Almost 400 years after the last execution of a woman accused of witchcraft in Scotland, calls are growing for a national memorial to the thousands who were tortured and killed for their supposed black magic.

The moral panic around witchcraft and devil worship that convulsed post-Reformation societies across Europe and colonial America was especially fierce in Scotland, which carried out five times the European average of executions per capita.

“For a country of this size, it’s striking,” said Julian Goodare, a professor of history at Edinburgh University and co-director with Louise Yeomans of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, a comprehensive database of known prosecutions.

The survey’s interactive map, launched by Emma Carroll in September, provides a vivid illustration of the scale of persecution across the country against women and men – 15% of Scotland’s alleged witches were male – whose stories are far removed from the cartoon wickedness of Halloween.

Between the first execution in 1479 and the last in 1727, at least 2,500 women and men were killed, Goodare said, and thousands more were tortured or put on trial.

The ferocity of the Scottish prosecutions, which far outnumbered those in England, is often attributed to James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, who was notoriously obsessed with the malign influence of witches, publishing his own treatise on the subject, Daemonologie.

“James VI did provide legitimacy at an early stage but I think it would have happened anyway because of the intensity of the Scottish Reformation,” Goodare said. He described a potent mix of Protestant religion, strict morality and ingrained misogyny as local kirk sessions – the ruling body of mainly male elders for each Church of Scotland parish – endeavoured to stamp out corrupting behaviour. “Women were on the frontline because they were seeking out extramarital sex, fornication and adultery and you notice these things when someone becomes pregnant.”

But women were targeted not only for their sexual conduct. Kate Stewart, an SNP councillor in Fife who is leading cross-party efforts to establish a national memorial, said: “These women were targeted because they were vulnerable, some of them owned land that others – usually men – wanted access to, or they were unmarried or widowed, or they looked or spoke or acted differently.”

Stewart added: “It must have been a horrendous time to live through. You could so easily be accused of witchcraft and once you were it was a one-way ticket.”

Historical records detail the horrendous fate of those accused of witchcraft, including prolonged interrogations, pricking with large pins to try to find the devil’s mark, and sleep deprivation. “They suffered excruciating torture, but now it’s made into fun,” said Stewart. “Witches are portrayed in cartoons as women who are ugly and evil, but if you look at the images of Lilias Adie, that wasn’t the case.”

A digital reconstruction of the face of Lilias Adie, an alleged witch who died in prison in 1704. Photograph: Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, University of Dundee/BBC Radio Scotland/PA

Lilias Adie is Fife’s most famous victim of the witchcraft panic. She died in prison, it is presumed as a result of torture, and was buried on the shore at the village of Torryburn in 1704. Her resting place, under a hulking sandstone slab to prevent the devil from gaining access, is the only known grave of an accused witch in Scotland, as the majority were burned.

Some of Adie’s remains were dug up by grave robbers in 1852 and her skull was exhibited at various locations until it went missing in the middle of the last century. Old photographs of it were used in 2017 to construct a 3D virtual model showing the face of an older woman with a gentle demeanour.

Stewart is working on a detailed proposal for a memorial to Adie and the thousands of others who lost their lives, and asking local artists to contribute designs.

“I hope the message will be about being more accepting and tolerant of people who are different,” she said. “It was a difficult period for women then, and 300 years later we are still being accused over the way we dress or how we look or act. That has to change.”