The witches of Eastwood ... and our other suburbs
DO you have an anti-witchcraft shoe hidden in the walls of your house? If it’s more than 100 years old there’s a fair chance you do. Nathan Davies reveals why.
THEY’RE under our floorboards, in our roof cavities and hidden in our chimneys – children’s shoes, bibles and even mummified cats hidden by builders to protect homeowners from the evil spirits thought to roam 19th Century Adelaide.
The discovery of a small shoe in a chimney during the recent renovation of a home in Brompton has shone a new light on the once common practice, known as ritual concealment.
Architectural historian Dr Ian Evans, who has written a PhD thesis on the subject, said the child’s shoe found in the chimney was almost certainly placed there by builders to protect the occupants of the house.
“The boot is clearly a deliberately concealed ritual object – I’ve seen a great many of them,” Dr Evans said.
“Around half of all such concealments are the boots and shoes of children. I think they were using the power of the good and innocent to guard against evil.”
Dr Evans said that while ritual concealment was a common folk magic practice across the English-speaking world, stretching back centuries in Britain, little is known about exactly what the builders were trying to achieve as the details surrounding the practice were never written down.
“We know it was to protect people from supernatural beings from the underworld,” he said.
“And that’s something that’s quite difficult for a person from the 21st Century to get their head around.
Beyond that, though, there are no written documents associated with this.
“A builder in that time saw it as their duty to build a home that would protect you – from the weather, from burglars, from all of those things – and that duty extended to the supernatural.”
Dr Evans has catalogued a host of items found concealed in old South Australian homes, including boots and shoes, a carved marble “Bible”, and even a mummified cat that was found below the floorboards near the original alter site of the 1863 Methodist church in Woodchester, near Strathalbyn.
It is thought dead cats were sometimes buried to ward off the companion animals – or “familiars” – of witches, which were thought to be rodents, birds or other cats.
And while that all sounds slightly creepy to the modern Australian, it pales compared to the isolated Tasmanian farmhouse where Dr Evans was called to investigate the discovery of 38 children’s shoes, toys, clothing, dolls and a cat concealed within the building’s voids.
It turned out five members of the same family had died – four within the same month in 1860 – and the objects may have been a desperate bid to end the run of bad luck.
For Brompton homeowner Lisa Vlassis, the story behind the shoe was just another link to her home’s interesting past.
“They were certainly different times,” Ms Vlassis said.