In late November 1928, a killing in a remote York County, Pennsylvania hollow became one of America’s most notorious intersections of folk belief, fear, sensational journalism, and criminal justice. Nelson D. Rehmeyer—a farmer and practitioner of Pennsylvania German ritual healing commonly called powwowing—was beaten, strangled, and burned inside his home by three people who believed he had cursed them. Often reduced to a “witch murder” or ghost-story shorthand, the Hex Hollo

In 1950, a man named Timothy Evans of South Wales is charged with the murder of his young wife and infant daughter. He told the court he...