Lost Soles: Concealed Shoes and the Hidden Magick of British Houses

If you have ever taken down a ceiling in an old house and found a single, filthy, misshapen shoe wedged into the void, you have not found rubbish. You have found somebody's working, and by the older reckoning you should put it back.

How we know about this at all

In the 1950s, a young assistant at Northampton Museum called June Swann kept receiving shoes. People brought them in for identification, and the odd thing was where they had come from: up chimneys, out of roof spaces, from behind walls, above windows and doors, under floorboards.

Around 1957 she and John Thornton of the local boot and shoe department realised, more or less simultaneously, that they had each been handed six or seven of these and that this could not be coincidence. Swann began recording every find on a card. There was nothing in print on the subject at the time. She was starting from scratch.

By 1969 she had 129 separate finds. By 1986 she had 700. The index she founded is still maintained by Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, still on her original card system, and still receiving on average two or three reported finds a month. It now holds records of upwards of three thousand shoes from around two thousand locations, mostly British, mostly dating between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Swann was appointed MBE in 1976 for her work at the museum, and has been called the world's leading authority on historic footwear. That the whole field exists at all is down to one woman noticing a pattern and refusing to let it go.

The pattern in the numbers

Swann's 1996 analysis, published in Costume, gives us figures that are far more useful to a practitioner than any amount of atmospheric speculation:

Two further figures matter enormously. Only about 11.3% of finds are pairs, so the overwhelming majority are odd shoes. And around 40% belonged to children.

The shoes are almost always well worn. Not damaged, not new, worn. A woman's leather tie shoe from around 1750 found at Lower Harlestone in Northamptonshire holds the shape of its owner's foot in the sole, the backstay and the vamp: her weight, her gait, her particular way of walking, preserved in leather long after she was gone.

Why a shoe

This is the part that repays thinking about, because a shoe is a very strange object to choose and the choice is not arbitrary.

A shoe is the only garment that takes and keeps the shape of the body. It moulds to one specific person and to nobody else. It carries their scent, their sweat, their wear pattern, their weight distribution. In magickal terms it is a personal concern that you do not have to cut off anybody: the body has already been deposited into the object over years of use.

So the shoe functions as a decoy body. The prevailing interpretation is that a malevolent spirit or a witch, entering by chimney or threshold, encounters what smells and feels like a person, goes into it, and finds there is no way back out. The single shoe is a trap baited with a human being.

The distribution supports the reading. Chimney, hearth, threshold, window, roof: every one is an entry point. This is not decoration, it is a picket line drawn round the weak points of a building, exactly as with witch bottles. And the two are sometimes found together, along with animal bones and, notoriously, dried cats.

The proportion of children's shoes is the detail that stays with me. Forty per cent. Children were understood to be the most vulnerable members of a household, most at risk from the evil eye, from fairy interference, from being taken. Putting a child's worn shoe into the chimney breast is a parent standing between their child and whatever is coming down it.

The rule about removal

Across the folklore, one instruction recurs: once concealed, the shoe stays. Removing it is unlucky.

There is a much repeated account of a shoe found in a house and sent away to the Museum of London for analysis, after which the household began to experience disturbances that ceased when the shoe was returned. Treat it as folklore rather than evidence, but treat the underlying instruction as sound practice. A working that has been sealed into a building was made to be permanent. If you find one, the traditional and the courteous response is the same: photograph it, record it, report it to Northampton Museum's index so it enters the record, and put it back where it was.

If the building itself is being demolished, that is a different situation, and the working can reasonably be considered released. Keep the shoe. Do not sell it.

The wider family of house deposits

Concealed shoes belong to a much larger practice that the architectural historian Timothy Easton has called the spiritual midden: an accumulation of ritually deposited material in the fabric of a building, built up over generations.

Alongside shoes you find:

• Witch bottles, in the same locations and often literally alongside
• Dried or mummified cats, usually posed as if hunting, walled into roof spaces
• Animal bones and skulls, particularly horse skulls under floors, which also served an acoustic function in some barns
• Clay pipes, candles and candlesticks, which Swann noted appear disproportionately often alongside shoes, all objects associated with fire and smoke
• Textiles, garments and written charms, tucked into thatch and wall voids

The practice was carried abroad. Manning's work on ritual concealments in the eastern United States shows the same behaviour concentrated in New England and the north east, the regions first colonised from East Anglia. People took the custom with them in the same way they took their dialect.

What to take from this into practice

Your house has weak points and they are the same ones they always were. Threshold, hearth, chimney, window, the gap under the stairs. If you are warding a home, that is your map, and you did not have to invent it.

A worn personal object is a stronger link than a new one. This is the practical takeaway and it is worth changing your habits over. The instinct in modern practice is to buy something clean and pretty for a working. The tradition says the opposite: use the thing that has been carried, worn, slept in and sweated into. Wear is not damage, wear is accumulated presence.

Household protection was permanent, not periodic. Nobody was refreshing these every full moon. They were placed once, sealed in, and left to do their job for the life of the building. There is something restful in that idea, and something worth recovering.

If you make a house deposit, make it removable in principle and undisturbed in practice. Do not damage the fabric of a building you do not own, and do not put anything into a listed structure. A floorboard void, a loft corner, or a jar buried at the boundary of your own garden will do the same work.

Sources

• Swann, J. (1996). Shoes Concealed in Buildings. Costume, 30, 56–69. Full text reproduced at Apotropaios: Concealed Shoes, an article by June Swann
• Swann, J. (2015). Shoes Concealed in Buildings. In R. Hutton (ed.), Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain, 118–130. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Concealed Shoes Revealed — Footwear Research Network, on the Northampton Museum index and its current statistics.
• June Swann and Concealed shoes — Wikipedia, for the overview and the Swann distribution figures.
• Supernatural Safeguarding: Hidden Objects in the Post-Medieval Home — Ceri Houlbrook, FolkloreThursday.
• Houlbrook, C. The Other Shoe: Fragmentation in the Post-Medieval Home (PDF, University of Hertfordshire).
• Merrifield, R. (1987). The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. Batsford, London.
• Easton, T. (1995). Spiritual Middens. In P. Oliver (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World. Cambridge University Press.
• Manning, M. C. (2012). Homemade Magic: Concealed Deposits in Architectural Contexts in the Eastern United States. PhD thesis, Ball State University.
• Manning, M. C. (2014). The Material Culture of Ritual Concealments in the United States. Historical Archaeology, 48(3), 52–83.
• Hoggard, B. (2019). Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft. Berghahn Books.

If you find a concealed shoe, Northampton Museum and Art Gallery still accepts reports for the Concealed Shoe Find Register.