Murder in Hex Hollow

by Blake Smith
July 8, 2025

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Today we're going to turn our skeptical eye on a murder case that became a media sensation just one year before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression. But this is Skeptoid so we're going to look beyond the spooky details of the murder and perhaps we can find some lessons that still have relevance more than a century after these events.

The word magic has many meanings to the point of being almost impossible to pin down. Anthropologists, scholars of comparative religion , and magical practitioners often have very different ideas about the nature of magic. To understand the unfortunate events of November 27, 1928 we need to travel back another century to 1820 when America birthed its first major grimoire — The Long Lost Friend. This is not some cinematic dark and mysterious book of Latin and woodcuts, but a collection of Christian-centered practical formulas and rituals meant to help rural folk deal with life's many ailments.

Collected by Johann Georg Hohman, The Long Lost Friend contains spells of healing, blessing, and warding familiar to folk healers across Early Modern Europe. These practices were not orthodox, but were common folk magic, augmenting traditional Christian belief in healing and protection by adding ritual practices such as writing magic squares, performing specific gestures, and using contagion magic — the idea that names or articles belonging to a target can affect the owner. Contrary to popular stereotypes, most magical practices of the Early Modern period were rooted in folk Christianity, and not esoteric concepts.

The Long Lost Friend is not just full of spells of protection, but is itself said to be a potent tool for warding off evil. Its text explicitly states:

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 be drowned in any water, burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him.

Merely possessing the book thus is a form of "apotropaic" or protective magic.

Johann Hohman wasn't inventing these texts from his imagination. The Long Lost Friend represents a collection of many beliefs and practices that had come from Europe, evolving in the Pennsylvania Dutch communities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While commonly referred to as Dutch, this is a corruption of Deutsch, reflecting the historical pattern of German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania, who brought their Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist (including Mennonite and Amish) practices with them.

Hex Magic or 'Powwowing' is a syncretic folk practice — a blend of diverse but compatible spiritual traditions and healing beliefs that merged into a distinctive practice over time. The term itself has no practical connection to the indigenous Algonquin term "powwow" which had come to mean "a gathering." Hex in this context doesn't mean malicious curses. Derived from the German Hexe, this is a benevolent practice which still exists in regions of America today. Curses and dark malevolent intent are not consistent with these folk practices. Powwowing is one of the most trusted means for those in the community to try and remove curses, a detail at the core of this story.

Powwow rituals and prayers would have been familiar and common in Europe when these immigrants left for America. Outside of these communities, changes in broader culture drove many of these ideas underground or out of practice entirely as science and medicine professionalized in the late nineteenth century. The events in this story mostly took place in York County, PA where class, wealth, education and geography left a fertile ecosystem for the survival of folk magic.

By November 1928 the broader public outside of these communities was shocked to find that folk healing persisted even as Quantum Theory was redefining the smallest scale of reality, and Edwin Hubble's observations were expanding the universe beyond our old single-galaxy view and making clear the shocking depth of its mind-boggling antiquity.

The murder victim in this story was himself a Hex practitioner and was well regarded in the community as a trustworthy and reliable healer. His name was Nelson Rehmeyer and he was 60 years old in November of 1928. He lived alone after his wife moved back to her family's farm four years earlier. They were still on passable terms — she continued to do Nelson's wash for him — but he had become accustomed to living alone on his farm and had no close neighbors.

Nelson was the victim, but the real mystery lies with the three young men who sought him out that night — and why.

This story might be said to have started decades earlier when Nelson Rehmeyer treated a five year old boy named John Blymire. That child would grow up into a troubled young man obsessed with magic and curses. John was himself a powwow practitioner and the product of several generations who also practiced the craft. Written accounts portray him as perhaps mentally deficient to the point of an almost childlike view of the world — and fiercely obsessed with finding out what external cause was responsible for his life of bad luck and misery.

John Blymire and his wife Lily had two children, but both had died in infancy. Life's compounding sorrows convinced Blymire that he was under a curse. When he sought help from a Powwower named Andrew Lenhart, Lily became concerned because a previous client was convinced by Lenhart that her husband was the source of the curse so that she murdered him in his bed. When Lily could not calm John's obsessions with curses and hexes, she had him institutionalized. While he was locked up, Lily filed for divorce — but less than two months into his treatment John just walked away from the asylum and returned to York.

Still convinced that he was cursed, Blymire sought another powwow practitioner named Nellie Noll and over several paid sessions she helped Blymire pin down the source of his bad luck. As she met with him, his suspicions moved from person to person in his life, eventually settling on Nelson Rehmeyer as the culprit.

Noll advised Blymire to get a lock of Rehmeyer's hair and to steal his copy of The Long Lost Friend. If he followed a bit of ritual, including burying the hair and the book in a deep hole — the curse would be lifted.

But that's not how things played out that night.

Blymire believed strongly that old Nelson Rehmeyer was the source of his misfortunes. He made the trip to Rehmeyer's farm but quickly realized that the old powwower was too much for him to handle. Always thin and sickly, Blymire — who weighed less than 100 lbs — was not capable of taking the lock of hair and magic book by force from the imposing 6 foot tall Rehmeyer so he enlisted the help of two young coworkers from his job at a cigar factory — Wilbert Hess, in his early twenties, and 14-year-old John Curry. Blymire convinced both of them that their fates were also tied up with Rehmeyer's magic.

The trio showed up at Rehmeyer's secluded farmhouse and claimed Blymire had left a book during his previous visit. While Nelson was providing the three men with hospitality, they choked him, tied him up, and delivered several blows to his head. Believing they had killed the big Powwower, they tried to cover their crime by starting a fire. The trio then fled into the night believing the curse was lifted with Rehmeyer's death.

It did not take long for the crime to be discovered. The fire had died quickly and Nelson's body was not consumed by flame. The police quickly identified the trio. In custody, John Blymire was quite unremorseful, believing for the rest of his life that he had killed an evil witch and lifted a curse — and that such a response was the only sensible course of action.

Each of the three men were tried separately. Blymire was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Wilbert Hess was convicted of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 to 20 years. And John Curry — the youngest of the three — served a decade for second degree murder. All three men were eventually paroled with Blymire serving more than 20 years.

There are a lot of points in this sad tale where skepticism and critical thinking could have helped those involved. John Blymire was perhaps too unsophisticated in his thinking to understand the idea of confirmation bias.

He was not alone in this: his intense focus on magic and curses as the cause of his misfortune is as old as it is common. Yet by the eighteenth century, witch trials in Europe and North America had largely ceased. As historian Owen Davies has discussed, by the 1700s witch trials had shifted from trials of suspected witches to cases like Rehmeyer's in which those who harmed alleged witches were put on trial for assault or worse. But this does not mean magical thinking was disappearing. Skeptoid listeners will recognize that magical thinking wasn't on the way out in 1928 and it hasn't gone anywhere since.

A very relevant part of this story lies in how the police investigation and trials were portrayed in the media.

It was obvious from the trial that while belief in Hex practices was common in rural Pennsylvania, the matter was a subject of smug shock and derision from city dwellers who surely felt that they weren't subject to such superstitions.

As the trials unfolded, the newspapers spread the story with sensationalist writing that would be familiar to anyone reading tabloid media today. It's hard to quantify precisely, but once the Hex Murder of Rehmeyer Hollow started selling papers, reporters in Pennsylvania began looking for more of the same. Subsequent stories that had any hints of Hex, Powwow, or folk magic were splashed into print even when connections to magic were tangential or entirely made up.

Today we would call this pattern a Moral Panic. We discussed this idea briefly back in episode 462 which covered Satanic Ritual Abuse. British sociologist Stanley Cohen explored this idea in his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. One of his key ideas is that moral panics cast certain marginalized people as folk devils — figures blamed for social problems and portrayed as far more dangerous than they actually are. Small and relatively powerless groups of people, real or in some cases imagined, are feared to be immensely powerful, imperiling the rest of the community. Examples of folk devils in modern moral panics have included hippies, Satanic cultists, immigrants, and people in the LGBTQ+ community.

Moral panics are fueled by what Cohen calls "Moral Entrepreneurs." These are influential voices that profit, literally or figuratively, from spreading fear of the folk devils. In the later twentieth century these were often media figures acting as spokespeople from think tanks or religious groups, or just wishing to cash in on lurid claims. Today the number of possible moral entrepreneurs is vastly greater and includes social media content farmers, influencers, and online culture warriors.

Cohen's work covers more than this, but the final aspect I want to mention is disproportionality — the idea that in a moral panic the fear and outrage is more intense and demands more response than the real threat ever poses, if it ever posed any at all.

Much more academic work has been done on Moral panics since Cohen's work, and further reading links are in the show notes.

When Nelson Rehmeyer was murdered, a modern world was shocked that such old ideas could still hold sway in America. But when we read this story yet another century on, we should recognize that the danger from superstition, magical thinking, and moral panics will never go away and our best course of action is to be skeptical.

By Blake Smith