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The Witcher People

Henningjohnathan

21:51 / 03.06.04

I grew up in very rural Kentucky, the back woods of the Boone Docks on the Ohio River. When I was very young there were people in the deep woods we called "Witcher People." Here's a story to illustrate sorta who they were:

When my uncle Steve (he was my Grandmother's cousin, so that makes him my second or third cousin, technically) was badly burnt when a kerosene heater blew up while he was standing in front of it. This was in the fifties and he was around seven years old at the time. The doctors told his parents that he was as good as dead, so his dad took him to the nearest Witcher Man.
As Steve describes it, the Witcher Man covered his burns with what smelled like manure mixed with mustard and then wrapped them in linen rags. He kept the boy overnight and the next morning the burns were healed. Today, the only time you can tell my uncle was ever burned is when he gets a dark tan or sunburn.

By the time I was a teenager in the 80's, it seemed like all the witcher people had gone. There were newer Pagan/Wiccan's moving to the country from the cities (also Shelbyville, KY seemed to be a hotbed for pagans and "Satanists"), but there weren't any who had the lineage of the "old knowledge."
I've tried to google to find information on the folk witches in Rural Appalachia and the Midwest, but I haven't had much luck.
Is there anyone here with knowledge or advice how I could find out more about these people, where they came from and what happened to them?

18:48 / 04.06.04

I don't know, to be honest, but I'd suggest checking out the anthropology department at an area university. A university library is likely to have a lot of small press books on local subjects (many of them written by former or current faculty), and this sounds like a subject that's likely to have interested people.

08:28 / 08.06.04

I got a great book partly about this subject in the early 80s in New England. It was calledf the Foxfire Book an I think it's pretty well known - goes on about all kinds of backwoods hunting, building and cropping knowledge. It's a hoot. A couple of sections are dedicated to folk remedies and faith healing. According to this book, industrialisation meant most of this knowledge just died out as people started doing jobs that didn't need it. In fact, that was why the book -- first a student magazine -- was started.

However, there was never any reference to "Witcher People". The faith healing etc was all in a Christian framework. Personally I think it's a bit of a misnomer to use the term "witch" in relation to folk magick, which was generally in an explicitly Christian context -- so it's interesting to hear this term being used. Any other references you can supply?

Henningjohnathan

14:08 / 14.06.04

That's the problem. The term "witcher" was in pretty common usage among the older people in my area, but I haven't found any sort of reference to it elsewhere. When I was a kid i thought it was a family name, the Witchers, but later realized that it was reffering to a group of people that specialized in this sort of thing.
Religiously, I think that they were probably christian and this was a kind of faith healing (that is or was also prevalent at the time). However, almost every family in the area I lived in had some member who could heal. When my cousin cut her throat on a laundry line one time, her mom laid her on the kitchen table, put a sheet over her and made everyone leave. When she opened the door again, the cut was gone. I never found out how that was done.
Also, when I worked for the local funeral home as a teen, I used grave-finders pretty regularly. These are divination rods that determine the location of graves in cemetaries so you can dig the grave beside. It was just a couple of bent rods that you'd hold a certain way and when you walked over a grave, they'd cross. When I asked how they worked, my boss said that all he knew was if you thought they worked, they worked and if you thought they didn't work, then they didn't.
Also, one of my earliest memories is of my grandfather dowsing to find water where a well-pipe was leaking. In some places, this is called "water-witching" so I imagine that is probably the origin for Witchers. basically people who divine using old folk methods.
My parents have the entire Foxfire series, so I'll have to check those out.
Thanks.

18:53 / 14.06.04

I've copied your query onto a good Wiccan board, will let you know if owt emerges.

Henningjohnathan

19:45 / 14.06.04

Cool. Thanks. I'm starting to get the impression that "witcher" is another rural term for "diviner." However, Kentucky is an interesting place to examine all sorts of this kind of paranormal phenomenon. In the late sixties and seventies, a lot of pagan/wiccan/satanist new age communities rose up as these groups looked for cheap land to congregate (alongside reclusive Fundamentalist Christian communes as well, oddly enough. Also, there has been a kind of Christian Paganism common in the seriously backwoods areas where some people practice a kind of white magic christianity with the good spirits represented by Jesus, Mary, saints and angels and the bad spirits represented by Satan, devils and demons. Of course, the Mothman incidents in West Virginia were still part of the strange Ohio River Valley phenomena which ran all along Northern Kentucky. There are several stories in my extended family where visions of "burning balls of light" (for the non-religious witnesses) and "angels" (for the religious) were seen often prior to a death in the family.
Other than the Mothman Prophecies by John Keel, which was an outsider point of view, I haven't seen much connecting the imaginative (mythological-religious) culture of rural and lower class America and these various sorts of paranormal experiences.