In the summer of 1649, the coastal town of North Berwick became the site of legal proceedings against Syvilla Wyllie. During this period, local presbytery records identified Syvilla as a person suspected of witchcraft, a designation that linked her case to that of another local woman, Elizabeth Hamiltoun. While the broader socio-political climate of Haddingtonshire was increasingly marked by an intense preoccupation with such allegations, the surviving documentation regarding Syvilla remains notably sparse, offering only a brief window into the administrative machinery of the period.
On July 11, 1649, Syvilla was formally processed within the judicial system, with a confession recorded on that same date. Though the subsequent trial records (T/JO/96) offer no details concerning the specific testimonies or the final outcome of her prosecution, the surviving case file (C/JO/2665) confirms that she was slated for trial based upon the ecclesiastical and legal grievances brought against her. Her story remains one of the many documented encounters with the seventeenth-century Scottish judicial process, preserved primarily through these formalised notations of accusation and confession.