Browse:Dead Doctor Tries to Complete Spell (Volume 1, entries 926)
Dead Doctor Tries to Complete Spell
Volume 1, entries 926. Source context: THE DOCTORS AT WORK: REPORTS FROM LAYMEN → Consultation Technique. Entries listed under this heading in the source volume.
Entries
Entry 926
Once upon a time there was a party going on and the boys of course was drinking as usual and a fight arose among them, and in the meantime they were fighting this woman's brother. So of course she went in to take her brother's part and she hit one of the men with her fist. So of course that roused the curiosity [animosity] of the man's mother, so nuthin she thought on but to cunjure this woman. So they met at an all day meeting [at church]. So just at the time of dinner [noon meal] this young man's mother fixed the special dinner for the woman who hit her son in time past. And of course she fixed a plate for this woman and asked her to eat at once before the crowd came. And she insisted several times, so many times that the woman suspected. And I looked in the plate which she was 'about to eat and the food it looked very peculiar - looked like corn bread and butter mashed together on the same plate with other food, cabbage and so forth. So she looked at it so hard until the woman said, "There's nuthin to hurt you." This woman didn't eat it. And the woman who fixed [cunjured] the plate was taken sick the next Sunday and died shortly afterwards. She might of gotten the same plate by mistake. The cunjure from King George [County, Virginia] who was doing the work [cunjuration] for her [the mother], he also died shortly after the woman died. The day he was buried, the same night, he came to the woman's house for whom he had fixed the dose, and he appeared in his own form and look. He stood on the steps and leaned over the bannister and looked at this woman, and the dog howled and run under the house, there was a whirlwind, and frighten the Woman out of her wits. And the woman didn't even know he was dead until the next day: He come because he didn't get the dose on the woman and he wanted to get in there and complete the job. [It was quite evident even before the narrator began, from the hilarity and repartee of her family, that she would be the chief actor in the story, which happened about 1911 in Stafford County. Her attempt at anonymity broke down when she became excited and revealed her identity by saying, "I looked in the plate."]