Ghosts of Berkeley County, South Carolina by Bruce Orr

Author:Bruce Orr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

HAGS, HANTS, BOO-DADDIES AND ROOT MAGIC

As stated in the earlier tale concerning the town of Childsbury, the slave population brought with it its own culture and folklore, which eventually combined with the others in Berkeley County. The slaves formed what would be known as the Gullah or Geechee culture of the Lowcountry of South Carolina and the state of Georgia. With the culture came its own group of spirits, demons, ghouls and magic, as well as a vast array of entities and an equally vast array of methods to deal with them. Some entities were mere nuisances, while others could be quite deadly. The latter usually required the help of a conjurer or root doctor to assist the victims in ridding themselves of the entity. Root magic was, and still is, considered to be a very powerful form of magic throughout the Lowcountry.

In the Gullah culture, there were the simple ghosts known as “hants” or “haints.” They were the ghosts of deceased people who refused to move on. They were considered nuisance spirits and were said to be more prevalent at the time of a new moon.

“Hags” were a little more dangerous. They would creep up on you while you slept and ride you like a horse. The victim would be unable to move, and sometimes the hag would beat the victim and suck the life from them as it rode them. Oftentimes a conjurer had to be called in to catch the hag. The hag catcher consisted of a mason jar filled with pins and needles. The conjurer would sit in the room with the sleeping victim, and upon seeing the first signs of trouble he would grasp the jar and wave the trap above the victim while speaking a conjuring spell. The hag would be captured in the jar, and the jar would then be sealed and buried. Hags could be demonic entities, but they could also be the spirits of the living. The spirits of the living that intended to do harm to the victim often left the evildoer at night while they slept and inflicted harm on the victim as he or she slept. These spirits were known as “boo-daddies.” When a boo-daddie of a living owner was captured in a hag trap and buried, the owner would inevitably suffer a very painful and horrific death due to the fact their soul had been trapped in a jar and buried, and they would be forced to sit on pins and needles for eternity.

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