The Burned Woman at Ellwangen

A truly horrific commission by Bezzub

Since the Spring Equinox of my 16th birthday, I started having very strange, vivid dreams of the past. In one of them, I watched a woman burn at the stake before bounding back towards the safety of a Black Forest. Had I stayed, I would have been next.

I would never forget her shrieks of agony as flames licked at and then devoured her bare feet. I finally included her story in my Anthology Series: Matters of the Hart.

“The first witch to be tried, in the spring of 1611, was a 70-year-old woman named Barbara Rufin, who had a long-standing reputation as a witch; even her husband had called her one. She was initially accused of having killed animals by witchcraft and attempting to poison her son. After a series of interrogations under torture increasing in duration and intensity, Rufin confessed to these crimes as well as to having made a pact with the Devil and having had sex with him. At this point, she lost mental control and continued alternately to confess to the charges against her and to deny them. Rufin was executed on May 16, 1611.

This was only the beginning. The course of events is unclear because of the haphazard survival of documents, but by the end of the year more than one hundred witches had been executed over the course of 17 public executions.”