Ashley’s Piece of Stuff this week (Season Two, Episode 20: Witch Bottles and Obsidian Mirrors) was a witch bottle from the nineteenth century found in a Civil War trench. Witch bottles were manufactured as anti-witch devices between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries by people who wanted to protect their homes and person from harmful magic. Bottles were “recycled,” filled usually with urine and nails and sometimes with fingernail clippings, hair and other objects. One such witch bottle was found during the renovation of a former pub called the Star and Garter Inn in the village of Watford in Northamptonshire. The building, now a private residence, was undergoing renovations on the chimney when a glass torpedo bottle from the nineteenth century was found. The BBC reports that the bottle was filled with “fish hooks, human teeth, glass and a liquid.” [1] Supposedly Angeline Tubbs, known as the witch Saratoga, was born at the Star and Garter Inn in Watford. The witch bottle found in the former Star and Garter Inn is unlikely to have anything directly to do with Tubbs, as she is supposed to have left England for the United States in 1776 and this type of torpedo bottle designed for carbonated beverages was only patented in 1809.
Angeline Tubbs’s story is a tragic tale of young love gone horribly wrong. She fell in love and became engaged with a British officer of the 31st Huntingdonshire Regiment of Foot, and when he was posted to the United States to fight in the American Revolutionary War, she decided to follow him. When the British were defeated in the Battle of Saratoga, however, the officer abandoned her, and she was in desperate straits. She knew no-one and had no place to go. The story goes that she walked through the uninhabited wilderness to the base of a hill called Mount Vista a mile north of the village of Saratoga Spring. There she built a crude hut, where she lived with her many cats. She supported herself by trapping and telling fortunes, gaining a reputation as a witch. After what must have been a very hard life, she died in 1865 at the age of 105. Today, ghost walks cash in on the legend of Angeline Tubbs, the so-called Witch of Saratoga, and there are claims that her ghost can be seen haunting the woods.
Angeline Tubbs’s story is a tragic tale of young love gone horribly wrong. She fell in love and became engaged with a British officer of the 31st Huntingdonshire Regiment of Foot, and when he was posted to the United States to fight in the American Revolutionary War, she decided to follow him. When the British were defeated in the Battle of Saratoga, however, the officer abandoned her, and she was in desperate straits. She knew no-one and had no place to go. The story goes that she walked through the uninhabited wilderness to the base of a hill called Mount Vista a mile north of the village of Saratoga Spring. There she built a crude hut, where she lived with her many cats. She supported herself by trapping and telling fortunes, gaining a reputation as a witch. After what must have been a very hard life, she died in 1865 at the age of 105. Today, ghost walks cash in on the legend of Angeline Tubbs, the so-called Witch of Saratoga, and there are claims that her ghost can be seen haunting the woods.
Tubb’s reputation was romanticized after her death in Reminiscences of Saratoga and Ballston:
Had she been the mistress of the whirlwind, she could not have been more delighted with storms. She had been seen, her form erect and with extended arms, standing upon the verge of fearful precipices, in the midst of the most awful tempests, conversing, as it were, with unseen spirits, her long, matted hair streaming in the wind, while the thunder was riving the rocks beneath her feet, and the red lightning encircling her as with a winding sheet of flame.[2]
I want to hope this was true for her: that she found power in life, nature, and spiritual practices. If so, then this might be the only part of her story that is true. Not only did Angeline’s British soldier never existed, but also Angeline was not born at the Star and Inn in Watford, nor even in Britain. While there were several families with the name Tubbes living in and around Watford in the eighteenth century, there is no baptism record for an Angeline Tubbs or any name like that in 1761. On the other hand, there are census record for an Angeline Tubbs in Saratoga Springs for 1850 when she gives her age as 69 and 1855 when she says she is 74, and which give her place of birth as America, not Britain. This Angeline, therefore, was born in 1781, and not 1761, and she would only have been twelve years old at the time of the Battle of Saratoga in 1777.[3]
William Stone, who wrote that hyperbolic passage quoted above, had more than a passing acquaintance with fabrication. It seem he blended real places that he knew from a visit to Saratoga, perhaps with local legend, or perhaps with a stock character of a forest witch for his story of Angeline Tubbs. His whole description of Angeline is lifted almost verbatim from a book his father wrote, Tales and Sketches: Such as they Are (1834). In this book Stone senior told of an old woman living alone in the forest, Elizabeth “Goody” Clawson, who he says practiced ritual magic with a demon named Azazel.
Many web-sites don’t doubt the tale of Angeline Tubbs and illustrate their piece with a photograph of her. The problem is that this is definitely not Tubbs, nor any living woman, as it is a dummy, and not even a dummy representing Tubbs. The dummy was made after the likeness of another fortune teller, Moll Pitcher, who was active during the Revolutionary War, and is supposed to have prophesied the Battle of Bunker Hill. An engraving of Moll Pitcher appeared on the cover of a book called, Moll Pitcher’s Fortune Telling Book, published in 1840 by the American Novelty Company of Cleveland, Ohio. The dummy was then prepared in the likeness of this engraving for postcards of Moll Pitcher sold as souvenirs by the Boston Card Company copyrighted in 1906. The picture was then taken and passed off as Angeline Tubbs as early as 1915, when it appeared in the March 7th issue of The Knickerbocker Press.[4]
Women like Angeline, who live outside of society’s norms and expectation, through choice or necessity, have always been targets of scorn and suspicion. Angeline was a “childless, cat lady,” without a man in her life to legitimize her. Maybe Angeline herself made up the story of being a luckless girl that had her head-turned by a flash officer and was then abandoned by him in a foreign, hostile country. She may have invented this past to explain or “excuse” her situation to garner sympathy from her neighbors or at least mitigate their approbation. Of course, the story could have been made up by others before or after her death to add a dash of romance to the supernatural story that people like William Stone were weaving around her. Something that is rarely commented upon, however, is the way that she was able to survive in the woods and not starve or freeze to death; this is a testament to her resilience and her skills as a hunter and outdoorswoman. Angeline must have had an extensive knowledge of the natural world and the properties of plants. She may have made herbal remedies or charms, and she may have been able to turn her isolation into mystique and scrape up a little extra money by fortune telling.
Inevitably stories of the Witch of Saratoga will continue to be told and be the subject of ghost walks, but perhaps something of the realities of Angeline Tubbs’s life should be acknowledged. She was a successful survivalist and though her life was probably hard at times, she seems to have lived it on her own terms.
[1] BBC, “Ancient anti-witchcraft potion found at old Northamptonshire pub,” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-50186758 accessed Oct 7, 2024.
[2] William Leete Stone, Reminiscences of Saratoga and Ballston (New York: Virtue and Yourston, 1875), p. 213
[3] Ethan Quinsey, Oddments: The Witch of Saratoga, accessed Oct 7, 2024 at https://www.patreon.com/posts/40067514
[4] Bloodstone Studios, Angeline Tubbs: The Witch of Saratoga, July 18, 2022, accessed Oct 7, 2024, at https://www.bloodstone.info/post/angeline-tubbs-the-witch-of-saratoga