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Curses · Witches and witch trials

Torsåker – 71 Victims in a Single Day

When
1675 date from records made at the time
Where
Häxberget (Bålberget) near Torsåker, Ångermanland, Sweden
Verdict
Explained

The largest witch execution in Swedish history: on a single day in 1675, 71 people, mostly women, were beheaded and burned on the testimony of children.

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63.05°, 17.69° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

Between 1668 and 1676 Sweden was swept by a hysteria known as the “Great Noise”: children claimed that witches carried them off at night to sabbaths in the Devil's realm of Blockula. The panic reached the parish of Torsåker in Ångermanland through the priest Laurentius Hornæus, appointed by the witchcraft commission. The main witnesses were children, and Hornæus forced testimony out of them by beating them, dipping them in holes in the ice and threatening to roast them in an oven. He placed boys at the church door to identify witches by an invisible mark on their foreheads. About a hundred people were accused. In 1675, after a final sermon, 71 of the condemned – 65 women and 6 men – were led out of church to a hill in the middle of the parish. Relatives armed with pikes made sure nobody escaped. The prisoners were beheaded away from the pyres so their blood would not soak the wood, and then the bodies were burned. Roughly one in five women of the area died.

Witnesses

The key account was written down in 1735 by Jöns Hornæus, the priest's grandson, from the words of his grandmother Britta Rufina, an eyewitness to the execution.

Explanations and hypotheses

Sweden's panic of 1668–1676 ended when several child witnesses in Stockholm admitted they had lied – some of them were punished. Historians attribute it, among other things, to pressure from the state church, which ordered priests to publicise the matter from the pulpit, and to violence against children. The original records of the Torsåker trial are meagre and give few details. A memorial stone now stands at the execution site.

Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.

Sources

  1. Camilla Stjärnvarg, En genusanalys av trolldomsprocessen i Torsåker, Ångermanland 1674 (Södertörns högskola, 2018)
  2. Helena Bure Wijk, Stockar och stenar falla där, istället för tårar: en studie av häxprocesserna i Torsåker, Ångermanland 1674–1675 (Högskolan Dalarna, 2014)
  3. Historisk studenttidskrift – En dröm, ett gyckelverk: En 1700-talstolkning av 1600-talets häxprocesser

More: Wikipedia (en)