It used to be that criminal punishments were the greatest form of public entertainment in Western Europe.
After all, this was before the day of basketball and video games. Books did exist at that point, but most people did not know how to read or write. They could always appreciate music and theatre, but the majority of the masses had little opportunity to experience such things.
And so public criminal punishments held in the city square were the greatest form of entertainment because they moved people's emotions in one way or another and would provide a stimulus outside of the normal rhythm of daily life. (Of course, the official reason was so everyone could show their disapproval of the criminal.)
And they did not always simply watch.
In some cases, they would actively participate.
Here is one example.
One possible penalty was public humiliation. It was one of the kinder punishments when compared to being decapitated with an axe or having one's arms and legs broken and tied in a knot using some giant wheel-like objet d'art.
The person being punished would simply be made to stand in the center of the public square with their arms and legs bound and then left there for a certain amount of time. The level of humiliation of the punishment was increased for the severity of the crime committed. Sometimes the person would have their clothes ripped open or be forced to wear a pig mask.
At first glance, public humiliation did not involve any direct violence.
Nothing was done to the criminal beyond the bound hands and legs.
However, there was an implicit understanding that the criminal had no way to stop the masses whatever they might do. These "good neighbors" who were starved for some kind of stimulation would do all sorts of things to the immobile criminal. They would throw stones at him, hit him with sticks, bring human waste from their houses and dump it on him, and otherwise enjoy the "justified punishment".
And on top of that, the criminal investigation abilities of the time were quite sloppy even when you did not take the infamous witch hunts into account. And the people were well aware of that. They pretended to do what they did because they could not go against the wishes of the authorities, but it can be guessed they felt a dark joy at punishing these people that were not evil but were neighbors they wished to treat as evil.
That was the way of things in that era.
In that era, criminal charges and legends about the criminal were often added after the fact.
There were many stories told of someone who bumped into a wealthy man being beheaded as a legendarily great thief, or a wife criticizing her husband for cheating on her being proclaimed violent due to demon possession and then her decapitated head blinking or a strange plant shaped like a woman growing from the ground where her blood landed. In fact, these stories even made it into official government records, so a lot of information from that age was of dubious accuracy.
And that is why the legends of that woman were buried amid all the other legends.
Fräulein Kreutune.
That woman outlasted 308 of the trials by ordeal that became for the basis of the "confession by torture" method that was later often used in witch hunts.
It did not matter if she was left within great flames for hours on end or forced to hold scorching hot stones in her hands.
It did not matter if she was tossed into a spring with her arms and legs bound.
It did not matter if she was tied to the top of a tower and struck by lightning.
It did not matter if she was left in a cell without food or water for over a month.
Not only did she not die, but her expression did not even change much, if at all. That woman's true identity and the trick behind her survival could not be determined simply by calling them legends of the day.
The general form of those trials by ordeal was to put the suspected witch through various ordeals. If she was guilty, god would abandon her and she would be harmed. If she was innocent, god would save her and she would not be harmed.
Later, it was decided that trials by ordeal were testing god which was forbidden, so they changed their methods to simply obtaining confessions by torture. However, the trials by ordeal did achieve some results when it came to Fräulein Kreutune.
Ironically, the judges at the time could only come to one conclusion.
Fräulein Kreutune had not been injured and ergo she was innocent and nothing but a mere human.