If you answered yes to ancestors three questions, it's untreated you were the pit of a witch prickle.
Witch bridles display a hunger history in New England mythology. Here the Salem witch trials of 1692, afflicted servant girl Mary Lair claimed Martha Emerson of Haverhill hand-me-down a witch prickle. According to Mary, Martha's spectre told her she had "rid a man with an inchanted prickle." Numb urge, Martha confessed that she had sure thing magically ridden her fellow citizen Matthew Herriman. Matthew verified this, claiming he had awoken one summer break of day friendship ailing and as if he had been holding a prickle in his mouth all night.
Herbert Sylvester tells unusual, disdainful little story in Maine Boon Settlements: Old York. Skipper Perkins, a fishing distribute boss, refuses to equip his impoverished Kittery fellow citizen Betty Booker any halibut for free. Snidely, he says to her "Functioning me your sixpence, ma'am!" Bad gift - Betty's inferior, but she's a witch. She curses his distribute, and he's powerless to bring in any good alight.
But that's not the cut down of her revenge. On a dark stormy night, Betty and some of her witchy equals infuse Skipper Perkins' home, loud "Hire me a bit o' hal'but, skipper!" They controversy Perkins bare, binding a prickle on him, and all focus him up and down the Maine coast until first light. As they renounce, Betty says "Don't say sixpence, leader, to a inferior old animal another time." It took Perkins three weeks to recuperate.
Kick in the manner of, an old hut was living unkempt down in Kittery. Happening one of the bulwark, the demolition company found a prickle finished from a foal shadow, tow twine, and golden-haired birch snarl. They burned it.
The October 10, 1896 holder of the Boston Sunset Log contains an be against titled "Witchcraft Today: The Code in Special Feats in a New England Capital." According to the raconteur, an dull coastal hamlet versatile Boston was occupied by three witches, who each had their own prickle. They were finished of the enormously reserves as Betty Booker's, were about nine feet hunger, and might be flummoxed taking into account lassos. A minute fisherman named Person in charge Isaac in some way slighted Hetty Moye, one of the three sorceresses. Hetty invades his bedroom one night seeking revenge, armed with her prickle, but Isaac avoids becoming her pony by ducking under the covers as she tries to carpet it once more his commander. He be adjacent to her from his home and was seemingly never distressed another time.
Here's one disdainful encompass of a witch prickle. According to a the February 6, 1919 holder of the Boston Herald, a Peninsula Cod man was cursed by a minute one-time witch in the wake of he scarf some of her doughnuts. She devised a magic prickle, and rode him in his dreams taking into account a foal until he was drained. Historian George Lyman Kittredge claims he heard a sticky story himself from a Truro state-owned in 1888.
I'm not stanch of the witch bridle's origin, but the belief seems allied to beliefs in succubi and night hags. There's a lot of sexual innuendo separation on as well, and some thought of women!
Sources: Botkin's Treasury of New England Tradition, the Dublin Seminar's Wonders of the Unremarkable Invention, and Kittredge's Witchcraft in Old and New England. And of course, the Web!
