Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert.
Speaker 2: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. It
Speaker 2: is time to go into the vault for an older
Speaker 2: episode of the show. This one originally published November one,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two. And Rob, this is an interview you
Speaker 2: did with the author Brian Hoggard.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yes, as the author of Magical House Protection The
Speaker 1: Archaeology of Counter Witchcraft. Just a really fun, fascinating discussion
Speaker 1: about the various curios that have been unearthed in old
Speaker 1: buildings throughout Europe and also in North America, where things
Speaker 1: have been hidden in walls or underfloors that have some
Speaker 1: purpose of protecting the house or the inhabitants from evil spirits.
Speaker 1: So this is a great one to listen to for
Speaker 1: the first time or re listen to as we begin
Speaker 1: to get into the Halloween season.
Speaker 2: Let's jump right in.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb. My regular co host Joe is out
Speaker 1: on parental leave, but today I'm going to be chatting
Speaker 1: with independent researcher into the archaeology of folk Magic Brian Haggart.
Speaker 1: He's the author of the excellent book Magical House Protection
Speaker 1: The Archaeology of counter Witchcraft, which I highly recommend. So
Speaker 1: without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. Hi Brian,
Speaker 1: thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 4: Hi you Wilco.
Speaker 1: So much of your work, and certainly your twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: book Magical House Protections, revolves around the archaeology of counter
Speaker 1: witchcraft artifacts secreted in many cases within historic homes. So
Speaker 1: before we get into the varieties and the particulars, what
Speaker 1: parts of the world and what time periods are we
Speaker 1: predominantly dealing with here?
Speaker 5: Well, it's actually worldwide, and I think it's been going
Speaker 5: on forever, to be honest with you, because humans seem
Speaker 5: to innately believe in the power of some kind of
Speaker 5: supernatural evil and they fear it wherever they exist, whether
Speaker 5: it's sort of tribal societies or up to sort of
Speaker 5: quite sophisticated societies, and so it's been happening for as
Speaker 5: long as humans have been around, I.
Speaker 1: Think, and I want to come back to specifics in
Speaker 1: detail later, but generally, what sorts of objects are we
Speaker 1: talking about, and where do we tend to find them
Speaker 1: positioned in a home.
Speaker 5: Okay, so I normally work with Western Europe, but also
Speaker 5: receive reports of objects from much further afield as well.
Speaker 5: And you know, within the home, we're talking mainly about
Speaker 5: hearths and thresholds. So wherever there's a fireplace or a chimney,
Speaker 5: that tends to be the main point of focus for
Speaker 5: a lot of this, a.
Speaker 4: Lot of these objects and practices.
Speaker 5: And that's because the chimney is always open to the
Speaker 5: sky because it kind of has to be, and so
Speaker 5: it's also the most vulnerable point in the building for
Speaker 5: that reason, so at night people fear things coming down
Speaker 5: the chimney. And also thresholds. So windows and doors obviously
Speaker 5: are also points where the house could kind of leak essentially,
Speaker 5: and they would often be protected. And yeah, but literally
Speaker 5: any boundary point within a house, any precious object or
Speaker 5: precious person or precious artifact, can you know, you can
Speaker 5: find that people have gone to some efforts to protect them.
Speaker 1: I hadn't connected the dots on this till just now,
Speaker 1: about mentioning the hearth as being an entry point. I
Speaker 1: guess we see this reflected at least distantly in traditions
Speaker 1: of Santa Claus entering a home through the hearth.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, indeed that goes even further than that, really, because, yeah,
Speaker 5: it is the idea of some energy coming down the chimney,
Speaker 5: but one of the types of objects that we often
Speaker 5: find in homes is concealed shoes, And obviously at Christmas
Speaker 5: you hang your stocking by the mantlepiece, which is a
Speaker 5: similar kind of thing, so you're kind of trying to
Speaker 5: trap some good energy instead of some bad energy.
Speaker 1: Now, early in the book, you do a tremendous and
Speaker 1: seasonally appropriate, I think, job of describing what the experience
Speaker 1: of church may have been like, especially to a pre
Speaker 1: Reformation English commoner. It sounds incredibly spooky really and really
Speaker 1: not at all that comforting. I was wondering if you
Speaker 1: might sort of summarize just a little bit of the
Speaker 1: energy here.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So when in the medieval Britain, when churches was still
Speaker 5: essentially Catholic before the Protestant Reformation, church rituals were usually
Speaker 5: conducted in Latin, so most common as most parishioners wouldn't
Speaker 5: necessarily understand the language that was being spoken, And in fact,
Speaker 5: it's quite widely assessed that a lot of priests didn't
Speaker 5: understand the words of the Latin rituals either, and they
Speaker 5: learned a lot of them by wrote, so they just
Speaker 5: they knew the sounds, they knew how to emulate a
Speaker 5: Latin ritual rather than perform one. And those rituals would
Speaker 5: take place behind a screen which was called the rude screen,
Speaker 5: which is basically a wooden screen that's been pierced in
Speaker 5: a decorative manner, so you could see behind, you could
Speaker 5: see through it, but not really clearly, a little bit gauzy,
Speaker 5: and there would also be in sense being burned as well,
Speaker 5: and candlelight, so you've got a sort of spooky language
Speaker 5: that you don't understand Latin conducted in a kind of
Speaker 5: foggy candlelight, misty environment, which is quite spooky, as you say.
Speaker 5: And on top of the rude screen, which was called
Speaker 5: a rude screen because it would have the rude on
Speaker 5: top of it, which is the image of Christ that
Speaker 5: judgment day, quite foreboding. And of course a medieval church
Speaker 5: would often be decorated with art, sometimes relating to the devil,
Speaker 5: sometimes relating to saints, so the be all kinds of
Speaker 5: supernatural imagery all around you, as well as the candle light,
Speaker 5: the incense, the slightly opaque view of the ritual. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's really quite a magical environment, and I think that
Speaker 5: that's how a lot of people felt about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You mentioned in this section that, for instance, one
Speaker 1: might not have like a clear idea of how the
Speaker 1: figure of Jesus factors into everything, which of course is
Speaker 1: very easy to take for granted today, especially with among
Speaker 1: modern Christians and people in Western society. But it's the
Speaker 1: idea here that you would have sort of the vague
Speaker 1: structure of the Christian religion and then just the common
Speaker 1: individual is then having to sort of fill in the
Speaker 1: gaps with other supernatural ideas.
Speaker 5: Yeah, to an extent, I think it would vary quite
Speaker 5: a lot depending on how literate someone was or wasn't,
Speaker 5: and how inquiring their mind was as to whether they're
Speaker 5: actually asking their priest the answer to any of these
Speaker 5: questions or not. But yeah, I think there's sort of
Speaker 5: overarching feeling that a god exists, and they would hear
Speaker 5: about Jesus, and they would hear about Mary, etc. But
Speaker 5: they wouldn't necessarily know what their relationship was. So I'm
Speaker 5: sure I've read an account before where someone was asked
Speaker 5: you know, do you know who God and Jesus are?
Speaker 5: And they would think that, oh, isn't Jesus God's uncle?
Speaker 5: And they would be really unclear about the familiar relationships
Speaker 5: that we might now think exists between them.
Speaker 1: So how does the Reformation change this scenario.
Speaker 5: Well, technically it's the reformations because there was like several
Speaker 5: attempts to kind of move it along. But yeah, essentially
Speaker 5: it was about trying to dispel some of the superstitions
Speaker 5: that might have aggregated around believing God and Jesus over
Speaker 5: the years. I think there was about a thousand years
Speaker 5: worth of people sort of augmenting what was going on
Speaker 5: in churches with their own ideas, and the Reformations were
Speaker 5: supposed to be about stripping all that away and getting
Speaker 5: back to the actual text of the Bible, particularly the
Speaker 5: New Testament, not the Old Testament, and trying to worship
Speaker 5: Jesus principally and also God, but you know, with the
Speaker 5: whole Trinity, the Holy Ghost, and pretty much getting rid
Speaker 5: of Mary and getting rid of all the saints and
Speaker 5: all these other things that have kind of grown in
Speaker 5: importance over the thousand ors of years before.
Speaker 1: So how does the period of witchcraft persecution factor into
Speaker 1: all of this, because I don't understand much of this
Speaker 1: takes place in post medieval times, no matter how much
Speaker 1: mean we might want to shove it back into prior centuries.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's an interesting one because I think that belief
Speaker 5: in witchcraft and beliefs about witchcraft actually didn't really change
Speaker 5: very much during.
Speaker 4: The period of witchcraft persecution.
Speaker 5: There were some new ones brought in, but essentially the
Speaker 5: core beliefs about witchcraft were essentially the same, in my opinion,
Speaker 5: they just became magnified. And that was partly through the
Speaker 5: popularity of new pamphlets and literature and the printing press,
Speaker 5: you know, the advent of the printing press, and partly
Speaker 5: through I guess, in a way, I think the stripping
Speaker 5: away of some of the superstitious aspects or the saintly
Speaker 5: aspects as well, you know, where you could appeal for
Speaker 5: help as particular saints, and all of that being stripped
Speaker 5: away post Reformation, I think meant that people had a
Speaker 5: bit more of a need to address supernatural feelings in
Speaker 5: their lives almost and I think it's possible that witchcraft
Speaker 5: beliefs and worry about it were almost they sort of
Speaker 5: came into the vacuum. If you're like created by the
Speaker 5: absence of a lot of the things that people used
Speaker 5: to do pre Reformation.
Speaker 4: That's a fairly contentious argument. It's not that simple. You know.
Speaker 5: It's probably more to do with the printing press than
Speaker 5: anything else. The fact that sort of very salacious and
Speaker 5: exciting stories about which is levels were being circulated in
Speaker 5: pamphlet form, and then literate people, people who could read,
Speaker 5: would then you know, regurgitate these two people who couldn't,
Speaker 5: and this kind of heightened awareness of the fact that
Speaker 5: there could be more danger around than there was before
Speaker 5: concerning witchcraft.
Speaker 1: So you discuss some of this in the book as
Speaker 1: being like the elite understanding of witchcraft and I guess
Speaker 1: ultimately demonology, right, that's again coming down through printed material.
Speaker 1: And then is it kind of like bumping heads and
Speaker 1: then meshing with ideas that would have been more commonly
Speaker 1: held among more common and less wederate people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's kind of we get this kind of
Speaker 4: very much.
Speaker 5: History gives us more of a top down look at
Speaker 5: what went on, whereas archaeology tends us to give us
Speaker 5: a bottom up or kind of look at what went
Speaker 5: on and really as other than Ralph Merrifield before me
Speaker 5: and some of his colleagues who have been doing work
Speaker 5: but not published, there wasn't really an awful lot of
Speaker 5: people looking at witchcraft from the archaeology angle. So so
Speaker 5: all we've ever seen really is from the history side,
Speaker 5: top down, and I think an awful lot has been
Speaker 5: neglected or missed for that reason. And so you know,
Speaker 5: these ideas like like, for example, I talk about concealed shoes. Again,
Speaker 5: some of our earliest examples of that are from the
Speaker 5: fourteenth century, but we've also got examples of it from
Speaker 5: the nineteen seventies, you know, And so so it's been
Speaker 5: a it's been a complete continuum, you know, the which
Speaker 5: the period of the witch trials as people think of it,
Speaker 5: came and went, but this practice has steadily been carrying
Speaker 5: on the whole time.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: It's you know, you can say that it had a
Speaker 5: period of magnification during the witch trials, yep, but it
Speaker 5: hasn't gone away and it didn't leave, you know, and.
Speaker 4: It's it's always been there.
Speaker 5: So the common people, if you like, the sort of
Speaker 5: illiterate people, maybe continue doing what they were doing. And
Speaker 5: then they started to hear about these apparently new dangers
Speaker 5: or more powerful witches, or that there was some kind
Speaker 5: of panic going on, and.
Speaker 4: It just raised everybody's fears. So there was always some fear.
Speaker 5: You know, there was general fear of the dark, general
Speaker 5: fear of the supernatural, especially particularly about around sleep, you know,
Speaker 5: because how could you protect your house when you're asleep.
Speaker 5: So that's one of the big worries that people had.
Speaker 5: But you know, during the period of the some people
Speaker 5: call it the witch craze. I don't really like that term,
Speaker 5: but you know, the kind of excitement about witches. Obviously
Speaker 5: fear was heightened, so people did more things to try
Speaker 5: and keep them away. And that's when you know, for example,
Speaker 5: witch bottles were a direct, in my opinion, a direct
Speaker 5: response to the witch trials, to the period of heightened fear.
Speaker 5: But the rest, all the other things seem to have
Speaker 5: just become magnified, if you're, like, more important during that time,
Speaker 5: but they'd always been there.
Speaker 1: Now you've mentioned witch bottles, so that this might be
Speaker 1: a good time to ask what is a witch bottle,
Speaker 1: what would it contain? And where were they found?
Speaker 5: Okay, so witch bottles were an awful lot of detail
Speaker 5: here they were essentially German stoneware bottles, which in Germany
Speaker 5: were known as Bartman's stoneware, nothing to do with the Simpsons.
Speaker 5: And basically Germans had the ability to make stoneware, which
Speaker 5: is this non porous, really hard bottle, which in Britain
Speaker 5: we couldn't make.
Speaker 4: We only had earthenware.
Speaker 5: So basically, when we found out about stoneware, we wanted
Speaker 5: these bottles, and so they were shipped over by hundreds
Speaker 5: of thousands, usually filled with beer or wine, and that
Speaker 5: beer or wine would be consumed and the bottle would be
Speaker 5: cast away. But the thing is, because these bottles were
Speaker 5: so good that often be reused again.
Speaker 4: And again and again.
Speaker 5: But the significant thing about them is that they have
Speaker 5: a really evil looking mask of a man on it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so they look quite anthropomorphic. So these bottles have a
Speaker 5: salt glaze which gives a kind of leathery skin like appearance.
Speaker 5: Then they have this beastly looking face on the neck,
Speaker 5: and then they have a big round belly which often
Speaker 5: has a kind of armorial shield on it, which sometimes
Speaker 5: that's a little bit occult or a little bit kind
Speaker 5: of a spooky and sometimes as well, they're quite sort
Speaker 5: of petal like quite flowerlike, which is which resembles another
Speaker 5: one of the marks that often crop up in this.
Speaker 4: Area of study as well.
Speaker 5: And so for that reason, you know, if you were
Speaker 5: going to do anything magical, you would want to use
Speaker 5: this bottle because it looks anthropomorphic. It's quite a spooky
Speaker 5: looking bottle. You couldn't imagine a better bottle for doing
Speaker 5: magic with. Put it that way if you want it,
Speaker 5: if you're sitting at home and you want to do
Speaker 5: some so anyway, these bottles, we quite often find them
Speaker 5: underneath the floor, sometimes up to a meter deep, underneath
Speaker 5: a flag stone, in front of a hearth, or directly
Speaker 5: underneath the hearth, sometimes integrated into an ingle nook into
Speaker 5: the wall, and they're often upside down in the ground.
Speaker 5: We're not entirely sure why the upside down thing happens,
Speaker 5: but inside the bottles this is when we x ray them,
Speaker 5: they often show evidence of lots of pins and nails
Speaker 5: that have accreted or aggregated and coagulated around the neck,
Speaker 5: whether gravity is just taking them down towards the neck.
Speaker 4: And then when we open them and have a.
Speaker 5: Look inside, they've often got some liquid, a big lock
Speaker 5: of hair, sometimes sort of thorns or other pins. Importantly,
Speaker 5: the pins and nails which are found inside are usually
Speaker 5: deliberately bent as well. And when I say deliberately, we
Speaker 5: have assessed the angle of the bend, and it seems
Speaker 5: like in many cases these nails and pins all been
Speaker 5: bent around the same iron pole. So someone's deliberately sat
Speaker 5: there and gone around lots of pins and nails before
Speaker 5: adding them into the bottle.
Speaker 4: So there's clearly an element of sort of.
Speaker 5: Ritual or like a quite a lot of effort goes
Speaker 5: into putting it together, and then of course you have
Speaker 5: to dig this really deep hole to put it down there.
Speaker 5: And so essentially what we've got is an anthropomorphic bottle,
Speaker 5: so it looks like a human and inside it we
Speaker 5: have the liquid, it turns out through analysis is human urine,
Speaker 5: so we've got a human's urine in there. We often
Speaker 5: also have nail clippings, nail pairings in there, a big
Speaker 5: lock of hair, and then all these pins and nails
Speaker 5: that have been deliberately and meticulously bent before being added
Speaker 5: into the bottle, which has then been sealed with a
Speaker 5: bung or a cork and then buried upside down under
Speaker 5: the earth, covered over and a big flagstone put on
Speaker 5: top of it. So it's quite a lot of effort,
Speaker 5: isn't it quite a lot of effort, right, And what
Speaker 5: I think is happening here is that because fifty of
Speaker 5: all of these bottles are found by the hearth or
Speaker 5: in the immediate vicinity of the hearth, so that we
Speaker 5: again we've got this focus on the hearth. And so
Speaker 5: the idea is, if something bad, like a spell or
Speaker 5: an energy or maybe a demon or something like that
Speaker 5: is potentially traveling down your chimney trying to attack you,
Speaker 5: it's plunging down the chimney trying to find you. It
Speaker 5: detects this human like figure that smells like you. It's
Speaker 5: got your hair in it, it's got your fingernail clippings
Speaker 5: in it, it's got your urine in it, and it
Speaker 5: dives down to attack you. And when it gets inside
Speaker 5: the bottle, it then gets impaled on all these dead pins,
Speaker 5: which you've deliberately killed one by one before putting them
Speaker 5: into the bottles. And there's kind of like the ghosts
Speaker 5: of pins there to work against the ghosts that's trying
Speaker 5: to attack you. And so there are some some bits
Speaker 5: of folklore that suggests that spirits and witches aren't very
Speaker 5: good at traveling backwards, so once they get into a spot,
Speaker 5: they find it difficult to get out. So maybe there's
Speaker 5: an element of that, like a kind of trap as well.
Speaker 4: So like a trap slash.
Speaker 5: Impaling people, you know, a decoy that has a trap
Speaker 5: within it. That seems to be what's going on, but
Speaker 5: confusingly there is. There are some texts that relate that
Speaker 5: talk about witch bottles that describe something different, right, So,
Speaker 5: there are several texts in the late seventeenth century that
Speaker 5: talk about this idea of boiling a witch bottle, that
Speaker 5: if you think you've been bewitched, or if you know
Speaker 5: someone who's been bewitched, you can take a bottle and
Speaker 5: you can get them to urinate into it, and you
Speaker 5: can add some pins and nails to it and boil
Speaker 5: it on a fire. You could to bug it up
Speaker 5: and boil it on a fire. And the idea is
Speaker 5: that this will that the bottle will act as kind
Speaker 5: of a substitute bladder for the you know, and by
Speaker 5: boiling it you're causing pain to the witch. Because they
Speaker 5: had this belief that if you've been bewitched. There's something
Speaker 5: of the essence of the witch inside you as well.
Speaker 5: So if you then urinate into this bottle and do
Speaker 5: something to it, it's going to have an effect on
Speaker 5: the witch. And so the thinking is in these texts
Speaker 5: that excruciating pain is cause to the witch, who will
Speaker 5: then come seeking you out and will come knocking on
Speaker 5: your door begging for you to stop boiling the bottle,
Speaker 5: and in return you can barter your freedom from the
Speaker 5: spit whatever spell has been put on you. And generally speaking,
Speaker 5: it says that if that fails, you should then bury
Speaker 5: the bottle. So that's interesting, but it's different to what
Speaker 5: we find in the buried bottles. Okay, so the buried
Speaker 5: bottles obviously have hair, which isn't mentioned in any of
Speaker 5: these test The texts also don't mention bending the pins
Speaker 5: to kill them if you like, you know. So what
Speaker 5: we've got is two separate ways of working that are
Speaker 5: thought to be behind these two practices.
Speaker 4: The boiling things seems to.
Speaker 5: Be depending on the idea that you can cause pain
Speaker 5: to the witch's bladder by sort of acting upon a
Speaker 5: substance that might be infused partly with the witch, whereas
Speaker 5: the ones that are buried seem to be acting as
Speaker 5: a decoy in a trap. And I think that that practice,
Speaker 5: the one where the bottles are buried, actually resembles and
Speaker 5: has a lot in common with other practices like shoes
Speaker 5: and like some of the marks and all sorts, whereas
Speaker 5: the one with the boiling seems to be well. One
Speaker 5: of my friends who was studying that called Dr Annie Thwaite.
Speaker 5: She was studying it for a long time, and she
Speaker 5: called it the urinary experiment and saw it as a
Speaker 5: kind of pseudomedical practice that people at the time thought
Speaker 5: that supernatural energies were real, and that this was a
Speaker 5: way of potentially removing them from someone. You know, they
Speaker 5: were sort of using medical theory, if you like, to
Speaker 5: try and remove the presence of a witch. Whereas the
Speaker 5: one where you bury them seems to have more in
Speaker 5: common with folk practices that have been going on for
Speaker 5: a very long time. So I'm not sure, you know.
Speaker 5: They certainly both use the same type of bottle. They
Speaker 5: both emerge at about the same time, which is the
Speaker 5: third quarter of the seventeenth century or thereabouts, but two
Speaker 5: separate practices. And I wonder if you know that you
Speaker 5: have the written one that's more about medicine and science,
Speaker 5: and you have the the other one, the buried one
Speaker 5: that's like more going with the real old school kind
Speaker 5: of folk magic to how to get rid of a witch.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, it's just just so so amazing and so
Speaker 1: like very roughly speaking, like what sort of numbers are
Speaker 1: we talking about in terms of surviving witch bottles that
Speaker 1: have been recovered.
Speaker 5: Since I last started counting? I mean, I think when
Speaker 5: I published, there was about one hundred and thirty odd
Speaker 5: bella means, which is the German German type ones, and
Speaker 5: there was probably another eighty or ninety of glass ones
Speaker 5: that I had on a file, and I wouldn't be
Speaker 5: surprised if the German stoneware ones was easily an excess
Speaker 5: of two hundred by now with the amount of reports.
Speaker 5: But you have to bear in mind that these things
Speaker 5: are only ever found when someone demolishes an old building
Speaker 5: or excavates under an old building, So there's probably a
Speaker 5: vast amount more that have been discovered that just weren't reported.
Speaker 5: Because these bottles are actually quite valuable, so you know,
Speaker 5: you can sell you can sell one that wasn't used
Speaker 5: as a witch bottle for potentially four to five hundred
Speaker 5: pounds on an eBay, and if it was used as
Speaker 5: a witch bottle, I've seen people selling them for up
Speaker 5: to fifteen hundred pounds, so you know, so, yeah, they're
Speaker 5: reasonably valuable when it comes to the black market. So
Speaker 5: I think a lot of builders and homeowners when they
Speaker 5: find these, they're curious, but they also see an opportunity
Speaker 5: for making a bit of money. And so we don't
Speaker 5: know exactly how many there were, but I wouldn't be
Speaker 5: surprised if they were maybe fifty times more common than
Speaker 5: my figures suggest, No, maybe even more than that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now we've twice mentioned shoes, So if you would
Speaker 1: explain how to shoes factor into all of this, because
Speaker 1: on one hand, we have the witch bottle here, which
Speaker 1: you know, once explained, has all of these obvious occult
Speaker 1: and supernatural aspects to it. But but shoes we take
Speaker 1: for granted. Any number of us just have shoes, probably
Speaker 1: piled towards the front of our house, and we don't
Speaker 1: attach any kind of special importance to them.
Speaker 5: That's right, and that's because we have an amazing factory
Speaker 5: production system that makes them cheap and easy to buy.
Speaker 5: But once upon a time they were you know, artisan
Speaker 5: made things and of course we do actually still have
Speaker 5: a culture of the professional artisan shoemaker still exists, and
Speaker 5: there's still people who care about the history of shoes
Speaker 5: and still make very expensive handmade shoes. But of course,
Speaker 5: once upon a time that was the only kind of
Speaker 5: shoe you could get would be a handmade shoe, and
Speaker 5: they were quite expensive, and so they were repaired and
Speaker 5: repaired and repaired until you eventually wouldn't you couldn't use
Speaker 5: them anymore. Basically, so they were quite valuable in more
Speaker 5: ways than you can imagine now.
Speaker 4: But yeah, they are that.
Speaker 5: Probably the most common object that's found in buildings is
Speaker 5: concealed shoes. They're usually concealed on their own. It's usually
Speaker 5: just one shoe. In the old days, shoes weren't made
Speaker 5: to fit a left foot on the right foot. They
Speaker 5: were just the same and they would take the shape
Speaker 5: of the wearer's feet gradually over time. But these ones
Speaker 5: that we find, they're as I say, they're almost always
Speaker 5: an odd shoe. I think there's slightly less than ten
Speaker 5: percent are found as pears, and they're almost always extremely
Speaker 5: well worn, because who would get rid of a brand
Speaker 5: new shoe with them being so expensive. Like I said before,
Speaker 5: and also they then wouldn't be able to if they
Speaker 5: hadn't taken the shape of the wearer's foot, they couldn't
Speaker 5: perform the function which I give, which I suggest that
Speaker 5: they have, which is not just me, other people too,
Speaker 5: but that they act as a kind of decoy a
Speaker 5: bit like we were talking about with the witch bottle,
Speaker 5: that it's got some hair and some urine in it,
Speaker 5: so it kind of fools any evil energies that are
Speaker 5: looking for you into thinking that you're there. It's the
Speaker 5: same idea with shoes that an evil entity or a
Speaker 5: spell or something negative trying to get into your house.
Speaker 5: It's seeking you to cause you harm, and it finds
Speaker 5: your shoe, which might have been on your foot for
Speaker 5: many years and has taken every you know, it's uniquely
Speaker 5: your shoe.
Speaker 4: It wouldn't for anywhere else anyone else.
Speaker 5: Coincidentally, this is also where the Cinderella myth comes from,
Speaker 5: you know, the fact that shoe has become a unique
Speaker 5: thing to someone's foot. And yeah, so it then plunges
Speaker 5: down to attack the shoe as a decoy, and it
Speaker 5: attacks it instead of you. So it's essentially acting as
Speaker 5: a kind of lightning conductor. It's drawing negative energy away
Speaker 5: from you, which is great, isn't it, And the idea
Speaker 5: that it's kind of trapping the energy inside it. Now,
Speaker 5: the idea that the shoe can act as a trap
Speaker 5: is weird, okay, but there is some kind of historical
Speaker 5: evidence for it. So there was a fourteenth century priest
Speaker 5: from England, from a little village called North Marston in Buckinghamshire,
Speaker 5: and he was When I say he was an unofficial saint,
Speaker 5: I mean he was never ever canonized by the Catholic Church,
Speaker 5: so people regarded him as a saint even though he
Speaker 5: wasn't actually one. And he is reputed to have cast
Speaker 5: the devil into a boot, which is a remarkable thing
Speaker 5: to do, as I'm sure you can imagine. But the
Speaker 5: interesting thing about John Sean is that even though he
Speaker 5: wasn't officially a saint, pilgrimages to his shrine for a
Speaker 5: period of about two hundred and fifty years, was the
Speaker 5: second most popular shrine in Britain, and second only to
Speaker 5: Thomas A. Beckett at Canterbury Cathedral. In fact, he was
Speaker 5: so popular that the monarchy in Britain stole his relics
Speaker 5: from the church at North Marston and moved them to
Speaker 5: Windsor so that they could benefit from the money that
Speaker 5: the pilgrims brought to come and visit his shrine. And
Speaker 5: then those remains and relics have then been returned to
Speaker 5: norse Maston when his popularity waned. But the interesting thing
Speaker 5: is that the little pilgrim badges that people would pick
Speaker 5: up when they went to visit his shrine, all of
Speaker 5: them show him holding a big boot with a little
Speaker 5: devil poking out of the top. And we're talking hundreds
Speaker 5: of thousands of people, maybe even millions of people would
Speaker 5: have had a badge that showed a devil trapped in
Speaker 5: a boot. Yep, And not just that, but an awful
Speaker 5: lot of churches had imagery. Obviously to do with all
Speaker 5: of the saints. He was an incredibly popular saint, and
Speaker 5: so many many churches would have had an image of
Speaker 5: john Shaw and holding a boot with a devil trapped
Speaker 5: in it. So from the fourteenth century onwards, this was
Speaker 5: a really popular idea that you could trap a devil
Speaker 5: in a boot, and funny enough that some of our
Speaker 5: earliest examples come from that time. So back to the
Speaker 5: shoes themselves, as I say, sometimes you find them singly.
Speaker 5: Sometimes you find them in large groups. Sometimes you'll find
Speaker 5: there'd be a void in a house just through some
Speaker 5: sort of quirk of construction that people can drop a
Speaker 5: shoe down. And for example, the plow at Sitting Born
Speaker 5: in Kent, there was over one hundred shoes I believe
Speaker 5: collected from that building from four different deposition points, and
Speaker 5: those shoes have been dropped into those voids over generations,
Speaker 5: so subsequent owners of the building all carried on the
Speaker 5: same practice of putting old worn shoes down the same holes,
Speaker 5: and you end up with this record of footwear over
Speaker 5: the ages, as well as evidence of people's desire to
Speaker 5: draw evil away from the people in the house.
Speaker 1: Now, what about dried cats? Why dried cats?
Speaker 4: Oh, the poor little cats.
Speaker 5: I love cats, so I would never do this to
Speaker 5: a cat, and I would never advocate anyone ever does
Speaker 5: this to a cat. This is a tradition from the past.
Speaker 5: We don't do it these days, So please don't go
Speaker 5: hiding cats in your houses people.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's.
Speaker 5: Really really common throughout the whole of Europe and Britain
Speaker 5: and Australia actually and the USA. So we have examples
Speaker 5: from from all over There's also an example that I
Speaker 5: have on a record from Canada, but I don't have
Speaker 5: so many records from Canada. I've also got a record
Speaker 5: from Chile actually, so it's a very, very widespread and
Speaker 5: it seems to be. Earlier on I mentioned about people
Speaker 5: having been very concerned with who was or how was
Speaker 5: the house being protected while they slept, and so there's
Speaker 5: an element of this going on with cats. Because they're
Speaker 5: semi nocturnal, they are quite mysterious in their behavior. In
Speaker 5: certainly in the British Isles, there was a belief about
Speaker 5: the witch's familiar that was often focused on cats as well,
Speaker 5: so that kind of leans towards how mysteriously people thought
Speaker 5: about them. But yeah, essentially they're benevolent little creatures that
Speaker 5: are in our lives. They help control pests. But also
Speaker 5: we must also consider the fact that they breed like
Speaker 5: wildfire if they're not used in spade as we do
Speaker 5: in the modern world. So basically, there were too many
Speaker 5: cats and they were semi noted or generally helpful, and
Speaker 5: so people started to they fell naturally into a helpful
Speaker 5: role essentially, So a lot of these practices. One of
Speaker 5: the things you'll find in common with them is that
Speaker 5: people were thinking about how do how do we affect
Speaker 5: something that's happening on the supernatural plane as it were. Okay,
Speaker 5: so most people weren't able to be supernatural, they weren't
Speaker 5: witches or wizards, yep. But there were these things happening
Speaker 5: to them that were coming from the supernatural plane, or
Speaker 5: they believed were happening to them from the supernatural plane,
Speaker 5: and so they had to find ways of affecting it, yep.
Speaker 5: And they had to find special little recipes and special
Speaker 5: little practices that would have an impact on those things. So,
Speaker 5: for example, these old shoes that are no longer worth using,
Speaker 5: no longer worth keeping on your foot, are essentially dead shoes.
Speaker 5: So they've died, they've flipped over to the other side,
Speaker 5: so they're now effective against the other side, against the
Speaker 5: supernatural realm, if you like. And then with witch bottles,
Speaker 5: you know, you've got a big lock of hair removed
Speaker 5: from your hair or nail pairings clipped off. These are
Speaker 5: parts of you that we're attached to you and we're
Speaker 5: considered to be alive, which are now dead because and
Speaker 5: so they're now on the other side, acting as a
Speaker 5: kind of lure or bait on the other side, and
Speaker 5: then the same thing with these nails. And then we
Speaker 5: come to the point where in that way of thinking,
Speaker 5: here is a cat that's alive but friendly and can
Speaker 5: control pests. If we make it dead, if we flip
Speaker 5: it into the other side, we can hope that it
Speaker 5: continues that role on that side, Yeah, as a presence
Speaker 5: in the house. And so what I think is going
Speaker 5: on is that these cats are being essentially kind of sacrificed,
Speaker 5: if you like, to the house to act as little
Speaker 5: protectors of the house while you sleep, because they're awake
Speaker 5: while you're asleep, and they're catching vermin. They're looking out
Speaker 5: for things that might come in that might harm you, like,
Speaker 5: you know, instead of pests, you know, exchange the word
Speaker 5: pests for spells. You know, negative energy is coming in,
Speaker 5: you know. And I think that's what people were doing.
Speaker 5: And there's also there's a little bit of I think
Speaker 5: that the idea that I've just expressed to you is
Speaker 5: probably the main one, but people have often thought about
Speaker 5: where the cats were killed as a foundation sacrifice, that
Speaker 5: you give a life to the house so that it
Speaker 5: went then take a life later by falling down on
Speaker 5: you and I once had a very brief discussion with
Speaker 5: Terry Pratchett about dried cats, and that was that was
Speaker 5: his idea, was that he thought that was what was
Speaker 5: going on. But I think it's more to do with this,
Speaker 5: you know, the role of a cat in death. I
Speaker 5: think it's more to do with what I said to
Speaker 5: you earlier about how, you know, you take some of
Speaker 5: the qualities of the cat, and by essentially killing it
Speaker 5: but keeping it within the house, you've hopefully got a
Speaker 5: helper within your house who's going to even why would
Speaker 5: it want to help you if you've just taken its life, right,
Speaker 5: But I think that that was thinking that was going
Speaker 5: on there, And we find them in all sorts of places,
Speaker 5: find them, Like the first one I ever came across
Speaker 5: was actually in a village I used to live in,
Speaker 5: which is weird because I'd moved away. And then the
Speaker 5: first report that came through my website was of just
Speaker 5: a few streets away from where I used to live,
Speaker 5: and a dried cat was found sandwiched in between some
Speaker 5: layers of thatch in a house. It was basically a
Speaker 5: sixteenth century cottage, but they think that the cat dates
Speaker 5: from one hundred years later. Yeah, and it was squashed
Speaker 5: quite flat, you know, the way, quite serious pressure had
Speaker 5: been put on it. There's no way it could have
Speaker 5: got there by itself. It had been placed there quite deliberately.
Speaker 5: But yeah, we find others that are sometimes strapped to
Speaker 5: flaw joists, you know, they literally could not have got
Speaker 5: there by accident. And there were others that I found,
Speaker 5: not me personally, but there was another one found sandwich
Speaker 5: between tiles and plaster in the roof of a church,
Speaker 5: clearly had been placed there by the builders. And that's
Speaker 5: another thing we're thinking about. Some of these some of
Speaker 5: these methods and practices were put there by the builders,
Speaker 5: and some were put there by the homeowners. So sometimes,
Speaker 5: you know, when we're looking at an old house and
Speaker 5: looking at all the fine so we get from an
Speaker 5: old house, we tried to discern, you know, which of
Speaker 5: them were put the out by the builders and which
Speaker 5: were added later.
Speaker 1: So was there generally an idea that the builders were
Speaker 1: sort of on the side of the house and on
Speaker 1: the side of the occupants. Because I'm I'm reminded of
Speaker 1: something I was reading about in Chinese traditions. I believe
Speaker 1: this was from a book by Philip A. Kuhn about
Speaker 1: the Chinese Sorcery Scare of seventeen sixty eight, and in
Speaker 1: this one, a lot of it had to do with
Speaker 1: written magical protections that were used during during a homes
Speaker 1: construction to protect against potential curses leveled by the actual
Speaker 1: laborers against the owners or future occupants of a house.
Speaker 5: That's an interesting one. I quite you can send me
Speaker 5: that reference later. I've read that one. But yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 5: I think that generally speaking in England, for sure, because
Speaker 5: that's why I tend to know the most about it.
Speaker 5: But in England it seems like it was an additional
Speaker 5: service that the builders could provide or could offer. So
Speaker 5: say you've got two builders and you're trying to assess
Speaker 5: which ones you want to pay to give them a
Speaker 5: contract to build your house. You know, one of them
Speaker 5: has clear expertise in marking the timbers in such a
Speaker 5: way that it will act us and you know that
Speaker 5: it will repel evil just through the timbers that have
Speaker 5: been put up there, you know. And so you're gonna
Speaker 5: you're going to go with the builders that can help
Speaker 5: protect you in a supernatural way slightly more than you
Speaker 5: would another company that wasn't so good at doing that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so it's another service that some builders offered, and but
Speaker 5: it's a bit more nuanced than that, because I think that,
Speaker 5: you know, you might have somebody who is the principal
Speaker 5: builder might employ a carpenter and a stonemason, and they
Speaker 5: might both have individual practices that they could do, and
Speaker 5: whether they would do them on that project or what
Speaker 5: might depend on whether they liked you or not, or
Speaker 5: you know, how skilled they were in that in that field.
Speaker 5: So there's quite a few different, you know, elements of
Speaker 5: play here. I wouldn't say it's necessarily as simple as
Speaker 5: one builder would give you the all round service. You know,
Speaker 5: they'd give you their cat, their mark, all this kind
Speaker 5: of stuff. And I think some of these practices were
Speaker 5: a direct response to people feeling that they've been bewitched
Speaker 5: as well, so that would have definitely come after a
Speaker 5: building had been put up. But there were certain things
Speaker 5: that certain marks in particular, and you know, I do
Speaker 5: think that builders leave shoes, for example, and sometimes they
Speaker 5: include glass bottles, sometimes empty ones in buildings as well
Speaker 5: as part of you know, in addition to some of
Speaker 5: the other mason's kind of traditions like the topping out
Speaker 5: ceremonies and things like that, but in terms of specific
Speaker 5: counter witchcraft, there was quite a few things builders and
Speaker 5: their trains people could do.
Speaker 1: Now this is too big of a question, we can
Speaker 1: skip this one. But I was also fascinated by the
Speaker 1: whole topic of horse skulls being included in foundation and
Speaker 1: in floors, because on one hand, it makes sense that
Speaker 1: it would line up with some of the things we've
Speaker 1: already talked about here, like the horse as an important
Speaker 1: animal and having an important role and for the humans
Speaker 1: that are doing this. But then there's this whole potential
Speaker 1: acoustic angle. Right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've been grappling with the whole notion of horse
Speaker 5: skulls and the different theories that play for quite some time.
Speaker 5: I don't think I haven't quite finished thinking about it
Speaker 5: all yet, but I think I've got more answers than
Speaker 5: I had before. So when we were talking about cats
Speaker 5: earlier being nocturnal and people worried about who was looking
Speaker 5: after their house and they were asleep, I think that
Speaker 5: the horses play a role in that. And it took
Speaker 5: me a while to realize this, but basically, horses can,
Speaker 5: although they don't always choose to, they can sleep standing
Speaker 5: up and with their eyes open, so they can be
Speaker 5: in a sleep state but look like they're awake, you know,
Speaker 5: and they're and they are basically in a shallow sleep.
Speaker 5: They're ready, ready for action, ready to be alert for
Speaker 5: the benefit of the other horses that they are with,
Speaker 5: who might just be literally falling asleep on their back
Speaker 5: with their hoofs in the air. You know, some of
Speaker 5: them are like that, but there'll be one or two
Speaker 5: of them that can be awake in this kind of
Speaker 5: light sleep with their eyes open. And I think that
Speaker 5: people knew that. So this idea of horses as incredibly
Speaker 5: vigilant creatures was I think part of what's going on.
Speaker 5: And then we also have the fact that if you
Speaker 5: take a horse's head and you deflesh it, to use
Speaker 5: a horrible word, a defleshed horse skull is a really
Speaker 5: dramatic looking thing. I presume you've the big tradition of
Speaker 5: using horses in the States, obviously, I presume you've seen
Speaker 5: a horse skull. You know they are there. They're quite
Speaker 5: quite impressive looking beasts. And I think that when when
Speaker 5: they're in that state, you know, when it's just a
Speaker 5: horse skull, they seem to have almost a super actual
Speaker 5: power at them. You know, they take on a different persona.
Speaker 5: It's not like, you know, a dead cat is a
Speaker 5: dead cat, you know, whereas a horse skull as opposed
Speaker 5: to a living horse is a kind of supernatural thing.
Speaker 5: It looks different and it's regarded differently, I think as well.
Speaker 5: And some of the ideas at play in counter witchcraft
Speaker 5: are about basically being scarier than something else. So you know,
Speaker 5: so if you've got something that's really scary, a lesser
Speaker 5: scary thing might be scared away by it, you know.
Speaker 5: Like there's there's one tradition, for example, with rug working
Speaker 5: that I've heard about where certain rugs that are put
Speaker 5: in front of the fire would often have a red
Speaker 5: diamond pattern on them, also like just a red diamond
Speaker 5: in the middle or in the corners or something. And
Speaker 5: some of the folklore around this is that a devil
Speaker 5: poking his head down the chimney would poke his head
Speaker 5: down the chimney and think, oh, my goodness, there's already
Speaker 5: a devil in the house. I won't go interfering with this,
Speaker 5: and we'll go scarping up the other way to go
Speaker 5: and find the house that doesn't have a devil in
Speaker 5: it because the diamond does met to represent this devil's
Speaker 5: i And I think in a way, this idea with
Speaker 5: the horse skull is that they are particularly frightening and
Speaker 5: quite large, so they could actually intimidate and frighten away
Speaker 5: other things.
Speaker 4: And I think that the.
Speaker 5: Sort of proof of that is that horse skulls are
Speaker 5: used in some of these folk dance traditions which appears
Speaker 5: to be about scaring away spirits, like the marry Luid
Speaker 5: and certain other ones that like the obbios and what's
Speaker 5: the other one called the hood and horse as well,
Speaker 5: you know, these kind of dances and rituals that have
Speaker 5: these kind of horse like figures that go dancing around
Speaker 5: and converting around the countryside. And you know, with with
Speaker 5: the marry Luid, for example, there's also a custom in
Speaker 5: that of sweeping the hearth and cleaning the hearth away
Speaker 5: with this figure that's a horse skull and a big cape,
Speaker 5: and that again seems to sort of tune in with
Speaker 5: this idea of protecting the hearth as well. So yeah,
Speaker 5: I think that the horse skulls, you know, and on
Speaker 5: top of that, there's all this ancient myth about horses
Speaker 5: as well, you know, and the idea that horses were
Speaker 5: thought to literally toe the sun up, you know, at sunrise,
Speaker 5: and chariots of the gods almost you know, and they
Speaker 5: were also the way that people access the.
Speaker 4: Underworld sometimes as well.
Speaker 5: You know, you would ride your horse to Valhalla or
Speaker 5: it would take you to the underworld. There's all these
Speaker 5: really old ideas about horses as supernatural beings that had
Speaker 5: access to other worlds.
Speaker 4: Almost. Yeah, at the.
Speaker 5: Same time, they've got this really multi sort of sort
Speaker 5: of multi functional role almost on a mythic level in
Speaker 5: a human life, you know. But ultimately, when we're talking
Speaker 5: about the period, this period of the Witch Trials, if
Speaker 5: you want to look at that period, for example, we're
Speaker 5: talking about animals that are broadly benevolent to humans. You know,
Speaker 5: we don't see them simply as eating animals, you know,
Speaker 5: although they were eaten and still are in some countries.
Speaker 4: But yeah, they were you know, kind of a benevolent
Speaker 4: role in our lives. But also this kind of.
Speaker 5: Incredible vigilance about them, and also there's kind of fearsome
Speaker 5: aspect to them when they are in the shape of
Speaker 5: a horse skull. And in my book, I do cite
Speaker 5: one example from I think it's eighteen ninety seven where
Speaker 5: this is actually reported in a really good book about
Speaker 5: folklore in Cambridgeshire, where this building company we're essentially laying
Speaker 5: the foundations for a new chapel in Cambridgeshire, and they
Speaker 5: sent the builder's lad off to get a horse's head
Speaker 5: from the knacker's yard because they had a very strong
Speaker 5: tradition of placing a horse's head in the base of
Speaker 5: the foundations, which at first you think this is a
Speaker 5: foundation sacrifice, but it's not that simple because after they've
Speaker 5: poured some beer over it, and they've all shovel with
Speaker 5: various bits of stone work and everything and earth over
Speaker 5: the top of it, they then said that they were
Speaker 5: doing this quite clearly to ward off evil and witchcraft,
Speaker 5: you know, so it's not as simple as thinking foundation
Speaker 5: sacrifice appeasing local spirits. They very clearly believed this was
Speaker 5: for warding off evil and witchcraft. Idea of including a
Speaker 5: horse's head in the base of a foundation trench in
Speaker 5: eighteen ninety seven, which you know is well into the
Speaker 5: industrial era, and we know that there are many examples
Speaker 5: of horse skulls and horse bones found underneath nonconformist chapels
Speaker 5: throughout all of Wales and probably much of England as well.
Speaker 5: And these many of these chapels were built well into
Speaker 5: the nineteen forties, you know. And yet we also know
Speaker 5: that horse skulls were concealed underdwellings in the fifteenth century,
Speaker 5: because we've got archaeological records of them. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 5: the whole idea of horse skulls being concealed instead of
Speaker 5: the whole horse. I'm not sure exactly when that happened,
Speaker 5: you know, because the Viking has used to conceal whole horses,
Speaker 5: will not conceal them, but bury them and have lots
Speaker 5: of rich horse to do with them. But at some
Speaker 5: point between that period and the fifteenth century it became
Speaker 5: much more about the horse's head or the horse's skull.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure exactly when.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating and confusing, No, no, now is there is
Speaker 1: there also an idea that there might have been an
Speaker 1: acoustic benefit in some of these cases to having the
Speaker 1: horse skull lender there.
Speaker 5: I'm glad you brought me back to that because I
Speaker 5: clearly wandered away from that topic. But yeah, so there
Speaker 5: is this idea that somehow horses act as natural amplifiers
Speaker 5: or acoustic enhancers in buildings. So when people first started
Speaker 5: looking at the practice of concealed horse skulls, particularly in Ireland,
Speaker 5: actually a paper by Shaun O'Sullivan I think it was
Speaker 5: in nineteen forty five, but the references in my book
Speaker 5: if I got that wrong. But yeah, he was asking,
Speaker 5: you know, what was the reason for them concealing these
Speaker 5: horse skulls underneath stones in front of the hearth in
Speaker 5: many of these cottages. And the answer he got from
Speaker 5: any of these people was that it made the dancing
Speaker 5: sound better in the evening, you know, so when they
Speaker 5: were gathered together in the evening around the fire and
Speaker 5: they were doing some Irish dancing, it sounded nicer by
Speaker 5: having a horse skull underneath the stone. And then similarly
Speaker 5: in England when they found twenty four.
Speaker 4: Horse skulls beneath the.
Speaker 5: Floor of the Portsway Inn in Herefordshire, which is in
Speaker 5: Staunton on why this village, they said it made the
Speaker 5: fiddle go better, made the fiddle sound better. And then
Speaker 5: in Sweden, for example, when Albert san Cleff was researching
Speaker 5: horse skulls beneath barns threshing barns in Sweden, you know,
Speaker 5: he came to the conclusion mostly through what people told
Speaker 5: him that it made the flails sound better when they
Speaker 5: were threshing wheat. But you know, I find it I
Speaker 5: struggle with it a little bit because, you know, when
Speaker 5: I'm not doing this kind of research, I am also
Speaker 5: a musician. I've been playing guitar for over thirty years.
Speaker 5: I think I'm quite good at it. And actually, but yeah,
Speaker 5: i have a horse skull on top of the bookshelf
Speaker 5: behind my head right now, and I also played guitar
Speaker 5: in this room quite a lot, and I've certainly not
Speaker 5: noticed any kind of ringing or pleasant harmonious sound because
Speaker 5: of it. It may be that I need to attach
Speaker 5: the horse skull to a floorboard with a big screw
Speaker 5: in order to notice any benefit.
Speaker 4: I haven't yet tested that.
Speaker 5: Let's just say that I'm dubious about the acoustic benefits
Speaker 5: of horse skulls, especially because I'd say about fifty percent
Speaker 5: of the examples I am aware of are in locations
Speaker 5: where a lot of the sound that they could produce
Speaker 5: is absorbed by the earth that they're set in, or
Speaker 5: they're in a part of the building that wouldn't you know,
Speaker 5: sound wouldn't reach that part of the building, you know.
Speaker 5: So you know, so I'm a little bit dubious about that,
Speaker 5: And I think that a lot of the reasons why
Speaker 5: people gave this explanation is because it was a way
Speaker 5: of saying that you weren't doing something heretical or superstitious.
Speaker 5: You know, if you said, you're you know, you're walking
Speaker 5: down the street with a pair of horse gulls under
Speaker 5: each arm, and the local vicar comes up to you,
Speaker 5: So what on earth are you doing that? Oh, it's
Speaker 5: to improve the acoustics, when in the evening, of course
Speaker 5: it is, you know, and I would say that probably
Speaker 5: a big clay bowl or something would be better at it.
Speaker 4: I mean, maybe it's more expensive.
Speaker 5: Obviously we used to have, you know, our transport culture
Speaker 5: was completely dominated by the horse for centuries, so there
Speaker 5: was an awful lot of available horse skulls, you know.
Speaker 5: They maybe this was a use people found for them,
Speaker 5: and maybe people really believed that there was Maybe there is.
Speaker 4: Some marginal or acoustic benefit that I'm not aware of.
Speaker 5: But I personally I think that that explanation began as
Speaker 5: an excuse for why someone is walking around with a
Speaker 5: horse skull trying to dig a hole into their house,
Speaker 5: rather than because they thought, I desperately need to improve
Speaker 5: the acoustics in my house and a horse skull must
Speaker 5: be the way I do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as we mentioned already, these artifacts tend to emerge
Speaker 1: during cases of demolition or renovation, digging up the ground
Speaker 1: beneath the old dwellings and old buildings, etc. And you
Speaker 1: also mentioned like the black market and so forth. What
Speaker 1: what is the appropriate course of action that you would
Speaker 1: recommend if anyone out there is engaged in construction, renovation, demolition,
Speaker 1: et cetera, if they find something that that could conceivably
Speaker 1: be part of one of these traditions, what should they do?
Speaker 5: The perfect thing to do is, first of all, as
Speaker 5: soon as you see something emerge from the ground or
Speaker 5: emerge from a wall, it's just pause and take loads
Speaker 5: of photographs from every angle, just sort of really really
Speaker 5: record it as well as you can maybe do a
Speaker 5: bit of video as well, you know, write down when
Speaker 5: you found it, what you found, yeah, before you even
Speaker 5: touch it, you know, and then ideally then contact someone
Speaker 5: who is interested in it or as an expert in
Speaker 5: that field. Obviously, I would like you to consider me
Speaker 5: if you find those things, you know, and I'd like
Speaker 5: to give you some advice or maybe look at some
Speaker 5: photos and have some input about what you found. And
Speaker 5: then the ideal thing, because obviously I live a long
Speaker 5: way away from many of your listeners, you know, the
Speaker 5: ideal thing is that you find some way of keeping
Speaker 5: it in the house after you've recorded it, as well
Speaker 5: as you can keep it in the house and keep
Speaker 5: it where you found it if you can. Some people
Speaker 5: find solutions, like they'll put a little window so you
Speaker 5: can still see it and appreciate it, and it's a
Speaker 5: kind of fun talking point in the house. I know
Speaker 5: lots of houses where they've done that with dried cats
Speaker 5: as well. Actually, even though they're a bit gruesome to
Speaker 5: look at, lots of people still like to keep them. Obviously,
Speaker 5: as something like a dried cat, it's organic and it
Speaker 5: could rot if it becomes damp, so you've got to
Speaker 5: think more carefully about what you do with that, and
Speaker 5: a lot of people do end up disposing of them
Speaker 5: for that reason.
Speaker 4: But you know, if you can.
Speaker 5: Keep it dry and keep it visible or just con
Speaker 5: seal it again, just put it back in and forget
Speaker 5: all about it. Like the first one, I ever came across,
Speaker 5: went straight back in the thatch after I'd recorded it,
Speaker 5: and it's still there as far as I know. So
Speaker 5: that is the best thing to do. That's very by
Speaker 5: far the best thing to do wherever you live. That's
Speaker 5: the best thing to do. The shoes, by and large,
Speaker 5: they're not going to be worth anything, so you know,
Speaker 5: record them and put them back.
Speaker 4: You're not going to lose any money.
Speaker 5: You're not denying yourself some kind of riches by reconcealing
Speaker 5: a shoe or a cat, you know, the ones that
Speaker 5: people assign more monetary value to it as the witch bottles,
Speaker 5: because pottery, you know, nice old pottery with clear witchcraft,
Speaker 5: you know connections, is very interesting. But what I would
Speaker 5: say to you is sell it to your local museum.
Speaker 5: You know, your local museum will love to own it,
Speaker 5: and I'm sure would make you an offer if you
Speaker 5: have a history you know, local history museum, and just
Speaker 5: make sure you offer it to local historians or archaeologists
Speaker 5: after you've recorded it, and let them buy it off.
Speaker 4: You don't put it.
Speaker 5: Don't just put it on the black market, because someone
Speaker 5: will buy it and its provenance will be lost and
Speaker 5: no one will know where it is ever forever after.
Speaker 5: So that's my only request is just record it as
Speaker 5: well as you can share that information. And if you're
Speaker 5: going to sell anything, sell it responsibly, send it to
Speaker 5: someone who is going to care about that object and
Speaker 5: care about its relevance and it's contexts in your local
Speaker 5: historical environment.
Speaker 1: Now, in some cases, I think you mentioned in the book,
Speaker 1: the individuals who find these these objects then kind of
Speaker 1: maybe buy into the supernatural ideas around them, even as
Speaker 1: modern you know, as residents of the modern world.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in modern parlance, you could say that people kind
Speaker 5: of freak out a bit when they find when they
Speaker 5: find these things in their houses. So in England, most
Speaker 5: of the houses where these objects like this are found
Speaker 5: are usually very historic houses, usually quite desirable, usually quite
Speaker 5: expensive houses.
Speaker 4: See.
Speaker 5: So in modern times, usually the people that live in
Speaker 5: these houses are quite wealthy or professional, you know, and
Speaker 5: usually consider themselves to be quite serious professional individuals. So
Speaker 5: we've got kind of quite a lot of lawyers, you know, academicians,
Speaker 5: you know, people like that. And these are people who
Speaker 5: often don't even don't think they're superstitious or have any
Speaker 5: supernatural believes at all, and yet when they find these
Speaker 5: objects in their houses. They want to know what they
Speaker 5: are first of all, and they'll contact someone like me
Speaker 5: and they start to learn more about it, not just
Speaker 5: from me, but from you know, other relicious are online
Speaker 5: or from friends or whatever.
Speaker 4: And then they start to.
Speaker 5: Get really, really, really really worried that they are, that
Speaker 5: they're disturbing some form of protection, and that whatever evil
Speaker 5: that these things were protecting against might come back into
Speaker 5: their houses. And they're often really frightened of, for example,
Speaker 5: a shoe being taken away from the house, or a
Speaker 5: cat being moved, or a bottle being broken or something
Speaker 5: like that.
Speaker 4: They feel that.
Speaker 5: Some dark energy that was being held at bay by
Speaker 5: this thing might suddenly re emerge. Now, obviously, when you
Speaker 5: when you look at the way people used to use
Speaker 5: these things, it was usually in the specific response to
Speaker 5: them feeling bewitched. So the chances of that same cause
Speaker 5: of a harmful energy, the same witch still being alive
Speaker 5: and transferring that home energy onto you, it's almost zero.
Speaker 5: But people for some reason feel that this is going
Speaker 5: to happen to them, and they get incredibly worried. I
Speaker 5: remember one house where a witch bottle was found. We
Speaker 5: persuaded the guy to let us analyze the witch bottles.
Speaker 5: So we were going to take it to university, have
Speaker 5: it X ray's and have all the contents analyzed. And
Speaker 5: it took a lot of persuading to get him to
Speaker 5: do it, and this was for an English TV program
Speaker 5: on BBC two called History Detectives. He'd reported the fine
Speaker 5: because he found it really interesting and as part of
Speaker 5: the research, you know, myself and my colleague Dot dr
Speaker 5: All and Massy we often would investigate bottles like this,
Speaker 5: and the production team and us we had to work
Speaker 5: on him for ages, so it allow us to take
Speaker 5: it away. The whole time it was away, he was
Speaker 5: ringing every day as the bottle, Okay, when's it coming back?
Speaker 4: Was it coming back?
Speaker 5: I need it back in the house. Really really felt
Speaker 5: desperately worried about it. And when it did come back
Speaker 5: to the house eventually after the analysis, he wanted it
Speaker 5: to be reinterred and he wanted me to do it
Speaker 5: because I was the first person he reported it too,
Speaker 5: and so I agreed. But when I got there, what
Speaker 5: I didn't know was that he and the production team
Speaker 5: had employed a group of nuns to pray around me
Speaker 5: while I was lowering it into the hole. So that
Speaker 5: was a startling ends to that little bit of TV work.
Speaker 5: But yeah, it just shows how strongly this guy felt
Speaker 5: about it. He really wanted the thing to go back
Speaker 5: where it come from, and he felt that it needed
Speaker 5: some kind of religious blessing in the process as well
Speaker 5: to make it safe.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating. It really makes me think about you know,
Speaker 1: early on in the book you also you mentioned like
Speaker 1: the different sense world of being in a house in
Speaker 1: historic times and everything's quieter and I guess maybe you
Speaker 1: hear all the sounds or potential sounds a bit more.
Speaker 1: But then also just thinking about our modern relationship with
Speaker 1: like the spaces between our walls or the spaces underneath
Speaker 1: the floors. There are things we know, we tend to
Speaker 1: know or assume there are not spirits or demons under there,
Speaker 1: but we don't know for sure that there's not a mouse.
Speaker 1: We know there are wires and pipes under and through
Speaker 1: our house, and we have at least some level of
Speaker 1: understanding of how those things work, but then also maybe
Speaker 1: some some some empty spots in our understanding concerning say
Speaker 1: electrical wiring.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's really interesting. I mean I would say
Speaker 5: that that people in the past often used to feel
Speaker 5: a bit like our children do now, you know. So
Speaker 5: you know you've got a child going to sleep, that
Speaker 5: the fears of something under the bed or something you know,
Speaker 5: hiding behind the cupboard or something like that. You know,
Speaker 5: I think that it's not quite the same. I mean,
Speaker 5: I'm not saying that people had beliefs that were just
Speaker 5: like children. But if you imagine a more mature version
Speaker 5: of those beliefs, you know that there's there still is
Speaker 5: a belief in magic. There still is a belief that
Speaker 5: there are some entities and some things around you that
Speaker 5: can harm you, but you can't see them, and you
Speaker 5: haven't got the powers to do anything about them unless
Speaker 5: you learn some of these practices.
Speaker 4: You know, only witches can.
Speaker 5: Maybe do something about these things, or white witches, you know,
Speaker 5: the village cunning person for example, who's got control over
Speaker 5: some supernatural powers, could maybe manipulate some of these things.
Speaker 4: But you can't.
Speaker 5: But all these things are around you, And so I
Speaker 5: think that some of those fears that you might remember
Speaker 5: from being a child basically carry over into adulthood as.
Speaker 4: A legitimate belief that everybody shared.
Speaker 5: You know, I really do think that even as recently
Speaker 5: as the early twentieth century, and some rural areas, beliefs
Speaker 5: like this were absolutely normal, and people had very sophisticated
Speaker 5: responses to them, including the practices I've mentioned plus others.
Speaker 1: Now, this is not an example that I think has
Speaker 1: any supernatural aspects to it, but I was wondering, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if this is a feature of homes in
Speaker 1: the UK or not, or if this is just a
Speaker 1: thing in the States, or if this is found throughout
Speaker 1: the world. But you look at older medicine cabinets sometimes
Speaker 1: and there'll be a slot in the back to dispose
Speaker 1: razors down, like shaving razors. And I couldn't help but
Speaker 1: think of that now and again whilst whilst reading the book,
Speaker 1: as being you know, a place where we put things
Speaker 1: that maybe have some sort of connection to our physical body.
Speaker 1: And they also reminded me of the bent nails a bit,
Speaker 1: the bent pins, as being these you know, these these
Speaker 1: bits of iron or metal that are that are no
Speaker 1: longer useful.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've seen I've seen some lots of examples to those.
Speaker 5: I can't remember the name of the Facebook group, but
Speaker 5: there's a group about things found hidden in walls and
Speaker 5: everything yeah, And a lot of the examples from the
Speaker 5: States are where people have bought a really old house
Speaker 5: and it's been like a medicine cabinet, and they've found
Speaker 5: this great, big, massive razor blades all behind the plaster board,
Speaker 5: you know, that will be pushed through this slot, have
Speaker 5: just been allowed to just sit there and rust away
Speaker 5: behind the behind the wall. And yeah, it's very similar,
Speaker 5: isn't it. You know, you can see why it's a
Speaker 5: similar idea, isn't it. You've got this thing, like you say,
Speaker 5: closely associated with the body. It's then been disposed of
Speaker 5: behind the wall. It's very sharp, you know, it's this
Speaker 5: sharp thing where supernatural you know, it's not going to
Speaker 5: look there anymore, is it? Because you've got all these
Speaker 5: dead sharp things. And it's very reminiscent of the belief
Speaker 5: in knife blades and things that used to be found
Speaker 5: underneath windows, cells and sometimes under door intels where there's
Speaker 5: there's a you know, we've talked a lot about this
Speaker 5: idea that things can be sort of killed in order
Speaker 5: to be activated on the supernatural plane, and that would
Speaker 5: the same wind apply to well, you're kitchen utensils.
Speaker 4: You know, if you've got a broken knife.
Speaker 5: It now is activated if you're like and it is
Speaker 5: now a useful form of supernatural defense if you were
Speaker 5: to secrete it beneath a window sill or pop it
Speaker 5: above a door intel, And so it's very similar.
Speaker 4: There's kind of there's definitely a resonance there isn't that.
Speaker 1: Finally, as both a witchcraft archaeologist and a musician, do
Speaker 1: you think there's a shortage of which mentions in songs
Speaker 1: about witchcraft and wizardry or there are there some great
Speaker 1: examples out there that I just don't know about.
Speaker 4: Are you also a musician? Are you going to rectify
Speaker 4: this situation?
Speaker 1: I have no ability to directify it if there is
Speaker 1: a lacking.
Speaker 5: I don't think, though I don't know of any. I'm
Speaker 5: sure that there are some little folk poems that reference
Speaker 5: the idea of protecting against witchcraft. But I'm not aware
Speaker 5: of a good song, especially a rock song, which is
Speaker 5: my world, about witch bustles. But I do know there
Speaker 5: is a metal band called Ghost or Ghost but with
Speaker 5: a cane the front instead of a G and I
Speaker 5: know that they've started writing some crazy songs about counter witchcraft.
Speaker 5: So there may be a witch bustle song coming from
Speaker 5: them soon.
Speaker 1: Excellent. Well, but before we close out here, I imagine
Speaker 1: that we have perked a number of listeners curiosities about
Speaker 1: this whole topic. Can you tell our listeners how they
Speaker 1: can follow you the website or social mediaccounts they can
Speaker 1: go to to learn more about the study.
Speaker 5: Sure, so on Twitter and Instagram, I'm there as folk
Speaker 5: magic Man as one word. But on Facebook and on
Speaker 5: my website it's a little bit more difficult to convey
Speaker 5: without seeing it. But the domain is aperture pios, which
Speaker 5: is you can probably share a link, can't you in
Speaker 5: your podcast? But yeah, that's probably the best way to
Speaker 5: do it. But it's appaios, dot co, dot uk or
Speaker 5: or dot com and the same thing on Facebook it
Speaker 5: would be forward slash as But yeah, that's where it
Speaker 5: all is.
Speaker 1: Excellent. Well, thanks for taking time out of your day
Speaker 1: to chat with me here. This has been I've enjoyed
Speaker 1: it tremendously and I am sure that our listeners are
Speaker 1: going to enjoy it as well.
Speaker 4: I've enjoyed it very much too.
Speaker 1: Thanks again to Brian for coming on the show to
Speaker 1: chat again. The book is Magical House Protection, The Archaeology
Speaker 1: of counter Witchcraft and It's available in physical and digital
Speaker 1: forms wherever you get your books. We only had time
Speaker 1: to discuss really a fraction of what is explored in
Speaker 1: the book, so if this topic fascinates you as it
Speaker 1: does me, pick it up. Thanks as always to Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson for producing the show, and if you want
Speaker 1: to reach out, simply email us at contact at stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com.
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