Claire's Scare

The trees had just begun to leaf out . It was dark and dank. I had looked all over our old Wisconsin farmhouse for Aunt Claire.  I  called out, and finally found  her, sitting upstairs by an attic window with an open dust encrusted trunk , and a very bedraggled old book in her lap .  She looked up.


“Whatever are you doing up here dredging around in this old stuff ?,”  I asked.
She showed me the book she had been holding. It was a handwritten journal of sorts.   
Claire said,  “I had this very strange feeling that drew me up here to this old trunk and as I sat near, there was a wierd chill that came over me while the sky outside clouded over. It’s like days of funerals - as if the earth is mourning the passing. Disturbing.- Further,  it was though this old chest was almost compelling me to look inside. So I did.”

“And...,” I interjected

“ And ,” Claire went on, “so I rummaged inside and found this old journal.  handwritten by your great, great grandmother , Gerta.  The page I turned to began an account, passed down to her by generations long before, telling of an event occurring in 1628 in our ancestral settlement of Würzburg , Germany. 

It was a very turbulent time.  There was much religious contention then and the period was rife with dark tales of evil spirits , witches, and warlocks.  Indeed, the town was in the midst of regular trials of persons accused of witchery and Satanism.  In her journal ,Gerta writes of a story told to her by her grandmother. It was about a 19 year old girl in Würzburg,  Gobel Babelin, who was considered the prettiest girl in the whole town. Gobel was our blood  relative .

Gerta doesn’t give much background as to why the girl was considered a witch but my guess is that the town wenches were jealous of her beauty and found the accusations of witchery a convenient excuse to deride her. For whatever reasons, charges were taken seriously, and Gobel was tried as being a witch and sentenced to be burned at the stake. “

 I was chilled.

Claire got a very serious expression on her face and went on, “ But this is where the story gets really interesting. Gerta wrote that it was passed down down by family  present that day, that, when the fires engulfed Dear Gobel , bound on the pyre,  a placid smile was observed on her and , then, in a grand burst , flames sparked into a kaleidoscope of colors and sparkle. They subsided,  revealing she had vanished into the tumult that instant, leaving nothing behind . There was the silence of awe from the onlookers who were frightened by this strange event.  Babelin was gone, bones and all,  but the event was powerful enough that memory carried it forward.”

“Wow,”  I was really taken by this dramatic story.  But the real catcher for me is that, as  Claire ceased her telling and closed the old journal, I saw incandscent colored sparks jump ever so briefly from her fingertips.  She smiled at me.  I know there was a legacy here, and it was Gobel Babelin that had left it.


-Jerry Wendt 2017

Gobel Babelin is mentioned by name in Jesuit Priest Friedrich Spee’s 1631 book Caudio Criminalis, detailing accounts of the famous Würzburg witch trials and executions occuring in 1626-1629. He mentions her as being noted as “The prettiest girl in town,”
-Wikipedia