The reader has already encountered a range of characters who offered to heal the bewitched: medicine men and women, cunning-folk, hex doctors, conjure and hoodoo doctors, wise women, fortune tellers, root doctors, trick doctors, pow wows, quacks, mesmeric healers and others, who drove a thriving trade in every part of the country. It is time to explore their world in more detail, for they were usually involved at some point in the many witchcraft disputes discussed in this book.
Nineteenth-century America teamed with people who called themselves ‘Doctor’ but had no formal medical training. The rewards were meagre for some, but others accrued wealth far beyond the modest lot of the trained medical man. Joseph Doddridge, who like many clergymen of the time also practised medicine for his flock, observed in 1824 that during his sojourns in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio he had ‘known several of those witch masters, as they were called, who made a public profession of curing the diseases inflicted by the influence of witches, and I have known respectable physicians who had no greater portion of business in the line of their profession than many of those witch masters had in theirs’.103 In general, they were usually literate, and the men often artisans, craftsmen, and tradesmen. If we take a look at Pennsylvania hex doctors we find bricklayers, masons, and farmers amongst them. The Allentown hex doctor Nathan Flickinger, who died in 1916 aged sixty-eight, had been a photographer and insurance salesman.104 A substantial minority of witch doctors were female, with the magic and healing trade providing good opportunities for single, independent women. The ethnic make-up of practitioners was diverse. An analysis of eighty magical healers and fortune tellers in New England in the period 1644—1850 revealed that nearly half were African American, Native American, or of mixed ancestry.105 There seems to have been a considerable degree of interethnic consultation with African Americans consulting European hex doctors, and whites seeking out black root and conjure doctors. Irish and British visited German practitioners and vice versa. In fact, the witch doctors played a crucial role in the transmission of magical ideas and practices from one cultural group to another. People often consulted several different practitioners when bewitched, and based their choice on reputation and proximity. That said, hoodoo and conjure doctors were often sought out by whites because they were thought to possess outsider knowledge unavailable to Europeans, likewise the numerous Chinese fortune tellers who plied their trade along the Western seaboard, and the small number of itinerant gypsy practitioners.
As to the sources of their power, some practitioners claimed a God-given birthright, such as being a seventh son of a seventh son or seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. In 1769 one Dr Isaac Calcott landed in Providence claiming to be a German recently arrived from London. He advertised that he possessed the ‘art’ of curing a wide range of conditions thanks to being a seventh son of a seventh son. He achieved considerable notoriety over the next few years.106 This European tradition also spread to African-American conjure. A black healer named T. Edwards took to advertising in i860 in the same way as Calcott a century before. His flyer explained that he was ‘naturally a Doctor—having a gift from the Lord. My mother was her mother’s seventh daughter, and, I am her seventh son; my father was a seventh son, and I am his seventh son’. He further claimed to have been bom with seven cauls—the caul or amniotic sac being known in European and West African belief as conferring healing, divinatory, or spiritual powers on its possessor.107 In the conjure tradition the possession of some potent artefact such as a ritually obtained black cat bone, root, magnetic lodestone, or the accumulated objects in a conjure bag, were viewed as key means of obtaining magical powers over others.
Access to literary sources of magic was another valuable asset, more so for European-American practitioners at first, but by the late nineteenth century, books, including the Bible, had also become important items in conjure. We have already heard of the Long Lost Friend and Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, but other titles circulated in much more limited numbers. Knowledge of the French arsenal of cheap grimoires that were printed in their tens of thousands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found their way to America via French Canadians who emigrated south. The ritual of the Poule noir or Black Hen to obtain riches, which was included in several French grimoires, was recounted to the folklorist Richard Dorson by members of the French-Canadian logging community in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan. One man remembered how fifty-four years earlier he knew a hotel proprietor in Escanaba, one of the largest towns in the Upper Peninsula, who possessed a copy of the notorious Dragon rouge, or Red Dragon: ‘One day I went up into his room, I saw this book there. It was written in red, as if with blood.... It gave me a fright. I started to read the book; I could not make it out!’108
The ‘new’ powers of mesmerism and hypnotism opened novel avenues for combating witches, and generated a breed of often itinerant mesmerists who were willing to apply their magnetic powers to identify and deal with witchcraft as well as mundane conditions. In 1843 the thirteen-year-old daughter of Absolom Lawrence, of Pepperell, Massachusetts, was afflicted with terrible fits. Her knees were drawn to her chest, her head was thrown backward, her jaws locked, and she could not swallow anything but a little liquid sucked from a cloth. There were other tell-tale problems. Groaning noises were heard, and the pots and pans in the house banged inexplicably. The family’s butter would not come. Witchcraft was suspected. A wandering magnetizer named Dr J.M. Nevens, who advertised in the press that through his magnetized lady companion he could cure ‘all complaints that the human frame is subject to’, was hired to investigate. Nevens magnetized his companion, who in her trance state saw the spirit of a woman approach the house on an un-shod white horse, then dismount, and enter through a crack under the door. Because of the presence of Nevens magnetic power, said the somnambulist, the supposed witch did not stay long, leaving via the cellar, groaning and stamping on the stairs in frustration. As a ‘doctor’, a practitioner of a science, Nevens professed his scepticism about witchcraft, but one suspects that he profited from involvement in such cases, spinning one story to the press and another to his bewitched clients. The girl improved once Lawrence removed his family to another property.109
Creating an aura of mystique was important for building a clientele. In the 1880s a distinguished Cincinnati medicine man, an African American who claimed descent from a Native-American tribe, had a distinctive coiffure with a twisted goatee, and wore a scarf baring magical medals. His consultation room at Broadway and New Street was decked to impress, with two-headed chickens in alcohol jars, and preserved snakes he boasted he had cast out of patients’ bodies. But many practitioners relied less on looks and decor and concentrated more on impressing through their arcane rituals in the field. In 1824 one Dr Scoby made a considerable impression on a melancholic Irishman of Exeter County, New Hampshire, who believed he was a victim of witchcraft. The doors and windows of the man’s apartment were closed, and then Scoby drew about a quart of blood from him which was then burned over a fire. This proved successful and Scoby was paid nine dollars.110 In 1883, a peddler and witchdoctor named Armstrong McClain, who operated in the remote Pennsylvania region of Stony Creek Valley, was called in to cure the bewitched daughter of William Kildey. She exhibited symptoms of possession, babbling incoherently in the German tongue, a language she did not speak. This led to an old German woman being accused. McClain began by burning a black, a white, and a brown hair on a shovel. He inspected the ashes and then ‘pow wowed’ them. ‘If you don’t meet a brindle cow on your way home’, he told Kildey, who was a river pilot on the Susquehanna, ‘sprinkle that ash on the door sill. At sundown the witch’s power over your daughter will be broken’. Kildey did not meet a brindle cow, and so sprinkled the ashes as instructed, but to no effect. McClain returned and proceeded to Plan B. He brought some ‘snaky looking roots’ with him and ordered one of Kildey’s daughters to take the first bottle she could from a cupboard while holding her breath. He put the roots in the bottle along with some water, and sprinkled in some white powder while murmuring a charm. He then asked for a hammer, took it, and went outside with the bottle for fifteen minutes. He returned with the hammer and sat at the sick girl’s bedside. ‘Now I’ll kill the witch, old Mrs Boyer!’ he exclaimed, before gentle tapping the girl’s temple three times with the hammer and then throwing it outside. The witch would die in seven months he said confidently. In the meantime Mrs Boyer’s husband and son dealt with McLain the German way and had him arrested for defamation.111
Compare McClain’s showy series of treatments with the limp, lacklustre rituals of Jacob Shuck, another Pennsylvania hex doctor whose schtick was insufficiently impressive to gamer either respect or fear. Nicholas S. Adams of Shamokin, Northumberland County, paid Shuck $1.50 to cure his sick daughter of witchcraft. Shuck merely waved his hand in the air, drew them over the girl’s face, and stroked her hair with what he said was the magic palm of his right hand. No improvement was detected and Shuck refused to reimburse Adams. Another dissatisfied client, William Dietrich, related in court that Shuck treated two bewitched cows by stroking their hind legs and tickling their ears, presumably with his magic palm. The cows grew frisky for a bit but when they settled down they were no better. No wonder Dietrich wanted his $4 back.112
Proficiency in sleight-of-hand trickery was a useful skill. We have seen this with regard to the cure of witch intrusions. Similar craftiness was almost certainly involved in extracting pillow witches, as in an instance from New Albany, Indiana, in 1871. A woman, who would appear to have suffered from dropsy or oedema in the legs, but who believed she was bewitched, called in a witch doctor named Anderson. He visited and slashed her pillows open. Why, he got some beautiful little fans, some of the feathers were sewed up in knots, several cloth cats, just as perfect as live animals, and bunches of hair sewed together in different forms’, she said. As the journalist who recorded this conversation suggested, it seems that the good Doctor had introduced the cloth cats and other items during his bedroom investigations.113
While witch doctors were instrumental in the process of identifying witches, for the sake of their communal reputations and with possible legal consequences in mind, they were generally very careful not to name people explicitly. Armstrong McClain’s downfall is a case in point. Part of their art was to use insinuations or divinatory rituals that led clients to confirm their own suspicions. When in 1883 a witch doctor came to see the sick child of Scranton resident Sarah Kochert, she told him that the neighbour she suspected, Mrs Snyder, had asked her, What is the witch doctor doing here?’ He sagely told Kockert,
‘When you tread on a dog’s tail he howls’.114 The implication was clear. In the same year a butcher’s wife named Mrs Malinda Balthazar, of 82 Elm Street, Reading, PA, told a journalist about her consultation with a local witch doctor regarding her bewitched son:
‘I sent for a witch doctor, who as soon as he saw the child said he knew what was the matter with it — “bad people”’. ‘I was not surprised’, she said, ‘as I had suspected this to be the cause. The doctor said that several persons were concerned in it, but that this one woman was the leader of them, and she would bring something to present me, but under no circumstances should I accept it, as that would give her a fresh hold on the child... He described the woman who would call, and I immediately recognized her as the same woman who had come and admired and kissed the child when it was only a few days old’.115
And so another innocent woman ended up ostracized.
Newspapers considered themselves beacons of enlightened thought, regularly reporting instances of superstition and popular credulity to remind educators, clergy, and the authorities that more needed to be done to combat such beliefs. Yet in a cut-throat business they were willing to accept the advertising revenue generated from astrologers, quacks, and magical healers seeking to drum up new clients. Press advertising was of particular importance to itinerant practitioners who moved from town to town, staying for weeks and months, moving on before the authorities took an interest or the number of unsatisfied clients achieved critical mass. The following three adverts from just one 1861 edition of the Sun, a Maryland newspaper, demonstrate the wide range of practitioner styles and practices.116 First there was the Germanic Dr Samuel Funterbaugh:
The most wonderful Astrologist and phrenologist in the world, can now be found at his residence, No 7 FOUNTAIN ST., between Alexander and Fleet sts. He uses all kind of Witchcraft and Conjuring; cures all diseases and spells; does anything wished for by the Ladies and Gentlemen; and anything that is stolen or lost returned by witchcraft or conjuring, or describe the person that does anything, and give any person love that wants it.
Then there was the African-sounding R. Deeyou:
Herb Doctor and Scientific and Reliable Egyptian Astrologer, 9 SOUTH GREEN ST. The suffering in body and mind will do well to call. Lowest fee 50 cts. No trickery, cards or humbuggery resorted to. Dmnkenness positively cured.
Finally, Hispanic Madame Marientes:
NO HUMBUG. — Those who wish to know all affairs of late correctly should not fail to call on MADAME MARIENTES. She can bring together those separated, and cause love to be mutual where it does not exist. Consultation hours from io A.M. to 5 P.M. No 290 N. GAY ST.
During the mid-nineteenth century the press’s hypocritical role in condemning and yet promoting the occult arts was subjected to repeated attack. Writing under the nom de plume Q.K. Philander Doesticks, the gifted humorist and journalist Mortimer Thomson, a former actor and jewellery salesman, campaigned against slavery and humbuggery. In 1859 he wrote a book investigating and demolishing the ‘Witches of New York’. By witches he meant the multitude of fortune tellers, clairvoyants, and astrologers who advertised in the newspapers, and who, with some justification, he linked to the city’s underworld of abortionists and brothels. ‘It is to desired that the day may come when they will be no longer classed with harmless mountebanks, but with dangerous criminals’, he wrote.117
The American medical profession was also understandably sensitive about this plague of competing doctors. While there was an obvious and clear boundary between a licensed physician and an unlicensed healer in official terms, from a popular perspective there was often little difference with regard to the efficacy of their respective treatments. As well as charms and rituals, many witch doctors employed the same drugs and herbs as their official competitors. From a popular perspective, then, the distinction between orthodox general practitioners and unofficial healers was far from obvious, particularly as many of the latter were listed in trade directories as physicians, and operated like licensed doctors with nameplates on their doors, fixed consultation hours, and regular surgeries in different settlements. Dr Andrew Hoff of 818 North Park Avenue Alliance, Ohio, is a good example. Listed in the 1900 census as a ‘physician’, who would know from this that he was not a licensed doctor and was, in fact, as described in 1893, ‘the best witchfinder in Eastern Ohio’? We know all about his trade from his exposure in the press in the 1890s as a result of his involvement in a witchcraft dispute. Hoff (b. 1815), whose parents and wife were Swiss, was open in his belief in the power of witchcraft, and bold enough to name suspected witches. Yet he was a regular customer at an Alliance apothecary shop, whose proprietor had no problem with servicing his requirements and noted approvingly that Hoff seemed to have a thriving business.118 The history of another German ‘Doctor’ listed in the trade directories as a physician shows how such people operated openly and with a considerable degree of impunity despite laws against both unlicensed medical practice and the pretence to magic.
Franz Bacher was bom in Forst, a town in Karlsruhe district, western Germany, in 1828. He arrived in America as a young man, claiming to have a medical diploma from Heidelberg University. He began practising medicine in New Orleans, and then moved to St Louis until the outbreak of the Civil War. After a spell in the Home Guards he spent the next few years as a travelling medicine man before finally settling at 327 Maine Street, Quincy, Illinois. Here he developed a reputation as a cancer curer, using a special herb plaster. In 1888 he became entangled in a public legal dispute with a dissatisfied cancer patient. The press stirred things up and Bacher wrote to the Quincy Daily Journal defending his medical probity, claiming he had successfully cured fifty cases of cancer in the last twelve years. So far in this history there is no hint of any magical practices, and no suspicion was cast on his medical training—at least in the press. Fiis presence clearly irritated licensed physicians in the area however, and in 1901 the State Medical Society brought a charge against him for practising medicine without a licence. Someone did not do their homework though, because the law only applied to people practising after the 1 July 1899, and Bacher had been plying his trade in Quincy for a quarter of a century. The jury found him not guilty. Various appeals were launched and the case rambled on for another year, eventually concluding in Bacher’s favour.
Then, in 1904, Bacher’s witch-doctoring business was exposed after a nineteen- year-old client, Bessie Bement, committed suicide. Bement had visited his house in Broadway, Quincy, a small one-storey building with a large sign outside bearing the words ‘Dr Franz Bacher’. He confirmed that she was bewitched and provided her with a steel belt one inch in width on which she was to sprinkle some powder he gave her. He also advised her to check her pillow. As he related in a public statement written by his nephew and student William Knopfmeier, and printed in the press:
In the case of Bessie Bement it now is stated that she was not entirely personally responsible for her deed of self-destmction. It is stated by Dr. F. Bacher that Miss Bement applied to him for advice as she thought she was bewitched. Dr Bacher told her to examine her pillow. She did so and found a reeth in it, a combination of string with feathers attached to it.
Dr. Bacher told her to bum it, which she did, as far as known. It is stated that she was mostly downcast, and acted as though she was not entirely responsible for such a deed as to commit suicide. Miss Bement received some medicine from Dr. Bacher after which he heard nothing from Miss Bement until he seen the notice in the Whig that Miss Bement had committed Suicide.
The authorities investigated to see whether any charge could be laid against the now elderly Bacher. He, meanwhile, decided to give an interview at his home to a local journalist in which he spoke openly about his dealings with witchcraft. ‘Are you both an M.D. and a hoodoo doctor?’ the journalist asked. Bacher replied,
Don’t call me a hoodoo doctor please. I have been practising medicine since 1873, and I know when a person is suffering from a visitation of a hoodoo or bewitchery. But don’t say anything about that in your paper, for people are skeptical and many only laugh when we claim what we can do. I know it is for real though. Why it is bewitchery that fills our insane asylums — poor people there suffering and pining away because their physicians doctor them for something else, when they are under the spell of some hoodoo. I believe in medicine, but only a very little of it.
Despite the State Medical Board’s campaign against Bacher, he was never blacklisted and the Illinois Medical Journal noted his death stating that he was an ‘M.D., Heidelberg, Germany’. The death of his wife in 1913 was considered newsworthy. Their nephew Knopfmeier does not seem to have stuck with the business, though. He was drafted during the First World War and then settled into a number of mundane desk jobs. This is no indication that the hex doctoring business was in decline: early twentieth-century America was still full of witch believers.119