Concealed shoes

This week, our featured artifact is a mismatched pair of children’s shoes. While they seem rather ordinary at first glance, these relics are actually symbolic of an ancient superstitious practice: “concealed shoes.” 

People have been finding shoes in walls, chimneys, floors, and doorways across different regions of Europe since the end of the Middle Ages. The practice of concealed shoes made its way into North America via settlers from the East Anglia region of England, where this practice was exceedingly popular. 

Ancient folklore tales claimed that evil spirits, demons, and witches can be warded off using hidden items of clothing. You see, it was commonly believed that witches were attracted by the scent of a human; therefore, these shoes would lure them into the walls of a house rather than into the bedrooms or sitting rooms. Besides witches, some specific entities that could also be trapped or driven off by concealed shoes include: the Scottish brownie (brùnaidh), a mischievous elf, and the Slavic domovoy (Домовой), which could protect against evil – or produce it.

These two shoes were found in the Josiah Day House’s back wall – while Aaron Day Jr. was constructing the wooden addition in approximately 1810. The shoes’ style is reminiscent of a modern-day Oxford, with a low heel, flat toe box, and short laces. They have hardened leather footbeds, leather laces, and wooden soles. Only one of the shoes includes a cream-colored cotton lining, although the other one’s may have been lost to time. Interestingly, one shoe is roughly two inches longer than the other, leading us to believe that they belonged to different children. Perhaps this was to bolster the Day family’s protections against apparitions.

Aside from their ability to entrap spirits, these shoes were also thought to be harbingers of good luck and fortune. There is a connection between shoes and fertility across multiple European cultures! Some examples include the nursery rhyme “There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” and the shoe-throwing superstitions of England and the modern-day Czech Republic.

The majority of concealed shoes belonged to children, yet the reason behind this remains somewhat unknown. Some archaeologists propose that their belief in a child’s good luck actually stemmed from the ancient city of Carthage. Morbidly, babies were placed in the foundations of Carthaginian buildings in hopes of future prosperity; concealed shoes could have possibly spawned as the replacement for this practice. 

While concealing shoes met a sharp decline during the 20th century, other good luck charms remain relevant today: horseshoes, barn stars, ladybugs, four-leaf clovers, bamboo. What do you do for good luck?

Information for this blog article was taken from:
Manning, M. Chris (2012), Homemade Magic: Concealed Deposits in Architectural Contexts in the Eastern United States (Masters thesis), Ball State University
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_shoes

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