Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/88

78 and departs. This woman (pointing to the plaintiff) is such a night hag. She drives me out of every place, so that I can never stay anywhere more than three weeks. At midnight she comes out from under my bed when I am asleep, sits on me, and sucks the blood out of my breast. I am so weak that I can not work. Formerly I was strong and healthy, now I am lank and lean, because she has drained me of all my blood." Thereupon a woman in the court room exclaimed: "That is true; the witch ought to let her alone. I myself have seen the red spot on her breast and the bites on her arm with the marks of real teeth." The case was then adjourned in order to obtain the opinion of a physician as to the mental condition of the defendant. But if the psychiater declares Maria Wirzar to be crazy, what should he say of the sanity of priests like Dr. Bischofberger, or of the Catholic bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries whose teachings are directly responsible for the spread of such gross popular delusions?

Still later, in the autumn of 1892, Victoria Self ritz was charged with having bewitched the stall of the burgomaster of Schapbach, in Baden, and thereby produced an epidemic of hoof disease. As the circulation of this report was injurious to her reputation, and she found it inconvenient to prosecute the burgomaster, with whom it appears to have originated, she published a notice in the local newspaper denying that she ever possessed or exercised any power as a witch. In December of the same year a maid-servant, Elizabeth Hörrath, of Obermichelbach, in Bavaria, was sentenced to ten days' imprisonment for having accused her aunt of being a house witch and her own mother of being a stall witch, asserting that she saw the latter riding on the back of a cow, which immediately afterward went dry. The remarkable thing was, not that an ignorant and malevolent girl should have started such a report, but that many of the neighbors should have believed it and broken off all intercourse with the two satellites of Satan.

In June, 1885, at Kempten, in Bavaria, Xaver Endtes, a professional wizard, was tried and condemned to jail for three weeks because he swindled a peasant named Ostheimer out of seventeen marks under the pretext of casting devils out of cattle. He kindled a fire in the stable and heated two iron bars red hot, then poured on them a quantity of milk, and persuaded Ostheimer that the film of scalded milk that remained was the skin of the witch, who had thus been burned and rendered harmless for the future.

In 1891 a witch conjurer (Hexenbanner), a mason by trade, was arrested by the police at Ulm, where he had established himself as an exorcist, charging twenty-five marks for his services and finding apparently plenty of customers. He was also sentenced to three weeks' imprisonment as a common swindler. The possibility of brazen-faced deceptions of this sort implies a general