In the rolling countryside of sixteenth-century Ayrshire, Scotland, lived a woman named Bessie Dunlop. She wasn’t wealthy or powerful, and there was nothing about her position in society that should have ensured anyone remembered her nearly 450 years later. She was the wife of a farmer or herdsman, living an ordinary rural life in a world where illness could arrive without explanation, livestock could suddenly die and crops could fail without warning. It was also a world in which folklore, religion, traditional healing and belief in supernatural beings frequently existed side by side.
Over time, Bessie developed a remarkable reputation. People began seeking her out because she appeared able to heal illnesses, locate missing or stolen objects and sometimes predict whether a sick person would recover or die. To the people who came looking for her help, she possessed knowledge that others didn’t. Bessie, however, claimed the knowledge wasn’t entirely her own. According to the extraordinary testimony she would later give during her witchcraft trial, her abilities came from a mysterious supernatural figure connected to the fairy realm.
Bessie said everything began during an extremely difficult period in her life. Her husband and child were ill, and her livestock were also suffering. While walking near her home in Ayrshire, she encountered a mysterious man named Thom Reid. Bessie apparently recognized the name because Thom had once been a real man who had died years earlier. Yet here he was, standing before her and speaking to her as though death had merely taken him somewhere else.
According to Bessie, Thom explained that after his death he had entered the service of the Queen of Elphame, essentially the Queen of Fairyland. Belief in fairies was deeply embedded in Scottish folklore, although the fairies described in older traditions were not necessarily the tiny, winged creatures familiar from children’s stories today. They could be powerful, unpredictable supernatural beings associated with hidden places, the dead and an otherworld believed to exist alongside the human one.
Thom offered Bessie his assistance and allegedly promised that she could receive knowledge and abilities that would allow her to help other people. There was, however, a troubling condition. According to Bessie’s later testimony, Thom repeatedly encouraged her to renounce Christianity. Bessie insisted that she refused. This detail would eventually become important because she consistently denied making the kind of pact with the Devil that authorities associated with witchcraft. Whatever Thom Reid was, Bessie apparently did not believe he was Satan.
Despite her refusal, the encounters supposedly continued. Bessie said Thom taught her about illnesses and remedies, and she began using herbs and traditional treatments to help people in her community. She also claimed that Thom sometimes provided information about whether a person could be cured. If someone came to her desperately hoping that an ill relative would survive, Bessie might provide an answer based on what she said Thom had told her.
Her reputation grew. People sought her help when someone was sick, when livestock were suffering or when something valuable had disappeared. Bessie claimed that when she successfully located stolen property, it was because Thom had revealed information to her. In effect, she described herself not so much as someone independently performing magic, but as an intermediary between the ordinary world and an invisible supernatural one.
Bessie also described encounters with other strange beings. On one occasion, she reportedly encountered Thom accompanied by a group of mysterious people who appeared well dressed and respectable. Thom identified them as “good wights,” supernatural beings associated with the fairy world. Bessie spoke about these encounters with striking matter-of-factness. To her, at least according to the surviving testimony, these were not stories she was inventing for entertainment. She described them as experiences that had genuinely happened to her.
Unfortunately for Bessie, Scotland was becoming an increasingly dangerous place for anyone reputed to possess supernatural abilities. The Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563 had made witchcraft and consultation with witches serious crimes punishable by death. Religious authorities increasingly viewed supernatural practices outside accepted Christianity as evidence of demonic influence. A village healer claiming to communicate with a dead man who served the Queen of Fairyland was therefore attracting precisely the kind of attention that could prove fatal.
In 1576, Bessie was arrested and interrogated. Her healings, predictions, ability to locate missing property and especially her relationship with Thom Reid became evidence against her. Authorities questioned where her abilities came from, and Bessie’s insistence that she received information from a supernatural man connected to Fairyland did little to improve her situation.
The problem was that Bessie and her interrogators appear to have interpreted the same supernatural world very differently. Bessie apparently understood Thom and the other beings she encountered through traditional Scottish beliefs about fairies and spirits. Church authorities increasingly interpreted such beings as demons. From their perspective, something presenting itself as a fairy could simply be the Devil or one of his servants wearing another disguise.
Bessie continued to insist that she had resisted Thom when he asked her to abandon her Christian faith. Nevertheless, everything that had once made people seek her help could now be presented as evidence against her. Her knowledge of herbal remedies became suspicious. Her ability to predict the outcome of illnesses became suspicious. Finding stolen property became suspicious. Even the mysterious fairy beings she described became evidence that she had communicated with forbidden supernatural forces.
Eventually, Bessie Dunlop was charged with witchcraft and sorcery. On November 8, 1576, she was convicted and sentenced to death. She was strangled and her body was burned at the stake in Edinburgh, bringing a brutal end to the life of a woman whose neighbours had once approached her precisely because they believed she could help them.
Yet there is a strange irony in what happened to Bessie. The authorities who wanted to condemn her also preserved her story. Because her testimony was recorded, historians centuries later have been able to examine her remarkable descriptions of Thom Reid, the Queen of Elphame and the supernatural world she believed existed alongside her own.
There are many possible ways to interpret Bessie’s experiences today. Perhaps she genuinely believed she was communicating with the spirit of Thom Reid. Grief, dreams, visions or other unusual experiences could easily have been understood as supernatural encounters in sixteenth-century Scotland. It is also possible that Thom became a way for Bessie to explain knowledge she had accumulated herself through years of observing illness, traditional remedies and the natural world. A woman with considerable practical knowledge but little formal authority might have found it easier to attribute that knowledge to a supernatural source.
Another fascinating possibility is that Bessie’s testimony preserves traces of much older Scottish beliefs about fairies, spirits and the dead. Historians studying European witch trials have noticed that some accused witches described experiences that bear little resemblance to the stereotypical image of Devil worship. Instead, they spoke of fairy queens, spirits, mysterious nighttime gatherings, supernatural guides and journeys into another realm. Bessie’s account fits remarkably well within that older tradition.
Whether Bessie ever truly encountered something supernatural is a question history can never answer. What we do know is that people sought her out because they believed she could help them. She treated illnesses, searched for missing possessions and offered reassurance or answers during frightening moments when ordinary life provided none. She became known not because she harmed her neighbours, but because many of them believed she possessed an extraordinary ability to help them.
In the end, those abilities became her undoing. The same reputation that brought desperate neighbours to Bessie’s door eventually brought authorities there as well. Her world of herbs, healing, spirits and fairies collided with a religious and legal system increasingly determined to interpret supernatural practices as witchcraft.
Nearly 450 years later, there is something almost haunting about the fact that Bessie Dunlop is still remembered. The officials who questioned her and many of the people who condemned her have largely faded from popular memory, yet the story of the healer from Ayrshire survived.
And so did Thom Reid.
Whether he was a spirit, a fairy messenger, a vision, a creation of Bessie’s imagination or simply the name she gave to knowledge she could not otherwise explain, he became part of one of Scotland’s most fascinating witch-trial stories.
Bessie Dunlop died because the people judging her feared the world she claimed to see. But centuries later, it is that very world the mysterious Queen of Elphame, the good wights travelling through the countryside and the dead man who supposedly returned from Fairyland that ensures her story is still being told.
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