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Last week, the cosy one — the sweets, the turnips, the dead nan in the yard. Tonight, Grim takes you somewhere much colder and much more real: a wet hill in Lancashire in 1612, to watch the state hang ten people for a crime that does not exist, well, not in this case.

Because here's what nobody tells the children in the pointy hats: the witch was real. Not the broomstick — the person. Poor, frightened, mostly elderly country folk, dragged to a gallows on the word of a nine-year-old child.

Grim and Mark walk the whole terrible machine, step by step, from the documented record. Two feuding families of village "cunning folk" — Old Demdike and Old Chattox, both ancient, both half-blind, both scraping a living from other people's superstition. A pedlar who collapses on the road seconds after a young woman curses him. An ambitious local magistrate who smells a career. A king — James the First — so obsessed with witches he literally wrote the manual. A grief-stricken family dinner reframed as a satanic sabbath. And at the centre of it, little Jennet Device: nine years old, stood up on a courtroom table and used to send her own mother, brother and grandmother to the rope.

Ten were hanged on Gallows Hill in the August of 1612. Not witches — just the powerless, destroyed by the powerful, on evidence that proved nothing, before a court that had already decided. And the whole triumphant story comes to us through one book, written by the men who did the hanging. The accused never get to write the book. They just get the rope.

So this Halloween, when you see the pointy hat — spare a thought for who it really was.

From the shadows. Be kind to the frightened old women in your life — and never let them put a child on a table. And we will catch you again, somewhere in time.

🎧 The Evident Conspiracy Files · TheECF.co.uk · Follow us on X

The Witching Season runs every Saturday through October — and something big is coming on the 31st. Follow so you don't miss it.

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