The Real Witches of MacBeth

Summary

The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told
Episode: The Real Witches of MacBeth
Host: Mary Kay McBrayer
Release Date: May 6, 2025

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Introduction

In the gripping episode titled "The Real Witches of MacBeth," hosted by true crime writer Mary Kay McBrayer, listeners are transported to the dark and mysterious Scottish Highlands to uncover the true story behind the infamous witches portrayed in William Shakespeare's Macbeth. McBrayer delves deep into historical records, folklore, and her personal research to shed light on the real-life counterparts of these legendary figures.

Mary Kay McBrayer [02:12]: "When Shakespeare went to Scotland and heard this story, he definitely heard it from people who believed that."

Historical Context

McBrayer begins by setting the stage in the 10th century Scotland, a time when belief in witchcraft and supernatural beings was a societal norm. She emphasizes that witchcraft was not merely a mythical concept but a tangible reality for the people of that era.

Mary Kay McBrayer [15:45]: "Witchcraft was real. That was never a consideration. The trials were to determine whether you had committed witchcraft."

This firmly establishes the backdrop against which King Duff ruled and the subsequent witch trials that would shape the narrative of Macbeth.

King Duff and the Witch Hunts

Central to the episode is the figure of King Duff, the ruler of the Scots from 962 to 967. McBrayer explores King Duff's reign, highlighting his inheritance of the throne following his father's death in battle against Viking invaders. The historical King Duff differed significantly from Shakespeare's portrayal, being a respected monarch until his untimely illness.

Mary Kay McBrayer [14:47]: "I do remember learning that King Macbeth was a real person. Or at least that character was loosely based on the folklore of a Scottish king from the Dark Ages."

King Duff's mysterious sickness led him to believe that witchcraft was to blame, setting the stage for the arrest and eventual execution of three women accused of witchcraft and attempted assassination.

Execution of the Witches

The heart of the episode revolves around the brutal execution of the accused witches. McBrayer provides a harrowing account of their capture, torture, and demise. The women were found near Fares, engaged in a ritualistic act of melting a wax effigy of the king—a clear indication of their supposed malevolent intentions.

Mary Kay McBrayer [18:30]: "Each woman was forced into a herring barrel... and they did it with nails that were far too long for their purpose. Essentially, they created an iron maiden inside each barrel."

The execution was particularly gruesome, involving the burning of the women inside barrel contraptions, leading to their complete dismemberment. This act wasn't just a punishment but served as a grim warning to others who might dare to challenge the crown.

Aftermath and Lore of the Boulders

Post-execution, the episode transitions to the lingering legends surrounding the physical sites of the atrocities. McBrayer discusses three significant boulders that mark the locations where the witches met their fate. Each boulder holds its own story, with one remaining untouched, another partly destroyed, and the third forever split yet preserved.

Mary Kay McBrayer [29:10]: "One of them disappeared. The second of them seems to have never been moved... The third boulder rests half in Victoria Road in Fares."

These monuments not only serve as historical markers but also as cultural touchstones that continue to evoke awe and fear, reinforcing the pervasive belief in witchcraft that once dominated Scottish society.

Conclusion

In wrapping up the episode, McBrayer reflects on the intersection of history, myth, and true crime. She underscores the importance of understanding the real events that inspired Shakespeare's work, highlighting how societal fears and superstitions of the past can shape enduring legends.

Mary Kay McBrayer [32:50]: "What our story illustrates is how intertwined society, justice, and the human psyche are, especially when influenced by fear and misunderstanding."

She invites listeners to explore further, encouraging engagement and discussion for those who seek a deeper understanding of this dark chapter in history.

Notable Quotes

• Mary Kay McBrayer [02:12]: "The trope of Three Witches is ubiquitous throughout history and popular culture... Shakespeare's weird sisters just happen to be the most iconic, or at least my personal favorite, trio of magical women."

• Mary Kay McBrayer [15:45]: "The trials were not to determine whether witchcraft was real. Witchcraft was real."

• Mary Kay McBrayer [18:30]: "Each woman was forced into a herring barrel... Essentially, they created an iron maiden inside each barrel."

• Mary Kay McBrayer [29:10]: "The stones were not disturbed by its paving. There's actually a retaining wall over this marker."

• Mary Kay McBrayer [32:50]: "How intertwined society, justice, and the human psyche are, especially when influenced by fear and misunderstanding."

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About the Host: Mary Kay McBrayer

Mary Kay McBrayer is a renowned true crime author and podcaster, known for her meticulous research and engaging storytelling. Her previous work includes the acclaimed book Madame: The Life and Crimes of Harlem's Underground Racketeer Stephanie Sinclair. McBrayer combines historical analysis with narrative flair, offering listeners and readers alike a profound exploration of true crime stories that have shaped our understanding of justice and human behavior.

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Connect with Mary Kay McBrayer:

• Instagram: @arykaymcbrayer
• Book Pre-Order Link: Available in the show's notes.

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The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio, with theme music by Tyler Cash and executive production by Scott Waxman. For more episodes and detailed explorations into true crime, tune into Mary Kay McBrayer's series available on all major podcast platforms.

Transcript

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A Note this episode contains mature content and quite graphic descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners. Please take care in listening. When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain? So begins William Shakespeare's Scottish play featuring the power hungry warrior Macbeth. But against the rules of most script writing textbooks, our main character Macbeth doesn't get those iconic opening lines. Those belong to the three Weird Sisters. Although in the original text they were called the Wayward Sisters, which if you say weird in a Scottish accent, you might notice it sounds a lot like Wayward. Still, we know the characters today as the Witches. The trope of Three Witches is is ubiquitous throughout history and popular culture. From the three Muses and the three Fates to the three Sanderson Sisters. You can't really escape the maiden matron in Crone. Shakespeare's weird sisters just happen to be the most iconic, or at least my personal favorite, trio of magical women. They say if they hadn't prophesized that he would become king, then he never would have gotten ambitious and schemed to depose Duncan. But I think those scholars are probably the same kind of people who think Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles. Listeners, you and I know the real stars of the show, right? But did you know those three women? The Weird sisters? The three witches who prophesied Macbeth's ascendance? Did you know those women really existed? Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told. Mary. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, author of the true crime book Madame the Life and Crimes of Harlem's Underground Racketeer Stephanie Sinclair. Today's episode we're calling the real witches of Macbeth. It's a thousand year old story, which doesn't make it any less interesting. More so, I'd argue, but it does mean that source material was extremely hard to come by. I was surprised that there were any records at all, but they do exist and so do the witches of Forest. Still, because of the scarce research, this episode will be shorter than most. I'll tell you everything I could find right after this quick break. I'm the kind of person who loves to travel, but I'm also a complete dork about it. I read everything about the place I can find beforehand, do as much of the locals recommendations when I get there and then write about it when I get home. In a way, it's like having the vacation three times. So when we booked our trip to Scotland in the autumn of 2023, I picked up a book called the Lowdown on Witches by Leonard Lowe and I devoured it. The link to the Lowdown on Witches is in our show's notes. So don't wreck your car trying to take notes during rush hour, okay? Just come back when you're at a stopping place. I learned when I was researching and planning that most tourists land in Edinburgh and pretty much never leave the Royal Mile. Unless it's to golf at St. Andrews or hike to Arthur's Seat. Edinburgh was great, especially Mary King's close tour. But you can't beat the Highlands. We drove on the wrong side of the road north from the airport to Inverness. Well, my husband, the transportation engineer and my fearless friend drove us her Husband and I white knuckled the shotgun seat and I tried to navigate without having a panic attack every time I looked up from the phone. But the Scottish Highlands are amazing for so many reasons. They're exactly the postcard worthy landscape they show on Outlander, with the added bonus that the landscape extends outside the frame. With lush land like that and the kind of fog that portends King Arthur's birth, it makes sense that long ago, belief in fairies and other supernatural beings was taken as fact. It wasn't even a question. I mean, we were in the car pointing off the shoulder like, that's a fairy hill right there for sure. Hide your kids and hide your wife or they're gonna changeling them. Joking aside, even though the worst witch hunts of Scotland were in the 1660s, I would argue 1661 specifically, if you asked. Witch trials were ubiquitous long before that. And the most important thing to remember is this. The trials were not to determine whether witchcraft was real. Witchcraft was real. That was never a consideration. The trials were to determine whether you had committed witchcraft. Shakespeare wrote his Scottish play before those trials. It was published in 1623, but he wrote it around 1606. That's just three years after Queen Elizabeth was succeeded by a new monarch that is James I. Well, he was James I of England. In Scotland, he was James vi. And with a new Scottish monarch came an English fascination with all things Scottish. If you're a dramatist or remember anything from 9th grade literature class, you might remember that artists and playwrights, including Shakespeare himself, earned most of their living based on the donations of wealthy patrons. Yes, ticket entries helped, but not a lot. As I've said before in an article I wrote for the archive, that meant writers had to sort of sing for their supper. If your patron liked your play, then they'd probably send you more money for the next one. Shakespeare had already had one extremely wealthy patron in Queen Elizabeth I. You can see how he catered to her interests by representing strong fictional women characters in works like Twelfth Night and Midsummer Night's Dream. He also wrote a lot of his historical plays under her patronage. My point is, Shakespeare knew how to read the room. And I don't just mean that he knew how to read King James VI. It's true that in 1601, Shakespeare visited Aberdeen as a guest of James VI. And he did it specifically to do recon on his patron. Apparent. But like I said, the Bard didn't just read his patron. Well, he knew his audience. The patrons would be up in the best seats, the box seats, and those were few. Most of the audience was a rowdy, drunken crowd of peasants. And Shakespeare knew this. So imagine Shakespeare, not the man, his writing. Imagine trying to perform Shakespeare to a bunch of drunk illiterates. And I'm not being funny. Most of his audience would have been pretty uneducated and ready to take a load off after a long day's work. And it's not a raucous laugh fest like the Taming of the Shrew. This is the Scottish play strategizing for a murderous couple. It's one of those plots that requires you to wake up and focus or you won't understand what happens next. He had to get their attention somehow. And that's why so many of Shakespeare's tragedies start off with a supernatural event. Hamlet had his father's ghost. Macbeth had his witches.

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I don't know about you, but I do remember learning that King Macbeth was a real person. Or at least that character was loosely based on the folklore of a Scottish king from the Dark Ages. The real guy was not the power hungry king we all know and love, but he existed. So did Duncan and MacDuff. What I was not ever taught was that the witches were based on real people too. Here are the facts as I was able to reconstruct them. And this is based on research of my own, but largely guided by the Incredible Leonard low. It's the 10th century. King Duff is the king. Alternate accounts call him Duffus, which my husband actually mispronounced as Doofus when I was telling him this. But okay, alternate accounts call him Duffys as well, meaning Son of Enduff. Interestingly, Macduff also means Son of Duff, but there's not a ton of parallels between this actual guy and the Shakespearean Thana V. So I'm going to stick with King Duff as his moniker just for the sake of easy listening. So King Duff was King of the Scots from 962 to 967. In case mental math humbles you the way it does me, let me explicate that a little. King Duff was king for only five years, and he inherited the crown from his own father, who had died while defending the Highlands against Viking invaders Just a fun little piece of folklore. Rumor has it that the thistle is Scotland's national flower because of its history with Viking invaders. The stories say that Vikings attacked barefoot for the sake of quiet surprise. But when they stepped on a thistle, they'd cry out, which gave the Scots warning of the oncoming invasion. Anyway. Accounts do say that King Duff was a great king, though, until he took ill just outside the town of Fares. Fares is just a few miles east of Inverness for reference, and King Duff was convinced that that the sickness was a result of bewitching. Let me pause a moment here to explain what that would mean to a Scottish audience in the early 1600s. Scotland at the time of the play would have been Protestant, specifically Presbyterian, meaning that they were largely Calvinist. Calvinism is big on predestination. Read the True Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg if you want more tea on that. Hell, you can probably glean the thesis from the title Al alone, if not. Anyway, one part of Calvinist doctrine was that everything happened for a reason. More specifically, in the 1600s, if something good happened to you, then that was a reward direct from the hand of God for something you did. If something bad happened to you, then that was a punishment direct from the hand of God for something you did. Did. You might be thinking, but what if I didn't do anything to deserve a punishment? The fact, as it was accepted by Calvinists during the initial production of the Scottish play in Scotland was if you didn't do anything to deserve the punishment you received, then that punishment was the result of witchcraft. That's a lot of qualifiers, I know, and I don't know whether King Duff believed that. But when Shakespeare went to Scotland and heard this story, he definitely heard it from people who believed that. So if the good King Duff fell ill for no reason by the transient property, there are some witches to blame. In fact, the 10th century was well before the Malleus Maleficarum was authorized by Pope Innocent viii. That's the Hammer of Witches, by the way, which was a handbook on both how to smoke out witchcraft and how to punish it when it was identified. But according to history, as recorded in Kirkyard documents and letters, which admittedly could be a revisionist retelling, King Duff ordered a search. What exactly his guy searched for, I don't know. And by all accounts, it does sound like the search was conducted by some. Some guys. Any guys. I'm not confident that they knew what to search for, really. What these guys found, though, was documented as this in the fields Outside of Faris, the king's men found three women and they were playing with a wax effigy of a king. They were melting him into the fire. Even in a revisionist perspective in which witchcraft does not exist, Bakmia melting a wax effigy of the king in the middle of a Scottish Highland field looks like witchcraft. The women were arrested and they were carried into forest proper. I'll tell you what happened to them after this break, but right now I'll tell you this. There was no trial.

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Before the break. I told you, the three women in the field were arrested for witchcraft and carried into town. And as I told you, there was no trial. So what does this old wives tale have to do with true crime? Scotland saw several official witchcraft acts and legislation up until King James. Each of them detailed some instances in which witchcraft was punishable by death. Usually, though, witchcraft was not punishable by death. And then King James got fascinated with witchcraft. To be fair, he was obsessed with Christianity as a whole. You know the King James Bible. Yep, he's responsible for that addition. But he oversaw that after he wrote the pamphlet entitled Demonology Inform A Dialogue Divided into Three Books by the High and Mighty Prince James. Yes, that's the actual subtitle, y'all. Inform A Dialogue Divided into Three Books by the High and Mighty Prince James. That pamphlet, which it was three parts, can we still call that a pamphlet? That pamphlet was reprinted in 1603 after James became King of England in addition to Scotland. I wish I could tell y'all I have read the quote unquote pamphlet, but if you think Elizabethan English is tricky to decipher, try a non standardized Scots English from around the same period. For example, I was looking through some already translated and transcribed criminal documents for another project and I came across this word, y'all. I'm proud of being a good reader and I did teach English composition for several years. I'm pretty good at deciphering misspellings, but this word was different. I'm going to spell it for you and you tell me what you think it means. C U N T E R F O O T I'm literally crying right now writing and reading this because of what I thought meant. Think about it. Counterfoot. Well, here's a hint. It's not what I thought it meant. It means counterfeit. What the hell? Oh, tears of breath. Oh my gosh. I have told that story so many times and it still gets me. Okay, back to the very serious no laughing matter at hand. Scholars believe that James's demonology pamphlet was a main source of material for Shakespeare too. But in real life, King James was especially fixated on Exodus 22:18, the verse that says thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. And when he suspected that he was the victim of an assassination plot by witchcraft, he tightened up. I'd like to mention as well that King James's proposed assassination attempt by witchcraft sounds a lot like like the witches of Fares. When he sailed to Denmark in 1589 to collect his 14 year old wife Anne, the journey was wracked with storms because James had done nothing wrong ever in his life. If you hear my sarcasm, you can go ahead on and give King James a Google. By the way. Maybe I should rephrase actually. Because King James had inherited the throne by divine right, he could do no wrong. You see the problem here. Without me elaborating, I'm sure in James's mind he had not done anything to deserve this punishment. The storms. He reasoned that the stormy voyage was the result of a curse by witches. And this flawed logic resulted in the notorious North Berwick witch trials. This abomination of an investigation was as crooked as you could expect. But it leads to a bigger question. Why were Scotland's witch trials the most deadly? This is the short answer. Before 1604, execution was only used as a sentence if the practitioner of witchcraft committed a murder. But King James subsequent witchcraft act of 1604 made hanging mandatory for a first offense of witchcraft. You think that's bad? During the time of King Duff, that's. Back in the 10th century, things were different. It was 500 years before the Protestant Reformation in Scotland. 600ish before King James crackdown. But the women of Faris weren't just heretics or witches. They were attempting to murder the King. That was a direct attack on the Crown. So their crimes chalked up to not only witchcraft, but also attempted murder and assassination. And the King was sick already because of it. Those three women were executed brutally and publicly. What comes next is the reason we give a trigger warning at the top of every episode. The torture that these women endured is exceptionally heinous, even for the Scottish witch trials. Each woman was forced into a herring barrel. Someone, it's not clear who, nailed the Barrels shut, and they did it with nails that were far too long for their purpose. Essentially, they created an iron maiden inside each barrel. And then they tipped the barrels on their sides and they rolled the barrels down Cluny Hill, where each barrel came to rest someone, again not clear who, piled heather on the barrels as kindling and set them on fire. The shredded women, or at least their bodies, were burned inside. After the blazes reduced the barrels and bodies to ash, each site was marked the Boulder. Considering how well the creative extreme torture was documented in the 10th century, it seems almost intentional that no record ever mentions the women's names. It might seem like our story should end here with the deaths of the accused witches. But of course, the story is far from over. Let's talk about the lore of those boulders. One of them disappeared. The second of them seems to have never been moved. It rests in the corner of a beautiful garden along Victoria Road. The old Scots, by the way, had a big superstition about the corner of a garden or field. They called it the Goodman's Croft. And they didn't farm it. They saved it to placate the devil. The third boulder rests half in Victoria Road in Fares. It's protected by an iron band at the base of the Fares police station. Rumor has it that this boulder was actually moved. It was taken for a nearby construction project and broken up for materials. Then Fever took the person who moved the boulder and the other workers put the boulder back. That's why the iron band holds the three pieces of it together. I think that's why, even though it's an inconvenient location, half in the street, the stone was not disturbed by its paving. There's actually a retaining wall over this marker. And now there's a plaque memorializing the murders of the witches of Faris. It reads, from Cluny Hill, witches were rolled in stout barrels through which spikes were driven. Where the barrels stopped, they were burned with their mangled contents. This stone marks the site of one such burning. If you're a Scottish scholar, though, and you know more about this story, please contact me me on Instagram arykaymcbrayer and tell me more. Also, if you're interested in seeing that boulder along with the memorial of the witches burned on Clooney Hill, I have photos of all that there as well. Peace. The charms wound up the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer and I hosted this episode. I also wrote this episode. Our show is produced by Leo Culp. Theme music by Tyler Cash Executive Producer Scott Waxman and one more thing before I go, if you haven't already, I'll Love youe Forever. If you pre order my forthcoming true crime book Madame the Life and Crimes of Harlem's Underground Racketeer Stephanie Sinclair, there's a link to do it at your favorite retailer in our show's notes.

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