Digging up trouble?
A Civil War-era witch bottle may have been found on Virginia dig
When archaeologists digging between lanes of traffic on Virginia’s Interstate 64 unearthed a broken bottle filled with nails, they weren’t sure what they had found.
The glass vessel discovered at an old Civil War fortification east of Williamsburg might simply have been an ad hoc tool box for troops garrisoned at the site nearly 160 years ago. But researchers at the Center for Archaeological Research at the College of William & Mary advanced a far more intriguing theory.
The artifact may, in fact, be a “witch bottle,” they say, one of only a handful that have been found in the U.S.
What’s a witch bottle? For centuries, they were used as occult countermeasures to the mischief of suspected sorceresses in England and America.
The evidence of a superstitious purpose is circumstantial but compelling, according to Joe Jones, the centre’s director.
The bottle, which is jade blue, was plucked in 2016 from the soil dividing traffic on Interstate 64 between exits 238 and 242 in York County. William & Mary archaeologists were inspecting the area for any remaining artifacts in advance of a highway-widening project by the Virginia Department of Transportation.
Known as Redoubt 9, the site was part of a string of fortifications between the James and York rivers, originally built by Confederates to repel Union troops advancing on Richmond. But Redoubt 9 was taken over by Union forces after the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862, and the bottle is probably a relic of those soldiers, Jones said.
Witch bottles can be traced to the East Anglia region of England in the late Middle Ages, according to a summary of research on the subject by JSTOR Daily. The bottles typically included human urine, hair or fingernail clippings and sharp objects such as nails, pins or thorns.
The objects worked by luring witches or malevolent spirits with the urine, hair or fingernail clippings, then trapping them with nails or pins — a low-tech witch hunt. Last year, contractors razing an old pub found a suspected witch bottle containing fish hooks, teeth and a mysterious liquid.
The situation on the I-64 median is less clear-cut. While its resting place was undisturbed, the neck of the bottle had been broken open — probably from the weight of accumulated soil, Jones said — at the time it was uncovered.
Was there urine inside?
“That’s the first question that people who know about witch bottles would ask,” Jones acknowledged. However, with an unsealed interior, the vessel could not be accurately tested, he said.
And were this a tale told by M.R. James, the renowned British writer of ghost stories, the outcome would be predictable: Malignant spirits, up to and including long-confined witches, would emerge to torment the curious scholars who disturbed the bottle. The Washington Post