SUPERSTITIONS, OMENS and WIVES TALES

 

Superstition: a belief that an event or action will have certain unfavorable consequences.

Omen: a warning or sign of an upcoming fateful event. (some omens can be good. The ones discussed here are not).

Old Wives Tale: either of the above, passed from older generations to others.

 

Call them whatever you want, but these foreboding experiences are unexplained phenomenon that generally relate to predictions of misfortune and bad luck and much of the time: death (the ultimate in bad luck if you ask me).

Nova Scotia is full of these widely-circulated curiosities. You may think most of them are baseless fallacies. However, not all of them are. They actually do occur and have been well documented in many local books spanning many years.

Since this blog centers on paranormal activities, I will spare you the mundane and less-interesting superstitions in other categories (i.e: don’t walk under a ladder and heaven forbid you open an umbrella indoors), etc.

Also, since this blog pertains to Nova Scotia, this strangeness is known to have occurred here but without a doubt, has also happened elsewhere around the globe. It’s universal. So don’t think you can hide from it. You can’t. It will find you.

                                          Curious Ways To Repel Evil Entities

Years ago, people were quite keen on keeping evil influences far away from their home. Superstitious beliefs were more common then (for many reasons) and as a result, simple things were implemented in the hopes it would keep away witches, the Devil and anything even remotely evil.

 The Devil:

When I was a little girl, some work was being done on our very old house. Inside a wall, an old, old shoe from the 1800’s was found. Don’t tell me you have seen creepy things until you see an   old fashioned lace-up shoe a young girl from 150 years ago had worn. Add cobwebs and dust and a musty smell. Ugh. The carpenter told my mother a coin was often dropped down inside walls when houses were built back in those days for two reasons: for good luck and to “date stamp” the house. I have since read it was to bring the family health and happiness.  A coin was found in our wall, too but we never knew why the shoe was there and assumed it was done inadvertently.

Fast forward 40 years. I live in the aforementioned house. We have found two more shoes (oh goody, now I have a whole collection) behind baseboards, from around the same era. One is similar to the first young girl’s shoe; the other is clearly a small child’s.

Fast forward again one month to a Halloween Ghost Walk I found myself on in Lunenburg, N.S. (where else would I be?) when the leader of the group began talking about old houses in the area in which old shoes were put into walls to keep the Devil away. So apparently it was a common practice in the 1870’s around here. Side note: I learned on the ghost walk that you are supposed to return the old shoes to the space you found them in, (otherwise, you risk losing the protection from evil) which I have not done. However, since my house had 3 shoes in the walls, it likely has others so maybe I am already covered. Did the shoe trick work? Hard to say; the place has always been and still is haunted—not by anything evil, though. Just a few wayward spirits who like to drop in. If the Devil exists, does he think, “I sure would like to go in that house but they put all those old shoes in the walls so I guess I can’t” ?

Doesn’t make a lot of sense. But this is what they did back then so we’ll just go with it.

 

Worth noting:  Playing cards on Sunday was thought to invite evil spirits into your house. I heard this from my mother plenty of times while growing up. She didn’t exactly forbid it but she made sure I knew about this superstition. Sometimes I whipped out a deck of cards on a Sunday and shuffled them up for a few minutes just to see what would happen. Nothing ever did. It’s not like the devil appeared in a plume of red smoke and offered to take me on in black jack or anything.

 

 Witches:

  You couldn’t swing a black cat back in the day without hitting someone who knew of a local witch, was cursed by a local witch or was a local witch. I’m talking potion-making, cauldron-stirring, spell-casting witches. Rural residents were forever wary of witches and would take precautions to avoid any interactions with them. Many a Nova Scotian home would hang an upside down horseshoe over their front door or their barn door as an authentic witch would never come near it. Iron was believed to ward off evil spirits. There was also a saying that if you suspected someone of being a witch, lay a broom on the threshold. A witch will not step over it.

                                                    Specific omens of death:

There’s an old saying in the rural communities of Nova Scotia you may have heard: If you venture out to the barn on Christmas Eve at exactly midnight, you can hear the oxen talking to each other. Should you witness it, you will be dead by New Years Day.

~Never rock an empty rocking chair. The death of someone you know will surely follow.

~A picture falling off a wall (for reasons that are not obvious, like the hanger was crappy and just let go) is also a forerunner preceding a death.  A window slamming shut and a bird flying into a   window also warn of someone’s up-and-coming death.

~Deaths always come in three’s, meaning if you hear of one person dying, you will soon hear of two more.

~Another very common forerunner to a death is seeing an apparition of someone right before they die.

This reminds me of a local fisherman who died at sea some years back. He wasn’t due to return for a few days but his wife saw him come in the front door and walk through the house without saying a word. He vanished into thin air but left wet footprints behind. A few hours later she was informed the fishing boat had sank and everyone on board had perished.

 

This next one might be a forerunner predicting someone’s death. It’s certainly in the ballpark. I previously wrote about it on the blog and after comparing notes with my mother on this topic some time ago, and also reading about it happening to at least one other person  somewhere in Nova Scotia, I am going to consider it as a possibility. A strong possibility.

When I was about 11 years old, one night my brother and I saw a car come into the driveway, its headlights shining through the windows as it drove around to the back door of the house. Only my father ever parked there. No one came to the door. Eventually, the car just wasn’t there anymore. Years later, my mother experienced the exact same thing at the same house, except the headlights came near the front door one night very, very late. No one came to the door. The car disappeared. With my incident, my father died suddenly several months later. With my mother’s incident, a young family friend suddenly died several weeks later. My mom was convinced the car/headlight sightings at night with an unknown driver were forerunners. Pretty convinced of that myself.

 Hearing three knocks is a forerunner informing you of an imminent death, most of the time within 3 days. The timeline varies—I’ve heard of it happening up to a month in advance or even the same day as the death. The knocks can be on a wall, a door or any surface. Not everyone present can always hear the knocks. Many questions surround this phenomenon, for which there are no answers. (File this one under “It Happened To Me”, three days before my mom passed away.)

 

                                                   Needle and Thread Baby Predictor

This one is just unexplained, and does not fit the categories listed here. However, since it is an unexplained old-fashioned “parlor trick” and my mother could do it very well and I previously mentioned it on a preceding blog post, I want to include it. 

My mother would thread a needle and tie a knot in the end and hold it over the hand of a female (any age) and she could tell them how many children they would have and the sex of each child, based in the direction the needle would move. It also worked if you have already had children. If it swung around in a circle, that indicated a girl; if it swung back and forth, that was a boy. When the needle stopped moving entirely, then there would be no more children after that. She had done it on herself and also me, with 100% accuracy. She repeated it on each of us at various intervals over the years and the result was always the same. She performed this on many female friends and family and not once, NOT ONCE-- was she ever wrong.

Of course, it does not mean she had any special ability in this regard and probably anyone can do it. But it was always fun to see in action. Did she just luck out since the children could only be boys or girls, thereby increasing the odds of correct predictions? That doesn’t explain the predictions of the number of kids someone would have, though. And it doesn’t explain that when the process was repeated for the same person, the result never varied.

 This blog post is dedicated to my mother, who knew the ins and outs of most local Nova Scotian folklore. We had many conversations over the years about it, mostly the eerier superstitions and omens and what some people would refer to as “old wives tales”. Many were personally experienced by her or myself or someone else we knew and proven to be completely accurate time after time. 

Our conversations on this topic always brought us back to the same questions:

Take, for example, the incident of hearing three knocks which is a forerunner to someone’s death.

Why do we get paranormal warnings about someone’s death? What is the point of it?

Why me/us? Why not you, your friend or relative? Not everyone experiences it.

How is it actually occurring? What forces are at play? What causes 3 knocks on the wall before someone you know dies?

We were always left with these questions and never any answers. I don’t think we are supposed to know.

 

                                                          For further reading on related topics:

Maritime Devils and Witches