Browse:WHIPPED FOOT TRACK (Volume 4, entries 5785)
WHIPPED FOOT TRACK
Volume 4, entries 5785. Source context: THE PHYSICAL HUMAN BODY ITSELF → SWEAT → FOOT TRACK. Entries listed under this heading in the source volume.
Entries
Entry 5785
An old woman told me one time how to keep anybody from coming to your house. I asked her what was it. And she told me, in the summertime when the peach trees put out, to get some little twigs off the sugar [maple] tree; and when the person come to the house you didn't want there, just go after they were gone, and with them twigs whip their tracks all the way out of your house, and they won't ever come there any more. Over thirty years ago [1906]. [This man (28) from the edge of Newport News, Va., I interviewed by Ediphone at Old Point Comfort, Va., in 1936.]
The informant reports an old woman's instruction to whip a departing visitor's tracks. The claimed nonreturn is unverified, and the plant identification is partly editorial.