The Devil of Mâcon (L'Antidémon de Mascon)

Mâcon, on the Saône in Burgundy. September 1612. François Perreaud was pastor of the Reformed Church there. On the fourteenth he rode with one of the elders to a church meeting at Couches. He was gone five days.

While he was away, his household was troubled. His pregnant wife had her first sleep broken by something that drew her curtains "with great noise and violence." The maid found a door bolted from outside and felt resistance, "as if a man had beene on the other side thrusting against her."

The twentieth of September. About nine o'clock. A loud, shrill whistle sounded three or four times. Then came "an articulate and intelligible voyce though somewhat hoarse." It sang a little tune of five notes. Then it said "Minister, Minister."

It kept talking until the 25th of November. It recited the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, always leaving out some part. It sang part of Psalm 81, and many bawdy songs. It mimicked hemp dressers, huntsmen, frogs and a volley of shot. It mocked the maid's dialect and called her Bressande. It offered to appear as a man, a lion, a bear or a cat. It never did. Its last words were "Ha ha je ne parleray plus."

Bedding was found laid on the floor. Shoes flew about the room. A brass candlestick was snatched from the maid's hand, leaving the lit candle in her grip. Perreaud's horse was found saddled backwards.

In the last ten or twelve days, stones flew from morning to evening, some of two or three pounds. The Royal Notary François Tornus, a Catholic, marked one with charcoal. It was thrown back. Tornus found it "very hot." A lawyer who questioned the spirit was dragged by the arm into the middle of the room and thrown to the floor. The demon left on the 22nd of December. The next day a very great viper was seen leaving the house.

Every evening townspeople sat up with the pastor until midnight. Men of contrary religions met to hear it speak, among them the bleacher Claude Repay and the goldsmith Abraham Lullier. The Bishop of Mâcon, named in the text as Gaspard Divet, sent for Tornus to learn the truth. He heard the story "with great admiration" and made some records of it. Those records have never been traced.

Perreaud weighed several suspects. A disciple of a known magician. The maid, as a possible witch. An old murder in the house. Above all, a woman he had evicted, found under a chimney calling upon the Devil. In the end he put it down to God's permission. No source argues for a hoax or a natural cause.

The historian Kristine Wirts, writing in 2011, saw the spirit as more like "a naughty little child, or prankster," rooted in the popular culture of its day.

Perreaud waited 41 years. In 1653 he published his account in Geneva. Robert Boyle met him there and received the treatise before it was printed. Boyle had Peter du Moulin translate it, and it appeared in Oxford in 1658 as a standard proof of the reality of spirits. George Sinclair retold it in 1685. Joseph Glanvill cited it in Saducismus Triumphatus, beside the Drummer of Tedworth. It remains one of the earliest detailed accounts of a talking poltergeist.