A Bottle of Six Pins Buried to Fight Witches

Someone in colonial Pennsylvania dropped six pins into a squat olive-glass bottle, jammed a whittled wooden plug into the neck and buried it upside down beside the house. It was meant for a witch.

Archaeologists found it in 1976, during a controlled excavation at a colonial site in Essington, Pennsylvania.

Witch bottles were a form of counter-magic known from England: containers deliberately buried to fight back against witchcraft. In some cases, urine and pins were meant to redirect a victim's pain back toward the witch believed to have caused it. The Essington bottle was probably filled with urine when it went into the ground. Six was a number traditionally thought to work against witches, and burying the bottle upside down symbolized overturning the witch's intentions. What archaeologist Marshall J. Becker recognized in Pennsylvania was evidence that the practice had crossed the Atlantic, with little written record left behind.

The bottle was manufactured around 1740 and may have been buried around 1748. Its dark olive glass had aged to a gold patina. Tucked under its shoulder were a fragment of thin bird bone, possibly from a partridge, and a shard of black-glazed redware.

The Essington bottle was the first witch bottle ever documented archaeologically in the New World. In a 2005 follow-up, Becker reported five more from the northeastern United States, spread widely enough to suggest the belief traveled well beyond one household. One from Pennsylvania hints that the habit survived into the early 1800s.

The bottle held no confession of belief, no diary entry explaining what the household feared. It held six pins.

Written history barely noticed the practice. Archaeology dug it up anyway.

Read the full story at Archaeology Magazine, March/April 1980

Hot Take: Colonial counter-magic ran on "I'm rubber, you're glue" logic, only with urine, pins and a sincere expectation that it would work.