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Archaeology & History

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

By T.K. Randall
January 23, 2025 · Comment icon 8 comments
Witches bottle
The bottle was completely intact. Image Credit: Facebook / North East Lincolnshire Council
The bottle was analyzed at a British university after being discovered during excavations at a building site.
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 | Comments (8)




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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #1 Posted by Still Waters 25 days ago
From a bottle they'd just dug up? Surely not! 
Comment icon #2 Posted by Piney 25 days ago
Old hard liquor doesn't go bad. I knew a Piney logger who found a AC bootlegger's stash from the 20s and drank the whole case. ?
Comment icon #3 Posted by Still Waters 25 days ago
I was thinking more about the state of the bottle, it looks filthy. Even if it was washed well I wouldn't fancy drinking its contents.
Comment icon #4 Posted by Piney 25 days ago
Neither would I. ? I have a bottle of Philadelphia Quaker beer laying around from the 1800s. Fancy trying that? ?
Comment icon #5 Posted by Cho Jinn 25 days ago
This reminds of that cult classic movie Street Trash where they find the crate of "Cobra" and proceed to liquefy themselves.
Comment icon #6 Posted by Jon the frog 25 days ago
Found a soda can in the soil digging to place a culvert under a dirt road. Soda was without any paint left. I opened it and drank it, it was some kind of cola probably loss 30 yrs ago when the dirt road was reappeared. Beside not being cold, it was nice to find during a hot day. Probably toasted my system with an aluminum rich drink.
Comment icon #7 Posted by Tatetopa 25 days ago
Me and a bud used to use our metal detectors to find old outhouse pits.  People used to dump all sorts of things down there.  We were hoping to find guns knives coins etc.  We did find a lot of medicine bottles, but never tempted 
Comment icon #8 Posted by jmccr8 25 days ago
Hi Tate There was a Hutterite colony not far from my uncle's farm and knew them quite well. The ladies had used gasoline to clean some stuff and threw in in the outhouse, when the husband came home he went to the outhouse to sneak a cigarette as they were not supposed to smoke and when he threw the match in the hole it blew up.


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