Catherine "Catillon" Repond, known as Touâscha or "The Deformed One" due to her hunchback. She was born August 18, 1663 and lived with her two sisters in the father's family home in Villarvolard.
Poor and uneducated, she remained unmarried at the age of forty. Her notoriety arose from a series of extraordinary events.
One day, a violent storm battered Mt. Moléson, turning the sky a deep crimson from the blaze of a vast fire. All rivers, the Sarine, Albeuve and Trême were like torrents of flame. The flood soon swept away a thousand trees and twenty chalets, until finally spent against the cliffs of Pré-de-l'Essert. While the people were struggling against the fury of the elements, they suddenly beheld a gleeful Catillon dancing in a whirlwind of flaming clouds around the summit of a volcanic Moléson. She wasn't alone, but escorted by two hideous demons. The three were relentlessly trying to dislodge a gigantic boulder from the side of the mountain. Finally breaking loose, it rumbled through the pastures of Petit-Moléson, crushing the most prized cows, continuing to bound and vault until finally the hand of the Lord stopped it in its tracks forever. The Pierre-à-Catillon is still there to this day, surrounded by pines and recognizable by the figures on its sides: handprints left there by the witch and her infernal companions.
Once Catillon unleashed a tornado, and the accompanying lightning struck the steeple of the church in Avry-devant-Pont. The next morning, the church rooster was found in the parish priest's henhouse! She had supernatural powers!! Once she turned herself into a hare for a day, being chased about Mt. Gibloux by local hunters, but never in real danger of being caught.
Catillon was tried and burned as a witch on September 15, 1731 at Guintzet in Fribourg, the last victim of populist superstition...
Footnote:
Catherine Repond (18 August 1663 in Villarvolard – 15 September 1731 in Freiburg), was an alleged Swiss witch. She was one of the last people to be executed for sorcery in Switzerland prior to Anna Göldi.
In 1730, the bailiff Beat-Nicolas von Montenach, out hunting, injured a fox; the fox got away but, according to Montenach, shouted to him, with a human voice, that he had hurt it. At the same time, Catherine Repond sought refuge at a farm close to Villargiroud away from the bad weather. She was a beggar, reputed for sorcery, well known in the area, where she often performed chores at the farms. She had the same injuries which the fox had had, according to Montenach. Montenach then suspected that the fox had in fact been Repond.
Montenach had her arrested in April 1731 and taken to his castle in Corbières, where she was interrogated by torture to confess that she had flown on a broomstick to the witche's sabbath. She was then taken to Fribourg, where she was sentenced to death for witchcraft and executed by strangulation and burning.
In 1782, Anna Göldi, often called the last witch, was executed, but Göldi's trial was a dubious witch trial, while Repond was openly executed for this accusation.
It’s never been completely clear just why this one particular case navigated the Age of Enlightenment all the way to the stake — whether that was just the breaks, or if there was some larger interest at work that made Repond’s mouth worth closing.
Fribourg, in any event, adopted a 2009 resolution expressing regret for the execution, although it declined to issue a formal exoneration on the grounds that as the state itself was several times discontinuous with the one that put the “witch” to death, such a gesture would be intrinsically meaningless.
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