Witch Bottles: History, Culture, Magic by Daniel Harms

Author:Daniel Harms [Harms, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avalonia
Published: 2022-11-20T22:00:00+00:00

Later Evidence

Given that the geographic expanse of the continent and its relatively rapid settlement, historically speaking, an examination of North American witch bottles is probably best done in terms of space rather than time. Thus, the next part of our exploration will proceed from north to south through the eastern states, after which we will move to points west.

In the fishing villages of Newfoundland, “putting up a bottle” has remained a common remedy for misfortune. Barbara Rieti tells one particularly dramatic story. A local man had two auto tires go flat, and both his wife’s wedding ring and his wedding photo split in half, all within a single hour. He placed a bottle in the oven to heat; a few hours later, a woman from the other side of the island had to be airlifted to the hospital due to a urinary blockage.[123] Another man held such a bottle over his head as part of a ceremony, thereby killing his sister-in-law.[124] A unique aspect of this tradition is that the witch should be named at the time the bottle is created.[125] Further south, the demolishing of the hobs in a Halifax fireplace turned up a bottle filled with nails, the hair of a cow, parings from a hoof, and Bible passages.[126]

The most northerly tale in the States is set in Warren, New Hampshire, shortly after the American Revolution. A prominent citizen and constable of the town, Simeon Smith, was believed to have magical powers. Smith was feuding with Stevens Merrill, who Smith had compelled to pay taxes to support the American cause. One day Merrill’s boy Caleb started to act strangely, sometimes writhing in pain, at other times climbing to the roof of the house or barn. Merrill’s neighbours convinced him to place a bottle with Caleb’s urine under the hearth. Twice, Smith developed a nosebleed which seemed to last until the cork popped out of the bottle. The third time, Merrill replaced the urine with blood and placed a sword in the cork. This led to the death of Smith, and the alleviation of Caleb’s illness.[127]

The staff at the Raitt Homestead Farm Museum in Eliot, Maine reported finding an empty bottle with a pentagram on the cork beneath the house’s eaves. The house itself was built in 1896, and the presence of the pentagram suggests this is a more recent production. No further evidence on this item has been forthcoming.[128]

An early nineteenth-century bottle containing fingernail parings was found near an African-American slave burial ground in Colonie, New York. The Schuyler family, once prominent in New York state politics, once owned this land. Other bottles have been found hidden in Hudson Valley houses, but none have been noted as containing nails or pins, and archaeologists have not analyzed their contents.[129]

Another glass phial, dating to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, has turned up in an excavation at the Cove Lands near Providence, Rhode Island. Little has been revealed about this bottle, save that it is a clear bottle likely used for medicine, and that six straight pins were inside.

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