Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/91

Rh In August, 1893, at Montelepre, in Sicily, a girl of seventeen suffered from a painful malady which her family and kinsmen suspected of being the result of demoniacal possession. This opinion was confirmed by the village strega or witch, who gave them full information concerning the name, character, origin, and power of the indwelling demon, and recommended the fifteenth of the month, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, as the fittest time for casting out the evil spirit. On the appointed day the witch prepared a bath of boiling-hot water, into which she threw snail shells, lobsters' claws, nettles, and similar ingredients of a powerful hell-broth, recalling the contents of the caldron over which the three weird sisters in Macbeth muttered their potent charm. The patient was then put into the water and covered with a bed blanket, under which a pound and a half of burning incense was placed. The screams and struggles of the unfortunate girl were of no avail, and not until she fainted away was she taken out in a parboiled condition and laid on a bed, where she soon afterward expired. As she was at the last gasp the witch said, "Now the charm is beginning to work and the demon is about to go out of her."

It is not merely among ignorant and superstitious Sicilians that such things are possible. Not many years ago a young man at Urschütz, near Rosenberg, in Upper Silesia, was treated by a "wise woman" in precisely the same manner and with equally fatal results.

It was recently reported from Catania, in Sicily, that a fiddler named Carmolo had killed twenty-four children and saturated the earth with their blood as a means of finding hidden treasure. A little later the bodies of twenty children were discovered in the woods near the hamlets of Cibali and Santa Sofia; at the same time the parents received anonymous letters, in which the writer told them not to grieve for the dead, since their blood would enable him to unearth an immense amount of money, which he would share with them and thus amply compensate them for their loss.

In March, 1894, a farm laborer, Sier, was sentenced to fourteen months' imprisonment for having exhumed the body of a newly buried child in the graveyard at Moosbach, in Bavaria, and taken out one of its eyes, which, he believed, would render him invisible, like the tarn-helmet of the old German saga, and thus make it possible for him to thieve with impunity. The notion that a bridge will remain firm for all time if a living human being is immured in its foundations is quite prevalent in eastern Europe, and the gypsies are generally suspected of stealing children and selling them for this purpose. Not long since, when a bridge was to be built over the Save, near Breczka, in