The bottle was shorter and stouter than a wine bottle, with a slender neck, a jug handle, and a pale, reptilian skin pattern. Unlike the other pottery fragments, this bottle was fully intact, catching the eye of Ellen Crozier, a vice principal at a U.K.-based private school, in 2021.
Excavated in 2004 from a 17th-century privy under Rochester Independent College, the bottle had been forgotten until Crozier’s discovery.
“Someone joked it might be a witch bottle,” she says. But when its contents were examined—copper nails, a coin, a tooth, and fine hair resembling that of a white-blonde child—Crozier’s goosebumps rose for real. Experts would place the likely date of the bottle in the late 1600s.
The idea of centuries-buried cocktails of superstition is enough to have anyone in an old English building side-eyeing the hearth. Yet the term “witch” may have distorted their true nature, especially given the limited evidence available to archaeologists.
“There are far fewer than, say, concealed shoes,” says Ceri Houlbrook, lecturer in folklore and history at the University of Hertfordshire. “Thousands of concealed shoes have been found, and only a hundred and something witch bottles.”
Houlbrook says that shoes, horseshoes, or tree cuttings concealed within a house’s walls represent apotropaic objects—items designed to repel foes. Around the mid-1600s, “You were just as likely to hide something in your house to protect it from being struck by lightning or from fire as from evil,” says Houlbrook.
Witch bottles, though, were different. Their presence meant malign forces were already suspected. They weren’t charms but a much more targeted apotropaic: prescriptions issued to treat a specific person for a particular condition. So who—and what—were they for?
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“Anybody diagnosed as being bewitched,” says Nigel Jeffries, principal specialist at the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA). He notes that 17th-century medical books contain many diagnoses for this condition, from twelve-hour fits to eating and vomiting pins. Essentially, any eccentric behavior could be a sign of malevolent influence by another. The constants, Jeffries says, were that “one, the person never knows they are bewitched and two, has no idea who has bewitched them.”
A heated ritual
Jeffries says the oldest witch bottles were typically made of stoneware, specifically, Frechen jugs from Germany traded at English markets. Some had a ‘Bartmann’ (bearded man in German) face and were nicknamed ‘greybeards’ or ‘Bellarmines,’ the latter resembling an unpopular Italian cardinal. Glass bottles, like those recently found in Texas, came later.
This 17th-century Bellarmine jug from Lincoln, United Kingdom, features the iconic bearded face of a “Bartmann.” Often used as ”witch bottles,” these stoneware jugs were filled with sharp objects or bodily fluids to ward off curses and malevolent forces.
Photograph by Sabena Jane Blackbird, Alamy
The use of these bottles as anti-bewitchment devices is described in texts like The Astrological Practice of Physick (1671) and Saducismus Triumphatus (1681). One account tells of a Suffolk woman treated by a healer or “cunning folk.” Her husband was told to ‘“take your Wive’s urine… and Cork it in a Bottle with Nails, Pins, and Needles, and bury it in the Earth.” He did, and she began to recover. However, later, a distressed woman arrived, claiming the remedy had killed her husband, who she believed was the wizard that had cursed her—demonstrating the strong belief in the power of these bottles.
According to Houlbrook, the odd contents—bent pins, scraps, bones, urine—were based on “sympathetic magic,” an essential part of 17th-century medicine. The items symbolically linked the bottle to both the victim and the witch, so whatever “happened to the bottle happened to the witch,” she says.
In their enthusiasm to break supposed curses, some people boiled the bottled contents, causing messy explosions, or included sharp objects like bent pins to inflict pain on the spell-caster.
Most were interred in more gently warm places like beneath hearths, though riverbanks, ditches, and churchyards were also common burial sites. Contrary to cliché, though chimneys often concealed pierced hearts and shoes, true witch bottles have not been found there, says Houlbrook.
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“It’s become a big part of modern paganism, though,” she adds. “Go to YouTube and TikTok, there are [people] saying, ‘I’m making a witch bottle. I’m using water not urine. I’m using precious stones and sharp objects, and putting it up a chimney, or on my altar’. They’re using the term’ witch bottle’, but it’s something very different to the 17th century: a lot less specific.”
Concealed and revealed
Perhaps one of the most confusing aspects of witch bottles is their name. According to Jeffries, the term “witch” wasn’t associated with these bottles until the 1840s. In the 17th century, bewitchment was seen as a normal part of life. “Witch bottles are very much couched within the domain of witchcraft and so on… but that’s basically because everybody’s been reading the evidence wrong,” says Jeffries.
Since 2019, Houlbrook and Jeffries have worked on a project for the Museum of London Archaeology to understand these bottles better.
Their research, soon to be published in Bottles Concealed and Revealed , suggests that witch bottles were more about medicine than witch persecutions, a distinction that only became blurred over time.
“There is an interesting distinction between people who were burying objects in their homes to protect them against some potential evil and witch bottles that were specifically [prescribed] by healers for someone who was already bewitched,” says Houlbrook. “They weren’t there to be protective. A lot of writing about witch bottles hasn’t made that clear.”
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Despite the association with rural superstition, witch bottles weren’t limited to any one social class. “They’re definitely found in urban locations,” says Houlbrook, “Manor houses, ecclesiastical properties even. Not just humble yeoman cottages.”
While witch bottles have been discovered in the U.S., the oldest ones are concentrated in the East and Southeast of England, likely brought over from Europe—which Jeffries attributes to a strong cultural link. “In the Netherlands, in the 16th century there’s documentation of using the same practices of boiling urine and nails and hair, but in metal saucepans,” he says.
Future truths uncorked
Do witch bottles have further secrets to spill? “Yes. Absolutely,” says Nigel Jefferies. During the MOLA project, his team x-rayed bottles, deployed hashtag call-outs, and unstoppered intact finds live on Facebook—but he remains keen to do something a “bit more forensic.”
“It would be wonderful to have [a bottle] still sealed in situ. To excavate it properly, have the urine tested, those kinds of things. We haven’t had the opportunity to do that.” Jeffries adds that he has “absolutely no doubt dozens of them” remain hidden under the hearths of old buildings in the east of England.
While practices have changed, much about the rituals of the 17th century remains unclear. Houlbrook says she is always shocked by how sturdy the stoneware bottles feel, imagining someone from that time thinking, “Yes, this will last. This will be a good one.”
For Ellen Crozier, witch bottle 147 could carry a deeper meaning. “I picture a mother with an ill child who didn’t know what else to do,” she says. “She used symbolism to take control over something she couldn’t influence.”
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