HEX HOLLOW

The Strange True Story of the Rehmeyer Murder and Pennsylvania Dutch Witchcraft

De: John Foster

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

A true story of murder, folk magic, and a tradition that refused to die.

In the wooded hollow of a Pennsylvania farm, a man believed for fifteen years that he had been cursed. He was not alone in that belief. His search for the person responsible ended on a November night in 1928, when he and two other men walked to Nelson Rehmeyer's farmhouse and killed him.

What followed made national headlines for months: a confessed motive rooted in centuries-old Pennsylvania Dutch folk healing, a trial that argued over whether belief in witchcraft could excuse murder, and a case that turned an entire region into a national punchline. Newspapers called it the Hex Murder. The hollow where it happened still carries the name.

Hex Hollow tells the full, documented story, from the origins of the healing tradition known as powwow among Pennsylvania's German settlers, through the specific, fifteen-year unraveling of the man who committed murder over it, to the trial that tried and failed to make sense of a motive no courtroom had encountered before. It follows the case through decades of shame and silence in the community it touched, the slow rise of a sensational local legend, and the quiet survival of the actual tradition at its center, still practiced today by families who never asked for their inheritance to be defined by one man's worst night.

This is not a ghost story. Every person in this book was real. Their confessions, their trial, and the community they left behind are part of the historical record, and this account follows that record closely, noting plainly where it is disputed and where it could not be confirmed.

Readers of character-driven true crime, American folklore, and Pennsylvania history will find a story that is stranger, sadder, and more human than its reputation suggests.