Witch Trial Rituals: From Historical Accusations to Horror Fiction
- Cailynn Brawffe
- Oct 20
- 6 min read
History is full of whispers about witches, but some of the loudest came from courtrooms. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, entire communities became convinced that ordinary people — often women, outsiders, or the poor — were secretly practicing dark rites. These alleged witch trial rituals weren’t just stories; they became legal evidence that sent thousands to their deaths.
What’s chilling is how many of these so-called witch trial rituals — familiars, poppets, midnight sabbats, and the Devil’s mark — survived not just in folklore, but in the pages of horror fiction.
This blog explores how historical accusations of ritual crossed over into gothic literature and modern witchy horror, showing how fear itself is the most enduring ritual of all.
The archives of Europe and colonial America are heavy with accusations of witches performing sinister practices. Whether invented, exaggerated, or misinterpreted, these witch trial rituals reveal how communities constructed fear.
Each of these witch trial rituals blurred the line between folklore and “evidence,” codifying fear into law.
The supposed witch trial rituals didn’t disappear with the end of the trials. They became raw material for horror. Writers and filmmakers borrowed directly from these accusations, reshaping them into tropes that still haunt us.
Familiars: From Salem’s yellow bird to Black Phillip in The Witch (2015).
Poppets: Pendle’s clay dolls reborn as voodoo effigies in folk horror like The Ritual.
Sabbats: German sabbat lore echoes in The Crucible and Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching, where forbidden gatherings in the woods become sites of terror.
The Devil’s Mark: Once a blemish under suspicion, now a recurring horror trope — cursed sigils, occult branding, or inherited scars (Rosemary’s Baby, A Head Full of Ghosts).
Horror thrives on these witch trial rituals because they embody a universal fear: the idea that ordinary acts (a birthmark, a gathering, a doll) can become evidence of monstrous intent.
Looking at witch trial rituals across history and fiction, a divide emerges.
In Europe: Rituals were about accusation. The act didn’t have to be real — it only had to be feared.
In Horror Fiction: Rituals often “work.” Sabbats summon, poppets harm, familiars guide. Fiction gives teeth to the accusations.
In African Contexts: Ritual is defined by intent. Ubungoma (healing/divination) is sacred, while ukuthakatha (sorcery) is destructive. Communities distinguish healers from witches, but both are bound to ritual.
The lesson is clear: whether in courtrooms, novels, or ancestral traditions, ritual is never neutral. It is a lens through which communities project their deepest anxieties.
Witch Trial Rituals in Historical Records
The archives of Europe and colonial America are heavy with accusations of witches performing sinister practices. Whether invented, exaggerated, or misinterpreted, these witch trial rituals reveal how communities constructed fear.
Scotland (1590s): Agnes Sampson confessed to bearing the “Devil’s mark” — proof of allegiance (Newes from Scotland, 1591).
Pendle (1612): Witches were accused of crafting clay poppets to curse victims: “as the pictures did waste, so did the bodies of the persons represented” (Potts, 1613).
Bamberg & Würzburg (1620s): Children were said to be carried to sabbats where they danced with the Devil and feasted on strange meat (Midelfort, 1972).
Salem (1692): Tituba’s confession described the Devil appearing “like a hog” or “a great black dog” — an early account of familiars tied to demonic pacts (Salem Witchcraft Papers).
Each of these witch trial rituals blurred the line between folklore and “evidence,” codifying fear into law.
Witch Trial Rituals in Horror Fiction
The supposed witch trial rituals didn’t disappear with the end of the trials. They became raw material for horror. Writers and filmmakers borrowed directly from these accusations, reshaping them into tropes that still haunt us.
Familiars: From Salem’s yellow bird to Black Phillip in The Witch (2015).
Poppets: Pendle’s clay dolls reborn as voodoo effigies in folk horror like The Ritual.
Sabbats: German sabbat lore echoes in The Crucible and Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching, where forbidden gatherings in the woods become sites of terror.
The Devil’s Mark: Once a blemish under suspicion, now a recurring horror trope — cursed sigils, occult branding, or inherited scars (Rosemary’s Baby, A Head Full of Ghosts).
Horror thrives on these witch trial rituals because they embody a universal fear: the idea that ordinary acts (a birthmark, a gathering, a doll) can become evidence of monstrous intent.
Power, Fear, and the Ritual Divide
Looking at witch trial rituals across history and fiction, a divide emerges.
In Europe: Rituals were about accusation. The act didn’t have to be real — it only had to be feared.
In Horror Fiction: Rituals often “work.” Sabbats summon, poppets harm, familiars guide. Fiction gives teeth to the accusations.
In African Contexts: Ritual is defined by intent. Ubungoma (healing/divination) is sacred, while ukuthakatha (sorcery) is destructive. Communities distinguish healers from witches, but both are bound to ritual.
Witch Trial Rituals and The Girl Who Knew The Medicine
When I began writing The Girl Who Knew The Medicine, I wasn’t just thinking about witches in the abstract. I was thinking about how witch trial rituals — whether whispered in a 1600s European courtroom or feared in African communities — still echo in our lives today.
The idea first took root after I read a Daily Maverick article about occult gangs in South Africa. These groups weren’t the witches of fairy tales, but they were feared for the same reasons: rituals that blurred the line between faith and menace. Blood oaths. Inverted crosses. Traditional muti twisted into weapons. In those stories, I saw a mirror of the European accusations: different details, same fear.
That fear felt familiar. It reminded me of my own high school years, when a conservative environment could turn difference into suspicion. Being quiet, being outspoken, being too much or not enough — all of it could make you a target. And I thought: what if I dropped the hysteria of the 1600s into the hallways of a South African school? What if accusation itself became a kind of ritual, repeated until it felt like truth?
Like the historical records of witch trial rituals, my novel is obsessed with the tension between sacred and profane. In Nguni traditions, ubungoma — the calling of the izangoma (diviners) — is a sacred gift. But when fear creeps in, that same calling can be rebranded as ukuthakatha, the dark sorcery of the umthakathi. Communities decide which side of the line you fall on. Sometimes, that decision has nothing to do with truth.
In The Girl Who Knew The Medicine, rituals aren’t just background details. They are battlegrounds. A whispered chant can carry as much power as a curse. A branded symbol on a desk can be both prank and prophecy. A story passed between classmates can shift reputations, turning a girl into a witch before she’s even spoken.
That’s the legacy of witch trial rituals: they don’t need to be real to be deadly. The fear is the ritual. The repetition of accusation, the communal retelling of suspicion, the way a community names someone “witch” until she begins to wonder if they’re right.
My novel grew out of that space — where belief becomes fear, and fear becomes power. And like the witch trial records, it asks a haunting question: who is truly dangerous, the one accused of ritual… or the ones who make the accusation?
The Ritual That Never Ends
From Salem to South Africa, the history of witch trial rituals shows us how fear itself becomes a practice. Communities once believed in sabbats under the moonlight, clay dolls that drained life, and Devil’s marks carved into skin.
Horror fiction gave those accusations teeth, turning them into real curses, real gatherings, real horrors on the page. And yet, the heart of it never changed. The rituals weren’t just about spells — they were about control. About who holds power, and who is stripped of it.
That’s what drew me into writing The Girl Who Knew The Medicine. Like Henderson’s The Year of the Witching or the stories of Salem, it lives in the space where belief collides with fear. Where a ritual can be sacred or profane depending on who is telling the story.
Where a girl can be chosen by ancestors or cursed by her community — sometimes both at once.
The scariest part of witch trial rituals isn’t whether they worked. It’s how quickly people agreed they did. How easily a rumour hardened into evidence, how often the accusation itself was repeated like liturgy until it became a death sentence.
So here’s the question I’ll leave you with: if you lived then, would you be the accused… or the accuser? And if you read now, would you dare to step into a world where every ritual might be a curse, and every story might make you a witch?
Comments