BEWITCHED HENS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 274, 14 July 1932, Page 3

BEWITCHED HENS

SUPERSTITION STILL RAMPANT IN NORTH GERMAN VILLAGES. Belief in magic and witchcraft is still rampant in the villages of Northern Germany, and although persons accused of practising the black art are no longer burned or ducked, their lives are made a burden. One of them, Frau Schmidt, who lives in a village near Kappeln, not far from Hamburg, determined to clear her character, and she hrought an action for slander in a local court against one of her neighbours. The neighbour admitted that she had said that Frau Schmidt was a witch and that she had bewitched her and her daughter and her hens. "I can prove it," she said with great assurance, The judge asked her to state the grounds on which she based her opinion. "I was repeatedly ill," she said, "and so was my daughter, and than ' the hens took to laying hadly. So I said to myself, 'Something is amiss,' and I sent my daughter to find out what it was from a woman wh'o is very skilful in laying the cards. "She at once said that a witch was at work, and following her direetions we fumigated the whole house with burning branstone and th'e othar ingredients which she ordered. Frau Schmidt's spell was at once removed, We were at once well again, and the hens began to lay again properly." Th'e woman stated that she had tried to kill Frau Schmidt by magic. She had boiled milk mixed with various herbs — as prescribed by the woman who tells fortunes by cards — in an earthen pot, and left it until the pot cracked. The witch should then have died. "Unfortunately, she did, not," said the defendant aeidly. She was indignant when th'e judge fined her £2 10s, and his appeal to her not to believe in foolish superstition had evidently no effect, for as she left the court, she 'exclaimed: "The witch is still alive."