When Anna Göldi, a forty-six-year-old resident of the Swiss city of Glarus, was hired as a servant in the house of local judge Jacob Tchudi, she did not know that she would soon go down in history in a very sad way: to become the last woman in the history of Europe to be executed on charges of witchcraft.
It may surprise someone that the last such incident took place in Switzerland, a country that today is seen as a kingdom of order, law and order. However, it should be borne in mind that such a reputation of Switzerland has developed only in the last two hundred years. While in the era before the Napoleonic Wars, the Swiss enjoyed the glory of a people, firstly, very militant (it is not for nothing that the popes to this day recruit their guards from them), and secondly, wild and superstitious. In this regard, it is not surprising that the witch-hunt in this country has acquired a simply unprecedented scale: in the 15th - 18th centuries, in terms of the population in Switzerland, ten times more witches were executed than in France and twice as many as in any of the German principalities.
But back to Anna Göldi. Some time after her appearance in the house, the eight-year-old daughter of Jacob Tchudi fell ill: she began to have convulsions, and she began to "pull out needles from herself." Chudi allegedly noticed that the "charmed" pins were being mixed into her food by the servant, after which he drove the last one away. Subsequently, at the trial, witnesses claimed that the girl was an obnoxious child and often bullied the servant, which was the motive for the crime. And although the girl was healed after a while, Chudi turned to the competent authorities.
For a while, Göldi managed to hide, but the authorities of the canton of Glarus announced a reward for her capture, and soon she was brought to justice. This face, I must say, turned out to be very unattractive: an elderly woman was hung up on a rack and tortured until she confessed to trying to kill a little girl and, of course, to intercourse with the devil, who appeared to her in the guise of a big black dog. After that, without thinking twice, she was found guilty and sentenced to death by chopping off her head (burning by that time had already gone out of fashion).
Here we need to make one more digression and say that it was 1782 in the yard. The ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau were in the air, in just a few years the Bill of Rights in the USA and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in France would be adopted, and even in distant and seemingly backward Russia this very year Denis Fonvizin writes the comedy "The Minor", which ridicules ignorance and prejudice. And suddenly, at the same time, in the center of Europe, a person is seriously executed for witchcraft.
It must be said that the judges who sentenced Anna were nevertheless aware of the reaction their decision would cause, and therefore she was officially charged only with attempted murder. But it should be noted that the then Swiss laws did not provide for the death penalty for attempted poisoning, if it did not lead to the death of the victim. Nevertheless, Anna Göldi was executed, and when the circumstances of her trial became public, she made a lot of noise throughout Europe, and caused a lot of trouble for the authorities of the canton of Glarus. So many that more in Switzerland, and indeed in Europe, witches were not executed.
However, Anna Göldi was rehabilitated only recently - in 2008, a Swiss court officially declared her innocent, and her execution was “judicial murder”. There is a version that her employer, Jacob Chudi, was in a carnal relationship with his servant, and when things went too far and the publicity could harm him, he preferred to get rid of her using his connections. Whether this was so or not, one cannot establish over the years, but such an assumption looks clearly more convincing than the version of the involvement of the enemy of the human race in the form of a black dog in the events in Glarus.