Letter from Wolfgang Jakob Welsch to his friend Julius Hofmann, 1627. Translated from the original German by Dr. Angela Windsor, 2009.
My closest friend and colleague,
By the grace of God I have found the opportunity to send a last protestation against the fate which has befallen me. As I have never married and have no children, and my mother and father and dear sister have long since ascended to Heaven, I entrust you and you alone with this message; I have assured the guard who carries it that your lips are sealed as tightly as the grave, and neither his complicity nor my own story will be revealed. Though these will not be the last words from my tainted soul, they are final words I will write as my own man. There is no truth I can give to them that will satisfy the court; resisting will only prolong the torture, which my own foolish stubbornness—a trait you had admonished me for!—has perpetuated for an age of agony.
I cannot be honest with my judges and jailers, and therefore I must be honest with you. I am not a guilty man. I have had no hand in the crimes of which I stand accused, and I pray that you will believe me when I say I have not committed any witchcraft they have laid before me. Yet there are things I have never told another living soul, not even one so dear to me as you.
My confession will be within the week. I have stood silent for as long as I can, but my resolve has failed me; I must tell them something, gain some last bit of peace, even if it requires bearing false witness against myself and my fellow man. May the Lord forgive me for the petty sins I have committed and the worse ones yet to come. May you, my friend, forgive me for the stories I will relay, and for the request I must make.
Before I relay my present, I must relive our past, as it is the only way for you to truly understand the circumstances I now find myself in. I am forever grateful to you for your tender care during the weeks after the Lord recalled my sister’s soul these two years past, for I was inconsolable; the grief made me weak as if with fever, and I wept incessantly, unable to rouse myself from my bed. The patience and diligence with which God has blessed you made you akin to a saint to me, and I know now that without your presence I may never have recovered my strength. But you could not always be with me, and in-between the hours you spent standing vigil at my bedside I became aware of other visitors.
Perhaps my fever had awoken them, or else the depths of my grief, or something else entirely. Regardless of the means, it began as a stirring in the corners of the room, a shapeless whirlwind sweeping aside dust to leave behind clean floor. Though I held out my hand to feel the air, I could discern no wind against my fingers. It was a mild enough occurrence, but it shocked and terrified me, my body weakening until I could barely raise my head. An old fear, and one that seems strange to me now, after all the fresh horrors I have seen.
These events continued throughout my convalescence; wind from no source ruffling my hair, unseen hands rattling my chairs and bed, sweet and quiet laughter from places I could not locate. Eventually they ceased to frighten me; though they moved in my home they never harmed me, and as the weight of mourning began to lift and the memory of my sister’s pious, humble nature and kind demeanor lost the sting of pain, I began to go outside again for short walks. It was then that the unseen transitioned to the seen, and I could, for the first time, observe the phenomena that had visited me.
An aside: I swear to you that I have never kept company with the Devil, though I know not whether you will hold my promises in any regard after you have read my account. Nevertheless, I so swear to you now; though the things I have seen are strange and frightening, I believe them to be God’s creatures as surely as you and I, and I speak of them not to admit to witchcraft but to divulge a long-held secret.
I saw them in the woods and fields most often, though occasionally they would venture into town. Their shapes I can hardly describe for they were so varied. Some were as if the branching flashes of lightning had fashioned bodies with which to stride upon the earth, jagged arms and legs in constant jerking motion as they danced, shining blue and white. Others were gnarled, with twisted, crooked features that put me in mind of the knots of a tree, shambling hunched and uncanny through the streets; still others were playful creatures with the lightness of eiderdown, which had the sweet laugh I had heard so often in my home and which left behind strands of gossamer web and a smattering of fish scales. Soft beings lived among my clothing in nests of discarded hair and dust, their entrails pulsing with gentle light through their skin, and things with many eyes and twining arms of wrought-iron hung from the eaves of each house, watching the passersby. And there were more, some apparitions of unimaginable ugliness, others of beauty so awesome I could barely keep from weeping. I have seen these beings every day from my recovery until the day I was interred here, in this prison for witches, this Hexenhaus, and never once have I been acknowledged. Here it is that we come to my true reason for writing to you. Since the testimony of Herr Gottlieb’s daughter Liesel I have been a captive (and do not judge her, for she has begged forgiveness from me and I have given it! In this place we try to save our souls in any way we can, and since her own confession was recanted she has spent as much time in this Hell as I). I do not care to enumerate my torments or detail them too thoroughly, but let it be said that I have been fortunate. I was not stretched on the rack, and my feet were not pressed between the metal plates of the boot to be crushed; nor was I subject to those more often fatal forms. And yet the pain was such that at times I was sure I was viewing myself from the outside as they took to my body, buzzing like a hive in their pursuit, until the thread of agony drew me back to my anguished form and my vision narrowed to the size of a pin-prick, obscuring even the face of my executioner and leaving me in darkness.
It is here, in this place of pain and blood, that I have seen something terrible. The beings outside do not come here, but something else does; it lives in the pools of blood and waste on filthy stone, crawls in darkened corners, seeps from every shadow and crack in the wall. Things, pale as maggots with tiny, black eyes covered by a noxious film of foul water, move among these moaning and wailing forms. Sometimes a poor soul catches their attention with their cries; then they form a circle around the unhappy subject and reach out with spindly arms to grab at bleeding skin and torn flesh, pulling gobbets of pain from the sufferer and glutting themselves until their stomachs are bloated with the signs of their feast. Their mouths have no teeth or tongue, merely a dark, empty hole through which nothing can be seen but smooth, pink ridges of muscle, and when they are not eating they open and close it mindlessly in the manner of a fish. These beasts, shadows cast by the pitiless hearts of men, are here always save for on the days of an execution, upon which they follow the executioner in rank and file. On those days we are left alone, each dwelling within our own torments.
Upon my arrival I was stripped and shaved, left naked and shivering in the rank darkness, surrounded by faint whimpers and coughs from my fellow prisoners. They began with no torture, merely questions, threatening and cajoling in turn, offering small mercies and promising dire punishments. Then, when my only response was to insist upon my innocence and pray upon our Lord for forgiveness, they began to pull my limbs into awful contortions, poking and prodding at me with their pins. They declared that I had the witch’s mark and insisted against all evidence that I felt no pain, even as I thrashed and howled. The sun could have risen and fallen a thousand times in that span, and I would not have known, for every question seemed the same, until all voices turned to drones and all faces to masks. Eventually they left me upon a cot and beset upon another prisoner, and I lay with my arms and legs bound in chains, lacking even the strength to turn my head. Yet I did not lose faith. I prayed for the strength to withstand the ordeal I was now facing. I believed, then, that there was still hope.
Time ticked on, and pressure mounted. The clearest horror in my mind is of my first personal encounter with the creatures: the memory of when they made me observe the torture of old Frau Schafferin, whose son Peter was burned winter last. Her wrinkled skin was fragile and translucent as the membrane lining the inside of an eggshell, veins bulging blue on skeletal hands. She shook with cold and fever, and though they had taken her prayer beads from her I heard her praying to our Lord and to the Blessed Virgin as if she still held them—until they placed a pair of pincers in the fire and raised them to her flesh, and then her prayers turned to the cries of an animal, as all the while they urged her to give up her accomplices in witchcraft. When I struggled in my bonds, calling out to her and cursing our captors, they beat me until I could no longer move. I sagged, helpless in my chains, watching as they jeered at her. In the shadows cast by the fire their faces looked as ghoulish as those of the creatures, and I saw then that the monsters had begun to gather around our captors, around Frau Schafferin, around myself.
Helplessly I watched them surround us, moving like spiders with broken legs. Some were small and stunted, and others towered over me. Their fingers were blunt, ill-defined things like the digits of a newt, their hands misshapen and cleft in such a manner that the thumb and first two fingers dwarfed the others. They raised these curled appendages to stroke the brows and cheeks of the interrogators, a trail of dark slime marking where they had touched, and those who had been marked stood taller and glared fiercer, as if the anointment had solidified their resolve. All the while Frau Schafferin cried and wailed, unable to see the dozens of glittering eyes and gaping mouths around her, even as the numbers grew until I could not make out where one creature ended and another began, only a sea of writhing, pale flesh. At some unseen signal the ranks broke and creatures covered her and I, burying her frail and injured form under a hoard of bodies, filling my vision with grasping hands. Someone screamed—perhaps her, perhaps I, perhaps both. When the beings retreated, she was dead.
Since then the executioners have applied the pincers to me, and other methods besides. I have attempted to remain pious, faithful to God, to myself—to you—but my resolve is failing. I have felt hands slick with filth grasping immaterial pieces of my being and ripping them from my body, I have seen toothless mouths gulp the last bits of my strength. I have tried to be a good man, but now my striving is near its end, or has been over for quite some time. I wish to no longer be in pain. I hope my soul will find its way to Heaven, though I fear that after my confession to the court it will not.
O, dearest, how I wish that this letter should never have had to be written! How I wish that you should remain innocent of the creatures that breed within the shadows of cruelty, lurking in the deeds of man against man! But I must ask you to endure one horrible sight, for the sake of my own soul. I will give my false confession soon, and my execution will follow shortly. If I am fortunate I will be subject to the sword; if not, to the fire alone. Either way I do not desire to look into the crowd on the day of my death and see solely those faces waiting for me, beady eyes staring and mouths agape, drooling at the thought of my despair. Before you flee—and you must flee, for while I will not name you they may still find you—I beg you to attend, though I know it will cause you great pain. If I am to die a witch, though I insist to you forever that I am not, then I wish to die with the image of your face in my mind—your curls, your ruddy cheeks, your shining eyes—and with love in my heart. Then leave this place and never return.
May God’s light grant you the rest I cannot have. Keep this letter close, and show no one; it is a piece of me.
Yours faithfully,
Wolfgang
Translator’s note: This letter was found among the belongings of Markus Ruppel, who is listed among the recently hired employees of the Vogelsberg prison during the time of the writing of this letter. Ruppel can thus be assumed to be the guard briefly mentioned within; however, trial records from the time state that he was arrested on suspicion of witchcraft within a week of the letter’s writing, leaving it undelivered.
Wolfgang Welsch was executed on September 10th, 1627, by sword. Though Julius Hofmann is known to have resided in Vogelsberg during this period, his whereabouts following Welsch's imprisonment and death are unknown.
H.M. Shrike (he/him) is a debut short story author and graduate student. When he isn't writing, studying, or watching horror movies with his boyfriend, he's usually petting a cat.