Forced Confessions: Torture, Terror & the Birth of Witch Lore

How Pain Crafted the Mythology of the Witch

“Pain is truth,” the inquisitors claimed — but the truth shaped by torture is not truth at all. It is a story carved into flesh.

By the late fifteenth century, Europe entered a judicial darkness where confession became the only proof that mattered. Guided by demonological texts such as the Malleus Maleficarum and inflamed by sermons, pamphlets, and political anxieties, courts embraced a chilling premise: the accused was guilty unless they could prove innocence. And innocence, they believed, could only be established by confession — painfully extracted if necessary.

In this world, silence was treated as defiance, and endurance under agony was interpreted as the Devil’s strength. What followed was not justice but storycraft by force, shaping the mythology of the witch through screams in stone chambers lit by torches and iron.

Torture Becomes Law

Across Europe, witchcraft was legally classified as a crimen exceptum — an exceptional crime threatening the survival of Christendom, justifying exceptional measures.^[1] Courts adopted an escalating system of torture, believing that truth required pain.

Magistrates entered interrogation rooms with questions formed in advance, expecting the same script everywhere they turned:

A pact signed with the Devil
Flight to night vigils or Sabbaths
Familiars or demons offered as servants
Desecration of the sacrament
Storms conjured and infants cursed

Under sufficient agony, most victims eventually spoke the answers interrogators sought. Their forced confessions became “evidence”, reinforcing expectations in future trials and codifying myth into something that looked like historical fact.

Tools of Terror

Though methods varied across regions, the machinery of torture remained brutally consistent:

The Strappado — victims hoisted by ropes tied behind their back until shoulders dislocated
Thumbscrews — metal screws grinding bone and nerve
The Boot — splintering shins between crushing boards
The Witch’s Bridle — iron muzzle barbed with spikes driven into tongue and cheeks
Sleep Deprivation — days without rest, hallucination replacing reality
Ice and Cold Cells — freezing floors where prisoners were left naked for nights

Each device extracted not truth, but compliance — and from compliance, belief.

Individual Voices from the Darkness

Agnes Sampson — The Wise Wife of Keith

North Berwick Witch Trials, Scotland — 1590

Before her arrest, Agnes Sampson was known throughout her community as “the Wise Wife of Keith” — a respected midwife, herbal healer, and quiet counselor. Women trusted her hands during childbirth; neighbors sought her remedies for fevers and sleeplessness. She belonged to the tradition of cunning folk: healers who used plant knowledge and prayer, not sorcery.

Her downfall began far beyond her village. In 1589–90, violent storms battered the North Sea, delaying the voyage of King James VI and his new queen, Anne of Denmark. Terrified courtiers whispered of witchcraft. Under pressure, confessions extracted from earlier prisoners pointed to a wide conspiracy — and Agnes’s name was forced into the web.^[2]

She was dragged to Holyrood Palace before a crowd eager for spectacle. Stripped naked, her hair shaved, she knelt on cold stone while officials searched for the Devil’s mark, probing every crease of skin. When she refused to confess, they forced her into the witch’s bridle — an iron cage around her head with spikes driven into her mouth and cheeks, tearing flesh with every breath. She was denied sleep, warmth, light, and water.

After days of torment, delirious and trembling, she broke. She confessed to everything they demanded: raising storms, meeting Satan in person, kissing his body, convening at night gatherings, and plotting against the king. Her words matched exactly the fears that had preceded her arrest.

When she later recanted, speaking through blood-cracked lips, the court declared it proof of Satan’s renewed influence. She was strangled at the stake before her body was burned to ash.

The myth of storm-summoning witches was born not from reality, but from the agony of a midwife who had healed far more lives than she ever harmed.

Johannes Junius — The Letter in Chains

Bamberg Witch Trials, Germany — 1628

Unlike many accused, Johannes Junius was not a poor woman with little power. He was the mayor of Bamberg — proof that panic, once unleashed, could consume even the highborn.

The Bamberg trials were a frenzy of paranoia: hundreds accused, tortured, and burned in a matter of months. Junius was arrested after another prisoner, broken under torture, named him among supposed conspirators. From the moment he entered the stone chamber beneath the council hall, his fate was sealed.^[3]

He was subjected to the strappado, his arms pulled behind his back and hoisted until his shoulders tore from their sockets. When he refused to confess, they tightened thumbscrews until his fingers shattered. They demanded details — demons’ names, flying beasts, Sabbaths, pacts — supplying suggestions when he hesitated.

After days of agony, he confessed to everything they required: flying on a black horse, kissing the Devil, renouncing Christ, attending Sabbaths. His words were recorded as solemn truth.

But in the darkness of his cell, he managed to write a letter to his daughter Veronica — trembling, smuggled with help from a sympathetic guard:

“Dear child, I must say that which is not true. They never stop the torture until one confesses something. I would have confessed to killing all the princes in the Empire rather than endure that pain. It is all a lie.”

He signed it with a hand broken by iron.

The court ignored his final testimony. He was executed, and his forced confession remained as official history, while his letter survived only as a fragile whisper from the edge of death.

Anna Göldi — The Last to Die

Glarus, Switzerland — 1782

More than a century after the great panics had subsided, the persecution continued in shadows. Anna Göldi, a domestic servant, was accused after her employer claimed his child coughed pins and needles — a bizarre story rooted in fear, not evidence.^[4] Though the trial was disguised as a criminal poisoning case to avoid public shame in an age increasingly skeptical of witchcraft, her interrogators insisted upon diabolic influence.

She was subjected to weeks of psychological torment, isolation, cold, and relentless pressure to confess. Exhausted, she broke — admitting to dark forces she had never touched.

She was executed by sword — called merciful — and her death was recorded as justice.

Centuries later, Switzerland formally exonerated her, acknowledging what history had always known: she was murdered to protect the powerful.

A Judicial Performance

Torture transformed interrogation into theater. Interrogators entered chambers convinced of guilt, armed with scripts based on earlier confessions — themselves born under torture. Victims repeated the stories demanded of them because resistance meant agony without end.

The court records preserved these words as sworn truth. Pamphlets, ballads, and sermons spread them across Europe. What began as pain became belief. Belief became law. Law became execution.

And so fiction became folklore — and folklore became history.

Echoes in the Silence

When the chambers finally stilled, nothing remained but echoes: the soft gasp after screaming, the hollow quiet after a struggle ends. The voices of the accused — the real voices — were buried beneath forced testimony.

What history remembers as witchcraft was not born from moonlit rituals or satanic pacts but from the choreography of torture.

The cries forged the legends.
The legends justified the executions.
And the executions cemented the myth.

Toward the Dark Hills of Pendle

By the early seventeenth century, the machinery of persecution was fully assembled. Torture had created precedent; precedent had become law; and law had reshaped belief.

In the rolling green valleys of Lancashire, a single accusation — spoken by a child — would ignite one of the most infamous witch trials in British history. This time, iron would not be the primary instrument of destruction. Words alone would be enough. Suspicion, rivalry, poverty, and fear would tear a community apart.

The age of mass trials was beginning.

Next in the Timeline

The Pendle Witches & the Witchfinder

A story of voices sharpened by desperation rather than stretched by iron…

Footnotes

On torture, crimen exceptum, and early modern witchcraft law, see Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. ↩
For Agnes Sampson and the North Berwick trials, see Lawrence Normand & Gareth Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland. ↩
The letter of Johannes Junius appears in several collections, including translations in works on the Bamberg witch trials and German witch-hunting. ↩
On Anna Göldi and her posthumous exoneration, see the research associated with the Anna Göldi Foundation and modern Swiss legal reviews of the case. ↩

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