Witches’ Village is the feared settlement in an old woman’s tale, a place imagined beyond the village’s settled order where expelled women gather and practice magic. The story gives that danger a concrete shape through a lost child, a protective boar’s tooth, and three plants said to hold the lives of a family; as Ada’s terror breaks into the listening scene, the tale also reveals how folklore can make fear present and urgent.

The Village in the Old Woman’s Tale

The old woman describes Witches’ Village as a refuge formed by women whom their own villages have driven away. In her account, a woman judged wicked is expelled at night: her husband is fettered while she is beaten with switches, cursed, and driven into the woods and swamps. If she survives, she wanders until she learns the animals’ language and eventually finds the settlement where other banished women have gathered. There they live together, practice magic, and continue their wickedness.

The tale links the village’s supposed threat to the women’s childlessness. Because they have no children of their own, its inhabitants are said to entice children away from proper villages. A child who disappears in the woods might not have drowned or been eaten by a wolf, the old woman warns; a witch may have led the child astray and taken them to Witches’ Village. The settlement is thus not merely a distant place in the story but an explanation for a community’s most frightening uncertainty: a child lost beyond the village may never return.

The Lost Girl and the Three Plants

To make the warning vivid, the old woman recalls a girl who went berry-picking with other children, fell asleep among the ferns, and was left behind when the group returned home. After the villagers searched unsuccessfully, the girl wandered deeper into the wild country. Around her neck she wore a boar’s tooth, bored through by her father with a stone tool, boiled three times in boar’s blood, and prepared with protective spells. Remembering her parents’ warning, she slipped it off its cord and hid it in her belt before following a woman who appeared among the trees and offered to take her home.

The woman instead led the girl to Witches’ Village and locked her in a dark stable. The next morning she asked about the missing boar’s tooth. The child claimed she had lost it in the woods and showed the empty necklace. The witch then produced a clay pot of earth in which three plants were growing: one represented the mother’s life, one the father’s, and one the girl’s own. As long as the plants stayed green, the three were alive and well; if one withered, its person would fall sick, and if it were pulled out, that person would die. The witch began tugging at the father’s plant until part of its white root appeared, and the plant gave a deep sigh. The story ends at that moment of threatened revelation, holding the listeners inside the child’s peril.

Ada’s Fear and the Story’s Afterlife

As the old woman told the tale, Ada, who had sat listening and trying to master her terror, sprang up as if bitten and ran away. Some listeners were frightened too, but stayed seated; the old woman continued. Knecht, startled from his own trance of fear, ran after Ada. He searched near the Rainmaker’s hut by the village pond, calling and coaxing her with long, sweet notes. Ada had hidden beside a hut wall and, after hearing his first call, waited for him; when he reached her, she pressed her hand into his.

The episode makes Witches’ Village consequential without establishing it as a real place in the surrounding world. It exists here within a tale told by an old woman, yet its imagined threat is powerful enough to send Ada running into the night and to draw Knecht after her. The nested story shifts fear from a distant legend to a present human response: the child’s panic becomes the scene that Knecht must answer with patience and reassurance.