amuletsWitch bottle

The earliest surviving description is a story about a bird. In 1681 Joseph Glanvill printed it in Saducismus Triumphatus: a Suffolk man tells a travelling old man that his wife has been long in a languishing condition and is haunted by a thing in the shape of a bird that flurrs near her face. The old man tells him to take his wife's urine, cork it in a bottle with pins, needles and nails, and set it to the fire. The cork blows out with a report like a pistol and the wife is no better. The old man comes back and changes the instruction: bottle it the same way and bury it in the earth. She recovers. Then a woman arrives from a town some miles off crying that they have killed her husband, who told her on his deathbed that he was a wizard and had bewitched the man's wife.

That is the logic the whole class runs on. A witch bottle is countermagic: it draws in harm aimed at its owner and holds it. Folk magic contends that the bottle protects against evil spirits and magical attacks and counteracts spells cast by witches. It stays active as long as it stays hidden and unbroken, which is why people took so much trouble over the hiding — bottles buried under fireplaces have turned up only after the rest of the building was pulled down.

The bottles keep being found. In 2016 a glass bottle dug out of the threshold of a Cornish house appeared on Antiques Roadshow, filmed at Trelissick; the glass specialist Andy McConnell tasted a little of the contents and guessed port or wine, noting a rusty flavour and the nails. A 2019 episode gave the laboratory answer: Loughborough University found it contained "urine, a tiny bit of alcohol, and one human hair", along with brass pins dating from the late 1840s, and an ostracod. In 2020 a sixteenth-century jug used against witchcraft was found during the renovation of the De Zwarte Ruiter pub in Turnhout, Belgium — reported as the first witch bottle found in Europe outside England.

In the United States fewer than a dozen possible witch bottles have been identified. The archaeologist Marshall Becker was the first to identify one in an archaeological context: the Essington witch bottle, recovered during excavations on Great Tinicum Island in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. A mid-nineteenth to early twentieth-century slave or tenant site in Dorchester County, Maryland, yielded a buried bottle whose cork stopper bristled with straight pins. In 2016 a bottle filled with nails came out of the hearth of a Civil War site in Virginia.

A white witch or folk healer prepared it. The historical fill is the victim's urine, hair or nail clippings, or red thread from sprite traps; later bottles take rosemary, needles and pins, and red wine. Other recorded fills include sand, stones, knotted threads, feathers, shells, herbs, flowers, salt, vinegar, oil, coins and ashes; sea water or earth stand in for urine. Then it is corked and buried — at the farthest corner of the property, beneath the hearth, or somewhere inconspicuous indoors. Carriers describe the mechanism: evil is drawn in, impaled on the pins and needles, drowned by the wine, and sent away by the rosemary. One variant is destructive rather than protective: throw the bottle into a fire, and when it explodes the spell is broken.

Still made. Modern practitioners bottle and bury them, and the historical ones surface at a steady rate during building work in England and, now, Belgium. Inference — the finds are a function of demolition as much as of belief: a charm designed never to be found is only counted when a wall comes down.