The facts regarding the after-life of Loos were discovered by Prof.Burr in manuscript records at Brussels.
That this threat was not unmeaning had been seen a few years earlier in a case even more noted, and in the same city.

During the last decades of the sixteenth century, Dietrich Flade, an eminent jurist, was rector of the University of Treves, and chief judge of the Electoral Court, and in the latter capacity he had to pass judgment upon persons tried on the capital charge of magic and witchcraft.

For a time he yielded to the long line of authorities, ecclesiastical and judicial, supporting the reality of this crime; but he at last seems to have realized that it was unreal, and that the confessions in his torture chamber, of compacts with Satan, riding on broomsticks to the witch-sabbath, raising tempests, producing diseases, and the like, were either the results of madness or of willingness to confess anything and everything, and even to die, in order to shorten the fearful tortures to which the accused were in all cases subjected until a satisfactory confession was obtained.
On this conviction of the unreality of many at least of the charges Flade seems to have acted, and he at once received his reward.

He was arrested by the authority of the archbishop and charged with having sold himself to Satan--the fact of his hesitation in the persecution being perhaps what suggested his guilt.

He was now, in his turn, brought into the torture chamber over which he had once presided, was racked until he confessed everything which his torturers suggested, and finally, in 1589, was strangled and burnt.
Of that trial a record exists in the library of Cornell University in the shape of the original minutes of the case, and among them the depositions of Flade when under torture, taken down from his own lips in the torture chamber.