- 171 - to preclude nasty gossip. So, I can recount these events openly and boldly, as I can be absolutely certain that there was not – nor could there be – the least bit of fraud involved. Whenever I visited her during that time, whether I had been called or not, something began to move within her and worked its way out of some part of her anatomy. The pain was always dreadful, so that she more or less fainted each time. She said: ‘I can’t stand it. This will be the death of me.’ • All these objects could be removed from her only with prayer. Whenever she complained of a pain somewhere, I had only to lay my hands on her in prayer, and she could soon feel the object move and turn and seek a way out. The outer skin was the most difficult to penetrate, and one could often feel something pushing its way out for a long time. • There was never any blood, and no wound was produced. At most one could identify for a while the spot where something had worked its way out. This was only the case, however, when the removal had taken place accompanied by prayer. On occasion, in my absence, and driven by the intensity of the pain, she cut her skin open with a knife, and these wounds could hardly be healed at all. Living creatures also came out of her mouth: grasshoppers, bats, frogs and on one occasion a viper, which wounded her in the neck afterwards and bit her foot so violently that the bleeding almost wouldn’t stop. I cannot close my account of this segment of the battle without relating at least one more occurrence of the most horrifying kind. At the beginning of December 1843, Gottliebin had a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. After she had already lost a bowl full of blood, the bleeding began anew. How she could have remained alive after such an enormous loss of blood is beyond me. The blood had a particularly pungent odour and always looked very black. One day, as I was returning home from another town, someone came running towards me and said I should please come quickly to Gottliebin. I hurried there and saw people looking out of the windows, horrified and shouting, ‘Pastor, it is urgent!’ I entered Gottliebin’s room. The suffocating stench of blood almost drove me back out. She sat in the middle of her small room, in front of her a pail half filled with blood and water. Across the length of the room to either side of her there was a wide pool of blood. She herself was so covered with blood that one could hardly see her clothes. The blood poured forth out of both ears, both eyes and her nose, and it even bubbled out of the top of her head. It was the most horrible sight I have ever seen. For a moment I was baffled. Then I pulled myself together. • A short, intense prayer brought the flow of blood temporarily to a halt. I had her face washed, which had been no longer recognizable, also her head. Then I felt for a spot on her head, where she said there was something. I discovered a small, bent nail above her forehead, boring its way upward. At the back of her head, under the skin, something was working its way downward. Finally, a large, bent nail emerged. Then the bleeding stopped for good, and by evening she was feeling quite a bit better and had regained some of her strength. Gottliebin could remember that in the past she sometimes felt something strange in her throat or body after having eaten some soup or other foods. Once she gave the leftovers of such a meal to a chicken, which immediately ran crazily about and after a while collapsed dead, as though it had choked. She cut open the head and neck of the chicken, and found – to her horror – a bunch of shoe nails. How could such objects get into head and body? Gottliebin recounted having seen the spirits of all kinds and classes of people come up to her bed at night. They had put something like bread into her mouth or touched other parts of her body. At once she had felt changes inside herself, and later the objects had come out of her. The large and the small nail that had caused the violent bleeding had been placed in her head, in some peculiar way against which she could offer no resistance, by a spirit in priest’s vestments that had been
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