In the spring of 1662, the village of Torrich in the parish of Auldearn became the site of a formal legal inquiry into the alleged practice of witchcraft involving a local woman named Bessie Peterkin. On the 14th of April, her case was officially processed under the reference C/EGD/458, marking the beginning of the administrative scrutiny that characterized the intense period of prosecution in the Nairn region. While the small settlement of Torrich was her home, the machinery of the Scottish judicial system quickly drew her into a broader sphere of legal documentation.
The transition from initial accusation to the rigors of the courtroom followed in due course, as evidenced by the trial record T/LA/1847. By being brought to trial, Bessie became a subject of the statutory and ecclesiastical mechanisms prevalent in seventeenth-century Scotland. Although the surviving records are primarily administrative in nature, they reflect the precise, methodical process by which the seventeenth-century judiciary addressed those suspected of supernatural transgression. Through these registers, the name of Bessie Peterkin remains preserved as a distinct figure within the complex history of the Scottish witch trials.