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The Witch Bottle

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The Witch Bottle poster art

Here is how you fight back, and I will tell you plainly that it is disgusting.

Take a bottle. Fill it with every bent nail and crooked pin in the house, a hank of thread to snarl the thing up, a scrap of red cloth cut in the shape of a heart. Then top it off yourself. You know how.

Cork it. Bury it under the hearthstone, deep, where nobody digs.

Now, somewhere out past the hedgerow, whoever wished this on your family stops sleeping. Cannot pass water. Cannot pass a night. The bottle has hold of her and it will not let go for three hundred years.

Just so long as nobody ever, ever pulls it up out of the ground and opens it.

The Witch Bottle t-shirt
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SKU 31450008

From The Morgue

Witch bottles were English counter-magic, thick on the ground from the 1600s onward — stoneware Bellarmine jugs at first, glass later, packed with iron nails, pins, hair and urine and set under the hearth or the threshold. The Reverend Joseph Glanvill wrote the recipe down in 1681. Archaeologists have pulled hundreds out of English foundations and out of colonial American ones too; the Greenwich bottle came up in 2004 with its cork still in and its contents intact. Somebody, three centuries ago, was very frightened and did something about it.

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