Ireland's Mass Witchcraft Trial
In 1711, in County Antrim, eight women were put on trial accused of orchestrating the demonic possession of young Mary Dunbar, and the haunting and supernatural murder of a local clergyman's wife. Mary Dunbar was the star witness in this trial, and the women were, by the standards of the time, believable witches - they smoked, they drank, they just did not look right. With echoes of Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible', and in fact Mary Dunbar repeated many of the reports from the Salem Witch trials word for word in court, this is a story of murder, of hysteria, and of how the 'witch craze' that claimed over 400,000 lives in Europe played out on Irish shores.
