Mysterious ‘witch bottles’ have washed up on the Gulf of Mexico – and researchers are too afraid to open them. Researcher Jace Tunnell found the items on a beach near Corpus Christi, Texas, on November 15.
The bottles get their name as they come from an unknown sender and often have weird items inside – including what some fear are spells. A recently discovered witch bottle contained gooseneck barnacles clustered on the glass, meaning the artifact had been in the water for a while.
Tunnell told Fox News eight witch bottles have been discovered since 2017 and he does not get creeped out by them, but he will not open them because they are supposed to have ‘spells and stuff.’ Tunnell’s wife is also not up for taking any chances and told him that he can bring shells inside, but ‘no spell bottles.’
Witch bottles are common discoveries in the UK, and can be filled with items like hair, herbs, plans, nails or bodily fluids. Nearly 200 bottles have been found over the years in walls, dung piles or buried underground.
‘Back in the 16th and 17th centuries there was a powerful belief in witches and their ability to cause illness by casting a spell,’ reported the McGill University Office of Science and Society via Fox News.
‘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,’ McGill University Office added. Because of this, the witch would have no other option but to remove the spell and allow the victim to recover.
According to Tunnell in a YouTube video he posted last October, there are a variety of reasons why people would create these kinds of bottles. ‘Some of the spell bottles are for protection,’ the researcher stated.
‘They do a ritual where they’ve got incense and smoke and stuff like that.’ Tunnell added: ‘Sometimes they do it for health reasons, for luck – there’s all kinds of reasons why people would have spell bottles.’
The William & Mary Center for Archaeological Research also discussed the history of nails in a witch bottle via The Charlotte Observer. ‘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,’ said the University.
Tunnell said in his YouTube video there are some people who create witch bottles just to throw them into the ocean. However, he has no idea how the bottles he found were even in the ocean to start.
‘When it comes to manmade debris, it’s about telling people if you see a piece of trash on the ground, pick it up,’ Tunnell told Fox News. ‘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.
