The Murder of Nelson Rehmeyer: Witchcraft, Hexes, and a Killing in Pennsylvania Dutch Country
In the late autumn of 1928, the quiet farming community of York County, Pennsylvania, found itself at the center of a story that felt centuries older than the automobiles parked along its dirt roads. This was Pennsylvania Dutch country, a place where folk healing, powwow magic, and whispered hexes lived alongside churchgoing respectability. And it was here, in a lonely farmhouse in Rehmeyer’s Hollow, that Nelson Rehmeyer met a violent and superstitious end.
Rehmeyer was a powwow doctor, a practitioner of traditional folk healing rooted in Germanic charms and scripture. He was known as gentle, solitary, and a little strange, but hardly dangerous. Yet to John Blymire, a local man plagued by misfortune, Rehmeyer became the embodiment of a curse.
Blymire believed he had been “hexed.” His crops failed. His health declined. His luck evaporated. In desperation, he sought the advice of another powwow practitioner, who told him that the person who had cursed him was someone he knew, someone with “the strongest power.” Blymire became convinced that the culprit was Rehmeyer.
On the night of November 27, 1928, Blymire and two accomplices, John Curry, age 14, and Wilbert Hess, age 18, went to Rehmeyer’s farmhouse. Their plan was rooted in superstition: steal Rehmeyer’s copy of The Long Lost Friend, a powwow book believed to hold protective spells, and bury a lock of his hair to break the curse.
But when Rehmeyer resisted, panic took over. The men beat him, strangled him, and left his body on the kitchen floor. They attempted to burn the house to hide the crime, but the fire mysteriously failed to spread, a detail that fed local legends for decades.
The murder shocked the nation. Newspapers called it the “Hex Murder,” framing it as a relic of medieval superstition surviving into the modern age. Blymire and his accomplices were arrested, tried, and convicted, but the deeper story, of fear, folklore, and the dangerous power of belief, lingered long after the courtroom closed.
Today, Rehmeyer’s Hollow remains a place of eerie fascination, a reminder that superstition can be as deadly as any weapon.
germansingergirl
areudirty
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
gracieabrams
