Her father Donald Reoch was a piper to the Earl of Caithness. After she bore an illegitimate child she claimed she could not speak, and her brother is said to have tried to cure her by violence. In Orkney she wandered and made her living through clairvoyance. The Orkney folklorist Ernest Marwick called her harmless, with nomadic tendencies.
She said she used the herb melefour, yarrow, plucking petals while chanting Latin phrases, to cure illness. She claimed second sight and said she had foreseen men with ropes round their necks.
On 12 March 1616 she was charged with witchcraft and with deceiving islanders by pretending to be mute. She confessed to meetings with a fairy man, said to have started from the age of about twelve. Court clerks of the period often turned a fairy in a confession into the Devil, and that happened here. She was found guilty, strangled, and her body burned the same afternoon.
The trial took place under Bishop James Law. Her case is in the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database and a later scholarly rewriting of the trial exists.
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