Although it is much more common in the United Kingdom or in the British colonies, it is not uncommon for shoes to be discovered hidden in the walls of old houses in various countries today.
If you were to have a sledgehammer and hit the walls of some old house, you shouldn’t be surprised to find a pair of shoes, which probably remained hidden for tens or even hundreds of years.
However, this strange “ tradition”, (if we can call it that), has a rare but intriguing work, dating back several centuries.
Why did they hide shoes in the walls of old houses?
The hidden shoes in old houses they were placed there for a “simple” purpose: to keep evil at bay, or at least that is what was believed.
Yes, in the 18th and 19th centuries, shoes hidden in the wall were considered an effective decoy for evil spirits and witches, who enes was considered the most macabre evil forces in the game at the time.
Witches were even more terrifying to people than goblins and demons because they were sure that they walked freely among them in human form, while at night they went out to do some misdeed.
To be clearer, hidden shoes have been found in homes all over Europe and in all those countries where these beliefs arrived and they were inherited by word of mouth, even in the United States.
Placing hidden shoes in the “weak points” of a house, such as near the windows or the fireplace, would supposedly act as a good spirit that could prevent evil entities from entering or stalking people. the families.
The historic hidden shoes, now even in museums
After receiving a large number of shoes found sandwiched in thousands of properties, the Museums of Northampton, UK, decided to launch a “Hidden Shoes Index”, and their records now amount to around of 3,000 shoes recovered in more than 2,000 locations.
Alternatively, the hidden shoes may have been a kind of decoy intended to “catch witches on the prowl”.
And that’s not all the old boots are supposedly capable of.
“ Shoes have sometimes been associated with fertility,” reads the Northampton Museums site. “The children’s shoes may have been hidden to ensure fertility or to specifically protect the children of the home.”
If you happen to be doing renovations to your home and find a pair of shoes in the foundations, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to put them back.
1840
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