In 1671, the judicial records of Dumfries formally identified Grissel McIlney as the subject of a legal proceeding concerning allegations of witchcraft, indexed under case reference C/EGD/596. Little remains of the specific testimony or the nature of the accusations brought against her, yet the archival trail confirms that Grissel was caught within the complex machinery of the Scottish justice system during a period of heightened scrutiny regarding perceived diabolical activities.
The gravity of her situation is evidenced by the subsequent trail notes (T/LA/1910), which suggest that Grissel was being prepared for transfer to a circuit court trial. In the seventeenth-century Scottish legal framework, such a move indicated that her case had progressed beyond local magistrates and was deemed significant enough to warrant the attention of the high-ranking justices who travelled to provincial towns to adjudicate the most serious of capital crimes. The records leave Grissel at this intersection of local suspicion and the formal processes of the Scottish state, marking a definitive point in the legal handling of her life and personhood.