In 1629, a single printed list from the German city of Würzburg recorded 157 people as their neighbors would have known them: a minstrel, the fattest man in town, a city councilor named Bonac, the cook’s two sons aged fourteen and ten, a girl of twelve entered only as a strange girl. The names were grouped by execution, each heading reading the same way. The first burning, four persons. The list stopped early that year with a note that more burnings had been held since.

Across Europe over roughly three centuries, courts conducted these trials with clerks and receipts, and much of that paper survives. Modern estimates place about 100,000 people on trial, with nearly half killed, roughly three in four of them women. The road to Würzburg’s list began about two centuries earlier in the Alps. For most of the Middle Ages, the church treated women who claimed to fly at night as deceived.

An old text called the Canon Episcopi instructed priests to preach that these visions were dreams and that nobody had gone anywhere. People were still punished for harmful magic, but the idea of a secret army of witches sworn to Satan came together in the western Alps around 1430. Starting in 1428 in the Valais, authorities arrested people on new charges. A chronicler from Lucerne, Hans Fründ, recorded that the accused confessed to denying God, paying the devil tribute, flying on chairs smeared with ointment, and murdering children.

Fründ noted matter-of-factly that the accused were tortured, and a number died under it without confessing; they were burned anyway. He counted more than a hundred burned within about a year and a half. The trials reached the Council of Basel, where the Dominican Johannes Nider gathered stories from a Bernese judge named Peter. Nider’s book, the Formicarius, set down confessions of infanticide, cauldrons, and flying ointment.

A far more influential work followed from the inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. Around 1484 in Ravensburg, after a hailstorm wrecked the harvest, two women were tortured into confessing they had raised the storm by stirring water in a hole. Kramer obtained a papal bull from Innocent VIII in 1484, then went to Innsbruck, where he accused one Helena Scheuberin after she publicly called his preaching heresy. The trial collapsed when the bishop’s commissary objected that the charges had nothing to do with witchcraft.

Kramer was asked to leave the diocese. He went away and wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, printed in 1486 or 1487 with the papal bull bound into the front. The book argued that women were more credulous, that the very word femina derived from falta in faith, and that all witchcraft came from carnal lust, which in women was insatiable. The final third served as a manual on how to run a trial, promising a suspect her life for a confession and then handing her to another judge for sentencing.

In practice, once arrested, a suspect faced a fixed order of events. She was stripped and shaved, searched for a devil’s mark with needles. Then came the questions from a numbered list: how long she had been a witch, who taught her, what her devil was called, what she had killed, who else was at the dance. If she denied it, the executioner laid out his instruments.

The terrors began with thumb screws, then leg screws, then the rope. Some courts used burning sulfur, some used sleeplessness. On paper, the Carolina code of 1532 limited torture, but the law schools provided an escape: witchcraft was an excepted crime, treason against God, so the usual protections did not apply. Torture could be repeated, children could testify, and a confession had to include names, so each burning supplied the next arrests.

The trials paid for themselves. Costs were charged against the accused’s property. In Dillingen in 1587, the midwife Walpurga Hausmännin, a widow of thirty years, confessed under what the newsletter described as kindly questioning and also torture. She said the devil had come to her in her widowed year, guided her hand to sign away her soul, and lain with her ever since.

She named forty children she had killed, some with salve, some by pressing on their soft skulls. She was drawn through town on a cart, torn five times with hot irons, her right hand cut off, and burned alive. The first of the great hunts broke out around Trier. For nearly two decades, harvests failed, and the country rose up to root out the witches.

A canon named Johann Linden lived through it and wrote that 368 people were burned from about two dozen villages in under seven years, including burgomasters, counselors, and priests. The executioner rode a fine horse and dressed in gold and silver. Linden noted that the burnings stopped when the money did. The best-known victim was Dietrich Flade, a doctor of law and chief judge, named by twenty-three prisoners.

He was tortured, confessed, and was strangled and burned in 1589. The pattern spread to the free cities. In Nördlingen, Rebecca Lemp, wife of the town paymaster and mother of six, was arrested in 1590. Her children wrote to her that they were well and she was not to worry.

She wrote to her husband that she was innocent and could not confess to what she had not done. After torture with thumb screws, leg screws, and the rope, she confessed. She smuggled out a second letter begging her husband to send her poison, asking for something so that she might die. The note was intercepted and added to the file as proof of a fresh crime.

She was burned on the 9th of September 1590 with four other women. The hunt broke when an innkeeper named Maria Holl, tortured sixty-two times over eleven months, never confessed or named anyone. Nördlingen let her go, and the trials petered out. In Fulda, the prince-abbot Balthasar von Dernbach, restored after twenty-six years in exile, gave the witch trials to a man named Balthasar Nuss.

One of the first arrested was Merga Bien, a pregnant woman in her thirties. Her husband appealed to the imperial court, which ordered she not be tortured, but she was questioned anyway and gave way with the words, Oh God, then I will have done it. She confessed to killing her second husband and children, and the pregnancy itself went into the indictment. She was burned in the autumn of 1603.

Nuss went on for three years, burning around 250 people. After the abbot died, Nuss was arrested for enriching himself, spent twelve years in prison, and was beheaded in 1618. Three years before Merga Bien, Munich staged a public execution of an entire vagrant family, the Pappenheimers. The father, mother, and two grown sons were tortured repeatedly with the rope and burning torches, and the ten-year-old was beaten with a cane.

Over five months they confessed to pacts with the devil and hundreds of murders, naming some four hundred accomplices who largely did not exist. On the 29th of July 1600, all four adults were torn with hot pincers, impaled, and burned alive. The ten-year-old was made to watch from the sheriff’s horse. Four months later he was strangled and burned.

In Würzburg, the prince-bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg presided over the deaths of some nine hundred people across his territory in five years. The city’s running list of 157 named children as young as nine and ten, hospital boys, a noble page, students, and cathedral vicars. In August 1629, the bishop’s chancellor wrote to a friend that a third of the city was surely involved, that children of three and four were said to have had intercourse with the devil, and that he had seen put to death children of seven, promising students of ten, twelve, fourteen, and fifteen. He could not write any more about it.

At neighboring Bamberg, the prince-bishop was remembered as the Hexenbischof, the witch bishop. In 1627 a special prison went up called the Drudenhaus, the witch house, with small cells, a chapel, and its own torture chamber. Methods included a spiked stool, scalding baths with lime, and burning feathers dipped in sulfur held under the arms and at the groin. Prisoners were fed salted herring and refused water.

The bishop’s own chancellor, Dr. Georg Haan, opposed the trials openly and left to appeal to the imperial court. His wife and daughter were arrested, tortured, and burned. Haan came home, was arrested himself, named burgomasters and counselors as his fellow witches, and was executed in 1628.

One of the men Haan named was Johannes Junius, a fifty-five-year-old burgomaster of Bamberg. His wife had already been executed. Under torture, the court record noted he felt no pain. After repeated sessions, he confessed to a story of an orchard and a grass maid who turned into a goat.

He named people after being told to walk street by street and give at least one name from each. Three weeks before his execution, he persuaded a jailer to carry a letter to his daughter Veronica. He wrote that he had come into prison innocent, been tortured innocent, and must die innocent. Whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head.

He described eight times drawn up on the rope and let fall again, his hands lame, the executioner begging him to confess something, whether true or not. He told her the confession was all sheer lies and things made up, so help me God. He was burned early in August 1629. The letter survived in the state library at Bamberg.

Bamberg’s trials were stopped from outside. The execution of Dorothea Flock brought the matter before the imperial assembly. By 1631 the emperor put an opponent of the trials in charge of the commission, the bishop left for Austria, and the prisoners in the Drudenhaus were let out. Counts of the dead at Bamberg run from about three hundred to around nine hundred.

One condemned woman of the period had a son at the emperor’s court. Katharina Kepler, mother of the astronomer Johannes Kepler, was arrested in 1620 after neighborly quarrels. She spent fourteen months in chains, most of them in Güglingen. Her son ran her defense himself.

The best he could win was a ruling that she should be spared the torture itself and only shown the instruments. The executioner laid out the tools and explained them. She told them to do what they liked, that she would have nothing to confess. She knelt and said the Lord’s Prayer.

She was released and died the following April. Inside the Catholic system, one Jesuit raised his voice. Friedrich Spee served as confessor to condemned witches and walked with them to the fire. In 1631, a book appeared without his name, printed in a Protestant town, called the Cautio Criminalis.

It asked fifty-odd questions and showed how the case ran against any suspect: if she lived badly, she was wicked; if she lived well, that was suspicious too. If she confessed, she was guilty; if not, she was tortured again. Spee swore that of all the women he accompanied to the stake, he had not found one he could say with confidence was guilty. A young canon later said Spee’s hair had gone gray before its time from grief for those he had walked to the fire.

Spee died in 1635 of an infection caught nursing sick soldiers. The same idea had crossed the North Sea earlier and taken root in Scotland. Scotland passed a witchcraft act in 1563, and its first great panic began with a king’s sea crossing. In 1589, James VI arranged to marry the Danish princess Anne.

Her fleet was beaten back by storms, and blame settled on witches. James sailed to fetch her himself; they came home through more foul weather. In Scotland, a deputy bailiff named David Seaton tortured his maid, Geillis Duncan, with the pilliwinks and a rope about her head until she confessed and named others. Near the top of her list was Agnes Sampson, the wise wife of Keith, a midwife and healer.

Brought before the king, she denied everything at first. After her hair was shaved and her head thrawn with a rope for almost an hour, she told of two hundred witches putting to sea in sieves, dancing in the churchyard of North Berwick, and the devil in the pulpit making them kiss his backside. She told James the very words that had passed between him and his queen in their chamber at Oslo on the first night of their marriage, at which he swore that all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same. She was strangled and burned in January 1591.

The schoolmaster John Fian was put in the boots until his legs were crushed, and he was burned alive. Over the next seventy years, Scotland went through several more waves. The modern survey counts 3,837 people formally accused, about five in six of them women, with roughly two-thirds of those whose sentences are known put to death. One parish kept the receipts.

At Kirkcaldy in 1633, Allison Dick and her husband William Coke were accused of witchcraft, watched, and kept from sleeping. On the 19th of November they were burned. The session account listed ten loads of coal, tar barrels, rope, the executioner’s fee, and three shillings for whoever sewed the short coats they wore. The whole business came to under £34.

The last execution for witchcraft in Britain is usually placed at Dornoch in 1727. An old woman remembered as Janet Horne, whose daughter had misshapen hands and feet, was said to have turned the girl into a pony and ridden her to the devil. The daughter escaped. The mother was stripped, smeared with tar, paraded through town on a barrel, and burned.

No court paper has ever been found. South of the border, England’s law worked differently. Under common law, courts could not order torture, and convicted witches went to the gallows. Fewer than five hundred people died for witchcraft in England across the whole period.

The English cases were marked by the familiar, the witch’s animal spirit. At Chelmsford in 1566, Elizabeth Francis told of a white spotted cat named Satan that spoke in a hollow voice and wanted a drop of her blood for each service. She swapped it to Agnes Waterhouse for a cake. Agnes was hanged, confessing that she had sent it to kill her husband.

England’s largest hunt came during the civil war. Matthew Hopkins, a young man of Manningtree, became convinced witches met near his house. In 1645, Elizabeth Clarke was kept from sleep for three nights, and on the fourth she confessed, naming imps that her watchers swore came into the room. She named other women, and by summer more than thirty were in Colchester Castle.

Nineteen were hanged in July. Hopkins and his associate took their method on the road across East Anglia. Suspects were watched without sleep, walked until their feet blistered, or thrown into ponds to see if they floated. Estimates of those hanged run from about a hundred to three hundred.

A clergyman named John Gaule preached against the witchfinders, and when judges came to Norfolk in 1647, they were handed questions about Hopkins’s fees and methods. Hopkins died that August, probably of consumption. In 1682, three old women from Bideford were hanged at Exeter, usually counted as the last people hanged for witchcraft in England. In the Basque country in 1609, the French judge Pierre de Lancre sent between seventy and eighty people to the fire.

Across the mountains, the Spanish Inquisition took up accusations from the village of Zugarramurdi. Fifty-three people were sentenced at an auto-da-fé in 1610; eleven were to be burned, five of them already dead, their effigies and bones burned beside the six living. The third inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías, had voted against the burnings. The following year the Inquisition sent him back with an edict of grace.

He collected confessions from 1,382 children and found the accounts did not match. Jars of ointment fed to animals did no harm. Girls who swore they had lain with the devil were found to be virgins. He told the council he had not found a single proof that any act of witchcraft had actually occurred, and he added that there were neither witches nor bewitched in a village until they were talked and written about.

In 1614, the council issued rules of evidence so strict that the Spanish Inquisition all but ceased to execute anyone for witchcraft. In France, the priest Urbain Grandier of Loudun was burned alive in 1634 after the nuns of the Ursuline convent reported a man appearing to them at night. Under exorcism, the prioress named Grandier. He was arrested, shaved, and searched for devil’s marks.

His legs were crushed in the boot, and a written pact with the signatures of demons was put in evidence. He admitted sins of the flesh but would not say he was a sorcerer. At the stake, the friars had knotted the rope so it could not be drawn, and he burned alive. In the Scandinavian trials, much of the testimony came from children.

At Vardø in Norway, after a storm drowned forty fishermen on Christmas Eve 1617, a woman named Mari Jørgensdatter was tortured in 1621 and confessed to flying to a gathering near Bergen. Several accused were thrown bound into the Arctic sea; they floated and were burned. Forty years later, in the winter of 1662, again on the same island, most of the evidence came from young girls. Maren Olsdatter, twelve, told the judges she had been to hell, where the devil blew fire through an iron horn to boil a great water full of people crying like cats.

Between them, the children named many women. Eighteen were burned that winter; two more died under torture. Across the century, ninety-one people were put to death in Finnmark, in a district of perhaps three thousand. Sweden had gone decades without an execution for witchcraft until children in Dalarna began telling of being carried to a place called Blåkulla.

In the parish of Mora, some three hundred children said they were being taken. A royal commission arrived in 1669, and fifteen people were beheaded. The largest single execution came in Torsåker in 1675, where the chaplain, through two boys who stood at the church door and pointed at parishioners, gathered about a hundred accused. The methods included whipping children, lowering them through a hole in the ice, and shutting them in a bake oven.

Seventy-one people were condemned, about one in five of the women in the three parishes. They were beheaded on a hill still called the mountain of the stake. The noise reached Stockholm, where a twelve-year-old boy told his story and women were named. Malin Matsdotter, a woman of sixty-three who spoke Swedish poorly, was burned alive in 1676.

A few weeks later, some of the child witnesses admitted they had made it up. The trials stopped, and the boy from Gävle was executed. He was thirteen. While Swedish children were giving evidence, children in one corner of the Alps were going to the fire themselves.

In Salzburg, the authorities concluded they faced a conspiracy of vagrant children led by a sorcerer named Jakob Koller. Beggar children were rounded up and tortured. The count most often quoted is 139 people put to death between 1675 and 1690, nearly all beggars. Thirty-nine were between ten and fourteen, and another fifty-three between fifteen and twenty-one.

The youngest was ten. Jakob Koller was never found. The fear crossed the Atlantic with the English settlers. The first person known to have been executed for witchcraft in the English colonies is a name and almost nothing else.

Alse Young of Windsor, Connecticut, was hanged at Hartford on the 26th of May 1647. In 1688 in Boston, the Goodwin children fell into fits after accusing the washerwoman’s mother, Goody Glover, an Irish Catholic widow. Rag images stuffed with goat hair were found in her house. She was hanged that November.

By 1692, Salem Village was a farming settlement of five or six hundred people with a long history of quarrels over land and ministers. In January, the minister’s daughter Betty Paris, nine, and his niece Abigail Williams, eleven, began to behave strangely, creeping under chairs, twisting into impossible postures, complaining of being bitten by something invisible. The doctor said they were under an evil hand. The girls began to name who was hurting them: Tituba, an enslaved woman; Sarah Osborne, a sick woman who had not been to meeting in over a year; and Sarah Good, a pregnant beggar who muttered as she went from door to door.

At their examination on the 1st of March, the girls fell into torments at the sight of them. Tituba, after being beaten according to later report, confessed, describing a tall man from Boston in black clothes, a black dog, and a book in which she had made her mark in blood. The accusations then moved up the social scale. Martha Cory, who had said she did not think there were any witches, was named.

So was Rebecca Nurse, a seventy-one-year-old grandmother so well thought of that she spent some minutes sympathizing with the afflicted girls before she learned she had been accused herself. Dorothy Good, Sarah Good’s four-year-old daughter, was examined and sent to join her mother in the Boston prison, where leg irons were made for the accused. In May, the new governor, Sir William Phips, arrived to find the prisons crammed and set up a special court. He put his lieutenant governor, William Stoughton, at its head.

Stoughton accepted spectral evidence without reservation, holding that the devil could not take the shape of an innocent person, so a vision of the accused was proof against her. Bridget Bishop was hanged alone on the 10th of June. Rebecca Nurse was tried at the end of June. The jury returned not guilty, but the accusers made a hideous outcry, and Stoughton questioned the verdict.

The jury went out again, and the foreman asked Nurse directly about something she had said; by his own statement, she made no reply, being hard of hearing and full of grief. They took her silence for an answer and found her guilty. The governor granted a reprieve, then withdrew it. On the 3rd of July, she was excommunicated from the Salem church.

Five women were hanged on the ledge on the 19th of July. Before Sarah Good’s turn, the minister Nicholas Noyes told her she was a witch and had better confess. She answered, You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard.

And if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink. August brought the men. George Burroughs, a former minister of the village, was accused by Anne Putnam, who said his two dead wives had appeared to her in their burial sheets. John Proctor, who had written a petition from prison describing how confessions were obtained by tying men neck and heels until the blood gushed from their noses, was hanged.

Martha Carrier, whose sons had accused her under that treatment, was hanged. So were John Willard and George Jacobs, a man of about eighty who laughed at the charge. On the 19th of August, Burroughs made a speech clearing himself and ended with the Lord’s Prayer without a slip, which it was common belief a witch could not do. Many in the crowd wept.

Cotton Mather, on horseback, called out that Burroughs had never been properly ordained and that the devil could transform himself into an angel of light. The executions went on. In September, the court condemned fifteen people. Giles Corey, Martha’s husband, pleaded not guilty and then refused to answer whether he would be tried by a jury.

He was pressed to death under a growing weight of stones, the first in New England to suffer that penalty. His tongue was forced out of his mouth, and the sheriff pushed it back in with his cane as he was dying. Martha Corey was hanged three days later with seven others, including Mary East, Rebecca Nurse’s sister, who had written a petition begging that no more innocent blood be shed. When the bodies were hanging, Noyes said, What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there.

Those eight were the last. Nineteen people had been hanged and one pressed to death. More than 150 were still in prison, where at least five people died, not counting Sarah Good’s baby. By October, the accusations had reached too high.

The girls had named the wife of a prominent minister and, it was whispered, the governor’s wife. Men who had kept quiet began to speak. Increase Mather wrote that it were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned. Phips forbade any more arrests and dissolved the court.

A new court sat in January under orders to disregard spectral evidence, and without it the cases fell apart. Of fifty-two people tried, three were convicted. Phips reprieved them all. In May, the governor pardoned everyone still held.

Even pardoned, a prisoner stayed until her fees were paid. Tituba sat in prison for thirteen months and was sold for her fees to a buyer whose name is not recorded. Dorothy Good was let out in December 1692, after eight and a half months, chained in a dungeon. Her father later wrote that she was so hardly used and terrified that she had little or no reason to govern herself.

He was awarded £30. Public admissions came over the following years. In January 1697, the colony kept a day of fasting and prayer. In the Old South Church in Boston, Judge Samuel Sewall handed a paper to the minister and stood in his pew while it was read aloud, saying he desired to take the blame and shame of it.

Twelve of the jurors signed a declaration that they were sadly deluded and mistaken. In August 1706, Anne Putnam, now twenty-six, stood in the Salem Village meeting house and asked to be admitted to the church. She desired to be humbled before God for being made an instrument of accusing several persons of a grievous crime whereby their lives were taken away, whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe were innocent persons. She was accepted.

She died at thirty-six. In 1711, the legislature reversed most of the convictions and voted compensation. The last name, Elizabeth Johnson, was formally exonerated in the summer of 2022 after a class of thirteen-year-olds took up her case as a civics project. Across Europe, the trials fell away at about the same pace.

In 1712, Jane Wenham was convicted in England after witnesses said she could fly; the judge, Sir John Powell, is supposed to have remarked that he knew of no law against flying. He passed sentence, then got her a royal pardon. In 1735, Parliament repealed the old acts, and the offense became pretending to have magical powers. The accusations did not end in the villages.

In 1751, near Tring, the publican Butterfield had an elderly couple in the parish workhouse, Ruth and John Osborne, ducked in a pond. Ruth died. The chimney sweep who turned her over with a stick collected money afterwards and was tried for murder and hanged at the crossroads. The case usually called the last execution for witchcraft in Europe came in Switzerland.

Anna Göldi, a maidservant in Glarus, was dismissed after needles turned up in the bread and milk of her employer’s daughter. The child fell into convulsions. Anna was arrested, confessed under torture that the devil had come to her as a black dog, and withdrew the confession. The court convicted her as a poisoner, keeping the word witch out of the verdict.

She was beheaded with a sword on the 13th of June 1782. A German professor writing the following year used a new phrase for what had happened: judicial murder. The formal apologies began about two hundred years after that. Glarus cleared Anna Göldi’s name in 2008.

In March 2022, the first minister of Scotland apologized in Parliament to everyone accused under the witchcraft act, nearly four thousand people, for what she called injustice on a colossal scale. Catalonia’s parliament had passed a resolution a few weeks earlier for the women condemned there. Connecticut’s legislature followed the year after for Alse Young and the others. The violence still goes on.

The United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution in 2021 on violence against people accused of witchcraft, still reported from parts of Africa, India, and Papua New Guinea. The victims in those reports are very often older women and children. Lilias Adie, who died in custody in 1704 in Torryburn and was buried in the mud between the tides under a half-ton slab, lay there for nearly 150 years. In 1852, the grave was opened for the collector’s market.

Her skull went into a private museum and later to the University of St Andrews; it has not been seen since 1938. The wood of her coffin was sawn into walking sticks. In 2017, a forensic artist used surviving photographs to rebuild her face. He said nothing in her story suggested she was anything other than a victim of horrible circumstances, so he saw no reason to pull the face into a mean expression.

She ended up having quite a kind face. Her stone was found again in 2014, believed to be the only known grave of an accused witch in the country. In August 2019, a memorial service was held, and the council put out an appeal for the skull, should whoever holds it care to send it home. The slab is still out there.

The tide covers it twice a day.