In a world without physicians or safeguarding community institutions, belief was not ornamental; it was explanatory. Settlers trusted what they recognized and feared what they could not read. When fear of violence erupted after the Yellow Creek Massacre, that alarm did not emerge in a vacuum. It was shaped by years of living in isolation, interpreting misfortune through inherited belief, and confronting forms of power that resisted colonial understanding. What followed was not panic born of superstition, but fear sharpened by uncertainty.

Imagine the life of a frontiersman waking on the cold floor of a log cabin. Outside, between the cabin and the nearby stream, lies the partially eviscerated carcass of a deer, killed sometime in the night. The wolves he heard in the forest after dark had been close, close enough to circle the cabin while his family slept. Yet it was not the wolves that most unsettled him. The greater fear lay beyond the tree line. Rumors of vengeance-seeking Native war parties had traveled faster than any confirmed report, and the forest offered no clear answers. He scanned the woods, listening for signs he could not interpret.

If he knew what was best for his family, he would make the half-day journey to the nearest blockhouse, where others were already shut in behind timber walls. The trip could be shortened by cutting past the old Indian mound, but few did so willingly. Places like that carried stories, now more than ever, and on the frontier, stories were treated as warnings. But leaving meant more than distance. Without food, they would starve. Abandon the cabin for too long, and claim jumpers might take the land. Stay, and risk being alone if violence did come. He reached into his pocket and felt the folded slip of paper, its Bible verses scratched out by a neighbor woman, and pressed it into his hand. 

Cunning Folk

This was the frontier’s constant tension: danger on all sides, and no choice without consequence. In such conditions, fear alone was not useful. Families needed explanation, reassurance, and some measure of control. Where physicians, courts, and institutions were absent or distant, people turned instead to neighbors whose knowledge offered practical answers to unseen threats.

When Americans think about magic and belief in the country’s past, they often fixate on the witch trials of the seventeenth century. That focus obscures a broader reality. Belief in unseen forces did not vanish with the gallows at Salem, nor was it limited to accusations of witchcraft. Witches, as colonial law defined them, were individuals accused of consorting with demons or the Devil to cause harm deliberately. Every day belief was something else entirely.

Central Appalachia is often associated with supernatural traditions, from folk healers to modern cryptid lore. Among the most enduring is the later legend that the Mothman represents a Native American curse tied to the murder of Chief Cornstalk by American soldiers during the Revolutionary era. While this interpretation belongs to a much later moment, its persistence is revealing. It reflects a long-standing tendency to frame Native power, especially in the wake of colonial violence, as supernatural retaliation. The belief itself is not evidence of an eighteenth-century worldview, but of a cultural habit that survived it.

On the eighteenth-century frontier, sudden illness within a family or among livestock carried serious implications. In isolated settlements where medical knowledge was limited and help distant, misfortune demanded meaning. Some believed harm arose from ill will or unseen influences. Those thought capable of addressing these afflictions, people who recognized patterns others overlooked and offered explanations where none were otherwise available, were not cast out but sought after and quietly relied upon. In the absence of alternatives, families frequently turned to trusted “cunning” neighbors to locate lost items, address ill luck, lay hands on the injured, and recite verses over the sick. These figures were not outsiders but embedded members of communities that relied on them in moments of uncertainty and transition.

These practices survived through habit rather than explanation, passed along because they seemed to work, or at least to help, when other options were absent. For that reason, they rarely appear clearly in the historical record. They were ordinary, domestic, and unremarkable to the people who relied on them. Their survival is visible not in theology, but in behavior. Even in the modern period, people continue to knock on wood, avoid speaking aloud of potential good fortune, consult almanacs, carry charms, or observe inherited cautions, such as staying out of cemeteries at night. What endured was not belief in magic as an idea, but practice as inheritance: ways of managing uncertainty learned early and repeated because of tradition. As folklorist H. Byron Ballard notes, these traditions are best understood not as superstition, but as lived knowledge shaped by place, necessity, and continuity. [1] In this world, belief was not deviance; it was survival. 

The folk beliefs of Central Appalachia emerged as an amalgamation of Protestant Christianity, Native American knowledge, and African practices. They were not systems of theology, but practical responses shaped by isolation and experience; ways of making sense of illness, misfortune, and uncertainty without assigning blame. While such beliefs were not formally endorsed by the Christian denominations of the colonial United States, that did not prevent biblical verses from being used to ward off ill luck or heal the sick. Scripture was spoken aloud, carried, or repeated as a form of protection.

Bewitched

“There are jugglers of another kind, in general old men and women, who, although not classed among doctors or physicians, yet get their living by pretending to supernatural knowledge. Some pretend that they can bring down rain in dry weather when wanted, others prepare ingredients, which they sell to bad hunters, that they may have good luck, and others make philters or love potions for such married persons as either do not, or think they cannot love each other.” John Heckewelder, describing Native healers through a lens of perceived deception and threat. [2]

While settlers normalized their own protective practices as common sense, they often interpreted Indigenous spiritual authority through the language of magic, conjuring, or dangerous influence—especially in moments of crisis when Native knowledge of land, illness, and warfare proved unreadable to colonial observers.

America’s Native peoples were more outward with their spiritual traditions. Once, when Moravian missionary John Heckewelder was visiting a Lenape village to meet with Chief Killbuck, Gelelemend, he encountered a figure terrifyingly dressed as a bear. The figure was a Native healer, but to Heckewelder it resembled a monstrous “evil spirit.”[3] Heckewelder was aghast that a healer would dress in that way, but Killbuck assured him that it was the only way to counteract bewitchment. 

In the Absence of Care

Heckewelder lectured Killbuck on the superiority of colonial medicine, yet he never addressed its availability on the frontier. For many backcountry families, professional medical care was unavailable. Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason, who toured the Carolina backcountry in the 1760s, recorded a stark assessment:

“No physician—no medicines—no necessaries—nurses, or care in sickness. If you are taken in any disorder, there you must lye till nature gets the better of the disease, or death relieves you.”[4]

Woodmason’s journals reveal the harsh realities of backcountry life, though they must be read with care. His writing is saturated with disgust and moral judgment, shaped by class, education, and distance from the people he observed. He described settlers eating from what he considered “filthy” crockery, consuming diets of cornmeal, water, and deer, and living in conditions he found repellent. He claimed that, across 1,800 miles, he had not encountered a single person who could read or write.

Such observations tell us less about inherent backcountry deficiency than about isolation, scarcity, and Woodmason’s own expectations. What his account makes clear is not squalor for its own sake, but the absence of infrastructure—medical, educational, and institutional. In such conditions, reliance on folk healers, inherited remedies, and nonformal knowledge was not a cultural quirk but a necessity.

Many missionaries, including Heckewelder, dismissed Native explanations that malevolent spiritual forces could cause illness. Yet similar beliefs were widespread among colonists themselves. In the backcountry, diseases that struck suddenly or resisted explanation—particularly ailments such as dropsy or rickets among children—were often attributed to witchcraft or harmful influence. Both disorders resisted treatment and visibly altered the bodies of the vulnerable. As Joseph Doddridge observed in the early nineteenth century, “Diseases which could neither be accounted for nor cured were usually ascribed to some supernatural agency of a malignant kind.”[5]

The heavy reliance on cornmeal, coupled with the absence of dairy, fresh vegetables, and reliable protein noted by Woodmason, produced nutritional deficiencies that likely contributed to both rickets and dropsy among backcountry populations.

Conclusion

In 2010, archaeologists uncovered a glass bottle deliberately placed in a well in downtown Pittsburgh. The object is widely interpreted as a witch bottle—an apotropaic folk device intended to absorb or deflect harm. Its concealment was deliberate. Objects like this were never meant to be seen, discussed, or recorded. Both the maker and the intended beneficiary understood that such practices were safest when unspoken.

Folk belief rarely announces itself in the archive. It leaves material traces, not explanations. Historians are trained to interpret documentation, yet entire systems of belief operated precisely because they avoided scrutiny. The silence surrounding these practices is not evidence of their absence, but of the risks attached to naming them.

Eventually, Pennsylvania Dutch folk practitioners gathered and printed Anglo-German and local remedies that had previously circulated only through oral tradition. Manuals such as The Long Lost Friend, first printed in the United States in 1820, demonstrate how thoroughly these practices were woven into everyday life. Framed as “faithful and Christian instructions,” the book offered remedies for both people and animals—charms against violence and theft, protections for livestock, spoken formulas to stop bleeding, and biblical invocations to counter snakebite.[6]

The risk that folk practitioners undertook was real. In 1787, an older woman in Pennsylvania was beaten and stabbed to death in the street after being accused of witchcraft. Outside the protection of one’s own community, belief could quickly turn lethal. As the Independent Gazetteer observed, such accusations left individuals exposed “to the unrestrained discretion of human nature.”[7] Fear did not require proof to act; only suspicion was required.

Notes & Citations

[1] H. Byron Ballard, Roots, Branches and Spirits: The Folkways and Witchery of Appalachia (Richmond, VA: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2023).

[2] Jugglers is a period vernacular for deceivers. 

John Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1819), Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50350/50350-h/50350-h.htm. 

[3] Ibid

[4] Charles Woodmason, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant, ed. Richard J. Hooker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 38, https://archive.org/details/carolinabackcoun0000wood/page/12/mode/2up.

[5] Joseph Doddridge, Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, from 1763 to 1783, Inclusive (Albany, NY: J. Munsell’s Sons, 1876), 126, https://archive.org/details/notesonsettlemen00doddrich/page/126/mode/2up.

[6] Johann Georg Hohman, The Long Lost Friend; or, Faithful & Christian Instructions Containing Wondrous and Well-Trained Arts & Remedies, for Man as Well as Animals (Harrisburg, PA, 1820), 22, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/0223252.nlm.nih.gov/page/22/mode/2up.

[7] Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), November 1, 1787, 2, quoted in contemporary commentary on the Corbmaker witchcraft killing.