Dead Hands, Live Wens: Latest Record? March 3, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
There is a well attested belief that the bodies of executed criminals could heal certain illnesses. This led in past centuries to bits of executed felons being bought, sold and even eaten. Though the most gentle version was as simple as going to the gallows and begging the hangmen to let you run the dead man’s hand against a wen on your neck. With such beliefs we always have the idea of knowing when they ceased to be actually ‘live’. Sure late nineteenth-century folklore books are full of this stuff but did Joe Public still go around craving the cold hand of death in Victoria’s dotage. Well, before you pout here is an intriguing and genuine sounding mid nineteenth century record from the Western Daily Press, 14 Apr 1860, 2
A curious superstition was exhibited in connection with the execution of the Spaniard at Devizes on Wednesday. A man in a respectable sphere of life presented himself at the prison door, and begged an audience of the governor. It was immediately given to him; and he then informed Alexander that he had come from Frome that morning for the express purpose of seeking the cure of wen in his neck (which had long troubled him) by the application by the hand of the murderer after his execution. He had been assured, he said, that if he could only get the hand of a man who had been hanged laid upon the sore it would at once effect cure, and he begged therefore that, after the execution had taken place, he might be admitted to the gaol, and have the spell worked upon him. The governor said he could not comply with his request, without consulting the Sheriff; and the Sheriff afterwards gave permission to allow the applicant’s whim to be gratified. Calcraft (the executioner), upon being made acquainted with the application, at once pronounced the spell a certain cure, adding that he had known previous instances where its effect had been efficacious.
There isn’t quite enough material here to be confident. The man is not named: this could be friend of a friend stuff, the staple of urban legends. But the governor and sheriff and the executioner are all implicated and were all individuals who could have written furious letters to the newspaper or sued out of hand (get it?). Can anyone push this later and find east end Beldames looking to remove their warts with cold clammy hands in Edwardian England: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
Chris from Haunted Ohio Books, 25 Mar 2016, ‘Does it have to be a wen or a wart? I’ll keep looking…. But in the meantime, here’s an 1864 case involving the blood of a hanged man: A “female vampire” in the 1860s was certain that the blood of an executed criminal would heal her heart. This strays over into the territory of hanged men’s hands being used to treat boils and hemorrhoids and a strand of gallow’s rope carried for health and luck.
A FEMALE VAMPIRE
There is a young married woman in St. Louis, a native of the Canton of Berne, Switzerland, who is afflicted with a disease which she calls “a dancing of the heart,” [perhaps some sort of Arrhythmia?] and which the physicians pronounce incurable. The lady with the “dancing heart” firmly believes that she can be cured by drinking a few drops of the blood of man who has been executed. Her name is Elizabeth Mund, and she is twenty-three years of age, and has been the mother of three children, none of whom survive. She has made numerous applications at the jail to inquire when there would be an execution, and as there has been no case of capital punishment at that institution for several months, her desire for human blood has not been gratified. She heard that John Abshire, sentenced by court martial to be hung by the neck, was to be executed in the jail yard on the 18th, as it was state in the papers. The execution of the sentence, however, was suspended, and on being informed that the man was not to be hung, Mrs. Mund appeared to be greatly disappointed and chagrined. Captain Bishop cheered her drooping spirits however, by telling her that on the 15th April a man would be hung by the neck until he was “dead, dead, dead,” and that she might then appear and obtain a dose of the blood of Valentine Hansen, the murderer, provided Governor Hall did not pardon or respite the criminal, and the physician would allow her to extract the curative fluid. With this pleasuring assurance Mrs. Mund took her departure, greatly consoled. This is a curious case of modern superstition. Augusta [GA] Chronicle 7 April 1865: p. 1
And the sequel:
Execution—A Female Vampire
Valentine Hanson was hung at St. Louis on the 15th for the murder of John Eng. He protested his innocence to the end, and was so overcome by fear and weakness that he had to be lifted on the scaffold. The parting with his wife in jail, who assured him that she believed him innocent, was very affecting. [Said wife grieved for all of eight days before she remarried.]
A notorious female vampire named Elisabeth Mund begged of Hanson’s wife and the jailer for a dose of the murderer’s blood which she considered a specific for her disease—a “dancing of the heart” as she termed it. Mrs. H. scorned the blood-sucker, and quite [illegible] of words allowed. The vampire took her place with the crowd in the street, still insisting that a drink of the blood of a man hanged by the neck would cure her of the heart disease, and she waited and watched with the hope that her strange desire might be gratified. Cincinnati [OH] Enquirer 25 April 1864: p. 1
She was just a ghoul who couldn’t say no…
The cure by stroking or rubbing the goitre with a dead man’s hand was tried quite recently in East Oxford township, the woman who had it coming from some distance to where the corpse lay. (Mrs. R.W.B., Woodstock, Jan. 1, 1908) [footnote Compare W.J. Hoffman, “Folk-Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans” (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society [Philadelphia, 1889], 26: 338)
Journal of Folklore, 1918
Sleaford, Goitre. At a sewing meeting held at Sleaford on Feb. 2nd, a woman present mentioned a certain cure for a full throat, as she called it, and stated that her own mother and also an acquaintance had both been cured by it. This somewhat ghastly remedy was: ‘drawing a dead man’s hand nine times across the throat.’—L.N. & Q., vol. i
Country Folk-lore Vol. 63, 1908: p. 109
The Dead Man’s Hand. — In Ellis’s enlarged edition of Brand’s Popular Antiquities, iii., 276, is an instance of the remedy of stroking a wen with the hand of a dead man. From the context it would appear that the dead man ought, for the cure to be effectual, to have been executed for some crime. Nowadays, it seems, this condition is not held to be essential. [I like how the traditional has been brought up to date!] The Peterborough Standard, 11 Mar., 1899, quoting from the East Anglian Daily Times, has this story, related by a gentleman “whose veracity may be relied upon “:— Some time ago a man living to the east of the Isle of Ely was Buffering, apparently from some disease of a cancerous nature. His sufferings were intense and his face and neck terribly swollen. He was discharged from Addenbrooke’s Hospital, as nothing could be done for him. He appeared on the verge of sinking, when a woman said, “I know what will cure yon, and it is this only. You must rub your face and neck with a dead woman’s hand.” Soon afterwards the man heard that a woman had died in a village some distance away. He went to the house, and implored to be allowed to rub his face and neck with the dead hand. The request was granted, and he spent a long time in the operation. He quickly recovered, and is now hearty and well.
The next week the same paper gave an additional instance of the superstition:—
Mrs. Brown, housekeeper to Messrs. Preston Brothers, Stowmarket, gives as a fact the statement that a friend of hers in Norwich had a tumour on his eye, and hearing of the dead band cure determined to apply the same. At the same time his father lay dead in the house, and taking the cold hand of the deceased, he rubbed the tumour with it after which the growth disappeared.
Fenland Notes and Queries, Volume 4: 1900 p. 187
Diana, 25 Mar 2016, writes in: I’m certain my mom who will be 77 in July, never saw anyone get hanged, but when she was around 7 or 8 years old, she said she had a wart (or warts) on her hand, and that a man who, at least in my memory of this story, was some sort of traveling salesman who came by periodically, told her that he could witch off her warts. He cut a potato in half, rubbed the cut side on her warts, and told her to throw it away in a field (a wild meadow sort of place, not a field where crops were grown). I think the eyes of the potato might have looked a little like warts, sympathetic magic? Anyway, the warts went away. She lived at that age on a small poultry farm; her other repeated story from this age is that she candled eggs for her parents, but no one told her what she was looking for, so she thinks she sold a lot of bad eggs.) This was in Gloucester County NJ, across the river from Philadelphia. However, I recall reading years ago that the mind can actually activate the immune system for small infections like warts if you believe that you have been treated. Also, I took a class in medical anthropology and our professor taught that just by believing in witchcraft a person could actually will their own death if they thought they’d been cursed. Warts and wens seems like small potatoes (lol) compared to that. I don’t know when people stopped selling things door to door or delivering small things, but when I was a child (I’m almost exactly the same age as Obama, month and year) there were still people who sold vegetables from the back of a truck driven around neighborhoods, bread and baked goods on a sort of tray that hung off the man’s neck (the only similar thing I can think of is like a cigarette girl, also a thing of the past!) and milk men still delivered milk. This was near when my mom grew up for my first 5 years, but later than that in a suburban tract development too. Also my kids think this is very strange, but we had to separate our organic garbage from our trash, and put it in a small metal pail which someone picked up and took to the next county over where it was fed to pigs. I remember my mom opening it (now I know she had morning sickness and the sight of the contents was too much) and throwing up into it, later she and my dad laughed about “the poor pigs!”. When we drove past the town where they raised the pigs, it would smell bad and everyone would yell “Pigs!” and roll up the car window (no air conditioning). The poor pigs, it was just their food that smelled so bad, I guess. After living away from this area for years, I moved back and that town is now a destination for shopping, which is why my children and I have such different opinions, I hear the name and think pigs, they hear it and think new clothes. I only mention the locations because for one thing, a lot of people now think milk and such was only delivered in cities where houses were close together. Also there were a lot of farms, and farm stands within a short distance of our homes in the 60s, but apparently you could still make a few bucks over wholesale by bringing produce to housewives.
