On January 22, 1941, a group of young Washington, D.C. residents drove out to a remote cabin in the Maryland woods armed with axes, nails, a dressmaker’s dummy, and plenty of Jamaica rum. Their goal was highly specific: they planned to murder Adolf Hitler using voodoo incantations.
Accompanied by an infamous occultist and a photographer from LIFE magazine, these citizens spent the evening drinking heavily and performing a dark magic ritual they genuinely believed would send the Nazi dictator straight to his grave.
Recruiting a Cannibal Occultist
The plan was inspired by William Seabrook, an author and occultist known for his extreme travel experiences. Decades before the gathering, Seabrook traveled to West Africa, where he acquired and ate human flesh, noting in his book that it tasted exactly like fully developed veal.
After reading his writings on witchcraft, the Washington group contacted Seabrook to lead their ceremony. He eagerly accepted, designing a ritual that required a surrogate target, a pagan deity, and significant amounts of alcohol.
The Hitler Dummy Ritual
Inside a cabin owned by a Naval factory worker, the group spent the first hour consuming rum before beginning the ceremony. They dressed the dummy in a Nazi uniform. Ted Caldwell, wearing a witch doctor’s robe, shook a rattle and initiated the chanting.
The group struck tom-toms borrowed from the U.S. Department of the Interior. “You are Hitler! Hitler is you!” they shouted at the figure. “The woes that come to you, let it come to him!”
Axes, Nails, and Curses
The ceremony escalated as the attendees drove nails and needles directly into the dummy’s heart and throat. They chanted curses at the dictator in unison and called upon a pagan deity named Istan, demanding that 99 cats claw out Hitler’s heart and 99 dogs eat it.
The ritual reached its violent peak when the group used an axe to decapitate the dummy. They then carried the severed remains into the deep pine woods and buried them in the earth to be devoured by worms.
Documented for the Dictator
Seabrook brought LIFE magazine to document the event because he claimed the voodoo would only work if the victim knew about it. The magazine published the story on February 10, 1941, encouraging readers to hold similar parties at home using small store-bought dolls.
Hitler did not die from the hex, surviving until he took his own life in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. One year after the dictator’s death, Seabrook took a lethal dose of pills in Rhinebeck, New York, ending his own highly unusual life.