I wrote this a while back.  It’s about curses in New England.  It seems like a good time of year to re-post it.  If you think we are not a superstitious lot in this country, think again!

New England Curses

By Joseph Monninger

Caleb Merrill, a deaf boy, went hoeing one day and was struck by a terrible noise like the sound made from the wings of a mighty bird.  Caleb could hear nothing, but when he returned home in a terrified state he reported that Mr. Simeon Smith, the most feared wizard in the region, had come after him.  Thereafter Caleb began to act in a strange manner.  He would “run up the house or barn like a squirrel, and would traverse the ridge pole.”  At other times he would writhe in agony for hours.  To cure him the town people procured a bottle of his urine and buried it under the hearth of Simeon Smith’s fireplace.  Immediately after Simeon Smith was taken with violent nose-bleeds and for a long time they could not be stopped.  Eventually the urine seeped out of the bottle and the boy began to cut his antics again.  Finally they replaced the urine with blood drawn from young Caleb, stopped the bottle with a small sword dashed through the heart of the cork, and buried it again beneath the hearth.  This time the sword worked through the cork and into the blood, causing Simeon Smith’s death.  The hamlet buried Smith beneath an apple tree, where, to this day, the apples are ‘the bitterest, crabbedest things that ever grew.’”

–from The History of Warren, N.H. by William Little, 1870

If good fences make good neighbors, as the New England poet Robert Frost

reminds us, curses make having neighbors good fun.

Although most New Englanders are familiar with the Salem Witch Trials that took place in the long winter of 1691-1692, many New Englanders do not realize witchcraft and curses plagued rural America long after the famous trials concluded.  Curses, witchcraft, and spells were as much a part of everyday life along the Connecticut Valley as church meetings or square dances.

So as summer deepens in New England and the harvest commences, here are a few curses and omens that might be useful or informative:

n  If your calf grows ill, cut off its ear and throw it in the family hearth.  If that fails, scald the calf.

n  If a witch troubles you, wait until she must have her shoes repaired.  Then persuade the cobbler to break his awl off in her sole.  The witch will be pinned to the ground and will be unable to walk until the awl is removed.

n  Similarly, if you stick a needle down in a witch’s track she must turn around.

n  Witches cannot resist a rocker.  If a rocker moves with no one in it, be aware that she is beside you.

n  If a dog howls at night, someone is going to die soon.

n  If one stubs the left foot, one is not wanted where he or she is going; if that same person stubs the right foot, she or he will be welcome.

n  A ticking from a little bug in the wall is a sure sign of death.

n  When a person begins biting his lip, it is a signal that someone has used the evil eye on him.

n  Rubbing a raw hen’s egg over a person may rid him or her of a curse.

n  If you suspect someone of cursing a friend or relative, take three pebbles from a crossroads, wave it above the victim, then throw the pebbles away.

n  Wave a lamp around a baby before taking it to another town.

n  If a child is seen by a woman suspected of having the evil eye, the mother should spit directly on the hand and face of the child, or at least pretend to spit.  Before a child is taken out for the first time, the child’s grandmother should spit in the infant’s hand.

n  A baby that is too beautiful invites the evil eye.  Babies should not be dressed too beautifully.  You may want to drag a child over a dung pit to demonstrate the child’s worthlessness so that the spirits will not bother it.

n  Overturn a pot in a crop field.  This will attract the attention of a passerby so they will not look at the crops and risk cursing it.

n  Before moving into a new house wave bread in front on the structure, then throw the bread away.

n  Glass and mirrors can deflect an evil eye.  Use them judiciously.

n  Drop burnt matches into water to determine if you have been given the evil eye.  If the matches sink, you have been cursed.

“People in colonial New England opened the Bible at random and pointed to a

verse,” explained Robin DeRosa, an American Studies instructor at Plymouth State College who is working on a book about the Salem Witch Trials.  “They used it as a source of divination.  The verse foretold the future.  They also used knives and keys to decide what the future held.  We may think of them as superstitions now, but it was a part of everyday life.”

Curses spring from jealousy, anthropologists point out, or the desire to obstruct the good fortune of a neighbor.  Before zoning laws or legal suits, neighbors attempted to set the record straight by casting spells.  At the same time families sought to protect themselves by the use of charms and precautions to ward off supernatural attack.  The great Colonial theologians, Increase and Cotton Mather, took the invisible world, as they termed it, as a matter of fact.  Though they regretted the deaths caused by the Salem Witch Trials, they did not for an instant doubt the possibility of witches causing such mischief.

As historian DeRosa points out, “Magistrates and ministers would force people suspected of witchcraft to recite the Lord’s Prayer.  It was commonly held that the Devil could not recite the Lord’s Prayer.  It followed that if the person stumbled while reciting the paper, the Devil might be the culprit.  It was one of many proofs of demonic possession.”

“Spells and curses keep social order,” Plymouth State English Professor Robert Garlitz says, “because they provide reasons for events.  Much of life revolves around the question of self-identity.  In some parts of the world, no death is an accident.  In other words, every death is explained by an act of human intervention.”

Professor Garlitz also points out that before science came to grips with certain elemental truths, people searched vainly for explanations.  If one does not have an understanding of lightning, for instance, the phenomena can appear supernatural.

“Imagine seeing great bolts of jagged light in the sky,” Garlitz says, “and simultaneously having no conception of lightning.  It would have been a frightening experience.  It might be made slightly less frightening by imagining your neighbor as the causal agent.  You can act against a neighbor and procure protections.  Clinging to simple equations permitted simple solutions.”

*

Mrs. Weeks, with her husband, went down to Mrs. Clough’s after some flax, but was unable to procure it.  She was mad, as usual, and went to the backside of the room and laid her head upon a table and closed her eyes.  Immediately there was a terrible noise at the barn.  The men folks rushed out and found that a two year old colt had reached into the sheep pen and lifted two lambs out with his teeth and killed them.  He was now working hard to catch a third lamb.  Weeks went back to the house on the run, shoved his wife to the floor, then told her to behave herself.  To the credit of the colt it was told that he quieted right down and never injured a sheep afterward.

–from The History of Warren, N.H. by William Little, 1870

*

New England architectural features sometimes provide clues about curses and spells.  Hexafoos or witchfoots — a slightly swirling swastika pattern often seen on barns — is Germanic. It predates the alphabet and is commonly associated with the sun worship that ruled pre-Christian Europe for over 1,500 years.                 In colonial America, where witches were said to put spells on cattle to dry them up, the whirling swastikas came to represent hex signs.  The hexafoos, according to some sources, served as demonic lightning rods.  Interestingly, witches’ balls — the purple glass balls sold in boutiques around the country — actually were used on lightning rods.  Placed on a lightning rod at the top of a barn, the purple balls exploded or cracked when lightning hit, notifying the farmer than he should check the ground on his barn against future storms.  When the globes burst, it was said that God had paid a visit to the barn.

“Cultures bleed into one another,” Professor Garltiz says, “and the influx of European immigrants to the United States brought with it many of the curses and superstitions from overseas.  The Native Americans had their own belief systems.  It is human nature to attempt to control what goes on around us, even if we can never be entirely successful at it.”

*

A young man, Jonathan Merrill, went to see his lady-love.  On his way home he had to cross a stream on the trunk of a fallen tree; and when he arrived at this point, as he was stepping upon the log that was shaded by thick foliage, and through which a few straggling rays of moon struggled, he saw standing on the other end a white, airy figure which looked to him anything but earthly.  He gazed upon it for a few moments and then stepped from the log.  As he did so the figure followed his example and he saw it standing on the water.    He turned quick about and ran with all his might to the house where he had been.  Young Merrill always believed he saw a witch that night.

–from The History of Warren, N.H. by William Little, 1870

*

Finally, a few more curses and cures.  Use them wisely.

• Tie a black string or piece of yarn around the arm of an ill person to lower his or her temperature.
• To cure a sick child, take sticks from a new or unused broom, set them on fire, and wave them around the head of the child.
• To seek an attacker, place a sickle in the flames of the hearth.  Apply the hot metal to the patient’s face., making a small pattern of burns.  As the wounds heal, the scars will become transferred onto the face of the attacker in the same place and with the same pattern.
• Pour water on the ground at the feet of a newly wedded couple.  That will keep them safe from witchcraft.
• Pregnant women can turn fruit sour and tasteless
• To harm an enemy, make a knot from object that once belonged to the enemy.  Tighten the knot daily by small increments.  In time, the person will succumb.
• A horseshoe is good luck, or protection, because it takes the evil sent by an attacker and reverses it back to the enemy.