Due to the many cultures that make up the population of America, numerous rituals have been recorded for identifying whether witches had been about their business. They could take the form of a customary trial, the most notorious of which was swimming. This was based on the notion that a river or pond, symbolic of baptismal waters, would reject the bodies of such evil people as witches and, therefore, they would float like corks even when pushed under. If the suspected witches were innocent, then they would sink—and hopefully be pulled out before they drowned. Although never a formal legal means of ordeal in early-modern Europe, the swimming of witches was fairly widespread. Communities basically took the law into their own hands, although local officials often tacitly sanctioned proceedings. We have examples from England, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, and the Ukraine, and the practice continued long after the laws against witchcraft were repealed.1
In America the puritan minister Increase Mather condemned the practice of swimming in 1684 and William Jones, Governor of Connecticut, denounced it as superstitious and unwarrantable. Nevertheless it was instituted a few times, and quite late on. In 1692 Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough of Stamford, Connecticut, were swum at Fairfield. Mercy requested to undergo the ordeal as a means of proving her innocence. Neither sank, unfortunately. Then, in 1706, Grace Sherwood, of Princess Anne County, Virginia, was swum ‘by her own Consent’. The authorities were most considerate, the swimming being postponed initially as inclement weather ‘might endanger her health’.2 But that seems to have been the last recorded instance. A couple of late eighteenth-century almanacs provided an account of a Virginia community’s attempts to try a suspected witch in 1727. This relates how, with the help of churchwardens, the witch was about to be placed in a sack and thrown in a river to see if she floated when an Irish colonel arrived on the scene and saved the woman by telling those gathered that in Ireland they had a better test. This Irish method was to weigh the witch against the church Bible and if she proved the heaviest she was no witch. The ritual of weighing against the church Bible was occasionally practised in England during the eighteenth century, but this almanac story was clearly a tall tale along the lines of the much-repeated satire of a witch swimming written by Benjamin Franklin for the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1730. This bogus event purportedly took place at Burlington, New Jersey, where a mob first weighed the suspected witches and then swum them in a mill pond. Such subtle critiques of popular credulity may have had the adverse consequence of spreading knowledge about both trial procedures, but there is no convincing record of a swimming beyond the early eighteenth century. The legend of a Bible-weighing and a proposed but not consummated swimming in mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, as related in a History of Chester County (1881), sounds suspiciously like a variation on these earlier, dubious published accounts.3 The early demise of swimming in America is curious considering that the practice occurred periodically in England right through until the mid-nineteenth century, while a swimming took place at Deldenerbruck in the Netherlands in 1823, and at Hela, near Danzig, in 1836. So it would have been far from a distant memory for many immigrants to America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The notion that witches had insensitive spots on their bodies where the Devil had marked them led to the rise of the witch-pricking trade in seventeenth- century Europe, Scotland in particular. Self-styled prickers travelled the land charging the authorities for their services with Scottish practitioners being hired south of the border. The profession withered as the trials declined, but the practice left traces in European and American folklore. In the Ozarks it was thought that if an awl was secreted in the seat of a chair so that just a small bit of the point came through, then if a person sat on it without feeling it he or she was surely a witch.4 On to other methods, and in the Ozarks it was also believed that a freshly cut onion would sour instantly and become poisonous in the presence of a witch, and that a witch would become sick if he or she inadvertently smoked tobacco into which had been slipped a bit of pawpaw bark. The most common method of detecting evil eye amongst Mexican Americans concerned the use of eggs. A raw egg was cracked and poured into a plate, saucer, or cup and placed under the head of the bed of the sick child, or under the pillow. If after a while an eye or a pair of eyes appeared in the egg then that was confirmation. If the white appeared cooked then that was also a sign, and could also signify that the evil eye had been negated.
Eggs were also used in cures, with the yoke being rubbed over the victim’s body usually by healers known as curanderos 5 Then there was the technique of boiling the urine of a victim, or the milk of a bewitched cow, which would draw the guilty party to reveal themselves. This was recorded in seventeenth-century colonial trials as well.6 Dutch immigrants brought the practice of boiling a black chicken alive in a room where every entrance, gap, or crack in the house was sealed to draw the witch to the house. It was carried out in the Dutch village of Graafschap, Michigan, during a witch panic in 1889.7 The seemingly limited use of the practice in America may be due to the fact that in the nineteenth-century Netherlands it was largely restricted to mid and western areas of the country.8 One of the most distinctive and best-recorded detection practices also derived from Dutch and German areas and had avian connections.
In 1883 excitement was generated in a Pittsburgh neighbourhood when it was reported that Mrs John Smith of McLane Avenue, wife of an employee of Oliver’s Wire Company, found a bundle of tightly woven feathers in the shape of an alligator, about fifteen inches long and two inches wide, in her husband’s pillow. She had cut open the pillow to investigate the cause of his lingering illness after a sick neighbour, Mr Caffrey, had recovered after having found similar strange feather formations in the shape of flowers and crosses in his pillow. ‘I did not know what to make of it’, said Smith. So she asked some of the neighbours. ‘They said it was the work of a witch’. She kept the feather alligator for a couple of days until she became fed up with the number of curious inquirers coming to her door—some even wanted to the purchase the wreath, and so she burned it along with her husband’s bedding.9
If Smith and Caffrey, as their surnames suggest, were of British and Irish extraction, it is not surprising that the meaning of the feather patterns puzzled them, and that Mrs Smith sought advice from neighbours. It is quite likely that those who interpreted it as witchcraft were of Dutch or German origin, as numerous newspaper reports confirm that wherever Dutch and Germans settled in America, they brought the belief with them. In the late-eighteenth-century trial of a witch doctor from the province of Drenthe, in the Netherlands, we find several of his clients cutting open their pillows and finding feather wreaths.10 The notion was also known in Belgium, Westphalia (western Germany), and northeastern Italy, where feather bundles in the shape of a crown or coffin were burned at crossroads.11 During the early twentieth century, numerous accounts of feather dogs, birds, roosters, and flowers were collected from the German inhabitant of Adams County, Illinois. The general interpretation was that these feather formations were created over time by the witch and it was only when the image was complete that the sick person who used the pillow would die.12
In 1896, several members of the German community of Carondelet, Missouri, discussed the tell-tale signs of pillow wreaths. A Miss Neubauer had fallen ill while staying with her sister at 261 Schirmer Street. One day several female neighbours gathered there to discuss the girl’s strange sickness. Mrs Hoffmeister, a sister of the girl, was asked whether she had opened the bedding to see if anything was suspicious. A friend of hers who believed in witchcraft, she related, had cut open her pillows and had been horrified to find several feather roses. Later, Hoffmeister and Neubauer cut open the pillow she had been using, and found seven roses and a wreath made of feathers. A woman named Spinning, who knew a thing or two about such matters, was called in and she ordered that they be burned.13
During a witchcraft dispute in a suburb of Paterson, New Jersey, known as Little Holland, Peter Sandford told a journalist how he knew his son had been bewitched by a local woman named Mrs Geiser (Geeser):
Little Hendrick tore open the pillow on his bed. While my wife was mending the pillow she felt something hard inside of it. She immediately cut it open and searched through the feathers. In our country feather ropes of three plaits like that one are said to belong to the devil, and witches are the only ones who possess them. I took the rope to a Belgian priest who lives a distance down the road, and when he saw it he shook his head and said: “Some one is working you harm, Peter. Look out for yourself!.”14
There was a contagious aspect to the practice, with communal pillow-slashing sessions taking place, as occurred in Graafschap, Michigan. This small village was founded in 1847 by Dutch-speaking settlers from Drenthe and Hanover, Germany. They were part of a wave of close-knit Dutch Reformed Church communities who, led by their pastors, emigrated to western Michigan during the 1840s. A newspaper in 1889 described them as ‘contented, but superstitious Dutch people’. This was a conclusion drawn from reports that the Graafschap villagers were in a state of excitement following several cases of supposed witchcraft. People had been cutting open their pillows to look for the ‘feather devils’, which were described as looking like crowns or chickens. They had been found in several households and a communal burning of them had apparently taken place. In October, the Graafschap pastor delivered a sermon on the subject to try and extinguish the excitement.15 Seven years later, similar disruption was reported from the Dutch community of East Overisel in the same county, where several feather designs were found in pillows. It was further claimed that a mouse with a ribbon tied to its tail scampered out of one pillow.16
A presentation to the Kansas Academy of Science in 1898 put forward a rational explanation for what were described as ‘pillow witches’ in a discourse on concretions. The speaker explained how a few human hairs would work their way into the pillow, which would become entangled by the movement of the pillow contents when in use. This tangle of hair would form a nucleus around which feathers would accumulate.17 I doubt this would have convinced the dedicated Dutch pillow slasher.