In September 1678, Margaret Douglas, a fifty-year-old resident of Crichton in Edinburgh, found herself at the centre of a formal legal proceeding brought by the Lord Advocate. Though the trial records list her age as fifty, the internal logic of her confession suggests she may have been closer to sixty-three. In her testimony, recorded on the 11th and 13th of September, Margaret described her entry into the practice of witchcraft as a transformative event triggered by a severe falling out with her own daughter. According to her own accounts, this familial rupture marked the beginning of thirteen years spent as a practitioner of the craft, a period during which she was also charged with participating in clandestine meetings with other witches.
The legal machinery moved with remarkable speed. Following her two recorded confessions, Margaret faced trial in Edinburgh on 13 September 1678, where she was found guilty of the charges brought against her. Only five days later, on 18 September, the sentence was carried out at the Gallow. Consistent with the standard practices for capital offences of this nature in seventeenth-century Scotland, Margaret was subjected to the method of execution by strangulation and burning.