212 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



into the room, crying : " The demons have stolen your child and put 

 a changeling in your bed: beat him, beat him, if you wish to have 

 your child again! " Under the influence of this suggestion, which 

 seemed to be almost hypnotic in its character, the bewildered mother 

 began to beat the boy. The aunt now seized him and swung him 

 to and fro, as if she would fling him out of the window, at the same 

 time calling out to Satan: " There! you have him; take your brat! " 

 She then gave him back to his mother with the words : " Throw him 

 to the ground, drub him, beat him to death; otherwise you will never 

 recover your child." This advice was followed, and the boy severely 

 strapped with a heavy girdle as he lay on the floor. Meanwhile 

 Bekker, hearing the noise, got up and at first tried to intervene for 

 the protection of his son, but was easily convinced by his wife that 

 she was doing the right thing, and persuaded to aid her in discom- 

 fiting the devil by beating the boy with a juniper stick. The process 

 of exorcism, thus renewed with increased vigor, soon proved fatal. 

 At this juncture, as the son of the aunt, a lad of five years, threw 

 himself down with loud lamentations beside the dead body of his 

 little cousin, his mother cried out: " Beat him; he is not my child! 

 Why should we spare him? We shall get other children! ' There- 

 upon he, too, was maltreated in the same manner until he expired. 

 The aunt then declared that the devil had crept into the stovepipe, 

 and went to work to demolish the stove, but, when she was prevented 

 from doing so, fled into the garden, where she was found the next 

 morning by the school-teacher. By this time Bekker and his wife 

 seem to have come to their senses, and were sitting by the corpses 

 of the murdered children, weeping and praying, as the neighbors 

 entered the house. The trial, which took place at Ostrov in January, 

 1872, led to the introduction of conflicting expert testimony concern- 

 ing the mental soundness of the accused, and the matter was finally 

 referred to a commission of psychiaters in Berlin, who decided that 

 Bekker and his wife were not suffering from mental disease, and 

 therefore not irresponsible, but that the aunt was subject to periodical 

 insanity to such a degree as not to be accountable for her actions. 

 Curiously enough, the jurors remained uninfluenced by this testi- 

 mony, and pronounced her guilty of the crime laid to her charge, 

 and in accordance with this verdict the court sentenced her to three 

 years' imprisonment with hard labor. The jurors even went so far 

 as to declare that she herself did not believe in the existence of elf 

 children or satanic changelings, but made use of this popular super- 

 stition for her own selfish purposes, and that she guilefully de- 

 nounced her own boy as an imp in order to get rid of him. In this 

 verdict, or rather in the considerations urged in support of it, it is 

 easy to perceive the effects of strong local prejudice against the 



