Sweden conducted its last witch execution — a beheading — on this date in 1704.

Anna Eriksdotter (English Wikipedia entry | Swedish) was a local cunning-woman whose talent for healing both men and beasts had seen her dogged with rumors of devilry for many years.

Evidently she leaned into the story or — who knows? — believed it herself. When a man named Nils Jonsson accused her of striking him blind, deaf and dumb, she acknowledged punishing her “disgusting” neighbor, and even claimed that, raised to witchery from her childhood, she had committed various other supernatural offenses against the community: laying a curse on the vicar, and conjuring wolves to prey on livestock.

These “admissions” might have been necessary to actually bring a witch to the block in 18th century Sweden, scorched as consciences were after a particularly notorious witch hunt 28 years before.

Even so, Anna Ericksdotter just barely attained her milestone. Her sentence was approved by the young king Charles XII — a bit preoccupied in that moment getting rinsed on northern Europe’s battlefields by Peter the Great — over the strong pardon recommendation of his magistrates who considered Ericksdotter “full with mad imaginations”.

On this day..

• 1779: Manuel, burned for witchcraft in the USA?
• 1944: Raymond Burgard, lycee Buffon inspiration
• 1820: William Holmes, Edward Rosewaine, and Thomas Warrington, pirates
• 1967: Moustapha Lô, failed assassin
• 1899: John Headrick and Carroll Rice, Missourians
• Feast Day of St. Vitus
• 1920: Triple lynching in Duluth, Minnesota
• 1915: 20 Hunchakian gallows
• 1648: Margaret Jones, the first witch executed in Boston
• 2004: Benjamín Altamirano lynched
• 1389: Saint Tsar Lazar, after the Battle of Kosovo
• 1945: Aniceto Martinez, an American rapist in England