1782. Beheaded for witchcraft. Not 1482. Not 1582. Not the plague years or the crusades or any of the centuries people point to when they talk about the darkness of the past.
1782. The same year Mozart wrote his Piano Concerto No. 12. The same year the hot air balloon was being tested in France. The same year the modern world was quietly assembling itself.
In a small canton in Switzerland, a maidservant was beheaded for witchcraft.
This is the story of Anna Göldi. A servant from Glarus. Fifty years old. The last woman in Europe to be legally executed for witchcraft. Not a peasant from a forgotten village in the medieval dark. A woman who lived in the same century as Beethoven, Jefferson, and Voltaire.
The world that killed her knew exactly what it was doing. It just could not bring itself to stop.
Anna was born in 1734 in the canton of Glarus in eastern Switzerland. She had worked in domestic service most of her adult life. By 1780 she was employed in the household of Johann Jakob Tschudi, a physician and one of the most prominent men in Glarus. She worked in his house. She cared for his children.
Tschudi abused her.
When Anna reported him, she did the correct thing. She filed a formal complaint with the cantonal ecclesiastical court, the body that existed precisely to hear such cases. She named him. She put it in writing. She did everything a woman in her position could do.
The judge assigned to hear her complaint was a member of the Tschudi family.
The case was dismissed.
Within weeks of that dismissal, Johann Jakob Tschudi accused Anna Göldi of witchcraft.
The man she had reported became the man who destroyed her. He went from defendant to accuser in the space of a month. His daughter Anna Maria had begun suffering violent convulsions. She vomited needles. The symptoms were alarming and in 1782, in a canton where the most powerful man now had every reason to want Anna Göldi gone, they needed an explanation.
Tschudi provided one.
She was arrested in January 1782. She fled briefly, was recaptured, and brought back to Glarus in chains.
Then the examination began.
They crushed her legs. They administered emetics that induced violent prolonged vomiting. They kept her in conditions designed methodically to break her. This was not the medieval period. This was 1782. The men doing this knew it was 1782. They did it anyway.
She confessed. She confessed to feeding the child a white powder and a needle on the instructions of the devil. She confessed to everything they needed her to confess to.
There is no serious historian who believes a word of that confession was true.
Now here is the detail that strips away any remaining doubt about what was happening. The authorities of Glarus knew that executing a woman for witchcraft in 1782 would look barbaric to the rest of Europe. The Enlightenment was in full force. Voltaire had spent decades arguing that witchcraft trials were superstition dressed as justice. Glarus knew this.
So they did not officially charge her with witchcraft.
They charged her with "evil acts similar to witchcraft." New paperwork placed over an old murder. A legal fiction thin enough that the men writing it knew exactly what it was, and used it anyway.
She was beheaded on 13 June 1782.
Johann Jakob Tschudi faced no consequences of any kind. The man who abused her, whose family member dismissed her complaint, who turned her report against her and sat on the council that condemned her, continued his life in Glarus undisturbed. He is recorded in the history books as a physician and public servant.
The ecclesiastical trial, the one where Anna reported him, the one that was dismissed, was buried so completely that it was only rediscovered in 2007 by a researcher named Walter Hauser. Without him, that part of the record may never have surfaced at all. It was Hauser's findings that led directly to what happened next.
In 2008, the canton of Glarus formally rehabilitated Anna Göldi's name and acknowledged the injustice of her execution.
Two hundred and twenty six years after they killed her.
There is a small museum in Mollis dedicated to her memory. A handful of scholars have written about her. Her case occasionally surfaces in articles about the Enlightenment's limits.
She was fifty years old. A maidservant with no title, no council seat, and no protection from the most powerful man in the room. She reported him through the correct channels. The system handed her complaint to his family and closed the door. Weeks later she was in chains.
She was tortured into a confession. Executed under a legal fiction. And the man who set all of it in motion died peacefully with his reputation intact.
It took 226 years for anyone in authority to say the word sorry.
Her name was Anna Göldi.
She did everything right. The system was simply not built for women like her.
Remember her name. She waited long enough.
