In 1661, the lives of Anna Pilmure and her husband, residents of Sammuelston in Haddington, were irrevocably altered when they were formally accused of witchcraft. This was not Anna’s first encounter with the judicial authorities regarding such charges; she had previously been proceeded against in 1649, an investigation that included the recording of a confession. While the historical record remains silent on the immediate outcome of that initial 1649 inquiry, it indicates that the scrutiny surrounding her activities persisted well into the Restoration era.
The resurgence of the case against Anna occurred in 1662, when she was denounced as part of a significant group of accused individuals by a youth named James Welch. Although Welch was considered too young to stand trial himself and was subsequently held in imprisonment, the authorities treated his testimony and the specific denunciations he provided with substantial gravity. Consequently, Anna was brought before the courts in April 1662, marking a further development in a legal trajectory that had shadowed her household for over a decade.