On the 13th June, 1782, Anna Göldi was executed for murder in Glarus and became known as the last witch in Switzerland. Her accuser was a physician called Johann Jakob Tschudi, who Anna had worked as a maidservant for, for some seventeen years. Tschudi reported her to the authorities for putting needles in the bread and milk of one of his daughters, seemingly via devilish means. According to documents found in local archives, after the eight-year-old girl fell ill, she began to have coughing fits in which she spat up pins.
Anna was arrested and tortured, under which she admitted that she had entered a pack with the Devil, who came to her in the guise of a black dog. She withdrew this confession when the torture stopped but was still sentenced to death by decapitation.
Rather than hold a ‘witchcraft’ trial, this was avoided by her charges being stated as ‘poisoning’ and the court protocols were destroyed to wipe out all allegations of pacts with the Devil having to be used as evidence against Anna.
Following her execution, there was uproar across Switzerland and Rome, the Holy Empire.
It took over 200 years after Anna’s dreadful death by decapitation, for the Swiss parliament (in August 2008) to decide to exonerate her for this crime, on the grounds that she had been subjected to an illegal trial. Jakob Tschudi, her employer, had falsely and maliciously accused Anna of this crime after she threatened to reveal their love affair. Evil as this was, Tschudi was not alone in this violation. The authorities at the time willingly accepted his accusations and zealously acted on them.
It was Fritz Schiesser, the representative for Glarus in the Swiss parliament, who, in 2007, called for this injustice to be recognised and now there is a memorial for Anna in Glarus, consisting of two permanently lit lamps on the side of the court house.
A plaque on the building's facade explains the lamps' significance.
“The memorial is an expression of atonement for the injustice that took place here. It will be an eternal light for Anna Göldi.”
Anna Göldi-Stiftung
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