Murder apart, many of those who attempted to draw blood or otherwise manhandle accused witches left themselves open to prosecution for assault, so it is not surprising that most people chose to harm witches at a distance through acts of sympathetic magic. As well as the common practice of shooting the images of witches, there were numerous alternatives, some of them the same procedures as witches were thought to use. Driving a nail in to a witch’s footprint was quite widespread in African-American and European tradition.41 Symbolically beating out the witch from the substance or person bewitched was another technique. Sarah Kochert, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, told a court in 1883 that to unbewitch her infant daughter she had been advised to beat the cradle with a briar stick. This she did until she was so tired she could no longer carry on.42 Milk chums, or the milk, were beaten with a hawthorn, hickory, or hazel switch to drive out witchery. Sometimes it was reported that the witch would appear with whip marks on her body afterwards. Putting a red-hot poker or horseshoe in the chum had a similar effect on the witch.43 Burning bewitched objects, or items associated with the bewitched, was practised in seventeenth-century America and continued throughout our period. Again it was based on the sympathetic principle with the witch experiencing burning pains. Another variant practised by a German family in Michigan involved placing a chip of wood in the chimney to dry out, with the witch dying slowly in pain as the moisture left the chip.44
Witch bottles, which came into vogue in seventeenth-century England, were used either to draw witches to the victims’ houses or to force them to remove their spells by causing them great bodily torment. The general recipe was as follows: take a bottle, put some of the bewitched person’s urine in it, add some sharp objects such as bent pins, nails, or thorns, some toenail clippings or hair perhaps, and maybe an item such as a felt heart for good measure. Seal the bottle and either bury it under the hearth, put it up a chimney, or boil it in a fire. The bottle represented the witch’s bladder, and the sharp objects, particularly when boiled, would cause him or her excruciating pain. Cotton Mather noted the use of such ‘Urinary Experiments’ in late seventeenth-century New England, and writing in 1824, Joseph Doddridge explained that a common cure for bewitched children involved ‘getting some of the child’s water, which was closely corked up in a vial and hung up in a chimney’.45 A handful of examples have been found by American archaeologists. Excavation of a long-demolished house of nineteenth- century date in Kentucky turned up an obvious case. Buried under the hearth was a bottle containing four pins, the cork was still firmly in place when found. Similarly the fragments of a wine bottle of mid-eighteenth-century date, excavated from the hearth of a house at a coastal Maryland site, contained straight and bent pins stuck in either side of the stopper. A wine bottle of around the same date containing brass pins was found near the base of a chimney in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.46
Plugging was another technique used to kill and cure. This involved drilling a hole in a beam or tree, placing items within it and then fitting a wooden plug to drive home the sympathetic magic. In America it was used in folk medicine to cure a range of diseases, asthma in particular. Some hair or nail clippings of the afflicted were plugged, usually into a tree but sometimes into a doorjamb or post.47 Its anti-witch potential is well described in a leather-bound manuscript of remedies and charms written down in 1784 by a South Carolina man named Joshua Gordon:
If you are suspicious of the person that does you Hurt write their name and Sirname on a pice of paper then bore a hole in your horse trough make a pin that will Just fit the hole then put in the pice of paper into the hole and drive in the pin a little way next day drive it a little more and So on Every day till it be driven Home. All this must be dun Without any persons knowledge but yourself.48
There were numerous variations on this practice. When, in 1886, a carpenter named Jefferson Grimley was tearing down the comice of a farmhouse near Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, a town with a strong ethnic German population, he came across a piece of pinewood six-and-a-half inches long whittled into the form of a cylinder. Six holes of varying diameters had been bored into the wood, three of which went all the way through. In the largest hole was a wooden pin. It transpired that the sizes of the hole corresponded to the degree of torment that the suspected witch would suffer, with the placement of the pin in the largest hole causing death. On the same farm a wooden pin was found driven into the door jamb of the plough-horses’ stable. When the pin was withdrawn, some horsehair and a piece of paper with magical marks on it were found stuffed into the hole.49 Farms and buildings changed hands over generations and the original intent of such magic could be misinterpreted. A new tenant coming across such a plug might naturally assume that the charm was against the farm rather than having been done to protect it. This seems to have been the false interpretation of a Pennsylvania farmer early in the twentieth century, whose stock ailed mysteriously. In one of the uprights in his bam he found a hole bored out with an auger and fitted with a wooden plug. On taking it out he found a wad of hair. After removing it, he said his fortunes improved.50
While plugging was a widespread practice in Europe, its use as an anti-witch remedy is absent from the British archives. So its source in America was probably German settlers considering its widespread usage amongst the Pennsylvania Dutch. It was adopted by African Americans, who developed the distinctive conjure practice of ‘locking the bowels’ to cause death by placing the excrement of the intended victim in the plugged hole.51