On September 8, 1677, a young painter lay struggling on the floor of an Austrian chapel while priests prayed over him. Then, according to the monks’ account, he suddenly stopped fighting and stared into an empty corner.
His name was Christoph Haizmann, and he believed something terrifying was standing before him. He claimed the Devil had appeared holding a contract, a document supposedly signed years earlier with his own blood.
The priests could see nothing where the painter was looking. Yet Haizmann reportedly broke free, rushed toward the corner, and returned holding a piece of paper. The monks recorded the incident as an extraordinary religious deliverance.
The document was believed to represent a bargain with Satan. Haizmann had allegedly promised his body and soul after nine years of service. But the strangest part of his story was still waiting to emerge.
To understand what happened inside that chapel, the story begins nearly a decade earlier in Bavaria, where a grieving teenager was struggling with a personal tragedy that would shape the rest of his life.
Christoph Haizmann was born around 1652 in Traunstein, Bavaria. He eventually became a painter, but his early years were marked by a devastating loss. According to later religious records, his father died when Christoph was still young.
Around 1668, the teenager reportedly fell into profound despair following his father’s death. The surviving account describes a young man overwhelmed by grief, unable to recover emotionally from losing someone central to his life.
During this period, Haizmann later claimed that an unusual visitor approached him. The stranger appeared as an older gentleman with a brown beard, a red cloak, and a walking stick, accompanied by a black dog.
The mysterious visitor allegedly offered the teenager extraordinary rewards. According to Haizmann’s account, these included magical books, money, a yellow purse containing coins, and opportunities for worldly pleasure. The painter claimed he rejected those temptations.
Nevertheless, Haizmann said he eventually agreed to a disturbing arrangement. Rather than describing a conventional exchange for wealth or influence, the surviving contract presented him as the stranger’s bound son for nine years.
The first agreement was reportedly written in ink. Its language committed the young man to serve the mysterious figure, but it did not clearly explain what he would receive in return for surrendering his freedom.
A second document, according to the later account, made the supposed arrangement even more disturbing. This time, Haizmann claimed he signed using his own blood and explicitly identified the recipient of his promise as Satan.
The wording committed him to Satan as a bound son, with his body and soul belonging to the Devil after nine years. Two short contracts supposedly placed the teenager under an approaching supernatural deadline.
What makes the agreements particularly strange is their missing reward. Traditional stories about bargains with Satan usually involve money, power, forbidden knowledge, or pleasure. Haizmann’s recorded agreements offered no equally clear benefit to the human signer.
The absence of a promised reward would later become important to investigators examining the case. Rather than suggesting ordinary greed, the documents appeared connected to the painter’s emotional suffering and his unresolved relationship with his deceased father.
Haizmann also created paintings depicting the visitors he believed had appeared before him. Eight images were preserved through copies in the religious records, each accompanied by descriptions explaining the frightening figures he claimed to have encountered.
The earliest image portrayed a relatively ordinary older gentleman. Subsequent pictures became increasingly unsettling as the figure changed appearance, eventually taking on monstrous characteristics, including wings and features associated with traditional depictions of the Devil.
Whether these paintings represented supernatural encounters, religious imagination, or psychological distress cannot be established from the surviving material. What is clear is that Haizmann’s descriptions became progressively more frightening as his account developed.
For approximately nine years, the available narrative provides little information about his ordinary life. His movements, employment, relationships, and personal circumstances during this period remain largely undocumented within the account preserved by the monks.
Then, on August 29, 1677, Haizmann attended a church service in Pottenbrunn, Lower Austria. According to the historical narrative, he suddenly collapsed and suffered violent convulsions, alarming the people gathered around him during worship.
The episodes reportedly continued over the following days. Haizmann eventually confessed to the local priest that he had signed a contract with Satan nearly nine years earlier and feared the Devil was about to claim him.
The priest, Leopold Braun, regarded the situation as a desperate spiritual emergency. On September 1, he wrote to the religious authorities at Mariazell, describing the painter’s condition and emphasizing the approaching September 24 deadline.
Mariazell was an important Austrian pilgrimage destination with a long tradition of devotion to the Virgin Mary. For centuries, visitors had traveled there seeking spiritual assistance, healing, and relief from suffering they could not otherwise overcome.
Haizmann was brought to the sanctuary, where priests began performing exorcism prayers on September 5. According to the monks’ records, his struggles continued for three days as the clergy attempted to deliver him from his feared tormentor.
On September 8, the feast celebrating the birth of the Virgin Mary, the situation reportedly reached its dramatic turning point. Shortly before midnight, Haizmann stopped resisting and fixed his attention on a corner of the chapel.
He claimed that Satan was standing there, no longer appearing as the elderly gentleman from his earlier visions. Instead, the figure had allegedly transformed into a winged dragon holding the blood contract he desperately wanted returned.
The priests themselves reportedly saw no dragon. Nevertheless, Haizmann suddenly escaped their grasp, ran toward the apparently empty corner, and returned with a document that the monks identified as the contract written in blood.
The abbey authorities recorded the incident as a triumph over Satan. From their religious perspective, the painter had recovered the evidence of his terrible promise and escaped the supernatural obligation that had threatened his eternal salvation.
For Haizmann, however, the apparent deliverance did not bring lasting peace. He subsequently traveled to Vienna, where he stayed with his married sister, hoping to resume life beyond the fear that had consumed him.
On October 11, 1677, his distressing experiences reportedly returned. The painter began keeping a diary describing recurring visions, temptations, frightening religious encounters, physical attacks, and episodes that left him increasingly distressed and uncertain about his condition.
One apparition appeared as a wealthy nobleman who offered money, employment, and worldly pleasures. Haizmann described magnificent halls filled with dancing women and even a throne constructed from gold coins, supposedly intended to make him a king.
The visions subsequently changed from worldly temptation to religious terror. Beginning around October 20, he claimed to encounter a radiant figure identifying itself as Christ, demanding that he abandon ordinary life and serve God in isolation.
According to his diary, this figure instructed him to spend six years in the wilderness. It also presented terrifying visions of hell, transforming what might have appeared to be a spiritual calling into another source of fear.
The experiences intensified after Christmas. Haizmann described a vision in which he stood surrounded by flames, bleeding from his mouth and nose while spirits punished him for thoughts he considered sinful inside a church.
The threatening figures allegedly warned that the suffering would continue unless he joined a religious order. His accounts reveal a deeply troubled man whose fear of damnation increasingly shaped his perception of ordinary thoughts and experiences.
Throughout these months, Haizmann also reported blackouts, repeated convulsions, and periods of physical weakness. At one point, according to the narrative, his legs stopped functioning, adding another terrifying dimension to his already disturbing experiences.
By May 1678, the painter returned to Mariazell seeking further religious assistance. There, he disclosed a detail that dramatically complicated the monks’ earlier declaration of victory over the Devil and the supposedly recovered blood agreement.
The document he had retrieved during the exorcism was only one of two alleged contracts. The original ink agreement, he explained, had never been returned, leaving him fearful that Satan retained another claim over him.
This revelation changed the meaning of the earlier ceremony. The monks had believed the blood contract represented the end of his ordeal, but Haizmann now insisted that another document continued to bind him to the Devil.
His return to Mariazell led to further religious intervention, and the surviving account places his eventual recovery within the monastery’s spiritual framework. Yet the documents associated with both supposed agreements would later raise serious chronological questions.
Between 1714 and 1729, a monk compiled an extensive record of the case. The collection included correspondence, reports from religious authorities, the painter’s diary, reproductions of his artwork, and copies of the alleged contracts.
The compilation became known as the Trophy of Mariazell. To the monks responsible for preserving it, the material represented evidence of a remarkable victory in which religious devotion had rescued a troubled soul from Satan.
In 1729, the abbot of St. Lambrecht certified that the collected writings and illustrations corresponded to the original materials held in the monastery’s archives. The surviving compilation subsequently became an important historical source for the case.
The collection eventually attracted the attention of Sigmund Freud. In 1923, the influential psychoanalyst published an interpretation of Haizmann’s experiences, approaching the supposed demonic bargain from a psychological rather than supernatural perspective.
Freud focused particularly on the death of the painter’s father. He proposed that Haizmann’s despair created an emotional need for a replacement paternal figure, giving the Devil an unusual role within the young man’s imagination.
This interpretation offered a possible explanation for the contracts’ peculiar wording. Instead of bargaining for wealth or pleasure, Haizmann appeared to be offering himself as a son, seeking a relationship rather than a conventional reward.
The psychologist also examined a troubling discrepancy in the surviving paperwork. Both copied contracts carried dates in 1669, yet the original account placed the expiration of the nine-year obligation in September 1677.
Counting backward nine years from September 1677 suggested that at least one agreement should have originated in 1668. The conflicting dates created an inconsistency that could not be explained simply by accepting the monks’ chronology.
Freud proposed a controversial solution. He suggested that the ink contract might have been produced after the original exorcism, providing Haizmann with a reason to return when his distressing experiences continued despite the apparent deliverance.
Under that interpretation, the second document was not evidence of another supernatural bargain. It was potentially part of the painter’s continuing psychological struggle, with its inconsistent date revealing a problem in the reconstructed narrative.
The theory remained an interpretation rather than a proven conclusion. The surviving copies do not establish precisely when each original document was created, who wrote every portion, or how the agreements entered the religious archives.
Another important limitation concerns the physical documents themselves. The copies survive within the historical compilation, but the original ink and blood agreements have not been conclusively produced for modern examination in the account presented here.
Even Freud could only refer to reports that the original documents were preserved at Mariazell. Consequently, the authenticity, physical composition, and complete chain of custody of the alleged blood contract remain unresolved historical questions.
The evidence therefore supports a narrower conclusion than the dramatic religious story suggests. Haizmann’s experiences were recorded, and his alleged contracts became part of a historical collection, but those records cannot establish actual supernatural intervention.
After his second period of treatment, the painter eventually entered the Brothers Hospitallers, a religious order devoted to caring for the sick. He adopted the name Brother Chrysostom, choosing a life centered on religious service.
Joining the order marked a major change in his circumstances. The young man who had once feared eternal ownership by Satan now spent his days within a structured religious community, helping patients who depended upon the brothers.
Yet his disturbing experiences reportedly never disappeared completely. Later religious accounts suggested that he continued to experience temptations associated with the Devil, especially after drinking more wine than usual, although the brothers regarded his resistance as spiritually successful.
The records state that he remained within the order for approximately two decades. Whatever the nature of his earlier suffering, his later life was largely associated with religious service rather than the frightening visions that had made him notorious.
On March 14, 1700, Brother Chrysostom died of a fever in a monastery in Bohemia. The religious account described his death as peaceful, bringing an unexpectedly quiet conclusion to a life once dominated by extraordinary fears.
His death did not end the mystery surrounding the contracts. The preserved writings remained available for later readers, including scholars who would interpret the same documents through dramatically different understandings of religion, human behavior, and mental suffering.
For the seventeenth-century monks, the case demonstrated the power of faith over demonic possession. For Freud, it reflected unresolved grief, paternal longing, and psychological conflict expressed through the religious symbolism of Haizmann’s world.
Neither explanation can be treated as complete proof of what occurred inside the painter’s mind. The historical documents preserve reported experiences, institutional beliefs, and contradictory details, but they cannot establish every event independently.
The most unsettling feature of the case may be the contracts themselves. Their language surrendered the signer’s body and soul while apparently demanding nothing tangible in return, challenging familiar expectations about bargains involving the Devil.
A grieving teenager, a supposed promise written in blood, frightening religious visions, and a document with inconsistent dates became intertwined in a historical mystery that continued attracting attention long after the painter’s death.
Nearly three centuries after the compilation was certified, the Trophy of Mariazell remains a remarkable record of early modern religious belief and personal suffering. Its pages preserve extraordinary claims without proving that Satan ever appeared.
Christoph Haizmann’s story ultimately leaves two different mysteries: what caused his terrifying experiences, and how the documents describing them were created. The surviving evidence offers interpretations, contradictions, and uncertainty rather than a definitive supernatural answer.
The man who believed he had surrendered his soul twice spent his final years caring for the sick. His alleged contracts survived in written records, while the Devil he feared remained a figure described only through testimony and art.
