Some stories demand more than just reading. They demand an hour or two by lantern-light, with a notebook and your boots on the cold floorboards of memory. The murder at Rehmeyer’s Hollow is one of those stories. Folklore and law collide. Magic and cold facts. Curses and courtrooms. This is that collision, laid out.
One of the accused, John Blymire, claimed he and others were under a curse. Misfortune, fear, sickness — signs, he believed, that they had been “hexed.” He visited a woman known locally as the “River Witch,” who told him the curse came from Nelson Rehmeyer. The cure? A lock of hair or Rehmeyer’s copy of the old powwow book The Long Lost Friend. That was what would break the spell. That was the solution he believed in.
In his own testimony, Blymire said he entered the house not strictly to kill — but to get that hair or book. Not to steal cash, but to lift what he believed was a spiritual weight pressing on his life.
Under questioning at trial, Blymire’s words were startling in their bluntness. When asked why he went to the house he said: “I went there to get a lock of hair, or the book called the Long Lost Friend.”
Pressed further on his motive, he answered plainly: “To break a ‘spell’ that Rehmeyer had put on me, and Curry, and the Hess family.”
Later, when asked whether killing Rehmeyer had broken the spell, his answer was stark: “Yes.” He said afterward that he could eat again. Sleep again. “The witches cannot bother me anymore.” Words like that may feel foreign now — but at that moment, in that hollow, they carried everything.
But the law does not parse spells. The court would not accept curses or powwow-logic as a motive. Instead, the case was framed as one of “robbery turned violent.” Many of the supernatural references — hair, book, hex, witchcraft — were quietly excluded from the official record.
When the defendants entered the courtroom, they stepped into a different reality. The one where intent is measured in legal terms, not in fear-fueled folk belief. The map of their motive was redrawn by judges and jurors so that magic became irrelevant. The crime became tidy. Legal. Murder. Nothing more, nothing less.
What stands out hauntingly is the gap between two worldviews — the one held by the men who walked into Rehmeyer’s house, and the one defined by the courtroom in 1929. On one side: power in books, hair, curses, and hexes. On the other: statutes, verdicts, verdict forms, and prison terms. The two did not line up. They never did.
That clash leaves a scar in the historical record. Trajectories of belief and desperation get erased when they fail to conform to legal language. But perhaps what we carry forward is not the verdict. Perhaps it is the belief. The fear. The longing for relief from a curse no one but them could feel.
Walking away from this story — from those old pages, that skinny courtroom, and the hollow that smells of dust and woodsmoke — you carry something lighter than a book, heavier than a verdict. You carry the memory of a world where belief was real, even when the world around you refused to see it.
If Rehmeyer’s Hollow still exists, if that house still stands, you could wander down a cold country road and listen for echoes. Maybe you’d feel, just under your skin, the bated breath of a man who thought he was cursed — and in the moment, believed murder might be his cure.
This post draws on reprinted 1929 trial testimony, court summaries, and modern historical analysis. Key sources include archived press excerpts and the preserved pamphlet-style record of the trial confession and verdict.
Published under a lantern light. Thoughts welcome in the comments.
I found several direct (or near-direct) quotes and confession-style statements attributed to John Blymire (and retellings of what the group claimed) — showing how the “hex/curse” motive was expressed. I also show how the legal record later largely ignored or suppressed those claims. As always: “what was said” vs. “what was accepted.”
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📜 What the Defendants (or Their Confessions / Associates) Claimed — Witchcraft, Curse & Hex Belief
According to accounts of the case, Blymire visited a woman known as Nellie Noll (the so-called “River Witch of Marietta”), who told him that the misfortunes he and two others suffered were the result of a curse laid by Nelson Rehmeyer.
The instructions allegedly given by Noll were: obtain Rehmeyer’s copy of the powwow book The Long Lost Friend or a lock of his hair — then burn the book or bury the hair “six feet underground” in order to “break the hex.”
As summarized in a pamphlet-style “powwow” record — apparently quoting from the trial testimony or confession — Blymire said:
> “I went there to get a lock of hair, or the book called the Long Lost Friend.”
“To break a ‘spell’ that Rehmeyer had put on me, and Curry, and the Hess family.”
When asked if killing Rehmeyer “broke the spell”, Blymire allegedly replied: “Yes.” He claimed afterward that he could now “eat, sleep and rest better,” and that the “witches cannot bother him anymore, nor can any ‘spell’ be again placed on him!”
Further narrative accounts state that the group truly believed they were victims of sustained bad luck — illness, failed crops, animal problems — and interpreted those as evidence of a curse, not just misfortune or coincidence.
So the motive as they framed it was spiritual/magical: fear of curses, belief in powwow traditions, desire to “undo” a hex by destroying or burying key magical items (book, hair), and they genuinely thought that killing the alleged witch would end the curse.
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⚖️ What the Court / Trial Record Accepted — Focus on Violence, Murder, Robbery; Magic Largely Ignored
During the trial for the murder of Nelson Rehmeyer, the prosecuting authorities — according to retrospective accounts — argued the motive was robbery, not witchcraft, even though the seized valuables were meager (the “robbers” reportedly took only a small amount, something like a few dollars), and the dramatic magical motive was evident in the confessions.
In court, whenever the defense attempted to present the “witchcraft / curse” narrative (via recollection of consultation with Noll or the group’s beliefs), those arguments were repeatedly rejected by the judge and district attorney.
According to one detailed post-trial excerpt (an archival-style document reproduced in a pamphlet), when Blymire was questioned on the stand, he was asked:
> “Why did you go to Rehmeyer’s house then, if not to kill him?”
He replied: “I went there to get a lock of hair, or the book called the Long Lost Friend.”
But even though he admitted the “spell” / “hex” as his motive — and explicitly stated he believed murder would break the spell — the court and record treated the crime as premeditated murder / robbery / violent assault, not as a “witchcraft-driven” or “hex-related” crime. The magical claims were effectively expunged from the official narrative.
The disparateness between confession and verdict – particularly the ignoring of the supernatural motive — suggests a clear judicial decision to treat the case within “rational / criminal” frameworks, rather than as a trial of occult crime.
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🔥 What This Tension Suggests — Magic, Law, and the Erasure of Belief
The defendants didn’t just mention magic in passing — they framed their entire motive around folk-magic logic: hexes, curse removal, magical items, ritualistic demands. Their confessions show a genuine belief in the supernatural.
But the court — representing mainstream legal and cultural norms — refused to legally recognize magic as motive or defense. Once behind the docket, everything became “robbery, assault, murder.” The “spell” story was legally irrelevant.
The result: the folkloric dimension was erased from official history. Newspapers and public records from the trial don’t center the witchcraft story; the judgment treats it as a plain crime, not spiritual warfare.
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🧾 What This Means for Researchers (Like You)
Any attempt to reconstruct “what really happened” must treat the “witchcraft motive” as authentic within the worldview of the accused — not as a retelling artifact, but as their own stated belief.
Legal records — trial transcripts, court dockets — will intentionally avoid or minimize the magical aspect. So to recover the belief-based motive, you must rely on confession-transcripts (if available), newspaper reportage of pre-trial statements, or secondary folklore-history sources.
Because those records were suppressed in court, there will always remain a gap — a tension between “what was said” & “what was judged.” This is not just a difference of opinion, but a deliberate exclusion by the judicial system of spiritual belief from material fact.
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