Archaeology & History

This 200-year-old 'witches bottle' contains something surprising

By T.K. Randall
January 23, 2025

Image: Various Artifacts of Traditional Witchcraft (illustrative)
Credit: Malcolm Lidbury (aka Pinkpasty) / CC BY-SA 3.0 (adapted) Unearthed by workers who had been digging trenches at a construction site on Sea View Street, Cleethorpes last year, this curious bottle exhibits a rather distinctive iridescence of blue and green.

At the time, builders had assumed that it was an old bottle of rum and had actually planned to pop it open and sample its contents (which would have been a bad idea, as it turns out).

Instead, it ended up in the hands of University of Lincoln student Zara Yeates who used a multi-spectral imager - a type of scanner typically used in police forensics - to analyze its contents.

It turned out that it wasn't rum inside the bottle - it was urine.

"Thankfully the project manager was on site and recognized the significance of the object," said Yeates. "But we have discovered that it is actually urine, not alcohol.""So it's a good job the manager stepped in to stop them."

It is believed that the bottle was most likely made around 200 years ago and it is in fact very rare to find one of this particular style and age fully intact.

Exactly why a bottle of urine was buried at the site remains unclear, although one possibility is that it was a 'witches bottle' designed to protect the property from evil.

It's also possible that a sailor put it there as a way to ensure a safe voyage.

Either way, you definitely wouldn't want to take a swig of what's inside...

Source: BBC News

Tags: Bottle, Witch