancaster Castle before the trial. One woman, Alice Grey, was acquitted. The executions accounted for approximately two percent of all people hanged for witchcraft in England across three centuries of trials — ten people, from a handful of villages, in a single August morning.
We know all of this because Thomas Potts wrote it down. Potts was the clerk of the court, and the trial judges personally commissioned his account. He published it in 1613 as The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, dedicated to Lord Knyvett — the man who had arrested Guy Fawkes in the cellars of Parliament seven years earlier. The dedication was not accidental. Potts was writing in a political climate in which witchcraft and treason had been deliberately linked, and his book needed to justify what had been done. He omitted details that reflected poorly on the judges. He emphasised every demonic detail that reflected well on the prosecution. He is, as the Lancaster Castle historian Christine Goodier has noted, our only real primary source for events in the more remote parts of Lancashire across those years — and he was writing, explicitly, for an audience that wanted to believe.
The record is vivid. The record is also, historians now broadly agree, a work of advocacy as much as documentation. What Thomas Potts discovered in the county of Lancaster in 1612 was not witches. It was a story powerful men needed to tell, and poor people who could not stop them telling it.
Jennet Device disappeared from history after the trial. She surfaced again twenty-two years later, in 1634, when a ten-year-old boy named Edmund Robinson claimed to have witnessed a witches’ gathering and began pointing at people. One of the thirty he accused was Jennet Device, now a middle-aged woman. She was tried at Lancaster. This time, the accused were sent to London for examination by the king’s physicians, who found no evidence of witchcraft. They were acquitted. The system that had used Jennet Device as a child to destroy her family had, in her middle age, tried to destroy her in turn. She survived it. What happened to her after that, nobody recorded.
The Legend
The folklore of Pendle Hill did not begin in 1612 and it did not end there. The trials gave it a name and a shape, but the landscape had been accumulating strangeness for considerably longer.
The hill itself carries a pre-Christian weight. A Bronze Age burial site was discovered at the summit, evidence of ritual use stretching back thousands of years before the Devices and the Demdikes were born. The name Pendle is thought to derive from the Cumbric pen and Old English hyll — hill-hill, as it is sometimes rendered, a reduplication suggesting that whoever named it considered the single word insufficient. There is a tradition across upland Britain of certain hills being regarded as liminal places, thresholds rather than merely high ground, and Pendle fits that pattern with an ease that may say more about human pattern-recognition than about the hill itself, or may not.
The ghost lore attached to Pendle is, predictably, dominated by the witches. Old Demdike is reported at the summit, a heavy presence rather than a visible figure — something felt in the change of weather or the sudden unease of animals. Elizabeth Device is said to haunt the lane between Newchurch and Roughlee, identifiable by the squint for which she was nicknamed during her lifetime. Alizon Device, the young woman whose guilt-ridden confession started everything, is reported near the site of John Law’s collapse, though the precise location of that encounter has been disputed by historians and the folklore has accordingly shifted to fill the gap with wherever feels most plausible on a given telling.
Malkin Tower carries its own mythology, compounded by the fact that nobody has conclusively located it. Thomas Potts places it somewhere in the Forest of Pendle; archaeological excavations have found nothing definitive. The most commonly proposed sites are near Blacko, on the moors between Gisburn and Colne, and the ambiguity has allowed the legend to remain mobile — Malkin Tower is wherever the story needs it to be, which is exactly the condition in which folklore thrives. Reports of lights moving across those moors at night, of voices without sources, of an oppressive quality to the air in the vicinity of Blacko Hill, have accumulated across centuries without ever cohering into anything verifiable or falsifiable.
In 2011, a cottage was discovered during renovation work in the village of Barley whose walls contained the bones of a cat, bricked in during construction. The practice — known to folklorists as a foundation deposit or concealment — was not unusual in early modern England. Cats, shoes, and other objects were sealed into the fabric of buildings as protective charms, intended to trap or repel evil spirits. The Barley cottage, promptly dubbed the Witches’ Cottage in press coverage, became a minor sensation and a significant tourist draw. The bones are real. Their meaning is, as with most folk practice, open to interpretation: they speak as clearly to the fear of witchcraft as to its practice, and it is not possible from the physical evidence alone to determine which side of that line the people who put them there were standing on.
The wider folklore of the area reaches beyond the witch trials into deeper, older territory. There are stories of the Pendle area as a place where the boundary between the living and the dead sits closer to the surface than elsewhere — a notion that predates 1612 and has been absorbed into it rather than created by it. George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement, climbed Pendle Hill in 1652 and recorded a vision at the summit of a great multitude waiting to be gathered — an experience he interpreted as divine revelation and which his followers took as the founding moment of the movement. Fox was not a man given to supernatural interpretation, and his account is notable for its sobriety; he saw something at the top of that hill that changed the direction of his life, and the most honest position is that we have no better explanation than his own.
The paranormal investigation industry has found Pendle Hill reliably productive for several decades. The television programme Most Haunted filmed there, with results that were dramatic and entirely consistent with the programme’s established methodology. Ghost hunting companies run regular overnight events across the surrounding villages, with Malkin Tower’s approximate location and Lancaster Castle among the standard itinerary points. Reported phenomena include temperature drops, electromagnetic fluctuations, disembodied voices, apparitions, and, in one widely circulated account, a tooth dropping onto an ouija board during a séance at the supposed Malkin Tower site — a tooth that, it was claimed, was identified as belonging to a forty-year-old man, though the chain of custody on that identification has not been documented in any way that would satisfy a sceptic.
What the legend of Pendle Hill has always had, and what sustains it beyond the appetite of the ghost-hunting industry, is a historical core that is genuinely terrible. The people accused in 1612 were real. The executions were real. The fear that produced them was real, and it is a fear — of the poor, of the old, of women who lived outside conventional structures, of knowledge that could not be supervised — that is not entirely historical. The folklore keeps renewing itself because the conditions that generated it have not entirely dissolved. What walks the moors above Barley, if anything walks them, is less interesting than why we keep going up there to look.
The Skeptics
The rational case for the Pendle witch trials is not a deflation of the story. It is, in several respects, a darker one.
Begin with the medical. Alizon Device’s encounter with John Law — the moment that started everything — almost certainly involved a stroke. Law’s sudden collapse, his left-side paralysis, his loss of speech: these are the presenting symptoms of a cerebrovascular event, not a curse. Alizon herself appears to have believed she had caused it; her confession to Roger Nowell has the quality of genuine remorse rather than coerced admission. A frightened young woman, steeped in a folk tradition that took the efficacy of cursing seriously, watched a man fall down after she had wished him ill and concluded that she had done it. The guilt was real. The mechanism was not.
Old Demdike and Old Chattox occupied a role that pre-modern communities both depended on and resented. The cunning woman — healer, herbalist, midwife, the person you visited when institutional medicine was inaccessible — operated in a space where gratitude and suspicion existed in permanent tension. When the remedies worked, she was valued. When they failed, or when livestock died and harvests rotted and children sickened in the ordinary way that livestock and harvests and children did in early modern England, she was available as an explanation. The accusations against both women drew heavily on a long history of local misfortune for which, in retrospect, they had simply been present — elderly, poor, and already carrying a reputation that made them useful to blame.
The political context is essential and consistently underplayed in popular accounts of the trials. Roger Nowell was not a disinterested servant of justice. He was an ambitious magistrate operating seven years after the Gunpowder Plot, in a kingdom whose king had written a book about witchcraft and whose government was actively alert to signs of Catholic conspiracy in the north of England. Lancashire was known as a recusant county — a place where Catholic practice had survived the Reformation more robustly than the Crown preferred. The Pendle area in particular was a patchwork of competing religious loyalties. When Nowell escalated a local matter involving a stroke and a beggar girl into a conspiracy to blow up Lancaster Castle, he was not misreading the situation. He was reading it very carefully indeed, and positioning himself accordingly.
Thomas Potts did the rest. His Wonderfull Discoverie is the document on which almost all popular knowledge of the trials rests, and it is, in the precise sense of the word, propaganda. Potts omitted evidence that complicated the prosecution’s case. He amplified every detail that made the accused appear threatening. He dedicated the book to Lord Knyvett — the man who arrested Guy Fawkes — in a gesture that explicitly linked Lancashire witchcraft to the most traumatic political event of the decade. The judges who commissioned the book reviewed it before publication. What survived that process is a document that tells us a great deal about what powerful men in 1613 needed the Pendle trials to mean, and somewhat less about what actually occurred in the Forest of Pendle in 1612.
The child witness question is where the sceptical case becomes most uncomfortable, because it does not resolve cleanly. Jennet Device was nine years old. The consensus view — that she was manipulated, coached, or simply too young to understand the consequences of her testimony — is reasonable, and there is circumstantial support for it in the way Potts presents her: as a marvel, a providential instrument, a child whose clarity of accusation proved the guilt of the accused more convincingly than any adult testimony could have done. The judges needed her. The book needed her. Whether she understood that she was being used, or whether she believed everything she said, or whether the truth was something more complicated — a child who had grown up in a household full of genuine fear and superstition and family violence and had reasons of her own for what she said — the record does not allow a definitive answer.
What the sceptical case cannot fully account for is the thing that keeps drawing people to Pendle Hill four centuries later. The debunking is correct. The stroke was a stroke. The cunning women were healers. Nowell was a careerist. Potts was a propagandist. Ten people were murdered by a system that needed them to be guilty, and the primary instrument of their conviction was a nine-year-old girl who may or may not have understood what she was doing.
All of that is true. And the hill is still there. And people still go up it at night. And the question of why — what we are looking for, what we expect to find, what it would mean if we found it — is one the rational case has not yet answered to anyone’s complete satisfaction.
My Thoughts
I find myself less interested in whether Pendle Hill is haunted than in why it needs to be.
The rational case is, as I have laid it out, essentially complete. The strokes, the poverty, the political ambition, the compromised record — none of it is seriously contested by historians. We know what the Pendle witch trials were. They were the intersection of a frightened community, an opportunist magistrate, a credulous king, and a court clerk who understood that the story he told would outlast the story that actually happened. Ten people died because they were poor and old and female and available. The supernatural had nothing to do with it.
And yet the hill draws something like a hundred thousand visitors a year. Ghost hunting companies book out their Pendle nights months in advance. A cottage with a cat’s bones in the wall became national news. Jennet Device — a nine-year-old beggar girl who was used by the state to kill her own family, who then survived a second accusation in middle age, and who then vanished from the record entirely — has become a figure of genuine cultural fascination, the subject of documentaries and poems and fictional retellings. We have not finished with her. She has not finished with us.
I think what Pendle Hill is haunted by is not the dead. It is the mechanism. The process by which ordinary people — frightened, poor, already living at the edge of what a society would permit them — became legible as a threat requiring elimination. That process did not require the supernatural. It required poverty to be pathologised, women’s knowledge to be criminalised, and a child to be placed on a table and asked to point. Those are not seventeenth-century problems. They are problems with a seventeenth-century example.
The ghost-hunting industry, and I say this without contempt for the people who participate in it, is engaged in a kind of displacement. The real horror of Pendle is not available for an overnight vigil. It does not register on electromagnetic meters. It will not drop a tooth onto a ouija board. It is the horror of institutional machinery that looks perfectly reasonable from the inside — a magistrate doing his job, a clerk doing his, a king’s theology providing the legal framework, a child’s testimony given in good faith or bad — and produces, at its output, ten bodies on an August morning. That horror is not trapped on the moors. It is entirely portable. It travels well.
What I cannot shake, and what I think the sceptical case tends to sidestep, is Jennet Device’s second trial. In 1634, when she was herself accused, the system failed to convict her — not because it had reformed, but because the king’s physicians happened to examine the accused and found nothing. The machinery misfired. She survived by contingency, not by justice. And then she disappeared. No record of her death. No record of where she went or what she made of a life that had been defined, at its beginning, by what she said from a table in a courtroom, and that had nearly been ended, in its middle, by what a ten-year-old boy said about her.
I believe the rational explanations. I believe Alizon Device watched a man have a stroke and thought she had caused it. I believe Old Demdike was a healer whose knowledge became a liability the moment a magistrate needed it to be. I believe Thomas Potts wrote what the judges needed him to write. I believe all of it, and it does not make the hill feel smaller.
What I keep returning to is this: the Pendle witch trials are described, routinely, as a dark chapter. A historical aberration. Something we have moved past. But the architecture of 1612 — the targeting of the marginalised, the suspension of normal evidentiary protections in the name of exceptional threat, the child whose testimony the system needed and used and discarded — did not require belief in witchcraft to function. It required only the will to use it.
That is not a seventeenth-century feeling. That is a contemporary one.
Is there something on that hill? I doubt it. But I think the more honest question is what we are really asking when we go up there to look — and whether finding nothing is the reassurance we think it is.
Visitor Information
Pendle Hill is in east Lancashire, between Burnley to the south and Clitheroe to the north-west. The village of Barley, on the hill’s southern flank, is the practical base for a visit and the starting point for the main ascent routes. There is a pay-and-display car park in the village; it fills quickly on weekends between April and October.
The ascent from Barley to the summit takes between forty-five minutes and an hour and a half. The plateau retains water year-round and the weather on the ridge changes quickly — waterproof footwear and a windproof layer are not optional, even in summer.
Getting there: the nearest international airport is Manchester, around 40 miles south. Search flights to Manchester via Kiwi.com. From the airport, pre-booked transfers run to Clitheroe and Lancaster. If you prefer to drive, car hire from Manchester Airport gives you the flexibility the area rewards — the hill villages are not well served by public transport. For accommodation, the nearest towns are Clitheroe and Burnley; browse hotels near Clitheroe on Trip.com.
The area around Blacko Hill, north-east of Barley, is the most commonly proposed location for Malkin Tower — the gathering place at the centre of the 1612 accusations. Nothing has been conclusively identified. That ambiguity is part of the record, and worth sitting with.
Newchurch-in-Pendle and Downham are both worth time beyond the ascent. St Mary’s church in Newchurch contains the grave traditionally identified as Alice Nutter’s. The Pendle Heritage Centre in Barrowford provides solid contextual grounding before you walk.
Lancaster Castle, where the trials were held, is thirty miles north and open for tours. The courtroom where Jennet Device gave her testimony has survived. Gallows Hill, where ten people were hanged on 20 August 1612, lies just east of the castle. Both repay the journey.
Pendle Hill is open access land with no admission charge. For public transport options, traveline.info is the most reliable resource. Dogs are welcome on leads near livestock.
The communities here have a complicated relationship with the tourism the witch trials generate. Treat the landscape, and its history, accordingly.
Follow The Dark Atlas
This is the first location in Season 1 of The Dark Atlas — a twenty-location series covering the world’s most compelling haunted places, published on Shin Stories and available as a podcast on Spotify. If Pendle Hill is where you found us, there are nineteen more to come. You can follow The Dark Atlas on Spotify so new episodes reach you as they land, and you can find the full series — articles, audio, and everything still forthcoming — at Shin Stories.
Other pieces of travel writing on this site explore the strange and the unsettling — including God’s Own Country Has a Dark Side, a road trip through haunted Yorkshire. For background on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Britannica has a good account of the disaster that reshaped the city.
Sources
Books and Academic Works
Potts, Thomas. The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. London: W. Stansby, 1613. Edited and introduced by Robert Poole. Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2011.
Poole, Robert (ed.). The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Lumby, Jonathan. The Lancashire Witch Craze: Jennet Preston and the Lancashire Witches, 1612. Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 1995.
Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996.
Goodier, Christine. The Pendle Witches. Lancaster: Lancaster Castle, 2012.
Gibson, Marion. Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches. London: Routledge, 1999.
James I. Daemonologie. Edinburgh: Robert Walde-grave, 1597.
Journalism and Long-form Reporting
Armitage, Simon. The Pendle Witch Child. BBC Four documentary, 2012.
Higginbotham, Joyce. ‘The Pendle Witch Trials of 1612.’ Learn Religions, updated 2019.
Official and Institutional Sources
Lancaster Castle. ‘The Pendle Witches.’ lancastercastle.com. Written by Christine Goodier.
Pendle Hill Landscape Partnership. pendlehill.org.
The National Archives, Kew. ASSI 45 series.
Further Reading
Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Lancashire Witches. London: Henry Colburn, 1849.
Marsh, Terry. Walking in the Forest of Bowland and Pendle. Cicerone, 2008.
The Retrospect Journal. ‘The Pendle Witches: How a Nine-Year-Old Girl Sentenced Her Family to Death.’ retrospectjournal.com, 2022.
