Legends 18: Magical Objects

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Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books.

So, if you're ready, let's begin.

The world is a dangerous place.

Hiding around any corner could be something waiting to harm us or affect our lives in a sinister way, which is why we've gotten creative over the years when it comes to defending ourselves.

And a common place to find help has always been household objects.

Case in point, a frying pan can do wonders against an intruder, as can your kid's baseball bat.

And as that now classic holiday film Home Alone has demonstrated for us, just about anything else laying around can become a literal defense mechanism.

But while we might use the nearest heavy item as a clobbering tool, it was more likely that those who came before us utilized something more magical.

After all, physical threats were only half the problem, right?

There were also dangers they couldn't see, such as nefarious spells or evil spirits.

From food and bottles to shoes and human limbs, humanity has constantly been looking for new ways to combat evil.

Because for many cultures, it took a lot of effort to protect one's home and family, and people would go to great lengths to achieve that goal.

And as you might expect, the pages of history are filled with examples of this sort of physical folklore, tactile things that help people do the pre-modern equivalent of the Starship Enterprise raising her shields.

But just because these tools were meant to offer a bit of safety doesn't necessarily mean that the legends about them are tame.

In fact, stepping into the world of magical objects should not be something done lightly, because protective measures only exist because of terrifying danger.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore Legends.

You might not know the term for it, but you certainly understand it.

Cultures all over the world have used something called apotropaic magic.

This is a type of magic intended to turn away harmful or evil influences, sometimes known as maleficium.

One of the best-known places where the use of apotropaic magic left an indelible mark was in England.

Many of the objects and practices connected to it were left over from old pagan traditions and were eventually absorbed into Catholic or secular rituals.

But the rise of Protestantism added some complexity to all of it.

You see, the Protestants didn't approve of most Catholic observances, including healing practices, holy water, anointing the sick, and exorcisms.

So, the new Church of England outright forbade those seemingly magical acts.

Desperate for solutions, people were forced to look elsewhere.

Witches.

And those witches recommended all sorts of magical defense methods.

For example, horseshoes have been associated with luck for hundreds of years, both because of their shape and their composition.

They used to be made of raw iron, which was said to repel evil spirits and fairies.

Traditionally, a horseshoe was fastened to a hoof using seven nails, with the number seven being considered both lucky and magical.

Now, how a horseshoe is meant to be displayed in a home or other important places has been a topic of debate for almost as long as they've been around.

Some say that a horseshoe should face upward and catch luck like a cup.

If the horseshoe falls or faces downward, that's said to signify that the household's luck has run out.

But others believe that a horseshoe is meant to be mounted facing down in order to shower luck on those who walk through the door.

They were different perspectives on the same thing though.

Luck was considered to be a real manageable resource for a lot of people.

One story that's pointed to as an origin for this sort of folklore comes from the 10th century in a legend about a man named Saint Dunstan.

Dunstan had been a blacksmith before he became the Archbishop of Canterbury.

And as the story goes, the devil paid him a visit one day at his blacksmith shop and asked him to shoe his horse.

Pretending not to recognize his sinister customer, Dunstan agreed, but instead of nailing the shoe to the horse's foot, he somehow nailed it to the foot of the devil.

He then gave his visitor a choice, swear to never enter any house with a horseshoe hanging over the door ever again, or else be stuck with permanent iron footwear.

The devil picked the first option, and ever since, the belief that horseshoes keep him away has stuck around.

One magical object that's not as well known, however, is the witch bottle.

Now, despite its name, it wasn't actually used by witches.

It was actually meant to keep them away.

How?

Well, they were said to draw in and trap harmful intentions directed at their owners.

According to most folk magic, a witch bottle was sort of a counter-magical object that could be used as protection against everything from witches to evil spirits and magical spells cast by angry neighbors and enemies.

They were mostly popular in Elizabethan England and early colonial America, although some people still utilize them to this day.

And witches also inspired another magical object with a similar function.

Hollow spheres, usually made of green or blue-colored glass that would hang in a window or chimney of a house.

They are traditionally called witch balls, and although they could be made of just about anything, glass was preferred because the bright colors were thought to lure in evil spirits, which would then be captured inside the orb.

In the Ozark Mountains of the United States, though, witch balls were made from black hair rolled with beeswax into roughly the size of a marble.

They were often used as part of a curse, where a witch would throw one at their intended victim.

Similarly, in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, witch balls were made from the hair of a horse or a cow.

A witch would then draw a picture of the person they wanted to curse and then throw the ball at a specific part of the body depicted on that sketch.

But these objects only scratch the surface of apotropaic magic.

It's a massive field of study and worth digging into into if you ever want to know more.

From the concealment of dead animals like cats inside walls and chimneys to the practice of hiding shoes inside a home, people have always leaned on certain objects to protect their well-being.

But one object was so common that almost everyone had a couple of them lying around.

To make them useful, though, often required a strong stomach.

Sometimes all it takes to change things is to reach out and touch someone.

Of course, that's a more appealing notion when your hand is still attached to your body.

As I'm sure most of you already know, a common punishment for criminals that can be found across a lot of different cultures throughout history is the amputation of the criminal's hand.

It permanently marked the person as a thief, a visible reminder of their crime, which naturally invited a lot of social shame within their community.

On the other hand, pun intended of course, these disembodied limbs would often be displayed as a warning to anyone else considering a similar crime.

But the practice of removing someone's hand as a form of punishment is much older than you'd think.

Going back nearly 4,000 years to the Babylonian code of Hammurabi, if you've ever used the phrase an eye for an eye, then you're basically quoting Hammurabi.

Over time though, as more and more hands were chopped off as punishment, people started claiming that they possessed supernatural powers.

This eventually led to an idea known as the hand of glory.

Fun facts, it was usually the right hand that was cut off because that was considered the hand responsible for whatever crime a person was guilty of.

The left hand was occasionally chopped off though, probably due to its connotation with evil.

After all, the Latin word for left is where we get the English word sinister.

Sometimes these hands were cut off felons while they were still hanging from the gallows.

They would then go through an exhaustive process of draining the blood before being wrapped in a burial shroud, then pickled, dried out in the sun, and finally covered in wax.

Now in some variations of this tradition, that waxed preserved hand would be formed into a candle holder, sometimes even using the criminal's own fat to make the candle itself, which is gross enough, I know, but it often got worse.

You see, sometimes the hand would be preserved in a flat position and then placed upright on the stump of the wrist, allowing each of its fingers to be lit like candles individually.

And believe it or not, these human menorah

were popular among homeowners who used them to ward off thieves.

As legends about the hand grew, a variety of powers became attributed to it, all of which were basically tips and tricks that burglars might find useful.

For example, the hand of glory could be used to put everyone in a coma or give the wielder a kind of secret night vision while leaving everyone else in darkness.

Hands of glory were even thought to have the power to open locks or grant invisibility to the person using them.

It's a type of folk belief known as sympathetic magic where certain objects take on special powers according to how they looked or their source.

In other words, the hand of a criminal could help other criminals commit crimes.

For example, during the North Barrack witch trials of the 1590s, a schoolmaster and occultist named John Feehan confessed, under torture, of course, to using a hand of glory to break into a church in order to perform a blasphemous religious ceremony.

There's a 684-year-old pub in England that used to have a hand of glory on display to deter cheaters.

It had belonged to a gambler who had tried to cheat his friends at a card game.

After being chopped off, it was thrown in the fireplace and forgotten about until the pub was renovated in 1911 when the hand was rediscovered and placed under glass, until its theft in 2010.

But perhaps one of the strangest stories of a hand of glory belongs to the one at the Whitby Museum in North Yorkshire, England.

It's a tale with numerous iterations, but the most common one begins at the Spittle Inn on Stainmore in 1797.

There, an old woman asked the innkeeper if she could sleep on a chair downstairs and leave in the morning as she did not have money for a room of her own.

The innkeeper agreed and headed upstairs to retire with his family while the old woman and a young maid bunked downstairs.

But the young maid noticed something that was off about the old woman, so she decided to stay awake and keep an eye on her.

Well, as it turned out, beneath the old woman's tattered skirt was a pair of men's trousers.

The maid waited up all night with a keen eye on her roommate and good idea because as soon as she seemed to be asleep, the old woman pulled off her disguise.

She had actually been a man who was preparing to rob the inn.

He quietly approached the girl, produced a lit hand of glory, and waved it in her face, saying, let those who are asleep be asleep, and those who are awake be awake.

Then he set the hand down and walked to the front door to let his partner in.

The maid, seeing her chance, leapt up and shoved the would-be thief outside, barring the door behind him.

After that, she dashed upstairs to wake the family up, but the magic from the hand of glory had worked.

Everyone was under a sleeping spell.

When the robbers began breaking the door down, the young woman tried to blow out the lit hand, but no matter how hard she huffed and puffed, the fire refused to go out.

In the end, it was a bucket of skim milk that did the trick, extinguishing the flame.

Instantly, the family woke back up.

Hearing the commotion downstairs, the innkeeper grabbed his gun and ran to the door.

Knowing their plan had been spoiled, the thieves begged for their hand of glory to be returned, promising to leave the family alone.

But the innkeeper refused.

The thieves were driven away, and in the process, the inn received a helping hand.

Anyone who's watched the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz is familiar with the question, are you a good witch or a bad witch?

Well, during the European witch trials of the 17th century, there was really only one answer.

I'm not a witch at all.

Why a person used magic didn't really matter.

It just had to stop.

At one point though, magic, medicine, and even poison were almost all indistinguishable from each other.

That's why plenty of folk remedies for things like a sore throat or the common cold looked like magic, especially if they were being dispensed by an old woman.

You see, women of a certain age have been the face of witch trials for centuries.

Yes, there were exceptions, and that ratio of men to women in witch trials varied from one country to the next, but human minds tend to veer towards stereotypes, and so for most people, a witch was a woman.

And these women were usually elderly, meaning that most of them had lost their youthful good looks.

This was of course a time when many people believed that what was on the outside was a reflection of what was on the inside.

Anyone who didn't adhere to traditional beauty standards, be it the number of wrinkles on their face or some visible physical disability, was considered evil.

This also extended to people deemed mentally disabled, who were said to be under some kind of magical corruption, either their own or someone else's.

Basically, if the person was a woman and part of a marginalized group, they were prime candidates for accusation.

In addition, older women were alone much of the time.

If they survived childbirth, they usually outlived the men in their lives, who tended to be the breadwinners and protectors of the household.

Once their children moved on to live their own lives elsewhere, a mother was usually left on her own.

These widows and mothers needed help from friends and neighbors.

Help that sometimes didn't come in time.

An older woman begging at her neighbor's house for food or support might be turned away.

She would yell or pitch a fit and then reluctantly go home.

And if that neighbor's cow died a few days later, superstitious people might think that the events were connected.

Perhaps that old woman had cursed them.

But there was also a different side of magic.

That same old woman could have been an important resource for her community as someone who practiced white magic.

This was more benevolent and natural, not requiring a conjurer to interact with any demonic forces or spirits.

According to one legend, the English county of Surrey had its own white witch during the 1600s, Mother Ludlam.

She lived in a cave near the village of Frencham, a tiny little hamlet on the bank of the River Way.

But unlike most witches, Mother Ludlam was perfectly friendly to the locals, who were often very comfortable in asking her for help with their problems.

And she gladly gave it.

But under one condition, any borrowed item had to be returned within two days.

And nobody wanted to find out what might happen if they missed that deadline.

This wasn't exactly a public library, after all.

A witch was still a witch.

The procedure was simple.

Go to Mother Ludlam's cave and stand on top of the boulder at the entrance and then declare what was needed.

Then the person would go home and that exact item would be sitting on their doorstep.

It was a bit like an early version of Amazon Prime, except instead of next day shipping, everything came with a two-day return policy.

As the story goes, a man traveled to the cave one day and asked to borrow Mother Ludlum's cauldron.

This was a cauldron that may have predated the woman herself and was likely a prized possession.

She hesitated, but she also wanted to help the man.

And this is where the story splits into two versions.

According to one version of the tale, she reminded him to bring it back in two days, and then she sent the cauldron away with him.

But two days later, he didn't bring it back.

Perhaps the man had gotten too busy, or maybe he simply forgot that he had borrowed the object in the first place.

Either way, the deadline came and went.

Naturally, Mother Ludlam was upset at the loss of her cauldron.

She flew into a rage and then did something that she hadn't done in years.

She left the safety of her cave.

Why?

Because she wanted revenge.

As soon as the man heard that she was looking for him, he bolted for the nearest church.

with that now stolen cauldron in his arms.

And that's one version.

The other way people tell the story suggests that the man wasn't really a man at all.

He was actually the devil in disguise and his goal had been a simple one.

He wanted the vessel for himself.

After all, she had used it to brew all of her magic potions.

So the devil dressed up as a regular old human, headed to the cave and asked the old woman if he could borrow her cauldron.

When Mother Ludlam came to the mouth of her cave to greet him though, she noticed that he wasn't leaving footprints behind him.

They were actually hoofprints.

And so she refused his request.

But the devil couldn't couldn't be dissuaded.

Instead of borrowing the cauldron, he stole it instead, and then he made a run for it, with Mother Ludlam close behind.

Naturally, the devil tried all kinds of tricks to escape.

This was the devil, after all.

Tricks are sort of his brand, right?

And one of them was to try making great leaps, which storytellers claim resulted in a series of hills wherever he landed, known today as the devil's jumps.

Unfortunately, he dropped the cauldron on his last jump, the location now known as Kettlebury Hill, and Mother Ludlam was able to reclaim it.

Fearful that it might be taken again in the future, she took it to the only place she felt it would be safe, the local church.

And as far as I know, the devil never came back to take it.

The way we interact with the world around us is often fascinating, even more so back when our understanding of how it all worked was a lot less informed than it is today.

Misfortune, illness, a tragic turn of events in your family or business, there were clearly evil forces at play.

But magic could be countered with, well, counter-magic.

From witch bottles hidden away in doorframes or buried beneath a family's hearth, to various other talismans and carvings, all designed to protect their house, people managed to be very, very creative.

Few objects, though, have the same witchy connotations that we attribute today to a cauldron, which is why I love the legend of Mother Ludlam.

Also notice how, in both versions of her story, each tale ends in the same place, the church.

In one, the man who stole the cauldron seeks sanctuary from the angry woman who just wants it back.

In the other, it's the witch herself who goes there, trying to protect it from the devil.

Even for a witch, it was hard to overlook the benefit of having God on her side.

Now, of course, the story is merely legend.

It may or may not be true.

But it honestly doesn't matter whether it's a tall tale or not.

You see, Mother Ludlam left behind a lot more than just an impressive 400-yard dash time.

Her legacy has carried on centuries after she was said to exist.

Because if you visit that church in Frencham today, you can see the very cauldron from the story.

It measures about three feet in diameter with a depth of 19 inches and is made of hammered copper.

It has resided in the church for centuries too.

It's no longer in use today, but this important piece of cookware was once used by the priests of the church for brewing church ale, and it was probably used to cook and brew for important celebrations as well, such as weddings and festivals.

And who knows, perhaps it's possible that a bit of Mother Ludlam's power rubbed off at those parties.

Because as we've learned, there is magic in some of the most ordinary household objects and in some of the most disgusting candles ever made.

Everyday Objects with Mysterious Power The world of magical items from folklore and legend is one of my absolute favorites.

And trust me when I say that I hope you enjoyed exploring a few of them with me today.

Don't leave just yet though.

I've got one more story to tell you and I know you're going to love it.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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Witches' cauldrons can be used to make any number of magical concoctions, potions, tinctures, even even stew.

But they aren't the only place to find such a meal.

Magic and food have been closely linked for centuries with medicine, protection, and spells.

And one kind of delicacy actually made an appearance in the events that led to the Salem witch trials.

Although delicacy is a generous term here, this magical object can hardly be described as food, let alone delicious.

It was called a witch cake.

But don't let the Betty Crocker recipe fool you.

This is not a brightly colored cake enjoyed at Halloween.

It was a disgusting magical tool used to root out supposed witches, and it was applied in Salem in a horrific way.

It's a common enough story by now, but in January of 1692, three girls started having fits.

Two of them, Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail Williams, lived in the same house, along with Betty's father, the local minister, Reverend Samuel Parris.

When the local doctor couldn't diagnose them though, he suggested that more diabolical forces were at work.

Three women in town were quickly accused of practicing witchcraft and then everything went downhill from there.

And I should point out here that most people point their finger at Tituba, the enslaved woman who worked in the Paris home, as the start of it all.

But it was actually a local homeless woman named Sarah Goode who made them suspicious.

Why?

Because just like the old stereotype, she was a woman who was down on her luck, came begging at the Paris household, and was rudely turned away.

And when she muttered and grumbled within earshot, it was taken as the whispered cursing of a witch.

Sound familiar?

I thought so too.

Of course, by the end of the event, 20 people had been executed, and Salem's reputation would forever be darkened.

But in between the shrieking girls and those gruesome executions, a test was whipped up to see if the girls actually were bewitched or if they were just looking for attention.

For context, it's important to remember that during the 1600s, doctors were focused on balancing the four humors inside the human body to ensure health and well-being.

They lacked many of the tools that we now consider essential for drawing accurate conclusions about what might be going on inside or outside a person's body.

But medicine had failed to bring a solution to the trouble in the Paris household, so the people took matters into their own hands, and it started with a woman named Mary Sibley.

According to one version of the story, she was known around town as a whiz of a baker, and she decided to put her skills to use in order to thwart the devil.

She baked a cake with many of the usual ingredients, flour and well that was actually it.

It wasn't much of a cake after all, but she did have one not-so-secret ingredient that she poured into the mix as well.

Urine.

That's right, the cake recipe was just two things.

Except she didn't use just anyone's pea to flavor her special cake.

She incorporated urine collected from those three afflicted girls.

Once mixed and baked, this pungent pastry was supposed to definitively prove that these poor young ladies were under the spell of some powerful magic.

The process for determining the truth was a simple one too.

This tinkle turnover would be fed to a dog.

If the pooch began to display the same symptoms as the girls, then clearly they were all under the influence of witches.

And yes, this logic entirely skips over what sort of real physiological reaction the dog might have to ingesting a bunch of flour and urine, but whatever, right?

And possibly more disturbing than the recipe for this cake itself is the fact that it represented represented one of the very few pieces of physical evidence that was ever produced at the trial.

Oh, and for those who are curious, yes, the dog ate it.

In retrospect, it might be too much to say that the witch cake was solely responsible for spawning the Salem witch trials, but without it, those people might not have devolved into panic so quickly, and nor would they have destroyed so many lives.

This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by me and Harry Marks and research by Alexandra Steed.

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