EEEEK! Scary Website Found

Well it didn't take long for me to find lots of misinformation.  Check out Haunted Happenings (Pendle Witch Hunts/A Haunting Experience), a website rendered truly terrifying in its lack of grammatical and historical knowledge.  I was particularly haunted by the indiscriminate use of the capital letter and mystified by the horrific disappearence of the full stop.

Most horrible of all, however, is the blatant lack of knowledge about the Pendle witches manifesting itself throughout this frightening website. Let's have a look at some examples.  Don't get too scared now.

1. Malkin Tower, where some of the witches lived, was a huge limestone tower.  WOW!  New information! No, wait, that's how Malkin Tower is described in Harrison Ainsworth's nineteenth century novel The Lancashire Witches - a work of FICTION.  We do not know what the real Malkin Tower was like - most probably it was a little cottage, possibly attached to a peel tower.  Alizon Device refers to 'our firehouse', which was a contemporary term for a small cottage.

2. The witches made clay effigies using human hair and teeth.  Euuuwwgh!  But wait.  While the witches were certainly accused of making clay effigies, (according to Thomas Potts' Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, 1613), nowhere does he (or anyone else) say that the Pendle witches incorporated human hair and teeth in their 'pictures of clay'.  Stop making things up. Read the original source material rather than watching 'Most Haunted'.

Me and the late Cecil Williamson during 'voodoo doll' research at his Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall
in January, 1991

A wax figure in the museum designed to cause the victim a hernia

Another 'poppet' or 'picture' from Cecil's collection

3. On one of the tours by this 'Pendle Hill Expert' you will actually walk on the hill in the exact footsteps of Demdike, Devise (sic) Chattox etc.  Oh no you won't.  Or at least it is most unlikely.  In the whole of The Wonderfull Discoverie (our only substantial historical source of information) Pendle Hill ISN'T MENTIONED ONCE!

Plenty more, but bored now.  Don't think I'll bother shelling out £65.00 for one of these 'journeys of facts', however.

Jennie, exasperated