In the autumn of 1864, two brothers in the small Alsatian village of Illfurth became sick at almost the same time. Théobald Burner was nine years old and Joseph was seven, sons of a poor family in a village of roughly 1,200 people south of…
More than twenty years before Salem became synonymous with witchcraft, sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Knapp began behaving strangely inside a minister’s house in Groton, Massachusetts.
The first sign was not a shadow standing at the end of a hallway or a mysterious voice calling from an empty room. It was an invasion of large black flies gathering around the screened porch of a small rental house in Gary, Indiana, during…
Richard Gallagher had spent years learning how badly the human mind could mislead itself.
In March 1857, ten-year-old Péronne Tavernier walked into school in the isolated Alpine village of Morzine and collapsed into a strange, deathlike state.
In April 1584, a 25-year-old nun named Jeanne Féry was brought before church authorities in Mons because the women around her believed something had taken hold of her.