Heather Freeman: Sara Amis grew up in northwest Georgia, and she's telling me about the folklore and folk practices of her childhood.

Sara Amis: A lot of the things that people do are super simple and use things that just happened to be around like they'd use a colander to keep spirits away and hang it over the door, because the spirit would have to stop and count the holes before they could cross your threshold.

Heather: These folk practices connect supernatural beliefs with everyday household activities. They assure good luck. Avert bad luck. And sometimes the reason is lost entirely to time. As a kid, Sara didn't think much of them. They were just things her family and neighbors did. But once she went to college, Sara started to see them from a different point of view. She majored in anthropology and learned about the folk traditions of other cultures and religions. Folk traditions are the practices, ideas and customs of a particular social group. These are shaped and reshaped over time and then passed on to new generations through stories, the arts, domestic crafts and more. Sara also discovered modern pagan witchcraft, and that's when she started to see her Appalachian folk practices as folk magic.

Sara: I sort of realized that there was this intersection between this sort of new ish religious movement and folk magic. Traditional practitioners don't view themselves as pagan. But on the other hand, the history of modern witchcraft very much draws on folk magic.

Heather: Sara identifies as Pagan today, but she pointed out that these practices aren't considered magic by most Appalachian practitioners.

Sara: This folk magic is just completely woven into the culture. They didn't call it anything at all. It's not something separate.

Heather: Having grown up in these communities, Sara knows that the language she uses is important. What words she can use in contemporary witchcraft spaces won't work in some parts of Appalachia.

Sara: If you want to talk to people who are traditional practitioners, don't ask them about witchcraft. They'll tell you they don't know anything. It's much better to ask, well, what do you do when somebody gets sick? Is there anything special that you do? Or you know, what happens if somebody gets a burn or anything like that.

Heather: This is Magic in the United States, and I'm Heather Freeman.

Folklore is everything from cold remedies to ghost stories, and it's passed orally within a community over generations. And folk stories often have a supernatural element to them. In today's episode, Montague and Duck we'll hear the curious legend of one rural Virginia community, a folk story that was collected during the Great Depression, and we'll learn how to read between the lines to understand what folklore can tell us about magic.

We'll be right back.

 (BREAK)

Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

I want you to visualize one of the most beautiful parts of the United States: Southern Appalachia. So let's soar high above the Blue Ridge Mountains and the winding New River and look upon the landscape itself.

Cory Hutcheson: These are some of the oldest mountains that we have on Earth, certainly some of the oldest ones in North America. Incredibly old and ancient mountains. And because of that, there's a real sense of timelessness.

Heather: Corey Hutcherson is a folklorist and lecturer in English at Middle Tennessee State University.

Cory: So if you think of like the Rockies as a mountain range or the Himalayas, there's a very sharp, pointy, jagged peaks. These are rounder. There's sort of a softer mountain, but they still can be quite high. You have, like we would call a bald. The treeline stops and you have an empty top of this round mountain where you can look out and see it's sort of a rippling carpet of trees and hills and things like that. And so you have all these little mountains, all these little balds, all these valleys kind of tucked in between them.

Heather: The Appalachian mountain range extends from Maine to Alabama, and we'll be focusing on the southern Appalachians, which includes Kentucky, North Carolina, Maryland, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. And the southern Appalachians were shaped by both geologic forces and by water.

Cory: For all the sort of quietness that we might associate with these kind of forested hills that are so old, it's very active. There are cave systems and waterways, waterfalls. The snowfall melts and you get rivers and flooding and things like that. They can be babbling brooks or they can be whitewater rapid levels in some places.

Heather And if we fly in a little closer, we'll see that these Southern Appalachian mountain soils and clear waters feed the roots of deciduous trees like white oaks and tulip poplars, as well as pioneer species like sycamore and sassafras. This thick forest canopy houses many different species. Moss and ferns. Blue cohosh and bloodroot. Beetles and salamanders. And it's in this landscape that we find the legend of Montague and Duck Moore, an oddly dressed old couple who moved into an abandoned cabin in Franklin County, Virginia, in the early 1900s.

I'll let Cory Hutcheson take it from here.

Cory: They move into this abandoned cabin and all of a sudden, all around this place, people's livestock start getting sick and nobody can figure out why. They're like, is there an illness going around? And of course, eyes turn to the strange outsiders that just moved in. And so they approached them. And, you know, initially it's sort of like, hey, do you know anything about this?

Heather: All eyes were on the newcomers, Mont and Duck, the peculiar old couple who had just moved to town.

Cory: Well, Mont, the husband of the couple, he basically comes out and says, oh, no, it's definitely my wife. She's able to curse and do witchcraft and do all of these things. Absolutely, 100%. It's her doing this.

Heather Montague told his neighbors they were both witches. But while Duck cursed people freely, he was given the gift of breaking curses. And he was happy to break the hex for a price, of course.

Cory: So if you will just bring me a bushel of potatoes, I'll make sure that your pigs get better. Bring me some barley or some corn. I will make sure that your hens start laying eggs again. Or your cows stop giving bloody milk.

Heather This went on for years. Crops would get a blight. A child would fall sick. Neighbors assumed it was a curse from Duck and asked Montague for help. In exchange for breaking the hex, neighbors gave Montague food, clothes or other small goods. According to the story. Neighbors sometimes even went to Duck for magical help. She knew good luck charms and had tips for preventing bad fortune. But mostly Duck cursed the neighbors and Montague cured them.

Cory: And so they begin to build up this essentially magical racketeering scenario.

Heather: Montague and Duck were already elderly when they moved into Franklin County, and for the most part, neighbors avoided going near their cabin. After all, a pair of witches lived there and it was probably dangerous. And time went on. Eventually, Duck passed away, and Montague followed. Soon after, the story of Montague and Duck's life started to become a local legend.

Cory: After they're gone, people start to come up and explore the cabin. It becomes kind of a locus for local dares and things like that. And in exploring the cabin, they discover the cave kind of outback behind it. And there's this larder full of goods that they'd been storing up over the years. And so they basically were not like wealthy, wealthy, like not having bundles of money, but they were incredibly well kept and cared for. And if they had that many goods, that meant that they were constantly in demand, that their services were constantly being used. The reputation, the theory behind is that they basically operated a magical economy all their own that was very lucrative for them; and then became kind of a local legend through that process.

Heather The legend of Montague and Duck Moore is a curious tale. It tells us what this Franklin County community believed that Mont and Duck were witches, and this elderly couple encouraged the belief. But it doesn't tell us about the specifics of their magical practice or if they even had one. We don't know how Mont broke a hex, and we don't know Duck's tips for good fortune. This story is folklore, and it leaves us with a lot of questions. But folklore offers other types of answers. Cory Hutcheson, again.

Cory: In folklore studies, were not necessarily setting out to say this piece of folklore is true or not true in sort of the factual sense. What we look at is why is it important? Why was it told? Why was it preserved? What is it saying about the people who are sharing it? The people who are centered within the story? And in the case of the Mont and Duck Moore story, there's definitely some issues that would have been very, very heavily on the minds of people, including things like where is food going to come from? How do you deal with economic hardship and poverty?

Heather In this podcast series, we've encountered diverse beliefs and practices. Some are magical, some religious, and most go beyond our usual definitions. But this episode is a little different. On the surface, The legend of Montague and Duck Moore is about witchcraft and magic. Except, as far as we can tell, there might not be any magic at all. So where did this idea of Appalachian magic come from? When we come back, we'll learn how the Great Depression and the New Deal preserved the story of Montague and Duck Moore, and also discover some of the actual folk practices that have been labeled Appalachian folk magic.

We'll be right back.

(BREAK)

Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

The story of Montague and Duck Moore is a folk legend, and while they probably weren't actually practicing magic as we understand it today, it gives us tantalising insights into one rural Virginia community. At the beginning of the 1900s. We've already heard about the beautiful landscape. But who were the people who lived there?

Trevor McKenzie Well, I think Appalachia has always been sort of a dialogue between land and people. And so I think that connection there is what makes things Appalachian. 

Heather Trevor McKenzie is Director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Trevor There's a real diverse background of people that are coming in to the region, not to mention the people who were already here. We have Cherokee tribes. The Yuchi. There was a subgroup called the HoCo Higgy of the Yuchi tribe. There was also the Shawnee. So there were already indigenous people here who had interacted with this land and even Mississippian cultures further south.  

Heather Starting in the 17th century. Outsiders also settled in the region, such as the Scots-Irish, who fled economic and cultural oppression at the hands of the English. And while slavery was practiced throughout the South, including Appalachia, these same mountains also provided isolation for African Americans escaping enslavement.

Trevor The Transatlantic Slave Trade is going on, and that is bringing people from Western Africa, and people are making their way inland from there. There's a lot of British Isles influence, and there's also a Germanic influence. And so there's all of these groups that are being blended, and they all come together to make what we think of today is Appalachian culture.

Heather Over time, individual communities generally grew around a few families who had settled in a particular valley. And while these mountain communities were geographically isolated, often by choice, they were not economically or culturally isolated.

Trevor I just have to say up front that Appalachian people, we've always been connected to the outside world. Despite being up here in the mountains. I would kind of use the word concentrated a bit more to historically describe the way that people have lived. And while the geography can be physically isolating, these communities have always had connections to outside, you know, the United States.

Heather So this begins to paint a picture of Montague and Duke Moore's community. The people of Southern Appalachia were concentrated in the mountains by choice and came from diverse cultural backgrounds. The Mont and Duck story doesn't mention organized religion. There's no mention of churches or preachers, but Southern Appalachia was religiously active as well. In season one, episode four, The Heartbreak of Harry Houdini, we talked about spiritualism and the Second Great Awakening, a period in the 1800s that spawned many new religious movements and ideas spread through educational lecture circuits. This enthusiasm for religious innovation thrived in southern Appalachia, perhaps most among Baptists and Methodists. Trevor McKenzie and Cory Hutcheson. 

Trevor There is a strong religious streak in the region due to that early influence of the Second Great Awakening. There's all these camp meetings and there's tons of different Baptist offshoots in the region. I think we maybe have as many Baptists varieties as we do salamanders here in the region.

Cory Methodism. Methodism becomes kind of a big thing. You have congregations that are being preached by sort of roving preachers that are bringing different messages and different ideas. How do you live a good life? How do you get into heaven? Some of them are very fiery rhetoricians who can get people in sort of a spiritual frenzy.

Heather Baptist, Methodist and other diverse Christian offshoots flourished at this time, and Appalachian folklore includes Christian preachers, the devil, ghosts, and witches. The natural and supernatural worlds sit side by side. While The legend of Montague and Duck Moore doesn't offer any insights into the organized religious practices of Franklin County, Virginia in the early 1900s, it does tell us about the challenges of living day to day so close to the land. Cory Hutcheson again.

Cory Obviously, it was a very kind of rural agricultural region. The soil was rocky soil. It was not always going to produce consistently what they needed or wanted. It was not an easy place to eke out a living for a lot of folks.

Heather And this was subsistence farming, which means you're growing just enough for your own family. And if you're lucky, you might have a little to sell on the side. And this shows up in the story of Montague and Duck Moore.

Cory You sort of generated your own resources locally as much as possible, without expecting things to come in from the outside. One of the things you can look at from this is that Mont and Duck are treated as outsiders initially, but by the end of the story, they're essentially embedded in the local folklore. Right. So now that's their home.

Heather Montague and Duck made their home at the edges of an already fragile community. There wasn't a big margin for bad weather or illness. Something as seemingly small as a sick cow could be a major disaster. So it's no wonder that supernatural beliefs about curses and witchcraft were strong in these communities. Mont and Duck said outright that they were witches, and this is perhaps the strangest part of their story. In early American history, when people were accused of witchcraft, they were often jailed, exiled, or even killed for it. So what Mont and Duck were doing should have been incredibly dangerous. But folklore reveals a lot about how people understand the world around them. And a lot of people, including witches, were just trying to get by.

Cory You look at a lot of stories in Appalachian witch lore, the things that the witches are doing. It's not that they're going out and just like cursing every person they see, and trying to kill everyone they see. In almost all cases, what they're doing is they're dealing with their own economic problems.

Heather Some Appalachian folktales illustrate how a witch could use magic to make ends meet. Cory shares an example.

Cory So they'll steal milk from somebody. They'll embed a hatchet into a fence post, tie a rag around it, and then milk that rag and it will give them milk. And it's stealing milk from somebody else's cow. So it's theft, but they're doing it so they have food to eat. 

Heather Subsistence farming in Appalachia was tough, although people made it work. But then in the early 1930s, everything got much harder.

The Great Depression was one of the worst economic disasters in American history and lasted from 1929 to 1939, ending with the start of World War Two. There was huge unemployment during this time, which rose to over 20%, and a massive drought crippled the agricultural heartland. The resulting dustbowl in the Midwest devastated families working on farms and led to mass migrations, and communities that were already economically fragile during the boom times of the 1920s were pushed to the edge during the Great Depression.

In 1933, President Franklin D Roosevelt announced the New Deal, a series of economic and social plans aimed at tackling the Great Depression. This ranged from insuring banks with the creation of the FDIC to developing economic safety nets like Social Security. And many of these programs greatly impacted Appalachia, such as the creation of the Blue Ridge Parkway and several national parks.  Another New Deal initiative was the Virginia Writers Project, which hired folklorists and writers to collect stories from rural mountain communities.

And it's thanks to the Virginia Writers Project that we have the story of Montague and Duck Moore today. In some way. These stories were collected because there was a sense of an era ending in Appalachia, and that these quaint folk beliefs and legends were in their sunset. These New Deal programs were designed to help southern Appalachians, but they were often a mixed blessing.

Trevor McKenzie again.

Trevor There's a dark side to this new deal, which is celebrated in Appalachian community still for things like putting people to work. But they operated on this idea of recreating a frontier America, a sort of wilderness, and that required the removal of people from those areas. In the Shenandoah National Park, there are over 2000 people who were moved out of that area. And I think when we see this image, especially of the hillbilly, there's a very real and deep history of damage that has been done.

Heather The stereotype of the Appalachian hillbilly is also damaging, because it erases the cultural diversity and long history of many peoples in this region. And long after the Great Depression. Media portrayals of Appalachians continue the stereotypes and erasure.

But those stories collected from the Virginia Writers Project, including the story of Mont and Duck Moore? Well, for 30 years they mostly collected dust.

Then in 1975, amateur folklorist Hubert Davies republished a collection of these stories in a book called The Silver Bullet. Davies focused on stories of witchcraft, ghosts, and the supernatural, and his retellings are mostly true to the originals. But Davies also made some creative changes. Ones that reflected popular stereotypes of Appalachians. And he also added folk magic details that weren't in the original stories. Davies' collection sometimes exaggerated folk charms and healing practices.

But were Montague and Duck Moore actually practicing folk magic?

It's impossible to say from the story, but it's very unlikely. As we learned at the beginning of this episode, most Appalachians wouldn't have called their folk practices magic. And Montague and Duck spent years in that community. They were Appalachians themselves. All we can know for sure is that they use the threat of magic to get food and supplies.

Sara Amis, who we met at the beginning of the episode, explains.

Sara: It is absolutely possible that they were just running a scam, right? People believe that Duck was putting curses on their animals, and the two of them just decided to go with that. You know, I'll scare people into thinking that I've cursed them. And then you go tell them that you can take it off. But I don't necessarily think that it says a lot about how people actually use folk magic in their everyday life. People don't view things like planting  by the signs as supernatural. It's just the way that things work.

Heather: Today, Sara lives in Atlanta, Georgia. With a rainstorm outside and a dog at her feet, Sara told me about the folk practices of southern Appalachia, including herbalism.

Sara: A lot of the medicinal herbs are used magically for protection. Joe Pye weed it's been used medicinally as a treatment for infections, but the root of it is used protectively. You'll see it called gravel root, gravel root is also used to get a job. Blackberries are the same. Sometimes people will use the leaves of the root bark to treat it cold or something like that. You can also use blackberries basically as protection. They're spiky.

Heather In many ways, these practices are very similar to Pennsylvania Dutch powwow and hoodoo, root work, and conjure, which we talked about in season one. They're remixed from several cultures over time, often include the Christian Bible as a charm book, and probably weren't considered magic by the practitioners themselves. They just got called magic by outsiders. All of these communities have folklore, too, but because of the Virginia Writers Project, we have a unique window into the folklore of 1930s Appalachia.

Today, some Appalachians, like Sara, are comfortable moving back and forth between the phrase folk magic and folk practice. And these are living traditions that continue to evolve to this very day. Here's Trevor McKenzie again.

Trevor: Not very far from where I'm sitting, right here at Appalachian State University, there was a gas station. I remember walking in there, and as I was walking out, I looked up above the door and there was a broom hanging above the door. Anybody that's a witch that means you harm would walk in backwards through the door, was sort of the understanding; But that broom was attached to a security camera. So these traditions and riffs on them are still alive within the region.

Heather Folklore is a living thing. It holds the practices, beliefs and stories of a community. Stories just like Montague and Duck Moore. Corey Hutcheson.

Cory In folklore more generally, it's a whole series of things going on. You have potentially somebody's real life. You also have the legends that get attached to them. There may be fantastical elements, and then you have this sense of place, too. So one story is working at multiple levels in that way, which is one of the reasons that I really like folklore.

Heather And folklore isn't just the stuff of early 20th century Appalachia. Whether it's legend trips to abandoned malls, children's sleepover games to summon a ghost, or creepypasta on TikTok; Like birdsong echoing through the Blue Ridge, folklore is all around us.

Next week on Magic in the United States, we'll look at how this word ‘magic’ has been used as a weapon against the civil liberties of native peoples; how a revolutionary Paiute dance resisted laws restricting native ceremony; and how this, the Ghost Dance, became a profound religious movement in the 19th century.

Would you like to leave us a comment or thought on one of our episodes? Give us a ring (980) 277-4402 or leave a message or voicemail at MagicintheUnited States@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Magic in the United States is written and hosted by me, Heather Freeman. The show is produced by Amber Walker and edited by Lucy Perkins. Our associate producer is Noor Gill and the show is mixed by Jennie Cataldo. Fact checking by Dania Suleman. The executive producer for PR Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. The show's music is from APM Music and Epidemic Sound, and our project managers are Edwin Ochoa and Morgan Church. Thanks to advisors Helen Berger, Abel Gomez, Daniel Harms, and Corey Hutcheson. Thanks to guests Sara Amis, Corey Hutcheson and Trevor Mackenzie. This production was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Wherever you are in the United States, the East, the West, the North or the South, remember that magic is everywhere. I'm Heather Freeman, and I'll see you at the crossroads.