Anna Göldi was forty-seven years old when she was put to death in the little town of Glarus, in Switzerland, on 13 June 1782.
She was taken to the town square and there, in front of the townspeople, her head was cut of with a sword. Before her head was parted from her body, she was broken in every way that mattered. She is remembered as Europe’s last witch and is the last person known to have been executed there for the crime of witchcraft. Glarus was small, among other small towns in a narrow valley.
Steep slopes of mountains cast shadows, making darkness that conceals. Göldi was born in the town of Sennwald, in the St Gallen canton of Switzerland, in 1734. Details of her life are blurred by storytelling but she had a child out of wedlock and the baby died soon after birth. Göldi was blamed in some way, no doubt and not least for the sin of having a baby at all while unmarried, and put in a pillory for pelting with rotten food.
She was then placed under house arrest, but escaped. There was another child, by another man, before she found work in Glarus, around the year 178o, with a well-to-do family called Tschudi.
Goldi was a good-looking woman – that much seems obvious. She was a tall and voluptuous brunette, long-haired and dark-eyed. She had a healthy complexion. Jakob Ischudi was a local magistrate, a man of influence and power, locally at least. He was married with children when, into is home, came Golds to take on some of the childcare and so, in a war hat is suble but that mattered, acquired some influence of her own. in any event there began an affair of sorts, between the husband and the nanny – an old story. If there ever was any love, any kindness, it did not last. The old story ran its course and Göldi was sacked, put out of the house.
There were other stories then. The Tschudis said there had come a day
when one of the children found a steel pin in her cup of milk. There had been pins in the bread as well, and the finger of guilt was pointed at the help.
All of this happened in 1782. While the people of Switzerland and the rest of Europe were in the thick of the Enlightenment and having their eyes opened to science and reason, Anna Göldi was arrested and accused of witchcraft.
She was tortured, of course. How else is a witch to be made to confess? They hung her up by cords around her thumbs and put weights on her feet to dislocate her joints. The confessions she made in her misery sound laughably scripted, except the horror of it all meant no one was laughing.
She said Satan himself had come to her in the form of a black dog. It was he who had given her the needles. Cut down from the ropes, she immediately said none of it was true, that she was innocent. So they hung her up once more and hurt her more severely until she said it all again, about Satan and his needles.
Göldi could neither read nor write but with one ruined hand she made her mark on a paper detailing her crimes. Soon after that she was taken to the square and the swordsman.
Göldi would speak no more, and that was the point after all. Jakob Ischudi had the power and, he no doubt thought, more to lose than she.
Maybe she came back to him after her sacking and threatened to tell all unless … unless … Maybe that was all the provocation he needed to raise a storm to destroy a woman scorned.
1782. In the November of that year Britain would recognize the independence of the United States of America, and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society would devote much space to the study of a Great Meteor that passed through the night sky… and an unmarried woman and her severed head lay cold in an unmarked grave, denounced as a witch. The ultimate cancelling.
It was all wrong. The people of Glarus, great and small, knew it was wrong, that there was no such thing as witchcraft. A powerful man feeling threatened, backed by others who knew better and cared nothing for scientific fact, far less the truth, if it did not fit the narrative, had made claims that flew in the face of all reason. The powerless people around them kept their heads down and were silent for fear of drawing the same deadly heat upon themselves.
No doubt in their homes they spoke the truth together – that they were being duped, frightened into accepting as right what they knew to be wrong. It was not the first time scientific fact and reason were set aside by powerful men for the sake of expediency, and it would not be the last.
About The Author
