The kind of magic I find myself closest to believing in, particularly on windy days, is the magic of Merricat Blackwood and concealed objects. You remember the magic of concealed objects, don’t you?
All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.
Did you know that this particular type of household magic has a name? It’s apotropaic magic, and it’s everywhere, including the walls of your house. From the Wikipedia entry on concealed shoes (muffled squeal at the thought of an entire article on concealed witch shoes):
“Since at least the early modern period it has been a common custom to hide objects such as written charms, dried or mummified cats, horse skulls, and witch bottles in the structure of a building, but concealed shoes are by far the most common items discovered.”
We’ll get back to the shoes in a minute, but a witch-bottle?
“A traditional witch bottle is a small flask about 2 inches (51 mm) high, created from blue or green glass. Larger and rounder witch bottles, up to 9 inches (230 mm) high, were known as “Greybeards” and employed so-called Bartmann or Bellarmine jugs…[made of] brown or gray stoneware glazed with salt and embossed with severe bearded faces intended to scare off evil.”
What should you put in your witch-bottle? Possibilities include (but are not limited to) urine, hair and nail clippings, red thread from a sprite trap(!), rosemary, needles, pins, wine, sand, stones, knotted threads, feathers, shells, herbs, flowers, salt, vinegar, oil, coins, or ashes. You can put pretty much anything in a witch bottle, as long as you bury it under your fireplace and never ever dig it up ever again.
Only eight witch bottles have ever been found in North America, which probably explains why we’re still mostly safe from witches. The key is to stop finding them.
If you do not have a salt-encrusted beard-jar at hand, you might also try burying a single shoe somewhere in the walls of your home. For more information, please pay a visit to the Northampton Museum Concealed Shoe Index, which is a real thing that actually exists.
When removing walls, especially around windows and doors, under roof rafters and behind old chimneys, homeowners should be aware of the possibility of turning up concealment shoes. While most are found in eighteenth and nineteenth century homes, a find hidden as late as 1935 has been reported. If shoes are found, they should left exactly as they were discovered and photographed.
When you woke up this morning, did you have any idea that the house you live in might be laced with powerful protection spells centered on Secret Wall Shoes? What object do you currently own that you suspect might hold counter-witch magic? Old jewelry, or a preserved bird’s nest, or the pack of playing cards your wealthy merchant father used to absently shuffle before that last voyage from which he never returned?
[Image via Wikipedia]
Tags: concealed shoes, object magic, shirley jackson, things your merchant father did before he never returned, witch bottles, witches
My dad used to play this game with me and my brother when we were very little. He would give us a list of things we’d have to find in the woods around our house: a leaf shaped like a heart, or moss, or thirty small twigs, or a brown stone. Then we would put them in this rotted stump and would have to leave while the spell worked. Several hours later we would come back and find the twigs and stuff gone, replaced by other little things in the stump. One time it was two small stone owls with orange eyes. I kept mine by my bed for like fifteen years. This is what I would put in the walls of my house.
Your dad was a very powerful witch, and a good man.
This is the best kid-distracting idea I’ve heard of yet. Beats the crap out of “do this 1500 piece jigsaw puzzle.”
Yeah no it took us at least an hour every time AND we were outside, so we were running around a bunch getting out energy. Genius work.
For an implausible length of time, every time I went out and did digging type stuff in our garden I would find a black glass marble. I thought I was going nuts and having deja vu until I started putting them in a drawer inside, and ended up with like, seven or eight of them. There’s probably more out there but now I’m thinking maybe I should leave them be.
Put them back right away! Or witches!!
I should add that every time I found one, I experienced a wash of calm happiness not unlike a pleasant dream state, but that might just be because I enjoyed collecting marbles as a child, or because I thought I was having deja vu. I think you’re right, they should go back!
That’s the witches trying to lull you into digging up all the marbles, no doubt.
Can I use this as the basis for a story? If I publish it (online, for free) I’d be glad to credit/link you.
sure, why not!
Reminds me of the medals with pictures of a certain saint on them, which my great-aunt would send my parents to put above our front door.
Soooo, if my home (an older house broken up into apartments) does contain concealed shoes or other witch-interference objects, and if (as previously established) I’m a witch…
… does that explain my migraines and occasional writer’s block? Or what?
This is freak-flag catnip, what the hey.
When I was about ten, my father illustrated me a deck of the Thoth tarot and taught me to read it and palms both. My grandmother’s house, pink, old, torn down now, was massively haunted. The haunt followed dad, lighting fires where there should be none, eg: the electric stove, parts of the basement. Eventually, Nana wouldn’t let him down the furnace room, because of the troubles with the pilot light.
We always had small blue bottles around and I never gave it a second thought.
Since that house I’ve had a little trouble determining which bits of children’s fiction are fiction, and which are straight sensible advice from fellow-travellers.
OH MAN
I found a shoe in my wall about a month ago. I didn’t touch it. It’s an old house, but it’s not that old of a shoe. It looked like it was from the 70’s and just got trapped when they remodeled the downstairs bathroom. Maybe it was put there on purpose, though? Let’s go with that.
The apartment upstairs from ours was remodeled over last summer (and let me tell you what a joy that was not, with power tools and heavy boots and early mornings in the rooms just above us), and the electricians had to open up the walls and snake wires all the way down to the basement beneath us for some reason, and they kept exclaiming over the junk they found stuffed into the walls.
One of them invited me up to check out the space, and he pointed out a heap of old dusty discarded things they’d fished out of the wall hollows. I’m not remotely superstitious, so it’s probably just the student archaeologist in me that reeeeeeeally wanted them to leave that stuff where it was put.
So, if I were going to mummify my annoying cat, can I just throw it in the attic, or do I have to open a wall? Does it count if you add it later?
oh my god come join my society of People Who Do Not Love Their Cats
My cat is the worst this week!
I want to take her to the barn and say “for the next week, you work here. We will then listen to your justifications for returning to our home.”
Yes I would like that! We can drink a lot and devise strategies for making them run away from home.
Also I must say, I have two cats, one of which I like very much despite his habit of pooping on the floor and hissing at guests, and the other of which I do not like at all despite her friendly demeanor and cute antics (also though she like to meow a lot at night, which is terrible).
my bunny has been behaving excellently well. maybe you all need bunnies! (he is litterbox-trained, too).
he actually wriggles his whole body from ears to tail and leaps in the air in circles when happy, which is at least once a day. see, how pleasant! though i will admit that, like most bunnies, he is a skillful sneaky and devoted chewer, that is true. he will chew all your (concealed) shoes…..
I had a bunny once. He ate the phone cords, and the lamp cords, and the edge of the carpet. He wasn’t litterbox trained (I’m not sure we realized this might be an option?), but the dog would follow him around like an M&M dispenser, so it wasn’t really a problem. He went to live elsewhere after about 6 months…
House bunny havers unite! The gnaw marks on my wooden furniture are a small price to pay for watching them jump for joy (binkies!) and flop and cuddle with each other and just generally be adorable.
When you woke up this morning, did you have any idea that the house you live in might be laced with powerful protection spells centered on Secret Wall Shoes?
This is a question that those of us who grew up in California tract homes purchased new by our parents never had cause to contemplate, though we did occasionally regret this reality.
When I was a kid, hanging out on building sites with my dad, he’d let me draw secret symbols on the wall behind the kitchen cabinets, say. So there is some small amount of hope for you!
So *that’s* why my bread would never rise!
Sorry! I was going for lucky things, but I wasn’t great at drawing, so who knows??
While I wouldn’t be exactly surprised about hidden shoes in my parent’s old house, I’ve never found any. My brother and I DID find the box where my mom had kept all the baby teeth the “tooth fairy” had taken from him, me, and our younger siblings. She didn’t know what to do with them so she kept them. We ended up burying them in the woods so that witches couldn’t get them. Some day, some poor construction worker is going to dig up a box of children’s teeth and be very freaked out.
OMIGOD you need to un-bury them and leave a laminated note.
Yes, because a laminated note containing the reassuring phrase “THESE ARE MY BABY TEETH JUST MY BABY TEETH NO ONE DIED NO NEED TO INFORM THE AUTHORITIES” will surely reassure someone who’s just plunged his hand into a trove of buried teeth.
Also, a picture of a toothless child giving a gummy smile and a thumb’s up!
I’m not sure what I’d put on a card to make it less creepy. “These children are fine”, “Don’t worry, I’m just hiding these from witches”, “I’m sorry for your future nightmares”.
“Don’t worry, I’m just hiding these from witches”
<3
“If you are a witch, please be advised that we are well armed with witch bottles.”
I knew someone whose mother saved his foreskin along with his baby teeth. Talk about witchbait.
When I was getting ready to move over the summer, I found a tiny bottle of my own baby teeth that my mother had saved and then, for reasons unknown, saw fit to pass down to me. WTF, mom.
“Here, honey, I thought you might need these in your new place.”
Ugh. My mom kept my baby teeth in an envelope in her closet. Creepy. I had to throw them out after she died. No thanks, Mom.
I stole my baby teeth back from my mom and spent a while carrying one around for luck.
A super straight-laced cheerleader classmate of mine had a birthday party that included, mind-bogglingly, a live metal band… all black clothing and white and black painted face and long black hair and leather and studs and growling. I like that kind of music a lot, but was perhaps the only person there who did… to this day I’m confused and puzzled as to why she had a metal band. it was very weird. Anyway, I gave the lead singer my tooth because why not.
I have always imagined building my own house and putting a few items in the walls or foundation to protect it and I did even know there was a history of other people doing this too! I don’t know if it is a relief to know that my crazy is a common crazy, or if it is creepy to think that I thought up something so similar.
I’m currently researching cob houses, and dreaming of one day building one of my own. It’s totally going to look like a witches cottage, and I will bury my treasures (I’ve already collected quite a few) in the walls, and I will whisper into them so they will know their purpose.
For now though, since I know I won’t be staying in this house forever, I haven’t buried anything, but instead have various objects placed around my room. Dried herbs, a butterfly wing (found/freely given), drift wood, petrified wood, giant chunk of salt, tiny bits of fossil, a skeleton of a small creature (found), various semi precious stones and minerals, lots of books(stories have power), sea shells, a small fisherman statue (found). Pretty sure if I found the object, it means it’s a protective spirit that wanted me to find it so it could protect me. And by pretty sure, I mean that I know I sound crazy, and feel free to make fun of me now.
Comment didn’t go thru, for the best, revealed too many personal oddities. no, no, i don’t feel rejected (quietly weeps in corner)
I used to work for a preservation society in New England, and they found lots of shoes in their properties. No cat skeletons, though.
One of my favorite episodes of “Oddities” involves a mummified cat that was found in a house and an alpaca fetus (?!) that was supposedly put in a house’s wall to protect it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1883919/plotsummary?r…
When I was a kid I was so bummed out that whenever I went digging for treasure, I would never find any. So when I was 9, I took my shoebox filled with pennies and buried it (about 5 inches deep) in the front yard with a note that said it was pirate treasure and not to remove it or be cursed forever.
I can’t remember if I dug it up later, when my parents were starting divorce proceedings or not. I don’t think I did. Maybe one of them dug it up or my mean sister… or maybe it’s still there.
This has got to be related to the practice of immurement: walling up a sacrificial victim in the foundations of a house to make it sound.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!! Yikes. To make it sound like it’s haunted you mean? That just can’t be a good idea…
That picture is my phone background! My fav imaginary BFF Kate Beaton posted it on twitter one night and I just about died laughing. Beware my vagina evil spirits!
Some friends of my parents redid their kitchen and found some shoes in the foundations from the 1600s or so, so they kept them and put them in a glass display case where they originally found them, as a feature.
House bunny havers unite! The gnaw marks on my wooden furniture are a small price to pay for watching them jump for joy (binkies!) and flop and cuddle with each other and just generally be adorable.
When we opened our walls as part of the remodel of our 1940s war box house, we found a small bag of tobacco and the remains of two peaches or plums. So, we hit the Google and found that this was a common practice among builders, to place an offering in the walls to curry good favor with the “house spirits.” Usually the offering included tobacco and booze, so our house now has a bottle of whiskey and pack of American Spirits in the wall. We also read about the practice of putting shoes in the walls near the front door, to fool bad spirits into thinking you are leaving so they won’t come in and bother you. So, two pairs of shoes went into the wall too.
Since then, we’ve heard of friends finding offerings in their walls. One friend-of-friend found an 80 year old bottle of whiskey in his walls – he poured it out because he thought it had probably gone bad. D’oh!
Any future owner of my home may get a bit of a shock when/if they pull up the laminate as there are many protection spells under them. The witch is in the house.