A NEW tourist attraction is set to bring visitors back to the time of Ireland's last witch trials with the help of virtual reality technology.
The VR experience is part of a new exhibition on the Islandmagee Witches that opens at Carrickfergus Museum on September 9.
Created in partnership with academics from Ulster University, the 'Demonised: Possessed and Bewitched' VR tour puts users into the shoes of eight women and one man in the Islandmagee area of Co Antrim who were found guilty of witchcraft following trials in 1711.
It was claimed the accused, who were tried under the Irish 1586 Witchcraft Act, had performed rites targeting an 18-year-old woman, Mary Dunbar, who was said to have shown signs of demonic possession.
Upon being found guilty, the eight female 'Islandmagee Witches' were sentenced to a year in jail and were forced to spend time in public stocks, before being ostracised from the community upon their release.
The father of two of the accused was tried and convicted of witchcraft later that year, following the death of Dunbar due to ill health.
It is believed he was executed following his conviction.
A plaque was unveiled at the Gobbins Visitor Centre earlier this year commemorating those convicted during the trials.
The VR experience, developed by Belfast tech firm Sentireal, allows visitors to view the experiences of both Dunbar and those wrongly accused of performing witchcraft against her.
The project was guided by Ulster University's Dr Helen Jackson along with Dr Victoria McCollum and Dr Andrew Sneddon, who co-authored a graphic novel released in March that tells the story of the infamous trials, which were the last of their kind in Ireland.
Dr Jackson said: “I believe that when academics and industry get together, the outcomes become so much more enhanced and working with Sentireal has proved this as it has allowed us to bring this important piece of our history to life in a way that will engage people in the 21st century.
“What evidence there is shows that the people accused of being witches existed on the very margins of society.
"They were mostly women who drank and smoked pipes or had facial deformities.
"They were people who didn’t reflect what society wanted to think it looked like so it was easy to believe they were guilty."
She added: “We wanted people to get a sense of what it means to be persecuted and that feeling of being disorientated, confused and alienated and even nervous when you know everyone is against you."
Dr Sneddon said the VR attraction "taps into an essential part of Ireland’s cultural heritage and allows people to navigate, in an interactive way, the moral choices and dilemmas in accusing someone of witchcraft in the early modern world".
