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July 8, 2025 - Skeptoid
19:38
Skeptoid #996: Murder in Hex Hollow

The 1928 murder of a folk healer ignited a media frenzy and moral panic, revealing how superstition and magical thinking can fuel real-world tragedy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Beyond The Spooky Details 00:02:28
On a chilly November night in 1928, three men approached the tall, dark wooden home of a bearded folk wizard in rural Pennsylvania.
They'd come to break a curse, and soon, this night would end in blood, flames, and murder.
But this isn't the premise of an H.P. Lovecraft story.
While newspapers would dismiss the magical aspects of this crime as mere superstition, the murder was all too real and would soon drag a popular folk practice into the harsh light of a world that thought it had seen the last of the witch trials.
That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.
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Murder in Hex Hollow Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.
Today we're going to turn our skeptical eye on a murder case that became a media sensation just one year before the stock market crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression.
But this is Skeptoid, so we're going to look beyond the spooky details of the murder, and perhaps we can find some lessons that still have relevance more than a century after these events.
Lessons From A Tragic Case 00:10:38
The word magic has many meanings to the point of being almost impossible to pin down.
Anthropologists, scholars of comparative religion, and magical practitioners often have very different ideas about the nature of magic.
To understand the unfortunate events of November 27th, 1928, we need to travel back another century to 1820 when America birthed its first major grimoire, The Long Lost Friend.
This is not some cinematic, dark, and mysterious book of Latin and woodcuts, but a collection of Christian-centered practical formulas meant to help rural folk deal with life's many ailments.
Collected by Johann George Hohmann, The Long Lost Friend contains spells of healing, blessing, and warding familiar to folk healers across early modern Europe.
These practices were not orthodox, but were common folk magic augmenting traditional Christian belief in healing and protection by adding ritual practices such as writing magic squares, performing specific gestures, and using contagion magic, the idea that names or articles belonging to a target can affect the owner.
Contrary to popular stereotypes, most magical practices of the early modern period were rooted in folk Christianity and not esoteric concepts.
The long-lost friend is not just full of spells of protection, but is itself said to be a potent tool for warding off evil.
Its text explicitly states, Whoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible, and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor be drowned in any water, burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him.
Merely possessing the book thus is a form of apotropaic or protective magic.
Johann Hohmann wasn't inventing these texts from his imagination.
The long-lost friend represents a collection of many beliefs and practices that had come from Europe, evolving in the Pennsylvania Dutch communities of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
While commonly referred to as Dutch, this is a corruption of Deutsch, reflecting the historical pattern of German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania who brought their Lutheran, Calvinists, and Anabaptists, including Mennonite and Amish, practices with them.
Hex magic, or powwowing, is a syncretic folk practice, a blend of diverse but compatible spiritual traditions and healing beliefs that merged into a distinctive practice over time.
The term itself has no practical connection to the indigenous Algonquin term powwow, which had come to mean a gathering.
Hex in this context doesn't mean malicious curses.
Derived from the German hexa, this is a benevolent practice which still exists in regions of America today.
Curses and dark malevolent intent are not consistent with these folk practices.
Powwowing is one of the most trusted means for those in the community to try and remove curses, a detail at the core of this story.
Powwow rituals and prayers would have been familiar and common in Europe when these immigrants left for America.
Outside of these communities, changes in broader culture drove many of these ideas underground or out of practice entirely as science and medicine professionalized in the late 19th century.
The events in this story mostly took place in York County, Pennsylvania, where class, wealth, education, and geography left a fertile ecosystem for the survival of folk magic.
By November of 1928, the broader public outside these communities was shocked to find that folk healing persisted even as quantum theory was redefining the smallest scale of reality and Edwin Hubble's observations were expanding the universe beyond our single galaxy view and making clear the shocking depth of its mind-boggling antiquity.
The murder victim in this story was himself a hex practitioner and was well regarded in the community as a trustworthy and reliable healer.
His name was Nelson Raymeyer and he was 60 years old in November of 1928.
He lived alone after his wife had moved back to her family's farm four years earlier.
They were still on passable terms.
She continued to do Nelson's wash for him.
But he had become accustomed to living alone on his farm and he had no close neighbors.
Nelson was the victim, but the real mystery lies with the three young men who sought him out that night and why.
The story might be said to have started decades earlier when Nelson Raymeyer treated a five-year-old boy named John Bleimeyer.
That child would grow up into a troubled young man obsessed with magic and curses.
John was himself a powwow practitioner and the product of several generations who also practiced the craft.
Written accounts portray him as perhaps mentally deficient to the point of an almost childlike view of the world and fiercely obsessed with finding out what external cause was responsible for his life of bad luck and misery.
John Bleimeyer and his wife Lily had two children, but both had died in infancy.
Life's compounding sorrows convinced Blymeyer that he was under a curse.
When he sought help from a powwower named Andrew Linhardt, Lily became concerned because a previous client was convinced by Linhard that her husband was the source of a curse, so that she murdered him in his bed.
When Lily could not calm John's obsessions with curses and hexes, she had him institutionalized.
While he was locked up, Lily filed for divorce, but less than two months into his treatment, John just walked away from the asylum and returned to York.
Still convinced he was cursed, Blymeyer sought another powwow practitioner named Nellie Null, and over several paid sessions, she helped Blymeyer pin down the source of his bad luck.
As she met with him, his suspicions moved from person to person in his life, eventually settling on Nelson Raymeier as the culprit.
Noll advised Blymeyer to get a lock of Raymeier's hair and to steal his copy of The Long Lost Friend.
If he followed a bit of ritual, including burying the hair in the book in a deep hole, the curse would be lifted.
But that's not how things played out that night.
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Blymeier believed strongly that old Nelson Raymeier was the source of his misfortunes.
He made the trip to Raymeier's farm, but quickly realized that the old powwower was too much for him to handle.
Always thin and sickly, Bleimeyer, who weighed less than 100 pounds, was not capable of taking the lock of hair and magic book by force from the imposing six-foot-tall Raymeier.
So he enlisted the help of two young co-workers from his job at a cigar factory, Wilbert Hess, in his early 20s, and 14-year-old John Curry.
Blymeyer convinced both of them that their fates were also tied up with Raymeier's magic.
The trio showed up at Raymeier's secluded farmhouse and claimed that Blymeyer had left a book during his previous visit.
While Nelson was providing the three men with hospitality, they choked him, tied him up, and delivered several blows to his head.
Believing that they had killed the big powwower, they tried to cover their crime by starting a fire.
The trio then fled into the night, believing the curse was lifted with Raymeier's death.
It did not take long for the crime to be discovered.
The fire had died quickly, and Nelson's body was not consumed by flame.
The police quickly identified the trio.
In custody, John Blymeier was quite unremorseful, believing for the rest of his life that he had killed an evil witch and lifted a curse, and that such a response was the only sensible course of action.
Each of the three men were tried separately.
Blymeyer was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Wilbert Hess was convicted of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 to 20 years.
And John Curry, the youngest of the three, served a decade for second-degree murder.
All three men were eventually paroled, with Blymeyer serving more than 20 years.
There are a lot of points in this sad tale where skepticism and critical thinking could have helped those involved.
John Blymeyer was perhaps too unsophisticated in his thinking to understand the idea of confirmation bias.
He was not alone in this.
His intense focus on magic and curses as the cause of his misfortune is as old as it is common.
Yet by the 18th century, witch trials in Europe and North America had largely ceased.
As historian Owen Davis has discussed, by the 1700s, witch trials had shifted from trials of suspected witches to cases like Raymeier's, in which those who harmed alleged witches were put on trial for assault or worse.
The Rise Of Moral Panics 00:06:28
But this does not mean that magical thinking was disappearing.
Skeptoid listeners will recognize that magical thinking wasn't on the way out in 1928, and it hasn't gone anywhere since.
A very relevant part of this story lies in how the police investigation and trials were portrayed in the media.
It was obvious from the trial that while belief in hex practices was common in rural Pennsylvania, the matter was a subject of smug shock and derision from city dwellers who surely felt that they weren't subject to such superstitions.
As the trials unfolded, the newspapers spread the story with sensationalist writing that would be familiar to anyone reading tabloid media today.
It's hard to quantify precisely, but once the hex murder of Raymeyer Hollow started selling papers, reporters in Pennsylvania began looking for more of the same.
Subsequent stories that had any hints of hex, powwow, or folk magic were splashed into print even when the connections to magic were tangential or entirely made up.
Today, we would call this pattern a moral panic.
We discussed this idea briefly back in episode 462, which covered satanic ritual abuse.
British sociologist Stanley Cohen explored this idea in his 1972 book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics.
One of his key ideas is that moral panics cast certain marginalized people as folk devils, figures blamed for social problems and portrayed as far more dangerous than they actually are.
Small and relatively powerless groups of people, real or in some cases imagined, are feared to be immensely powerful, imperiling the rest of the community.
Examples of folk devils in modern moral panics have included hippies, satanic cultists, immigrants, and people in the LGBTQ plus community.
Moral panics are fueled by what Cohen calls moral entrepreneurs.
These are influential voices that profit, literally or figuratively, from spreading fear of the folk devils.
In the later 20th century, these were often media figures acting as spokespeople from think tanks or religious groups or just wishing to cash in on lurid claims.
Today, the number of possible moral entrepreneurs is vastly greater and includes social media content farmers, influencers, and online culture warriors.
Cohen's work covers more than this, but the final aspect I want to mention is disproportionality.
The idea that in a moral panic, the fear and outrage is more intense and demands more response than the real threat ever poses, if it ever posed any at all.
Much more academic work has been done on moral panic since Cohen's work, and further reading links are in the show notes.
When Nelson Raymeyer was murdered, a modern world was shocked that such old ideas could still hold sway in America.
But when we read this story, yet another century on, we should recognize that the danger from superstition, magical thinking, and moral panics will never go away, and that our best course of action is to be skeptical.
We continue with more on the lingering effects of the Hex Hollow murder on current day reports of strangeness in the ad-free and extended premium feed.
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