The Original Knogler Witch

Prequel to The Curse of a Knogler Witch

Oct 31, 2025

The lineage of the Knogler Witches is vast. Extensive.

Dating back to the late 1500s, in the thick of the Dutch Golden Age. A period where everyone flourished. Netherland’s peoples were prosperous, thriving, and in high spirits.

All of its peoples, excepting the original Knogler Witch.

Mathilde Graham bore witness to more death and gore in her short years than most men on the bloodiest of battlefields.

That was the price she paid for being a Knogler Witch. Not that she could help it. At least, not really.

Before Mathilde’s grandmother died, she’d passed down to her a sort of family heirloom. On her deathbed, her gran had adamantly stated that Mathilde be the keeper of the bones. She’d handed her a small wooden trunk with a tarnished clasp. It was locked and had no key.

Her Gran had insisted she keep the trunk hidden, safe, and never opened.

Mathilde sobbed and nodded, acknowledging her Gran’s request. She held the old woman’s hand in hers—crepey, cool, skin and visible veins that felt familiar to the touch. She softly caressed the dying woman’s hand up until the moment she took her last breath.

Mathilda’s shrieks extended beyond the walls of the manor. She was only eleven. She didn’t understand the gravity of death and all its carried grief until that moment.

She waited but six months before breaking her promise.

Mathilde missed her Gran fiercely. The emotions, the loss, it all compounded so severely. So steadily, that she hadn’t the sense to honor her Gran’s dying wish any longer.

She broke into the seemingly innocuous trunk, hoping for a sense of closeness—or, maybe, closure.

“The Keeper of the Bones,” Gran had said.

Mathilde remembered that line, yet was still stunned speechless, and a bit disappointed, when the only contents within the wooden trunk were a pile of dusty, old, bones. Thin ones, shattered ones, some with markings that revealed a horrendous end.

Her brow knit in confusion as her finger ran across a bone’s particularly jagged edge. At the unanticipated slice, she muttered a curse, candy apple red droplets marring the whites and yellows of the ancient bones.

She stuck her forefinger into her mouth, hoping to cease its bleeding. Hoping, too, that her mother and father hadn’t been near enough to hear her swear.

With her uninjured hand, she fiddled with a bone shard no thicker than the stem of a flower. She picked out a few more pieces, all small enough to fit within a locket. She’d thought, if I wear these, I will always feel Gran nearby. Because, they were, afterall, the last gift she’d received from the dying woman.

She grabbed two lockets. Both large enough to encapsulate the bones, but secure enough so as not to allow them escape.

She decided she’d give the second necklace to her mother, who had been suffering greatly from melancholia. This ought to cheer her up, she’d thought. An amulet. From Gran, certainly it’d do the trick.

The second she placed the amulet around her neck though, it burned red hot. Her skin singed just beneath her collar bones. The sickening scent of burnt flesh filled her rooms. She tried to tear the amulet away. To unclasp the pesky beast. But it would not give.

She tried to pull it over her head, mussing her perfectly fussed-over hair in the process. Still, no such luck.

When heat subsided, Mathilde sighed a hefty release.

But as she clasped it in her delicate hand, she then could feel its pulse. Throbbing, just as her pierced finger had only moments ago.

She’d worn this locket on numerous occasions and never had she such an affair.

With the second amulet in her palm, Mathilde went in search of her mother. But the one around her neck began to sing. No, not sing, but squeal.

The squelches shot daggers into her ears, and left a ringing in their wake.

She continued her path towards her mother’s rooms, only to hear then a deep, sickening bellow.

Father.

She ran. Feeling only the pounding within her chest, and the tears hot on her cheeks.

Mathilde threw open the closed door. And then she saw. Her mother. Limp, ashen, and lifeless in her father’s arms.

From that moment on, everyone near and dear Mathilde perished. One after the other. Some in their sleep, some in the most violent of ways.

Some, only Mathilde knew the answers to. The whys, the hows. The amulet forced her to suffer. To investigate.

With each death, her cursed locket shrieked, burned, and throbbed. Alerting her to every single one.

And when all those she knew were gone, it alerted her to others. To travelers. To servants. To anyone in which Mathilde had the means to get to.

Every death that took place, Mathilde’s cage of bones made sure she sought. Made sure she would discover.

Her life—the very life that had once been shrouded in riches and love—was forevermore swathed painfully and deliberately in darkness. In death. And despair.

She could not hide. She could not run.

In the end, she had no hope. Even though she’d tried to muster it all those years ago—when she’d fallen for a handsome lad—hope still failed her at her close.

She’d rallied for years. For their love. For their unborn child. And finally, for her now-grown-daughter.

The bones had spoken to Mathilde when she was with child. Ancestors’ whispers greeted her in the night. Chilled murmurs of the curse, as she lay in bed. Rumblings of the “ancestral legacy” and its perpetuation.

She’d scoffed at the whispers. Ignored them entirely, aside from getting rid of the second amulet. She would never allow her daughter to carry on such a tumultuous existence.

But when her own life came to its bloody end, she knew the bones had never lied. That they planned to live on, after her.

She looked into soul-filled, lavender-gray eyes, as she worked to lovingly squeeze her daughter’s hand.

The whispers returned, teasing. Mathilde recognized then that her life’s only sunshine was the next Knogler Witch to be claimed.

There was not a brutality nor heartbreak that transpired that Mathilde Graham, the original Knogler Witch, would not concurrently endure.

Creatively Chronicled ✨

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