Rehmeyer’s Hollow

The chain of counsel is in the trial record. John Blymire, 33, sickly and luckless, had been powwowed fifteen times before age ten by his own mother's testimony, and a succession of healers — ending with Emma Knopp, the River Witch of Marietta — told him who had hexed him: Rehmeyer. With John Curry, 14, and Wilbert Hess, 18, who believed the healer had cursed his family, Blymire made the November visit.

The January 1929 trial made international news — the Philadelphia Record called it "the weirdest and most curiously fascinating [trial] in the history of modern jurisprudence" — 235 years after Salem, as papers delighted in pointing out. Blymire testified to the whole thing. When Judge Ray Sherwood asked whether he was unhexed now, Blymire answered: "Yes. I got the witch." All three were convicted of first-degree murder — Curry, at fourteen, among the youngest murder defendants the state had ever produced — and Blymire went to Eastern State Penitentiary for life. The district attorney believed the real motive was robbery and tried to argue it; the jury preferred the hex.

The case nearly killed powwowing itself — the Pennsylvania Dutch healing tradition built on John George Hohman's 1820 Long Lost Friend, a little German-language chapbook of charms, prayers and remedies that had sat in Deutsch kitchens for a century — which the newspapers confused with witchcraft until practitioners corrected them: powwow is the protective art, the counter-magic, not the curse. State authorities promised a crackdown; York County spent decades living down the coverage.

The record preserves the symmetry the retellings prize: Rehmeyer powwowed too. The 'witch' and the men who came to kill him were working from the same book — literally, since the book was what they wanted — and the remedy examined at trial was one healer's prescription for breaking another healer's spell.

Local memory has been more generous to Rehmeyer. The hollow took his family name in 1844; the house still stands, and the legend says his spirit blew the flames off his own body and stays in the kitchen where it happened.

Rehmeyer's Hollow is open to visitors — the house has been restored and opened for occasional tours and a documentary, Hex Hollow — and the file notes what the record actually shows: a documented murder with an occult motive, three convictions, one folklore tradition nearly prosecuted out of existence, and one unproven postscript about a healer who reportedly never left. The descendants who restored the farmhouse give the tours now, which means the file ends where it began — with the family keeping the house.