A man in York County, Pennsylvania killed another man in 1928 because he thought the victim had put a curse on him. Nelson Rehmeyer was 60 years old when he died in his home in a place called Rehmeyer’s Hollow. Someone beat him up badly, tied him with rope, poured coal oil on him, and tried to burn his body. Police arrested three people for killing him, but the reason behind the murder was really strange.
John Blymire was 34 years old and nothing seemed to go right in his life. A local historian named Jamie Noerpel said that “John Blymire kind of struggled with life, he never really had a spouse, he never held a stable job, and he didn’t have a lot of friends.” Blymire started to think someone had put a hex on him, which is like a magical curse. He went to see a woman called Nellie Noll who people knew as the River Witch of Marietta. She told him that Nelson Rehmeyer was the one who cursed him.
Blymire thought he could break the curse if he got Rehmeyer’s special book and a piece of his hair. The book was called The Long Lost Friend and it had spells and healing tricks in it. People who practiced something called powwow used this book for folk healing. As per WGAL, on November 27, 1928, Blymire went to Rehmeyer’s house with two teenagers named John Curry and Wilbert Hess. They wanted to find the book but could not locate it anywhere. Things got violent and they ended up killing Rehmeyer.
This murder made the whole town look bad
People all over America heard about this case and newspapers wrote lots of stories about it. They called the three killers the York Hex Slayers and wrote about witchcraft happening in Pennsylvania. Noerpel talked about how this affected the town badly. She said “It made us look superstitious, and it put us on international news as being, you know, this community that still believed in witches. It made us look bad and put us on the international map for a bad thing.”
Today in Research Rabbit-Holes: I’m writing about Nelson Rehmeyer – a Pennsylvania “powwow” practitioner murdered by those who thought him a #witch. Trial was January 1929. Anyone know about this flu epidemic? Relation to the 1918-20 pandemic? Context? #Pennsylvania #history pic.twitter.com/Hi1SD1lmPD
— Professor Marion Gibson (@witchesetc) May 20, 2022
The trial started in January 1929 and did not last very long. All three men got found guilty of murder. Blymire and Curry had to spend the rest of their lives in prison, but Hess only got 10 to 20 years because he was younger at just 18 years old. The judge did not want anyone talking about witchcraft during the trial and treated it like a regular murder case. Much like other bizarre crime cases that have shocked communities, this incident left lasting effects on the local area.
Powwow was really just a way of healing people that came from German settlers who moved to America. Noerpel explained that “Powwowing is about the protective arts, it’s about healing.” But after this murder happened, lots of people thought powwow was evil or dangerous. Many people who practiced it had to keep it secret because they did not want others to think badly of them.
Some visuals related to our most recent episode.
— Old Timey Crimey (@oldtimeycrimey) July 29, 2019
The Long Lost Friend, text used by many pow-wowers–and the book John Blymire was looking for when he and his accomplices confronted Nelson Rehmeyer. pic.twitter.com/DsaT5CTH4W
The three killers all got out of prison eventually and lived normal lives after that. Blymire died in 1972, Curry died in 1978, and Hess died in 1979. The house where Rehmeyer died is still there today in a spot locals call Hex Hollow. His family members own it now and they keep it the same way it looked back then to remember what happened. Some visitors claim the house is haunted by Rehmeyer’s spirit, adding to the eerie legacy of the isolated location.
