In December 1679, the judicial machinery of the Scottish witch trials turned toward Bessie Vikker, a widow of middling socioeconomic status residing in the port town of Bo’ness, Linlithgow. As the wife of a man once recorded as an "indweller" of the town, Bessie occupied a stable position within the local community, yet she found herself entangled in the formal legal proceedings that characterized the late seventeenth-century persecution of those suspected of diabolical pacts.
According to the extant records, specifically case file C/EGD/1912 and trial document T/JO/607, Bessie was formally brought before the authorities for reasons that remain obscured by the brevity of the surviving documentation. While the judicial registers confirm the occurrence of her trial, they do not preserve the specific accusations or the testimonies presented against her. Consequently, the narrative of Bessie’s experience remains fixed within the skeletal framework of the administrative records, marking her as one of the many individuals whose lives were caught in the intense legal scrutiny of the post-Restoration period.