carried on after a strange and frightful fashion on Strellin heath at
Guetzkow; but by God's help it all came to light just as I journeyed
thither with my man-servant to the fair, and I will here tell how it
happened. Some months before a man had been broken on the wheel at
Guetzkow, because, being tempted of Satan, he murdered a travelling
workman. The man, however, straightway began to walk after so fearful a
fashion, that in the evening and night-season he sprang down from the
wheel in his gallows' dress whenever a cart passed by the gallows, which
stands hard by the road to Wolgast, and jumped up behind the people, who
in horror and dismay flogged on their horses, and thereby made a great
rattling on the log embankment which leads beside the gallows into a
little wood called the Kraulin. And it was a strange thing that on the
same night the travellers were almost always robbed or murdered on
Strellin heath. Hereupon the magistrates had the man taken down from the
wheel and buried under the gallows, in hopes of laying his ghost. But it
went on just as before, sitting at night snow-white on the wheel, so that
none durst any longer travel the road to Wolgast. Until at last it
happened that, at the time of the above-named fair, young Ruediger von
Nienkerken of Mellenthin, in Usedom, who had been studying at Wittenberg
and elsewhere, and was now on his way home, came this road by night with
his carriage. Just before, at the inn, I myself had tried to persuade him
to stop the night at Guetzkow on account of the ghost, and to go on his
journey with me next morning, but he would not. Now as soon as this young
lord drove along the road, he also espied the apparition sitting on the
wheel, and scarcely had he passed the gallows when the ghost jumped down
and ran after him. The driver was horribly afraid, and lashed on the
horses, as everybody else had done before, and they, taking fright,
galloped away over the log-road with a marvellous clatter. Meanwhile,
however, the young nobleman saw by the light of the moon how that the
apparition flattened a ball of horse-dung whereon it trod, and straightway