The Real History Behind Women Captured in Apache Conflicts
In 1535, a woman hung from the church tower in Müster, Germany. A single iron hook pierced through her collarbone. She screamed for 3 days straight. By day five, she could only whisper. On day eight, she finally died. But that’s not even the worst part. That hook, the executioner’s hook, was used legally across seven European countries for over 600 years.
It appeared in official law books. Executioners required licenses to use it, and every single use was documented, signed, and filed away in government archives. I’m about to reveal three methods of using this device that Hollywood has never shown you correctly. You’ll discover why executioners called it the whisperer, [music] and the reason will make your skin crawl.
I’ll show you the one execution that was so brutal. A queen who watched it happen immediately banned the practice. and I’ll reveal the final victim, a woman who died by this hook in 1866, sparking outrage so intense it changed execution laws worldwide within 48 hours. This gets darker and stranger. By the end, I’ll explain how three of these hooks were stolen from a German museum in 2019 and never recovered.
Subscribe now because you won’t believe where investigators think they ended up. But first, you need to understand what medieval justice really was. Because here’s what nobody tells you about medieval punishment. It wasn’t chaos. It was a business. Picture this. It’s 1276 in Nuremberg, Germany.
You’re standing in a crowd of hundreds watching a public execution. But this isn’t a simple beheading. The woman on the platform is about to become one of the first documented victims of a brand new judicial tool, the executioner’s hook. What you’re witnessing is a revolution. For centuries, torture happened on battlefields. Chaotic, brutal, random.
But in the 13th century, European courts made a calculated decision. Move torture from the battlefield into the courtroom. Make it legal. Make it official. The executioner’s hook emerged as what lawyers called intermediate punishment. Too severe for criminals who deserved only whipping, not quite severe enough for those sentenced to death.
The hook was the in between. The tool designed to inflict maximum suffering while keeping you alive. And here’s the disturbing part. This wasn’t some crude medieval barbarism. The hook’s design shows shocking sophistication. Four prongs, each curved at a precise angle. Executioners were licensed professionals who served apprenticeships for years.
They studied human anatomy. Where to insert the hook for pain without immediate death. They were protosurgeons of suffering. Every single time a hook was used, the executioner had to file paperwork. The crime, the sentence, the duration, the outcome. Many of these documents survive today in German archives, and what they reveal is chilling.
This was systematic, regulated, and considered completely normal. Three types of hooks existed. The throat hook, the rib hook, and the suspension hook. Each served a specific legal purpose. Each had its own protocol. But before we go further, you need to understand the one thing Hollywood always gets wrong about the throat hook.
Because when you realize what it actually did to the human body, you’ll understand why victims couldn’t even scream. Imagine standing on that platform. You’re the woman convicted of theft. You’ve heard the rumors about the hook, but you don’t really understand. The executioner approaches with four curved iron prongs in his hand, each about three inches long.
The crowd has paid their admission. One to three pennies per person. They’re waiting, watching you. He positions the hook beneath your jaw, angled upward. Then he pulls. The four prongs pierce through the soft tissue under your tongue, through the floor of your mouth, and lock behind your jawbone. Then he attaches the chain. He lifts.
You rise to your tiptoes. And there you’ll stay for the next 4 to 6 hours. Here’s what’s happening inside your body. The hook isn’t just causing pain. It’s compressing your airway at a precise angle. Breathing becomes possible, but only barely. Every breath requires conscious effort. You can’t swallow. Saliva builds up.
Blood pools, but you remain conscious, fully, horribly conscious. We know these exact details because of France Schmidt, a Nuremberg executioner who kept a diary from 1573 to 1617. He logged 361 executions, 345 involved hooks. His entries are clinical, precise, disturbing. [music] He describes degrees of insertion. Shallow for warnings, medium [music] for punishment, deep for execution preparation.
But here’s the detail that historians buried for centuries. Schmidt’s notes reveal that executioners heated the hooks first, red hot, the prongs seared flesh as they entered, cauterizing blood vessels to prevent victims from bleeding out too quickly. This kept them alive longer. More suffering, better entertainment, and entertainment was exactly what it was.
Vendors walked through crowds selling hook programs, printed schedules listing the day’s punishments, the crimes, the names. Children under 12 attended free, part of their moral education. Parents brought their daughters to learn what happened to women who stole bread or spoke against the church.
This is why they called it the whisperer. After several hours suspended by jaw hooks, victims vocal cords were so damaged, so compressed, they could only whisper. Guards would lean in close to hear final confessions, last words to family members standing in the crowd below. Schmidt recorded one woman who whispered for 47 minutes straight before she died.
Her last words, “It teaches nothing.” But the throat hook wasn’t even the worst one. The method I’m about to show you was so brutal, one queen banned it after watching. but only in her kingdom. The rest of Europe kept using it for another 91 years. Don’t click away yet because what comes next involves 400 women and one queen’s diary entry.
Bamberg, Germany. The witch trials are in full swing. A woman named Anna Hansen stands accused of causing her neighbors crops to fail through witchcraft. The evidence. She was seen talking to herself near the fields. The sentence, death by rib hook. Put yourself in her position. The executioner approaches, but this hook is different.
Longer, sharper. He forces you face down onto a wooden frame. You feel the iron point between your ribs, just below your shoulder blade. Then he pushes. The hook slides between your fourth and fifth ribs, angling upward into your chest cavity. It doesn’t pierce your lung. Executioners trained for years to avoid that. Death would come too quickly.
Instead, the hook lodges against your spine. Then they lift you. You’re hanging face down, your entire body weight pulling against that single point of iron embedded in your rib cage. Every breath makes the hook shift. You feel your ribs separating from your spine with each inhale. The pain is beyond description, but you’re fully conscious.
Death takes 2 to 6 hours, internal bleeding, slow suffocation under your own weight, shock eventually, but for those first hours, you’re awake for every second. The Bamberg witch trials lasted from 1626 to 1631. Over 400 victims, 63% died by Rib Hook. That’s 252 women. We have one surviving testimony from a woman whose torture was stopped before death when her accuser recanted.
Her description recorded by court scribes. My ribs peeled away from my spine like fruit skin pulled from the flesh beneath. Let modern medical examiners have studied these accounts. Their conclusion, victims remained conscious for most of the duration. The hook placement avoided major arteries. Blood loss was slow. Your brain kept receiving oxygen just long enough to experience everything.
But in 1755, everything changed. Maria Theresa of Austria, one of the most powerful women in Europe, decided to witness a rib hook execution. She wanted to understand the justice system she inherited. She brought her personal physician and her confessor. She watched from beginning to end. 6 hours.
Her personal diary entry from that night now preserved in Vienna archives. I have seen hell’s machinery. God forgive us. Let within one week Maria Theresa banned the rib hook throughout all Hapsburg territories, modern-day Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, parts of Italy, and Poland. Her decree cited unconscionable cruelty, unbefitting Christian mercy.
But here’s what’s remarkable. She kept the throat hook legal until 1776. Even this powerful queen, horrified by what she’d witnessed, couldn’t bring herself to eliminate all forms of hook punishment. The system was too deeply embedded in law, in culture, in the social order. Meanwhile, in Protestant German states, the rib hook remained perfectly legal.
It was used 147 more documented times between 1755 and 1847. Most victims, women accused of adultery, heresy, or infanticide. But the suspension hook story is even more disturbing because it involves a woman whose execution sparked a war and her body is still on display today. Because what I’m about to reveal was deliberately erased from history books for 200 years.
These three cages have hung from St. Lbert’s Church in Müster, Germany since 1536. I stood beneath them last year. Tourists walk past them every day. Most don’t know what they’re looking at. They’re looking at the final resting place of three Anabaptist rebels, including Hill Fac, one of the only women ever executed by suspension hook, whose name we still know.
The Anabaptist rebellion has taken over Moonster. A radical religious sect declared the city New Jerusalem. They’re waiting for the end of the world. Hillil Faken is one of the prophet’s most devoted followers. A woman who recruited dozens of others to the cause. When Catholic and Protestant armies finally retake the city, she refuses to recant.
Her sentence suspension hook. Public display on the church tower. The suspension hook is different again. It’s designed to go through your shoulder just above the colliban or through your hipbone. Then you’re hoisted up the side of a building, often the tallest church tower in the city. You hang there as a warning for days.
Hill Facon lasted 8 days. We have letters from witnesses, church officials, visiting merchants, soldiers. They describe crowds of 10,000 people gathering daily to watch her die. On day three, she was still shouting religious prophecies. By day five, she could barely whisper. On day eight, she finally stopped moving, but they didn’t take her down.
Her body remained suspended for another 6 weeks, decomposing, visible from miles away, a warning to anyone who might question church authority. Eventually, her body was placed in one of those iron cages you saw earlier, where her bones remained on display for over 50 years. Protestant leaders across Europe used Hills execution as propaganda.
Pamphlets circulated showing her suffering, calling it Catholic cruelty. It became one of the flash points that intensified the religious wars tearing through German states. Her death, this one execution, is directly cited in histories of the 30 years war that killed 8 million people. But here’s what nobody talks about.
Modern surgical retractors, the tools surgeons use everyday to hold tissue back during operations, evolved directly from executioners hook designs. In 1847, German surgical textbook literally labels them modified suspension instruments. The same technology that held Hill fake and suspended on that church tower for 8 days now saves lives in operating rooms worldwide.
The human body knowledge that executioners accumulated through centuries of systematic torture became the foundation of modern anatomy. Schmidt’s diary, the same one documenting 345 hook executions, was used as a medical reference text in German universities [music] until 1903. Now, here’s the revelation I promised at the beginning.
the last woman to face the executioner’s hook and why her execution in 1866 became the most controversial in European history even though it didn’t happen in Europe at all because the final chapter of this story happened in Philadelphia and it was photographed. This photograph was suppressed for 90 years.
When it was finally released in 1956, it reignited national debates about capital punishment. You’re looking at the last legal execution by Hook in recorded history. June 8th, 1866, Philadelphia County Prison. The condemned Bridget Dan, an Irish immigrant woman convicted of murdering her employer’s family during a robbery. Pennsylvania law allowed the warden to select method of execution.
He chose an antique German device imported by the prison as a historical curiosity. He chose the hook. Newspapers reported that over 3,000 people gathered outside the prison walls. Unlike medieval public executions, this one happened in the prison courtyard, but word spread fast. Reporters from 12 newspapers were present.
This was the first execution ever photographed. Put yourself in Bridget’s position for a moment. You’re 34 years old. You’ve been in America for 6 years, working as a housemaid. Whether you actually committed the murders or not, historians still debate this. You’re about to die in a way that hasn’t been used in 20 years in Europe.
You’re walking toward a medieval torture device in an industrial age American prison. The executioner positions the throat hook beneath your jaw. He’s never used one before. He’s only read instructions from old German execution manuals. He pulls. The hook tears through flesh, but misses the proper insertion point.
You collapse. You’re still conscious. You’re screaming. He tries again. Repositions, pulls harder. The prongs catch, but one breaks off. You’re bleeding heavily now. The crowd outside can hear you. Third attempt. 2 hours have passed. Finally, the hook holds. They lift you. You hang for another 40 minutes before you die.
The Philadelphia Inquirer called it a mechanical failure of medieval barbarism in the modern age. The Evening Bulletin published a front page editorial. We have proven ourselves more savage than our ancestors. Public outrage exploded. Women’s rights groups just gaining momentum after the Civil War seized on Bridget’s execution as evidence of institutional cruelty toward women.
Within 48 hours, Pennsylvania banned all non-hanging executions, but it went further. The 1868 Treaty of Geneva, which established international laws of warfare, specifically cited Bridget Dan’s execution in its prohibition of archaic torch executions. Legal scholars in seven countries referenced this case when drafting new capital punishment laws.
One woman’s death, botched, photographed, publicized, ended 600 years of legal hook usage worldwide. In 2003, the actual hook used in Bridget’s execution appeared at a private auction in Boston. It sold for $12,000 to an anonymous buyer. Museums refused to bid. The Smithsonian released a statement. Too disturbing for educational value.
Remember that museum heist I mentioned at the start? Here’s where this gets truly strange. Medieval crime museum, Rothenberg, Germany. Three executioners hooks stolen in a sophisticated nighttime breakin. Value historically priceless. The thieves bypassed modern security, took only the hooks, left everything else untouched, never recovered.
Police theory specialized occult collector. The hooks have reportedly appeared in dark web listings for $50,000 each. There’s a market, a disturbing underground market for devices specifically used to kill humans. France Schmidt, the executioner who used hooks 345 times over 44 years, ended his diary with one reflection.
The hook teaches nothing. It only satisfies rage. The words of a man who spent his entire adult life inflicting this particular form of suffering. The executioner’s hook wasn’t an aberration. It wasn’t a temporary madness or a single society’s cruelty. It was law. It was science. It was entertainment. It was 600 years of Western civilization’s systematic approach to human suffering.
And it wasn’t even particularly controversial for most of that time. It was just normal. In the last 20 years, 14 countries have abolished capital punishment entirely, citing historical barbarity lessons in their reasoning. The executioner’s hook appears in unhuman rights training modules as case study number four.
Why documentation matters? because we know exactly how it worked, exactly how many people it killed, exactly how long they suffered. The documentation we have, Schmidt’s diary, court records, witness accounts, Maria Theresa’s diary, those newspapers reporting on Bridget Dan, prevents us from forgetting, from sanitizing, from pretending this was anything other than what it was.
Those cages still hang on that church tower in Müster. Germany could take them down. They’ve discussed it multiple times. They keep them there deliberately, forcing the city, forcing the country to look up every single day and confront what they did. The hooks are gone. The laws are changed. But the question remains, what does it say about us as humans that we designed this, that we used it for 600 years, that we made it legal, that we brought our children to watch? And here’s the question I want you to answer. Should museums display
the surviving hooks? Should we force people to confront this physical evidence of what we are capable of? Or does displaying them somehow honor the suffering turn it into spectacle all over again? Drop your answer in the comments because I genuinely don’t know the right answer to that question. Next week I’m investigating the Iron Maiden, the famous spikefilled torture device.
Except here’s the problem. It might never have actually been used. Everything you think you know about it might be Victorian era fabrication. And the evidence I found in German archives is going to completely upend the standard history. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss that investigation.
