How would you react if you thought someone cast a spell on you? Hopefully not the way any of the following people reacted.
Casting spells, real or imaginary, was a big deal in the past. While in today’s world we might brush the notion off as superstition, a hundred years ago people took spell casting rather seriously.
Burning Bush and Horse Hind
The belief in hexes was very much alive and well in Sible Hedingham, Essex, England back in 1891 when a report came out about a wizard living in the area. According to one report, the old man wizard stopped a man with a load of straw and told him that he would not be getting very far with the load. No sooner did the driver move on than his old horse fell. The horse was so badly injured that it had to be killed.
Other men came to the help of the driver who told them that the wizard had cursed him. In response, the men cut off some flesh from the hind of the dead horse, lit a bush on fire, and threw in the chunk of meat. They believed that the “person who cast the spell would suffer burning in a corresponding part of his body.” [1]
Queen of Mulberry Street Fortune Tellers
In 1921, Pietro Cerreseno of New York believed that a fortune teller had cast his family under a spell. Several of his family members were sick and it had to be because the woman, Mary E. Blancha, had bewitched them.
Furious, Pietro stormed into the woman’s studio apartment, “whipped out his razor, grabbed the woman and began stabbing viciously at her head. She struggled in his arms to a window and began screaming frantically for help. Policeman Fitzgerald rushed up and found her lying helpless under the window.” Pietro stood over the woman’s body and was placed under arrest. Then the policeman left the scene to get help and, while he was gone, Pietro managed to get his hands on a gun and shot himself in the head. [2]
Not the Best Neighbor
In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1919, a woman contacted the Dauphin County District Attorney. She claimed that her neighbor was a witch and had cast a spell on her dog. “The woman who did it is a witch. My poor dog did not eat for two weeks.” The distraught woman wanted her neighbor arrested.
However, when the District Attorney spoke to the presumed witch, the dear lady only asked if he could get the hysterical woman to stop calling her a witch. [3]
Slit His Own Throat
One day in 1909, Rev. John Haviland Carmichael arrived in Iowa to pick up a man named Browning at a boarding house. The reverend was supposed to drive Browning to church to attend a wedding. However, according to Rev. Carmichael, before they left the boarding house, Browning put the reverend under a hypnotic spell with a “queer” look. Suddenly, all hell broke loose. The reverend wrestled a hatchet from the strange man and the man pulled out two knives. With the hatchet, the reverend proceeded to hack Browning into pieces and throw his bits of meat into the wood stove.
Afterwards, the reverend went on the run until he was discovered in a boarding house in Illinois. He left a letter detailing the events of the murder and then he committed suicide by slitting his own throat. [4]
Afraid of Being Hexed for Speaking
The belief in hexes can still be found in Pennsylvania and there are numerous newspaper articles about this belief, past and present. For example, when a 21-year-old woman was murdered near a gun club in Catasaqua (pronounced kat-uh-saw-quaw or called Catty for short), no one in the community would speak to the police for fear of a local hex doctor, also called a Pennsylvania powwow. According to the report in 1929, people feared that the hex doctor would cast a spell on them if they were to tell what they saw that night.
The former District Attorney said, “It is hard to believe that people will withhold information at this time, because of such ridiculous reasons, but it is true nevertheless. The investigators have encountered silence at nearly every point.” [5]
