These witch bundles come in small, medium, and large, from a charm that might be a single energized object to a necklace bag, a satchel, or even a whole cauldron. A number of these witch-kettles have been found buried about upstate New York, including a fearful one in Buffalo surrounded by a ring of skeletons and filled with human skulls. Undoubtedly a bunch of the grim things are still out there, all over Iroquois territory. They only turn up by accident, when people dig. For those who happen to live above one unknowingly—enjoy.
The Erie lakeshore folk always thought the old woman was a witch, and no one entered her house for a long time after her death. The first who dared was a white man, and no slouch when it came to the spooky. Irving, New York, historian and antiquarian Everett Burmaster (1890–1965) found a bag in the house and listed its contents in his memoirs.
The bag, like the three witches’ cauldron in Macbeth (“fillet of a fenny snake,” “eye of newt and toe of frog”), had ingredients that were macabre but mundane and easily acquired: tiny weapons, dolls, animal hearts, thread, dried snake blood, a bottle of “eye oil,” various powders, hair in many shades, nail clippings, wet blood, a small sharp bone, various greasy substances, a dried human finger, and the skins of snakes, a black calf, and a big dog.
The miniature weapons were probably totems made to the supernaturally powerful Little People, “the Iroquois fairies,” in hopes of enlisting their energy into rituals. The pelts and skins could have been used with the aim of shape-shifting. Most of the other stuff has analogies to magical practices all over the world.
From his earliest days of experience with the Iroquois, our late East Aurora friend Bill Bowen (1940–2009) found them superstitious. If you were threatened or harassed by an angry Iroquois male and the situation got extreme, all you needed to do was clasp a hand over a spot on your chest about the level of an imaginary locket and look him in the eye. “That’s OK,” you might say. “I’ll just go get my bag, and we’ll take care of everything.” Presuming that you might have a witch working for you—or that you might be one yourself—your harasser would almost instantly recoil. It was a radical move, though. Bowen saw the trick in action in his youth in the 1950s on the Tonawanda Reservation.
Two Seneca men were arguing at a meeting, and one tugged the imaginary bag. The other marched out as if he’d seen a ghost. An undercurrent of grumbling broke the peace, and before long a near-riot started. A couple of friends dragged the air bag man out the door. “Are you crazy?” one of them said. In a culture that still dreaded magic, this gesture was the nuclear bomb of arguing, just a step short of pulling a gun. It could be dangerous in many directions, including to the man who made the threat.
THE WITCH JOHN JEMISON
In 1897, a Cayuga woman told white ethnologist William Beauchamp a strange story. During Mary Jemison’s days in the Genesee Valley, a curious pounding was heard coming from inside a nearby hill. Folk drew near just as a giant, one-horned serpent dug its way out like a hatchling. It retreated when it saw them, but came back later and was soon tame. Jemison tapped the horn with an awl. Out flowed blood, and she filled a cup with it and served it like Guinness to her children. Maybe this explains how one of her brood, John Jemison, became a witch.
Just after the War of 1812, a Seneca hero called Young King fell into a heated argument with the government blacksmith at Buffalo. A blow from a scythe cost Young King an arm and outraged the Seneca. While the Great Hill folk took the matter to court, John Jemison appointed himself the national executioner and stalked off for Buffalo.
Somewhere on his way along old Route 5, John was spotted by the white writer Orsamus Turner. To the author of the Pioneer History of the Holland Purchase, John looked like “ the Angel of Death”: face painted red and black, horse-hair fetishes on each arm, war club in one hand and tomahawk in another. People kept the smith out of sight until John quit looking for him. It was clear to all that Mary’s son by her second husband, the lethal Chief Hiokatoo, was no one to mess with. He may also have been a witch. There were signs of it early on.
One of Rochester’s first white settlers, Ebenezer “Indian” Allan (1752–1813), spotted something unsettling in John when he met him as a boy, and Allan—former member of the Crown’s Revolutionary terrorist outfit Butler’s Rangers and a frontier scumbucket of the first order—should have known. Some strange incident happened in John’s boyhood, something witnessed only by his younger half brother Thomas. Their mother either never knew what it was or didn’t include it in the autobiography she dictated to Doctor James Seaver. But brother Thomas always called John a witch, and the rumor stuck.
John Jemison was a renowned healer who made long nocturnal forays into the Genesee woods gathering his ingredients. The site of his medicine garden may be a grove in the northwest area of today’s village of Mount Morris, just yards from the top of Letchworth State Park. While no one but brother Thomas ever called him out as a witch, accusations of witchcraft were mighty serious in that society. Even a wisecrack could have led to a trial and a potential death penalty. Their mother believed this was the cause of the hatred between
