Texas residents have recently reported finding "witch bottles," folklore objects that people believed could trap evil spells, along the shore of the Gulf Coast, NBC Dallas-Fort Worth reported.
Last week, Texas A&M University's Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies posted a picture of a witch bottle on Facebook with the caption: "Witch bottle! We find these every once in awhile. Folks in certain cultures around the world put vegetation or other objects in a bottle. They are counter magical devices whose purpose is to draw in and trap harmful intentions directed at their owners."
The institute's director of community engagement, Jace Tunnell, said in an interview that he's found eight witch bottles over the past few years and has never opened any of them.
"I don't get creeped out by them, but I'm also not going to open them," Tunnell told Fox News Digital. "I mean, they're supposed to have spells and stuff in them — why take the chance?"
McGill University Office of Science and Society wrote that witch bottles were "meant to provide protection from witches' spells. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a powerful belief in witches and their ability to cause illness by casting a spell.
"But the evil spells could be fended off by trapping them in a 'witch bottle,' which if properly prepared, could actually reflect the spell itself while also tormenting the witch leaving the witch with no option but to remove the spell allowing the victim to recover."
Tunnell said that there's no way of knowing where the bottles came from, but the institute's YouTube channel has documented their finding the bottles in a series about cleaning up debris from Hurricane Hanna.
"When it comes to manmade debris, it's about telling people if you see a piece of trash on the ground, pick it up," he said.
"A lot of the stuff we find, even if it's way inland, gets into the nearest waterway if it rains. Where does that go? The ocean," Tunnell added.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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