A bottle of junk Virginia archaeologists found isn’t trash. It’s a rare ‘witch bottle’
A few broken nails in a glass bottle were found buried under an interstate median in Virginia, according to the College of William & Mary.
No, that wasn’t a clue on the world’s most disappointing treasure map.
The discovery might be one of less than a dozen in the United States — a rare “witch bottle” from the Civil War, university archaeologists said.
No one could be sure what it was at first, just “a glass bottle full of nails, broken, but all there, near an old brick hearth,” Joe Jones, director of the William & Mary Center for Archaeological Research, said in a university article.
But its contents and the historical context pointed to something far more unusual.
Witch bottles date to the 1600s in England “when continental Europe was in the grips of a major witch panic,” Smithsonian Magazine reported.
They reportedly were used to ward off evil spirits, Jones told the university news service.
“An afflicted person would bury the nail-filled bottle under or near their hearth, with the idea that the heat from the hearth would energize the nails into breaking a witch’s spell,” according to the university.
Witch bottles can be filled with any number of things: fish hooks, urine, fingernail clippings, teeth, hair — even belly button lint, according to the Archaeological Institute of America.
Hundreds have been found in England, the university news service reported, but not many have popped up in the United States.
Colonial immigrants likely introduced the witchy phenomenon here, Jones said.
Archaeologists theorize this one belonged to a Union soldier from Pennsylvania occupying an outpost of Fort Magruder known as Redoubt 9 — one of 14 “fortifications” spanning four miles between the James and York rivers during the Civil War, according to the university.
Redoubt 9 of the Williamsburg Line sits on what is now a traffic median dividing Interstate 164 between exits 238 and 242, the news service reports.
Archaeologists excavated the site in 2016 ahead of a planned interstate widening project from the Virginia Department of Transportation.
They found mostly bullets, a shrapnel fragment, cartridges, buttons, a brick hearth and an empty bottle of champagne, the university reported in 2018.
The witch bottle wasn’t mentioned at the time.
According to Jones, a cavalry unit from Pennsylvania occupied Redoubt 9 for a little over a year during the Civil War but likely was only there during Confederate raids — meaning “there were plenty of bad spirits and energy to ward off,” Jones said.
The bottle was made by a Pennsylvania bottle-maker.
“It’s a good example of how a singular artifact can speak volumes,” Jones said. “It’s really a time capsule representing the experience of Civil War troops, a window directly back into what these guys were going through occupying this fortification at this period in time.”
