#Nelson Rehmeyer
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Lonely House - Hex Hollow
What Happened at this Lonely House in Pennsylvania is Still Haunting to this Day
The story of Hex Hollow and the house that sits on its land is an infamous legend in York County, Pennsylvania, and the surrounding areas. While everyone knows about the infamous Salem witch trials that occurred in 17th-century Massachusetts, very few are aware that this region was at one point also rife with paranoia and magic 235 years later.
The dastardly murder of Nelson Rehmeyer in 1928 is not only well remembered in the community, the traces of his death still haunt the house he once called home.
After years of bad luck and illness, Rehmeyer’s neighbor, John Blymire, began to suspect that he was cursed and sought a supernatural solution.
The local river witch (because they apparently had those in 1928), Nellie Noll, blamed Rehmeyer, saying that it was he who was casting the dark hexes on Blymire. She told him that all he needed to do was to burn Rehmeyer’s book of spells and bury a lock of his hair.
The “book of spells” the river witch was referring to was The Long Lost Friend, written by the German John George Hohman in 1870. Also titled Pow-Wows, it contains a collection of ancient German spells, healing rituals, and even recipes popular amongst the Pennsylvania Dutch.
By the way, the “Pennsylvania Dutch” culture is actually rooted in German heritage and language, not Dutch. Pennsylvanians are just purposefully confusing people.
Blymire and two associates entered Rehmeyer’s home, but could not find the book. Desperate to lift the curse, Blymire resorted to beating Rehmeyer, tying him to a chair doused in kerosene and lighting him aflame.
Even the river witch must have been like, “Woah, dude! Too far!”
The spot where Nelson Rehmeyer died is still eerily charred from the flame after nearly a century. Blymire claimed that although Rehmeyer had caught fire, his body never burned, proving to him and his associates that the man indeed dealt in black witchcraft.
The house that sits on Rehmeyer’s Hollow is still maintained by the Rehmeyer family and is said to be haunted. A tour is offered of the family’s home and belongings, which includes a clock that stopped at 12:01AM back in 1928. This is the exact time that Nelson Rehmeyer returned to whatever dark master he served.
#ghost and hauntings#paranormal#ghost and spirits#haunted salem#haunted locations#myhauntedsalem#paranormal phenomena#ghosts#spirits#haunted#haunting#hex hollow#lonely house#nelson Rehmeyer
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Nellie Noll Reptilian River Porno Witch Of Marietta.
Nellie Noll Reptilian River Porno Witch Of Marietta.
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банник/bannik (Slavic):
bannik is a mischievous bathhouse spirit. he can appear as a naked bearded old man, or as some animals, and his favourite thing to do is to bathe after several people have already used the bathhouse, and to only use the dirty water for bathing. he does that closer to midnight, and he doesn't like to be disturbed, so people avoided going to the bathhouse at night.
he also doesn't like when people enter the bathhouse with dirty thoughts, without a prayer, or without respecting the rules of the bathhouse. as a mischievous spirit, he can deal quite a lot of damage: he can throw rocks at those who angered him, burn with boiling water, and even flay people alive.
there is a way to ensure he will remain friendly, though: you should always leave a small piece of soap and a small bath broom after you are done bathing. you can also leave some milk, or if you need him extra calm - you can grab and kill a black hen from your backyard and leave it in the bathhouse without plucking.
The Witch of Rehmeyer's Hollow (USA - Pennsylvania):
(Note: The linked article refers to the house itself. Theres no section specifically on the list, but go to "Murder of Nelson Reymeyer" for background)
The witch's real name is Nelson Rehmeyer and he was supposed to be a practitioner of a certain brand of Pennsylvania Dutch-influenced witchcraft. He was suspected of supposedly hexing a local resident, who confronted him to demand his spellbook and hair to reverse the hex and ended up beating Rehmeyer to death.
The man then attempted to burn his house down but it would not burn, which was taken as further evidence of his powers. It's considered to be extremely haunted even today and young people still fear to go there.
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Episode 219: Unanswered
January 16th, 2023
Trigger warnings: Murder, child death, xenophobia.
Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous editing on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!
To step inside them is to enter another world – at least, that was the idea. It’s located underground, beneath a hill in West Wycombe, just outside of London, England, and by it, I mean the caves. You enter them through a rather imposing set of iron gates that are situated beneath the ruins of what looks like an old church. There had always been a natural cave there, but in the 1750s, a local man named Francis paid a bunch of out-of-work farmers to widen and deepen it, using the chalk debris as road material all throughout town. What they created was a system of hand-cut rooms and passageways that looked like something out of a medieval fantasy movie, and each chamber has a name: The Entrance Hall, the Triangle, The Miner’s Cave, the Steward’s Chamber; you get the idea. There’s even one called Franklin’s Cave, but I’ll get to that in a moment. Nearly a quarter of a mile down the path, rumoured to be directly below the church that stands at the top of the hill, is the final destination, a place called the Inner Temple. You can walk right up to that room today, but back in the 1750s, it was actually cut off from the rest of the rooms by an underground river that was named (appropriately, I think) the River Styx. All of this, by the way, was crafted so that Francis had a place to hold meetings of a rather unusual social gathering. His full name was Sir Francis Dashwood, and his social group was known as the “Hellfire Club”, and they gathered for all sorts of rituals and celebrations. Oh, and the Franklin Cave I mentioned a moment ago? It was named after one of the group’s members: Benjamin Franklin. For as long as we’ve had society, there have been groups that seem to exist outside of it. Some have been secret, while others have put themselves on full display, but if the story of one group in particular is true, they should all be treated with caution, because some paths into the occult only lead to destruction.
I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.
His arrival in America was really what started it all. Benjamin had been born a little north of Naples, Italy back in 1886 – the year coca cola was invented – but in 1904, he and his brother, Antonio, packed up and moved to the United States, chasing after the promise of a better life. Benjamin and his brother settled in Philadelphia, taking on tough, labour-intensive jobs, but early on, cracks appeared in their relationship. It’s said that his very devout Catholic brother wasn’t too fond of Benjamin’s interest in the occult. Unable to get along, Benjamin left the city to find work elsewhere. And for a while, that was York, Pennsylvania, and I’ve not seen anyone else notice this before, but I find it more than coincidental that an occult-obsessed man would travel to one of the hotbeds of witchcraft in America at the time. Heck, just a few years later, in 1929, the York witch trials would take place, where the occult murder of a local white magic practitioner named Nelson Rehmeyer would be convicted. In York, folks believed in the supernatural.
After that, he married a fellow Italian immigrant named Santina, and the couple began trying to build a typical American life together, but that was a steep hill to climb in that era. You see, the last couple of decades of the 1800s and the first couple of decades of the 1900s were the years when a massive wave of Italian immigrants came to America. I have Italian ancestors through my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, and they arrived inside that window as well. But America didn’t treat them kindly – they were branded with stereotypes and pushed to the fringes of society, setting most of them on path into deep poverty and inequality, and this was what Benjamin and his wife found themselves facing. Of course, he did everything he could to fit in. He went by “Benny” instead, gave his last name an American makeover and worked hard, but it wouldn’t be until they moved to Detroit, Michigan that things started to improve. Yes, their financial situation got better - Benny invested in real estate, transforming himself from tenant to landlord - but the biggest change he experienced was a new focus, a new goal, and it all started with the dreams.
Remember, Benny had always been interested in the occult: it’s what had led to the falling out between him and his brother Antonio; it had been the foundation of close friendships, like a fellow Italian immigrant and railyard worker, Aurelius Angelino, back in Pennsylvania. If he was awake, he was thinking about the world beyond our own and how he could harness it. Even in his dreams, he was obsessing over it. In the dreams, Benny believed that he was receiving visions from God, visions of a mission that he was meant to embark on, and a very specific calling. Benny, it seems, was supposed to become a healer and a prophet, and it was in Detroit that he finally leaned into those dreams and made them a reality. You see, Benny and his wife still lived within a pretty tight-knit Italian community, and as his work as a healer and prophet began to increase, people around him noticed and paid attention. Over time, those ideas that he had about world history became the subject of book that he wrote, called “The Oldest History of the World: Discovered by Occult Science.” But mostly, he was focused on his sermons, gatherings where he would invite others to come and hear his teachings about the true history of the world, and it’s said that he even hand-crafted an intricate model of the universe, what he called the “Great Celestial Planet Exhibition”; it was made of wire and wood and paper and wax, and he placed it right in the middle of his makeshift altar in his basement.
But at the core of so many cults is a business model, and for Benny, that was healing. There were hexes and packets of mixed-up herbs that people could buy from him, all promising to aid in the healing of various illnesses. He even offered animal sacrifices for a fee, for those customers who needed something more than a potion, I guess. But healing of this sort was a gamble. Some people purchased his services and found what they were looking for, but many did not, and as the years went on, that sort of business model has a way of creating something new: disgruntled customers. All of it was bound to catch up with Benny; at least, that was the assumption most people would make. The trouble is, Benny wasn’t alone; in fact, American culture at the time was a hotbed of groups just like his, and there’s a lot we can learn from a brief study of a few. Although, truth be told, none of it bodes well for Benny.
***
The world that Benny Evangelist lived in was filled with others just like him. Actually, they ran the spectrum, from brushing right up against the edge of normal, accepted religion, to far out on the fringes of what was even considered normal. There were people like Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player, who traded in one touring life for another, travelling the country as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, whose message of temperance is thought to have helped spark prohibition. Or how about the House of David, a commune that was founded in Michigan in 1903. The folks who started it, a couple named Benjamin and Mary Purnell, proved that Benny wasn’t even the only cult leader by that name in Michigan. Their group, though, followed the teachings of a different prophet, Joanna Southcott, although she received her information the same way Benny did: through visions. Then there was Margaret Matilda Wright Brown*, who started having visions of her own in 1916 that focused on a lot of Doomsday stuff. Her teachings quickly grew her community to over a thousand followers but fizzled out years later with flavours of elaborate fraud and attempted murder. Out in Kansas City, there was the Adam God cult, started by James Sharp in 1903, after he witnessed a meteor crash and believed it was the Holy Spirit giving him a mission to preach a special message, which, if you’re paying attention, probably feels a bit familiar, doesn’t it? The Adam God cult drew a ton of followers, and they settled on a farm that was gifted to them by a wealthy member. By 1906, they were carrying guns and starting trouble, and two years later it all ended in a violent shoot-out that took five lives. Founder James Sharp and his wife, of course, survived. And these is just a small sampling of the seemingly countless groups like Benny’s that were out the in the early parts of the twentieth century. Maybe it was the growing class divisions that made it possible, perhaps it was the Great Depression; my guess is that it was a combination of a lot of those things and more. One European newspaper reporter asked the rhetorical question in an article in 1927: “How do Americans and English residents of the Riviera amuse themselves? They join cults.” And, honestly, if you read enough of them, it really does start to feel like it was becoming America’s pastime, which leads us back to Benny Evangelist. He might not have been the only prophet out there in the market, not even the only one in Michigan, for that matter, but he was having success.
But like I said before, not every customer was walking away happy. Yes, some were, and those people stuck around, even more convinced than ever that Benny’s healing powers had really chased away their medical problems, but there were just as many who felt that he had failed them. It’s easy to feel their frustration – Benny was apparently charging $10 a session, and while that’s probably what a lot of people today spend on coffee and a bagel each morning, it was roughly two day’s pay back then, the equivalent of about $300 now. It was a big sacrifice, and so when it didn’t pay off, people got upset. Making that an even more bitter pill to swallow was Benny’s new big house. He’d come a long way since his arrival in America a few years before, and some of that had to do with his real estate ventures, but what most people saw was a guy who was making a fat profit off of their suffering. 3587 St. Aubin Street was the address. Benny lived there with Santina and their four children, ranging from eighteen months to eight years old. It was a busy house, where family life was mixed with work, in the normal stuff and the occult. Everyone knew where Benny the healer lived, which is why, on the morning of July 3rd of 1829, a man named Vincent Elias showed up and knocked on their door, and what happened as a result would shake the community to its core.
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Vincent didn’t kill Benny. I know that’s what you were expecting to hear, so I thought I would get that right out of the way. No, Vincent had paid them a visit because he and Benny were about to wrap up some real estate business; they knew each other well, and were colleagues and friends. What he found when he knocked on the door and let himself in was a scene of absolute horror. No children came running to greet him, so he turned to Benny’s first-floor office and stepped inside. Benny was there, seated at his desk, but he was slumped over in a pool of blood. Oh, and his head? It was on a chair, beside him. Vincent immediately called for the police. It’s said that nearly the entire homicide squad from Detroit rushed to the scene, and when they arrived, they started investigating the rest of the house. Upstairs, the bodies of all four children, as well as Santina, were found brutally murdered. Benny might have been the only one who had been decapitated, but that doesn’t mean the others didn’t die brutal deaths. I’ll just leave it at that. The killer, however, hadn’t been neat and clean. There was no attempt to conceal their movement through the house, with bloody shoeprints marking each of their steps throughout. The police even found a bloody fingerprint. You don’t need to watch a lot of murder mystery shows to know how sloppy that was. Of course, the first assumption was that some disgruntled member of Benny’s cult had shown up in anger and killed the entire family. As we’ve already learned, he was getting rich off of other people’s misfortunes, and that sure doesn’t sound like the sort of life that leads to a happy ending. It didn’t help that there were a lot of occult objects found inside the house, painting a vivid picture for the police about who Benny really was, so it was a safe assumption. But even though they asked the entire neighbourhood and offered a big, $1000 reward, no one had anything useful to offer them.
They did also toy briefly with another theory, though. A note was found in the house that basically said, “This is your last chance.” Some people felt that it had the trappings of extortion, a common element found in a criminal organisation known as the “Black Hand”, and yes, they had spent years preying upon well-off Italian immigrants, but by 1929, they had faded away thanks to the growth of a new group – the Mafia. To the police, the letter felt like an amateur’s attempt to frighten Benny to hand over money – not the type of person who would kill a family of six in cold blood. The final theory was about a mysterious “demolition crew”, that Benny was buying some reclaimed lumber from. In fact, just the night before, he had called a watchman at a house the demolition crew was taking apart, so he could set up a time the next morning for them to deliver the wood to his house and receive payment. Maybe they showed up the morning of July 3rdand just decided it would be easier to kill everyone and take the cash. I don’t know, that seems weak to me, they were probably much more likely to just haggle the price higher. They had a business to run, after all, and if they killed all of their customers, that business would fall apart.
And that was the result of their investigation – three separate theories, no arrests, and no answer to the question of who truly killed the Evangelist family. The only witness that ever turned up was the family dog, who was found on a porch of a neighbour a few months later. The poor pup’s reputation proceeded it, too, and the woman refused to take it in and adopt it, and obviously the police weren’t able to get any useful information out of it, either. The family’s funeral service was held three days after their bodies were discovered, on July 6th. Over three thousand people attended, although I have to wonder how many people were their because they loved and respected them, and how many showed up to watch their anger and frustration be buried six feet below the grass of the cemetery. And as far as we know, their killer was never brought to justice.
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Humans have always been drawn to those who offer answers. Exactly how that desire has played out over the centuries is a varied and flavourful collection of groups that have left their mark on history. From the Hellfire Club’s debaucherous gatherings of society’s elite, to those struggling to make the most of their lives, cults have always been a vendor designed to provide what people are looking for. Most of them, though, leave those questions unanswered, and in the case of Benny Evangelist and his faithful followers, where the goal was physical healing, it ended in something worse: blood. Now, I could tell you that their house on St. Aubin Street was eventually torn down, but you probably know better than to assume that means the story has faded away. Events like that have a way of living on, even when all the people involved no longer are. Legends, whispers, rumours, all of it keeps them alive. But for Benny Evangelist, there’s one more enticing detail that’s kept people coming back, time and time again, to study the mystery. A little while ago, I mentioned that Benny had a friend back in York, Pennsylvania, who worked with him at the railyard there. His name, as I said, was Aurelius Angelino, and not only was he a fellow Italian immigrant, but he actually came from the same hometown back near Naples, and both men were obsessed with the occult. But here’s the thing I didn’t tell you: ten years before the brutal murder of Benny and his entire family, Aurelius Angelino gathered up his twin four-year-old boys and killed them while his wife was making dinner. Similar to Benny’s killer, Angelino used an axe, and similar to Benny’s crime scene, the police found a single bloody fingerprint. Now, Angelino was caught red-handed in the truest sense of the word, and because his behaviour wasn’t viewed as “sane”, he was sent to a psychiatric institution for the criminally insane. And then, four years later, he escaped. And I know what you’re thinking – what if Angelino was angry that Benny left town and made a better life for himself. Perhaps he followed him to Michigan and found his old friend at the centre of an occult gathering, wielding the power of a true prophet, and maybe he was overcome with jealousy, leading him to kill Benny’s entire family, and that could be it. But there’s one detail that’s left investigators and researchers confounded and stumped for decades, because it points to a timeline and chain of events that no one is prepared to unpack, that somehow, and in some way, Angelino didn’t kill his own kids back in 1919, and that Benny’s 1929 murder was an act of revenge and not jealousy. And that detail? The bloody fingerprint found in Angelino’s house back in 1919 was an exact match to someone he knew very well. It was the fingerprint of Benny Evangelist.
***
Do an internet search for terms like “cult” and “secret society”, and you’re bound to find a whole slew of books and websites that talk about them. One reason is because they have always been popular to discuss, but another would be because they are real things that have historically made a lot of people nervous. To that end, I’ve got one more unrelated tale of unusual groups to share with you, and all you need to do to hear about it is stick around through this brief sponsor break.
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William Morgan was trying to get ahead in life. Born in 1774 in Virginia, he worked as a bricklayer and a stonemason, work that eventually pulled him north to New York. He seemed like the kind of guy who might settle down, he had a wife and two kids, after all, but the only reputation he really had was that of a drunken drifter. He would pursue one business venture, only to fail, pack up his household, and move on to the next, rinse and repeat, and that was his life for a long time. Honestly, reading about his early life makes me feel like one of the very few respectable qualities this man possessed was his determination and confidence. William was sure he could find a way to put himself on the map, to make something of himself, and in a way, he eventually did, just not the way he intended. It happened when William was chatting with a friend of his named David Miller, who ran a struggling newspaper. Now, the two men had a lot in common. Both of them were horrible at running a business, both firmly believed that they were destined for greatness, and both had very few rules about how they were going to achieve it, which, I’m sure you’d agree, is not a healthy combination. William had an idea, though. All around him, he kept hearing about a secret society that seemingly controlled his entire world, they were embedded deep within the government of the newly born United States of America, and they used that power to become the wealthiest folks around. Who was this group? The Freemasons.
Now, I highly doubt there’s anyone out there who hasn’t at least heard of the Freemasons. A full third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of the Freemasons; so were other significant Americans, both then and now. George Washington, Paul Revere, Mark Twain, and, uh… Shaquille O’Neal. Anyway, William’s new business idea was really simple – he was going to infiltrate the ranks of the Freemasons, learn all of their incriminating secrets, and then write it up as a book, which David Miller would print and sell. It smelled like easy money to these men, so they got right to work. William did indeed sneak in, pretend to be a member and gain access to all sorts of juicy secrets, and he did in fact write it all up for publication. But he and David were so proud of the progress they were making that they bragged about it all over town, and soon enough, the Freemasons found out about it and set out to stop them. At first, it was just harassment from the masons in their community, angry words, threats of violence, that sort of thing. It was posturing, nothing more, except that posturing escalated quickly. On September 8th of 1826, a group of masons tried to destroy David’s print shop. Two days later, the masons set fire to the homes of both men, and then the following day, William Morgan was arrested on false charges. Basically, a local tavern owner, possibly a mason himself, claimed that William had borrowed a shirt and never brought it back. Once that charge was dropped, William was arrested again, this time for failing to pay a tab in the same tavern. The tab, by the way, was just $2. Yeah, the masons were angry, and they were pulling all the strings they could to unravel William and David’s business plan.
On the night of September 12th, a huge crowd of masons showed up at the jail where William was being kept and demanded to pay his bail and take him into their own custody. The jailor’s wife was on duty at the time, and she really did try to brush them away, but things got pretty heated and she gave in to save her own skin, and honestly I don’t blame her one bit. Those masons dragged William out into the night while another group visited his wife. They told her that they would let her see her husband, but only if she handed over the unpublished manuscript. Afraid for his life and her own, she did what they asked, and then they took it and sent her away. Her husband William was never seen again. That same night, another group of about fifty masons kidnapped David Miller and locked him up in an undisclosed location. Even still, a bunch of his friends managed to track him down and break him out, and with that, a very wild night came to an end. Now, from one point of view, the masons got what they wanted – they put an end to a critic who had threatened to expose their secrets. In fact, they made him disappear completely, but from another perspective, they really made a mess of things. Why? Because a secret society doing criminal stuff to stay secret didn’t exactly endear itself to the general public. Soon enough, news spread, and as a result, an anti-mason movement sprung up. Not locally, either – nationally. How massive was this movement? Well, a new, short-lived political party popped up, called the “Anti-Masonic Party”. Sitting president, John Quincy Adams, even felt that it was necessary to announce that he had never been, nor ever would be, a mason. Their recruitment numbers dwindled, and within a few years, the organisation was reduced to a shadow of its former self, and in the middle of that storm of bad PR, David Miller saw his next best opportunity. He rewrote the book from notes and memory and published it anyway, which, considering the harassment he had already suffered, was pretty brave of him. And the response from the masons? Not a single thing. David Miller’s tell-all exposé went completely unanswered.
[Outro]
*The correct name seems to be Margaret Matilda (Wright) Rowen.
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Reading about the murder of Nelson Rehmeyer and going down a rabbit hole o Pennsylvanian Dutch witches and the 'Hex Belt'.
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It was the dark of night on Thanksgiving Day 1928, when three farmers stole into the house of another man located in York County's Rehmeyer's Hollow. They tortured and murdered Nelson Rehmeyer spurred by the belief that he was a witch doctor steeped in th
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Episode 129: The Hex Hollow Magic Murders Photodump
Image 01: 1929 Newspaper clipping about the incident showing the 3 defendants (top) and photo of the victim, Nelson Rehmeyer (bottom)
Image 02: Eastern State Penitentiary’s wagon wheel layout
Image 03: A clip from a 1929 silent film showing Eastern State Penitentiary (credit: Eastern State Penitentiary’s YouTube Channel found at bit.ly/ESPLGH129)
Image 04: The Long Lost Friend and the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses are thought to be the most popular Pennsylvania Dutch Powwow texts
Image 05: Powwow Artist and Practitioner Rob Chapman explains a bit about powwow on his youtube channel (Full video found at bit.ly/PowWow129)
Image 06: Photo of the Hex Hollow house
Image 07: Wilbert Hess and John Curry (top) and John Curry, Wilbert Hess, and John Blymire (bottom)
Image 08: Nelson Rehmeyer’s widow and daughters
Image 09: 2007 clip from the York Daily Record as they interview Nelson’s great-grandson Rickie Ebaugh and take a tour of the area where Nelson was murdered
Image 10: BONUS PHOTO - Pep the Cat Murdering Dog’s mugshot (FREE PEP!)
#The Hex Hollow Magic Murders#Let's Get Haunted#Hex Hollow Murders#Powwow Artist#Powwow Practitioner#Instagram
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True Crime Sunday: Hex Hollow and the Murder of NElson RehMeyer
True Crime Sunday: Hex Hollow and the Murder of NElson RehMeyer
Welcome to another True Crime Sunday! This week, we’re going to take a look at a case involving witches, curses, and murder. Am I talking about Salem in the 1600s? Nope. This case happened in Pennsylvania in 1928 in Rehmeyer’s Hollow, also known as Hex Hollow.
For some time prior to the murder, John Blymire had been experiencing a pretty nasty run of bad luck. Money woes, health issues, failing…
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On this day in 1972, John Blymire "the York County hex murderer" died in Philadelphia, PA.
Blymire was born in 1895 in York County, PA. He was a creepy kid who claimed to have inherited magic powers from his father and grandfather, powerful Pennsylvania Dutch brauchers (also called "pow-wowers" or "witch-doctors").
Blymire lost those powers in his teen years. It was probably just puberty, but he chose to believe that he was being targeted by hexerei, or black magic. He spent all of his time and money trying to figure out who was behind it all.
After consulting other brauchers for years, Blymire decided the black magician was an old family acquaintance, Nelson Rehmeyer. On November 27th, 1928 Blymire and two young accomplices ambushed Rehmeyer in his home and murdered him.
Blymire was quickly caught. The "York County hex murder" grabbed the attention of the national media, which shined an uncomfortable spotlight on Pennsylvania Dutch folk beliefs and made the state seem like a superstitious backwater. Blymire was quickly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
His sentence was commuted to time served in 1953 by Governor John S. Fine. After his release he was a model citizen.
We talked about the York County hex murder in Series 5's "Bound in Mystery and Shadow."
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Located in Central Pennsylvania near the Maryland border lies Rehmeyer’s Hollow. Before being renamed, it was ominously called Hex Hollow.
A two-storey wooden house tucked in among the forest still stands. This house was the home of Nelson Rehmeyer. On the night of the 27th of November, 1928, it was the scene of his murder. Another resident, John Blymire, had been unable to sleep or eat for a prolonged period. Believing he was under some kind of curse, he went to local witch, Nellie Noll (also known as the River Witch of Marietta), for advice. Nellie told John that he was correct: he had been placed under a curse. But by who? Nelson Rehmeyer, Nellie replied.
There was a strong believe in witchcraft and curses in Pennsylvania at the time with many people practicing a form of folk magic called “powwow.” However, powwow focuses on healing ailments as opposed to creating them. It certainly was true that Nelson practiced magic but he practised powwow magic and had once allegedly cured Nelson of an illness. Nevertheless, Nellie said Nelson had placed this curse on John which was causing his ailments. He needed to kill him to life the curse, he believed.
On that fateful evening, John and two accomplices, John Curry and Wilbert Hess, made their way to the “hex house.” Once inside, the trio strangled and bludgeoned Nelson to death before mutilating his corpse and setting fire to his home. Somehow, the house survived the blaze, citing so-called further evidence of Nelson’s association with the supernatural. The three killers were soon apprehended; the trial garnered widespread notoriety. John and John were sentenced to life imprisonment while Wilbert was sentenced to 10 to 20 years.
All three of the killers were released from prison early and went on to live quiet and unassuming lives. The hex hysteria became a distant memory and then transformed into something of an urban legend. Powwowing still exists today.
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The Murder of Nelson Rehmeyer
Known by locals as Hex House, this was once the home of Nelson Rehmeyer a notorious Pow Wow Doctor, until he was brutally murdered in 1928 by three men who believed he had cursed them using witchcraft.
In York County, Pennsylvania there is a place called Spring Valley County Park. Before it was given that name it was known by the ominous name of Hex Hollow.
In 1928, a local man and suspected witch named Nelson Rehmeyer was murdered in his home in an effort by another local man to remove a curse. Though the so-called hex house was set on fire in the aftermath of the murder, it survived the blaze, and still stands today. In 2007, Rehmeyer’s descendants opened it to the public as a museum, featuring displays about his life and death.
The killer, a man named John Blymire, believed that Nelson Rehmeyer was a witch who had placed a curse on him. This wasn’t unusual at the time. Many people in Central Pennsylvania in the 1920s practiced a kind of folk magic called Powwow, which mixed elements of Christianity and European folk remedies. In fact, Blymire himself was a Powwow doctor.
After a string of illnesses and bad luck, Blymire became convinced that he was laboring under a curse. Unable to figure out the source of the curse, he turned to another local witch, Nellie Noll, known as the Marieta River Witch. She confirmed his fears, and told him that the author of his misfortune was none other than Nelson Rehmeyer, who had once cured Blymire of a childhood illness using his Powwow magic.
According to some accounts, it was Nellie Noll who told Blymire that in order to break the curse, he needed a lock of Rehmeyer’s hair, which he had to bury six feet into the ground. Then he had to burn Rehmeyer’s copy of The Long Lost Friend, an 1820 book of folk magic written by John George Hohman, and commonly employed by Powwow practitioners.
On November 26, 1928, Blymire and a friend visited Rehmeyer’s house in search of his copy of The Long Lost Friend. The story goes that they spent a peaceful night there, with Blymire holding back on his attack after realizing that it would take more than two men to subdue the witch. The next night, Blymire and his friend returned with another accomplice and the three of them assaulted Rehmeyer. The struggle is said to have lasted only about a minute, and at the end of it, Rehmeyer was dead.
Perhaps because they were unable to find Rehmeyer’s copy of The Long Lost Friend, the three men attempted to burn down the witch’s house. The fact that the hex house survived the blaze was cited as further evidence of Rehmeyer’s supernatural powers. Blymire would later attest that the hex placed upon him was broken the moment that Rehmeyer died.
All three men were captured, and the murder cast national attention upon the area as papers all over the country ran stories about the York Hex Slayers. Blymire and his first accomplice, John Curry, both received life sentences for their roles in the murder, while the other accomplice, Wilbert Hess, was given a sentence of 10-20 years. All three were eventually released without having served out their full sentences. None of the men ever committed another crime.
Rehmeyer’s great grandson now owns the farmhouse, known to locals as Hex Hollow, and welcomes visitors who inspect the charred floorboards, protected by Plexiglas, and stare at the clock, still frozen at 12:01.
#The Murder of Nelson Rehmeyer#Murder#Nelson Rehmeyer#Pow Wow#ghost and hauntings#haunted locations#ghost and spirits
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Hex Hollow: The Murder of Nelson Rehmeyer
In York County, Pennsylvania there is a place called Spring Valley County Park. Before it was given that benign designation, however, it was known by the ominous name of Hex Hollow.
In 1928, a local man and suspected witch named Nelson Rehmeyer was murdered in his home in an effort by another local man to remove a curse. Though the so-called “hex house” was set on fire in the aftermath of the murder, it survived the blaze, and still stands today. In 2007, Rehmeyer’s descendants opened it to the public as a museum, featuring displays about his life and death.
The killer, a man named John Blymire, believed that Nelson Rehmeyer was a witch who had placed a curse on him. This wasn’t unusual at the time: many people in Central Pennsylvania in the 1920s practiced a kind of folk magic called “Powwow,” which mixed elements of Christianity and European folk remedies. In fact, Blymire himself was a Powwow doctor.
After a string of illnesses and bad luck, Blymire became convinced that he was laboring under a curse. Unable to figure out the source of the curse, he turned to another local witch, Nellie Noll, known as the “Marieta River Witch.” She confirmed his fears, and told him that the author of his misfortune was none other than Nelson Rehmeyer, who had once cured Blymire of a childhood illness using his Powwow magic.
Nelson Rehmeyer. Still from Hex Hollow: Witchcraft and Murder in Pennsylvania via Freestyle Flicks
According to some accounts, it was Nellie Noll who told Blymire that in order to break the curse, he needed a lock of Rehmeyer’s hair, which he had to bury six feet into the ground. Then he had to burn Rehmeyer’s copy of The Long Lost Friend, an 1820 book of folk magic written by John George Hohman, and commonly employed by Powwow practitioners.
On November 26, 1928, Blymire and a friend visited Rehmeyer’s house in search of his copy of The Long Lost Friend. The story goes that they spent a peaceful night there, with Blymire holding back on his attack after realizing that it would take more than two men to subdue the witch. The next night, Blymire and his friend returned with another accomplice, and the three of them assaulted Rehmeyer. The struggle is said to have lasted only about a minute, and at the end of it, Rehmeyer was dead.
Perhaps because they were unable to find Rehmeyer’s copy of The Long Lost Friend, the three men attempted to burn down the witch’s house. The fact that the “hex house” survived the blaze was cited as further evidence of Rehmeyer’s supernatural powers. Blymire would later attest that the hex placed upon him was broken the moment that Rehmeyer died.
From left: John Curry, Wilbert Hess, and John Blymire. Still from Hex Hollow: Witchcraft and Murder in Pennsylvania via Freestyle Flicks
All three men were captured, and the murder cast national attention upon the area, as papers all over the country ran stories about the “York Hex Slayers.” Blymire and his first accomplice, John Curry, both received life sentences for their roles in the murder, while the other accomplice, Wilbert Hess, was given a sentence of 10-20 years. All three were eventually released without having served out their full sentences.
The region’s strange magical tradition—which some still practice today—as well as the murder partly inspired a series of books by horror author Brian Keene, himself a native of Central Pennsylvania. In 2015, a filmmaker named Shane Free released a feature-length documentary about the murder called Hex Hollow: Witchcraft and Murder in Pennsylvania, which features interviews with surviving relatives of those involved, as well as with folklorists and experts in the Powwow Tradition.
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Halloween coming. Time to head down to Rehmeyers Hollow to stroll in the woods. Strange time for that place. Seen really weird stuff in that hollow. REAL things you wouldn't believe. Used to live there. SCARY in that Witch Hollow http://jamen.do/t/1532417 https://youtu.be/otuDW28dktc
#halloween#witches#hex county#witches of hex county#halloween witches#rehmeyers hollow#rehmeyer the witch#nelson rehmeyer#Nelson Rehmeyer Witch
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Witchcraft and Murder in Hex Hollow
If you walk the roads in Hex Hollow in the right sequence on Halloween night, you will pass through the gates of hell. You’ll know the place because the trees will grow thick above your head and the woods are dark even at the brightest time of day. It is said that there are places here where the sun has never touched the ground.
Hex Hollow, also known as Spring Valley Park and Rehmeyer’s Hollow, is in southern York County. It is a maze of trails and dirt roads twisting in and out of each other, paths cut randomly through the vegetation. As a boy, I would spend an entire day hiking, climbing, crossing streams, trying to learn the trails just as I’d first learned the stories of this haunted place.
There is a lonely grave in Hex Hollow, marked with a pentagram where Nelson Rehmeyer, a black magician, is buried. Men were murdered in his house. On some nights, the moon casts light upon Rehmeyer’s specter, wandering his lands.
But most people, I have found, do not like to speak of Hex Hollow’s legend-or truth. When asked about it, they give short answers or none at all.
Most of the area is a county park now, but it’s not well used, partly because of it’s the beaten path, but mostly because it is Hex Hollow. It’s not easy to find, but you know it when you’re there. The world becomes a little darker. How much darker it must have been in 1928, when the hollow’s one resident was Nelson D. Rehmeyer-a loner well over six feet tall, with deep-set eyes and a powerful presence. Rehmeyer was married, but his wife lived outside the hollow because he was, in her words, “too damn peculiar.”
Rehmeyer was what is commonly called in this area a powwow doctor. They are also called Brauchers or, in a more negative light, Hexenmeisters, or just Hexers. A strong tradition of faith healing and folk magic continues even to this day among the Pennsylvania Germans.
With some searching, and no maps, my wife, Alison, and I found the Rehmeyer house. There’s not much peculiar about the place itself, but there is certainly something about the old farm that people pick up on. Perhaps it is the unnerving angle at which the house sits or the neglected outbuildings that surround it. There is no witch’s grave here, no pentagrams, and few hex signs (which are a common sight in these parts). The only outwardly “witchy” feature of the house is the red 13 painted on one of the barns. Yet Hex Hollow has a feeling that Alison likens to a graveyard: peaceful and quiet but with an undercurrent of foreboding.
In Rehmeyer’s time, there were hundreds of informal powwow practitioners throughout the area. One was named John Blymire, a sickly and sad man from a family of Brauchers who traced their spiritual lineage back to Pennsylvania’s most famous witch, Mountain Mary. But John Blymire could keep none of his powwow patients. He was reduced to working in a York cigar factory. He could figure out no explanation for his hardship, save perhaps the answer obvious to someone of his background: He must have been hexed.
Blymire visited every powwow doctor, witch, and faith healer in the area, trying to get his hex broken. He had no luck until he found Nellie Noll, a.k.a. the River Witch. After many visits-and payments-to Noll, she revealed the source of Blymire’s curse: Nelson D. Rehmeyer of Rehmeyer’s Hollow.
Noll told Blymire that the only way he could break the curse was to get a lock of Rehmeyer’s hair, or his hex book, or both, and bury them six feet down. Finally Blymire had a reason for his plight. He quickly enlisted two teenage boys, John Curry and Wilbert Hess, to help rectify it. Both boys came from families who had fallen on hard times, and it didn’t take much for Blymire to convince them that they too were cursed and that Nelson D. Rehmeyer was the source.
On a dark and rainy November night in 1928, the three went to confront Rehmeyer. The old man invited them in, and the men stayed up late, talking of many things. Rehmeyer asked them to stay the night, then went upstairs to sleep while his three guests slept downstairs. In the early morning, Blymire tried to convince Curry and Hess to go the basement to find Rehmeyer’s hex book. But no way were the boys going into a dark basement for a book of devil’s curses. After Rehmeyer fed them breakfast, the trio left.
But they returned the following night, and this time Blymire was determined to get the hex book. It took all three of them-Blymire, Curry, and Hess-to wrestle the powerful Rehmeyer to the ground. When he failed to give up the book, they tied a rope around his neck and beat him to death. Upon hearing his death rattle, Blymire exclaimed, “Thank God, the witch is dead!”
Even with Rehmeyer dead, the trio could not muster the courage to descend into his basement to look for his hex book. Instead, they decided to burn the body and the house. They pour lamp oil over the corpse and the floor, set them ablaze, and left. Rehmeyer’s nearest neighbor found his body two days later, on Thanksgiving.
Hex Hollow still feels lonesome and cold. Places seem to take on elements of their reputation. Most people don’t know the real story of the place, but they know to stay away from it, especially at night. They know it is associated with witchcraft and murder. I still spend a lot of time there. Now I know all of the paths. I know there’s no black magician, but I’m still searching. After all, there are tales of Rehmeyer’s wandering ghost to explore. -Timothy Renner
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I was Nelson Rehmeyer from Hex Hollow in my former life
I have no idea who that is but Gucci
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In 1928, a man named John Blymire, believed that a local reclusive man named Nelson Rehmeyer had hexed him. Blymire got the information from a local witch, and went to Rehmeyer's house in an attempt to get his "pow wow" book and burn it to rid himself of his bad luck. Along with two minions, John broke into Nelson's home and did not find the book and burn it. Instead they tied Nelson up to a chair and beat him to death, along with setting him on fire in an attempt to get rid of the "curse". Nelson's wife and daughter were not home at the time, and were un harmed, but supposedly poor Nelson's ghost haunts the home. It is said that burn marks from the murder can be seen on the floor.
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