In the autumn of 1710, an eighteen-year-old woman named Mary Dunbar arrived at Knowehead House in the townland of Kilcoan More, Islandmagee, County Antrim, to comfort a recently bereaved family. Within weeks she began exhibiting alarming symptoms: convulsions, blasphemy, and the vomiting of household objects — pins, buttons, nails, thread, and glass. She claimed she was being tormented by spectral visitors who entered through the bedroom keyhole, and by early 1711 had named eight local women as her tormentors in spirit form: Janet Carson, Janet Latimer, Janet Main, Janet Millar, Margaret Mitchell, Catherine McCalmond, Janet Liston, and Elizabeth Sellor.
The story
On 31 March 1711, the spring session of the Carrickfergus Assize Court heard their case. Under the Irish Witchcraft Act of 1586, the eight women were convicted and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment with four appearances in the pillory on market day — a relatively lenient outcome, since witchcraft had ceased to carry the death penalty. A ninth accused, William Sellor, was tried separately at the Summer Assizes in September 1711. By then Mary Dunbar had died, converting his lesser offence into a capital charge for which he was probably executed. The Islandmagee trial is now recognised as the last witchcraft prosecution in Ireland.
The case has attracted serious academic attention from Andrew Sneddon of Ulster University, who has examined its intersection with Presbyterian covenant theology and the social tensions of early eighteenth-century Ulster. Unlike earlier British and Irish witch trials driven largely by landholding disputes or malicious accusation, the Islandmagee convictions appear to have grown from a genuine communal belief in demonic possession shaped by the community’s Protestant religious culture. The tradition of the Islandmagee Witches persisted in oral memory on the peninsula well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a dedicated heritage project (w1711.org) now documents the trial’s history.