Jonka Dyneis of Fetlar

Jonka Dyneis was one of three women caught up in Shetland's first major witchcraft prosecution in 1616, and her case became one of its most remembered. According to the accusation, while her husband was at sea his boat was struck by sudden danger some six miles offshore — and at that exact moment, Jonka collapsed into a trance at home in Fetlar. When the boat went down, the trance was taken as proof that she had used witchcraft to cause the wreck, and she was tried and executed alongside the other accused women.

Fetlar's folklore preserves related beliefs about the supernatural dangers of the sea around the island: another tradition describes women of Fetlar gathering around a well, muttering charms over a wooden bowl that shook and trembled of its own accord whenever a boat's crew had been lost in the nearby Bay of Funzie — a kind of communal second sight for drowning.

Together these stories reflect a broader pattern in Shetland belief, where freak storms, wrecks and drownings were routinely blamed on the malice of women thought to have power over wind and water — a belief system that the 1616 trials turned lethal.