What happened
Anna Göldi was born in 1734 into a poor family in Sennwald and worked as a servant from her youth. In 1780 she was hired by the physician and judge Johann Jakob Tschudi of Glarus, one of the most powerful men in the canton, to look after his five daughters. Soon one of the girls began spitting out pins, which the family claimed Anna had put into her by witchcraft, slipping them into her bread and milk. Göldi fled, but the authorities advertised a reward for her capture in the Zürcher Zeitung. Under torture she confessed to a pact with the Devil, who had appeared to her as a black dog – and later retracted it. On 13 June 1782 she was beheaded with a sword in Glarus. She was formally convicted of “poisoning,” even though the girl survived and the law of the time did not impose the death penalty for that.
Witnesses
The Tschudi family and the judges of Glarus; the case was reported by the press across Switzerland and the Holy Roman Empire, including the historian August Ludwig von Schlözer, who called the sentence “judicial murder.”
Explanations and hypotheses
Historians believe Göldi was the victim of a powerful employer – they probably had an affair, or Tschudi abused her, and she threatened to expose him. The court deliberately avoided the word “witchcraft” and the records were destroyed, but all of Europe saw the verdict as a witch trial in the Age of Enlightenment. In 2008 the canton of Glarus declared the trial illegal and officially exonerated her. Since 2014 two lamps have burned in her memory on the wall of the Glarus courthouse, and in 2017 a museum dedicated to her opened.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
Sources
- SWI swissinfo.ch – "Last witch in Europe" cleared (2008)
- Anna Göldi Museum – Geschichte, Justiz & Menschenrechte
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