Once the identity of a suspected witch had been confirmed, one course of action was to carry out ritual actions that required physical confrontation. The most striking of these was the practice of scratching. This was carried out numerous times in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, leading to court cases, but there is little evidence of the practice amongst those of English descent in America in the same period. We know that in 1796 Elizabeth Smith of Arundel, Maine, consented to being scratched to stop her relatives from persecuting her, and another case occurred in Pittston, Pennsylvania, in 1877.18 Maybe instances went unrecorded of course, but it does seem that scratching fell largely out of usage amongst English Americans, perhaps supplanted by the less stressful alternative of shooting the image of the witch.
Still, the notion of drawing blood was not restricted to the English.19 In November 1914 a Polish woman named Michalana Zamowski and her husband, of Turkey Run, PA, were prosecuted after scratching Katie Short, a German, several times on the face to draw blood. Zamowksi had been ill and lost her voice for a year. She suspected the elderly Short, who earned a meagre living making and selling tallow dips, of having put a spell upon her. The two had shared a drink of whisky shortly before Zamowski fell ill. Very suspicious. Zamowski and her husband consulted others about what to do, and someone, perhaps an English person, recommended scratching.20 Some African Americans also knew something similar. In June 1893 Willis Wesley Shaw, an African-American farmer who farmed near Buchanan, Georgia, had words with a reputed witch while ploughing one day, and she made as if ‘to pick up his tracks’. Shaw got out his knife and slashed a three-inch gash in her neck. He caught her jugular but he pleaded that he was trying to cut her ‘witch vein’ to counteract her spell, not kill her.21 A European influence? Or a similar but African notion?
Spitting and spittle were thought to have anti-witch properties in many cultures around the world, and no less so amongst the various peoples of America.22 One tradition required coercing the witch to spit on his or her victim. In 1876 Julia Welsh, who had emigrated to New Jersey from Mayo, Ireland, ten years before, was told by a Mrs Collins that her bewitched child could only be cured by getting the suspected witch, another Irish woman named Mary Meehan, to ‘come and bless the child three times and cast three spits upon her’. Meehan reluctantly agreed to do this, but then refused at the last minute. Collins then advised that the only alternative was the Irish charm of taking a piece of Meehan’s clothing and burning it. Welsh duly acted on this advice, leading to a prosecution for assault.23 This was, indeed, a common Irish technique. In September 1830 an Irish hod carrier named Jamie was charged with assault before the municipal court of Portland, Maine. He had attacked a female neighbour with a razor, crying ‘you old witch, I will be the death of you’. He then began to slash her clothing before other neighbours came to the woman’s aid. In court Jamie explained that the woman had bewitched his goat to prevent it from kidding. He had asked her to remove the spell but she denied having done anything to it. So he then seized her with the purpose of getting a piece of her gown, which he intended to bum under the goat’s nose in order to break the witchery. He told the magistrate that he had heard of many instances of this remedy working successfully when he was in Ireland, though he had not encountered its use in his new homeland.24 He was ordered to provide sureties to keep the peace, but being unable to pay he was committed to jail. Jamie was telling the truth, for, indeed, we find references to this ritual in Irish folklore sources. In County Leitrim, for instance, a bewitched animal could be cured by either burning the alphabet on a shovel under its nose or, likewise, a piece of the dress of the witch responsible.25
A similar practice was known in the Polish community, too. In August 1903 a Chicago court case resulted when a grocer’s wife, Mrs Frank Galenski, attempted to cure her sick child by taking a pair of scissors and cutting off some of the hair and a piece of the shawl from the suspected witch, Francesca Krejewski. These she burned over her sick child, following the advice of a local fortune teller. Twelve years later another Pole, Veronica Bukowski, of South Bend, Indiana, was advised that her bewitched child would only recover if she invited the suspected witch to her home, burned a bit of her shawl, slapped her until the blood ran, and gave it to the child.26
In one instance in Goodhue County, Minnesota, in 1872, the forced confrontation between witch and bewitched occurred over a pan of urine. A farmer’s wife and young child were ill and the family believed their servant girl had cast a spell over them. Some of his wife’s urine was boiled in a pan and the servant girl was forced to inhale the fumes, thereby taking the spell upon herself. Her head was forced so low over the boiling liquid that her lips were scalded, and so she understandably lodged a complaint with the county attorney.27
Some assaults had no ritual function; they were base, brutal attempts to bludgeon or torture the witch in to retracting his or her spells. In i860 Marias Samierez, a wealthy American rancher of Roma, Texas, kidnapped a woman named Antonia Alanis believing she had bewitched his son who lived near Camargo. A witch doctor said that the witch had shot pigeon bones into his head. Alanis was beaten and her body lashed with prickly pear needles. This ordeal was repeated over a period of two weeks but the son did not recover. She was then tied up and a fire set under her feet. Under such torture the witch doctor said she would be forced to retract the pigeon bones and she would pull them out of the sick man’s skull. When, in June 1901, a 24-year-old man named Frank Olding of Jasper, Indiana, believed that his neighbour Mrs Catherine Ferry, a German woman in her sixties, was responsible for bewitching his horse, he grabbed his blacksnake whip and badly whipped, kicked, and punched her.28