The Hex Slayer: Did a Young Man Murder a Witch to Save His Own Soul?
Forget Salem. Forget the stories you were told in history class.
The most terrifying witch trial in American history didn’t happen in a courtroom with powdered wigs and pious judges. It happened in the dead of night, in the isolated hills of Pennsylvania. It wasn’t decided by a jury. It was decided by a desperate young man with a shotgun loaded with a single, magic bullet.
This is the story of Albert Shinsky and the woman he believed had stolen his life. It’s a story of black magic, spectral cats, and a murder that, according to the killer, was the only thing that could set him free. A story that peels back the veneer of the 20th century to reveal the ancient, primal fears still lurking in the shadows of the modern world.
Was he a deranged killer? Or was he the victim of a powerful curse, forced to take a life to reclaim his own?
You’re about to find out. And the answer is far more disturbing than you can imagine.
Welcome to 1934 Ringtown Valley: A Land Time Forgot
Picture it. The year is 1934, but not the one you know from the black-and-white films. Forget the bustling cities, the Art Deco skyscrapers, the dawning of a new age. Travel instead to the Schuylkill County hills of Pennsylvania, to the farming village of Ringtown. Here, the 20th century was a distant, muffled rumor. A story told by outsiders.
Life was primitive. Raw. Most homes were little more than shacks, clinging to the hillsides. Electricity? A luxury for the town’s elite. Modern plumbing was a fantasy. Telephones were science fiction. News traveled on foot or by horse, and the world outside the valley might as well have been on another planet. This was a pocket of the old world, a place governed by seasons, suspicion, and superstition.
And in this forgotten corner of America lived a sixty-three-year-old widow named Susannah “Susan” Mummey. She resided in a stark farmhouse nestled in the hills, a place you wouldn’t stumble upon by accident. With her was her adopted daughter, Tovillia. They lived a quiet, isolated life. But quiet didn’t mean peaceful. Not in Ringtown. Because everyone in the valley knew one thing about Susan Mummey.
She was a witch.
A Prophecy of Fire and a Reputation Forged in Tragedy
The whispers didn’t start for no reason. They began twenty-four years earlier, in 1910. One morning, Susan was gripped by a terrible, unshakeable feeling. A vision. A premonition so vivid it left her trembling.
She saw fire. And death.
Her husband, Henry, was getting ready for his shift at a local powder mill. It was July 5th. She grabbed his arm, her eyes wide with terror, and begged him not to go. “If you go to work today,” she pleaded, “you will die.” Henry, a practical man living in a practical world, laughed it off. A wife’s silly fears. He kissed her goodbye and went to work, just like any other day.
But it wasn’t any other day.
That afternoon, a violent explosion ripped through the powder mill. The blast was heard for miles. When the smoke cleared and the screaming stopped, Henry Mummey was dead.
Susan’s prophecy had come true. To the letter. But the tragic event didn’t bring her sympathy from the tight-knit, fearful community. It brought something else entirely.
Fear. Deep, chilling fear.
How could she have known? It wasn’t a lucky guess. It was something else. Something unnatural. From that day forward, Susan Mummey was no longer just a neighbor. She was the woman who had foreseen her own husband’s fiery death. She was a witch. A dangerous one. People in Ringtown started watching her from a distance, their awe curdling into a dark and profound suspicion.
The Golden Boy’s Dark Descent
Now, meet Albert Shinsky. At 23, he should have been the picture of youthful strength. And for a time, he was. Everyone in Ringtown knew Albert. A polite, good-natured kid from a well-respected family. He was well-liked, hard-working, and engaged to a charming local girl, Selina Bernstel, who absolutely adored him. He had his whole life ahead of him. Nobody, not a single soul, could have imagined him capable of violence.
But something happened when he was seventeen.
The change was slow at first. A gradual fading. The once-energetic young man became tired. Deeply, unnaturally tired. A strange lethargy took hold of him, a spiritual and physical exhaustion that no amount of sleep could fix. He lost weight, his face becoming thin and haggard. He couldn’t hold a job that required any real effort. His bright future dimmed, then went dark. He became a ghost of his former self, earning a meager living driving a taxi for mine workers, the only job his depleted energy would allow.
Doctors were useless. They poked and prodded but found nothing wrong. Priests offered prayers, but the prayers went unanswered. Albert was wasting away, and no one knew why.
But Albert knew. He knew exactly what was wrong. Susan Mummey had put a hex on him.
Deep Dive: The World of Pennsylvania Dutch Hexerei
To understand what happened next, you have to understand where it happened. This region of Pennsylvania was steeped in the traditions of German immigrants, and with them came their folklore—a powerful system of folk magic known as *Hexerei* or “pow-wowing.”
This wasn’t a joke or a quaint custom. It was a deeply ingrained belief system. Pow-wowers, or “brauchers,” were healers who used a combination of prayers, herbal remedies, and magical rituals to cure ailments in both people and livestock. They were respected members of the community.
But where there is light, there is shadow. The flip side of this healing magic was the *hex*—a malicious curse placed upon an enemy. A hex could cause illness, financial ruin, bad luck, or even death. People believed in it as surely as they believed in the sunrise. And they believed there were ways to fight it. Certain charms could offer protection. And, most importantly, they believed a hex could only be broken by the one who cast it… or by their death.
This was Albert Shinsky’s world. A world where an unseen evil was a tangible threat, and where a magic bullet wasn’t a fantasy—it was a necessity.
“She Put Her Eyes on Me”
When the police finally questioned him, Albert Shinsky didn’t just confess. He explained. He calmly told them a story that made the hair on their arms stand up.
It began six years earlier. When he was seventeen, he worked for a farmer who was locked in a bitter property dispute with Susan Mummey. One day, while walking on the contested patch of land, he saw her. She was standing a short distance away, silent, just staring at him. Her eyes locked onto his.
Under her gaze, a cold sweat broke out all over his body. He felt, he said, like invisible hands were closing around his throat, choking the life out of him.
That was the moment the torment began.
From that day on, he was never alone. He described a constant “physical and mental torment” that drained his strength. He told police about invisible hands gripping his shoulders, pushing him down. He felt sharp pains, as if someone were sticking pins into his body. And then there was the cat.
A black cat, he said, would descend from the sky and attack him in his sleep. It would claw and bite at him in the darkness, a demonic visitor from his worst nightmares. Desperate, he sought help from local pow-wowers. They gave him amulets to wear and spells to recite. Sometimes, they offered a few hours of relief. But the cat always came back.
Finally, a different kind of visitor came. A “spirit,” Albert explained, appeared to him. It told him the truth he had long suspected. The amulets would never work. The prayers were useless. There was only one way to be free. One way to break the hex.
He had to kill Susan Mummey.
One Blast in the Night
March 17, 1934. St. Patrick’s Day. A cold, black night in the valley.
Inside the Mummey farmhouse, a single lamp cast a weak, flickering glow. Susan, her daughter Tovillia, and a boarder named Jacob Rice were preparing for bed. Rice had a severely injured foot, and Susan, known for her skill with herbal remedies, was tending to it.
She bent over his foot to change the bandage. In that instant, the world exploded.
A deafening roar shattered the stillness. The living room window disintegrated into a thousand tiny shards. A blast of frigid night air rushed in, extinguishing the lamp and plunging the cottage into absolute darkness. Before their stunned minds could even process the sound, a second blast followed. A shotgun.
Someone was outside. In the dark. Trying to kill them.
They dropped to the floor, paralyzed by terror. Tovillia whimpered. Rice held his breath. They waited. But there was only silence, broken by the sound of the wind whistling through the broken window. After an eternity, Rice dared to move. He called out Susan’s name. No response. He fumbled in the blackness for a match and managed to relight the lamp. The sputtering flame illuminated a scene of horror. Susan Mummey was lying motionless on the floor, a dark stain spreading across her chest. She was dead.
The two survivors huddled together, too terrified to move, until the first gray light of dawn broke through the hills. Only then did Rice, despite his mangled foot, limp over a mile to the nearest neighbor to summon the police.
“I Am a Re-Born Man”
Investigators found a single gunshot wound to the chest. Embedded in the far wall was a crude, hand-made bullet. A slug. Common enough in these parts.
At first, the suspect list was long. Susan Mummey was a reclusive and quarrelsome woman. She had feuded with nearly all her neighbors, adding fuel to her sinister reputation. Many believed she had cursed their livestock or cast the “evil eye” on their children. A palpable sense of relief, not grief, settled over Ringtown when word of her death spread. Almost anyone could have done it.
Then, three days later, some local boys came forward. On the night of the murder, they’d seen a car parked on the road near the Mummey farm. They recognized it instantly. It belonged to Albert Shinsky.
When the police brought him in, he didn’t deny it. He didn’t even seem nervous. When they asked him why his car was there, he answered with a calm, clear voice that chilled them to the bone.
“I went out there to kill Mrs. Mummey.”
He told them everything. The hex. The staring. The cat. The spirit. He explained that he’d borrowed a shotgun and loaded it with a special “magic bullet” that a pow-wower had assured him would be effective against a witch. He expressed no remorse. No guilt. No regret.
Instead, he radiated a serene, joyful relief. It was an expression these hardened detectives had never seen on the face of a confessed killer. It was deeply, uniquely disturbing.
“It worked,” he said, a smile playing on his lips. Since her death, he felt incredible. The weight was gone. The exhaustion had vanished. The torment was over.
“I am a re-born man,” he declared.
A Love Story Cursed by Darkness
The final, haunting piece of the puzzle came from Albert’s fiancée, Selina Bernstel. She sat with the police, her love for him warring with the horror of what he’d done. And she confirmed his story. All of it.
She had no doubt he’d been bewitched. She spoke of her own cousin, who was once visited by the ghost of an old woman who cast a spell. To her, this was not insanity. It was a fact of life.
She described the man she loved as a “little puppy dog” and a “lost soul,” a haunted young man who told her she was his only friend in a world of pain. She watched him suffer for years. And she believed the hex had begun to affect her, too. Sometimes, she would wake in the night to a vision of Albert standing at the foot of her bed, his face twisted in agony. Each time it happened, she would later learn he’d had a particularly vicious visit from the evil cat, or had seen the spectral figure of Susan Mummey herself, “leering and leering at him.”
Selina said Albert had begged Susan to lift the curse, but the old woman had refused. Selina wanted to marry him, but he always said no. “The witch wouldn’t let him,” he’d whisper.
She hadn’t known he’d committed murder. But she knew something had happened. In the days following March 17th, the change in him was miraculous. “Albert seemed different and more gay,” she told the police quietly. “He acted as if something had been taken off of him.” She was so overjoyed to have the old Albert back, the vibrant young man she’d fallen in love with, that she didn’t dare ask any questions.
The Aftermath: A Clash of Worlds
The trial of Albert Shinsky was a spectacle. It was a collision between the 14th century and the 20th. On one side was the modern legal system, with its cold logic and psychiatric evaluations. On the other was a community that genuinely believed a man could be tormented by a witch’s hex.
The prosecution argued for murder. The defense argued for insanity. But was he truly insane? Or was he simply a product of his environment, acting logically within a belief system that the outside world had discarded centuries ago? In his mind, he wasn’t committing murder. He was performing an exorcism. It was an act of self-defense against a supernatural evil.
Ultimately, the court found Albert Shinsky guilty, but criminally insane. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the Farview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He escaped the electric chair, but not a prison. He had killed the witch, but he was never truly free.
The story became a dark legend in Schuylkill County, a cautionary tale whispered on long winter nights. A chilling reminder of what happens when ancient fears refuse to die.
So what do we make of it all? Was Susan Mummey a powerful witch capable of destroying a man’s life with a glance? Or was she just a lonely, misunderstood old woman whose tragic prediction sealed her own fate? Was Albert Shinsky a cold-blooded killer who concocted a fantastic story to cover his crime? Was he suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia, that manifested as a culturally-specific delusion? Or could it be that in those dark, forgotten hills, something truly evil had taken root in his soul, and he did the only thing he could to survive?
We are left with a simple, terrifying question. Who was the real monster in Ringtown Valley?
