Browse:Horse (Volume 1, entries 230–232)
Horse
Volume 1, entries 230–232. Source context: SPIRITS → SPIRITS AND ANIMALS. Entries listed under this heading in the source volume.
Entries
Entry 230
My mother told me that once when she was a child her father and another gentlemen had been to the city [Mt. Olive, North Carolina] on Saturday night to get food for the week, and on their way back - they had waited real late to come back, and they had to come through a stretch of woods. They got along at a certain distance where people had said a man Was killed. The horses stopped that was carrying them in the buggy and they couldn't get them to start. The team made an attempt that they were looking at something but they did not see it at all. After about a half a hour they got the team to go. But in the meantime something jumped on the back of the buggy and didn't get off until about a quarter of a mile from their home, and when it got off it fell like a tree had fallen. Yet they didn't see anything.
Entry 231
Now I know a woman down here in Caroline, she was called on a Sunday morning to come over there to the farm. They had a horse very bad off. She discovered where they had planted a bottle under this door, the door of the stable, and they got this horse so he couldn't get up. She removed it and the horse got all right. [Fredericksburg, Va., (?), Ed.; Caroline Co., Va.,1934; a rare example in my Negro folklore of an animal itself being bewitched.]
Entry 232
Well, now dat's done fo' hosses [horses] an' fo' humans, too. Fo' ninstance, say if yo' wanta buy a hoss - a nice fine hoss, fat an' all an' yo' Wanta buy 'im an' de man wants too much fo' him or he don't wanta sell him to yo'. Well, yo' take - git chew a brand new piece of homespun an' start from his hip-bone an' make one knot, an' go up. Ev'ry time yo' come up to ev'ry joint, yo' make a knot, an' yo' take an' bury it in dat hoss's track an' he'll become tuh be lame - crippled an' he lay down an' he can't git up. Well, de man maybe Wanted de hoss, but he take most any kinda price - well, he take it den.