In the British Isles, boots and shoes are hidden in the walls and in various hiding places in thousands of houses. The old tradition assumed that this would save the house and its owners from misfortune and misfortune.
In 2014, Laura Potts undertook a kitchen renovation at her Georgian house (18th century) in a village near Norwich. When she came one day to visit the builders and check how the repairs were going, she found an old shoe on the windowsill. She was informed that this shoe, which was a woman's, was found in an old chimney.
The shoe was worn out and out of date. Laura Potts posted a post about her find on social media and it attracted public attention, including the communications manager of the University of East Anglia, who reported it to faculty.
History professor Malcolm Gaskill says that most likely the shoe in the chimney was left deliberately to protect the house from the witch and put her on a false trail in the chimney.
- At the beginning of modern times (mid-17th century), many people believed in supernatural beings like ghosts, demons, goblins or elves. But the witches were the worst for the people. Because they looked like people and were difficult to recognize. The worst part was that the witch or witch could be anyone, even your neighbor.
Therefore, superstitious people tried by all means to protect their home from evil forces. The so-called witch bottles were in great use for such cases. They were filled with various contents such as herbs, nails, urine, pieces of cloth and buried under the threshold of the house or hidden somewhere inside the house. The bottle was supposed to attract the witch's attention and distract from real people.
Apparently, the old shoes of the owner or mistress of the house served the same purpose. She bore the "imprint" of a person's personality and perfectly suited the role of bait for a witch.
Six years ago, old shoes were found in Alison Norman's house and also in the chimney. The shoes were found when workers were restoring a 17th century fireplace. It was wrapped in a bag and belonged to a child. Moreover, the shoes were not 17 or 18 centuries. It was from the late 19th century. Even in those years there were very persistent superstitions here.
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The size of the shoes belonged to a 2-3 year old child. When Alison told about the find, the locals started telling her not to take her shoes out of the house, as this could "scare off her luck."
This women's shoe from around 1675-1699 was found in the wall of Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire.
According to historian Siri Holbrooke of the University of Hertfordshire. over the years, the goals of hiding old shoes in homes have changed. This could be to scare away witches, and later to scare away demons or ghosts or supernatural forces in general.
- The theory is that evil forces smell shoes (by smell or energy) and take them for real people and attack them instead of attacking people. And then the ghost or spirit is trapped inside the shoes.
This 18th century shoe was found at St John's College, Cambridge in 2016 during the renovation of a fireplace in one of the rooms. It was between the fireplace and the wall paneling.
According to Holebrook, he is aware of many more cases of finding old shoes inside houses. Most often it was in rural mansions and sometimes in church buildings. All in all, according to the historian, there are thousands of houses in the UK with such "time capsules".
Sometimes old shoes are found in homes in the United States, Canada and Australia. Immigrants from Britain took their superstitions to the New World. And there this tradition lasted the longest, at least until the 1930-1940s. In Britain, the tradition died out immediately at the beginning of the 20th century.
The Northampton Museum houses a large collection of old shoes found in homes. The records of found shoes are also kept there. Since the 1950s, it has been known about three thousand such finds in the British Isles. It was mainly in the south-east of England, but even came across from the Shetland Islands.
Curiously, over 900 shoes were for children. Museum curator Ms. Shawcross does not know why this is connected, but suggests that it was believed that children had purer souls and should have been more protected from witches. Especially considering the high infant mortality rate in those years.