The Vardø Witch Trials explores Norway's deadliest witch hunt, a 70-year period above the Arctic Circle that killed 91 people, most of them women. It begins in 1619, when a Scottish sea captain arrived in an isolated coastal community, and later a belief in hidden witches took hold. Host Lisa Williams travels to remote parts of Norway and gains rare access to 17th-century court books to examine the confessions and the mystery that remains unsolved. The series contrasts this largely forgotten story with the better-known Salem witch trials.
Episodes
Introducing: The Vardø Witch Trials
Inside the Arctic witch hunt that lasted 70 years.
Everyone knows Salem. Almost nobody knows Vardø. On an island at the very top of Norway, 91 people died in the country's deadliest witch hunt, most of them women.
The Vardø Witch Trials. A historical documentary from Lisa Williams.
Launching 1 October, with new episodes weekly.
The Wind and the Paper | EP 1
I go to the edge of the Arctic to find out why 91 people, most of them women, died in Norway’s deadliest witch hunt, which lasted more than 70 years.
Vardø is a small island town closer to Russia than to Oslo, a place long shadowed by fears of witchcraft. Who were the women who came here, and why would they come somewhere so remote, at the far end of a kingdom?
And then, one Christmas Eve, 40 men
Exporting the Devil | EP 2
Who brought the Devil to Vardø? I follow a trail Professor Liv Helene Willumsen calls the witchcraft triangle. It runs from Germany to Scotland, through a royal wedding, storms at sea, and women who confessed to sending devils after a Danish princess's ship.
In Tromsø, Liv Helene opens the surviving 17th-century court books of the Vardø witch trials for me. Written in a Gothic hand, they take us b
Their Master and Admiral | EP 3
In 1621, eleven women were brought before the court in Vardø, one after another, in the first great chain of witch trials in Finnmark.
In this episode, we go straight into the courtroom. The records describe women turning into ravens and wolves to meet for witches’ gatherings on mountains and at a mysterious place called Ballvollen. And the women keep saying the same thing, that they ha
What Could a Witch Do? | EP 4
In the winter of 1654, a young woman called Karen Jonsdatter is a long way from home, in a fishing village near Vardø. As well as working as a maid, she has a little business on the side, selling potions and charms to the men in the community.
But in these small villages, everyone is watching and listening, and for a woman, gossip and slander are a constant threat. Once she had been called a witch
The Witches’ Hole | EP 5
When a new governor, Christoffer Orning, and a well-born Danish exile, Anna Rhodius, arrive in Vardø, a darker idea takes hold: once the Devil has a foothold in a family, he will not let them go. Now the young daughters of accused women are brought before the court.
I finally go to Mount Domen, long believed to be the entrance to Hell, where the women were said to hold their witches’ gatherings. T
No More Names | EP 6
It’s spring 1663, and we’re in what Professor Liv Helene Willumsen calls "the most cruel of the panics in Finnmark". An intricate web of denunciations threatens to engulf the women of Vardø and the neighbouring villages.
In this episode, I go searching for what happened to a woman who vanishes from the court books, and I ask Liv Helene and Anya Bergman, author of The Witches of Vardø, what might h
The Reckoning | EP 7
How did Norway’s deadliest witch hunt finally come to an end? In the series finale, Professor Liv Helene Willumsen and I follow the last cases and what brought the trials to a stop.
Salem’s witch trials are known all over the world, but few people have ever heard of Vardø. So how does a small town live in the shadow of a past like this?
On the headland where many of the accused were burned at the
