St. Andrew's Night
Oral tale
Erasm. Francisci höll. Proteus
Bräuner’s Curiositäten, p. 91-93.
Goldschmid’s höll. Morpheus. Hamb. 1698. P. 173, 174.
It is commonly believed that a girl can invite and see her future lover on the St. Andrew’s Night, St. Thomas’ Night, Christmas Eve, and New Year’s Eve. For this purpose, she needs to set a table for two, but there must not be any forks among the cutlery. Whatever the lover leaves behind when he goes away needs to be stored carefully. For he will come to the one who owns it and loves her deeply. But he must never see this item again, for otherwise he will remember the anguish which he has suffered that night from supernatural forces and realize the spell he has been under. Great calamity will come from this.
A beautiful girl in Austria once desired to see her lover at midnight, following the necessary customs. Then a cobbler entered the chamber with a dagger, threw the dagger towards her, and quickly vanished again. She carefully picked up the dagger, and locked it within a chest. Soon, the cobbler visited her and proposed marriage. Many years after their marriage, she once went to her chest after the evening prayers, and wanted to search for something that she wanted to use for work the next day. When she had opened the chest, her husband approached her and wanted to look inside. She tried to prevent this, but he pushed her away with force, looked into the chest, and beheld his lost dagger. He quickly grabbed it, and immediately wanted to know how she got it, for he had lost it some time ago.
Out of startelement and fear, she was unable to come up with any excuse, but instead freely confessed that this was the same dagger which he had left behind that night when she had desired to see him. Then the man became wrathful, and spoke with a terrible curse: “Whore! So you are the slut who has caused such inhuman terror in me during that night!” and thrust the dagger right into her heart.
This legend is told in different places by other people. Oral: Of a huntsman who left his hunting dagger behind. Soon after the woman had given birth to her first child, she sent him to her chest in order to fetch white cloth while forgetting that the implement of magic was inside. He finds it and kills her with it.