Disclaimer: The following article discusses Appalachian folk practices which are presented for anthropological interest in folklore. None of this is intended as medical advice and it should not be viewed as such or attempted by anyone. Thank you. Enjoy.
On December 26th 2022, I interviewed my Mawmaw (or grandmother) about Appalachian folk practices. We discussed “the pencil test” which is an old fashioned way of determining if a baby would be a male or female by dangling a pencil on a string over a pregnant woman’s belly. A needle and thread is put through the head of the eraser to create this makeshift pendulum of sorts.
If it goes back and forth the baby will supposedly be a boy and if it goes around in a circle the baby will supposedly be a girl. This was of course before medical science had the ability to know the sex in utero and has been used in my family as a folk practice for generations. Mawmaw didn’t know the original source of the tradition but speculated that it could’ve just been something that people figured out over time and added that this kind of thing was common for the women folks in the family.
Spirituality and Signs:
Some of my Mawmaw’s spiritual views were contextualized within the framework of Christianity. We discussed her how her dad used bible verses and spit to reportedly cure warts and how she had used bible verses to reportedly spot bleeding. She also mentioned having a neighbor who could supposedly “draw fire” or “talk the burn out of a wound” meaning to get a burn to stop hurting with words. In the specific case of drawing fire, it seemed to require the person be a man whose father had passed away before he was born.
She said these “spiritual gifts” could only be taught or passed down from female to male and from male to female. She learned the blood stopping verse from her father. She also emphasized the importance of belief in such practices in order for them to work in her personal view. When asked, she said these folk practices were not discussed in church at all and were mostly discussed among family.
Mawmaw also mentioned how her mother was born with a veil or “caul” over her eyes which was a bit of skin which needed to be removed. This supposedly signified that the person would see things others couldn’t. Mawmaw indeed said that her mother sometimes saw black outline shadows or silhouettes of people that would go away if certain herbs were burned.
Her father was a bookworm and a very spiritual or religious man, who used crosses for protection and claimed to have even witnessed angels and had other visions. He said he saw the angels appear before him in the sky while sitting on his front porch cloud watching. He dropped his head down and when he looked up they were there but he couldn’t see their faces because the glow was so bright. Yet he did not go to church, preferring instead to read the bible in his rocking chair at home, and pray privately in his closet in reference to Matthew 6:6. Mawmaw said he went by the “old ways” and said you didn’t need to go to church. He gave her a necklace with a mustard seed in it representing the biblical allegory that you only need as much faith as a mustard seed.
When asked about spiritual signs, Mawmaw told of how her dad received a sign in the form of either anomalous lights or a storm coming around the hill to let him know his father had died in the hospital. She then told a story of how her sister reportedly saw a cloud-like mist when she opened her door arriving home after their dad passed away. She said her sister also instantly knew when their mother had passed because she smelled a strong inexplicable smell of sweet flowers blooming upon pulling into the driveway. There seems to be a trend in rural story telling of mystical “death announcement” experiences.
Folk Remedies and Divination:
She went through various folk remedies, such as elderberry root made into a nine bead necklace for teething, as well as “rattle snake buttons” which were the rattlers off of a rattlesnake for the same purpose. She also mentioned her grandmother on her dad’s side using old jars of herbs and “things you get out of the woods” for various purposes. She said her father put a horseshoe above the door and always carried a buckeye seed in his pocket for good luck. We discussed various “superstitions,” both the common ones and the more West Virginia derived ones. There are protection myths, things used for luck, things to ward off evil, interesting cause-and-effect beliefs and just compulsive things that folks do. A list of those is available here: (Read more)
She told of how her father once used the carbide from a mining lantern to kill the nerve in his tooth since they couldn’t afford dental work at the time. Some might wonder if this one qualifies as a folk remedy, as it’s rather inventive but certainly very ill advised. Classic folk magic books of the 1700s and 1800s also contain outlandish solutions for tooth problems and killing the nerve because the peasantry, much like the American working class of today, couldn’t afford proper treatment either. It’s actually a pretty common thing in such works. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I covered the topic of divination to see what she had heard of. She wasn’t familiar with the term but knew many of the concepts. When asked, she said that her dad and the neighbors used dowsing rods to find water. She said she also knew an old lady who did readings with chicken bones. She said her father didn’t like fortune telling and therefore would not allow a deck of playing cards in the house. Though her uncles used playing cards for this purpose and she later in life got a palmistry reading from a fortune teller.
Dreams or Night Visitation:
Mawmaw said that as a child she would sleepwalk and follow a certain person in her dream. As an adult she reportedly had an experience which sounds like sleep paralysis in which her body was measured in an outline and down her spine while she was unable to move.
Mawmaw said that in childhood her sister woke up one night and supposedly saw the devil himself warming his hands by putting them into the fire of the fireplace. Upon seeing this, her sister let out a loud terrified scream and woke up everyone in the house.
My Great Great Grandmother’s White Thing Sighting:
My Mawmaw then told me how her grandmother of her dad’s side (therefore my great great grandmother) would sometimes stay with them at their house at the bottom of the hill. On one occasion her Mawmaw claimed to have seen a “white thing” she described as a four legged furry white creature standing in the road looking at her through the window. She said it was large but smaller than a horse and solid white.
West Virginia Folklorist Ruth Ann Musick documented stories in her books about “White Things” of various description reportedly encountered in the Mountain State. Mawmaw wasn’t aware of those books, though such white-furred creatures seem to be somewhat of a trend in these local tales.
Around the same time of that supposed sighting, the whole family heard sounds like something running around the outside of their house which she said sounded like an elephant. The sounds would reportedly wake up people sleeping in the house. Mawmaw was reportedly 6 or 7 years old when these two events happened, meaning that the timeframe was either 1959 or 1960.
Listen To The Full Audio Interview Here: