Geillis Duncan's case is the one that set the entire North Berwick witch panic in motion. Around 1589 she was working as a maidservant for David Seton, the bailie of Tranent, a role that would ordinarily have left little trace in the historical record — except that Seton grew suspicious of her, partly because of her evident skill at treating the sick, which he found unaccountable, and partly because she was repeatedly absent from the household at night without explanation he found satisfactory.
Seton had her tortured to extract the truth as he saw it: thumbscrews were applied to her fingers, and a rope was wound around her head and gradually tightened. When this failed to produce a confession, he carried out an intimate physical search for a "devil's mark," a mark supposedly given by the Devil to his followers, and claimed to find one on her throat. Combined with further sleep deprivation and isolation, this eventually broke her, and she confessed to witchcraft, going on to name somewhere between sixty and seventy other people as fellow witches — among them Agnes Sampson — and to describe, in detail that captivated her interrogators, a great gathering of witches at North Berwick Kirk on Halloween night, said to have been attended by more than two hundred people intent on working harm against the King.
Her testimony effectively created the North Berwick witch trials, dragging dozens of people into interrogation and, in several cases, execution over the following months. Duncan herself spent roughly a year imprisoned in Edinburgh's Old Tolbooth, during which King James VI, whose own conviction that witches had conspired against him hardened over the course of these trials, is recorded as visiting her in person and having her play for him on the Jew's harp — an instrument she is credited as the first named person in Britain known to have played. She eventually tried to walk back her original confession, telling those who would listen that it had been beaten and starved out of her rather than freely given, but the retraction changed nothing: she was executed on Castlehill on 4 December 1591, roughly ten months after Agnes Sampson had died at the same spot.
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