The earliest printed account is by George Woods, in his Account of the Past and Present State of the Isle of Man, published in London in 1811. Walking the road from Peel towards St John's, Woods was told of an uncultivated hill about two miles from the town, on the far side of the river, still haunted by the spirit of a murdered witch. She did not appear to mortal eyes, but every night she joined her lamentations to the howling of the wind. He could not learn how she had offended the people. She had been put into a barrel with spikes set round the interior and rolled from the top of the hill to the bottom by the weight of herself and the apparatus, a fate Woods likened to that of the Roman general Regulus. The man who told him the story appeared to believe it himself. Woods names no hill, gives one woman, and uses the word murdered. In the same book he recorded Manx fishermen who, returning with an empty boat, blamed a witch and burned bundles of dry heath or furze through every part of the vessel to dispel the charm.

Joseph Train, whose Historical and Statistical Account appeared in 1845, took the passage from Woods almost word for word and cited him for it. He added the name. About two miles from Peel, opposite the Tynwald Mount, there was a hill called Slieu Whallan, haunted by the spirit of a murdered witch. He then added a plural, since many other persons had suffered there in a similar manner, and a second victim, a man named Thomas Carran who died protesting his innocence and predicted that a thorn tree would grow on the summit to prove it. Train followed this with a second ordeal at the Curragh Glass near Greeba, where a suspected woman was driven into the water and, if she paddled to the side, was burnt alive or rolled from the top of Slieu Whallan. He set beside all this a case of December 1843, a trespass jury at Marown examining witnesses on whether they had witched a farmer's cattle, which he introduced with the observation that suspected witches were now differently treated in the Island.

Henry Jenkinson's Practical Guide of 1874 condensed Train for visitors climbing the hill from St John's station. It kept the word murdered and Woods's phrase about the weight of herself and the apparatus, and it enlarged the plural to many other persons of both sexes. The condemned man became a separate story, unnamed, with a thorn tree at his head and a well or spring at his feet, and a promise to trouble the neighbourhood so long as grass continued to grow or water to flow. A. W. Moore's Folk-lore of the Isle of Man of 1891 printed Train's version under the heading The Witch of Slieu Whallian, and in its chapter on witchcraft described the ducking and the spiked barrel as what it was supposed had happened in old times, before setting out the church and civil records from 1638 onwards to show that the courts had dealt with such people in a milder fashion. John Rhys, collecting at St John's about 1890 and avoiding the printed books, found a tradition that witches had at one time been punished by being set to roll down the steep side of the mountain in spiked barrels, with nothing else attached to it. Sophia Morrison, writing in 1911 from Peel, joined the barrel to the loss of the herring fleet. Her wise woman sold fair winds, looked into a basin of water, foretold the wreck of the fleet on the Calf, and was blamed afterwards for raising the storm. The people took her to the top of Slieu Whallian in a spiked barrel, the barrel sank into the bog at the foot, and a bare track down the mountainside where nothing would grow was called the Witch's Way.

The record does not support the custom, and the shape of the tradition shows why. The Spiritual Law that Moore printed required a suspected witch to be presented to the Chapter Quest, held in the Bishop's prison while a jury of the parish inquired, and then delivered to the Lord's gaol and court if a notorious fault was proved. That is the process the court books show, and the cases Moore printed from them end in penance, apology or acquittal. The one capital case that has been read for this site, against Margaret yne Quane and her son John Cubon of Kirk German in 1617, ended in a sentence of burning pronounced at Castle Rushen, not on a hill. A practice carried out repeatedly would have left a charge, a court and an entry somewhere in books that recorded every sixpence, and it has left none, whereas a single killing by neighbours would leave nothing at all, so the silence tells against the custom and says nothing either way about the woman. Every account close to the ground has a single woman. The plural rests on one sentence of Train's, enlarged by a guidebook. The reason for her death moves with each teller. Woods could not discover one, Train supplied a judicial sentence and attached it to the man, and Morrison's tellers said she had raised the storm by her spells. What stays fixed from 1811 to 1911 is a woman, a hill, a barrel, a killing and a lament in the wind, told first by a Peel man to a visitor who wrote it down, and carried since by Train's history, Jenkinson's guidebook, Moore's collection, Rhys's fieldwork at St John's and Morrison's tales from Peel.