Beneath Switzerland’s postcard scenery, political neutrality, and chocolate-making, is a long history of witch hunts—longer than anywhere else in Europe. From a moving museum to a light-hearted ski event, Demi Perera visits the pretty village of Ennenda in northeastern Switzerland, where the last person in Europe executed for witchcraft is remembered.
The wooden floor creaks as I move around the darkened room. Slivers of daylight filter through gaps in the walls but not enough for my eyes to adjust. Long black curtains twitch, and I hear whispers. I feel quite frightened. In only a few steps, I can understand, even a little, how Anna Göldi, the last person in Europe to be executed for witchcraft, might have felt.
I’ve seen a great deal of Switzerland—my family has lived in the village of Oberhofen in the canton of Bern, since the 1970s. It’s a place where people still hang pagan deities on their doors to keep evil spirits of the forest out. This however, is my first visit to the northeastern canton of Glarus and the Anna Göldi Museum in the village of Ennenda.
On June 13th 1782, a notorious witch hunt ended with Göldi, maid to a wealthy family, being decapitated by sword in a nearby village, Mollis. She was tried after being accused of bewitching the eight-year-old daughter of her employer and causing the girl to spit pins and have convulsions.
Switzerland not only carried out one of Europe’s highest numbers of witch executions, but it did so for one of the longest periods—for 350 years. Witch hunts, as we know them, started here. But why?
Witches had often been singled out throughout Europe before, but often dismissed by the church as individuals in need of salvation—no-one burned at the stake. Earliest mention of witches pre-dates Christianity; in Homer’s Odyssey (c.800 BC), Circe is one. Forbidden magic features heavily in Roman law statutes and continued onto Christian beliefs. Centuries later, the figure of the witch, as we now know it, began to emerge out of a need to defeat heresy. but without reference to witchcraft. In the Western Alps, that figure was the personification of winter—old, mean with the power to harm people.
15th-century Switzerland however, particularly the Alpine canton of Valais in the southwest,and the rural bi-lingual canton of Fribourg in the west, was a far cry from the serene snow-capped scenery it’s now famous for.
“This is the first place where a witch was exonerated by a democratic vote. We have corrected a historic injustice. That is something to be proud of.”
- Dr. Ursula Helg, director, Anna Göldi Museum
Europe’s first systematic campaign and inquisition by the Catholic church to hunt witches began in Valais in 1428, following decades of political rivalry which polarized communities—between then and 1447, 3,500 men and women were executed for witchcraft and sorcery. In Fribourg, 360 witch trials were documented between 1493 and 1741. In what was then Pays de Vaud (now Maud), 3,000 trials took place in the same period.
That history now plays out differently in Ennenda. Here, descendants of those involved in the trial of Göldi still live in the village.
“The early history of this region is industrial,” Dr. Ursula Helg, director of the Anna Göldi Museum, tells me over a coffee. “When cotton started arriving here from Zurich, the poor were employed to spin the cotton, and the rich owned factories. It created inequality in power as well as money.”
The museum takes up the top floor of a distinct industrial heritage building—Ennenda’s Hänggiturm (drying tower). The space is vast, stacked with timber beams once used to air-dry freshly dyed or printed cloth at the height of the textile boom between the 18th and 19th centuries.
Some residents are allegedly uncomfortable with the history of this particular witch hunt; the familiar argument is it places an unfair spotlight on the families involved who still live in the village. When the parliament of the canton unanimously exonerated Göldi as a victim of judicial murder in 2008—a charge led by local author and lawyer Walter Hauser—it garnered widespread support across Switzerland.
Hauser, who grew up in Glarus, never believed that Göldi was a victim of medieval beliefs as her death occured during Europe’s Age of Enlightenment. His research of the original trial unearthed an illicit romance between Göldi and her magistrate employer; Göldi threatened to reveal the affair when she was fired for bewitching his daughter. Motivated by this discovery, Hauser worked diligently to successfully Göldi’s name and before his death, he established the Anna Göldi Foundation and museum.
Helg considers the museum a triumph over injustice. “This is the first place where a witch was exonerated by a democratic vote,” she says. “We have corrected a historic injustice. That is something to be proud of.”
I walk around the museum’s themed spaces, starting with witch hunts in Christian Europe and the networks of power that enabled them, to contemporary topics such as human rights and modern slavery.
The circular layout begins with copies of Hexenhammer, the 15th-century work of German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer which inflamed witch hunt hysteria with its manifesto for torturing witches to extract confessions, how to prosecute them, and recommended burning them for heresy. Several contemporary translations of the book hang from a string, and set the tone.
At the heart of the museum is a courtroom reconstruction, retelling the well-documented original 18th-century trial through a series of interactive exhibits. A likeness of everyone, from Göldi’s accuser to the court clerk, hangs from the ceiling, and audio recording introduce each character and the part they played.
While the injustice of witchcraft trials is keenly felt among many, particularly in places like Ennenda, many events today are less a political stand, and more a light-hearted take on local lore.
Another exhibit connects the Glarus nobles, who gave weight to the case, in a toxic family tree. Each click on a name on a digital screen makes evident the complex and overwhelming power brandished against a powerless maid. The most poignant displays are personal items belonging to Goldi; a blue-and-white striped canvas skirt, white blouse and black waistcoat, replicated from a 200-year-old ‘Wanted’ poster.
Among copies of court documents and witness statements, in German with English translations, are replicas of the pins the child she was accused of harming was alleged to have spit out. The circle completes with a frank ode to accountability. The case of Göldi was the first to give rise to the term, “judicial murder’’ where the law was wielded like a tool to silence and erase her. That Göldi was denied justice, and the principle that all people should be equal before the law did not apply here.
Given this somber history, modern Switzerland has taken a more playful tone to witchcraft. A trio of trains, buses and gondola brought me to Belalp in southern Switzerland which plays host to the week-long winter festival in Valais, known as Belalp Hexe (Belalp Witch), which ends with the Witches Descent.
Participants, dressed as witches, ski and screech on brooomsticks, seven miles (12 kilometers) from the summit of Hohstock mountain in the Bernese Alps in Valais (3,226 meters above sea level)—famous for its ski lift that changes direction twice—to the village of Blatten which made headlines in 2025 when it was almost destroyed in a glacier collapse.
The festival was started by the Belalp Ski Club in 1983 to draw tourists to the region during shoulder season, and has taken place every January since. While the injustice of witchcraft trials is keenly felt among many, particularly in places like Ennenda, many events today are less a political stand, and more a light-hearted take on local lore. “It is really fun,” Lara Andereggen, a member of the Belalp Ski Club, tells me. “Sometimes, the witches plant their broomsticks in the snow and hand out food to the people watching.”
My home here is Hotel Belalp. On my walk around town, I spot two artificial ravens on a balcony and a cauldron swinging outside another cottage. I find out both are paying homage to Belalp’s famous folklore which, unfortunately, ended with another witch hunt.
In the 15th century, an unnamed woman from a nearby village was accused of using supernatural powers to transform into a raven, and pooping in her husband’s eyes while he was climbing a cherry tree, causing a fall that killed him. Rumours had spread she transformed into a raven to visit her lover in the next village. By all accounts, the husband, Sepp, was fond of cherry brandy and may have lost his balance through inibriation but she was charged with ‘raven flight’ and murder, and burnt at the stake.
Today, up to a thousand skiers with faces painted green and wearing pointy hats zip down this mountain to keep that story alive. The Witches Descent finishes where Sepp is said to have fallen to his death—winners receive a bottle of kirsch.
Racers whoosh down magnificent Alpine scenery—the 13,642-feet-high (4,158-meter-high) Jungfrau and Europe’s longest glacier, Aletsch Glacier, which stretches 14 miles (23 kilometers) through Valais. “Belalp Hexe has become something that is important to the local community,” Gerold Berchtold, who owns Chalet Sepp where the Witches Descent ends, tells me. “especially because of the legend of the sorcery that surrounds it.”
Alongside this more tongue-in-cheek approach Switzerland’s witchy history, my time at Ennenda’s Göldi Museum is a reminder of the powerful upper crust of Glarus who banded together in 1792 to attempt to eradicate one name—Anna Göldi. And yet, 244 years later, a black-and-white banner with her name hangs on the side of a tall building at the heart of the community that condemned her to death as a simple reminder of the many women who lost their lives to systematic injustice.
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The writer traveled with the support of Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS) and Travel Switzerland’s Swiss Travel Pass which includes the Swiss Museum Pass for free entry to 500 museums and exhibitions.
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Demi Perera is a London-based food and travel journalist of Sri Lankan heritage. Specializing in unusual travel, culinary, and sustainability stories around the world, she’s also the author of guidebooks on London and Sri Lanka.
