Hex Hollow: The 1928 Witch Murder of Nelson Rehmeyer
Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries The last week of November, 1928. York County, Pennsylvania. In an isolated hollow that has carried one family's name for generations, a neighbor finds sixty-year-old potato farmer Nelson Rehmeyer dead on his kitchen floor, beaten, bound, and burned. Someone had poured lamp oil over him and set the house alight, expecting it to burn to the ground. It didn't. The fire scorched a hole thr...
Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries
The last week of November, 1928. York County, Pennsylvania. In an isolated hollow that has carried one family's name for generations, a neighbor finds sixty-year-old potato farmer Nelson Rehmeyer dead on his kitchen floor, beaten, bound, and burned. Someone had poured lamp oil over him and set the house alight, expecting it to burn to the ground. It didn't. The fire scorched a hole through the floorboards, charred the body, and went out. The house refused to burn. And when word spread through the valley, some neighbors didn't call it luck. They said the house couldn't burn, because of what Nelson Rehmeyer was. The men who killed him weren't there to rob him. They walked away with less than three dollars. They came because they believed, completely, that he was a witch who had hexed them, and that killing him was the only cure.
This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel go to Hex Hollow, and to understand the murder, they start not with the crime but with the magic.
We trace the real folk tradition at the heart of it: Braucherei, or "powwowing," the Pennsylvania Dutch healing practice German immigrants carried to America in the 1700s, a devoutly Christian tradition of charms, Bible verses, and cures for fevers, burns, and sick livestock, practiced openly by ordinary neighbors. We cover its most famous text, John George Hohman's 1820 The Long Lost Friend, a remedy book still in print two centuries later, said to protect whoever carries it from fire, a promise that returns, darkly, at the end of this story. And we cover the tradition's shadow: if a healer can bless, someone can curse, and the "hex doctor" whose whole business depends on witches existing, because every diagnosis of a hex is also an accusation of a neighbor.
Then the people. John Blymire, born into powwowing, a sickly man powwowed fifteen times before age ten, who spent roughly a decade convinced an unseen curse was draining his health and luck, drifting from hex doctor to hex doctor asking one question: who is doing this to me? The elderly woman across the river in Marietta, remembered in legend as "Nellie Noll" though the records suggest another name entirely, who finally gave him a face in a dollar bill: Nelson Rehmeyer, a man who had once powwowed to heal Blymire as a boy. And Rehmeyer himself, a big, quiet, separated-but-amicable farmer who healed on the side and became "the Witch of Rehmeyer's Hollow" only at the moment someone needed a witch.
We walk the recruitment of two teenagers and a desperate, failing farm family, the prescribed cure (bury a lock of the witch's hair, or burn his copy of the book), the strange overnight visit where Rehmeyer fed his eventual killers dinner, and the night of November 27 itself, told carefully from the confessions and trial record, where a retrieval mission became a killing, and where Blymire claimed that the instant Rehmeyer died, his own curse lifted and he could finally sleep. Then the "witch trial" that made global headlines and the county's determined effort to keep witchcraft out of its own courtroom by calling a three-dollar killing a robbery. And finally the aftermath: the hollow renamed, the house that still stands with its burned floor under plexiglass and a clock stopped at 12:01, the reported hauntings, and the way the scandal drove an entire folk tradition underground. The episode's real chill isn't whether Rehmeyer was a witch. It's that a curse doesn't have to be real to work. It only needs one person who believes it is.
This is Hex Hollow.
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SOURCES:
Contemporaneous coverage of the November 1928 murder of Nelson Rehmeyer and the 1929 York County trials of John Blymire, John Curry, and Wilbert Hess, including reporting in the York Dispatch and the national and international press; the court records, confessions, and verdicts from the trials (first-degree murder convictions and life sentences for Blymire and Curry, and a second-degree conviction for Hess); Arthur H. Lewis's 1969 book Hex, cited as the popular basis for most later retellings and noted for its novelized, dramatized scenes and dialogue rather than strict documentation; the scholarship of anthropologist David W. Kriebel on Braucherei/powwowing as a traditional Pennsylvania German healing practice; John George Hohman's The Long Lost Friend (Der lange verborgene Freund, 1820) and its folklore; and the 2015 documentary Hex Hollow: Witchcraft and Murder in Pennsylvania, made by a descendant of Nelson Rehmeyer, together with accounts from the family and from visitors to the still-standing farmhouse. Where the legend and the documented record diverge, including the disputed identity of the Marietta "hex doctor," the episode notes the difference.
DISCLAIMER:
Content warning: This episode describes a violent murder, including beating, strangulation, and burning, and discusses mental illness and the killing of an innocent man. Please take care while listening.
The Mugshot Mysteries podcast is independently produced and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any individual, family, publication, or production referenced in this episode, including the makers of any documentary named or the descendants of anyone involved.
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