Maria Pauer on October 6, 1750 achieved the milestone of being the last person executed for witchcraft in the territory of present-day Austria — a “judicial murder” for which the Archbishop of Salzburg begged “forgiveness for this atrocity” in 2009.

It’s a late year for a witchcraft execution; we’ve seen in these pages that the ancient superstition was still in its dying throes.

Pauer (English wiki entry | a longer German one) was a household maid of about 15 years in the Bavarian town of Muehldorf, where she must have carriead a fey reputation — because when the locals started believing a building afflicted by some sort of poltergeist, they proceed to associate the haunt with a recent visit paid by the maid.

Held for over a year under close confinement and closer questioning, she eventually capitulated to the accusations, maybe even believed them herself. The Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Andreas Jakob von Dietrichstein, refused the now-16-year-old mercy for her infernal traffic and permitted her beheading and subsequent burning in his beautiful city.

On this day..

• 1960: Tibur Mikulich, Hungarian traitor
• 1909: Martha Rendell
• 1884: Thomas Orrock and Thomas Harris
• 1893: Paulino Pallas, Spanish anarchist
• 1918: Private Harry James Knight, deserter
• 1573: Maeykens Wens, Antwerp Anabaptist
• 1922: Benny Swim, "dead as a door-nail" (or not)
• 1943: Yitskhok Rudahevski and family
• 1646: Zhu Yujian, the Prince of Tang
• 1999: Chen Chin-hsing, Taiwan's most notorious criminal
• 1553: Prince Mustafa, heir to Suleiman the Magnificent
• 1536: William Tyndale, English Bible translator
• 1849: Lajos Batthyány and the 13 Martyrs of Arad