Bones, Apples, and Pie: Folk Magic for Thanksgiving

Since it's a holiday this week I thought I'd turn away from the usual witches and ghosts to write about something more light-hearted. But fear not! I'll get back to the spooky stuff next week. 

While browsing through some old books I came upon this familiar piece of folklore:

The forked bone just in front of the breastbone of a chicken or other fowl is known as the wishbone. If this bone chances to fall to you, preserve it and put it on the shelf behind the stove to dry. When properly seasoned you take hold of one end, let a friend take hold of the other, each make a wish, and then both pull. The wish of the one that has the top with his piece when it breaks will come true. (Clifton Johnson, What They Say in New England, 1896) 

Many of you have probably broken the wishbone and the tradition has very old roots. The Latin term for the wishbone is furcula, which apparently means 'little fork', and different types of folklore about this particular bone date back to at least the Middle Ages. Jeffrey Webb's American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales (2016) claims they date back even further, to the ancient Etruscans who lived more than 2,000 years ago. It's a very intriguing bone, apparently. 

Mel McCuddin, Wishbone (2011), at the Art Spirit Gallery.

The specific tradition of getting your wish if you get the bigger piece of the bone is not ancient but is still quite old. Edward Armstrong's book The Folklore of Birds (1970) claims the practice of wishing upon the bone originated in the 1700s. So if you pull on the wishbone this year during your socially distanced celebration recognize that you are carrying on a centuries-old tradition, albeit under unusual circumstances.

Not everyone eats turkey so sadly not everyone can participate in the wishbone tradition. I did once buy a Tofurky that included a fake wishbone in the box but those fake bones aren't part of the Tofurky anymore. There is folklore about making pie, however, so even vegans can join in the holiday fun:

When a girl trims piecrust, and the trimming falls over her hand, it is a sign she is going to marry young (Clifton Johnson, What They Say in New England, 1896)

Nineteenth century folklore collections are full of omens that predict marriage. In a pre-liberated era, marriage loomed even larger in people's minds than it does today, and it particularly did for young women, who usually had limited career and life choices. Even the humble act of making pie could provide an indicator of one's marital future.

If you are making apple pie you have even more options for fortune-telling. One well-known tradition instructs a woman to peel an apple in one strip and then throw the peel over her shoulder. The peel will form the shape of a letter on the ground, and that letter will be the first initial of the man she will marry. Some accounts say you need to swing the peel around your head three times before throwing it down, so don't omit that crucial step.

A weirder piece of apple folklore comes from Maine. A young woman curious about her marital prospects should eat an apple at midnight while standing in front of a mirror. In one hand she should carry a lamp or candle for light. As she eats the apple she should recite the following incantation:

Whoever my true love may be

Come and eat this apple with me

Something about eating an apple at midnight and evoking an unknown lover to appear sounds a little spooky to me. I guess I wasn't able to resist the urge to write about spooky things after all. Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving, even if you spend it alone this year.

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In addition to Clifton Johnson's book, I got material for this week's post from Fanny Bergen's book Current Superstitions (1896).

Weird and Wonderful Folklore from 2017

I have been celebrating Christmas in the old-fashioned way: eating too much, sleeping a lot, and spending time with family and friends. I hope your holiday season has also been a good one!

I had a lot of fun blogging this year, and I hope you enjoyed reading my ramblings. In case you missed any of these, here is a list of the top five most popular posts in 2017 here on New England Folklore.

Number One: Why The Devil Loves Christmas

In a season filled with twinkly lights, eggnog lattes and holiday sweaters, sometimes it's nice to remember that Christmas hasn't always been about sweetness and familial love. It used to be a drunken party that lasted for weeks where the poor harassed the wealthy for gifts and everyone ate and drank way too much. That last part hasn't really changed much, but the attitude of our nation's religious leaders towards Christmas certainly has. They used to hate the holiday and claimed it was the Devil's work. Now they're demanding we all go around saying "Merry Christmas."

Number Two: Bradford College: The Necronomicon, Strange Lights, and Ghosts

I grew up in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the city where Bradford College is located. Sadly I was unaware the Necronomicon, that legendary book of evil magic, is supposed to be hidden in a tunnel under the campus. If I had been my high school career would have been much more interesting. There are lots of classic ghost stories about Bradford, but this post also incorporated the personal experiences of someone who went to school here. Those experiences were particularly strange and and quite creepy.

Number Three: Apple Lore: Love, Death and Magic

I live near a farmer's market that sells a really great selection of apples in the fall. Who doesn't love to bite into a crisp, recently picked apple? But there's more to apples than cider and pie. There's also a lot of folklore. Some of it is spooky, like tales of corpse-eating apple trees and bloody apples that reveal the identity of a murderer. Some of it is charming, like using an apple peel to find your true love. And some of it is both spooky and charming, like the best folklore often is.

Number Four: Milton's Ghost Road 

Milton is a rural suburb just south of Boston, but one short stretch of road there has a really bad reputation. There are so many ghost stories about Harland Street that it's earned the nickname Ghost Road. Is it just that Harland Street runs through some dark swampy woods, or are there really a variety of spirits haunting it? People claim to have seen a family of ghosts, a man with no face, and a phantom car. Psychic investigators encountered glowing blobs of energy back in the early 1980s, so perhaps there really is something lurking on Ghost Road.

Number Five: Wild Men in The Woods: Strange Creatures Seen in Haverhill, Massachusetts

My hometown made it into the top five list twice. Just as I didn't know the Necronomicon was buried in Haverhill, I was also unaware that several wild men had been sighted there in the 19th and early 20th centuries. What were these mysterious creatures? Were they disturbed individuals living in the woods, primitive ape men, or something else entirely? Witnesses described a 1909 wild man as "very lightly clad" so perhaps he was just a nudist caught sunbathing. Whatever they were, legends about wild men just demonstrate that our backyards can be strange and wonderful places.

Have a great New Year's Eve and stay tuned for more weird New England Folklore in 2018!

Apple Lore: Death, Love and Magic

The other day I went to the farmers market and was very excited to see a bin full of small greenish brown apples. I am an apple fanatic, and those little beauties were Roxbury Russets. They actually weren't much to look at, but they have a long history in New England. In fact, Roxbury Russets are the oldest type of apple grown in the United States.

Their origin is a little murky, but they are said to have first been discovered growing in Roxbury, Massachusetts way back in the mid-1600s. One source claims they were growing as early as 1649. The word "discovered" is a little puzzling. It implies that some hapless Puritan just stumbled upon an apple tree, but apples are not native to New England. The Roxbury Russet must have been introduced by someone, but who? I've read that William Blackstone, the first Englishman to live on  the Boston peninsula, grew apple trees on what is now Boston Common. Perhaps the Roxbury Russet is a wild American version of an English cultivar he planted, its seeds carried into the hills of Roxbury by a bird or beast.

That's just speculation on my part. According to folklore, the first person to grow Roxbury Russets was a colonist named Joseph Warren. He died falling off a ladder while picking apples. That story almost seems too ironic to be true, but death by apple may have been a common thing in Colonial New England. For example, a man named Peter Parker died in the 1700s when a giant barrel of his home-made cider rolled off a wagon and crushed him. This happened in his orchard on top of Roxbury's Mission Hill (formerly known as Parker Hill), near what is now McLaughlin Park next to the New England Baptist Hospital. I lived on Mission Hill for many years, and every fall a local neighborhood group gathered the apples that still grow in the park to make cider. Some of the trees in the park may be descendants of Peter Parker's original trees. No one ever reported seeing Peter Parker's ghost, though.

Roxbury Russet apples

Given the apple's Biblical connections with sin, death and sex, it's not surprising there is some weird apple folklore in New England. Some of it is downright creepy. Take the strange story of Roger Williams's corpse. Williams was the founder of Rhode Island, and in 1936 his descendants exhumed his body to move it to another location. They were horrified to find that the roots of a nearby apple tree had grown into Williams's coffin and apparently absorbed most of his corpse. There were very few bones left inside and the tree roots had taken the shape of Williams's body. The roots are now part of the collection at the John Brown House museum in Providence.

The legend of Micah Rood is similarly grim. Micah Rood was a surly farmer who lived in Connecticut in the 1600s. One night a traveling peddler came to Rood's house and asked if he could spend the night. Rood grunted that he could. In the morning the peddler's cold dead body was found lying underneath one of Rood's apple trees. The peddler had been murdered and his money and wares stolen. The town naturally suspected Rood but had no evidence to prove he was the killer. The next autumn, though, all the apples that grew from Micah Rood's trees had a single blood-red spot in their white flesh.

One end of the sin continuum is death, but the other end is sex, and apples are a key component in a lot of nineteenth century New England love magic. Most of it is focused on determining who your true love is. For example, here's a simple charm involving apple seeds. If you have several potential lovers in mind, take some apple seeds and name each seed after one of the potential mates. Wet the seeds and then stick them to your forehead. The last seed to fall off is the person you are meant to be with.

Similarly, you can take two apple seeds and name them after two potential lovers. Wet them. Put one seed on each eyelid. Blink rapidly. Whichever seed falls off last represents your true love.

You can also predict a lover's name using an apple peel. Remove an apple's peel so it comes off in one long piece. Throw the peel over your shoulder onto the ground. Turn around and examine the peel. What letter does it form? That letter will be the first letter of your true love's first name.

Those love charms are kind of cute and would make good party games. This last one is a little more spooky. Stand in front of a mirror holding a lamp (or candle) and an apple. As you eat the apple repeat the following words:

Whoever my true love may be
Come and eat this apple with me

Is your true love supposed to arrive in person or just appear in the mirror? I'm not sure. That charm is in Fanny Bergren's 1896 book Current Superstitions, and she notes that it is particularly effective when done on Halloween. If you dare to try it let me know what happens.

America's Oldest Apple Pie Recipe, Plus Some Strange Apple Stories

I'm taking a brief break from writing about the Devil and witchcraft because we are in the heart of apple season. It's been a great year for the New England orchards, and the trees are literally groaning under the weight of all those apples. Shhh! If you listen closely you can probably hear them.

Although I live in Boston my neighborhood used to be an agricultural area, and the streets near me are still lined with apple trees. There are so many apples this year they are literally rolling down the sidewalks. The Roxbury russet, the first variety of apple grown in North America, was domesticated not far from where I live now. My neighbor has a Roxbury russet tree growing in the backyard.

Apple pie is the quintessential American dessert, and I can't even begin to guess how many recipes for it exist. My mother always makes hers with a crust made from vegetable oil. The crust is really difficult to roll out, but after baking it's flaky and thin, almost like a puff pastry or phyllo dough. Delicious!

I was curious about the oldest American recipe for apple pie, so I looked at Amelia Simmons's 1796 book American Cookery. The first cookbook published in America (in Hartford, Connecticut, to be exact), American Cookery's recipes have their roots deep in New England's history. But even two centuries ago there were multiple recipes for apple pie - Simmons includes two.

The first recipe is just called "Apple Pie." Note that the "paste No. 3" Simmons references is a pastry crust recipe in her book made from flour, butter, and eggs.

Stew and strain the apples, to every three pints, grate the peal of a fresh lemon, add cinnamon, mace, rose-water and sugar to your taste--and bake in paste No. 3.

This recipe is a big change from most contemporary apple pie recipes because it involves cooking the apples first. Stewing the apples first probably sped up the baking time, which would have been helpful to cooks at that time who were baking in their fireplaces. The lemon, cinnamon and sugar are still used, but I think most people now would substitute nutmeg for mace. Mace comes from the same nut as nutmeg, but is kind of hard to find these days in supermarkets. I don't think very many people still use rose-water in their apple pie. It's just not a flavor we associate now with fall cooking.

Simmons's second recipe is perhaps a little more similar to modern recipes, but there's still a twist or two. Here's her recipe for "A Buttered Apple Pie":

Pare, quarter and core tart apples, lay in paste No. 3, cover with the same; bake half an hour, when drawn, gently raise the top crust, add sugar, butter, cinnamon, mace, wine or rose-water.

So this recipe involves putting the cut and peeled apples into a pastry crust and baking it for a while, which we still do, but strangely without any of the spices or sugar. They're are added in after the top crust is cooked enough to lift it off. Again, it seems like the recipe is designed for ovens that took a long time to cook, and it also involves rose water or wine. 

OK, those are America's two oldest apple pie recipes! I think they're kind of quirky and interesting, but if you're not a baker and want to read some really strange things about apples I'd suggest these past posts:

• Some magic spells involving apples. Love magic seems popular.
• 
  
• New Englanders who were killed by their own apples!
• 
  
• The apple tree that ate the corpse of Roger Williams.
• 
  
• A ghost who haunted an apple orchard.

Enjoy apple season while you can. It's all too brief.

UFOs in Derry, and Bigfoot in the Orchard

My tastes in New England folklore are pretty broad. Sometimes my attention is captured by a 17th witchcraft story, sometimes by something more contemporary and paranormal. I say that because I was planning to write about an old witchcraft story from the New Hampshire mountains today, but at a party last night someone told me something too good to ignore. The witch story will wait until next week.

My friend David lives on Beaver Lake in Derry, New Hampshire. While talking with him at a birthday party for a mutual friend he asked me if I knew about the UFOs that had been seen in his neighborhood. When I said no, he pulled out his cellphone and showed me this video:



I don't know if the video is real or not, and I certainly don't like the creepy "UFOs are Satanic" preface. However I do think it is interesting and, like all UFO videos, a little freaky. What are these lights? Why are they hovering over a small lake in a residential neighborhood? I'm sure we'll never have authoritative answers to those questions, but David said he and his neighbors have also seen the lights in the sky.

As I wrote a few years ago, Beaver Lake is connected with some of the rare fairy folklore found in New England. A fairy named Tsienneto supposedly lived in the lake, and helped local heroes Hannah Duston and John Spark (who coined the phrase "Live free or die").

Some authors who write about the paranormal, like Patrick Harpur or Jacques Vallee, claim fairies and UFOs are two sides of the same coin. They're both both visitors from another world, but while our ancestors often placed this other world underground or in a mystical realm, we place it in outer space. Maybe Tsienneto has just upgraded her mode of transportation.

By the way, this isn't the first time UFOs have been seen in Derry. In October 1973 multiple witnesses saw a UFO splash into the waters of Rainbow Lake. According to an article in the Derry News, police divers searched the lake but did not find anything.

Here's another interesting video I found while poking around on YouTube. The video was uploaded recently, but apparently it is really from 2010. A Hubbardston, Vermont man noticed that apples had been disappearing from his orchard. When he set up a camera to capture the thief he got a photo of Bigfoot!



I love apples myself, so I can sympathize with Bigfoot here.

Next week I'm going to write about something "Olde Tyme", but as this week's videos show lots of strange things continue to happen in New England. 

Boiled Cider Pie

Thanksgiving is one of New England's great gifts to American culture. Originating in Puritan feast days, the holiday gradually spread across the country bringing turkey, stuffing and pies with it.

Modern Americans eat a wide variety of pies on Thanksgiving, many of them unrelated to the holiday's origins in New England. Let's face it, the Puritans weren't eating coconut cream or key lime pie, so a few years ago I wrote about the obscure pies of old New England, like squash pie, mincemeat pie, and boiled cider pie.

At the time I had never eaten or made a boiled cider pie, but this year in honor of Thanksgiving I decided to give it a try. I was really happy with the results.

Boiled cider is not something you see in many 21st century pantries. Its use has been recorded as early as the 1670s in western Massachusetts, and it was a common sweetener in the Colonial era. It makes sense. Molasses and sugar were expensive imports, but apple cider was locally produced and inexpensive. You can still buy boiled cider at country stores in northern New England and online from the King Arthur store, but I decided to make my own using instructions from an old Yankee Magazine cookbook.

It was easy, but took a long time. I poured a gallon of cider into a large pot, and then boiled it at high heat until it was reduced to a single cup of gelatinous goop. Even though I boiled it over high heat it still took around two and a half hours! I didn't need to stir it much until the end when it was really getting thick.

Boiling, boiling, boiling...

... Still boiling more than two hours later!

What I had after two hours and thirty minutes of boiling.

After it cooks down to a cup, let it cool. I put it in the refrigerator but I don't know if this was the smartest move. The boiled cider became almost completely solid which made it harder to use in the recipe. I would recommend letting it cool on the counter or maybe not boiling it down as much. The cider that is sold commercially is more syrupy and less goopy than what I made.

There are a few boiled cider pies floating around on the web, but I liked this one from Wood's Cider Mill in Vermont, which has been owned by the same family for seven generations. They make and sell boiled cider so I figured they must know what they're talking about. Also, their recipe is simple and really focuses on the boiled cider as the main ingredient. I baked the pie for an hour, which is 10 minutes longer than the recipe instructs, but that could just be my stove.

Sugar, eggs, milk, a little flour, and boiled cider. Mix it well because that boiled cider is thick!

It's looking a little  like pumpkin pie, but don't be fooled.

Boiled cider pie - sweet, tart, goopy and historic!

The pie came out great. Its consistency is similar to a custard or pumpkin pie, and although it's really sweet the sweetness is cut by the cider's tartness. If you like cider, sugar and pie crust (and who doesn't?) you will like this pie. It's like autumn, New England, and three centuries of history all in one dessert.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Some Apple Magic

September is apple season. I love going to the farmers market in my neighborhood to see what varieties they have, and sometimes we head out of the city and go apple picking. I love the sight, smell and of course the taste of apples!

This week over at Boston.com they ran an article about fifteen ways to use apples, ranging from barbecue sauce to apples. They don't mention you can use apples to tell the future, but you can.

Apples are associated in European and American lore with love and sex (thank you Adam and Eve!), so apple magic from New England tends to be focused on divining who your true love might be. There are many ways to do this, but here are a few of my favorites.

One of the easiest divinations is to pare an apple in one long piece, and then throw this long piece of peel over your shoulder. Look at the shape the peel makes on the ground. It should form the first letter of your true love's name. Some writers stress that you also need to twirl the apple peel three times around your head before you throw it over your shoulder.

This belief comes from England, where it was mentioned by John Gay in his comic 1714 poem The Shepherd's Week. The country maiden Hobnelia says,

I pare this pippin round and round again,
My shepherd's name to flourish on the plain.
I fling th' unbroken paring o'ver my head,
Upon the grass a perfect L. is read. 

She's happy with the result, since she's in love with a shepherd named Lubberkin. Yay!

You can easily do the apple paring divination surreptitiously while you are making a pie, but the next form of divination is a little harder to hide. Take two apple seeds, and give each the name of someone you think might be attracted to you. Wet the seeds in your mouth, and then stick them on your eyelids. Blink rapidly. Whichever seed falls off last is the person who will be your true love. If anyone walks in while you have apple seeds stuck on your eyelids just tell them you are exploring your New England heritage.

The two previous forms of divination are from Alice Morse Earle's 1902 book Old Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth. I think they're both kind of charming, but here's one that's a little spookier from Fanny Bergren's Current Superstitions (1896).

At midnight, stand in front of a mirror holding a lamp and a mirror. As you eat the apple, say the following:

Whoever my true love may be,
Come and eat this apple with me.

Your true love should appear, though I'm not sure if they will appear in the mirror or in person. Bergren notes that this charm works better if performed on Halloween. I will also note that sometimes the person who shows up in these love spells is not always what you expect.

There is of course a darker side to apple lore, which I have written about here, here and here. I describe some additional apple charms here. Enjoy apple season!

The Ghost of Enoch Pratt

Here's a great little ghost story I found in John Hanson Mitchell's book Ceremonial Time.

Back in the 1700s a wealthy farmer named Jeremiah Caswell lived in Littleton, Massachusetts. He owned many acres of fertile cropland, as well as an extensive apple orchard. Jeremiah had a son named Adam, and a daughter named Eve. Eve was quite beautiful.

When she was a young woman, Eve fell in love with Enoch Pratt, a hard-working farm boy from a modest background. They would meet illicitly almost every night in the apple orchard, where they were safe from prying eyes. Eve was afraid that her father would disapprove of their love.

One night Jeremiah secretly followed his daughter out to the orchard and saw her meet Enoch. To the young lovers' surprise, Jeremiah saw they were genuinely in love and gave his blessing. Eve and Enoch became engaged.

Before they could celebrate their wedding, however, Enoch was called away with other local men to fight in the the French and Indian War, which was raging to the west.

The might before he departed, he and Eve met once again in the orchard. "Swear to me you'll return," Eve said.

Holding her tight, Enoch said, "I will, in body or spirit."

Eve said, "And I will meet you."

Enoch left for the war, and a few months later word came to Littleton that he had been killed in the fighting. Eve was devastated by the news but carried on with her duties on the farm.

One night, as she was walking by the orchard, she heard someone calling her name. It was Enoch! Eve was overjoyed and ran to greet him, thinking that his death was falsely reported.

As she wrapped her arms around Enoch, though, she noticed that his body was unnaturally cold, and that his eyes stared lifelessly. Enoch did die, and his ghost had returned to Littleton. Terrified, Eve ran to her father's house and told him what she saw under the apple trees.

And do you know what her father said?

He said, "If you vowed to meet him, Eve, you must meet him, in the flesh or in the spirit."

Eve returned to the orchard that night and consummated her marriage with Enoch. All through that fall and winter Enoch called out her name from the apple orchard, and Eve would dutifully leave her bed to join him under the dark trees. Eve became weaker and weaker, and finally died when the spring came.

Although Eve passed over to the other side, Enoch's ghost lingered in Littleton. Locals reported seeing him throughout the 1800s, calling Eve's name in the woods and orchards. His ghost was even seen in the Caswell house.

His ghost was last seen in 1975, when a Littleton man who had been walking in the woods reported seeing a twenty year old man with his black hair pulled back, dressed in Colonial attire, with a mournful look in his eyes.

Sally Somers, the Witch of Southwest Harbor

Which is scarier - a ghost, or an evil witch? If you visit Southwest Harbor, Maine you don't have to choose because it's haunted by an evil witch's ghost. You'll get two supernatural creatures for the price of one!

Sally Somers was born in 1791 to Elsie Somers, a witch who was known for extracting tribute from sea captains to guarantee safe passage of their ships, but also for using herbs to heal the sick. I suppose you could call Elsie morally neutral, since she was just trying to make a living from her dark arts.

Sally, on the other hand, was just no damn good.

Sally bewitched a young man named John Clark into marrying her. He spent much of their marriage wandering around in an enchanted, zombie-like daze. John tried to escape Sally's spell by booking passage on a ship bound for Europe, but disappeared before the it set sail. Everyone suspected Sally, but since his body was never found she wasn't charged with a crime.

According to another legend, Sally sacrificed two black dogs on the top of a nearby mountain so she could assume their form when she sent her spirit out to cause mischief. These devil dogs roamed through the area, terrifying the locals and sometimes drinking blood. Creepiest of all, they were said to have human eyes.

Like all successful witches, though, Sally's preferred to take the form of a black cat when she wanted to cause trouble. In this shape Sally would spy on her neighbors and find out if anyone was gossiping about her. Those who did usually came to a bad end. This black cat was also said to have human eyes.

Sally's reign of terror ended when one of her neighbors, tired of all the witchy shenanigans, fashioned a silver bullet and shot the spectral black cat. It died instantly, and Sally passed away three days later.

That was in 1832, but Sally's malefic influence supposedly still lingers around Southwest Harbor. The apples that grow on a tree near her house allegedly cause illness, accidents and even death to anyone who eats one.

In 2004, a woman named Daisy Harper was concerned for her mother's well-being because she was working in Sally's former home. Hoping to appease Sally's ghost, Daisy dropped an offering of colored stones into a crack in the apple tree's trunk. The stones fell for a long, long, long time before they hit the bottom. I don't think we want to know what's lurking under Sally's tree.

Daisy had good reason to be concerned about her mother. The furniture in Sally's house sometimes moves on its own, and it's said that anyone who breaks a pane of glass will die shortly afterwards. One window that overlooks the harbor even has an imperfection in it that looks like a witch.

If you ever go hiking near Southwest Harbor, be careful. The locals say a large black cat with human eyes haunts the woods. I guess Sally's spirit is still out there causing trouble.

I found this story about Sally in Marcus LiBirzzi's Ghosts of Acadia. If you like lurid stories about ghosts, this is the book for you.

Apple Love, and Some Media Updates

Adam and Eve go apple-picking!

My last post was about the ominous side of apples. Today, I thought I'd share some happier lore. Sure, apples have a bad reputation in Western culture because of that incident in the Garden of Eden, but that story isn't just about sin, it's also about love. If Adam and Eve (or Steve) hadn't eaten the forbidden fruit, there'd be no love in the world!

Discovering the identity of your true love through magic was widespread in New England in the 1800's. I think some of it spread through the magazines of the time, but some may also have been brought over with the Puritans. Apples figured prominently.

To figure out if someone loves you, split open an apple and count the seeds. The number of seeds inside determines where the relationship is heading. There is a chant that goes like this:

One I love,
Two I love,
Three, I love, I say
Four, I love with all my heart,
And five I cast away;
Six he loves,
Seven she loves,
Eight they both love;
Nine he comes,
Ten he tarries,
Eleven, he courts,
Twelve he marries;
Thirteen wishes,
Fourteen kisses,
All the rest little witches.

There's another way to use apple seeds to predict love. Let's say you're romantically interested in multiple men. Take some apple seeds, and assign the name of a potential lover to each. Wet the seeds and stick them on your forehead. The one that falls off last is the person you're meant to be with.

Those are quoted in Botkin's Treasury of New England Folklore, but are originally found in William Wells Newells' Games and Songs of American Children and Alice Morse Earle's Old Time Gardens.

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New England folklore has been appearing in the media lately. Today's Boston Globe has an article about George's Island, including the ghost who is supposed to haunt Fort Warren, something I wrote about a while ago.

The October 2009 issue of Martha Stewart Living has a brief article about New England gravestone art. There are some nice photos of historic Massachusetts cemeteries in Haverhill, Salem and Ipswich. Martha Stewart can even make death look tasteful. I don't think the article is online, but you can see many grave stones from across New England at A Very Grave Matter.

Death by Apples

Roxbury Russet apples from Flickr.

An article in the Boston Globe noted that the apple crop has been particularly good this year. The cool rainy weather that ruined things like tomatoes and eggplant has been perfect for apples. So, get out to your local orchard or farmers' market and get a bag of local apples!

There's a lot of folklore about apples in New England, much of it spooky. I guess apples pair with strange deaths as well as they pair with pie crust. I've mentioned bloody Micah Rood apples and the apple tree that ate Roger Williams' body earlier, but the very introduction of apples into New England was a cause for misery and death.

The first named variety of apple cultivated in New England and the the United States was the Roxbury Russet. Named for the Colonial town of Roxbury (now a Boston neighborhood), and the apple's greenish brown color, the Roxbury Russet was in cultivation by the mid-1600's. Some sources say it was being grown as early as 1649. I guess apples were a high priority for the English, since they only settled the Boston area in the late 1620s.

According to a book called Apples of New York State, an English settler in Roxbury named Joseph Warren was the first person to grow the Roxbury russet. He died in 1755 when he fell off a ladder while picking apples and broke his neck. (I got that little tidbit here).

The idea that Joseph Warren was killed by the very thing he was famous for makes this story seem mythic to me. Not mythic in a "what a lie" way, but in a "Wow! That's seems to make strange sense" way. I'm not saying it isn't true, but the story wouldn't be as resonant if he died in bed from pneumonia.

When I read the Roxbury Russet story I was reminded of a similar "death by apple" story. Strangely, it's also from Roxbury.

I live on Mission Hill in Boston, which is part of Roxbury. Mission Hill used to be called Parker Hill, after the wealthy Parker family which lived here in the 1700's. Back then, the hill was quite agricultural and covered in orchards. Peter Parker, the scion of the family and owner of the hill, also met his end through apples. He was crushed by a barrel of his own cider when if fell off a cart. (This tidbit is from Samuel Francis Drake's book The Town of Roxbury: Its Memorable Persons and Places, Its History and Antiquities, with Numerous Illustrations of Its Old Landmarks and Noted Personages.)

Although Mission Hill is now quite urban, it still has a lot apple trees. They grow in people's yards, and the park at the top of the hill actually has an orchard in it. One of my neighbors has an apple tree, and he told me it is indeed a Roxbury Russet. The agricultural past peeks through into our modern urban neighborhood.

I feel I should wrap up this post on a dramatic note, like "And I've seen the bloody ghosts of Peter Parker and Joseph Warren wandering in the orchard!" I haven't though, so the stories will have to stand on their own.

How Do Ya Like Them Apples?

I'm a big fan of the farmer's market in my neighborhood, particularly at this time of year. Apples, squash and potatoes - yum!

The other day I was eating an apple (it was a Red Free), when I noticed that the skin was kind of thick. Not inedible, and still tasty, but thick.

"That's funny," I thought.

Then I noticed all the other apples I bought had thick skins.

Something about thick apple skins rang a bell in my mind. I looked through some of my books, and saw an explanation in Clifton Johnson's What They Say In New England:

Thick apple skins mean a cold winter is coming.

The squirrels with extra bushy tails! The unusually chilly September! It all made sense.

I like snow and cold winters, so I'm glad signs are pointing that way. If you don't want to think about winter, peel your apples before you eat them.