In the winter of 1633, Alison Dick, a fifty-year-old married woman residing in Kirkcaldy, Fife, found herself at the center of a legal process that would culminate in her death. While the specific testimonies presented against her remain largely absent from the surviving judicial records, the administrative trace left by the Presbytery of Kirkcaldy confirms that she was accused of causing property damage. The allegations leveled against Alison focused on the destruction of boats and the spoilage of meal, suggesting that her neighbors held her responsible for significant economic losses within the coastal community.
Following her trial in Fife on November 15, 1633, the court returned a verdict of guilty. The legal apparatus of the time moved with deliberate speed, and on December 17, 1633, the sentence was carried out. Alison was executed by being strangled and burned, a procedure consistent with the capital punishment protocols for witchcraft cases in seventeenth-century Scotland. Her case, documented under reference C/EGD/2260, stands as a stark testament to the period’s prevailing anxieties regarding supernatural interference in the daily livelihoods of its people.