Witchcraft and Superstitious Record in the South-Western District of Scotland

This is a painstaking 18th-century record of the supernatural beliefs that governed everyday life in Dumfriesshire and Galloway. Maxwell Wood gathered accounts of witchcraft trials, fairy encounters, death warnings, and haunted dwellings, preserving a world where the boundary between the rational and the uncanny was thin as gossamer. The text documents how witchcraft was understood not as isolated superstition but as a kind of secret society with its own rituals, gatherings, and alleged powers to reshape reality through malevolent magic. It also captures the broader web of folk belief: the brownies who haunted farmhouses, the wraiths that foretold death, and the ghostly portents that villagers read as literal warnings. What elevates this beyond mere antiquarian curiosity is its implicit argument: that superstition was not peripheral but foundational to how people organized their understanding of illness, misfortune, and mortality. The author presents his material without much analysis, letting the accounts speak for themselves, which gives the text an eerie neutrality. For readers interested in the history of belief, the persistence of folk religion in early modern Scotland, or the texture of a world where fairies and witches were taken seriously by educated and uneducated alike, this remains a remarkable primary document.