Hans Trapp, The Christmas Scarecrow That Terrorized Parts Of France
In the 1400s, there lived a wealthy and powerful man named Hans Trapp, who was well-known and feared in the French regions of Alsace and Lorraine. More than anything else, Trapp desired power, and so, the tale goes, he made a deal with the devil to get it.
News of Trapp’s Faustian bargain spread quickly, however, and drew the attention of the Pope — who then excommunicated Trapp, confiscating his wealth and land, and banishing him from Alsace.
Illlustration by Andrea BolochThe story of Hans Trapp was inspired by a real knight named Hans von Trotha, who cut off the water supply to the nearby town of Weissenburg after a dispute with the church.
Trapp made his new home in the Bavarian mountains of Germany, festering his evil desires and, eventually, acquiring a longing for the taste of human flesh. To satisfy this hunger, he crafted a disguise out of straw and waited by the roadside. To passersby, he looked like nothing more than a scarecrow.
One day, a young boy passed by the seemingly innocuous scarecrow, which suddenly sprang to life and grabbed him. Trapp, in his disguise, then stabbed the boy in the stomach with a sharpened stick and dragged the lifeless body back to his mountain lair.
There, he sliced the boy’s body into pieces and roasted it over a fire. In a stroke of divine intervention, however, Trapp never got to feast on the human meat as lightning took his life. But his spirit, supposedly, lived on.
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images“Christmas In Alsace” depicts the Christkindel, the Child of Christ, wearing a crown of candles, followed along by Hans Trapp. In legend, the Christkindel visits children terrorized by Trapp and instills in them hope.
Mythic though this tale is, the legend of Hans Trapp actually originated with a real man, a knight named Hans von Trotha, who lived from 1450 to 1503. Von Trotha commanded two castles in Palatine, but became embroiled in a disagreement with a local abbot over some of the items in one of them.
When the abbot refused to concede some of the property over to von Trotha, the knight constructed a dam that cut off the water supply to Weissenburg nearby. The dam was eventually destroyed, and, much like in the story of Hans Trapp, the Pope himself intervened and excommunicated von Trotha.
Von Trotha, however, continued to live a wealthy life in the French royal court, unlike his folktale counterpart. He also, as far as history can tell, did not eat the flesh of children.
