[From Manx Quarterly, #5 Nov 1908]

MANX SUPERSTITIONS,

A writer in " TP.'s Weekly," styling Himself " Thormanby," in the course of an article entitled, "Are We Superstitious?" says . —

In the Isle of Man, and in many parts of England, too, to bury a snail is believed to be a cure for warts, As the snail dies and decays, so will the wart, I have often known this spell worked, Of the efficacy of a child's caul worn as a charm, I have heard many wonderful tales, and in my boyhood I knew several persons who wore that kind of amulet, in most cases as a preservative against drowning, but in one remarkable instance (that of an old Manx advocate) to secure eloquence! I came across a curious advertisement of a caul when rummaging once in " Notes and Queries," It had appeared in the "Times" of May 8, 1848, and ran thus : — " To be sold, price. six guineas, a child's caul, which was afloat with its late owner thirty years in all the perils of a seaman's life, and the owner died at last in the place of his birth," Are there any believers in the virtues of the caul extant, or is that one of the few exploded superstitions?

A weird superstition in the Isle of Man in my time was this: If the strings of the shroud-cap on the corpse of a widow were not untied before burial, her spirit would haunt the house, As late as 1865 this superstition caused a scandal, which came before the Ecclesiastical Courts, Two young farmers came to the vicar of a parish. and asked permission to exhume the body of their recently-interred mother, " for," said they, "the strings of her shroud-cap were not unloosed, and she has given us no peace ever since, and won't be at rest till the strings are cut," The vicar indignantly refused to countenance such heathen superstition, so the two sons took the law into their own hands — exhumed the body at midnight, and cut the strings of the shroud-cap. They were prosecuted and punished for desecrating consecrated ground by the Ecclesiastical Court; but they always stoutly averred that they never had any more trouble with their mother's ghost.