Mary Butters, the Carnmoney Witch

Mary Butters (c.1770–c.1850) was a cunning-woman from the Carrickfergus area of County Antrim who practiced folk healing and magical cures, becoming locally celebrated for lifting bewitchments from cattle. Fear that a neighbour's ill-wishing could prevent a cow's milk from churning into butter was widespread in early 19th-century Ulster, and Butters had a well-established reputation for diagnosing and remedying such cases.

On a Tuesday night in August 1807, farmer Alexander Montgomery brought Butters to his Carnmoney holding to tend his bewitched cow. Following traditional practice, she filled a pot with sweet milk and dropped in crooked nails, pins, and needles, then ordered all windows and doors sealed so that the purifying smoke could work without interruption. She told Montgomery to stand guard outside with his shirt turned inside out. By dawn he returned to find his wife Elizabeth and their son David dead on the floor, with Butters herself and a young servant woman barely alive; they had all been overcome by the toxic fumes of her concoction.

At the 1808 spring assizes, the jury found that the deaths resulted from accidental suffocation. Unusually for Ireland of the period, the 'Carnmoney Witch' emerged from the episode with her reputation and livelihood largely intact: a comic ballad was written celebrating—or mocking—the affair, and Butters continued to be consulted about bewitched cows and stolen horses. She has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ed. McGuire & Quinn) and her case is examined in detail by St. John D. Seymour in Irish Witchcraft and Demonology (1913), making her one of the best-documented named cunning-women in 19th-century Irish history.