In the winter of 1589, Princess Anne of Denmark set sail to marry King James VI of Scotland. A violent storm rose up and nearly sank her ship, forcing it to shelter in Norway. It was weather. Nothing more. But someone had to be blamed — and in 1590, when a king’s bride was nearly drowned, the blame could not fall on the men who built or outfitted the ships.
So it fell on a woman named Anna Koldings.
THE HORROR The Danish finance minister, Christoffer Valkendorff, was accused of sending the royal fleet to sea poorly equipped. To save himself, he deflected: this was no ordinary storm, he insisted, but witchcraft — a coven of women had conjured it.
The hunt began in Copenhagen. Anna Koldings, already in prison on another charge, was folded into it.
She was tortured. Under enough pain, she confessed to exactly what her interrogators wanted to hear: that a group of women had met in a house in the city and sent small devils crawling up the keel of the princess’s ship to stir up the sea and raise the wind. It is one of the strangest confessions on record — precise, vivid, and physically impossible.
Then they demanded names. Torture always demands names. Anna gave them five — including Malin, the wife of a mayor. Those women were arrested. They were tortured in turn. They named others. The machine fed itself, each broken woman buying a moment’s relief by pointing to the next.
Anna Koldings was burned at the stake. In total, roughly a dozen women were executed in the Copenhagen trials of 1590 — burned alive for a storm the sky produced on its own. While she was imprisoned, she attracted so much attention that curious visitors came to see her; she was given a nickname that stuck all the way to the pyre: the Mother of the Devil.
THE MODERN RELIC This is where the story reaches forward. King James VI sat at the Danish court while these trials unfolded and was deeply shaken — and hardened — by them. He came to believe, personally and obsessively, that witches had tried to kill him and his bride.
He returned to Scotland and launched the North Berwick witch trials, in which around seventy people were prosecuted and many tortured or executed. He wrote a book, Daemonologie, explaining how to detect and destroy witches. Later, as King James I of England, he commissioned the new Bible translation that still bears his name — the King James Version found in millions of homes today.
The witch‑hunting zeal he brought back from Denmark helped fuel a century of persecution across Britain and, indirectly, across the Atlantic — some see its shadow in Salem a hundred years later.
There is also a place you can stand. Several of the Danish executions are thought to have been carried out at Kronborg Castle on the coast at Helsingør. Kronborg still stands. You can walk through its courtyards now. It is the real castle Shakespeare used as Elsinore — the setting of Hamlet.
The walls that frame the world’s most famous ghost story once watched real women burn for a storm.
A princess ran into bad weather. A powerful official needed someone to blame. And a woman named Anna Koldings went to the fire so that men in authority would never have to admit the wind is no one’s fault.
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