Supernatural Feathers: Death Beds, Witchcraft and Angels

Chris and Simon wing it through the strange world of feather folklore — from cursed peacock plumes to pillows that prevent the dying from slipping away. Do feather crowns signal a heavenly reward or a witch’s curse? Simon’s disturbed by beds hiding feather rats and spectral bouquets; Chris dares to suggest a rational explanation. There's a detour into swan-lined pits, angel relics, deer hunting and the suspiciously decorative world of Victorian featherwork. Listener beware: this one might leave you checking your pillow twice. 

Transcript

Simon: I wonder if you could explain a bit how we actually decide on the individual topics.

Chris: We alternate topics every other month, so we each have a chance to inflict our pet interests on the others. I personally am sort of a Fortean magpie. I'm just sort of picking up shiny objects, whatever interests me, and trying to put together a lot of anecdotes or details about a particular folklore belief or a particular type of supernatural entity, that kind of thing. How do you choose yours?

Simon: You know all too well that I have a weakness for case studies. So if there is a supernatural event that is very well documented, for me, that would be an example of a dream episode. And so, last month, we did The Deerness Mermaid. There, you and I had about 20,000 words of sources to go off. There is a bit of a difference in subject matter. For instance, I would never have chosen bells. I would never have chosen weddings. There are a series of topics that I just don't think I would have got into. But I have to say that either, when I do the preparation for them or in the episode itself, I'm always grateful we've done these topics.

Chris: Oh, well, that's gratifying. I would hate to have you suffer through my personal obsessions, supernatural obsessions.

Simon: No, I think I've always learned a lot. And that actually brings us to today's episode, because you have chosen, of all things, supernatural feathers. And I have to say, the jury's still out on this one, Chris. But how on earth? What were you feeling the morning you woke up and you decided that supernatural feathers were a thing?

Chris: Well, I thought, we need something lightweight, you know, a little 40 and fluff. But actually, it came from looking at stories about witches, stories about Victorian material culture, and one of my obsessions, death. So that's where we're going with the feathers.

Simon: I mean, so we're really ticking several of your boxes here, because material culture, Victorians, death, all of these things scream Chris. I'm going to run through what I think about feathers. I've been given this some time today, and I really want to share with you three thoughts about feathers and why they were important to our ancestors in a way that perhaps they're not anymore. And then I'd be really curious before we dive in whether you could add anything to the list. First thing is perhaps obvious, feathers have to do with flight. Many supernatural beings are not tied to this earthly realm and they go up, they whiz around. Perhaps the most notable example with feathers are angels, and I'm sure we'll get to angel feathers in a little bit. The second thing I'd say is that, whereas today we rarely encounter feathers in the house, in previous ages, feathers were very important for mattresses, and also most importantly for pillows. And of course, that's the one place that some of us will still be familiar with feathers as long as we don't have allergies. 

And perhaps this is one of the reasons why feathers appear in witchcraft, because of course, where you sleep is just the most intimate space imaginable. And yet feathers are there, hidden under the cover, but they're there. And so perhaps that's why they come to matter. 

And then the other thing that comes to mind, and I owe this to Dan Harms, who helped me with a couple of points for this episode, is that you write with feathers. We're used to biros or keyboards today. Even the Victorians have pretty much given up on quills. But before, say, the 1830s, the 1820s, quills were very common for writing with. And there are a couple of examples, and I hope we can come to these by the end of today, where quills appear in magic rituals because they have to do with writing. Anything to add to that list, Chris?

Chris: I really can't. You've covered pretty much why feathers appear in supernatural stories. They're usually associated with witchcraft, and sometimes they're associated with death. 

They're also associated with luck, both good and bad luck. And I think that's where we can start here with a reading about a feather luck story. A year or two ago, Daniel Hodnot of Long Branch, New Jersey, brother-in-law of the late Daniel Liddy, brought home from Europe a screen made of peacock feathers. He told his wife of the prevailing superstition that they were unlucky, and said they would disprove this commonly received notion. She said the superstition didn't disturb her. Since then, Mr. Hodnot's house has several times marvelously escaped destruction by fire. A valuable dog of his died without apparent cause. Burglars have entered the place and stolen valuables, and both Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hodnot have died. Finally, there was a lawsuit to contest Mr. Liddy's will. In the neighborhood of Long Branch, peacock feathers are now no more popular than before the test was made.

Simon: Wow. So this is something that's new for me, the idea that feathers can be unlucky, and I imagine also lucky. And if we have the positive side of the ledger and the negative side, can you give us some sense of the kind of birds that are lucky or unlucky? I would never have guessed that a peacock was unlucky.

Chris: It's kind of a mystery how it became that way. People say it's because the eye is the evil eye on the peacock feather, but for a long time, they were extremely fashionable to wear or to have in your house. Also, they were a symbol of royalty in the Far East, that sort of thing.

Simon: Can I also add there, Chris, that actually in Roman times, the peacock was a sign of immortal life because it was believed that peacock's meat never went off, something that I suspect is absolutely untrue. Actually, it was adopted as a bird by early Christians, so much so that if there is a villa with a mosaic of a peacock, it's often taken that this might be an indirect sign that there were Christians on the site because, of course, Christians were very excited by the promise of immortal life. So you might have thought that peacocks have to do with vanity, but actually in early Christian tradition, they were the sign of something overwhelmingly positive.

Chris: That's new to me. As far as good luck birds, we've got the custom of hunting the wren on St. Stephen's Day, and then you distribute its feathers as charms against witchcraft, or if you're a sailor, to avoid disaster at sea. Apparently, turkey feathers are considered a barrier to bad luck. I've heard this, they keep off the witches also, so everyone should own a turkey wing, which were actually used for fanning fires. It's said that if a feather is placed in the bride's bouquet without the knowledge of the groom, they'll both be rich. And when a bohemian bride is about to go to church, her friends put a feather and a little flax seed in her shoes so that she will always have linen and feather beds in abundance because those were two very, very important domestic products. There's also dueling beliefs about if a feather from the wing of a bird falls to your feet and you pick it up and keep it, it will keep all evil from you. If a bird sheds a feather while flying over your head, it's better luck if it falls upon you. But then there's another one that says if a feather lights on your hair, it means you're going to be angry all day.

Simon: So what I'm getting here are, let's say, mixed signals. It sounds that different societies give different birds the role of good or bad luck, and probably if you move from one parish to another, you'll hear different things. But why don't you give us a little bit on bad luck feathers? I know you've given us peacocks, you've given us the lucky feathers, but there must be some unlucky ones out there. I would imagine that picking up a raven's feather or a crow's feather might go badly.

Chris: Apparently, dark feathers. Those are the owl and the buzzard, and as you say, the raven. These are the ones that have evil on them and you don't want to mess with them. 

Apparently, woodpecker feathers, and I don't think I've ever even seen a woodpecker feather, are also considered to be bad luck, possibly because they chew up your wood on your house. Another possibility are pigeon feathers. We'll come later to the association of feathers and death.

Simon: So we've got a sense, an overview of feathers. One thing that I just wanted to throw in there is that I go for my daily walks in the wood, and I've often been struck by how visible feathers are. Perhaps this is part of the fascination that they're not like acorns or pine cones that you could easily just walk past 10 times. The feathers you tend to actually see, they are quite visible. If you have a feather like a Kingfisher or a woodpecker that's a little bit iridescent, they're of course very obvious. So I suppose in this way, I mean, I'm thinking here of the fairy census where there are a couple of records of people who are on some kind of quest. Perhaps they're going into a wood and they take a feather that they find as being a symbol of something about to happen in their own lives.

Chris: Right. We find this in evangelical Christian belief, the idea that angel feathers, you're walking along and suddenly a feather just appears out of nowhere and you take it as a sign, some sort of spiritual sign. It has a very personal feel to a lot of people.

Simon: Well, you brought us onto angel feathers now, but I have to stop you there. I can't quite believe that's a thing.

Chris: Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. There's in fact one megachurch in California that's one of their big schticks is that the people who go to the church supposedly see feathers falling from the church ceiling or they appear from falling in their houses. One ornithologist wanted to study this and got a packet of these feathers and he said it's obvious they're normal bird feathers. There's nothing about them to suggest they're other than bird. It is a belief by many people that somehow feathers appear mysteriously and they're either a message from an angel or perhaps from a deceased relative.

Simon: I mean, on that subject of evangelical feathers, I find this idea delightful. One thing you don't know about me, Chris, is that I have an evangelical past. I went to an evangelical church in my teens and one of the things that I most remember about going to the church services are when people spoke in tongues.

But I did find it really quite impressive when people spoke in tongues. It was something that got your attention and I just cannot really take seriously the idea that a pigeon's feather falling from somewhere up in the gallery would have quite the same effect.

Chris: Well, apparently at this church there's also gold glitter falling from the ceiling. God's blessings, you're being showered with gold at any rate. But there is a long history of angel feather relics in the history of the church. For example, St. John the Baptist in Pusey, Wiltshire, apparently during restoration work, they found this compartment with glass over it and it was filled with feathers. The story is that they came from the wings of the archangel Gabriel. Apparently Zacharias, when he was told by Gabriel that he was going to be the father of John the Baptist, clutched at the archangel and was left with a handful of feathers. 

Sure enough, a crusader from Pusey acquired them in the Holy Land, brought them home, and they were placed on display. They look a lot like goose feathers, but that's not the story.

Simon: But let me stop you there because something that's been bothering me as I've been reading about feathers is their durability, how long they actually last. I would imagine that if I got a chicken's feather and left it on my desk for 10 years, it would just have dissolved down to nothing. Or is that not actually the case?

Chris: Well, they do get eaten by insects, but there's an ostrich feather fan that survived from King Tut's tomb. And that's 1323 BC.

Simon: Okay, okay. I'm not going to complain about the lifespan of feathers anymore.

Chris: There's also Charles II's wax effigy at Westminster has still got the original ostrich and heron feathers, and that was 1686.

Simon: And if you've seen it, does it look a little bit shabby or have they actually...

Chris: They've cleaned them up, but they're still feathers. You recognize them, they're not threadbare. There's also an absolutely gorgeous feather fan at the Fitzwilliam Museum, 1665, and it's in South American bird feathers, all beautiful, beautiful colors. It's in immaculate condition. So it also depends on have these things been conserved in a proper location or temperature or whatever. 

Simon: I mean, this business of angels and feathers, I have come over the years across some references. Most famously, I think in one of Boccaccio's stories in the Decameron, there's a priest who has an angel's feather and he boasts about it. And I believe it's one of his parishioners, swaps it out for a grubby parrot's feather, and so it makes him look rather foolish. But yeah, angel feathers were absolutely a thing. And when I was getting ready for this episode, I came across one lovely footnote. Footnotes are always the best, aren't they? 

And it was about a man on Mont Saint-Michel in France. This is on the border between Normandy and Brittany. Sorry, I'm going to start laughing now. But he had a business selling feathers from St. Michael.

Chris: That happened everywhere. There was a Hungarian priest who came to Rome and went to the Church of St. Augustine and said a glass case contains a wing of the archangel Gabriel. Supposedly, Pope Gregory had asked the angel for a wing. And the guide informed me with a look of deep significance that he knew a pious man, the possessor of a feather from this angelic wing, who would be happy to dispose of it in favor of another devout man.

Simon: I can deal with an angel losing a feather in a moment of high emotion. I can imagine kneeling before Mary, and I'm sure a couple of feathers could easily have fallen out. But what I can't take seriously is the idea that someone gets an angel's wing. How on earth is that supposed to happen? Are we supposed to imagine angels having many wings?

Chris: Well, obviously, Seraphim and Cherubim have multiple wings. They have six and four. I may be wrong about which ones have six and which has four. But also, let's just assume that the archangel Gabriel is asked nicely by Pope Gregory for a wing, and he pulls one off and hands it to him and regenerates and flies off. Angels have many talents, I'm sure. My favorite archangel feather was at the Escorial. William Beckford, the traveler and writer and eccentric, saw it there. It was in a drawer on a quilted silk mattress, and it was all scented with all kinds of perfumes. It was full three feet long and of a blushing hue more soft and delicate than that of the loveliest rose. He wanted to know how did they get this, but he said, I repressed all questions of an indiscreet tendency. The why and wherefore, the when and how for what and to whom such a palpable manifestation of archangelic beauty and wingedness had been vouchsafed. I love that word, wingedness. It's been debated as to what kind of a feather this really was. Apparently, the Escorial doesn't still have it, or they don't admit to still having it. But the color precludes a quetzal. Maybe it's a bird-of-paradise plume. It's probably not an ostrich feather since it's pretty long, and I think he would have recognized an ostrich feather because they were so prominent in fashion at that time. I don't know about Rosiette's spoon bills. It might be something like that.

Simon: I'm a little bit disappointed, Chris, that you don't give the consideration that it could actually be an angel's feather. 

Chris: Mmmmm

Simon: So if I can sneak in another point now, would you be open to doing a future episode on angels? If I could find a case study with enough words, would you be up for this?

Chris: Absolutely, yes. I would be very interested in that because there's lots of 19th century appearances of angels. It's not just an early Christian or biblical story. So yes, I'd be very interested in that. I have another religious feather story that is extremely strange, and it's surprisingly modern. This is a feather object found in a pillow that comes from the western part of Virginia from a town called Claypole Hill. And on 10 December 1933, a little girl named Nanny Ruth Lowe died. Now, she'd been something of a religious prodigy. She was supposedly walking and talking at nine months and reading her Bible and preaching at age three. She died when she was only seven years old, and she told her mother that her mission here was finished and she was going to have to go away. And she sickened and died a few days later. Her mother emptied the pillow from her deathbed maybe a couple weeks later and found a feather cross inside the pillow. It was only six inches long at that time. She put it away in a shoebox, and when she looked at it again, it had grown. In 1937, it was reported as being about 20 inches long. It was kept in a glass top box, and they had to keep making new boxes because the cross would outgrow the box. And hundreds of people came to see this prodigy. So it's a really odd story for the 1930s. And some people said it was one of the strange things that would arise before Christ's second coming. A man who actually dealt in feather pillows and mattresses said this was just something that feathers do. They wind around a thread or piece of fabric inside the mattress or pillow, and the growth was just the feathers expanding. Mrs. Lowe said she watched that new bits of down would just appear inside the box and attach themselves to tendrils from the cross, and then they'd morph into full-size feathers. So honestly, I don't know what to make of this, but I've got a photo of it. I think it eventually fell to pieces. It was put up on a wall, and I think it eventually fell to pieces, but I can't verify that.

Simon: It dissolved away. Yes.

Chris: And some people said that it was a sign that the deceased was finally in heaven. They'd moved past purgatory or limbo or whatever.

Simon: Before looking for this episode, the only time I've come across feathers in English folklore, I think, is connected actually with death. And I'm sure you know what I'm about to say here. This is to do with the idea that certain feathers actually prevent people from dying. 

And the idea is that if someone is at the extremity of their life, they're in the last hours of their life, of course, it's necessary to give them as quiet and as peaceful and as painless a passing as possible. And sometimes when people didn't die, there was the idea it was because there were the wrong kind of feathers in the pillow, or I think sometimes in the mattress. And what I find confusing about this, I have a little file with examples, and I'm sure I could expand this massively. Because over the years, I've come across many references. But the feathers that don't let you die are often different, one from the other. So in one source, I think they're geese. In another, I think they're pigeons. I've come across several references to game birds. Do you know this tradition? Did it also get to the States?

Chris: I have not found that tradition here in the States at all, and I'm not quite sure how we account for that. But I've heard that no one can die on a bed in which there are any pigeon or game feathers. Other people say it's impossible for a person to die while resting on a pillow stuffed with the feathers of the dove. So there's a couple of... I haven't heard the geese, because those were the most popular, the most sought after for feather beds. So I'm not quite sure why there's a difference there. Supposedly, the dove and the pigeon represented the Holy Ghost. So you were almost committing sacrilege to die on those feathers or something to that effect. I've also heard some people say that pigeon feathers or game bird feathers smell bad, and why would you put them into a bed or a pillow? But it was an extremely widespread belief in England, at least. And if you wanted the person to die, that you would remove them from the bed and put them on the floor. Or the death of a person who was too slow in dying was hastened by removing the pillow and allowing the sick person's head to fall back. And doctors hated this. They thought it was murder. And one physician reproached an old woman who'd done it and said, you murdered that person. 

Oh no, sir, it's not murder. It's what we call drawing the pillow.

Simon: I've never heard that one. I do know a similar account that I find quite gruesome, that is a letter written by a doctor. And the doctor also clearly became very angry with the family. There was a young woman, early 20s, and she was dying, bless her, of consumption. Not, I believe, an easy death. And at a certain point, the family, after four days where she just was going downhill, but was not actually passing on, they decided that there was a problem, not with the pillow, but with feathers in the mattress. And so against the doctor's advice, and the implication is that he was in the room and was furious about this, they actually decided to move mattress. And so they lifted this poor girl up and took her towards another bed and she died as soon as she left the bed. And I've never thought of this before, but just saying out loud, I imagine this confirmed the family immediately in their beliefs, but it also made the doctor incandescent with rage. And so he wrote this very angry letter about these silly yokels and what they'd done to the girl. You know this style.

Chris: Now, yes, they don't like the superstitions of the peasants. Another detail though, they said, for example, should one show signs of not getting on with his dying, you may be sure there are pigeon feathers in the mattress. And it's not as all improbable that the invalid will be taken quite out of bed and laid on the bare floor. Whilst on the other hand, if he seems likely to pass away before the arrival of some distant son or daughter, a small bag of feathers may be placed under his pillow to hold him back until the last farewell can be said. That appears in Catherine Briggs' Hobarty Dick, where they're trying to keep someone from dying until someone arrives to say goodbye. 

Simon: So for anyone who doesn't know it, this is a novel by Britain's most important folklorist of the last 50 years. It's a very, very fine novel. Have you read it, Chris?

Chris: Oh, yes. It's one of my favourite books.

Simon: Beautiful book.

Chris: Now that we've talked about feathers in deathbeds, death feathers, let's move along to something that's called feather crowns that appear in beds. These are circular feather formations found in pillows and feather beds. I've always associated them with witchcraft, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But apparently they're also supposed to be a sign that the dead person has gone to heaven. I can't help but think this is a later interpretation meant to comfort those left behind, because the earliest I've found this interpretation is in 1914.

Simon: Presumably your cross that you described before so movingly must belong to that same tradition.

Chris: I think it does. But that's in the 1930s, so that's much later also. But the 1914 story is a little child dying and a wreath or crown of feathers is found in the pillow. The informant said there's a legend that whenever a crown of feathers was found in a pillow after anyone's death, it was a sure sign that the one who died had gone to heaven. This is a very, very popular belief. I think it's still a little bit found today. People talk about how my maternal grandmother passed away in 1945, and my mother emptied the pillow and found a feather crown. It was about two inches high and two inches wide, and the person who's died and whose pillow the crown is found has now got a crown in heaven. We find the same feather crowns inside pillows and feather beds, and they have a much more sinister implication.

Simon: The same terminology though, feather crown.

Chris: Yes. Well, you find the description of feather crown, you find feather wreath, and occasionally you find them described as a witch wreath. I think the witch wreath is a sort of a later term, but usually you find feather wreaths is what they're called. What they usually do is they find somebody who's been inexplicably ill. For example, this one fellow kept throwing his pillow away during his last illness saying, there's something in that pillow that hurts my head. His wife said, this is impossible. I gathered the feathers, made the pillow myself. She looked at the pillow afterwards and found this big witch wreath, as she called it, about three inches in diameter.

Simon: I would go back there to what I said at the beginning, that pillows are very intimate objects. It reminds me a little bit of the urban legend. Do you remember the one of the lady with the beehive hairstyle that has the nest of tarantulas? But it's something similar. The idea that in this pillow, which is so close to your head, so trusted, it gives you rest, that there is this thing that is damaging you. There's something very creepy about that, I would say.

Chris: What's interesting to me is in a lot of these stories, the woman said, it's impossible. I gathered the feathers and made the pillow myself. They always say that they look into the pillow or the feather bed and they can't discover any rips. They can't discover that any of the seams have been opened and redone. Yet, they find these things inside, buried deep in the feathers. Sometimes, they're even different colored feathers. The tradition is, of course, that you put your goose feathers in. They're not generally that brightly colored, but in some cases, it was scarlet and gold. It was bright blue and vivid green, all kinds of colors. Or they'll say, I stuffed that with goose feathers, and now it's all chicken feathers. This custom seems to be a very Germanic one, a North European one. I've also occasionally found it in France.

Simon: And so do we find it in the UK as well?

Chris: I have only one example in England, and it's from 1712. In that case, it was cakes of feathers found in pillows, but it was definitely involved with witchcraft. There's a pamphlet written on a full and impartial account of the discovery of sorcery and witchcraft, practiced by Jane Wenham of Walkern in Herefordshire, upon the bodies of Ann Thorne, Ann Street, etc. It was written by a fellow named Francis Bragg, and it talks about cakes rather than wreaths.

Simon: So, trying, Chris, to be a little bit rational about all of this, I know very little about feather pillows. But I imagine what's happening here is that feathers in the pillow are attaching to each other. The little tendrils that feathers have are locking into each other, and slowly, you're getting these globulations. I mean, this was the reason that in the old days, when you had a feather pillow, what's the verb? You puff the pillow out. You bang the feathers around so they don't settle into a single shape.

Chris: Even at the time, people who dealt in feather products were saying, oh, as I say, this is what feathers do. They just attach to each other, or they get caught up in a thread, and then they clump. But what interests me is that wreaths, which are fairly consistent when you look at the ones that survive, those weren't the only things found in beds and pillows. We have bouquets and flowers. We have anchors and crosses and a nest full of eggs. There was a case in the Netherlands where a couple of newlyweds were in the marriage bed and were quarreling, and they ripped open the bed and found a feather heart put there by malicious people, jealous people.

Simon: But Chris, to be clear, when you're talking about nests of eggs or these other examples, they're all made of feathers, correct?

Chris: That is correct. Yes. One of the most sinister collection of objects that was found in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Mrs. Sally Anderson displayed what she called a number of gruesome objects, which she said had been formed by evil spirits in the pillow of her 11-year-old daughter and had caused the child to have seizures. Well, she consulted a witch doctor, and he supposedly cured the child after telling the mother it's been bewitched and checked the pillow. So she found a miniature coffin, a pallbearer's glove, a funeral wreath, and a bouquet, all made of feathers. And so many people rushed to the house to see these items that it was reported that there was a riot going on and police were sent to dispel the crowd. And one woman in Cincinnati found a veritable museum of feather figures inside her lumpy feather bed. And she ripped it open and pulled out a little baby clothed all in feathers. So she brought in a number of her female friends and said, you know, look at this horrible thing I found. They went with her to the infested bedroom, and they opened up the bed tick, and they found it nearly filled with baby forms, human hands, a human leg from the knee down, including the foot, a number of rats, a quantity of balls, and a lot of bouquets, all made of or clothed with feathers sewed together in the most careful and skillful fashion with white silk of a nature so fine as scarcely to be visible to the naked eye. 

Now, the lady who slept in the bewitched bed said she bought the feathers two years ago, made them up in a bed herself. Nobody's touched them. No human hands, of course. 

And she was the one that swore that she'd put nothing but goose feathers in. And now they were all chicken feathers. And the newspaper regretted that their readers couldn't go see these prodigies, but everything had been thrown into the fire to baffle the witches who'd put them there.

Simon: Tonight, I was looking in my pillow and I find, God forbid, a feather rat or something like this. The trick for confounding witches is just to put it immediately into the fire.

Chris: Right. And for extra protection, you salt it before you put it in the fire, and that may make it burn brighter.

Simon: Okay. That's good to know.

Chris: The few surviving witch feather wreaths that I've seen, they look like swirls of They look like they just might be formed naturally by body heat and pressure and movement. But these feather babies, these bouquets and flowers, that's very, very strange. And the complexity suggests that it's the artistry of a feather worker rather than just random matted feather swirls.

Simon: No, no, but stop everything, Chris. A feather worker? What is a feather worker?

Chris: Oh, for heaven's sakes. Well, we know this well from places like Mexico and Hawaii where feathers were worked into intricate works of art. But in the Victorian era, feather wreaths, flowers, and religious scenes were a Victorian domestic craft, like hair work. They were meant to be hung on the wall of the best parlor or displayed under a glass dome, either as a memorial or as an artistic display. And I can put some pictures on the Facebook page of feather wreaths memorials. They were also worn by brides. And you could find instructions in women's magazines on how to make flowers out of feathers. Prizes were given at local fairs for the best feather wreath. Milliners made them to trim hats or to wear in the hair.

Simon: It sounds to me like you might have found an explanation.

Chris: In fact, one account from 1868 adds, after expressing surprise that thoroughly educated persons should believe in such stupid and ignorant superstition, said that the presence of the feather wreath can be conjectured as merely an accident. A little girl living in that vicinity has been known to peddle similar artificial bouquets, and it's not unlikely some purchaser, after the bouquet had lost its novelty, threw it into the bed, where the feathers could be rendered useful as well as ornamental.

Simon: That makes sense. I hadn't thought of that. But of course, if you get bored of these old feather works of art, then you just throw them in a pillow somewhere.

Chris: If you had a memorial wreath made out of feathers, I think that would be unlikely, that you would discard it so casually. And a fair number of these do survive. They're framed and made into shadow boxes and things. But I was wondering if any of this, since this is such a Germanic custom, has anything to do with Frau Hall, who causes it to snow by shaking out her feather bed. And I believe she's associated with witchcraft as well.

Simon: You get that tradition. I know of a reference from Bedfordshire and one from Cornwall. Obviously, it's not called Frau Hall, but they talk about the lady in the sky, and that when it's snowing, it's because she's shaking out her bed or shaking the pillows, this kind of thing.

Chris: Which leads us to more about what do witches do with feathers or what role do they play in witchcraft or prevention of witchcraft?

Simon: I've got a couple I can throw in here. I don't know if you know about these. Perhaps the most exciting one and one of the most exciting discoveries really in witchcraft studies in the last 40, 50 years came in the early 2000s when a team of archaeologists in West Cornwall digging, I believe at a Neolithic site anyway, a prehistoric site, came across a number of pits. These pits were very unusual. They were lined with swan pelts and objects had been thrown into the which screamed some kind of magic ritual. These objects included eggs, feathers, of course, and also, and this is the really suggestive bit, human nails. 

They carbon tested the pits and to everyone's amazement, these were early modern pits. I think the carbon dating was to the mid 1600s. And so, someone in the mid 1600s had dug down accidentally into a prehistoric level and had created this rather unusual pit using a swan's pelt to actually line the pit. Now, I would love to say that this is all based on some silly kind of misunderstanding, but the human nails are very suggestive there and it really does look as if this might have something to do with magic. The excavators were rather ambitious in claiming that some of the pits dated as late as the 1950s and they rather tied themselves in not saying that this was perhaps a cult of witches that secretly in a subterranean fashion through the centuries had been carrying out these rituals. But the later pits are quite different and for instance, I think I'm right in saying there were no swan pelts there.

Chris: I would have thought absent the nails, if there's a whole bunch of them or something or eggs, the eggs could be explained. It just seems to me that they would bury these pelts to clean them of the flesh, let the beetles and the maggots clean the flesh off and then you can use the feathers.

Simon: Yeah, two thoughts there. First of all, I don't know how many human nails there were, because clearly if there was just one human nail, it could be explained very easily. But if there were 10 or 20 or 30, and one of the slightly annoying things about this excavation is I don't think the findings, they've been very much publicized, including in the press, but I don't think they've ever been properly published and commented upon. I could be wrong about that, but looking for them in the last couple of days, I've not found them. Second comment, Chris, is that swans in a British context are very unusual and particularly in an English context, because the swan automatically belongs to the English monarch. And so it is illegal for someone to kill a swan. Sometimes the monarch gives the right for killing swans to local nobles, but certainly some peasant down in West Cornwall shouldn't be doing this. And so the fact that there are these swans in a pit, it's something that would have the potential for symbolism there, perhaps.

Chris: Definitely, definitely.

Simon: I mean, another bit of magic involving feathers, and I must once more thank Dan Harms for this. This is a reference to the Pit Rivers Museum, and they have an object that is called a witch ladder. I think many years ago, perhaps I've seen a photograph of this. We'll put this up again on our Facebook page. But the description was a stretch of rope tied with feathers found in the roof of a house in Somerset. Of course, when you find something hidden away in a building, you usually would assume that it has a magical connotation. 

But I love the two explanations for this. The first explanation is that it is said to have been used for getting away the milk from neighbors' cows and for causing people's deaths, which seems pretty general. But the other explanation is that it's, quote unquote, a piece of deer hunting equipment. So over to you with that one, Chris.

Chris: That one is just baffling to me. I mean, I know of things whirled to train falcons, but I don't understand what that's supposed to be unless it makes a noise that might call a deer. I've heard of the witch's ladder, and I've got a report from 1887 United States, although it's quoting Walford's Antiquarian, and I'm not sure what periodical that is. But it says it's used that if the fire won't burn or if your irons won't heat, let the ladder be waved to and fro in the air while the request is muttered and all will be right. And I suspect that the same thing might have been used to make butter come if you thought the witches were preventing it from coming.

Simon: So it's the same idea that the witches could prevent a process and that you, in some way, have to break the witch. You have to use counter magic.

Chris: Right. And let me find this one story that illustrates that perfectly. And I warn sensitive listeners that this is rather gruesome. Now, much in the same way as witches caused cow's milk to dry up or they blocked butter from coming in the churn, they could block you from plucking feathers from a goose. It was thought that the best featherbeds and pillows were made of feathers plucked from a live goose as opposed to a dead one.

Simon: Was that a thing then that you would pluck a live goose? 

Chris: Yes, you would. I don't know how it was done, but it was done. So this was when a witch interferes, they make the feathers so tight into the flesh that nobody can pull them out. This is a serious crisis for the housewife who wants to make a featherbed. So the witch's spell may be broken only by killing the bewitched geese, but then the feathers will not be live ones and they want the live feathers. So the only thing that can be done is that you have to get feathers from a bed on which some very old woman has recently died and which has not been slept on since. The bewitched geese are then shut up in a small, tight enclosure and the feathers burned within it. The smoke of the burning feathers rises and sets the geese to sneezing and sniffling and cackling outlandishly. Whether it is the unpleasant smoke from the feathers or the tumult of the geese that the witches can't endure, I don't know. But in the general disturbance, the uncanny things fly from their victims and the goose plucking can be preceded with.

Simon: Well, two questions there. What on earth are the uncanny things that fly? Creepy or what? And second, what total amateurs, Chris, they forgot to put salt on the feathers before burning.

Chris: That's the problem right there.

Simon: It's always the way. Yeah. Well, look, I'll give you a last little bit of witchcraft magic or perhaps magic more generally with feathers. And once more, this is thanks to the great Dan Harms, but here we have the use of quills in magic. This is from the Bell House Cunning Manual and this is the use of a quill to drive off witches. No salt though, you'll see. They use something much more powerful, mercury. This is the recipe. Take a fine quill of a goose or swan's wing, if you're really ambitious, fill it with quicksilver, seal up the end with virgin wax, bore a hole into the doorpost and put the quill in and make up the hole and then put a quill for each doorpost and one for the bed head. And Dan also sent me an interesting spell where quills are used, but mundane quills like goose feathers for magic, it's a bit too passe. And so here, you're told to get feathers and even specific feathers from a special bird to do your writing in. And for instance, you're asked to find the third feather off the left wing of a lapwing or even more difficult, the fifth feather of the right wing of a raven. Presumably you have to kill the bird. So feathers do appear in magic, but they seem to be at least in Britain, these are more traditions that are underground. They're not things that make their way into our texts frustratingly. A lot of this evidence is suggestive, but not really definite.

Chris: Yeah, I was surprised to not find more of the witch reads or the feather crowns in Britain. Only that one reference. So perhaps some of our listeners will have more information on that.

Simon: Well, Chris, let's move on to readings. I have absolutely nothing. I do have a Spanish text, but I'm a little bit frightened of reading the title out loud. So I think over to you in all glory. What have you got for our listeners?

Chris: Well, there's not a lot of books. Well, there's no books written on this particular subject. There's a chapter in Extraordinary Animals revisited by Dr. Carl Shuker on archangel feathers and some other types of feathers. I've got that pamphlet. I mentioned a full and impartial account of the discovery of sorcery witchcraft. We'll put this up on the Facebook page. There's a place where you can go see some of the witch reads or the feather crowns in the Museum of Appalachia. I'll put that link up also. Most of what I have are blog posts because people just haven't seemed to write books about this subject. But I do recommend if you want to see examples of featherwork, there's a book called Under Glass, a Victorian Obsession by John Whitenight. I'll put some pictures of the featherwork under glass up on the Facebook page. Some of it is extremely spooky looking. 

Simon: But all of the book is on featherwork. Is that right?

Chris: No, some of it is on shell work, some of it's on hair work, some of it's on skeletonized leaves, all kinds of things. And then lastly, I'd recommend the short story A Crown of Feathers by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It's a very painful tale and it ends with a devastating sentence because if there is such a thing as truth, it is as intricate and hidden as a crown of feathers.

Simon: I will be checking out all of these apart from possibly Under Glass. And I wondered whether you have a reading to play us out. I really enjoyed the peacock feathers to start. So let's see which of these roads we've opened up you were going to go running down.

Chris: Well, this one is a bit grimmer. This is from Cincinnati, 1881. Again, a German community, a German family, seven-year-old child was wasting away. And the doctor said it was meningitis, but the neighbor ladies were muttering about witchcraft. And one of them asked to examine the feather bed where the child lay. After the boy had been taken from the bed, the ticking was ripped open and there among the feathers, they discovered five unfinished wreaths of feathers, which at once to their mind, filled as they were with the legends of the fatherland, explained the reason of the boy's continued illness. The wreath begins to form in the bed and then the person who is so unfortunate as to repose on it is sure to get sick. As long as the wreath remains in the bed, the person continues ill. And if the wreath is allowed to lay there until the ends of the circle come together, just that minute the patient dies. The only way in which to save a life is to remove the unfinished wreaths from the bed, put on them a copious supply of salt and burn them in the fire. As long as the circlet stays in the bed in an unfinished state, the patient can neither dine or get well. And one of the women described the ones she'd seen. She said she'd seen three and one was as large as a plate. The feathers are all different colors and lap over each other at the ends, just like the feathers on a bird. They're fastened to a cord and when the wreath is finished, it is utterly impossible for anyone to break it. In regard to the wreaths found in the bed of the child referred to in this article, it was said that the old woman took five wreaths to an old fortune teller on race street, who is, so to speak, on good terms with the witches. She kept the feathers when they should have been burned, as then the child would have got well. As it now stands, the poor little fellow can neither get well nor die.