Hexentanzplatz, Thale: The Witches' Dance Floor, Layer by Layer
An Iron Age wall, a Devil's dance floor from 1800, a Goethe ballad and a völkisch stage from 1903: how Germany's Witches' Dance Floor got its story, dated source by source.
Contents
The Hexentanzplatz near Thale has one genuinely ancient feature, an Iron Age dry stone wall (c. 750-450 BCE). Its oldest printed name, from 1800, is the Devil's dance floor; the pagan-witch origin story matches a Goethe ballad of 1799, and much of the Germanic staging dates from 1901-1913.
The Hexentanzplatz is a plateau at 454 metres above sea level on the northern rim of the Bode gorge near Thale, opposite the Rosstrappe (403 metres).
The Bode gorge has been a nature reserve since a decree of 5 March 1937; near Thale the drop to the valley floor is close to 250 metres, in Ramberg granite.
The Sachsenwall is a dry stone wall of granite blocks, about 150 metres long and originally about two metres high.
Standard references date the Sachsenwall to about 750-450 BCE; we could not consult a published excavation report.
The Saxons lived around Schleswig and the Baltic coast in antiquity and spread through northern Germany in the fifth century CE, long after the wall was built.
The oldest printed name we found is 'Teufels-Tanzplatz' (Devil's dance floor), in Otmar's Volcks-Sagen, Bremen 1800, pp. 181-186.
Praetorius's Blockes-Berges Verrichtung (1668) names the Harz 41 times and the Blocksberg about 89 times, but never the Rosstrappe, Thale or a dance floor (own full-text search).
Goethe wrote Die erste Walpurgisnacht in May 1799 and described its idea in a letter to Zelter on 3 December 1812.
The Walpurgishalle was built in 1901 to plans by Bernhard Sehring at the suggestion of the painter Hermann Hendrich, and reopened as a museum on 9 October 2015.
Ernst Wachler founded the open-air theatre on 8 July 1903; the Germanic Faith Community was founded there in August 1913.
The rebuilt plateau with its witch village reopened in 2024; the works on plateau and theatre cost 27 million euros.
The leap legend of the Rosstrappe: Emma's horse jumps the gorge and leaves its hoof print in the granite.
The story of Saxon worshippers disguised as witches chasing away Frankish guards, as told locally today.
Walpurgis Night is celebrated on the plateau every year on 30 April.
That the Hexentanzplatz was a pre-Christian cult site. Neither the wall nor any documented find proves it.
That goddesses called Hagedisen were worshipped here; we found no early source for the name or the cult.
That the 'Opferstein' in the Walpurgishalle was used for sacrifices; no published find report was found.
That visiting the site has any physical, medical or spiritual effect.
VERIFIED = verifiable in scientific or official sources · TRADITIONAL = historically or culturally recorded · LIVED PRACTICE = widely practiced, experiential knowledge · NOT PROVEN = spiritual interpretation, not scientifically established.
High above the Bode gorge in Germany's Harz mountains lies a granite plateau with one of the most evocative names in Europe: the Hexentanzplatz, the Witches' Dance Floor. Every guidebook calls it an ancient pagan cult site. We went back to the oldest printed sources to see which parts of that story can be dated — and found that the name, the witches and the pagan backstory each arrived at a different time, and none of them is as old as the wall that actually stands there.
What this article covers
- What is physically on the plateau
- Why the "Saxon Wall" cannot be Saxon
- The oldest written name: the Devil's dance floor
- What a 1668 book on the Harz witches leaves out
- How Goethe's ballad became a local legend
- 1901 and 1903: the hall and the stage
- Thale and Salem: two ways to live with a witch name
- Visiting today
The short answer
The Hexentanzplatz is a plateau at 454 metres above sea level on the edge of the Bode gorge near the town of Thale in Saxony-Anhalt, directly opposite the cliff called the Rosstrappe. Across part of it runs the Sachsenwall, a dry stone wall of granite about 150 metres long, which standard references date to roughly 750–450 BCE — the pre-Roman Iron Age. That wall is the only thing on the site that is demonstrably ancient.
The name is far younger. The oldest printed source we could find, a collection of Harz legends from 1800, calls the rock "the Devil's dance floor", not the witches'. The popular story that Saxons held forbidden May Eve rites here and scared off Frankish guards by dressing up as witches has no early source at all; its plot is identical to a ballad Goethe wrote in 1799. What visitors see today — the timber hall with Wotan's head on the gable, the open-air theatre, the witch village — was built between 1901 and 2024.
What is physically on the plateau
The Bode river has cut a gorge through the Ramberg granite, and near Thale the drop from the rim to the valley floor is close to 250 metres. The gorge has been a protected nature reserve since a decree of 5 March 1937 and covers about 474 hectares; it is also an EU habitat site. The Hexentanzplatz sits on the northern rim, the Rosstrappe (403 metres) on the southern one, and the two rocks face each other across the chasm. Anyone standing there understands at once why this landscape collected stories.
The Sachsenwall crosses the northeastern part of the plateau. It is a dry stone wall — no mortar — made of granite blocks, originally around two metres high and about four metres wide at the base, and it closed off part of the high ground. Local and encyclopedic sources date it to about 750–450 BCE and read it as a refuge fort, a place people withdrew to in times of danger. We were not able to consult a published excavation report, so the dating in this article follows those standard references and is marked accordingly in the classification box.
That is worth saying plainly because it cuts both ways. There really is something here that is about 2,500 years old. But what it was built for is a matter of defence and shelter, and nothing in the wall itself tells us anyone danced, prayed or sacrificed behind it. A cult use is possible. It is not documented.
Why the "Saxon Wall" cannot be Saxon
The name Sachsenwall means "Saxon wall", and several local websites state flatly that the Saxons built it between 750 and 450 BCE. Those two claims cannot both be true. The Saxons appear in history as a people living around modern Schleswig and along the Baltic coast; Britannica places their rapid spread through northern Germany in the fifth century CE. A wall built in the Iron Age predates the Saxons in this region by more than a thousand years.
The likeliest explanation is ordinary: later inhabitants attached the name of the most famous "old heathens" they knew to an old structure they did not understand. The same wall was also called Heidenwall (heathens' wall) and Teufelsmauer (Devil's wall), which fits that pattern. It is a small detail, but it is the first sign of something that runs through the whole site: names that tell you more about the people who gave them than about the thing they name.
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View the bookThe oldest written name: the Devil's dance floor
In 1800 the Bremen publisher Wilmans printed Volcks-Sagen, a collection of folk legends by Johann Karl Christoph Nachtigal under the pen name Otmar. Its chapter on the Rosstrappe is the earliest written version of the famous leap legend: the giant Bohdo chases Emma, the king's daughter from the Giant Mountains, across Thuringia into the Harz. Her horse stops on "the fearsome rock which, from the jubilant dance of the Evil One, is called the Devil's dance floor". Emma calls on "the spirits of her fathers", the horse leaps the gorge, and its hoof strikes the opposite rock so hard that the print can still be seen. Bohdo falls into the river, which takes his name — Bode — and guards Emma's lost crown as a black dog.
Two things in that text matter. First, the name in 1800 is Teufels-Tanzplatz, the Devil's dance floor. Wikipedia's article on the plateau notes the same form still in use in the nineteenth century. The witches came later. Second, Otmar explains the name inside the story itself: the rock is where Emma "begged the help of the spirits of hell". The earliest source, in other words, ties the name to a legend, not to any memory of a cult.
The hoof print has had its own afterlife. It has been read as a Germanic offering basin, but geologists identify it as a granite weathering pan — a hollow that forms naturally on granite surfaces — which people later reworked by hand. Otmar himself was cautious: he describes it as a hollow with "some resemblance" to a giant hoof.
What a 1668 book on the Harz witches leaves out
If Thale had been a famous witches' meeting place in the age of the witch trials, one book should say so. In 1668 Johannes Praetorius published Blockes-Berges Verrichtung, a long compilation of everything then said about witches gathering in the Harz. The full text is digitised by the German Text Archive, and we searched all 131,347 words. The Harz is named 41 times, the Blocksberg in its various spellings about 89 times. The Rosstrappe, Thale and any "dance floor" appear zero times.
That silence does not prove no one ever told witch stories about the plateau. It does show that in the seventeenth century, the Harz had one witch mountain, and it was the Brocken, about 30 kilometres to the west. (We have written about how the Brocken got its reputation and about Praetorius's book separately.)
It also helps to know what a "Hexentanzplatz" originally was. In trial records, judges demanded that accused people name the places where they had supposedly danced with the Devil — and name the others they had seen there. Those denunciations fed chains of new arrests. Hundreds of such places are recorded across Europe: in 1589 the Trier official Dietrich Flade confessed under torture to attending a dance place near Hetzerath; in 1631 Peter Essenkemper of Menden named eleven. A witches' dance floor, historically, was a location extracted under torture. That is the real history behind the word, and it is darker than any legend told about Thale.
How Goethe's ballad became a local legend
Visit Thale today and you will hear a different origin story. The plateau, it goes, was an Old Saxon sanctuary where people honoured forest and mountain goddesses called Hagedisen on the night before 1 May. When the Christian Franks banned the rites and posted guards, the Saxons disguised themselves as witches, rode in on brooms and chased the soldiers away — and so the Witches' Dance Floor got its name.
We could find no source for this story earlier than modern tourist literature. We did find its plot. In May 1799 Goethe wrote the ballad Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgis Night): pagan druids climb the Harz on May Eve to worship the "All-Father"; their watchmen, disguised as devils with forks and rattles, frighten away the Christian guards, who flee crying that all of hell has come. In a letter to his friend Carl Friedrich Zelter of 3 December 1812, Goethe explained where he got the idea: one of the German antiquarians, he wrote, had tried to "rescue" the old tale of the Brocken's witch ride by giving it a historical origin — heathen priests driven into the Harz who had some of their people disguise themselves to keep the converters at bay. Felix Mendelssohn set the ballad as a cantata, premiered in Berlin in 1833 and revised in 1843.
Laid side by side, the Thale legend and Goethe's poem share every element: banned pagan worship, May Eve, a mountain, disguised worshippers, frightened Christian guards. Goethe himself framed the idea as an antiquarian's theory about the Brocken. Our assessment is that the Thale version is a later transfer of that theory to a new site. The name "Hagedisen" also looks learned rather than inherited: it echoes hagazussa, the Old High German word usually given as the root of Hexe, witch.
1901 and 1903: the hall and the stage
Around 1900 the plateau was remade into a place of pilgrimage for a new kind of believer. The painter Hermann Hendrich had wanted a Walpurgis hall on the Brocken summit; after an architectural competition, the site became the Hexentanzplatz instead. The Berlin architect Bernhard Sehring built the Walpurgishalle in 1901 in the style of an Old Norse timber hall, with a monumental Wotan head in a winged helmet on the gable, the ravens Hugin and Munin and the wolves Geri and Freki carved in relief. Inside, Hendrich painted five large scenes from the Walpurgis Night in Goethe's Faust. The building was restored from 2014 and reopened as a museum on 9 October 2015. In the entrance stands a granite block displayed as an Opferstein, an "offering stone", said to bear Germanic signs. We found no published find report that dates it or documents any sacrificial use.
Two years later, on 8 July 1903, the writer Ernst Wachler opened an open-air theatre on the plateau, today the Harzer Bergtheater, one of the oldest in Germany. The historian Uwe Puschner counts Wachler among the founders of the völkisch-religious movement of Imperial Germany, a nationalist and antisemitic current that wanted to replace Christianity with a reinvented Germanic faith. The theatre opened with Wachler's play Walpurgis; its door carried a carved swastika and its stairs a stone altar. In August 1913 the Germanic Faith Community was founded there. Wachler, whose mother was of Jewish descent, died in the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1945 — the movement he helped build ended by persecuting him.
This is the layer most visitors never hear about, and it is the one that explains the rest. The "ancient Germanic sanctuary" on the Hexentanzplatz was, to a large degree, built on purpose between 1901 and 1913, by people who wanted such a sanctuary to exist. The same impulse appears at the Externsteine, where Wilhelm Teudt argued in 1929 for a Germanic observatory; see our pieces on Teudt's holy lines and on the Externsteine.
| Date | Layer | Status |
|---|---|---|
| c. 750–450 BCE | Sachsenwall, dry stone refuge wall | Physical structure; dating from standard references |
| 1668 | Praetorius's Harz witch book: no mention of Thale | Checked in full text |
| 1800 | "Devil's dance floor" in Otmar's Rosstrappe legend | Oldest printed name we found |
| 1799 / 1812 | Goethe's ballad and letter: disguised heathens scare Christian guards | Literary source of the later legend |
| 1901–1913 | Walpurgishalle, völkisch Bergtheater, Germanic Faith Community | Documented modern cult staging |
Thale and Salem: two ways to live with a witch name
American readers will recognise the pattern from Salem, Massachusetts, which also sells itself as a witch town. The difference is instructive. Salem's name rests on real events: in 1692 twenty people were executed there, nineteen by hanging and one pressed to death, and the town has spent the last half-century building museums and a memorial around that history. The reputation is uncomfortable because it is true.
Thale's reputation runs the other way. No trial record we know of names the plateau, and the Harz's real persecutions took place in towns like Quedlinburg, about ten kilometres away, where the eighteenth-century official Gottfried Christian Voigt counted the local cases. The Hexentanzplatz sells a witch history that happened somewhere else and a pagan history that was, in large part, staged in the twentieth century. Neither makes it a worse place to visit. It makes it a better place to think about how such places are made.
Visiting today
A cable car runs from Thale up to the plateau, and a chairlift climbs to the Rosstrappe on the other side. Since 2024 a "witch village" of crooked little houses with seventeen shops has formed the entrance; the rebuild of the plateau and the theatre cost 27 million euros from EU, federal, state and town funds. There is a wildlife park (since 1973), a summer toboggan run and the bronze group of the Devil, a homunculus and a witch grandmother, unveiled on 21 April 1996. On 30 April the plateau hosts one of the Harz's big Walpurgis Night parties.
If you want the older layers, walk to the northeastern edge to see the remains of the Sachsenwall, then look across to the Rosstrappe and find the hollow in the granite on the far side. Stay on the paths — this is a nature reserve — and leave the stones as you find them. Whether you come for the witches, the Iron Age or the view, the gorge is the oldest thing here, and it is well worth the trip. The site makes no promise of spiritual effects, and neither do we.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Hexentanzplatz an ancient pagan cult site?
No source proves it. The Sachsenwall on the plateau dates to about 750–450 BCE and is read as a refuge fort. A cultic use is possible but not documented, and the story of Saxon rites on May Eve has no early source.
Why is it called the Witches' Dance Floor?
The oldest printed source we found, from 1800, calls it the Devil's dance floor. The witch version of the name took hold in the nineteenth century, alongside growing tourism and the fame of Goethe's Walpurgis Night.
Did the Saxons build the Sachsenwall?
No. The wall is dated to the Iron Age, more than a thousand years before the Saxons spread through northern Germany in the fifth century CE. The name was given later.
Were witches tried or executed at Thale?
We know of no trial record naming the plateau, and Praetorius's 1668 book on the Harz witches does not mention it. Real trials in the region took place in towns such as Quedlinburg.
What is the hoof print on the Rosstrappe?
According to the legend, it was left by Emma's horse as it leapt the gorge. Geologically it is a granite weathering pan, a naturally formed hollow that was later reworked by hand.
When is Walpurgis Night at the Hexentanzplatz?
It is celebrated every year on the night of 30 April, with one of the region's largest festivals on the plateau.
Sources
Otmar [J. K. C. Nachtigal], "Die Roßtrappe", Volcks-Sagen, Wilmans, Bremen 1800, pp. 181–186 (read in the Wikisource transcription) · Johannes Praetorius, Blockes-Berges Verrichtung, Leipzig 1668 (full text, Deutsches Textarchiv; own word search) · Goethe, Die erste Walpurgisnacht (1799) and letter to Zelter, 3 December 1812 · Landesverwaltungsamt Sachsen-Anhalt, NSG "Bodetal" (decree of 5 March 1937) · Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt, "Denkmal des Monats" June 2023: Walpurgishalle (Pregla/Steinecke) · Uwe Puschner, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich (2001) · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Saxon" · Wikipedia (de) articles "Hexentanzplatz (Harz)", "Hexentanzplatz", "Roßtrappe", "Walpurgishalle", "Harzer Bergtheater Thale", used as a register of sources · MDR, "Hexentanzplatz im Harz wiedereröffnet", 26 September 2024 · Fuhrmann/Vogt, Die Steine am Hexentanzplatz, 2nd ed. 2007.
Further reading on our site: The besom: history of the witch's broom · Gerald Gardner: what is documented