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Kathryn Finegan Clark: By the Way -- A place of myth and mystery

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Imagine finding a treasure in your own backyard – even if it’s a jagged hunk of truly ancient rock. A mysterious rock that can lead to a lifelong and rewarding pursuit of knowledge and a book that just keeps growing – one at once scholarly and hard to put down.

A treasure is exactly what Ned D. Heindel and his wife, Linda, discovered in 1967 after they’d bought a house and barn in neighboring Northampton County, just a few miles north of Bucks.

Their hillside property in Williams Township is dominated by a craggy rock formation that rises more than 1,000 feet above sea level. German (Pennsylvania Dutch) settlers called it Hexenkopf (Witch’s Head.)

In the 18th and 19th centuries the rock was a favorite dumping ground for brauchers, or powwow doctors, who often treated illness by transference, drawing evil from a sick person and throwing it at the rock. The immigrant brauchers had brought their black arts with them from Germany’s Rhineland-Palatinate area, Heindel explained.

Hexenkopf has since been considered “a focal point of evil and mystery,” according to Ned Heindel, and it has consumed a great deal of his time as he, fascinated by the rock, its hauntings and legends and the fear and superstitions surrounding it, researched its history.

The area surrounding Hexenkopf includes the riverside village of Raubsville, where brauchers of the Seiler (or Saylor) and Wilhelm families treated the sick and injured for generations. It was a hotbed of powwowing for about 200 years with the practice only truly coming to a halt in the 1950s.

Both Ned and Linda are college professors emeriti, he at Lehigh, where he still does research, and she at Moravian College. Ned, who is a pharmaceutical consultant and a former president of the American Chemical Society, turned his considerable research and analytical skills toward examining and documenting the history of Hexenkopf and the practice of braucherei.

His findings first appeared in a book published during the 1976 Bicentennial. Expanded and renamed editions have followed.

“Hexenkopf: History, Healing & Hexerei (Demons),” a third edition, has just been released by the Northampton County Historical & Genealogical Society.

Heindel is a natural storyteller and his new book is a valuable, thorough and fascinating study of a piece of rock atop a hill the Lenape believed to be a sacred place; later, generations of settlers thought it was haunted. The brauchers took advantage of its weird profile and bestowed on it the evils their charms cast out of people who were sick or injured.

But others revered Hexenkopf and still do in this 21st century. A group of Lenape, whose ancestral tribe had been ousted from the area, even traveled from Oklahoma to visit Hexenkopf in 2018, Heindel said. The beautiful rocky ridge, with its stands of poplar and oak trees, wild azalea and freshwater springs, still seems to evoke a spirituality that tends to be universal. It continues to bring wiccans’ covens, Urglaawe practitioners (a pre-Christian group associated with brauchers), Gardnerian witches, American druids and Zen Buddhists to worship at the rock, some dancing at midnight when the mica-strewn rock glows in the light of a full moon.

All of the books offer a glimpse into old-fashioned practices that have all but disappeared, but the new edition is the most comprehensive.

It contains fresh information contributed by readers of Heindel’s earlier books, including old family photographs, powwow cures and charms – some quaint, some funny and some downright gross, old maps and, perhaps best of all, what Heindel calls “oft-repeated tales of mysterious doings up on the Rock.”

All of this enriched his knowledge and made the Hexenkopf story more compelling. But now, after all that gathering of information, all that meticulous work, imagine giving the treasure, the source and subject of the book, away.

That’s exactly what the Heindels have done. Last December Hexenkopf Rock and its surrounding 76 acres officially changed hands, becoming the Hexenkopf Ridge Preserve within the Northampton County Park System, the gift of Ned and Linda Heindel to the people of Northampton County.

The 202-page, illustrated paperback, “Hexenkopf: History, Healing & Hexerei” is available at the Sigal Museum of the Northampton County Historical & Genealogical Society in Easton. It costs $15.

kathrynfclark@verizon.net


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