Possessed By the Devil: The History of the Islandmagee Witch Trials, 1711

County Antrim, Ireland, 1711: Eight women were put on trial accused of bewitching and demonically possessing young Mary Dunbar, amid an attack by evil spirits on the local community and after the supernatural murder of a clergyman’s wife. Mary Dunbar was the star witness in this trial, and the women were, by the standards of the time, believable witches – they dabbled in magic, they smoked, they drank, they had disabilities. A second trial targeted a final male ‘witch’ and head of the Sellor ‘witch family’.

With echoes of the Salem witch-hunt, this is a story of murder, of a community in crisis and of how the witchhunts that claimed over 50,000 lives in Europe played out on Irish shores. It plunges the reader into a world where magic was real and the power of the Devil felt, with disastrous consequences.