Gruyères, Switzerland

The Gruyères region, tucked inside the canton of Fribourg, is more than a postcard-worthy Alpine valley—it’s a place locals call “cursed ground.” Records show that these Swiss valleys became an early epicenter of witch-hunt hysteria, long before the craze swept Europe’s great cities. The idea of the witch as pure, organized evil took centuries to harden.

It really started with Peter von Greyerz, the secular judge who ruled the Simmental Valley. To silence political rivals, von Greyerz weaponized witchcraft accusations. His growing paranoia led him to share his “findings” on local superstition with the theologian Johannes Nider. Nider’s treatise, Formicarius, was the first work to link everyday folk magic with devil worship, midnight sabbaths, and ritual cannibalism. That text became the backbone of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum and turned a local Swiss feud into a continent-wide panic.

One of the period’s most notorious cases was that of a farmer named Stedelen. Tortured mercilessly, he “confessed” to whipping up storms that ruined crops and casting curses that caused miscarriages and barren livestock. From that point on, simple superstition was framed as an existential threat to life itself.

Switzerland would eventually set the grim record for witch trials per capita: about ten thousand trials ended with roughly six thousand executions. People believed a spell could be broken only by the witch’s physical suffering, a notion that fueled ruthless inquisitions and mob violence alike.

Hidden in these hills is one of the region’s most powerful relics—the statue of the Black Madonna, kept out of sight in local chapels. Her face isn’t blackened by soot; the color stands for the ancient earth-magic, the primal darkness from which all life springs. Beneath the Christian veneer lies an older figure: the pagan Mother-Goddess of nature. Pilgrims swear her aura grants visions, heals sickness, and wards off disaster; some claim she can halt a raging storm.

From 100 Cursed Places · Fern Flower Press