In October 1649, a man named John Steill, a resident of the parish of Ormiston in Edinburgh, became ensnared in the legal mechanisms of the Scottish witch trials. His case, cataloged under the reference C/EGD/1989, appears within the judicial records of the period alongside several other unnamed individuals, suggesting that his examination was part of a broader localized pursuit of those suspected of maleficium or diabolical pacts.
John’s involvement with the court culminated in a recorded confession dated in October 1649, shortly before his formal entry into the trial process under reference T/JO/367. While the surviving documentation does not elaborate on the specific nature of his admission or the testimony presented against him, the existence of a confession indicates that he was subjected to the intensive interrogations typical of the mid-seventeenth-century Scottish judiciary. Following these procedural steps, his name disappears from the granular details of the historical record, leaving only these sparse administrative markers of his encounter with the early modern legal system.