Everyone knows about Salem. Twenty people dead, mass hysteria, Arthur Miller wrote a play about it, and now it's a Halloween tourist trap. But while America was hanging witches in 1692, the Netherlands had already been burning them for over two hundred years.... and almost nobody outside of Dutch history nerds knows about it.

Let's change that shall we?

The Numbers — Between 164 and 300 people were executed for witchcraft in the Netherlands, depending on which borders you use. The overwhelming majority were women. They were strangled, burned at the stake, or died under torture before they ever saw a verdict. The first recorded death sentence for sorcery in Dutch history came in 1472... more than two centuries before Salem even existed.

The Roermond Trials of 1613 — The largest and most brutal witch trial in Dutch history. In the span of roughly a month, 64 people were tortured and burned alive in and around Roermond. Confessions were extracted through torture, and victims were forced to name accomplices; which meant every confession created new arrests. A 12-year-old girl was among those taken into custody after she was caught doing magic tricks on the street (quick, put your wand away Hilde!)

The Water Test — In the town of Oudewater, accused witches were weighed on a giant scale. The logic.... well... witches had no soul of course, so they'd weigh less than a normal person. The Oudewater scale was famously not rigged, which meant nobody there was ever convicted. You can still visit the Heksenwaag (Witch Weighing House) today and get an official certificate confirming you're not a witch.

Ahead of Their Time — Here's the twist... the Netherlands stopped executing witches earlier than any other country in Europe. In 1593, the High Court overturned a death sentence for witchcraft, setting a legal precedent. Province by province, the death penalty for sorcery was effectively abolished by 1610. Dutch jurists insisted on actual evidence and due process... radical concepts at the time. The rest of Europe was still burning people for another century.

The Last Witch — Entgen Luijten, accused in 1674 in Limbricht, is widely considered the last person prosecuted and killed as a witch in what is now the Netherlands. But belief in witchcraft lingered far longer. As late as 1823, a woman voluntarily underwent the water ordeal to prove her innocence to suspicious neighbors.

The Dutch witch trials are a reminder that magic, fear, and power have always been tangled together... and that the line between healer and heretic was dangerously thin. This same tension lives at the heart of the Amsterdamaged series, where magic is real, old grudges run deep, and not everyone who wields power uses it for good.

Step into a world where the witches survived. Start the Amsterdamaged series on Kindle Unlimited!