Exploding Witch Bottles November 23, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Witch bottles were ceramic or glass or (sometimes) iron bottles into which a cursed man or woman put parts of their own body and sharp objects. Parts of their own body might be hair, nails and, classically, urine. Sharp things might be nails, pins and thorns. The logic behind all this was that the curser (typically a local witch) had put something of herself into her victim. If the victim put something of themselves into a witch bottle, then the witch would start to suffer and eventually surrender her power over the cursed one. Once you had a witch bottle there were various strategies. Typically witch bottles were buried beneath or near the hearth, or on holy land (we have one record from a coffin). But another possibility would be to boil the witch bottle, trusting that the witch would die when the bottle exploded. Here is a fascinating record of the same from 1900. It is also (be warned) a tragic record.
On Saturday morning the lifeless body of Stephen Choppen, aged 68, was found hanging to a beam in an outbuilding adjoining his picturesque little cottage at Hadleigh (Essex). Deceased was a retired blacksmith, and lately suffered from gout. Many years ago he forged the celebrated iron witch bottles for a notorious local wizard named Murrell. In these bottles were placed blood, water, finger-nails, hair, and pins. When screwed up air tight these bottles were set on fire by means of a ‘charm’ against witches and frequently burst thus signalizing the destruction of the latter’s diabolical influences. Choppen told an anecdote of the first bottle which he said refused to be welded until Murrell arrived and blew the fire, when all went well.
Beach’s first impression on reading this was to wonder how dangerous boiling an iron bottle full of shrapnel might be to anyone standing about? And, in fact, it sometimes proved perilous. In 1804, John Hepworth of Bradford, a white witch, boiled an iron witch bottle and it exploded and killed his client (Hoggard, 93): had the client perhaps bewitched himself? Other examples of boiling iron bottles: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com. Do any, in fact, survive?
Sources: Anon, ‘The End of a Weird Character’, Nottingham Evening Post (5 Nov 1900), 4
Brian Hoggard, ‘Witch Bottles: Their Content, Context and Use’, Hutton Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain (2016)
Richard S writes in, 25 Nov 2016, keep going for the anecdote: A very interesting post, not least because I live just a few miles from Hadleigh. The wise man referred to is remembered locally as Cunning Murrell and there are a lot of stories told about him, many of which were told on an audio cassette that used to be sold by a local museum. Your story about him is new to me, however. I seem to recall that he was living in the scrubland just below Hadleigh castle at one point and allegedly taught Francis Barrett something about his magical art prior to the writing of The Magus.
I have a loosely related story to share with you. A couple of years ago I attended a talk by a retired forensics scientist. He told us that during the 1960s the police took a urine sample from drivers suspected of being over the alcohol limit. These had to be held for months just in case the drivers claimed that they had been sober when they eventually had their hearings. Thousands of sample bottles were held in one big room, which understandably was an unpopular room to be in. As time passed the contents of the sample bottles began to ferment, and the pressure within them increased considerably. Occasionally one would explode, and when that happened you had to get out fast and close the door behind you, as the initial explosion would set off a chain reaction…
Chris from Haunted Ohio Books writes in, 25 Nov 2016: What a fascinating post on iron witch bottles! I assumed they were all glass or ceramic, like the Bellarmine jugs. These sound like the cartoon anarchist bombs with fuses. Here’s a mention from 1908 Essex, which adds the obligatory journalist’s examples of witch-superstition including the drowned Frenchman (whom I think you’ve written about) and Bridget Cleary. (whom you’ve most certainly covered.)
WITCHCRAFT IN 1908.
That the belief in witches and witchcraft is not yet quite dead in parts of rural England was made strikingly plain the other day by the hearing of an assault case in Essex.
Curiously enough, that county has long shared with Norfolk and Cambridge the double distinction of being the principal home of this weird superstition.
In that latter shire, the “witch’s bottle” is still made by the village blacksmith. It is really a hollow iron bomb, hermetically sealed and filled with water instead of gunpowder or dynamite.
Its effect, however, when placed in a fire is much the same; the heat converts the water into steam, which, finding no outlet, presently rends to pieces its metal envelope with explosive violence. The fragments are, of course, scattered in all directions, though more in some than in others, and, wherever they are most numerous, there or thereabouts lives the witch.
It was a Cambridgeshire farmer, too, that, a. little while back, earned for himself a sentence of three months’ imprisonment by administering to a horse that had the glanders—but which he believed to have been bewitched—a “witch’s potion,” the principal ingredients of which appear to have been iron nails and bent pins.
Suspected persons have even been put to death in England for alleged witchcraft within comparatively recent years. At Castle Hedingham, Essex, for instance, in 1803, a poor old paralysed Frenchman was drowned as a wizard by a mob of villagers.
But by far the worst case of the kind happened in Ireland, where, so recently as 1895, a young married woman named Bridget Cleary was burnt alive by a crowd of credulous peasants. She had been accused of witchcraft by her husband, who stood by at her “execution,” a consenting party. He got twenty years penal servitude, and five others of those implicated also went to gaol for lengthy periods.
Taranaki [NZ] Daily News 24 October 1908: p. 3
