HEATHER FREEMAN: You're going to teach me a powwow charm, right?

THORN NIGHTWIND: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. If you don't mind, pull up your wrist.

HEATHER: I'm in Southeastern Pennsylvania and Thorn Nightwind, age 39, is teaching me a folk charm learned when he was 12. 

THORN: Alright so this charm was first taught to me by my Aunt Phyllis. She called it “Blowing Fire”. 

HEATHER: The Pennsylvania Dutch have used a unique folk healing practice for over 200 years. It's used for all sorts of things, mostly stuff that would be helpful if you lived on a farm, like healing wounds headaches, and sick livestock. The practice is called powwow and, no, this is not the same thing as the Native American word you've probably heard, but we'll get to that. The people who administer these charms are called powwowers. And Thorn Nightwind is a contemporary practitioner. The charm Thorn is teaching me today is for healing burns.

THORN: You take, like, your dominant index finger and you lay it over top of the burn like this.

HEATHER: He's sort of holding his finger perpendicular to my arm, where a burn might be.

THORN: Then the incantation you use is “The maid walked over the land and in her hand, she carried a torch that burned and the fire went out” and then you blow, like, across the burn as you're doing the chant in your head. And then you would blow across the finger like this— [blowing sounds]

HEATHER: Thorn makes a sweeping gesture down my arm as he blows across his index finger like he's blown the burn right off my arm. 

Powwow is a beloved healing tradition with deep roots in Pennsylvania Dutch communities. But the fact that there are contemporary powwow practitioners at all is, in a lot of ways, kind of a miracle. Because even though powwow used to be really common, something happened nearly a hundred years ago that changed the practice forever: the murder of powwower Nelson D. Rehmeyer

ROBERT PHOENIX: That one incident in that tiny little section of Pennsylvania, in that tiny little dot on earth, almost was the destruction of the whole tradition. Because by the time that the fifties and sixties rolled around, everybody just thought powwow was dead.

PATRICK DONMOYER: Nelson Rehmeyer is an interesting character because I don't know that his life was ever really subject to any form of scrutiny until after he died.

THORN: He was, you know, just friendly and kind and that's who he was.

HEATHER: I'm Heather Freeman. And this is Magic in the United States. 

Episode 3: The Murder of Nelson D. Rehmeyer. In this episode, I'll tell you why powwower Nelson Rehmeyer was brutally murdered in his home, how the trial of his killers became a media circus that nearly destroyed powwow, and how this uniquely American folk healing tradition managed to survive – and is now thriving around the world to this day.

We’ll be right back.

[BREAK]

HEATHER: This is Magic in the United States. I’m Heather Freeman.

In 1928 in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Nelson Rehmeyer was 60 years old and was well-regarded in his quiet Pennsylvania Dutch community. He mostly kept to himself, tended his farm.

PATRICK: He was a potato farmer in North Hopewell Township, York County. He had a modest 45-acre farm. He raised corn, potatoes, apples, chickens – didn't have a lot of livestock.

HEATHER: That's Patrick Donmoyer. He's Director of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University. It's a folk life museum and research center, specializing in Pennsylvania Dutch culture.

PATRICK: Nelson Rehmeyer grew up in a mixed cultural background. 

HEATHER: The Pennsylvania Dutch lived in farming communities of German immigrants that were largely insulated from the rest of American society. They spoke German and they came to Pennsylvania seeking religious freedom. These were devout Christians who'd been marginalized or persecuted in their home countries.

PATRICK: They considered themselves Americans. But many aspects of their culture gave them some degree of insulation from some of the normative effects of American culture at large. And of course, part of that is the fact that Pennsylvania Dutch people historically and presently are bilingual.

HEATHER: Because the Pennsylvania Dutch were also geographically isolated and conventional medical care was often far out of reach, they developed their own folk healing practices: powwow. And Rehmeyer was a well-known practitioner in his community.

Now powwowers were the urgent care clinics of their day, which meant people were showing up at all hours looking for all kinds of help, from healing gunshot wounds to soothing screaming babies. And as a powwower, Rehmeyer helped his community by using ritualized biblical prayers and healing charms like the one you heard at the beginning of this episode. So Rehmeyer moved out of his wife's house and down the road so his family wouldn't be bothered by so many visitors.

Before we go any further, we should unpack the word powwow because -- it's got some challenges. 

The word powwow is from Narragansett, one of the Algonquin languages, and refers to healing ceremonies conducted by a skilled spiritual practitioner. But in the 1600s, Puritan missionaries began to use this term as a pejorative.

PATRICK: These Puritan missionaries were using this word ‘powwow’ to describe, especially with a sense of disdain, any of the ritual traditions coming out of the indigenous communities. That term was later used by many speakers of English, to describe anything that was considered magical or ritual in orientation. 

HEATHER: In fact, these missionaries used the word powwow for anything they perceived as non-Christian. Daniel Harms is Associate librarian at the State University of New York at Cortland.

DANIEL HARMS: ‘Powwow’ was adopted later on by the settlers often in a pejorative sense to mean, somebody who was engaging in “questionable” religious activity by the standards of those settlers, and it came to be applied to ritual practices among the Pennsylvania Dutch communities.

HEATHER: The practices that make up Pennsylvania Dutch folk healing are largely Christian prayers from German-speaking countries in Europe. While there were undoubtedly cultural exchanges, these are not Native American practices or traditions.

The word powwow evolved for the indigenous peoples as well. For many contemporary Native North Americans, a powwow is a gathering where songs and dances are shared. These are important community events, where cultural ties are renewed, and they are cherished. The casual use of the word to refer to meetings diminishes its cultural importance.

Time and again, throughout history, marginalized groups have adopted derogatory terms for themselves in defiance against those who oppress them. Maybe it's a deliberate act of rebellion, or maybe it's bitter acquiescence to an impossible position — and maybe it's both. But such was the case for Pennsylvania Dutch healers.

​So back to Rehmeyer who is practicing powwow for his rural Pennsylvania Dutch community — staunching blood, cooling fevers, treating livestock, those sorts of things.

And now we meet a second powwower: the emotionally plagued John Blymire.

He was 33, a neighbor of Rehmeyer's, and also a powwower. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. Blymire struggled physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially his entire life.

PATRICK: John was the son of Emanuel and Maggie Blymire. Emanuel was also a practitioner of powwowing, a healer. And John dabbled in this as a young person. But John also suffered as a child from an illness called ‘opnema’, and opnema is a wasting-away, especially in the case of children. This is usually equated in today's terms with malnutrition, where a child does not put on weight. Emanuel and Maggie took their son John to Nelson to be treated.

HEATHER: Despite being treated by Nelson Rehmeyer as a child, John Blymire was plagued by difficulties that affected every aspect of his life.

PATRICK: This illness that he had really contributed to a feeling of restlessness, an inability to settle down, an inability to focus on his work. And it got worse progressively over time, so much so that he described himself later as ‘pining away’. He felt as though he was plagued by a desire for some form of relief that he was unable to discover

HEATHER: Blymire's life was so challenging, he believed he'd been cursed, a victim of hexerei, or malicious magic.

To be cursed. To be jinxed. To be hexed. Who hasn't had a spate of bad luck and looked for some explanation, some external cause? When I have a streak of bad luck, I sometimes wonder if Mercury's in retrograde. It's a way for me to externalize things but also resign myself to things that are outside of my control.

But Blymire's challenges were chronic and impacted every aspect of his life. 

PATRICK: His wife, Lillie Belle Alloway, lost two children and John became obsessive. He was not leading a normal life and was creating a lot of suffering for his wife.

HEATHER: In 1923, his father-in-law actually had him taken to the York County Almshouse in order to be evaluated psychologically. He was later committed to the Harrisburg State Hospital and diagnosed with hypochondriacal melancholia which was, at that point in time, a fancy term to describe someone who was obsessed, suffering from both illusions and hallucinations and also deep depression. 

And he spent quite some time at the Harrisburg State Hospital. But he escaped while attending a baseball game and he was never pursued. He came back to York, and his wife had divorced him.

Convinced he was cursed, Blymire sought help from other powwowers, including hex doctors. Now a hex doctor is also a powwower, but a hex doctor specializes in identifying and repairing afflictions caused by malicious magic.

PATRICK: They're kind of on a portion of the ritual spectrum of the Pennsylvania Dutch that's frowned upon, not in the direction of a healer who would have been many times revered, or considered a full-standing, honorable member of the community, but usually specialize in the removal of curses.

HEATHER: One of the hex doctors Blymire went to was Emma Knapp.

PATRICK: She laid a dollar bill on his palm and then asked him to focus on the image of George Washington on the front of the dollar bill. She slipped the dollar bill from his hand and he saw the afterimage that's produced by retinal fatigue — when you look at one black and white image and then look at a neutral surface, you see an afterimage — and he saw the image of someone that he thought was Nelson Rehmeyer. 

HEATHER: Emma Knapp told Blymire how he could finally remove his lifelong curse. And this involved three simple steps: First, he needed to get a lock of Nelson Rehmeyer's hair. Second, he needed to find the book of magic Rehmeyer used to practice powwow. And then third, he needed to bury both of these items eight feet under the earth. Simple, right?

But Before we find out how Blymire tried to accomplish this. I want to tell you about Rehmeyer's book of magic, the one Blymire needed to steal. 

Now Rehmeyer's magic book wasn't some hand-written tome filled with Latin and strange symbols. And it wouldn't have told you how to summon demons or provided recipes involving eye-of-newt. Nope. None of that.

Rehmeyer's book of magic was a popular and widely published text, known as the Long Lost Friend. It's basically an encyclopedia of powwow charms and it is, to this day, America's best-known grimoire.

DANIEL: [A] grimoire is a handbook of magical procedures, basically using supernatural means to accomplish everyday purposes. 

HEATHER: That's Daniel Harms again, the librarian at Cortland. He's studied magical texts from the 16th to the 19th centuries for over a decade. And he's a world expert on the Long Lost Friend.

DANIEL: The Long Lost Friend was probably one of the most famous books of magic that has come out of North America. There's actually a formula inside that says basically if you carry this book with you, you will be protected. You mind if I look it up real quick?

HEATHER: No, go for it, man. 

DANIEL: Oh, here we go. 

Whoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible. And whoever has this book with him cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor drown in any water, nor burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him. So help me.

HEATHER: The author of the Long Lost Friend, John George Homann, was himself a German immigrant to Pennsylvania and a powwower. And his book has been in continuous print since 1820. Because of the devout Christian background of the Pennslyvania Dutch, many of the charms are actually ritualized prayers from the Bible or reference figures in the New Testament. And most of the charms in the Long Lost Friend are focused on treating medical problems. Contemporary practitioner Thorn Nightwind told me about another burn charm.

THORN: One burn charm says, 

Mary walked across the land carrying a fiery hot brand in her hand, the brand beats, the band sweats, and then the fire went out. 

These are biblical characters, but you don't find these stories in the Bible itself. 

HEATHER: With over a hundred charms and prescriptions, the Long Lost Friend would have been one of Rehmeyer's most important resources as a community healer. While some powwowers regarded the Long Lost Friend as a protective talisman, for most it was a practical Almanac of cures and blessings.

But to Blymire, obsessed with the idea that he'd been hexed, finding and burying Nelson Rehmeyer's copy of the Long Lost Friend must have looked like a shockingly simple way to break his lifelong curse.

So back to Blymire's task ahead. It was late November 1928. And no doubt cold in York County, Pennsylvania so close to Thanksgiving. John Blymire was eager to rid himself of his lifetime of bad luck. So he gathered a 14-year-old named John Curry and went to Rehmeyer's house to size up the powwower. Nelson knew them both and welcomed them into his home.

THORN: They had a conversation. The conversation got really late. He allowed them to stay overnight.

PATRICK: Even at the age of 60, Nelson Rehmeyer was a strapping man in good physical condition. He was much bigger and stronger than John Curry and John Blymire.

THORN: They had to regroup because they saw how big of a man and how strong of a man Nelson was. They weren't sure they were going to be able to subdue him.

HEATHER: So the next day, John Blymire gathered a third co-conspirator, Wilbur Hess, a strong 18-year-old. The three first went to Rehmeyer's wife to find out where he was. And then they went on to Rehmeyer's home.

PATRICK: They went back to his house, knocked on the door, under the pretense that they had left something at the house the previous night.

HEATHER: Rehmeyer opens the door before he realizes there's a third man with them.

DANIEL: They go in, they start looking around, they start asking him where the book is. And then everything just kind of falls apart. 

HEATHER: The three men were going to grab and tie up Rehmeyer, but it didn't work.

THORN: One of them beat him over the head with a piece of firewood and knocked him out. 

HEATHER: But instead of knocking him unconscious, they kill him.

PATRICK: They attempt later on to conceal the crime by attempting to burn the house down.

THORN: So they never did cut a lock of his hair or get his spellbook because from what the trial shows that they thought the curse was now removed since they had basically murdered this man, right?

HEATHER: They left Rehmeyer's body at the house and fled the scene. 

PATRICK: Eventually the mules at Rehmeyer's house are making noise and the neighbors realize they haven't been fed and they go over to check on them. Nelson is laying in his house, which has been scorched. According to the death certificate, he had third-degree burns covering seven-eighths of his body and had been beaten, had fractures to the skull, and it was determined, of course, that he was murdered.

HEATHER: Because they had visited Nelson Rehmeyer's wife earlier that night to ask where he was, they were quickly apprehended and charged with murder. The trial took just three days, and Blymire, Curry, and Hess were found guilty of murder and spent time in prison.

The murder of Nelson Raymar was a tragedy and the trial itself should have brought a sense of justice, but a media circus quickly surrounded the trial, and the national frenzy shattered the Pennsylvania Dutch communities.

After the break: Sensational news painted powwow as dangerously superstitious and this disinformation campaign-- and the threat of legal action-- nearly destroyed the practice of powwow forever.

[BREAK]

HEATHER: Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

The 1929 media frenzy surrounding the three-day murder trial eclipsed the human tragedy of Rehmeyer's loss.

THORN: The trial made national news. People were talking about it like crazy: witchcraft, murder, all these types of things.

HEATHER: Powwowers suddenly found themselves trapped in an impossible position. The press depicted powwow as dangerously occult on one hand and superstitiously foolish on the other -- often in the same article. One newspaper, for example, showed photos of Rehmeyer’s murderers along with magical symbols from the Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses, another common powwowing text. Without context, these images must've appeared uncanny to most American audiences -- and frightening in the context of a murder trial. And this wasn't the first time outsiders had scrutinized powwow. Here's historian Patrick Donmoyer.

PATRICK: That was just one of many instances when Pennsylvania Dutch people were exposed to some level of scrutiny for their traditions. In the 19th century, it was the ministers who took an issue with Pennsylvania Dutch healing traditions. In the 20th century, it was oftentimes medical societies and then ultimately often legal as well.

HEATHER: During the murder trial, newspapers portrayed the Pennsylvania Dutch as uneducated and powwowers as medically irresponsible. The Philadelphia Record wrote that the “deaths of scores of children can be laid at the door of the powwow practitioners”, although the York County coroner later said this was ridiculous. Other articles focused on the magical elements of powwow, portraying it as sinister and unnatural.

And although the Pennsylvania Dutch were mostly white, the press used overtly racist language to describe powwow practitioners. Here's Daniel Harms again.

DANIEL: So you start to see this language like, ‘This is voodoo. These people are witch doctors.’ And so you start to see, like, these tropes, these powerful, very racialized tropes into this language about predominantly white people living in the, you know, the hills of Pennsylvania.

HEATHER: Let’s pause and do some term definition. 

Haitian voodoo — spelled V-O-D-O-U or V-O-D-U-N — is a religion of the African diaspora. New Orleans voodoo is another diasporic religion with strong elements of Roman Catholicism.

But voodoo, as it's used in these articles about the murder trial, is a racist demonization. In the case of the media frenzy around the murder trial, it was used as a slur to denigrate the spiritual practices of a cultural minority.

The derision by the press was broad and sweeping, and it inspired calls for both state and federal action against powwow. Although no legal probe was ever launched, the active threat of one hung over practitioners through the 1930s. And by then, the damage was done. 

PATRICK: All of the media coverage that followed was an especially difficult time for the Pennsylvania Dutch community in the area, who did not see the murder as having anything recognizable connected with their healing traditions, but rather saw this as something of an outlier, an individual who was not mentally, emotionally, or spiritually sound, who had committed murder in cold blood. In many ways, this contributed to a silencing of the healers and local people who partook of these traditions. People became very quiet.

HEATHER: The media frenzy that followed a tragic murder; the vilification of a folk healing practice by medical bodies; heightened scrutiny by law enforcement; and demonization by socially powerful Christian denominations: all of these together almost wiped out powwow.

Almost. Powwow went dark and it went underground, yes. But it didn't die.

Robert Phoenix is a contemporary practitioner of powwow. He serves his Pennsylvania Dutch community as a healer and teaches powwow to others regardless of where they live.

ROBERT: I'm a Christian. I was baptized in a German reformed church, which is now the United Church of Christ. And I'm a powwower.

I was raised as a Catholic. We lived in northeastern Pennsylvania, and we had a local powwower. This was in the early 1980s. Nobody thought anything of it. We just knew she was a powwow, we knew she could heal people, and it just kind of is what it was. Nobody thought it was anything odd or weird.

HEATHER: To a kid, powwow must've looked like an ordinary profession, like your neighborhood eye doctor or handyman. But that changed for Robert in one pivotal moment.

ROBERT: I was at the bank with my mom and there was this freak ice storm in, like, March. And you know back then they didn't clear roads like they do now and so everybody's slipping and sliding and cars are crashing and we're in the bank and there was a man saying to somebody else, ‘yeah, this is that powwow up in Catawissa’.

HEATHER: For that man at the bank, the powwower must have seemed like a weather witch, even though powwow is traditionally a healing practice. Still, 50 years after Rehmeyer's death, it seemed that powwow was still associated with the supernatural. And what child doesn't dream of having magical powers? 

ROBERT: And I was fascinated by that. I thought, I really kind of want to know how to do that. So, it led me into studying like things like magic. I found a couple of books mostly about witchcraft, I started researching and studying that, and then there was a local lady teaching powwow. I joined up with her group and learned all sorts of things, astrology and herbal remedies, and such, but also a lot of witchcraft or Wicca, but the powwow stuff is really fascinating to me.

HEATHER: But also it's incorporated into my life. You know, we check the phase of the moon, the sign of the moon, and we want to know what's going on and what's best to do that day, kind of like farmer's almanac stuff, best to fix fence post and plant potatoes and harvest our lettuce. We really try and go by all that information, just to sort of keep those traditions alive.

The Pennsylvania Dutch are largely Christian communities to this day. And powwow is, at its core, a Christian practice. But individuals of diverse religious identities all over the world practice powwow. Thorn Nightwind lives in Pennsylvania today, and his story, like every powwower’s, is unique.

THORN: Maybe I was about 11 or 12 years old, and I was visiting with my Aunt Phyllis, and I had a clear view of the dining room area, and my Aunt Phyllis, was teaching my mother's youngest sister's husband how to powwow and do the charms and the spells and the incantations, it was just very matter of fact, no fanfare. This is just how you do it. But like as an 11 or 12 year old kid who was fascinated with magic and witchcraft, the occult, and all these things, my mouth, like, about hit the floor. Cause I was like, I want that too!

About a week or so later, I called her up on the phone and I said, “Do you remember those things that you were teaching Uncle So-and-So?” And she says, “Uh-huh, yes.” I said, “Would you also teach those to me, too?” And she says, “Absolutely, we can.”

Well, because I was so interested in witchcraft and magic and then I got my taste of something magical, you could say. I just learned and learned and learned, and that's what led me to having a real love of Wicca.

HEATHER: Wicca, by the way, is a modern Pagan religion and magical practice. Practitioners also assertively own the title, 'witch'. This is a new religious movement, which formed in Britain in the 1940s and only arrived in the United States 20 years later.

For both Robert and Thorn, powwow is a folk healing tradition and it connects back to their religious practices. But it is not in and of itself a religion to either of them. And while powwow falls under the umbrella of magic for Thorn Nightwind, Robert Phoenix refers to it as folk healing. And 100 years ago, for Nelson Rehmeyer, these practices were almost certain healing prescriptions and not magical spells.

THORN: That experience with powwow at that age is what propelled me to explore, examine, and probe further and that's what led me to what I accepted as my religious belief and to take initiation to be part of the priesthood of Wicca. I identify as Wicca and a high priest, and I'm also a practitioner of powwow, amongst a number of things.

HEATHER: When I first got my copy of the Long Lost Friend, I wasn't sure I'd be able to find anything useful for my urban lifestyle here in Charlotte, North Carolina. Like, there's no charms to beat traffic jams or get good wifi.

But I kept looking and there is a charm to get back stolen goods -- that happens. And another to ease headaches. Well, that helps in traffic jams. There's a third charm that promises to chase away storms. And, facing climate change, I'll try what I can.

So they're not obsolete to my city living. And I can see why practitioners all over the United States, indeed, all over the world, keep a copy of the Long Lost Friend in their libraries.

Next week on Magic in the United States, we'll visit the dead. Or rather, the dead will visit us through Spiritualist mediums in the 1920s. Spiritualism exploded into popularity as part of America's First Great Awakening, a series of enthusiastic religious movements during the 19th century. After the Civil and Great Wars, Spiritualism provided solace for grieving families through contact with their beloved dead. But it didn't take long for fraudulent mediums to fleece grieving mothers and widows, and public scrutiny over these hucksters threatened the survival of Spiritualism itself. And one of those public critics? None other than escape artist extraordinaire Harry Houdini.

Magic in the United States is written and hosted by me, Heather Freeman. The show is produced by Amber Walker and edited by Lucy Perkins. Our Associate Producer is Noor Gill, and the show is mixed by Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Dania Suleman. The Executive Producer for PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. The show’s music is from APM Music and Epidemic Sound, and our Project Managers are Edwin Ochoa and Morgan Church. Thanks to Advisors Danielle Boaz, Chas Clifton, Abel Gomez, Daniel Harms, and Meg Whalen. Thanks to guests Patrick Donmoyer, Daniel Harms, Thorn Nightwind, and Robert Phoenix. This production was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.   

Wherever you are in the United States, the East, the West, the North, or the South: remember, that magic is everywhere. I'm Heather Freeman. And I'll see you at the crossroads.