TO DEFY “EVIL SPIRITS”

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 June 1934, Page 11

TO DEFY “EVIL SPIRITS”

" ‘WITCHCRAFT TRAGEDY.’ PARIS, May 2. Inquirv into the death of a woman and her'child at Lyons has revealed the existence in that busy industrial town of superstitions and witchcraft worthy of the Dark Ages. The mother was the wife of a cooper and when her 14-nionths-old child fell ill early last month the parents consulted a fashionable woman “practitioner.” The woman did not see the child, but prescribed sugar watei. When this did not prove efficacious, coffee was ordered. At tho end of a week the child died. The woman assured the distracted parents that it was not really dead but possessed by evil spirits, which could be driven out _of its body. The process of exorcism was a, strange one. The mother had to bathe her own feet in a mixture ot hot water containing an acid.' Firmly convinced of the miraculous powers of the “practitioner” the unhappy parents resisted the undertakers when they came to remove the child’s body for burial. Meanwhile the mother’s sister had been prescribed a similar treatment for a feverish condition, and the two women’s feet were so badly burned by the acid that they had to go into hospital. From this institution they were removed to a hospital for mental cases, where the mother of the child died a few days later in acute delirium. Undeterred by these tragic experiences, the child’s father and another woman of the family attempted to drive out the evil spirits which were tormenting them by taking foot baths of the same acid mixture, but at this point the authorities stepped