The evidence given to prove that she was a witch was embodied in a narrative deposed to by Mr. Pool, a servant and officer in the court to Judge Archer, then Judge of Assizes at Taunton.
"The first witness was a huntsman, who swore that he went out with a pack of hounds to hunt a hare, and not far from Julian Cox her house, he at last started a hare. The dogs hunted her very close, and the third ring hunted her in view, till at last the huntsman perceiving the hare almost spent, and making toward a great bush he ran on the other side of the bush to take her up, and preserve her from the dogs. But as soon as he laid hands on her, it proved to be Julian Cox, who had her head grovelling on the ground and her globes (as he expressed it) upward. He knowing her, was so affrighted that his hair on his head stood on end, and yet spake to her and asked her what brought her there; but she was so far out of breath, that she could not make him any answer. His dogs also came up with full cry to recover the game and smelt at her, and so left off hunting any farther. And the huntsman went home presently, sadly affrighted."[65]
In a report dated in the latter half of the nineteenth century on the state of the county prison at Dingwall, a statement was made by a fisherman who was imprisoned for assaulting a woman of sixty, whom he accused of bewitching everything he had. She prevented him from catching fish and caused his boat to upset. The other fishermen then refused to work with him as a companion. "She is known in all the neighbourhood to be a witch," he deposed. "She has been seen a hundred times milking the cows in the shape of a hare, though I never saw her do it myself."
"People believe that if anyone gets blood from a witch she can do them no more harm, and that is the reason I cut her with a knife, so that it might go into her as short a way as possible. All I wanted was to get blood," was his quaint way of putting it.
The hare has always been closely associated with witches, and for this reason seems to be of evil augury, though in some parts of the country its foot, and sometimes its head, are used as a protection against sorcery, perhaps on the homeopathic principle.
The cat runs the hare very close in its association with witches, and is a handy animal for transformation purposes, being so frequently met with in this country.
One of the most celebrated Scottish witch-cat trials took place at Caithness when Margaret Nin-Gilbert was interrogated on February 8, 1719, by William Innes, minister of Thurso, and confessed that she was travelling one evening when she was met by the devil in the likeness of a man who "engaged her to take on with him," which she agreed to do. From that time she became familiar with him, and sometimes he appeared to her in the likeness of a huge black horse, sometimes riding a horse, sometimes like a black cloud, and again in the shape of a black hen. She apparently obtained the powers of a witch with the help of this apparition, and the use she made of them appears in the following story told by one William Montgomery, a mason, whose house was invaded by cats in such numbers that his wife and maidservant could not endure to remain in the place.
One night on Montgomery's return he found five cats by the fireside, and the servant told him they were "speaking among themselves."
The cat-witch on the preceding November 28 had climbed in at a hole in a chest, and Montgomery watched his opportunity, intending to cut off her head when she should put it out of the hole. "Having fastened my sword on her neck," he continues, "which cut her, nor could I hold her; having (at length) opened the chest, my servant, William Geddes, having fixed my durk in her hinder quarters by which stroke she was fastened to the chest; yet after all she escaped out of the chest with the durk in her hinder quarter, which continued there till I thought, by many strokes, I had killed her with my sword; and having cast her out dead, she could not be found next morning." Four or five nights after, the servant cried out that the cats had come again, and Montgomery "wrapped his plaid about the cat and thrust the durk through her body, and having fixed the durk in the ground, I drove at her head with the back of an axe until she was dead, and being cast out could not be found next morning."
He further declared that no drop of blood came from the cats, also that they did not belong to anyone in the neighbourhood, although one night he saw eight of them and took this to be witchcraft for certain.