Bygone Days: Old Montgomery’s poor cow and the noted ‘Carnmoney witch’ trial of 1808

She was born in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim around 1770. Carrickfergus had witnessed the infamous Islandmagee witch trial in the early 1700s. From a young age Butters practised “white” magic, using superstitious or herbal remedies as cures for physical and other ailments.

She was best known for curing cows of suspected bewitchment. Given how important cattle were to Irish agriculture at the time, fear of cows being bewitched was a common one, with a common malevolent spell believed to make it impossible to churn butter with their milk

Her story illustrates the gross superstition which was rife in the province of Ulster of that day. It would be laughable were it not so full of tragedy.

The story ‘Carnmoney Witch’ concerns one, Alexander Montgomery, a tailor who lived in Carnmoney in the early nineteenth century. It was in August, 1807, that Montgomery and his wife became possessed by the idea that their cow was bewitched. Accordingly they lost no time in consulting Mary Butters, who lived in Carrickfergus and had no mean reputation as a wise woman.

Mistress Butters agreed to help them and soon arrived in Carnmoney with the implements of her craft. That night war was declared against the unknown magicians who had so maliciously “overlooked” Mr Montgomery’s cow.

Mary Butters ordered old Montgomery and a young man named Carnaghan to go to the cow-house, turn their waistcoats inside out, and stand beside the cow until she sent for them, while the wife, the son, and an old woman named Margaret Lee remained in the house with her.

Montgomery and his ally kept their long vigil until daybreak, when, becoming alarmed at receiving no summons, they left their post and knocked at the door, but obtained no answer.

They then looked through the kitchen window, and to their horror saw the four inmates stretched on the floor as dead.

They immediately burst in the door, and found that the wife and son were actually dead, and the sorceress and Margaret Lee nearly so.

The latter expired soon afterwards, but “the witch”, Mary Butters, recovered. The house smelt “vilely of sulphur”, and on the fire simmered “a witch’s brew of milk, needles, pins, and crooked nails”.

At the inquest held a few days later, the jurors stated that the three victims had come by their deaths from suffocation, owing to Mary Butters having made use of “some noxious ingredients after the manner of a charm”, to recover a sick cow.

She was brought up at the Assizes, but was discharged by proclamation. Her ingenious defence was that a man (“probably the devil”) had appeared in the house armed with a huge club, with which he killed the three persons and stunned herself.

It was an age remarkable for superstition, but Mary Butters’ story was too much for even the most credulous jury to swallow. It was greeted with laughter as a huge joke and Mary Butters was released.

A detailed account of Butters, her trial and subsequent life come from The Butter Stealing Witch and the Ploughshare was written by William Orr McGraw. McGraw claimed that there was more to Butters’s actions than met the eye.

He claimed that she did it on purpose to murder Elizabeth and her son who allegedly had been instrumental in the conviction and subsequent execution of a relative of Mary Butters in 1803 for spreading messages of rebellion. As such these claims appear unsubstantiated.

No sign of a Mary Butters, Buttles or Butlers appears in the parish records of Carrickfergus or Carnmoney. There is no gravestone or marker with her name, and no birth, marriage, and death announcements appear in the Belfast News Letter from 1800 to 1860. Neither does she appear in the Ordnance Survey memoir for Carrickfergus. A memoir of the parish of Carnmoney does record a Mary Butters living in Carrickfergus on 28 April 1839. McGraw records that Mary Butters died in Carrickfergus “at an advanced age”.