For eight years in the late 1600s, Sweden was swept by one of the darkest episodes in its legal and social history. Children accused neighbors and relatives of flying them to meet the Devil, special courts handed down death sentences, and hundreds of people were executed for witchcraft.
Sweden is rarely the first country that comes to mind when people think of witch trials.
Salem has become synonymous with the phenomenon in the United States, while the large witch hunts of Germany, Scotland and parts of Central Europe dominate much of the European history.
But Sweden had its own period of mass panic.
It became known as Det stora oväsendet, roughly translated as The Great Noise or The Great Commotion.
Between 1668 and 1676, accusations of witchcraft spread through communities across the country. Sweden’s National Archives says a couple of thousand people were accused during the country’s major witch trials and approximately 300 women and men were sentenced to death by the special witchcraft commissions created to handle the cases.
Many of the victims were women.
It began with stories about Blåkulla
The panic that became the Great Noise began in Dalarna in 1668 and spread rapidly through central and northern Sweden.
The accusations followed a remarkably consistent pattern.
Children claimed that witches had taken them from their beds during the night and transported them to Blåkulla, a mythical place that Swedish folklore associated with the Devil.
The stories became increasingly elaborate.
According to documents preserved by the National Archives, children testified that witches rode to Blåkulla on broomsticks, backwards facing cows and even enchanted people. At the alleged gatherings, they described meals of frogs and snakes, backwards dancing and encounters with the Devil.
To modern readers the stories sound fantastical.
To courts operating in a deeply religious 17th century society, they could become evidence in a capital case.
Children became key witnesses
One of the most disturbing elements of the Swedish witch trials was the enormous role played by children.
Young witnesses accused adults of taking them to Blåkulla, and those accusations could spread quickly from household to household.
Some children became known as visgossar, boys who claimed they could identify witches by seeing a supernatural mark on their foreheads.
As fear grew, accusations reinforced one another. A child’s story in one village could resemble accounts already circulating elsewhere, making increasingly extraordinary claims seem credible to frightened communities.
The trials were not ordinary local court proceedings alone. King Charles XI’s government sent out special witchcraft commissions with authority to investigate the accusations and impose death sentences.
The executions were not quite what popular culture suggests
Swedish witch trial victims are often described simply as having been burned at the stake.
The reality was slightly different, though no less brutal.
Those sentenced to death in the major Swedish trials were generally beheaded first. Their bodies were then burned.
The burning had an explicitly religious meaning. Fire was believed to destroy the physical remains of those considered to have allied themselves with Satan.
Torsåker became the deadliest chapter
The most infamous episode occurred in the parish of Torsåker in Ångermanland in 1675.
There, 71 people were sentenced to death: 65 women, two men and four boys.
Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Radio describes the Torsåker executions as the largest witch trial in Swedish history and one of the country’s largest legally sanctioned mass executions.
Most of the victims were executed on or around June 1, 1675, at a site that later became known as Häxberget, the Witch Mountain.
The scale is difficult to comprehend. Estimates suggest roughly one in five women in the surrounding parish area was killed.
In 2025, 350 years after the executions, a new memorial was dedicated near Torsåker church to honor those who died. SVT reported that descendants and local residents gathered to remember what is now recognized as one of Sweden’s gravest historic miscarriages of justice.
How did it finally stop?
The panic eventually reached Stockholm.
And that helped bring it down.
During witch trials in the capital in 1676, judges began finding serious contradictions in children’s testimony. Several young witnesses admitted that accusations had been fabricated.
Once the credibility of the child witnesses collapsed, the system that had sustained the trials began collapsing with it.
Authorities became increasingly skeptical of accusations based on supernatural testimony, and the large scale prosecutions ended.
Historiska museet, Sweden’s national historical museum, describes the period from 1668 to 1676 as the country’s great wave of witch trials and has devoted a major exhibition to the women whose lives were caught up in it. The museum’s account emphasizes how quickly fear, religious belief and state power combined to turn accusations into death sentences.
Sweden was not Salem
The Swedish and American witch trials are often compared, but the scale was very different.
The Salem witch trials took place in colonial Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693, roughly two decades after the Swedish panic. Nineteen people were hanged in Salem, while another man died after being pressed with stones.
Sweden’s Great Noise lasted for years and produced hundreds of death sentences.
Yet the basic mechanisms feel disturbingly familiar across both episodes: rumor became evidence, children became witnesses, fear moved faster than skepticism, and institutions that were supposed to establish truth instead amplified the panic.
A history Sweden is still confronting
For centuries, the witch trials sat somewhat awkwardly within Sweden’s national history.
Today they are increasingly being examined not as strange folklore, but as the stories of real people subjected to catastrophic failures of law and society.
The National Archives has digitized records from the witchcraft commissions in several parts of the country, allowing researchers and the public to read testimony from the trials themselves.
Memorials now stand at places where victims were executed. Museums have returned to the subject. Historians continue identifying the individuals behind lists of names.
The witches, of course, were never the frightening part of the story.
The frightening part was how many ordinary people became convinced that they were real.
Featured image credit: Simon N / Unsplash.
