The First to Confess Flying a Broom Was a Priest

The witch on a broomstick is the oldest Halloween image there is, and its story is stranger than the cartoon. The first person in Europe known to confess to flying on a broom was a priest who had preached that it was impossible. This is the story: Alice Kyteler's greased staff in 1324, the 1451 manuscript with the oldest picture of witches on brooms, Guillaume Edelin's confession of 1453, three explanations for the broom, the European witch hunts, Salem in 1692 (where nobody was burned), the long road to clearing the accused, the pointed hat, and the green skin of 1939. 0:00 The question 0:24 Before the broom 1:01 The first picture, 1451 1:50 The priest who confessed 2:30 Why a broom? 3:27 The witch hunts 4:06 Salem 5:09 Three hundred years of apologies 6:12 The pointed hat 6:48 Green skin and postcards 7:27 Who people feared A note on certainty: almost everything we know about medieval witchcraft comes from inquisitors and from confessions made under torture, so the ointment and fertility-dance explanations are theories, and we say so. The origin of the pointed hat is disputed; we give four theories and none is proven. Estimates of witch-trial deaths vary; we use the commonly cited range of 40,000 to 60,000 executions between about 1400 and 1775. Sources: Wikipedia, "Broom", "Guillaume Edelin", "Martin Le Franc", "Flying ointment", "Witch trials in the early modern period", "Salem witch trials", "Witch hat" and "Wicked Witch of the West"; Sarah Pruitt, "Why Do Witches Ride Brooms?", HISTORY; LiveScience, "A Bewitching History: Why Witches Ride Broomsticks" (with Charles Zika); NPR, "After 329 years, a woman accused of being a witch in Salem has been exonerated" (May 26, 2022). Images (Wikimedia Commons, public domain unless noted): Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des Dames, manuscript of 1451 (Bibliothèque nationale de France); "Hallowe'en" postcards, about 1908 to 1910; W. W. Denslow, the Wicked Witch of the West, 1900; Mother Louse, alewife, about 1650 to 1672 (British Museum); news sheet on the burning at Derenburg, 1555; Joseph E. Baker, The Witch No. 1, 1892; Thomas Satterwhite Noble, The Salem Martyr (Witch Hill), 1869 (CC BY 3.0). Licensed under CC BY: "TheSalemMartyr-Noble", Thomas Satterwhite Noble, CC BY 3.0. Diagrams and charts are our own. Narration and music are AI-generated.