Throughout history, the phenomenon of vomiting or disgorging strange and often foul objects has been closely associated with cases of demonic possession, obsession, or witchcraft. In early modern Europe, such occurrences were not only feared but also meticulously documented by physicians, clergy, and chroniclers, who sought to understand and explain these unsettling events.
During the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, the act of expelling unusual items from the body was widely regarded as a physical manifestation of supernatural interference. Many believed that witches, through spells or curses, could cause their victims to vomit objects as a sign of bewitchment or as evidence of the Devil’s presence.
Treatises on possession from this era, such as those by Jean Bodin and Martin Delrio, often listed the vomiting of foreign objects as a key symptom of demonic influence. These texts described a wide array of items—ranging from living creatures like toads, snakes, worms, and butterflies, to inanimate objects such as iron nails, pins, needles, stones, shards of glass, hair, feathers, and even pieces of cloth or thread.
The variety and strangeness of these objects fueled both fear and fascination. For example, Simon Goulart, a 15th-century historian, recounted the case of a young girl whose abdomen swelled dramatically, mimicking pregnancy. After being administered medicinal drugs, she began to vomit an astonishing assortment of items: masses of hair, food, wax, long iron nails, and brass needles.
In another of Goulart’s accounts, a man named William, under the intense prayers of his master’s wife Judith, expelled from his body the entire front part of a pair of shepherd’s trousers, a serge jacket, stones, a woman’s peruke or hairpiece, spools of thread, needles, and even a peacock feather. William insisted that these items had been placed in his throat by the Devil himself.
Such stories were not isolated. In 1566, a mass episode in Amsterdam involved thirty children who became frenzied and repeatedly vomited pins, needles, thimbles, bits of cloth, and fragments of broken jugs and glass. Despite the efforts of doctors, exorcists, and local sorcerers, the children continued to suffer recurrent attacks, baffling the community and reinforcing beliefs in supernatural causes.
Modern historians and medical experts now recognize that some of these cases may have involved psychological conditions such as mass hysteria, pica, or Munchausen syndrome, where individuals ingest or claim to expel non-food objects. However, in the context of their time, these phenomena were powerful evidence of the unseen forces believed to shape daily life.
The legacy of these accounts endures in the study of witchcraft and possession, offering a window into the fears, beliefs, and social dynamics of past societies. For those exploring the history of witchcraft, these stories illustrate how the boundaries between the natural and supernatural were once deeply blurred, and how the search for meaning in the inexplicable shaped both folklore and the development of early medicine.
.
