The Heksenwaag — Oudewater's witches' scales

OVERVIEW

The Waag of Oudewater, a goods weigh house built in 1482, is also called the Heksenwaag (witches' scales) because from the 16th to the 18th century people accused of witchcraft were weighed there. The old belief was that a witch has no soul and so weighs much less than an ordinary person — light enough to fly on a broomstick.

HISTORY

According to the town's tradition, Emperor Charles V gave Oudewater in 1545 the privilege of a fair weighing, and no one was ever found to be a witch there. People came to be weighed from all over Europe, and each received an official certificate that their weight was in proportion to their build. Historical research by Kurt Baschwitz and others has shown it was a lucrative business supplying 'not-a-witch' certificates by which the innocent could buy their way out of miscarriages of justice — and that in fact few came: for 1674–1743 the surviving records show with certainty only 13 people who received a certificate, mostly from near Oudewater. The scales were not used during the witch trials of Holland and Utrecht in the late 16th century; Oudewater was still weighing people when judges elsewhere in the Republic were refusing such tests.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The Heksenwaag is a record of the witch-hunt rather than of any haunting: of the belief that a witch weighs too little, and of a town that made a living out of proving otherwise.

VISITING

The Heksenwaag is a museum: visitors can still be weighed and receive a 'Certificaet van Weginghe' declaring them not too light, and so not a witch. Upstairs is an exhibition on the persecution of witches in Europe.