Most people picture witch trials happening in Salem or the Scottish Highlands. In fact, Switzerland holds the grim record: more witch executions than anywhere else in Europe, carried out over roughly 350 years — and the witch-hunt era as we know it began here.
That history comes to a sharp, personal focus in the village of Ennenda, in the northeastern canton of Glarus. On 13 June 1782, a maidservant named Anna Göldi was beheaded by sword in the neighbouring village of Mollis, accused of bewitching the eight-year-old daughter of her employer. The girl allegedly spat pins and suffered convulsions, and Göldi paid for the accusation with her life. She is recognised as the last person in Europe to be executed for witchcraft — which makes Glarus an unusual endpoint to a story that spans centuries.
Today the Anna Göldi Museum in Ennenda puts visitors inside that world. One installation is deliberately unsettling: a darkened room with creaking floorboards, thin slivers of light through the walls, twitching black curtains and whispered voices. It only takes a few steps inside to feel, faintly, the fear a woman accused of witchcraft might have known. The museum isn't a horror attraction, though — it examines how superstition, social hierarchies and local justice combined to destroy a vulnerable domestic worker, and asks why this region was so determined to hunt witches for so long.
Göldi's story also sits inside a broader Swiss culture of old beliefs. In villages like Oberhofen in the canton of Bern — where the writer's family has lived since the 1970s — people still hang images of pagan deities on their doors to keep forest spirits at bay. Witchcraft here isn't just a museum topic; it's part of the folklore that never fully faded.
For travellers, Ennenda makes a rewarding detour from Switzerland's usual itinerary of lakes and peaks. Glarus is a quiet alpine canton an hour or so from Zurich, and pairing a museum visit with walks in the surrounding mountains gives you a day that's equal parts history and hiking. It suits curious, independent travellers — the kind who like their trips with a story to take home. And there's a modern coda: in 2008, more than two centuries after her execution, the Swiss parliament formally exonerated Göldi, acknowledging her trial as a judicial murder. The woman once condemned by her community is now one of its most remembered figures.
For more on Göldi's story and what modern Swiss think about witchcraft, read the original feature from Adventure.com.
