On February 2, 1658, Katherine Cossie appeared before the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh to face proceedings concerning the charge of witchcraft. The records of this case (C/LA/3286) place Katherine within the broader, often tumultuous legal landscape of mid-seventeenth-century Scotland, a period when the judicial scrutiny of suspected maleficium reached significant intensity. Despite her presence on the high court index, the specific details of the allegations brought against her and the testimony provided during the trial remain elusive, as her case does not appear in the extant Books of Adjournal.
The absence of a surviving trial record in the formal court books complicates our understanding of how the proceedings against Katherine concluded. While the indexing confirms that she was brought before the judiciary on that winter day in 1658, the silence in the subsequent legal registers leaves her ultimate fate a matter of historical ambiguity. Like many others caught in the machinery of the Scottish witch trials, Katherine remains a figure defined by a singular, high-stakes moment of institutional interaction, preserved in the administrative archives but ultimately obscured by the gaps in the surviving documentation of the period.