Witchcraft

Belief in witches was once common in this country, and in some areas it persisted into the early 1900s. During the late 1890s, Appleton’s Science Monthly magazine sent Frances Albert Doughty into the mountains of West Virginia to explore these beliefs and report on them. The report was published in the July, 1899 issue, and I’ve excerpted parts of it here.

Doughty writes that after asking one of the locals about witches, they would answer, “‘Tain’t that I believe them things myself. I know they ain’t nawthin’ but superstition; but I kin qualify that right round here, not many miles away, there’s people that believes in witches.” Then came stories such as those that follow.

In a little cottage on a much-traveled thoroughfare one woman admitted to me with bated breath, as though not quite sure her tormentor was dead, that she had been bewitched. She said: “I kep’ seein’ an old woman with a cow’s hoof in her hand; sometimes she was by my side an’ sometimes she was there on the wall. At last she come up close to me, an’ she was goin’ to clap the cow’s hoof over my mouth, but I slapped at her right hard an’ she went away. She ain’t never come again. Yes, I know I was bewitched.”

The independent mountaineer will often take the law in his own hands, as the following story illustrates: “A farmer believed a woman was bewitching his stock. He drew a picture of her and set it up as a target; then he sunk a piece of silver in his bullet with an awl, that being the charm for shooting a witch. He aimed to shoot the picture through the heart, but fired a little too low. On that very day the woman herself fell flat on the ground, and a deep, awful hole was found in her side. From that minute she suffered extreme agony, and died in a week.”

The narrator had heard this gruesome tale from his grandmother, who said that she had seen the hole.

One of the oldest inhabitants of Monroe County is responsible for the ensuing chronicle; he dates it in the “forties” of the present century: “‘Tain’t so very long ago there was a woman livin’ near the Sweet Springs who used to be always seen with a cap and bonnet on; nobody ever saw her without the cap. She was a hard, grim-lookin’ monster. If anybody was watchin’ to see her ontie her cap strings to change it, somehow they never could see any more until the clean cap was on — now that’s so, there ain’t any mistake about that! When she come over here from Botetourt County the report followed her that she lived pretty close to a man whose chillun went to school, an’ a calf had been in the habit of attackin’ ’em an’ bitin’ em. The father concealed himself one day and was watchin’ to catch the calf. On that occasion it come out an’ attacked the chillun on a bridge across a little stream o’ water. He ran and caught the calf and cut off his ears with a knife. They always believed that the old witch had turned herself into that calf, and so when she turned back into a woman she wore the cap to hide that she didn’t have any ears. There was three sisters of ’em; it was reported they was all witches, possessed of some uncommon art. John and Harriet had two little pet pullets they thought a good deal of. The cap-woman wanted ’em; they just fluttered an’ fluttered till they died. Her name was Nancy L—-. Well, she wanted the carpenter to make her a piece of furniture out of an old dirty plank she had, an’ he wouldn’t do it. He said it was gritty and it would ruin his tools. Then she got mad and said, ‘I’ll make you suffer in the flesh for that!’ One day soon after that he was at his hog pen feedin’ the hogs, when suddenly he was struck down perfectly helpless, so he couldn’t speak. He thought it was paralytic or rheumatism. In those days there was an old doctor in Staunton, Augusta County, who had a kind o’ process to steam people and boil ’em in a big kettle, for rheumatism. He put sump’n fireproof, a paste or ointment, all over ’em, like the fireproof you put on buildings, an’ boiled ’em an hour or two hours, as the case might be. The carpenter went to consult him, an’ he put him in a kettle that was big enough for him either to stand or sit down in it; a collar was fitted tight round his neck so the hot water couldn’t get into his face and eyes. The boilin’ didn’t seem to do him any good. When he got home he halted about for twelve months or more. First he felt a pain in his hip, and then he felt a pain by the side of his knee as if it was gradually workin’ down; then one day there was sump’n jaggin’ in the calf of his leg. He put his leg up on a bench and an old gentleman seen sump’n stickin’ out. He took a pair of nippers an’ ketched holt an’ pulled out a big shirtin’ needle. Hugh kept the needle as long as he lived, and he believed Nancy the old witch shot him with it. He halted on that leg the balance of his days. I’ve seen the needle; it’s God’s truth!”