Mary Schweidler, the amber witch: The most interesting trial for witchcraft ever known, printed from an imperfect manuscript by her father, Abraham Schweidler, the pastor of Coserow in the island of Usedom / edited by W. Meinhold ; translated from the German by Lady Duff Gordon.Meinhold, Wilhelm
General
Mary Schweidler, the amber witch: The most interesting trial for witchcraft ever known, printed from an imperfect manuscript by her father, Abraham Schweidler, the pastor of Coserow in the island of Usedom / edited by W. Meinhold ; translated from the German by Lady Duff Gordon.
Meinhold, Wilhelm
Witchcraft -- Pomerania (Poland and Germany)
Neither did I feel much care with respect to food for them, inasmuch as
there was a great plenty of hay in the neighbourhood, seeing that all the
cattle had been killed or driven away (as related above). I therefore made
up my mind to go in God's name with my new ploughman to Gützkow, whither a
great many Mecklenburg horses were brought to the fair, seeing that times
were not yet so bad there as with us. Meanwhile I went a few more times up
the Streckelberg with my daughter at night, and by moonlight, but found
very little; so that we began to think our luck had come to an end, when,
on the third night, we broke off some pieces of amber bigger even than
those the two Dutchmen had bought. These I resolved to send to my wife's
brother, Martin Behring, at Hamburg, seeing that the schipper Wulff of
Wolgast intends, as I am told, to sail thither this very autumn, with
pitch and wood for shipbuilding. I accordingly packed it all up in a
strong chest, which I carried with me to Wolgast when I started with my
man on my journey to Gützkow. Of this journey I will only relate thus
much, that there were plenty of horses and very few buyers in the market.
Wherefore I bought a pair of fine black horses for twenty florins apiece;
_item_, a cart for five florins; _item_, twenty-five bushels of rye, which
also came from Mecklenburg, at one florin the bushel, whereas it is hardly
to be had now at Wolgast for love or money, and costs three florins or
more the bushel. I might therefore have made a good bargain in rye at
Gützkow if it had become my office, and had I not, moreover, been afraid
lest the robbers, who swarm in these evil times, should take away my corn,
and ill-use and perchance murder me into the bargain, as has happened to
sundry people already. For, at this time especially, such robberies were
carried on after a strange and frightful fashion on Strellin heath at
Gützkow; but by God's help it all came to light just as I journeyed
thither with my man-servant to the fair, and I will here tell how it
happened. Some months before a man had been broken on the wheel at
Gützkow, because, being tempted of Satan, he murdered a travelling
workman. The man, however, straightway began to walk after so fearful a
fashion, that in the evening and night-season he sprang down from the
wheel in his gallows' dress whenever a cart passed by the gallows, which
stands hard by the road to Wolgast, and jumped up behind the people, who
in horror and dismay flogged on their horses, and thereby made a great
rattling on the log embankment which leads beside the gallows into a
little wood called the Kraulin. And it was a strange thing that on the
same night the travellers were almost always robbed or murdered on
Strellin heath. Hereupon the magistrates had the man taken down from the
wheel and buried under the gallows, in hopes of laying his ghost. But it
went on just as before, sitting at night snow-white on the wheel, so that
none durst any longer travel the road to Wolgast.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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