Crucuble of the cursed

housing scheme.

The town will celebrate its 25th birthday this year. It would seem the last place one would expect to find tales of demonic possession, brutal tortures and men being bitten by Satan in dark country lanes.

But during 1696 and 1697, the area was scoured by Scotland's last great witch-hunt, which ended with seven people being condemned to death. In the seventeenth century, the Devil was as much a reality to most people as their next-door neighbour, and the fear of damnation had a powerful hold on Christian souls.

In those days, most people lived in small rural communities. Renfrewshire itself was a fertile expanse of green fields, cut by the glittering waters of the rivers Cart and Gryffe and bordered by the Clyde to the north. The Clyde itself was still shallow enough in places to be forded as far downstream as Erskine itself.

The area was owned by various landlords. One such man was the laird of Bargarran, John Shaw. Shaw's family had lived in the Erskine area for 300 years, and he was the ninth to hold the name of laird. In the census of 1695, it was recorded that Shaw was married with five children, a sixth being born the following year.

In August 1696, one of Shaw's servants unwittingly began the events which were to give Erskine such notoriety throughout Scotland. A young Highlander named Katherine Campbell was seen by Shaw's 12-year-old daughter Christian stealing some milk from the kitchen. When Christian told her mother, Campbell three times screamed at the girl: ``The Devil harle your soul through hell.''

The Presbytery records of April seventeenth, 1697, describe Campbell as a ``young woman of proud and revengeful nature, and much addicted to cursing and swearing upon any like occasion.'' What is likely is that Campbell, being used to the more relaxed laws of the Highlands, did not realise the seriousness of what she was doing.

Soon after, however, Christian became ill and was seized by fits and deliriums. Rumours began to circulate that the child was possessed by the Devil. During one fit she cried out that Campbell and a neighbour, Agnes Naismith, were cutting her body with knives.

Over the following weeks, Christian was said to have vomited up a huge quantity of hair, straw, pins, feathers, bones, dung, hay, and coal cinders. She allegedly rose from her bed, and floated around the house, crying out that she was being carried by invisible witches.

The laird of Bargarran and his wife took Christian to the prominent physician, Doctor Brisbane in Glasgow. Brisbane later attested: ``I could hardly be persuaded there was any real need for me, or any man of my profession; the child appeared brisk and vigorous in motion, in a word to every outward appearance, every way healthful.

Brisbane was at first unconvinced by the fits and seizures, but admitted the regurgitation puzzled him. He wrote: ``Were it not for the hair, straw, hay and other things contrary to human nature, I should not despair to reduce all the other symptoms to their proper classes in the catalogue of human diseases.'' The family, urged on by the local minister, the Reverend Andrew Turner, prayed to help drive the evil spirits away from their daughter.

Turner informed the Presbytery of events. Contemporary minutes record the discussions. Christian is described as ``frequently seized by strange fits, sometimes blind, sometimes deaf and dumb, the several parts of her body violently extended and at other times violently contracted, and ordinarily much tormented in various parts of the body, which is attended by a unaccountable palpitation in those parts that are pained . . .''

The members of the Presbytery were shocked. They were used to hearing about minor cases of tricksters and charmers, but this was different; a wealthy landowner's daughter was involved. Word eventually reached the ears of the minister at Paisley Abbey, the Rev Mr Blackwell.

Blackwell had been appointed to the ministry of Paisley in 1694 with an eminent reputation as an efficient witch- finder. Wherever he was sent, he always uncovered the work of the Devil so efficiently that, after he left, there was no sign of it again.

At Blackwell's insistence, the church decided the time had come to take a stand against Satan. Two members of the Presbytery were sent to Edinburgh to gain a Royal Commission to investigate the case. This was granted. Three local ministers, including Turner and Blackwell, were appointed to wait on the Commission when it met at Renfrew on February 5, 1697.

Katherine Campbell and Agnes Naismith had already been taken into custody. Between February 5 and 17, they arrested two local farmers, James and Thomas Lindsay and Elizabeth Anderson, the granddaughter of a local ``woman of ill repute,'' Margaret Fulton. Under torture, they confessed and in turn accused others. Altogether, 21 people were denounced by Christian in person and many more were rounded up for questioning.

Permission was granted to set up a trial. By the time the Judges arrived, the area was living not only in fear of the Devil, but of Christian's denouncements. The Judges and members of the Presbytery appointed to assist them issued a manifesto throughout the area. With typical vehemence, it told how the forces of light and darkness had met in battle among the orchards and fields of Renfrewshire. The events, they said, were ``great evidence of the Lord's displeasure, being provoked at the sins of the land . . . so to let Satan loose among us.''

A day was to be set aside for abject prayer and fasting to appease God. Meanwhile, Mr Blackwell mounted the pulpit at Paisley Abbey and delivered a particularly fiery sermon in which he made plain that the battle lines were being drawn.

``My friends,'' he told a packed congregation, ``we have been teaching of Christ to you; we are now going to speak of the Devil to you. The thing I am about to intimate to you is this - the members of the Presbytery having taken into consideration how much Satan doth rage in these bounds and have thought fit to appoint a day of solemn fasting and humiliation, so that He who is the Lion of the tribe of Judah may appear with power against him and come out in great wrath. O, that it may be because his time is short!''

Blackwell ominously declared that nobody was above suspicion. He called on his colleagues and all right-thinking Christians to seek out the guilty, wherever they were hiding. Spurred by such displays of fervour, the witch- hunt reached new levels of hysteria.

Confessions were forced from the accused. It was commonly believed the Devil would leave his mark on the body of those in his employment. This mark was supposedly impervious to pain, but was often hidden beneath the skin. In order to find it, the services of the Witch Pricker were enlisted. Their job was to stab the accused with iron needles, sometimes up to six inches long, until they found a spot which elicited no reaction from the victim.

John Reid, a blacksmith from Inchinnan, ``confessed'' that a year previous to his arrest he had met Satan in the guise of a tall black man on a dark lane. Over the coming weeks, Reid said he met the Devil on a further two occasions, on the first of which he was bitten on the loin. The pain was so intense that when the Devil appeared two weeks later and offered to cure it he immediately agreed on the condition that he would join the Devil's service.

Reid claimed that he had attended several meetings of the witches where they denounced Christian Shaw. Each time the witches were summoned by a large black dog with a chain around its neck, supposedly a hound sent by Satan himself. Each meeting ended with a meal of human flesh, thus ensuring their loyalty to Satan. Reid said he refused to eat, enabling him to later renounce his master.

Another accused was Margaret Lang. Lang was the local midwife, and could often be seen around the parish calling at homes to inquire after the health of children she had helped deliver. Mr Turner was by now becoming worried that things were going too far. When it was plain that Lang was a suspect, he urged her to leave the county, but she refused. Soon after she too was arrested.

The trial itself was a judicial travesty. A minister of the Presbytery, Mr Hutcheson, was entreated to deliver a sermon to the Judges beforehand. He chose as his sermon ``Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live.''

The trial heard of black dogs, of dark men, of mysterious firelit covens. Elizabeth Anderson told the judges how her father, Alexander, had taken her to a gathering in Bargarran orchard, where she was introduced to the Devil. Fourteen-year-old James Lindsay described how the witches, led by Alexander Anderson and Margaret Lang, strangled a baby with a silken cord.

The result was a foregone conclusion. Once the evidence of the ``insensible mark'' was discovered, the accused had no hope of acquittal. The advocate for the prosecution further influenced the jurors by telling them acquittal would place their own souls in danger of damnation. If they found the prisoners not guilty, he said, ``they would be accesssory to all the blasphemies, apostasies, murders, and seductions whereof these enemies of heaven and earth should thereafter be found guilty.''

Seven of the accused were convicted and condemned to be executed on the Gallows Green in Paisley. John Reid was confined in the Renfrew Tollbooth the night before the sentences were due to be carried out.

The next morning he was found dead, hanging from a small stick jammed into a cleft in the chimney. Some said that the devil had come to claim his revenge for his subject's betrayal.

A huge crowd gathered on the Gallow Green in Paisley on the day of the executions. News of the trial spread far across the countryside, and there was an atmosphere resembling market day in the town that June morning.

The accused were led to the scaffold and hanged, slowly strangling as they were hoisted up. Katherine Campbell protested her innocence right to the end, and struggled fiercely as the rope was placed round her neck. There were murmurs of discontent from the crowd as she writhed on the end of the rope.

Before they died they were cut down, and dragged to a large bonfire burning nearby. The flames were doused in tar to make them burn more fiercely. There the still living bodies of the Bargarran witches were thrown to be consumed by the fire, their ashes buried at a crossroads in Paisley.

In 1971 the first tenants moved into the new scheme at Erskine, the green fields, carefully planted floral borders and countless sapling trees an antidote to the tenements and housing estates of Greater Glasgow. With a view to lending the place some historical credibility, the planners chose names from the past for the networks of new streets.

The first area to be built was called Bargarran, after the old estate. Next to a shopping centre where surly youths hang around day and night is a collection of flats, named Shaw Court, filled with elderly people. Considering the unusual nature of Christian Shaw's childhood, it is also perhaps strange that the local nursery school bears her family's name.

The fields and lanes of old Erskine have since vanished under the bulldozer and housing estate. Even Bargarran House, where Christian is supposed to have flown around the room and vomited barnyard rubbish, has long gone. All that remains from that time are a few crumbling dry stone dikes and a couple of old ruins.

But among the council houses in Semphill Avenue stands an ancient and imposing oak tree. Its base is usually cluttered with children's toys, pushchairs and bicycles. There isn't anything to suggest that the tree had anything to do with the events of 1696 and 1697, but Erskine children have passed the events into local folklore. To them it's the Witch's Tree, the only lasting reminder of an event rooted in zealotry and suspicion.