Wart Removal Folklore in Appalachia

you often hear people on appalachia talk about faith healing some of the more common ones that come to mind are people who have the ability to stop blood if someone's bleeding they can they can do something that will stop the bleeding also people that have the ability to take the fire out of a burn means they take the the pain away and and the damaging properties of a burn what happens to your skin they can talk the fire out what it's called also another common one is um that you'll hear a lot about is people that have the ability to take off warts or to make warts disappear another one that i think of is the ability to stop or to cure thrush in a baby's mouth if you've ever maybe you've had a baby that had thrush or heard about it or whatever it's like almost like a yeast infection that happens in a child in an infant usually it's infant's mouth and you have people hear about people who have the ability to blow in the child's mouth and cure the thrush now of course there's varying opinions about all this there's people who say that believers who say well those are god-given talents or god-given powers that give you the ability to do that there's the other side that says anybody that believes that is not of god that that couldn't be of god you know it's magic it's not it's conjuring it's not actually uh biblical so there's varying debates about it but um it's really interesting when you think about it all the different ones now today i'm only going to talk about one i'm going to talk about the wart situation and the ability to remove warts in later videos maybe we can talk about the other ones because it's all fascinating and there's so many people that have documented uh proof you know according to them it's like so many other things in life that you know sometimes the believer you have to see it to believe it those kind of things so there's a lot of people that have those sort of stories but today we're going to talk about wart removal in appalachia one of my favorite books about folk remedies in appalachia is folk medicine in southern appalachia by anthony cavender and the book is readily available you can find it in a lot of different places and it's a really interesting book today i was going to read you a little portion of what it has to say about warts so southern appalachian folk medicine is abundant with beliefs about contracting and removing warts some of the more frequently mentioned naturalistic remedies were rubbing warts with castor oil a chicken gizzard a slice of irish potato we would say arsh potato bean leaves or stump water and inserting a hot needle into the warts i can't remember who it was but somewhere i saw i was with somebody maybe when i was a child and i saw that they heed the hot needle and put it in the ward i can't remember exactly who that was but i've seen that one done okay back to the book even these however sometimes had a magical element such as rubbing warts with castor oil for nine morning stray or washing with stump water in the light of a full moon of the many magical remedies used one of the more frequently reported involved cutting a wart letting it bleed on a grain of corn and then feeding the corn to a chicken some people thought the chicken should be fed grains of corn equal to the number of warts to be removed the underlying assumption was that the warts would be transferred to the chicken i don't think i'd want my chickens to have warts either okay the same assumption is evident in another remedy also documented in england and ireland it entailed gathering a stone for each war putting them in a paper bag and placing the bag on the side of a road or at a crossroads when the bag was picked up by some curious passerby that person would also pick up or contract the warts rubbing one's warts with a dish rag and burying it or placing it under a gutter spout was another popular wart remedy according to tradition one must steal the dish rag from one's mother or grandmother this underline or the underlying assumption of this remedy is that the essence of the warts is transferred to the dishrag and as the dishrag decomposes so will the warts i like that one better than trying to give them to somebody else some other magical remedies were tying a knot on a string for each war and burying the string rubbing the warts while looking at a new moon and say and you grow and you go rubbing the warts on a dead body yikes and selling the warts to another person for a penny a wart should these or any of the many other wart remedies fail one saw a wart doctor who had the ability to conjure warts off by rubbing them with a hand and murmuring you grow and you go or some other secret charm so that's really interesting information from the book you know just fascinating to think about i love old remedies of any kind any kind of old folklore of course i love anything connected to appalachia you already know that but what i find most fascinating is over the years i've wrote about wart removal on the blind pig and acorn several times and what i find actually uh one of the posts is one of my most popular posts ever all these years later you know how whatever you put on the internet stays on the internet all these years later i still have people commenting on that post to to tell me to share what their their experience was with getting warts removed to share you know maybe uh whether it happened to them or to a family member or their grandma or grandpa or somebody like that so those are the ones i find most fascinating especially the ones that come from people who i've i've developed a relationship with so there's a story i'm going to share a few of the stories today with you and the ones that are especially meaningful and fascinating to think about to me are the ones one of them's from my mother-in-law of course she's a member of my family so i know her well enough to know that she's not making up stuff or you know that she's telling the honest truth all those kind of things another one is from a gentleman garland davis he's been a long time reader of the blind pig and acorn and although i've never met him i have this online relationship with him i feel like he's one of my friends one of my neighbors and he's wrote for me over the years wrote for the blind pig in the acorn so those are the ones that are really fascinating to me somebody i know personally that has a story about work wart removal so i start with the one from garland i had numerous warts on my hands everyone told me that they were caused by playing with toads and letting them pee on your hands i remember thinking that wasn't right i knew that i hadn't touched any toads i remember trying to keep my hands in my pocket so that people wouldn't see my warts my parents tried any number of homemade potions to no avail some things from the drugstore were tried but again no remedy for my warts i remember going to the doctor and him telling them that i was too young to have them burned off we carried my granny salmons to yadkin county one sunday afternoon to visit some friends i remember that it was late in the day and daddy was ready to leave she told them to wait that she was going to take me to get my warts which she led them led me for a long distance probably not that far but to a little boy quite a distance down a path through the woods we eventually came to a log house and old again old as relative to my age at the time woman came out and talked with my grandmother granny gave her a sack that she had brought the old lady lady sat down on the stoop to the cabin door and started touching the warts on my hand she then took a piece of cord and tied a number of knots in it i later realized she was counting the warts and tied a knot for each one she then hung the cord around my neck and led me by the hand around the yard she then took the cord and went into the woods she returned and told me that my warts would leave me to look for the cord she said if i ever tried to find the cord all my warts would return we left and went back home within a few days all my warts except one disappeared i still have that one wart on the knuckle of my ring finger and have had it my whole life i always figured that she missed it when she was counting now see what a great story so that was from garland now i'm going to share the one from miss cindy my mother-in-law she said she says when i was around 10 years old i had a ward on my left thumb it was on the side of my thumb at the knuckle the wart measured about 3 8 inch across that's fairly large on a 10 year old hand my folks took me to the doctor for removal the doctor burned it off it wasn't long until it came back so it was back to the doctor this time he cut it off but again it come back my cousin julie also had a wart hers was on the thumb also but it was on the wrong on the side growing partially into the nail it was about the same size wart as mine her folks took her to a dermatologist they were really concerned because of the way it grew into the fingernail the dermatologist removed it several times several different ways and each time it grew back my dad finally said enough get in the car both of you he took us to an old man in henson cove above canton not too far from my grandmother's house i think the man's name was mr hall he looked at both warts rubbed them and then sent us on our way i looked down a couple of weeks later and it was gone i called zulie and her wart was gone too i don't know what to tell you or what happened the warts were gone and they never returned that's all i know so that was her story so just fascinating you know when you think about it i have a few other ones i'll read from other people that i don't know i don't have like a personal relationship with but i found that they were interesting though so my dad is 80 years old now so i don't know if he still claims to be able to do this however i know firsthand that he has this ability and we've never been able to explain it he said that he got it from his grandmother who told him simply who's told simply told him you will have the gift too when i was a kid i had a ward on the back of my right hand a cat scratched me through it and left a trail and the length of the scratch turned into a puffed up wart like scar my mom told me to go to my dad with it and he gently rubbed it without any medicine home remedy or other action about a week or two weeks later i noticed that the war and cat scratch were gone would you love to know if there's any scientific reasoning in his body chemistry for this so see that's an interesting one could it be something in the work con war doctors physical makeup in their chemistry that's interesting though here's another one when i was little i had warts all over the backs of both hands i lived in a small farming community in southeast arkansas my great aunt gave me some kernels of corn and told me to touch every wart with the corn say a phrase no idea what it is anymore and throw the corn to the chickens i did what i was told and with a couple in a couple of weeks all but one of them were gone my mother told me later that she had wanted to tell me that it was just superstition but after my warts disappeared she knew i wouldn't believe her i just wish i knew what it was that aunt gene told me to say so this is a kind of a comical one i had a wart on my wrist that popped up out of nowhere i went to the dermatologist and had it burned off and it came back i was at my uncle's house and he saw it he grabbed my hand rubbed my wart with his thumb and asked me why i wanted that thing on my arm i went into this rant about how it was burned off and came back he told me not to worry that it would fall off soon and never come back sure enough a few days later it was gone that was 15 years ago and it has not come back many other family members have similar stories we've joked always joke the possibility that he takes the warts from us and his rear end is covered in them joking aside i'm amazed that there is an entire thread on this phenomenon i've got some crazy looks from people in the last 15 years when i tell my story so i could go on and on reading comments that have been left over the years on the blog post on the blind pig and acorn there's just so many people that have similar stories uh there's a couple where someone used a dime and like went around the outside of each wart and then kept the dime or told um it wasn't so in some situations they keep it in one situation they went around each little area of the wart with a dime and then said go spend this money and forget where you spin it and then in a matter of days the warts were gone so there's all kinds of different little variations to it it's just really fascinating to think about so i've never had or thank goodness i've never had one but when i was pregnant with corey and katie i did have something and i don't know the name of it at the time of course the doctor told me and it was this big long word that i couldn't even hardly say but basically what happened it was a place on my thumb and i still have a scar there today but he explained it like maybe i got a splinter right there maybe i pricked my uh thumb with a pen with a pen a needle and didn't know it something like that i had some kind of little minor injury right there that i would have probably never noticed but since i was pregnant my body was like oh no let's go to the go to help so it sent so many resources there that it ended up growing like a little growth of sales there it wasn't really a war necessarily it was really ugly though but every the worst part about it was every time i hit it on something even the slightest little hit it would start bleeding and it would bleed everywhere so it was terrible i had to go to a surgeon and they had they cut it off and they told me it might come back but thankfully it didn't didn't come back but that was some weird side effect of pregnancy and as i said i can't remember exactly what it was called but when matt and i first met years ago we were still just dating he had some warts on his hands well i was just so took a shine to him the first time i ever seen him you know so i wasn't worried about those warts and i didn't even really think about them well we've probably been dating a couple of months when one day he asked me said if i had i noticed that his warts were gone and i was looked at his hands and i was like well no i didn't i didn't really notice but how what happened did you get some medicine or what happened he said no i just started thinking about it and every time i thought about them i would rub them and i just done that and then all of a sudden they went away they were gone and so i couldn't you know uh i teased him a lot i was like oh you're one of those people that can remove warts you've got this power you know you could go into business and set up a little shop and be the wart removal removal remover for that for the area of canton that we were in you know anyway that's just a funny little story but still his warts disappeared and he he says all he did was rub him every time he would think about him he would start rubbing them so i'm sure some of you are going to say well miss tipper what do you believe what do you think about it well i am a believer i'm a believer in god and i believe in faith healing i believe that most people me i'm talking about me have such shallow small faith that we we don't even understand the greatness of god and what he could do if we just had true faith because i lack in that but that's how i come at it from the point of view of when i hear people like miss cindy and garland when they tell their stories because i have a personal relationship with them i believe them i believe it i don't think they're making it up you know i don't think it's they're stretching or make telling a tall tale i really believe it so i come at it like it's a faith healing like it's belief like those people that remove the warts have some kind of belief and faith that's greater than than what i have i lack in that like i said i i need to do better and try better but they'll other people of course don't believe that and that's the most wonderful thing about the world we live in is that everybody gets to have their own opinion but i'll be greatly interested to know what you think about it and greatly interested to see if you've got stories maybe you've got a story where you had a wart removed by somebody or maybe your grandpa or grandma told you about it i'd love to hear any kind of thing like that that you've got to share with us but mostly as always i just hope you'll keep dropping back by as we celebrate appalachia

Channel: Celebrating Appalachia

Views: 15,539

Rating: 4.936295 out of 5

Keywords: wart removal folklore, Appalachian wart removal, Supernatural healing in Appalachia, Appalachian Mountains, Dishrag wart folklore, buying warts to get rid of them, wart witch, power to remove warts, can some people remove warts, wart docotr, medicinal folklore, how to conjure off warts, how to talk off warts, folklore wart removal, wart superstitions, secret wart removal, wishing warts away, spiritual healing in Appalachia, magical healing in Appalachia

Id: OJ76wD8pgdU

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021