Torsåker — seventy-one in one day

OVERVIEW

Torsåker is a parish in Ångermanland, in Västernorrland. The trial held here in 1675 was the largest in Swedish history, and the single day of executions that ended it is without parallel in the country.

HISTORY

The panic reached Torsåker as part of *det stora oväsendet*, the Great Noise — the wave of witch hysteria that spread across Sweden after the 1668 case brought by Gertrud Svensdotter against Märet Jonsdotter in Dalarna. Sweden had no separation of church and state, so state-employed Lutheran clergy were bound by government instruction: the clergy were ordered to use their sermons to tell their congregations about the crimes being committed, and the rumour of the witches spread through a country where witch-hunts had previously been a rarity. The local minister, Laurentius Hornæus, was ordered by the special commission to investigate. The evidence was largely taken from children, who were made to point out those they said they had seen carried to Blåkulla.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Seventy-one people were beheaded and their bodies burned in one day on the hill above the parish. The entry is a court record, not a haunting, and it is on the map because the scale of it is hard to grasp from a page: a parish of a few hundred households lost that many of its people in a morning, on the word of children, because the government had instructed the priests to preach about it.

VISITING

An ordinary working parish in Ångermanland. The execution site — Bålberget, the pyre hill — is above the village and is marked.