The Music-Making Witches

It began in autumn, when the evenings grow long and the mist creeps from the Dender. Farmers returning late from market heard music — not the familiar sound of a tavern fiddle, but something sharper, something that crept beneath the skin. It came from the abandoned barn of Tiest Vermeersch, a farmer who had died months earlier without heirs.

The first to hear it was Fons, the farmhand from the neighbouring homestead. He assumed vagrants, musicians looking for shelter. But when he went to the barn the next morning he found nothing — no footprints, no ash from a fire, no crumbs. Only a faint smell of sulphur clinging to the beams like the memory of something that was no longer there.

For weeks it continued. Every night, between midnight and three, music sounded from the barn. A fiddle, a bagpipe, sometimes something that resembled a drum made of bone. The neighbours whispered names: Bosselierens Jette and Lie Pachtes, two old women who lived on the edge of the village and of whom it was said they were the queens of the witchcraft cult in the Dender region.

One night Fons could no longer contain his curiosity. He crept to the barn, pushed the door open a crack, and peered inside. What he saw froze his blood. In the middle of the barn a green fire burned that gave no heat. Around it danced Jette and Lie, their hair loose, their feet bare, their bodies turning in figures no Christian knows. And behind them, on an upturned milk pail, sat a figure in black playing a fiddle — a fiddle whose strings glowed like embers.

Fons wanted to run, but his legs would not obey. The music held him, pulled at him the way a current pulls at a drowning man. The figure in black looked up — no face, only two eyes that glowed like the strings of its fiddle — and grinned. At that moment Fons screamed. He did not know where the scream came from, but the sound broke the spell. The green fire went out. The music stopped. The barn was empty.

Fons ran home and did not speak for three days. When he finally told what he had seen, no one laughed. The parish priest came, sprinkled the barn with holy water, and prayed three rosaries. The music ceased — at least from the barn of Tiest Vermeersch.

But Bosselierens Jette and Lie Pachtes continued to live on the edge of the village, old and bent and silent. And on quiet autumn nights, when the mist crept from the Dender, some farmers claimed they still heard the music — not from the barn, but from somewhere deeper, somewhere underground, where no holy water can reach.