The Things People Put in Walls to Keep Witches Out

The Things People Put in Walls to Keep Witches Out

Shoes, bottles, dead cats, scratched circles, and the private magic of the English home.

If you renovate an old house in Britain, there is a small but perfectly respectable chance that somebody has left you a shoe.

Not dropped one. Left one.

They turn up under floorboards, inside chimneys, above ceilings, beside doors. Usually they are old. Usually worn. Frequently there is only one. Northampton Museum and Art Gallery keeps an international database devoted entirely to these finds, which tells you something about how often this has happened. Historic England records the practice in European buildings from at least the sixteenth century, although one particularly early pair was found behind choir stalls installed at Winchester Cathedral in 1308. (Historic England)

Nobody is entirely sure what the shoes were doing there.

That is one of the pleasures, and irritations, of studying household magic. The people who hid things in walls were inconsiderate enough not to leave explanatory notes.

A shoe might have been a charm. It might have stood in for the person who wore it, leather moulded by years around an actual body and therefore possessing something of that body’s presence. A builder might have hidden it for luck. Some objects may have had no magical purpose whatsoever. Archaeologists have to be careful here, because once you decide every odd thing beneath a floorboard is witchcraft, an old house becomes Salem very quickly.

Still, the shoes are not alone.

People have opened old chimneys and wall cavities and found mummified cats. Pierced animal hearts. Knives. Horse bones. Clothing. Bottles packed with nails.

The house, it turns out, had a private life.

And much of it was worried.

⸻

In 2008, archaeologists working just off Shoreditch High Street in London lifted the remains of a brick floor and found that someone had been there before them.

A hole had been dug beneath the floor of an eighteenth-century building. Into it somebody had placed a stoneware bottle upright, filled the hole again, then carefully relaid the tiles.

Inside the bottle were roughly sixty fine copper-alloy pins, many of them deliberately bent, along with corroded nails and a small fragment that may have been wood or bone.

The bottle itself dated from about 1670 to 1710.

It had not fallen there. Someone had made a considerable effort to put it there. (MOLA)

Objects like this are now generally called witch bottles, although the name makes them sound like equipment belonging to a witch. Quite often they were the opposite.

They were meant for the person who thought a witch had found them.

The recipe varied. Pins. Nails. Hair. Nail clippings. Thorns. Sometimes urine.

Especially urine.

Around 1670, an English ballad told the story of a girl supposedly suffering from witchcraft. After other remedies failed, a knowledgeable “chymist” instructed her companions to collect her urine in a bottle with other ingredients and bury it in a dunghill. In the story, the witch soon appeared in distress and demanded the bottle back. She was refused, died, and the girl recovered. The ballad never calls the object a “witch bottle,” which is one reason historians are careful about treating our modern category as though everyone in the seventeenth century used it themselves. But the procedure is unmistakable. (Cambridge University Repository)

The logic becomes unpleasant once you understand it.

Something belonging to the afflicted person goes into the bottle. Sharp things go in with it. The witch, or the force she has sent, is drawn into the trap. The pins hurt her. Heating or burying the vessel might torment her until she withdrew whatever she had done.

A medical treatment, if your diagnosis happened to be witchcraft.

And this is where the subject gets stranger than the usual picture of early modern superstition.

The people hiding these bottles did not necessarily think of themselves as dabbling in forbidden magic. They were defending the household from it.

Magic was being used against magic.

Someone could fear witches, condemn witches, believe entirely in Christian cosmology and still go home and bury a bottle full of urine and nails beneath the hearth.

Apparently contradiction was no obstacle. It rarely is.

⸻

The location mattered.

Witch bottles tend to appear under floors, near thresholds and around fireplaces or chimneys. Protective marks cluster in many of the same places: doors, windows, hearths. (MOLA)

A modern house encourages us to think of a wall as a wall. Early modern folklore was less confident.

A door is a hole in the house.

So is a window.

A chimney is a hole leading directly outside, except wider, darker and difficult to watch.

If you believed harmful things could enter a home, these were practical problems.

People scratched protection into them.

One common design is now called the daisy wheel or hexafoil: overlapping arcs cut into wood or stone, sometimes repeatedly, until they produce a six-petalled flower. Other buildings carry pentangles, grids, intersecting circles, possible Marian marks — Ms, Vs, combinations interpreted as invocations of the Virgin Mary — and strange deliberate burn marks whose exact meanings remain debated. (Historic England)

Some were barely visible even when new.

That matters.

These were not necessarily decorations meant to impress the neighbours. You can find them on beams, beside cellar doors, beneath floors, in roof spaces. Historic England records marks at Shakespeare’s birthplace near the entrance to the cellar where beer was stored; others protect barns full of crops. In 2019, researchers announced what was then described as the largest concentration of such protective marks found in British caves, at Creswell Crags on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border. (Historic England)

To call all of them “witches’ marks” is slightly misleading. Historians often prefer apotropaic marks: signs intended to avert evil. Their meanings were probably not uniform, and some apparently magical scratches turn out to be carpenters’ construction marks.

But imagine the act itself.

Somebody finishes building the doorway.

Then, before life carries on through it for the next three hundred years, somebody takes a blade to the timber.

Circle.

Circle.

Circle.

Again.

Then the plaster goes up. Furniture arrives. Children are born. People eat there, fight there, die there. Nobody remembers the mark.

It works its way into the building.

⸻

The dead cats are harder to write about.

They have been found deliberately concealed in old buildings too, sometimes dried naturally inside sealed spaces. You will occasionally see them confidently described as sacrifices against witches, but the evidence is messier. Some may have been placed to deter vermin; some may have been protective deposits; in other cases we simply do not know why the animal is there. The same uncertainty hangs around concealed clothing and shoes. The placement looks deliberate. The explanation has gone missing. (Current Archaeology)

I like that historians leave some of these objects unresolved.

There is a temptation, especially with folklore, to make our ancestors much more certain than they probably were.

They believed X.

This symbol meant Y.

This object was used for Z.

Real belief is rarely that tidy.

Ask ten people now why knocking on wood is supposed to help and you will get ten slightly embarrassed answers. Many will perform the action anyway.

That is probably closer to how a lot of folk practice survives.

You do not need a complete theology of the horseshoe above the door.

Your mother did it.

The old people said not to remove it.

No sense inviting trouble.

Leave it there.

⸻

Court records have given us a particular picture of witchcraft because courts write things down.

Accusation. Examination. Confession. Sentence.

A woman quarrels with a neighbour; his cow sickens; somebody remembers what she said at the gate. A child convulses. A harvest fails. A magistrate asks questions. Eventually there is a document.

Domestic magic leaves a poorer archive.

The bottle under the floor never testified.

The person cutting circles beside the chimney did not explain himself to a clerk.

The woman who put one of her husband’s shoes into a wall — if it was a woman, if it was her husband’s, if that is even why the shoe is there — disappears completely.

All we have is the shoe.

This is one reason concealed objects interest me more than another retelling of the famous witch trials. Trials show what happened when belief became public, when fear acquired witnesses and officials and punishment.

The things inside walls show what people did before that.

When the cow became ill.

When the baby would not sleep.

When something knocked in the chimney.

When the medicine failed.

When a run of bad luck became a little too long to remain bad luck.

Most fear never reaches a courtroom.

Most of it stays home.

⸻

There is a story we like to tell about the disappearance of magic.

Science arrives. Education improves. The old beliefs retreat. Eventually the modern house is disinfected of all this nonsense, leaving us with central heating and smoke detectors and very little need to scratch flowers above the door.

The objects make that story awkward.

Protective practices persisted into periods we are accustomed to calling modern. Immigrants carried bottle magic across the Atlantic. Concealed shoes appear in comparatively recent buildings. Archaeologists continue finding things for which there is no entirely satisfying practical explanation. Even today, Historic England has to tell people how to distinguish ritual markings from ordinary construction marks because homeowners keep discovering them. (JSTOR Daily)

And then there is us.

We bury a St Christopher medal in a car. Keep a dead relative’s coat because throwing it away feels wrong. Wear the same socks for an important match. Touch wood. Refuse to put new shoes on a table. Hang an evil eye beside an electronic alarm system.

Different materials. Familiar reflex.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the witch bottle is not that someone once believed a bottle could stop a witch.

It is that when frightened people cannot control what is happening to them, they very often want to do something with their hands.

Tie this.

Bury that.

Scratch here.

Put iron by the door.

Turn the horseshoe upward.

Keep the shoe in the wall.

The old house could not promise that nothing terrible would enter.

So somebody gave it another line of defence.

Three hundred years later, we tear down the plaster and find it.

And, usually, have absolutely no idea who they were afraid of.

Writer’s Bio

Timothy Henney is a writer and journalist.