The Mandrake Under the Gallows: Folklore, Law, and the Hanged Man

The mandrake is the root that looks like a little person, and for centuries one story explained why. It grew, the story went, at the foot of a gallows, where the seed or the urine of a hanged man had dripped into the ground. What came up was the last trace of the man himself: a root in his shape, with what looked like arms and legs. It carried his luck and his spirit. The belief was written down in Strasbourg in 1500 and still produced films in the 1920s. At every step it was attacked by the people who knew the plant best.

The Mandrake Under the Gallows

The plain form of the belief is easy to state. Under a gallows, where the fluids of an executed man had soaked into the earth, a mandrake would grow. The plant was the man’s residue, and its human shape was the proof. The German name for the root, Alraun or Alraune, came to be joined by a second name that said it all: Galgenmännlein, the little gallows man. Flemish folklore had mandragora manneken, Italian mandragora maschio. A 2021 study of the plant’s vernacular names counted fourteen gallows names for it, seven German and four Dutch, and dated the written record of the belief to the early sixteenth century.

The earliest printed record we can point to is older than that and already skeptical. In his Kleines Destillierbuch, printed in Strasbourg in 1500, the surgeon Hieronymus Brunschwig reported that the mandrake “is dug under the gallows” and, so people said, “comes from the nature of a urinating thief.” Then he added his own verdict: “which is false.” Brunschwig had no use for the story, but he wrote it down, and his sentence is the earliest verifiable trace of the gallows mandrake in print.

The plant itself had nothing to do with gallows. The mandrake is native to the Mediterranean, and John Gerard, the English herbalist, noted that it grows “in hot regions, in woods and mountains, as in mount Garganus in Apulia.” Gerard had planted and replanted mandrakes himself. The forked taproot can split into leg-like lobes, and that resemblance, not the execution site, is what the story grew around. The Inside the Mandrake: Root of Screams, Salves, and Story article covers the plant itself, its chemistry, and its medical history. Here we stay at the gallows.

The Hanged Man’s Seed

The belief developed exact mechanics. The fluids had to come from a hanged man, and the best hanged man was a thief. Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, writing under the name Simplicissimus in 1673, spelled out the conditions: the hanged man had to be a hereditary thief who had died a virgin, and his mother must have stolen, or planned to steal, while she carried him. If all that held, the fluids that dripped down would produce a Galgn-Mänl, the arch-thief’s soul mixed with his seed and urine. The root then served as a familiar in the house.

A legend collected in the Black Forest and written down in 1891 repeated the pattern: the mandrake grows from a hereditary thief who kept his chastity and drops water or seed when the rope takes him. In that telling the plant has broad leaves and yellow flowers. The real mandrake flowers violet, and the mismatch shows how easily the story settled on whatever big-rooted plant stood near at hand. Gerard had already explained the mechanism: English vendors carved bryony roots into human shapes and sold them as mandrakes, a “falsifying practice,” he wrote, that “hath confirmed the error amongst the simple and unlearned people.” The gallows story and the fake root reinforced each other.

In Iceland the plant went by another name, the thieves’ root, and was said to grow from the froth that dribbled from the mouth of the hanged man. In every version the source is the same: the executed body gives something of itself to the ground.

Johannes Praetorius, the seventeenth-century German writer who collected such material in his Saturnalia of 1663, described the proper harvest. It had to happen on a Friday before sunrise. The collector stopped his ears with cotton, sealed them with wax or pitch, and made the sign of the cross three times while working. The root, once brought home and properly tended, was treated as a servant. The German Alraun tradition kept the root in a shrine or a cloth, fed and washed it, and consulted it for money and luck, the same way the alchemical homunculus was fed and kept in its flask.

The Dog and the Shriek

The harvest ritual is the oldest layer of the story, and it predates the gallows. In the first century, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus described a root called Baaras that grew in a valley near the fortress of Machaerus, on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. It was flame-colored and shone like lightning toward evening, and it could only be taken with care. The harvester dug a trench around it until the root hung by a thin thread, then tied a dog to it. The dog, pulling to follow its master, tore the root free and died on the spot, in the man’s place. Josephus added that the root was used to drive out demons, a function that belongs to the long history of exorcism across religions and cultures. An older precaution, recorded by Pliny and quoted by Sir Thomas Browne, was to draw three circles around the root with a sword and dig facing west.

By Gerard’s day the danger had been given a voice. The root screamed when pulled from the earth, and the scream killed anyone who heard it. John Gerard, in his Herball of 1597, repeated the method and the warning: “he who would take up a plant thereof must tie a dog thereunto to pull it up, which will give a great shriek at the digging up; otherwise if a man should do it, he should surely die in short space after.” Then Gerard, who had dug up mandrakes himself, dismissed the whole apparatus. “All which dreams and old wives’ tales you shall from henceforth cast out of your books and memory,” he wrote, “they are all and every part of them false and most untrue.”

William Turner, the reformer and botanist, had said the same a generation earlier. In his New Herball of 1568 he mocked “a certain dotyng doctor of Colon” who taught in his lectures that the mandrake grew under gallows from “the sede of man that falleth from hym that is hanged,” and he rejected the false etymology that derived Mandragora from man’s seed. He also condemned the carved roots sold in England, “little puppettes and mammettes,” trimmed by “crafty theives to mocke the poore people with all, and to rob them both of theyr wit and theyr money.” The shriek itself is a medieval addition. The classical sources record the danger but not the voice; the earliest written scream appears in the Anglo-Norman bestiary of Philippe de Thaon, written around 1119.

A Skeptic at the Naturalienkammer

The strongest attack on the gallows belief came from a German text that most histories skip. In 1703 an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title Kurtze Betrachtung der Mandragorae oder Alraun-Wurtzel, a short consideration of the alraune root, written, as the title page said, for lovers of natural magic and “for the destruction of superstitious opinions.” It is a small book of two letters, the second signed De Halperia and dated from Leguin, 30 January 1703.

The first letter describes a visit. Traveling through the market town of Brandenburg, the author called on a learned man and was shown a root of human shape, the Alraun-Wurzel, kept in his cabinet of curiosities. The owner explained that it grew only in one kind of place, “under the gallows,” that it was hard to find and dangerous to dig up, that it brought love and unchanging luck, and that because it had sprung from human seed it contained a secret spirit. Washed with wine and kept clean in a hidden place, the owner said, the root could serve as a homunculus and would bring money and valuables.

The correspondent did not believe it. He answered point by point. No botanist had ever confirmed that the root grows only under gallows. Whether a hanged man even emits seed is itself disputed among scholars. And if spilled seed were the mechanism, he wrote, mandrakes would have to grow wherever men and animals spill seed, “which is evidently false.” Urine is an excrement, he added, and could not produce a plant. He finished with the sharpest cut: it is absurd to say the root lives and cries out, because God gave plants no animal life, and a voice belongs only to creatures with one. Behind the whole superstition, he concluded, stands the Devil, who “is quite willing” to deceive men into error.

The 1703 author kept the Devil in the picture. But he drew the same line as Gerard and Turner: the root is a root, it grows where it grows, and the story of the screaming gallows-spirit is a lie that bad teaching and carved fakes kept alive.

The Gallows as a Place of Power

The belief did not survive on botany. It survived because the gallows was more than a place of execution. In folk culture the execution site read as a threshold, ground where death and the body’s last fluids met, and therefore ground where extraordinary things could grow. The gallows in the ballad quoted in Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood of 1834 stood “just where the creaking carcass swings,” and the mandrake there was “engendered from the fat that drops from the bones of the dead.” The place itself was the argument.

The same logic put the alraune in the witch trials. In 1650, at Rottenburg in Württemberg, a man on trial confessed that he had gone into a forest at night, masturbated into a vessel, and buried it, expecting a good-luck charm to grow from it. The confession reads like the gallows story turned inward: the seed in the ground, the charm that comes up.

The trade in gallows mandrakes faded in the nineteenth century, and the reason was practical. Executions moved from the countryside gallows into centralized prison yards, the bodies were no longer left to display at the crossroads, and the residue the root was supposed to grow from stopped being available. The belief lost its supply line.

From Woodcut to Novel

Before it faded, the image had been fixed in art. The woodcut from the 1485 Herbarius zu Teutsch shows the male mandrake as a bearded human figure crowned with leaves, establishing the root’s anthropomorphic shape in print. In 1870 the painter Robert Bateman exhibited a gouache at the Dudley Gallery in London, Three People Plucking Mandrake, in which three women, possibly witches, pull a mandrake up by cords at the foot of a gallows. The critic Christopher Newall noted that the mandrake “is reputed to give a scream that will frighten the hearer to death,” which is why the women use the elaborate system of lines.

Shakespeare had already used the two registers of the plant, the shriek and the sleep. Suffolk, in Henry VI, Part 2, wishes curses could kill “as doth the mandrake’s groan.” Juliet, facing the tomb, hears “shrieks like mandrakes’ torn out of the earth.” Iago tells Othello that “not poppy, nor mandragora” will give him sleep, and Banquo asks whether he and Macbeth have “eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner.” The plant was a poison that makes you mad and a medicine that puts you under, and the gallows story gave it a birthplace.

The nineteenth century turned the belief into fiction. In 1827, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué published a novella, Mandragora. Eine Novelle, and German literary history credits him with fixing the little gallows man, Galgenmännlein, as a second name for the root. In 1911, Hanns Heinz Ewers wrote Alraune, the story of a scientist who uses the semen of a hanged murderer to artificially inseminate a woman, and the child, Alraune, carries the criminal’s coldness. The novel was filmed four times: in 1918 as Alraune, die Henkerstochter, in 1928 by Henrik Galeen with Brigitte Helm, in 1930 by Richard Oswald again with Helm, and in 1952, directed by Arthur Maria Rabenalt, with Hildegard Knef. The gallows seed, which had been folk belief in 1500 and a seller’s story in the herbals, became the plot of twentieth-century horror, in the same German Expressionist air that produced Nosferatu.

The mandrake still grows in the Mediterranean, flowers violet in late winter, and forked roots still look, to a willing eye, like people. No one has found one under a gallows. The people who spent their lives pulling the roots out of ordinary ground said so plainly. The belief came from the gallows, not from the root: the same gallows that gave the witch-sabbath its night sky in Walpurgisnacht and the poisoned garden its other tenants, henbane and belladonna. A man was hanged, something of him entered the ground, and the ground gave back a story in his shape.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Hieronymus Brunschwig, Kleines Destillierbuch (Strasbourg, 1500), mandrake entry (quoted in de: Wikipedia, ‘Alraune (Kulturgeschichte)’)
• John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597), chap. 65 ‘Of Mandrake’
• William Turner, A New Herball (1568), quoted in A. J. Carter, ‘Myths and mandrakes,’ Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 96 (2003)
• Anonymous, Kurtze Betrachtung der Mandragorae oder Alraun-Wurtzel (Cosmopoli [pseud.], 1703), Internet Archive b31880307_0002
• Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War, Book VII (the Baaras root), trans. William Whiston
• Johannes Praetorius, Saturnalia (1663), harvest ritual (cited in en: Wikipedia, ‘Mandrake’)
• Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimi Galgen-Männlin (1673), ‘Galgn-Mänl’ passage (cited in en: Wikipedia, ‘Mandrake’)
• Philippe de Thaon, Le Bestiaire (c. 1119), the earliest written mandrake shriek
• William Harrison Ainsworth, Rookwood: A Romance (London, 1834), the ballad ‘The Mandrake’ (Internet Archive text)
• Brothers Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, no. 83 ‘Der Alraun’ (1816), care and inheritance of the root (cited in en: Wikipedia, ‘Galgenmännlein’)
• Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Mandragora. Eine Novelle (Berlin, 1827)
• de: Wikipedia, ‘Alraune (Kulturgeschichte)’ (accessed 2026-08-15)
• en: Wikipedia, ‘Mandrake’ and ‘Galgenmännlein’ (accessed 2026-08-15)
• Sõukand et al., ‘In search of traces of the mandrake myth,’ Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 17 (2021)
• Wellcome Collection, ‘Mandrake medicine and myths’ (2022)
• ‘The Places and Tools of Execution,’ in the Palgrave Handbook on the History of Execution (2017)
• Victorian Web, Robert Bateman’s ‘Plucking Mandrakes’ (1870), including the Christopher Newall quotation
• William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 4.3; Henry VI, Part 2 3.2; Othello 3.3; Macbeth 1.3 (MIT Shakespeare texts)
• Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune. Die Geschichte eines lebenden Wesens (1911)