Delusional Witch Juice

There's a witch in Slavic folklore whose house gets up and walks around on chicken legs. She flies in a giant mortar, sweeps away her tracks with a broom, and depending on the story, she'll either eat you or save your life.

So where did Baba Yaga come from? Heather follows the paper trail and finds that her earliest written traces don't come from village storytellers at all. They come from a woodblock print of Baba Yaga riding a pig into battle against a crocodile, a scientist's grammar book that couldn't match her to a single god, and a writer who claimed the devil boiled her out of twelve nasty women.

Along the way: the goddess theory and the people who wanted it to be true, why her hut might really be a house for the dead, and how she ended up in Dungeons & Dragons, Fables, and AMC's Yaga.

Goddess, monster, or grandma? It depends on who's knocking.

0:00 The Slavic witch with a chicken-leg house1:08 Meet Baba Yaga: Vasilisa the Beautiful5:51 Villain or helper? It depends who’s knocking12:50 Baba Yaga vs. the Brothers Grimm14:01 The paper trail: a cartoon, a scientist, and a cauldron19:32 Was Baba Yaga ever a goddess?24:22 Why does her house have chicken legs?28:48 Why people kept telling her stories31:04 How Baba Yaga got to America34:27 So who invented Baba Yaga?

Follow Delusional Witch Juice on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.Selected sources : Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (2004); Sibelan Forrester, Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales (2013); Faith Wigzell, review of Johns, Slavonic and East European Review (2006); A. N. Afanasyev, "Vasilisa the Fair," trans. Leonard A. Magnus; University of Florida Center for European Studies, Baba Yaga materials (tale translations by Johns); A. Boguslawski, "Satirical Lubok," Rollins College; Russia Beyond, "Your ultimate guide to Baba Yaga" (Alexandra Barkova); UT Austin Linguistics Research Center, Old Russian Online.

Mercury goes retrograde three or four times a year, and somehow that’s supposed to explain why you hit reply-all. So who decided retrograde means anything in the first place?

Heather starts with a quick cheat sheet of what astrologers say Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune mean in retrograde, then follows the belief back 2,700 years. From Babylonian scribes reading the sky for their kings to astrologers interpreting backward motion as delays, reversals, and things returning, the meanings piled up for a reason.

The jump from royal omens to blaming Mercury for broken phones (and Venus for texts from your ex) got some help from a 1970s astrology newsletter and early internet communities.

Plus: a Babylonian tablet interpreting Mercury’s movements is missing, leaving a frustrating gap right where we’d like some answers

Chapters:

0:00 Five planets moving backward1:20 What's actually happening in the sky2:50 The retrograde cheat sheet: what each planet means5:20 Back to Babylon: the sky as the gods' message board7:24 The first people to track retrograde8:49 Mercury's god of writing10:17 The lost Mercury tablet14:55 Greeks, Romans and Ptolemy17:22 Astrologers for hire: "nothing will come of it"20:07 Copernicus explains it, and it survives anyway22:00 The modern relay: newspapers, a newsletter and the internet26:02 So who decided?

Selected sources:

National Geographic, "We're in Mercury retrograde. Here's what that really means" (2023; Mathieu Ossendrijver, Nicholas Campion); TIME, "Mercury Is Entering Retrograde Again" (Campion); Eleanor Robson, "Who wrote the Babylonian astronomical diaries?" (UCL); ORACC, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses: Nabu; Skyscript, "Mercury: mythology"; William Lilly, Christian Astrology (1647); Jo Livingstone, "How Mercury Retrograde Went Viral," Harper's Bazaar (2022; research by Joanna Martin); Bustle, Mercury retrograde oral history (Kate Trgovac); LMU Munich, Electronic Babylonian Library; British Museum / Library of Ashurbanipal.

Music: "The Box's Secret" via AISong.org, used under license.

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A medieval Irish story says that on Samhain night, the fairy mounds open, and one warrior walks into a hill and comes back carrying summer. This year Americans will spend $13.5 billion on Halloween. So what happened in between? We follow Samhain from feasting kings and a maybe-sacred hill in County Meath, through a made-up "lord of the dead," the Church's messy calendar, kale-stalk fortune-telling, turnip lanterns, and a Welsh demon pig. Then we look at how the witch got into Halloween (it starts with confessions taken under torture), the first "tricks or treats" in print (Canada, 1917), the poisoned-candy panic, and whether anyone still celebrates the old way. Spoiler: there's a kid on the Isle of Man with a turnip.

Chapters

0:00 The night the hills open

1:26 What Samhain actually was

6:22 The god who wasn't

7:55 Did the Church steal Samhain?

9:49 Guising, kale stalks and turnip lanterns

13:02 How the witch got into Halloween

15:31 Coming to America

17:40 The first "trick or treat"

18:48 The poisoned-candy panic

20:03 Does anyone still do it the old way?

24:55 From the hills to a hot dog costume

Content note: witch trials and torture (briefly), and the 1974 poisoning of a child.

Music: "The Box's Secret" via AISong.org, used under license.

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In 1645, a young man in a small Essex town said he'd overheard witches meeting near his house. Within about two years, more than a hundred people across eastern England had been hanged. Matthew Hopkins had no official job and no real title, so how did the "Witchfinder General" end up running England's deadliest witch hunt, and why didn't anyone stop him?

Heather follows the imps of Manningtree, the towns that paid for the witchfinder's services, a court sent to make the trials fair that hanged eighteen people in one day, an eighty-year-old vicar who confessed to sinking a ship, and the legend of how Hopkins died. Was he a con man, a true believer, or a service his neighbors kept hiring?

Chapters:

00:00 The imp called Vinegar Tom

01:48 Who was Matthew Hopkins?

04:53 Manningtree, spring 1645

08:50 The Chelmsford trial

09:47 The witchfinders on tour

12:26 A bear in the garden

13:02 Twenty shillings a town

16:08 Parliament steps in

17:53 John Lowes

19:23 The vicar who pushed back

21:29 Hopkins answers back

23:30 How he really died

24:45 So what was he?

27:08 His ghost

Content note: discusses torture, sleep deprivation and executions.

Sources

• Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (2005): https://research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/publications/witchfinders-a-seventeenth-century-english-tragedy/
• Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (1647), Project Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/files/14015/14015-h/14015-h.htm
• "The devil in East Anglia: the Matthew Hopkins trials reconsidered," Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press): https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/witchcraft-in-early-modern-europe/devil-in-east-anglia-the-matthew-hopkins-trials-reconsidered/457471091C78984FFDB263B9CF2290BD
• A True Relation of the Araignment of Eighteene Witches… at St. Edmunds-bury (1645), Bodleian: https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/handle/20.500.12024/A95190?show=full
• John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcrafts (1646), Bodleian: https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/handle/20.500.12024/A85867?show=full
• Britannica, "Matthew Hopkins": https://www.britannica.com/print/article/1279664
• University of Manchester, Nehemiah Wallington's notebook: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/diary-of-witchfinder-general-trials-published-online/
• Discovering Britain (Royal Geographical Society), Manningtree trail: https://www.discoveringbritain.org/activities/east-of-england/trails/manningtree-trail.html

Thanks for listening! Follow Delusional Witch Juice wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Wednesday.

In 12th-century England, a dead man kept climbing into bed with his wife, and the whole street stayed up every night to watch for him. To understand why, we follow the strange medieval debt between the living and the dead: from Cluny’s prayers for souls, to walking corpses at Wharram Percy, to the 1517 indulgence campaign that literally put a price on salvation.

Content note: descriptions of corpses being exhumed and burned, plague, and death.

Chapters

00:00 The man who came home

01:46 Cluny and a day for the dead

04:35 When hell filed a complaint

06:21 Before purgatory had a name

07:55 William of Newburgh's walking dead

13:35 The bones at Wharram Percy

15:28 The bishop's letter

17:22 The 1517 price list

22:01 The rhyme and Luther's letter

25:09 They kept paying anyway

29:28 Why pay the dead?

Selected sources: William of Newburgh, History of English Affairs, Book 5 (trans. Stevenson); Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory; Mays et al., Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2017); the Instructio summaria and Tetzel's sermon (trans. Hillerbrand, The Reformation, 1964); Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun; John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme.

Music: "The Box's Secret" via AISong.org, used under license.

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In 2004, builders in London dug up a sealed bottle from the 1600s filled with urine, bent nails, hair, fingernail clippings and a leather heart with a nail through it. Whoever made it never explained why.

For centuries, people across England hid bottles, worn-out shoes, dead cats and carved symbols in their homes to keep witches out. Heather digs into a 1681 witch-bottle recipe, a 1682 witchcraft trial where a grieving father tried the counter-spell himself, protective marks in a room prepared for King James I, the shoe historian who started tracking hidden shoes in the 1950s, and the mummified cats nobody can fully explain. Was this magic kept secret, or was it just so normal that nobody bothered to write it down?

Content note: discussion of a child's death and of animal remains.

0:00 The bottle in Greenwich1:30 The witch-bottle recipe9:11 The trial of Jane Kent13:27 A king's bedroom17:09 Hidden shoes21:47 Cats in the walls24:44 Hidden in plain sight26:17 Why didn't anyone write it down?

Music: "The Box's Secret" via AISong.org, used under license.

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Show notes sources

• Greenwich witch bottle: LiveScience/NBC News (2009) · https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna31107319 ; Archaeology Magazine · https://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/halloween/opening_witch_bottle/
• Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), full text · https://github.com/textcreationpartnership/A42824
• Trial of Jane Kent, Old Bailey Proceedings, 1 June 1682 · https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t16820601a-11
• MOLA, witch bottles · https://www.mola.org.uk/discoveries/news/what-should-you-do-if-you-find-17th-century-witch-bottle
• National Trust, Witchmarks at Knole · https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/kent/knole/witchmarks-at-knole-and-the-gunpowder-plot ; Francis Young, "A note of caution" · https://drfrancisyoung.com/2014/11/06/the-knole-witch-marks-a-note-of-caution/
• Northampton Museums, Concealed Shoe Index · https://www.northamptonmuseums.com/info/3/collections/61/shoes-2/4 ; Ceri Houlbrook, "The Other Shoe" (2017) · https://www.research.herts.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/11997749/The_Other_Shoe_Proof.pdf
• John Schorn pilgrim badge, British Museum · https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1983-1203-2
• Brian Hoggard, "Dried Cats" · https://www.apotropaios.co.uk/dried-cats.html ; Pendle cottage cat · https://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/witches-cats-and-buildings-not-a-simple-story/
• Creswell Crags witch marks, Historic England (2019) · https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/witches-marks-discovery-largest-in-britain/

In 1848, according to her mother, an 11-year-old girl in upstate New York clapped her hands at a knocking wall and said, "Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do." And the wall knocked back. Forty years later, her sister walked onto a New York stage and cracked her toe in front of around 2,000 people to show them how she said it was done.

In between, the Victorians built a log cabin full of instruments for ghosts, tied mediums up in cabinets, took a spirit's pulse, and turned talking to the dead into a board game you could buy. This week I'm digging into Victorian séances: the rules of the spirit circle, the mediums who got caught (and the ones who didn't), how Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace ended up on opposite sides of a medium's trial, and how the pendulum, the planchette and the Ouija board let people make the call themselves. Plus a modern experiment where the Ouija board seemed to know more than the people using it.

So when the Victorians called out to the dead, who actually answered?

Chapters(00:00) Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do(01:33) Why people wanted to call the dead(07:14) The spirit room(11:04) Proof in the dark(17:04) Maggie Fox's confession(20:30) The pendulum: who's moving it?(23:25) The planchette(25:04) The Ouija board(27:35) So who answered?

The modern Pagan name for the fall equinox belongs to a Welsh man who was kidnapped when he was three nights old, imprisoned for an unknown length of time, and rescued only because one of King Arthur's impossible tasks required him to handle a magical hunting dog.

In 1974, a Pagan writer named Aidan Kelly needed a name for the autumn equinox. He built an argument for one — running through the Eleusinian Mysteries, Demeter and Persephone, a baby held in a fire, Abraham and Isaac — and landed on Mabon ap Modron. But the Welsh story does not say what Kelly said it says. Mabon is not dead when he is found, nobody named Gwydion rescues him, and the search that finds him runs through a blackbird, a stag, an owl, an eagle, and finally a salmon.

I follow the name back through the stories that built it, and find that the most interesting thing about Mabon is the part nobody can explain: why he was taken at all.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open: a baby stolen at three nights old

02:01 How Mabon got onto the calendar

05:10 Demeter, Persephone, and a child in the fire

11:05 Abraham, Isaac, and the ram

14:20 The Helen problem

15:28 Looking for a northern counterpart

16:51 The marriage quest from hell

20:43 Asking the oldest animals in the world

23:14 A loose end: who actually holds the dog?24:41 Who was Mabon before the prison?

29:33 Back to the equinox

Sources

• ​Aidan Kelly, About Naming Ostara, Litha and Mabon (Patheos, 2017) — his own account of the 1974 calendar
• ​Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Evelyn-White translation
• ​Medelhavsmuseet, The Eleusinian Mysteries
• ​Foundation of the Hellenic World, The Eleusinian Mysteries ritual
• ​Apollodorus, Library, Epitome 1.23–24
• ​Genesis 22 (Chabad Tanakh)
• ​Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 31a (Sefaria)
• ​Culhwch and Olwen, Lady Charlotte Guest translation (Robbins Library, University of Rochester)
• ​Pa gur yv y porthaur (“Arthur and the Porter”)
• ​Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, triad 52, via Siân Echard
• ​Roman Inscriptions of Britain 583 — the Ribchester dedication to Apollo Maponus
• ​Peniarth 147 — the woman at the ford

Music: “The Box's Secret” — AI-generated via AISong.org

If you want another historical rabbit hole with a suspicious amount of mythology attached, follow Delusional Witch Juice wherever you're listening.

When did Practical Magic stop being a movie and start becoming witch lore?

The 1998 film gave us the Owens house, rosemary by the garden gate, midnight margaritas, family grimoires, suspiciously perfect hair, and enough cozy witch imagery to fuel Pinterest for approximately three lifetimes.

But a lot of what we now associate with the Practical Magic version of witchcraft wasn't an ancient tradition. It was fiction.

In this episode of Delusional Witch Juice, we're getting into how a box-office flop slowly became one of the biggest influences on the modern witch aesthetic, and how the internet helped remove the quotation marks around fictional witchcraft.

We’re talking about:

• Why Practical Magic originally flopped
• The very real folklore mixed into the movie's fictional magic
• The alleged curse placed on the production
• Why the Owens house feels weirdly historically authentic despite never actually existing
• How Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and WitchTok turned movie imagery into “witch knowledge”
• Why repetition can make something fictional feel traditional
• And what happens when Practical Magic 2 enters an internet already obsessed with the Owens aesthetic

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 Cold Open
• 02:57 The Movie Did Not Become a Blueprint Overnight
• 05:43 How Repetition Turns an Image Into a Fact
• 08:01 The Movie’s Actual Magic Trick
• 13:24 The House That Looked Like Proof
• 16:08 The Internet Removed the Plot
• 20:09 When the Feed Became the Grimoire
• 24:49 Does Fictional Lore Become Real Lore?
• 27:28 So What Happens When the Sequel Arrives?

RESEARCH + FURTHER READING

Alice Hoffman — Practical Magic (1995)

Claudia Williams — “The Practical Magic House: Unveiling the Design Secrets of This Enchanting Dwelling,” Architectural Digest

David Sims — “Thank the ’90s for Practical Magic,” The Atlantic

Lila Shapiro — “The True Story of How Practical Magic Got Cursed by a Witch,” Vulture

Chris Miller — “How Modern Witches Enchant TikTok: Intersections of Digital, Consumer, and Material Culture(s) on #WitchTok,” Religions

Museum of Witchcraft and Magic — “The Witches Hat”

Museum of London Archaeology — research on concealed witch bottles and ritual objects

Follow Delusional Witch Juice on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, subscribe on YouTube for full video episodes, and follow on Instagram and TikTok for clips, strange history, folklore, and whatever rabbit hole I fall into next.

And if you know somebody who owns the margarita glasses, planted rosemary beside the garden gate, or has spent twenty years trying to recreate the Owens kitchen... send them this episode.

Why is regular full-moon water considered magical, but eclipse water is treated like the LaCroix of chaos?

In this episode of Delusional Witch Stews, Heather investigates where our beliefs about full moons, moon water, and “chaotic eclipse energy” actually come from. We’re talking lunar madness, historically inaccurate werewolves, modern Wiccan esbats, celestial dragons, moon-eating jaguars, Mesopotamian eclipse omens, and the deeply inconvenient question: should you make eclipse water or not?

The answer is less about a universal witchcraft rule and more about the story you believe the eclipse is telling.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Tonight’s lunar eclipse
00:20 The usual full-moon rules
01:11 Why is eclipse water considered dangerous?
02:08 Why humans think the full moon is powerful
04:48 Werewolves and modern moon folklore
06:17 Full moons, Wicca, and esbats
08:09 Where did moon water come from?
10:14 The science of a lunar eclipse
11:42 Dragons, jaguars, and monsters eating the moon
14:30 Mesopotamian eclipse omens
17:28 Why eclipses became symbols of chaos
19:02 Is eclipse water actually dangerous?
21:12 When magical symbolism meets physics
23:12 Should you make eclipse water?
24:49 Two different stories about the moon
26:09 Closing

RESEARCH & FURTHER READING

• NASA — August 27–28, 2026 Deep Partial Lunar Eclipse
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5672

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art — The Solar Eclipse and the Substitute King
https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/solar-eclipse-substitute-king

• PubMed — The Influence of the Lunar Cycle on Psychiatric Emergency Consultations
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41845243/

• PubMed — No Effect of Lunar Cycle on Psychiatric Admissions or Emergency Evaluations
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17256692/

• Scott Cunningham — The Complete Book of Incense, Oils & Brews

If you enjoyed this trip down the lunar rabbit hole, follow Delusional Witch Stews and share the episode with the witch in your life who already has a jar sitting outside.