The tall stump of a windmill on the western edge of Castletown was known locally as the Witches Mill long before anyone put witches in it. Cecil Williamson bought the derelict building in 1948 with the idea of opening a museum of folklore and witchcraft, and on his wife's advice added a restaurant next door called the Witches Kitchen. The museum opened in 1951 as the Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft, timed to follow the repeal of the old Witchcraft Act that June.
Williamson recruited Gerald Gardner, a retired civil servant who had joined a coven in the New Forest and was then working with a group at Bricket Wood in Hertfordshire. Gardner came to Castletown as the museum's resident witch and performed a ritual at the opening. The arrangement suited both men. Williamson got publicity, and Gardner got a public platform for the religion he was building, a safe distance from his coven.
They did not stay friends. Gardner disliked what he saw as Williamson's sensational displays, and in 1954 he bought the museum outright and renamed it the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft. He lived on the island and ran it until he died in 1964. His heir, Monique Wilson, kept it going briefly before the collection was sold to Ripley's, which showed it in the United States in the 1970s before dispersing it.
For about twenty years, then, a Castletown windmill was one of the main places where modern Wicca was put in front of the public. Nothing supernatural is claimed for the site itself. It earns its place here as the Isle of Man's link to the twentieth-century witchcraft revival, in a town where a mother and son had been burned as witches three centuries earlier.
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