In 1782, Anna Goldi was accused of bewitching the daughter of Johann Jakob Tschudi. Anna was a servant in the Tschudi home at the time and among her charges was causing the young girl to spit pins and collapse to the ground in a fit of convulsions. General knowledge provided that John and Anna were having an affair and should that information become widely known in the area it would have seriously damaged John’s reputation who was both a doctor and a magistrate. Anna, whose family and herself denied that she was ever a witch, was tried and beheaded for the crime of witchcraft. Her sentencing was done well after the witchcraft hysteria had already run its course through Europe.
Now, after almost two hundred years Anna Goldi is being touted as the “last witch to be exonerated in Europe” despite the fact that she was never a witch. Last year her case was brought before the cantonal government in Switzerland where it was reviewed in conjunction with the Protestant Church; her case was denied. The cantonal parliament worked to persuade the government to look at the case again and this year the case was brought before both the Protestant and Catholic churches in the Swiss canton of Glarus and was accepted today.
The reason that Anna’s case was first brought to the Protestant Church in the area is due to it being the same institution that condemned her for being a witch all those years ago. The Swiss government has come out to say that the church had no legal authority to decided if Anna Goldi was guilty of being a witch or not.
In spirit of calling the exoneration a rehabilitation of Anna Goldi’s name the canton government in Glarus will base a new play on Anna and in Mollis, the canton where she was beheaded they have already opened a Goldi museum in her honor on the two hundred and twenty-fiftieth anniversary of her death from last year.
It is interesting to note that even though Anna was not a witch, that because of the way she died in an condemnation of witchcraft her legacy is now that of being the “last witch to be exonerated”. Yes, Anna is one of the the last cases of women being killed for the false accusation of witchcraft but I do doubt that in the many who came before her and the many who are still coming after her that she will really be the last one to be exonerated. The title implies that there are no more accused witches to be cleared… but there are.