13. A Girls School’s Witchcraft Panic
Antoinette Bourignon was a pious but mentally unstable seventeenth-century Frenchwoman, who founded a boarding school for girls in Lille, France. One day in 1639, when she entered a classroom, Madam Bourignon imagined that she saw a swarm of little black angels flying around the schoolgirls’ heads. Alarmed, she told the children to beware the devil, whose little black imps were buzzing all around them. Over time, she grew more and more obsessed with the imps hovering around her wards’ heads, and warned the schoolgirls daily to watch out for the Devil. Soon, the impressionable children came to believe that there were, indeed, little black demons flying all around them.
Before long, Satan and satanic possession were the sole topic of conversation. One of the girls ran away, too scared to stay in a school infested with little black devils who might possess her at any moment, as Madam Bourignon and her staff never tired of warning the students. When she was brought back, the girl claimed that she had not run away, but had been carried away by the Devil, and that she was a witch and had been one since she was seven-years-old. That absurd babbling by a child kicked off a witchcraft panic that threatened the lives of dozens of children.
