In May 1662, Barbara Innes, a woman of middling socioeconomic status residing in the burgh of Elgin, found herself entangled in the rigorous legal machinery of the Scottish witch trials. Recorded in the Register of the Privy Council (RPC) simply as an "indweller" of the town, Barbara was subjected to the formal judicial processes of the period during a time when the hunt for those accused of malefice had intensified across the north-east.
Within the same month that her case was officially recorded, Barbara provided a confession. While the specific content of her testimony remains absent from the surviving documentation, the existence of this record confirms her participation in the trial process (T/JO/918) conducted under the jurisdiction of the burgh. Barbara’s case, preserved in the archives as C/EGD/1499, stands as a quiet testament to the lived experience of an Elgin resident caught within the complex social and legal anxieties that defined seventeenth-century Scotland.