The Last Woman Executed As A Witch In Europe

In 1782, Anna Göldi was working as a maid in the household of Johann Jakob Tschudi — a physician and prominent councillor in Glarus, a small canton in eastern Switzerland. She was in her late forties. She was poor. She was unmarried. She had almost no protection.

She was accused of putting needles into the milk given to one of the Tschudi children. The child, it was said, spat out the needles. The household screamed witchcraft.

What the household did not publicly say — but what the town whispered — was that Anna Göldi had been having an affair with her employer. Tschudi needed her gone. Witchcraft was the mechanism.

The Horror

Anna fled Glarus but was captured and brought back. She was interrogated. When she denied the charges, she was subjected to strappado — hoisted into the air by her hands bound behind her back, with heavy stones tied to her feet. Her shoulders dislocated. The pain was so extreme that she confessed to everything: the needles, dealings with the devil, a pact with Satan.

The confession was extracted under torture that had already been officially banned across much of Europe for decades.

On 13th June 1782, Anna Göldi was beheaded by sword in Glarus. She is often described as the last person in Europe to be legally executed for witchcraft.

The date matters. In 1782: Mozart had just premiered Die Entführung aus dem Serail in Vienna. Immanuel Kant was completing the Critique of Pure Reason. In Philadelphia, the men who would write the US Constitution were debating the shape of a new republic. The Enlightenment was at its height. Reason, science and human rights were being discussed in every salon from Paris to Berlin.

And in a valley in Switzerland, a maid was being beheaded for putting needles in milk.

Even at the time, the execution caused outrage. A German journal described it as “judicial murder” — one of the earliest uses of that phrase. Other Swiss cantons were horrified. Glarus was accused of barbarism by its own neighbours.

The authorities did not care. Anna Göldi was dead. Tschudi’s reputation was preserved. The affair was buried with her.

The Modern Relic

In 2007 — 225 years after the execution — journalist Walter Hauser published a detailed investigation into Anna Göldi’s case, arguing that the witchcraft charge had been used to cover a sexual scandal and protect a powerful man. A year later, in 2008, the canton of Glarus officially declared Anna Göldi’s trial a miscarriage of justice. The cantonal parliament formally exonerated her.

It took 226 years.

A memorial stone was placed in Glarus. A small museum — the Anna Göldi Museum — opened in the nearby village of Ennenda. The courtroom where she was sentenced still exists. The sword is gone. The stones that were hung from her feet are gone.

The confession she signed under torture is still in the cantonal archive — written in ink in the same year Kant published a book arguing that human beings must never be used merely as a means to an end. The philosopher wrote it in Königsberg. The executioner swung the sword in Glarus. The maid was dead before the book was bound.

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