Original subtitles

[♪ eerie music playing]

[narrator] Sweden, the mid 1600s.

A simple argument between two children

sparks a horrific series of witch trials

known as the Great Noise.

- It was a girl, Gertrud, who was 11 years old,

and a boy, Mats.

- They're both goat herds.

It's a summer's day and some goats have got loose.

And in that ingenious way goats have of making trouble,

have managed to put themselves on a small island

in a river, so they're hard to get.

- They get into an argument and Gertrud goes

to this little island and she gets them back.

Mats gets embarrassed because she is the one

that fetches the goats.

- It's a childish dispute of which there were probably

hundreds of thousands in Europe at the time,

but it's what's made of that story

that makes it much more sinister.

[Ronald Hutton] Having fallen out with a younger girl,

he's bent on revenge by spreading smear stories.

And when they go back home, Mats Nielsen tells his family

that Gertrud walked on water to the island to get the goats.

[Goran Malmstedt] He also told his father that she could walk

on water because she had asked for help from the devil.

[Ronald Hutton] This would have meant nothing if the village

hadn't happened to have an inquisitive religious minister

who is obsessed by Satan.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] This argument about herding goats

causes the greatest witch panic in Northern Europe.

[Goran Malmstedt] The Great Noise is the name of a major

series of witch trials in Sweden during the years

from 1668 to 1676.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] Up until 1668, Sweden had very few

witch trials and then this exploded.

And within these seven, eight years, 300 people were executed.

[Alison Rowlands] It's a very kind of unusual anomalous

period of time in relation to the general history

of witch trials in Sweden.

This is a Lutheran context, so we're in a Protestant

Lutheran context.

People will always have believed in magic.

They'll always have believed in the possibility

that witches could work magic.

What you see in the 17th century is more of a spread

of those demonological ideas about witchcraft

as a group activity, witchcraft as a possible heresy.

[Ronald Hutton] Witch hunting was dying out in its

traditional heartlands like Germany and England.

And the Northern periphery of Sweden was where it broke out

after the big witch hunts were over in Central Europe.

[Goran Malmstedt] The children, Gertrud and Mats,

lived in a village called Orsen that was part of the

parish Alvenden in Darlana.

It was a small village.

I suppose everyone knew each other very well.

When this story got known in the village

and the vicar heard of it, he wanted to interrogate Gertrud

and ask what she had to do with the devil.

[Alison Rowlands] Some of these local ministers are

particularly zealous moralists and they're looking for sin

and looking for the works of the devil

in what might, first of all, be fairly innocent

stories and arguments.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] Normally, a pastor would call in the suspected parishioner

and he would probably start by questioning her

and also admonishing her that she should tell the truth

for the sake of her own salvation.

[Goran Malmstedt] We don't know about what happened.

But we can be sure that he was harsh

and he used cruel methods to frighten Gertrud,

who was 11 years old.

[Ronald Hutton]He spends an entire winter on and off

trying to get Gertrud to confess to being a witch.

And she might have escaped if another boy,

this time a 15-year-old, hadn't told the minister

that he had had a vision in the woods

in which he had seen Gertrud being transported off

to join the witch's Sabbath at Blåkulla.

[Goran Malmstedt] Blåkulla is a mythological place

where the witches met with the devil,

and the place where the witches took children.

The witches and the abducted children flew to Blåkulla

sometimes upside down, cows, but also on broomsticks

or other things.

[Ronald Hutton] The idea of Blåkulla, which means

blue mountain, is centuries old, by the 1660s.

The first evidence for it consists of wall paintings

in late medieval Scandinavian churches.

And they very clearly show witches,

on very early broomsticks, flying off to Blåkulla.

- The idea really is that witches

have a regular meeting place, and this is common to a number

of different cultures of witchcraft.

But in this case, it's a particular mountaintop

called the Blåkulla, and it's assumed

that witches from all over Sweden

can gather on this mountaintop.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] The Blåkulla descriptions differ

from other Sabbath stories.

It's the idea that this is also a bright place.

[Goran Malmstedt] People danced and they had a lot of food to eat.

They also often got nice gifts from the devil.

- Somehow it's more festive, and when the witches meet the

devil, they have more fun.

So they have the positive things,

but they also have the evil things.

[Ronald Hutton] Worshipping Satan,

promising loyalty to Satan,

eating, drinking, dancing back to back,

and doing most things in reverse,

then finding that the food and drink turns to ashes

or leaves you hungry and thirstier than before.

[Goran Malmstedt] There were also orgies of some kinds

where the witches got laid by the devil.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] The Witches Sabbath is a sexually

charged place, and the entire relationship is always defined

by somewhat the witch showing her allegiance to the devil.

And then you have that idea of when witches defy the devil,

and he would comb off their skin,

and he would put it on spikes, and he would torment

them forever.

[Julian Goodare] It's a folkloric idea that children

might be abducted to the Witches Sabbath,

but the authorities seem to be willing to go with it.

Somehow it makes the transition from crazy folk tale

to, "Oh, wait a minute, this is real.

This is actually happening."

[narrator] Over many months, the priest interrogates Gertrud,

desperate to force a confession from the innocent girl.

The minister thinks he's got a critical mass of evidence

against Gertrud, and Gertrud breaks and begins to confess.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] When Gertrud finally confessed,

she actually confessed that she had walked on water.

Her feet had been rubbed with oil,

and that was what made her able to walk on water.

What happened to her was what happened

in a lot of witch trials.

They were broken down, but they were also maybe

starting to believe things.

She would have heard the same questions over and over again,

and the parish priest would appeal to her conscience,

telling her that it would be for the sake

of her own salvation if she would only make

a full confession.

So she would probably have thought at some point

that this would be of her own good to confess,

or maybe she would even have started to believe it.

[Ronald Hutton] She gives us her reason for confessing

after denying everything all winter,

that an angel has appeared to her at Blåkulla

and told her if she doesn't fess up,

then a famine's gonna hit Sweden,

loads of people are gonna starve to death.

That way, Gertrud reveals herself

as a kind of patriotic heroine, and so worthy of

sympathy and reprieve.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] What interrogators in witchcraft

trials always wanted to do was to map the group of people

that were involved in this, because the interrogators

want to have confirmation that this is not just

a one-time event.

This is something that happens regularly.

[Goran Malmstedt] Every time you got a witch, the court wanted to

know which other witches she knew were in this area.

She corroborates all the details of the revels there

and of worshipping Satan, and of there being lots

of other witches present.

They wouldn't just say, "I've been taken to a Sabbath."

They would say, "I have been taken

"by a very specific individual."

[Ronald Hutton] She also provides a backstory,

which is how years before,

the person who took her to Blåkulla,

and therefore is really the most to blame for everything,

is a former maidservant in her father's household

called Maret Jonsdotter.

And this is where the match is applied

to the fumes of the Swedish witch hunt.

[narrator] As the interrogations continue,

Gertrud gives more terrifying details

of the Witches' Sabbath she attended

with her family's former maidservant, Maret.

[Louise Kallestrup] What Gertrud is telling during her

interrogations is confirming their worst fears.

Somebody were taking the children to the

cult of the devil.

This could not be more horrible to the early modern dwellers.

[♪ foreboding music]

[Ronald Hutton] There's some family business involved here

because it turns out that her father

had tried to marry Maret, and that another

suitor of the maid had beaten the father

up and humiliated him.

[Goran Malmstedt] The plans for a marriage was postponed.

I think Gertrud accusing Maret has something to do

with this old conflict.

This is now an accusation against an adult

because the maidservant concerned is in her late 30s,

and so a prime target for a proper accusation.

[Goran Malmstedt] When the people in Maret's village

heard of these accusations, they immediately

arranged a court session in Lillhärdal in this

village where Maret lived.

[door slams shut]

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] The father of Gertrud, presumably both with a

grudge against his ex-employee, Maret, and also a desire to try

and save his daughter, actually testifies his own

belief that Maret was a witch.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] He claims that she has made him sick,

that she rode him across the sky to Blåkulla.

It's no coincidence that we have these accusations

from men towards women where men have lost face.

We very much have to interpret witchcraft accusations

within the gender hierarchy.

I don't think there can be any doubt

that he did this out of vengeance.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Huttdon] All three of Maret's siblings, who are much

younger than she is, accuse her of doing everything

that Gertrud said she'd done, so these youngsters have

clearly taken against their elder sister

and are out to get her as well.

[muted dialogue]

So all this piles up a formidable convergence

of evidence against poor Maret from both Gertrud's

family and her own family.

[Goran Malmstedt] We don't know if they were forced to do so

or if they got manipulated in some way

that made them perhaps also believe that this was true.

♪ ♪

[Diane Purkiss] It's quite common for girls to get their

own back in these ways.

The society that produced the witch trials

was viciously hierarchical and children were completely

at the beck and call of older relatives, typically.

This led to a situation in which children were able

to exercise a really powerful counter-strike

against the older women who dominated their lives

by accusing those older women of witchcraft.

[Ronald Hutton] There are some glorious juvenile details

in the testimony of poor Maret's siblings,

being made to sign their names in a special big black book

containing those of people who'd given their

allegiance to Satan.

[Goran Malmstedt] The most important thing in Blåkulla,

actually, was that the devil wanted the visitors

to write their name in his black book

and he used their own blood then.

That meant that the visitors, the children and the witches,

had made a pact with the devil.

[Ronald Hutton] The idea grew up that on taking somebody

into his service, the devil put a brand on them,

a special kind of mark.

[Louise Nyhold Kallestrup] The devil's mark is something that

we see in a number of trials all over Europe.

It could be a mole, a birthmark.

It could also simply be a small bump in the skin.

[Goran Malstedt] Maret actually had a scar on one of her fingers

and the court thought that that was where the devil

had taken blood from her to write her name in the book.

Enormous pressure is put on Maret to confess.

Bullying, threats, sleep deprivation, et cetera.

♪ ♪

At this stage, Swedish law will not allow the execution

of somebody who refuses to confess.

She very bravely refuses to confess,

but it doesn't actually rescue Maret.

In April 1669, Maret was sentenced guilty

despite her denial.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] She's in fact put back in prison

and she will be staying there for four more years

before anything else happens to her.

[Ronald Hutton] The whole witch hunt centered upon Maret

didn't die down because the lurid stories had

spread like wildfire through the neighboring region.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] What happened in "The Great Noise"

is that you determine that witchcraft

becomes a Crimen Exceptum, which means it's an

exceptional crime.

You can set aside normal procedures.

You could bend the laws, you could change the laws,

because this was a super crime.

♪ ♪

[Goran Malmstedt] In 1672, the court decided that Maret should

be executed despite not having confessed anything.

[♪ dark choral music]

♪ ♪

The authorities realized that waiting for a confession

didn't always work, and they thought that

they had to do that.

They couldn't keep those witches still working with the devil.

♪ ♪

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] Of course, people talked.

People were talking to their neighbors.

They were talking when they met at markets.

This was gossip.

It had all of the bits and pieces

that you find in present-day tabloid.

The more official channels were in churches,

and these pastors were clearly preoccupied with these stories,

basically putting fear into people's minds.

You can actually see how the panic

is slowly spreading from one parish to another

in the province of Dalarna.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] Hundreds of children come forward and tell the story

that they have also been abducted to Blåkulla.

[Ronald Hutton] A complete moral panic begins with parents

tying their children down to the beds or having blessings put by

the priests on the doorways, and a whole range of

other remedies like that.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] After the witch panic had traveled

through the Älvdalen, it spread to Mora

in the early 1669.

A parish delegate from Mora goes to Stockholm

with a list of 35 children's names.

They want a commission to come to Mora

to help them investigate these cases.

Usually, a witch trial would be handled in the local court,

so when you did, in fact, issue an order

to send out a commission, something really

extraordinary was at play.

♪ ♪

In August '69, a commission of eight priests

and eight laymen are sent to Mora to investigate the trials.

They need to prove to local society

that they take responsibility and they are taking the

right measures in this, but at the same time,

it's in their interest to calm things down.

♪ ♪

A common trial would be the person involved,

his or her accuser, some witnesses,

and you would have a large audience from local society.

But the commissions and the way they worked,

everything was enlarged.

[Ronald Hutton] The witch trials at Mora are

the public entertainment of two decades.

They are the best show in town.

This is a thinly populated rural district.

It's said quite credibly that 3,000 spectators turn

up to the first sitting, but also when the people leave,

they will fan out across the entire district,

carrying vivid stories from the witnesses with them

and stoke suspicion further.

♪ ♪

[Goran Malmstedt] The accused people were in court

and the witnesses would tell their stories,

and the interrogation was done by the members of

the commissions.

After they have made their interrogation,

they voted on if they were guilty or not,

and if there was a majority, they could condemn them

to the death penalty.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] The commission finishes its

investigations within two weeks, and that is incredibly fast.

It's not uncommon for a witchcraft trial

to drag out in years.

The fact that you can sentence 23 people within two weeks

and interrogate hundreds of people

is simply impressive.

♪ ♪

[narrator] With so many sons and daughters ensnared

in the tales of Blåkulla and the Witches Sabbath,

the court forces children to take the stand.

[Ronald Hutton] Yes, child witnesses are not as reliable as adults,

but you can make them so by multiples.

The testimony of two 14-year-olds

equals that of one adult witness,

so you keep on raising the number of children needed

the further down you go to make up a competent witness.

[Alison Rowlands] There's always the possibility that children

who tell these stories are labeled as ill,

and there's always the possibility

that they could be labeled as play-acting or fraudulent.

[Julian Goodare] On the other hand,

children are kind of innocent and pure,

and they haven't become corrupted

in the way that adults might become.

[Louise Nyhold Kallestrup] What they testify about is something

so mystical that only people who have been there, attended it,

would know what happened.

So they could tell you all the greasy stories

and still be the victims.

[Goran Malmstedt] I think the stories are a mixture of

child fantasies, but also people making the interrogations,

as well as the children's parents.

♪ ♪

They used to arrange what they call wake houses,

where all the children that was suspected to go to Blåkulla

was held awake by some adults, because they thought

that the abduction happened when the

children was asleep.

[Allison Rowlands] Once they're kept in groups, the risk is that

they spread stories and ideas amongst themselves.

If you're deprived of sleep, you're more likely to tell

fantastic stories anyway and want to tell them so

that you can get some rest.

They are being done with this very misguided,

but probably genuine, belief that people were trying

to help the children.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] Within a few weeks, they have 60 people on trial.

They sentence 23 to death, and they end up

putting to death 15, and that's from Mora alone.

[Goran Malmstedt] Why people confessed is complex.

There were a lot of social pressure on them.

Children crying and begging them to confess.

[Louise Nyhold Kallestrup] They are promised salvation if they confess.

Maybe even the suspected are interrogated so roughly

so they start believing that they have done these things.

♪ ♪

The executions took place on the 24th of August, 1669.

15 people were sent to the pyres,

but before being sent to the pyres,

they were all beheaded.

♪ ♪

[Alison Rowlands] The logic at the time was it was a very tiny shred of mercy

shown to the condemned by killing them quickly

before their remains were burned.

[Ronald Hutton] Once they are beheaded, their heads and their

bodies are tied to stakes so that the observers

can see them clearly, and then they're

burned to ashes, hanging from the stakes

in clumps like grapes.

[Diane Purkiss] The underlying notion is that to rid the area of witches,

you have to completely destroy their bodies as well.

Just killing them and depriving their body of volition

won't do the job.

[fire crackling]

[narrator] These executions are made possible

by the hundreds of child witnesses

drawn into Mora's witch trials.

Their testimonies secure convictions and executions,

but the children have also incriminated themselves.

Some of the children were punished

because they had been in Blåkulla.

They could be flogged, or they could be shamed in the church.

[Ronald Hutton] Or it can be made into a running of the

gauntlet whereby a posse of adults line up,

and the child is made to run between them

and is thrashed heavily or lightly

according to the personality of the adult concerned.

It's possible they're also regarded

with a certain amount of esteem in their communities

for having brought really evil adults to their deaths.

[Alison Rowlands] Because there had been very few executions

for witchcraft before this time in Sweden, the impact of the

public executions would have been immense.

[Ronald Huttdon] Observers, especially in Stockholm and the Royal Court,

are beginning to ask hard questions

about the speed with which the trials were conducted

and the carelessness with which evidence was evaluated.

[Goran Malmstedt] One of the members of the council is reported to have said

that the more you touch this, the worse it will get.

But if you acted drastically in this kind of crisis,

it could only get worse.

At the same time, we have these demands from the parishes

to send out new commissions, so even though the government

find them ineffective, they are still under pressure

from local societies.

[Ronald Huttdon] The Mora trials are a centrifuge,

with thousands of people having watched them.

These people then go home and spread all the stories

they've heard there.

Once the children start to dish out the stories,

the spreading waves of accusation become hard to stop.

The spotlight shifts to a hitherto totally obscure parish

in rural north-central Sweden called Torsåker,

and that's going to become the quintessence of horror

in Swedish witch trials.

[multiple distorted sounds]

[sheep bleating]

[Goran Malmstedt] Torsåker is a small society in Norland,

in the province of Ångermanland, close to the coastline in

the northern of Sweden.

They were farmers, and they had crop failures

this year and the year before also.

It was difficult times for them.

[Ronald Hutton] We now bring a really interesting character

onto the stage.

He is a proper villain of the peace.

His name is Laurentius Horneus, and he is a young,

ambitious Lutheran minister.

Unfortunately, everything, it seems,

that we know about his career as a witch hunter

comes from two generations later,

from his grandson working on some local records

and also on stories told to him when he was a child

by his grandmother.

So the evidence in this case is a little bit dodgy,

but it is the most spectacular single witch hunt in Sweden.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] Two years after being installed as a pastor,

he receives a letter from the central government

that he should investigate and start trials

against potential witches.

[Goran Malmstedt] And if they could also get these suspected

witches to confess, that would be the best.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] Compared to his colleagues,

he was taking this order very, very seriously.

[Diane Purkiss] This clergyman was so committed

to the idea that there were witches

that he was willing to do almost anything

to ensure that the case could be properly prosecuted

and the accused convicted.

Witch trial is, among other things,

an opportunity for fame and fortune.

If you are a fairly ordinary justice of the peace

or clergyman, and you successfully prosecute

lots of people for witchcraft, you get your name in the papers.

You stop being Joe Ordinary and become somebody

who's rid the world of a major menace.

[church bell tolling]

[Goran Malstedt] Hornaeus, he was the one responsible

for the children witnesses.

He used what is called "Visgossar". Wise boys.

There were a couple of boys in this area

that said that they had capability

to see who were the real witches.

And they can do so simply by looking at them

and seeing signs on the forehead that mark somebody as a witch.

They are generally very poor.

They're early teenage.

[Goran Malmstedt] They were traveling around in this area,

offering parishes and priests that they could

point out the witches if they only got paid.

[Ronald Hutton] They are believed, because they're supposed

to be the kind of people who go to the Witches' Sabbath

taken on and groomed by adult witches.

When people came out of service,

they would stand and they would point to the people

that they would believe were witches.

Everybody would fear meeting these boys.

Could be enemies of their families,

people they've fallen out with, or it could be the people

that the minister has primed them to identify.

[Ronald Hutton] One of them actually accuses Hornaeus' own

wife, and she has the presence of mind to slap the adolescent

across the face and realizing people

are turning on him.

He then claims he was blinded by the sun

and made a mistake and backpedals very fast.

♪ ♪

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] The torture methods applied by Laurentius are gruesome.

He would be what we would call a true sadist, I think.

He would dunk children and people into ice water,

and he would shovel the children into ovens.

If you had seen the images of hell in churches,

just imagine how frightening it must have been

to be put into an oven.

[Diane Purkiss] He's almost behaving like the wicked witch

in the "Hansel and Gretel" tale.

To catch a witch, you have to be a witch, it seems.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] Laurentius does not limit

himself to torturing children and suspected witches.

He also tortures regular witnesses,

so he is really zealous in his efforts

of extracting what he believes is the truth.

♪ ♪

[Diane Purkiss] The very fact that you've pinned your hopes

on the idea that children will be able to tell you

about being kidnapped by witches means that you want the

next child that you speak to to confirm that

version of the story and make your case for you.

You tend to sort of sink all your intellectual

and legal capital in a particular version of events.

[Ronald Hutton] He would often construct testimony

by taking really rather fragmented,

inadequate testimony from a number of different witnesses

and fusing it together to make one polished

and apparently convincing single testimony.

[narrator] Now Hornaeus has completed his

vicious investigations, the trial in Torsåker can begin.

Overseen by the local authorities,

it will become one of the bloodiest

witch trials in Sweden.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] In an ordinary witchcraft trial,

you would have maybe one, maybe two,

maybe three suspects charged with witchcraft.

Maybe you will have one execution.

Laurentius Hornaeus had, in fact,

a hundred people charged for witchcraft at the same time.

That was the largest group of people

in the entire course of events.

His work is to round up the confessors,

especially among the children, also to appear as a

witness during the trials.

He's not one of the jury, he's just a witness,

but he's a very active witness.

[narrator] Almost 700 people live in the area,

and Hornaeus forces over 100 of them, mostly children,

to make diabolical and devastating

accusations in court.

[Ronald Hutton] There's the usual mixture of generic stuff,

like going off to Blåkula and dancing,

and there's the vivid detail, like the story of

milking barrels of milk from the forefinger of

a member of your family, and then taking off

the milk to Blåkula to make butter for the party.

[Goran Malmstedt] The accused were kept in prison in different houses.

They didn't have to lock the doors.

They stayed there voluntarily.

It wasn't easy for them to run away,

because where should they go?

But it's difficult to understand that they

didn't take the chance.

[Ronald Hutton] It's entirely plausible that so many of the

accused confess because they've been convinced that

it'll simply not be viable to decimate the

workforce of the community.

And so to get it over with quickly and

present the authorities with an absolutely

impossible legal conundrum seems a very good way of

short-circuiting the system.

[narrator] Almost 100 suspects are put on trial.

The commission finds a staggering

71 guilty of witchcraft.

Despite the verdict, the convicted witches are

spared from execution...

for now.

[Ronald Hutton] 1st of June, 1675.

[bells tolling]

It is the beginning of the Swedish Midsommar,

and the whole community is at church.

♪ ♪

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] They were going to church,

thinking that everything was back to normal.

If they were suspected of witchcraft,

they would not have been let into a service.

Somebody somewhere must have said to these people

that you are off the hook.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] And somebody who is not the minister of the community

stands up and gives a hellfire sermon against witches.

On a signal from him, the 71 accused

people are rounded up by the rest of their community.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] All of a sudden, the door is closed on them.

[door slams]

And they're not attending a service anymore,

and they're all told that they're to be

executed this morning.

♪ ♪

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] So when the door closes in

the church, it must have been an atmosphere of panic,

of fear, anxiety.

♪ ♪

They're dragged out of church, and they're forced to

walk by their neighbors, by their families,

pushing them, even though they're resisting.

♪ ♪

[Goran Malmstedt] The neighbors and the people in this parish

guarded the way for the witches to the place of execution.

They were standing in rows and in that way hindering

them from any escape.

♪ ♪

It seems as if the relatives were emotionally cold

in this situation and that they actually draw

their relatives to their death.

♪ ♪

Some of the relatives really believed

that their wife or mother actually was a witch.

[Ronald Hutton] They are frog marched three miles uphill

to a place which is known by various names now

of which Witch Mountain is the most often quoted.

♪ ♪

Some of them walk with dignity and speed.

Some bring up the rear lamenting.

They are driven up the slope and see in front of them

these three enormous bonfires, one for each parish

in the region.

[screaming]

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] At the mountain, the bonfires are ready.

This stage has been set for the executions.

This is not a spontaneous act.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] One by one, they are beheaded.

They are so numerous that they have to be beheaded

with the heads of the blood heading downhill

so that the blood won't extinguish the fires

which have now been lit.

[fire crackling]

Their bodies are piled up upon the enormous pyres of brushwood

and roasted to pieces.

♪ ♪

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] By the end of the day,

71 people from this small area were executed,

one-fifth of all the women in these towns.

That is very, very hard to believe

how damaging and horrible this must have been

to local society.

[Ronald Hutton] Households would have been ruined

right across the community.

It's really the furthest extreme to which a local witch

trial can logically go.

♪ ♪

[Goran Malmstedt] The president of the fourth commission,

his name was Sparre, when he learned that

they did execute, he got furious.

What he has told the subcommissions

was that they shouldn't do an execution

without consulting him.

So he wrote down to the government

and got the commission dissolved.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] According to the record of memory,

the Wise Boys, the young adolescents

who point out suspects coming out of church

were murdered, their bodies hacked to pieces,

were found by the roadside soon after the incident.

So there a rough kind of justice does seem to have been done.

♪ ♪

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] Many of the witnesses, due to the torture

that Hornaeus applied on them, were crippled afterwards,

so they had to live in the society

together with the men that crippled them.

[Goran Malmstedt] According to his grandson,

people were afraid of him, afraid of passing by his house.

We know that he tried to get another parish later on,

and he didn't get it, so his career didn't improve.

[Ronald Hutton] He seems to have done nothing else of note

for the rest of his life.

He just goes back to being a nobody,

having apparently produced the worst judicial atrocities

in the entire history of Sweden.

♪ ♪

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] When we reach the summer of 1675,

the news of the witch trials have been known in

Stockholm for many years.

This is not something that they have been confronted with,

at least not the gruesome details.

♪ ♪

[narrator] Now fresh accusations from a teenage boy

will not only bring the witch trials

to the capital of Stockholm itself,

but also reach new levels of brutality.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] The witch hunt in Stockholm itself

is precipitated by a loose-lipped adolescent.

He's 13 years old.

He comes from the countryside outside Stockholm,

and he brings in the usual claims

of flying to Blåkulla, seeing other people there,

and in doing so, of course, kick-starts a witch hunt.

[Goran Malmstedt] He's called the Gävle boy because he was from Gävle,

and he started pointing out women in Stockholm

as people he had met in Blåkulla.

[Ronald Hutton] And because of the rumors of Witches' Sabbath

and child witnesses, which have been leaking

into Stockholm now for almost a decade,

in one rather poor area of the city,

it produces a classic witch hunt.

[chain rattles]

[Goran Malmstedt] They form a commission in Stockholm.

Some of the members of this commission

are skeptical to the children's witnesses.

[Ronald Hutton] The witch hunt in the Katarina suburb

in Stockholm is a small one.

There are eight women accused, but the particularly

notorious episode is that one of the women

concerned, Malin Matsdotter, is not only found

guilty and executed, but she's actually burned alive,

which is very rare for a convicted witch.

♪ ♪

[Goran Malmstedt] I think it was because they thought

that she was so eager not to confess

and to protest about the trials.

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] There's a big difference between seeing a corpse burning

and seeing a human person being burned to death.

We cannot underestimate the impression

this must have left on people to seeing a person

being burned to death.

♪ ♪

The decisive turning point in the Swedish witch trials

is when the child witnesses begin to confess themselves

to having made up their stories.

Sensing that the tide of opinion is turning against them,

others of the child witnesses in the Katarina trials

confess to having given false witness.

And the end product of this, the very last victim

of the Katarina trials, is that the witness who kicks

them off in the first place, the Gävle boy,

is himself tried and sentenced to death for perjury,

and he is hanged.

♪ ♪

[Louise Nyholm Kallestrup] After the boy is sentenced to execution for perjury,

the government decides to put a lid on this,

to put an end to the witch trials.

[Ronald Hutton There are no more commissions.

There's no more tacit encouragement from the center

for clergy to go around urging on accusations.

They simply state that there are no more witches in Sweden,

and this is basically as interesting and as odd

as the start of all this panic, that you can simply just

state that, well, end of it.

This is not just something that you can decide

from the government, because the devil

is still out there.

This doesn't make sense, that you can simply decide

there are no more witches.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] This is a small country with a low population.

The victims are generally in thinly populated

rural districts, and so the impact on the

communities concerned is devastating in a way that

bigger witch hunts are not.

[Goran Malmstedt] And then you have thousands of children

that appeared as accuser and were engaged

in getting people convicted and killed.

Considering that we don't have such big witch hunts in Sweden

before or since the Great Noise, it's an exceptional event.

[narrator] These brutal Swedish witch hunts have come to an end.

Over nine years, around 200 people have been slaughtered

for the impossible crime of witchcraft.

By the last decades of the 17th century,

people throughout Europe begin to question

whether witches truly exist.

The age of the great European witch hunt

is drawing to a close, but it isn't over yet.

♪ ♪

[crows cawing]

[birds chirping]

[wind softly blows]