# Zeil Witch Tower Documentation Centre

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Canonical page: https://mytuur.com/en/city/zeil-am-main/spot/zeil-witch-tower-documentation-centre/

Content updated: 2026-08-19

The Dokumentationszentrum Zeiler Hexenturm rises among Zeil’s timber-framed houses as a fifteenth-century stone tower. Narrow cells, steep stairways and vaulted rooms reveal its later use as a prison during the seventeenth-century witch persecutions.

The adjacent Fronhaus presents the permanent exhibition “Schicksale hinter den Akten” through original trial records, letters and diary entries. Johann Langhans’s diary gives one personal voice, while spatial staging and audiovisual elements connect documents with individual lives. The persecutions began in 1616, when nine women were executed by burning on 26 November, and more than 400 people from the region died in the following trials through 1631. An audio play by Monika Schraut recounts Rochus Hofmann and his daughters, accused in 1617, while the attic holds temporary exhibitions and the historic tower entrance.

The cool masonry, cramped rooms and surviving papers keep the history physically close.

- City: [Zeil am Main](https://mytuur.com/en/city/zeil-am-main/)

## Photos

- ![](https://mytuur-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/image_Dokumentationszentrum_Zeiler_Hexenturm_6a4a9df82ddcd70cf79d1d37_0.jpg) — [Image: wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zeil_oberes_Tor_Hexenturm_3280148.jpg)
- ![](https://mytuur-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/image_Dokumentationszentrum_Zeiler_Hexenturm_6a4a9df82ddcd70cf79d1d37_1.jpg) — [Image: wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zeil_Hexenturm_-20180826-RM-174339.jpg)

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