"He saved my life," said Korai, 33, describing the attack from last June. Her skin was still scarred and one hand bumpy with an ill-fixed bone. She asked to be identified by only her first name over safety concerns.
She said of the baby: "I didn't kill her. I don't even know what a sorcerer is."
Cases like Korai's are disturbingly common in Papua New Guinea. Though it is hard to know for sure, researchers say that anecdotal evidence suggests such episodes are on the rise in at least parts of the country. They seem to reflect continued widespread belief that evil spirits exist, and that when tragedy strikes, black magic is the cause.
Observers say that changes in society are making the violence worse. Papua New Guinea is rich in resources, and foreign investment has increased in the country. At the same time, economic opportunities remain limited for many, creating a tinderbox of frustration, tension, and anger.
People have filmed women hanging from wooden poles, as attackers burn their breasts and thighs with glowing metal bars. "The violence is becoming more extreme," said Miranda Forsyth, a professor at the Australian National University who has focused on sorcery accusations. "It's a symptom of things being very, very wrong."
In one photograph, shared by Australian researchers, women sit naked and blindfolded on a sheet of metal with a fire burning below, in what resembles a contemporary stake.
In a sign of the scale of the problem, its horrors were related to Pope Francis, who visited Papua New Guinea in September. Sister Lorena, a Swiss nun, told Francis that she had saved over 200 people from sorcery-related accusations. One of them, the nun said, had been "tortured and burned so badly that we did not know if we could save her life."
The country's geography makes it hard to track cases. Its people speak hundreds of different languages and live scattered in bushlands across an area the size of California. There has not been a reliable census in years.
Many attacks go unreported, as the belief in witchcraft and the desire to punish sorcerers are widespread. Only a tiny fraction of perpetrators are prosecuted.
Researchers at the Australian National University documented 1,039 accusations involving 1,553 victims across four provinces of Papua New Guinea from 2016 to 2020. Roughly 300 were injured or killed. The practice is not confined to Papua New Guinea; cases have also been documented in Africa and Asia.
In Papua New Guinea, when a sudden death, illness, or other tragic event hits a community, alleged culprits are sometimes identified by a person nicknamed the glass man. He does so by burning a bamboo stick and interpreting the direction of the smoke. Multiple people can be accused and rounded up simultaneously.
The country has witnessed transformative change in recent decades. Phone companies have connected disparate regions, and multinational firms have set up huge mining and logging operations, bringing in new infrastructure and cash. But the development has been uneven and it has not dispelled traditional superstition, experts say. In fact, some say, the breakdown in traditional governance systems, combined with economic uncertainty and poor access to education and health care, has contributed to making the violence more brutal.
"There is much more tension," said Sister Lorena, who has been working in Papua New Guinea for over 40 years.
The country is largely Christian, and some religious leaders or pastors play an active role in nurturing these superstitions. Belief in sorcery is widespread, though not everyone who believes sorcerers exist approves of the lynchings.
Carmel Piknisu, 38, teaches elementary school in the village of Utai, near the border with Indonesia. In September, she traveled to the town of Vanimo to see the pope. Sitting with bottles of water and rosaries she had brought to be blessed, she said that she hoped the pope's presence would help her community fight witchcraft.
"All the sorcerers must repent and stop," said Piknisu, adding that witches "use some pretty bad things like poison" to harm people.
In 2022, The Post Courier, Papua New Guinea's main newspaper, published a letter from a reader who argued that "the dark angels are everywhere in our ecosystem."
The United Nations has tried to dispel these beliefs. "TB is not caused by sorcery," read a campaign sponsored here by the World Health Organization. Until 2013, Papua New Guinea allowed suspicion of witchcraft as a plausible defense in court. Two years ago, it criminalized the work of the "glass men," but rights activists say prosecutions remain rare.
The attacks are not confined to the remote highlands; they have spread to the main city as people migrated there, said Shirley Kaupa, an aid worker who supports victims of domestic abuse and sorcery accusations in Port Moresby.
There, shelters are filled not only with women who were recently tortured, but with their relatives, husbands, and children, who carry the indelible stigma of these accusations.
Rose, 42, lives in the same shelter as Korai. Her husband was accused of witchcraft and of being responsible for the death of a little girl in their community. A group of young men stormed their house and beat her husband.
"They said, 'You are a family of sorcerers,'" said Rose, who also wanted to be identified by only her first name to protect her safety.
Rose said that she suspected that the accusations were motivated by envy and a wish to take over her family's land and home, which the stigma of sorcery keeps her from returning to.
"They will still point fingers at us, and if they see our children," Rose said, "they will continue to accuse our children."
A few steps away, Korai shared the same concern, as her son, now 11, looked on.