The trouble began over some pigs. Jane Kent wanted to buy some, and Mr. Chamblet had two to sell. The problem was that Jane didn’t have the cash, and Chamblet wouldn’t sell them on credit.
Spiteful Jane Kent retaliated by bewitching Chamblet’s five-year-old daughter, causing her to swell all over, turn colors, and die. Or so it seemed to those close to the family — the year was 1682, and witchcraft was a common nuisance.
Believing his wife to be similarly cursed and fearing for her safety now, Chamblet combined a quart of his wife’s urine, some of her fingernail clippings, and a bit of her hair in a small jug and boiled them all together.
Magical remedies like these were known commonly as “witch bottles” and came into wide use in England in the 1600s. Variations on the witch bottle included contents like bent nails or felt hearts pierced with a pin, sometimes a bone or tooth fragment. All witch bottles shared a common purpose, no matter what was inside. Heating the victim’s urine would draw the witch close, and the bent nails served the dual purpose of conducting heat to the brew and snagging the witch. This method would reverse the spell away from the intended target and back upon the witch.
Superstitions like these traveled from England to America with the first colonists and persisted as late as the Civil War era, as a recent discovery on Interstate 64 between exits 238 and 242 in York County attests. In 2016, during excavations prior to a road-widening project, archaeologists uncovered a curious blue glass bottle filled with bent nails beneath a brick hearth in a wartime fort called Redoubt 9.
In the twenty-first century, witchcraft occupies a smaller portion of our day-to-day lives, but many of those Old World habits have stuck with us. If you’ve ever crossed your fingers, knocked on wood, thrown salt over your left shoulder, or held your breath as you passed a graveyard, you’re participating in a tradition as old as civilization itself: looking for good luck.
Some superstitious types like to hold their good luck charms as close as they can get them, around their homes and in the walls themselves. The phenomenon of concealed shoes would have been familiar to denizens of British and other European countries from the 1500s through the 1900s, where it was common practice to board up a shoe in a house’s walls, inside a chimney stack, or under floors.
Tucking a single shoe — often a child’s shoe — beneath the boards and between beams of the home was an everyday procedure for invoking protection against ghosts, witches, goblins or other forms of evil. Scholars speculate that the trend might have originated from the belief that one could attract malicious witches via the pungent human scent left in the shoe by its wearer, and then trap them within the walls. Other lore warns against placing shoes on a table, lest death be tempted into a home.
A common good luck charm employed around rural homes is the horseshoe. Mounted above the entrance to a dwelling, the horseshoe brings good fortune. The origins of the practice are unclear, with folklorists divided among theories that include the evil-repelling powers of iron and a witch’s preference to travel by broom rather than horseback. No matter how it began, most agree that the horseshoe’s tips must point up, to prevent the good luck from spilling out.
Small but mighty, acorns hold their share of folklore. In Greek mythology, the oak — born of the acorn — is said to be the wood used to construct the handle of Thor’s hammer. A connected belief says an acorn in your windowsill will protect your home from lightning, which is Thor’s wrath. Carrying an acorn is thought to protect the bearer from p
ain and imbue luck and strength.
Also from the natural world, licorice-scented fennel leaves a wake of legend. Place some in a keyhole and ghosts will be prevented from entering the home. As recently as 1842, it was lauded for its ability to restore eyesight, and some still hold that chewing its seeds increases focus and stays hunger pangs.
We’ve all been warned not to walk beneath a ladder, which might have as much to do with common sense as good luck. Early Christian belief regarded the triangle as a holy shape, representing the trinity of father, son and holy ghost. A ladder leaned against a wall forms a triangle and walking beneath it would break that bond. Luckily, a simple remedy is available. If you find you’ve accidentally trespassed through its triangle, you can walk backwards through the ladder again to absolve yourself.
Common wisdom holds that it’s unlucky to open an umbrella indoors but why? This tradition might have one foot in the practical and one foot in the metaphysical, as well. First, it’s a bad idea to open an umbrella in a small confined space, since its metal arms and spring mechanism could cause any number of unfortunate outcomes to any unprotected eyes or nearby breakables. The negativity following these events is bad luck in itself and easily prevented.
The humble broom plays an important part in protecting the home. Ancient tradition advises us that one should never bring an old broom to a new home. Symbolically, this prevents carrying negativity, sorrow or past hardships into the fresh space. In a practical sense, this precaution might also have been useful in discouraging transmission of insect infestation in times when lice and fleas were impossible to eradicate. A new broom brings good luck and sweeps away the bad, and it’s not bad for housekeeping, either.
A homeowner’s new broom might further be put to use in sweeping up salt, if the family followed the practice of sprinkling salt across the threshold. This habit has long been regarded as a standard protection, preventing evil spirits from entering the hom
e. Reverence for salt as a pure substance intolerable to evil beings comes from salt’s life-giving status. Salt is a critical nutrient in the human body, and it further sustains life by allowing the preservation of food. Salt can provide protection and promote wound healing, defeating some types of bacteria by drawing water from bacterial organisms and killing them.
Indeed, salt is so precious that spilling some accidentally is a great risk. Different cultures express the consequences of this kind of clumsiness in varying ways. The Greeks hold that he who spills salt will shed the equivalent amount of tears needed to wash each grain away, while the Germans believe spilled salt creates an enemy. In America, we throw a pinch of spilled salt over the left shoulder to hit the Devil in the eye and distract him from further evil efforts. Mysticism and the mundane cross paths once more in this superstition, where cautionary tales of the great cost of wasting salt help remind us of its everyday indispensability.
On the porch, superstition tells us that leaving a chair rocking invites bad spirits into the home; while a rocking chair that rocks on its own might already be inhabited by one. A blue-painted ceiling wards against evil spirits. Anyone who shares a potted plant must be acknowledged with the phrase “much obliged,” because saying “thank you” will cause the plant to die. As the entrance to the house, the porch has extra prominence: one should always enter and leave through the same door to bring good luck.
Mirrors are rife with meaning, from visiting bad luck on those who break them to confusing spirits on their journey to the afterlife. We can thank the Romans for the familiar “seven years bad luck” consequence of a broken mirror. To them, the mirror’s reflection of the body represented a reflection of the soul, and to break the mirror was to injure the soul. Romans believed that life renewed itself every seven years, hence the duration of this particular sentence.
After a death, mirrors in a house are draped to indicate mourning and respect for the dead. The origin of this tradition comes from an old belief that a soul leaving the body and traveling to the afterlife could be confused by seeing its own reflection and become trapped in a limbo between this life and the next. Covering the mirrors was a kindness for the departing soul but may also have prevented the mourners’ thoughts from straying to considerations of their own appearances.
Also at a death, clocks are stopped at the time of passing to indicate the timeless state into which the departed would transition. In the churchyard, another clock comes into play: the bell. The toll that normally kept time in a small town became a note of mourning during a funeral. Not surprisingly, both clocks and bells are now closely associated with superstitions around hauntings and ill luck.
Not surprisingly, superstitions surrounding death and dying are many. This is particularly true of the era when death and mourning took place in the home. A corpse was always removed from a home feet first, to prevent the deceased from looking back inside and tempting another soul to follow. This arrangement still prevails today, though a coroner might tell you that it has the added benefit of being the easiest way to maneuver a body that might have become stiff.
We follow countless superstitions without a thought, so ingrained are they in our collective consciousness. Who among us hasn’t knocked on wood to prevent a jinx? This action reaches back to Celtic and German tradition, when magical beings were believed to reside in trees. Knocking on wood had the literal effect of knocking on the spirits’ door, whether to ask them to them listen or to distract their attention.
Habits like these are the cautionary tales of civilization, reflecting an era’s values, fears, and teachings. Known collectively as “apotropaic magic,” these small protective gestures help humans make sense of a confounding world and invoke some protection through their own agency. As they are handed across cultures and down through generations, their power persists, even if some of their meaning has been lost. We might not always know why we do them, but we know it doesn’t hurt.