The Van Loon House, built in 1724, had dozens of strange objects concealed in its walls—a rust-encrusted revolver, children’s shoes, pieces of quartz, and the eyeless face of a decapitated doll.
Walter R. Wheeler, known as Wally, is an architectural historian in the Hudson Valley. He works for a firm called Hartgen Archeological Associates—“Breaking Old Ground Every Day”—which is based in a restored eighteenth-century farmhouse across the river from Albany. Fifty-five years old, with a cheerful, open face and small, oval eyeglasses, Wheeler has been inside, behind, and under churches, barns, homes, and temples in cities and towns throughout New York State.
Many of the people who told Wheeler these stories were approaching retirement, or something even more permanent. “I realized it was my last, best chance to collect information from them, to make a concerted effort to contact people and locate additional examples, creating a large-enough data set to be able to see some patterns,” he recalled, when we met, earlier this fall.
Hoggard’s own interest in the material culture of witchcraft was sparked by a now-canonical text in the field, “,” by Ralph Merrifield, a curator and archeologist primarily known for his work on Roman London. Merrifield’s book, published in 1987, approached the archeology of magic in a new way. In describing witchcraft, historians had often relied on condemnatory accounts written by judges or members of the clergy.
One protective object architectural historians often uncover is the witch bottle. In the British context, the earliest witch bottles were usually curvaceous ceramic vessels—vaguely humanoid Germanic jars known as bellarmines—that had been filled with human urine and hair, along with a mix of bent iron nails and deformed pins.
The Albertus Van Loon House is located about thirty-five miles south of Wheeler’s office, in the town of Athens, New York. The house has stood since 1724, its back yard sloping directly into the swollen waters of the Hudson River. When its current owners, Randall Evans and Carrie Feder, bought it, in 1997, it was uninhabitable. Its walls and ceilings were unstable, and entire rooms had been dismantled, their boards and beams stacked in no discernible order.
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