Moosham Castle, Austria

The epicenter of the bloodiest witch trials in Austrian history.

Moosham Castle rises 3,540 feet (1,079 m) above sea level in the remote Alpine district of Lungau. This massive stronghold of medieval stone would later earn the grim nickname “The Witches’ Castle,” yet its dark story reaches back even farther: archeologists have proved the fortress stands on the foundations of an ancient Roman fort. Over the centuries it was rebuilt again and again, evolving from a purely military citadel into a full-blown engine of repression.

The cruelty soaked into its walls began with a sharp shift in the Catholic Church’s attitude toward folk magic. The spark was the infamous treatise Malleus Maleficarum—“The Hammer of Witches.” One of its authors, Heinrich Kramer, taught at the University of Salzburg, which guaranteed that the book’s ideas took deep root in local law. Witchcraft was no longer dismissed as peasant superstition; it became the vilest form of heresy. The manual officially sanctioned torture and prescribed death by fire as the only way to stop evil.

The castle’s darkest chapter was the Zaubererjackl Trials. After years of crop failure, plague, and economic collapse, a terrified populace wanted scapegoats. Their frenzy began with Barbara Koller, an animal-carcass disposer already treated as an outcast. Under brutal torture in Moosham’s dungeons she confessed to black magic and claimed her son, Paul Jakob Koller, had signed a blood pact with Satan. Barbara was burned at the stake; her fugitive son quickly morphed in rumor into a powerful warlock known as “Wizard Jackl.”

Moosham’s inquisitors were famed for creative sadism. Prisoners were crammed into copper “witches’ cauldrons” hung from the ceiling, because the torturers believed that touching the ground would let the Devil restore their strength. To end the agony, victims confessed to the most impossible crimes. Once condemned, they had their hands cut off and a brand seared into their chests before being hanged, beheaded, or burned alive.

Of all the rooms that survive, none is more disturbing than the chamber of former bailiff Anton, better known as Schörgen-Toni. Local legends—painted on panels in the castle’s Hall of Tales—say this sadist sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for invulnerability. One storm-torn night a black coach arrived for him, driven by Satan himself, and ever since the bailiff’s damned spirit has roamed the dungeons, attacking travelers and researchers alike.

From 100 Cursed Places · Fern Flower Press