Anna Göldi

Having studied the history of witches and the beheading of Anna Göldi, this Newsweek article, Europe's 'Last Witch' was an interesting one. It's a web exclusive and contains video as well as some of the basic information as to what happened to Anna and the attempt all of these years later to clear her name.

She wasn't a witch but a live-in maid. She was indeed dangerous--but the spells she cast were in the bedrooms of the most powerful men in the canton, much younger than she. At a time when extramarital affairs were illegal, word of adultery could cost even the most powerful man in the land his influence. And Göldi had a history of sexual relations with the powerful men of the houses she tended. She had a relationship with one Dr. Melchior Zwicky, a doctor more than a decade her junior from a major Glarus political family for whom she was housemaid for six years in Mollis. The new documents Hauser has found show that Göldi may even have fled to Strasbourg in 1774 to secretly deliver and have baptized Zwicky's child.

But by 1782, Göldi, then 48, was working for the Tschudi family in Glarus. Her troubles began when Dr. Johann Jacob Tschudi, 35, a married doctor and judge from a politically powerful family, made sexual advances and she complained to church authorities, Hauser discovered. "There was speculation at the time that she was pregnant by Tschudi," the author says. Göldi had to be silenced. Suddenly, Tschudi alleged, one of the Tschudi children, Annemiggeli, became violently ill and spat up 100 needles. He blamed Göldi, alleging witchcraft. Soon a warrant was issued for her arrest. Once captured, she was imprisoned and tortured until she confessed. Replicas of her cell and the instrument used to torture her--a rope strung from a pulley that lifted her by the shoulders, her arms tied behind her back, stones tied to her ankles to stretch her body--are on display at the Mollis museum. The evangelical court, packed with Tschudis, charged Göldi with poisoning the child and condemned her to death by decapitation.