78 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sists 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, be- 

 cause 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. 1 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. Bischof berger, 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 Seifritz 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 Horrath, 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 imme- 

 diately afterward went dry. The remarkable thing was, not that 

 an ignorant and malevolent girl should have started such a re- 

 port, 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 pro- 

 fessional 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 possi- 

 bility of brazen-faced deceptions of this sort implies a general 



