It should be remembered that in the early settlement days of the county when the area was inhabited by early pioneers that most were uneducated. It is likely that many processes of nature were misunderstood and appeared “magical”. This undoubtedly accounted for superstitions of which, I am certain, there were many.
Many of the early settlers, living in the wilderness, as they did, with indigenous Indians and wild animals girded themselves in a sense of security that included their guns and their belief systems, however mis-guided they may have been.
Some of these beliefs and notions were recorded in 1875 when Milo Erwin wrote a history of Williamson County at the conclusion of the “Bloody Vendetta” era. I have added notes in parenthesis for clarification.
“The belief in witchcraft prevailed to a great extent in the east side of this county in an early day. To the witch was ascribed the usual powers of inflicting strange diseases and destroying cattle by shooting them with a ball of hair, and inflicting curses and spells on guns.
More ample powers for mischief cannot be imagined. The means by which the witch inflicted these diseases were one of the hidden mysteries which no one but the witch understood; and no wonder, for there never existed any such power on earth.
The way they got to be witches was by drawing their own blood, writing their own names in it, and giving it to the devil, thus making a league with him. From 1818 to 1835, there were a great many witches in this county.
The most noted one was an old lady by the name of Eva Locker, who lived on Davis prairie (between Marion and Crab Orchard). She could do wonders, and inflict horrible spells on the young, such as fits, twitches, jerks and such like; and many an old lady took the rickets at the mere sound of her name.
When she inflicted a dangerous spell, the parties had to send to Hamilton County for Charley Lee, the great witch-master to cure them. This he did by shooting her picture with a silver ball and some other foolery. It was a nice sight to see this old fool set up his board and then measure, point and cypher around like an artillery man planting his battery, while the whole family were standing around veiled and with the solemnity and anxiety of a funeral.
None of the wizards of this county could do anything with Eva. They had to pale their intellectual fires and sink into insignificance before the great wizard of Hamilton County.
When a man concluded that his neighbor was killing too many deer around his field, he would spell his gun, which he did by going out early in the morning, and, on hearing the crack of his rifle he walked backward to a hickory wythe (a tough, supple twig used for binding), which he tied in a knot in the name of the devil.
This rendered the gun worthless until the knot was untied, or it might be taken off by putting nine new pins in the gun and fining it with a peculiar kind of lye, corking it up and setting it away for nine days.
One old man told me he tried this, and it broke the spell. He had drawn right down on a deer just before that, not over twenty steps distant, and never cut a hair.
Cows, when bewitched, would go into mud holes and no man could drive them out; but the wizard, by laying the open Bible on their backs, could bring them out; or cut the curls out of their forehead and their tails off, and put nine pins in their tail and burn the curls with a poker. This would bring the witch to the spot, and then the matter was settled in the way our fathers settled their business.
Witches were said to milk the cows of the neighbors by means of a towel hung up over the door, when the milk was extracted from the fringe (wrung from the edges). If such deviltry was practiced now-a-days, the parties would be arrested for stealing. In place of having a herd of bob-tailed cows, we have laws against cruelty to animals.
There was an idea, too, that if you read certain books used by the hard-shell Baptists, that the devil would appear. Happily for the honor of human nature, the belief in those foolish and absurd pretentions has been discontinued, for forty years by an enlightened public.
Medical science has revealed remedies for those strange diseases whose symptoms were so little understood. The spell has been broken from the gun forever by untying the knot of ignorance, and letting the light of reason flood the mind.
The practice of finding water by means of a forked switch flourished from 1850 to 1860; but was so palpably silly that it died without opposition.”
(Extracted from History of Williamson County by Milo Erwin, published in 1876)