Was 2016 The Year of The Witch?

This year is grinding to a close, so I thought I'd see what stories on this blog from 2016 were the most widely read.

I was kind of surprised by the result. Overwhelmingly, stories about witches and witchcraft were the most popular this year. Monsters, haunted locations and weird seasonal folklore all took a back seat - 2016 was the year of the witch here on New England Folklore.


Drumroll, please! Here are the top five stories I posted this year:

1. By far the most popular story was this one from January about the Dogtown Witches. These 18th century widows made their living as fortune-tellers, herbalists, and by threatening to bewitch travelers passing through their North Shore village. The story of the Dogtown witches is charming, empowering and a little scary. In short, it's everything I like in a Yankee witch story. As an added bonus, Dogtown Common (the village where they lived) is now an abandoned ghost town in the middle of an enormous forest in Gloucester.

2. Readers also really liked this post about "How to Make a Witch Bottle," a type of classic New England defensive folk magic. Maybe people reacted to the crafty aspect. All you need is a jar, some nails, and your own urine. How much easier could it be? On the other hand, maybe a lot of my readers are plagued with supernatural problems and feel the need to defend their homes with magic. I hope that's not the case, but 2016 has been a very strange year...

3. In February of 2016 Robert Eggers's art-horror film "The Witch" was released to wide critical acclaim. I loved the movie, but I've heard mixed things from friends. Some horror movie fans were bored and confused by the slow pace and 17th century dialect, and art film aficianados didn't see it because they were afraid of the violence and bloodshed. I think the main audience for this film was intelligent people who love the creepy side of folklore, which happily describes all of this blog's readers. My review of "The Witch" was the third most popular post of 2016, and focused on how the film did and didn't reflect authentic New England witch lore. Spoiler alert: New England witch lore has fewer naked people and goats.

4. Do you see what I mean about 2016 being the year of the witch? So much witchcraft, but I'm not complaining. One exception to the witchcraft trend was this post about Connecticut's haunted fairy village. I spent much of 2016 researching New England fairy lore, so I was happy that readers responded well to this one. The legend features sinister fairies, an axe murderer, and a cursed ghost town, so there is a lot to respond to.

Image from From Roadtrippers.com.

5. Rounding out the top five is another witch-oriented post. I asked "How Did Tituba Become Black?", and that question apparently resonated with readers. Tituba was one the key figures in the Salem witch trials. A slave in Reverend Samuel Parris's household, Tituba was one the first people accused of witchcraft. She set the pattern for all the trials with her vivid confessions and incriminated several others as witches. Popular culture has depicted Tituba as black for many years, but she was actually an Aarawak Indian from the Caribbean. Read the post to find out how this transformation happened. (Hint: Arthur Miller and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow both made it happen.)

Ashley Madekwe as Tituba on TV's Salem.

I've had a lot fun writing this blog in 2016, so thank you for reading and letting me share my obsession with the weird side of New England. I hope you'll keep reading in 2017. Happy New Year!

How To Make A Witch Bottle (And How They Work)

Last fall I gave a talk in Rowley, Massachusetts about New England witchcraft. As part of my program I showed the audience how to make a traditional New England witch bottle. Most people hadn't seen this before, which made me wonder: what are the public schools teaching kids these days?

I'm just kidding about the public school thing. I don't really think the schools need to teach children how to make witch bottles. But if you are interested in knowing how to make one read on. Maybe if you are a home schooler you can work it into your curriculum!

Witch bottles are an old European form of defensive magic, and were brought to New England by the English colonists when they crossed the Atlantic in the 1600s. The Puritan leadership frowned on any form of magic, considering it all diabolic, but many people in New England still practiced various forms of divination and defensive magic. They believed there were witches among them using malevolent magic, and it was best to fight fire with fire.

Witch bottles work on a very basic magic principle. The English colonists believed that a magical connection was made between a witch and their victim when the witch cursed them. The witch's malevolent magic would flow through this connection, causing illness, pain, and various other torments to their victim.

However, the magical connection was a two way channel. The witch sent pain and suffering through it, but the clever person could send pain along it right back to the witch. This could be done without even knowing who the witch was.

The witch bottle was designed to send pain or even death to an attacking witch. Surprisingly, for something so powerful, it could be made using common items found in any home.

There are only three ingredients: a bottle, pins or nails, and urine of the bewitched person. That last one is kind of gross, but I'll explain why it was considered necessary.

It's more of a jar, really, but it's what I had available...

A few notes about the bottle. In some European countries special bottles were sold specially for making make witch bottles. They were usually imprinted with an ugly face, and were often called Greybeards or Bellarmines. Bellarmine was a particularly notorious Catholic Inquisitor, so you can understand why you'd want his image on a bottle that was supposed to defeat witches. I haven't seen any records of Bellarmines here in New England. The early colonists did not have a lot of material luxuries and would have just used whatever bottles were available.

The nails and pins were used to send pain back along the magical connection to the attacking witch. I've seen some modern recipes for witch bottles that include special herbs and things like that. I suppose you could include herbs if you want to, but again I haven't seen any records of that being done in New England. The colonists just used sharp, metal items like needles, pins and nails. If you're feeling creative you could add some broken glass or thorns. Really anything that will cause pain will suffice.

Note: this isn't really urine in this photo, but Red Bull.

The final and grossest ingredient is urine from the bewitched person. A couple years ago I bought a cute little souvenir witch bottle from a Salem gift shop. It contains herbs, salt, a nail, and a little scroll with a spell. It is sealed with wax. It's really nice, but it wouldn't pass muster in the 1600s because it doesn't have any urine in it.

The urine is absolutely necessary for a witch bottle to function. Again, according to the theory behind witch bottles, a witch establishes a magical connection with their victim. This connection links to the victim's physical body. The connection is also linked to any product of the victims body, like their hair, fingernail clippings, or urine.


Many witch narratives from New England tell how a farmer notices that one of his farm animals is acting strangely. Suspecting witchcraft, the farmer will cause pain to his animal by doing things like cutting off an ear or beating it with a stick. The pain he causes to the animal travels along the magical connection back to the witch. Usually these stories end with a mean neighbor being seen the next day with bruises right where the farmer beat his animal or with a missing ear. It was gruesome proof that they were the witch.

Happily, even the early colonists realized they shouldn't beat the hell out of a bewitched child or cut off a bewitched spouse's ear. But because the magic connection is linked to products of the body, not just the body itself, they didn't need to. Instead they just needed to put urine from the suffering bewitched person into the bottle along with the nails. The urine served as a substitute for the bewitched person's body, and mixing it with the nails had the same effect as actually driving nails into that person's body. Pain from the nails would shoot back along the magical connection to the witch, causing harm to them and forcing them to stop bewitching the victim.

In Europe people would usually bury a witch bottle for safe keeping once it was assembled, and many have been unearthed by archaeologists. Not many have been found here in New England, though, even though historians know they were used. One reason might be that the early colonists often added a final special twist to their bottles. Rather than bury them, they would set them in the fireplace until the urine heated up and exploded, which was believed to send extra pain and suffering back at the witch.

DISCLAIMER: Obviously, don't try this at home. Even if you decide to try making a witch bottle, heating it up will just fill your house with boiling urine, broken glass, and hot nails. It might even be worse than being cursed by a witch.