In the 1890s, the tiny village of Ashchepkovo in western Russia was struck by an epidemic of demonic possession. This episode attempts to understand this and other cases of malign spells by entering the mystical and magical world of the Russian peasantry.

Sources: C. Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Illinois University Press, 2003)

V. Kivelson, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013)