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Several restless spirits are believed to play host at two residence halls and one fraternity house. Click to expand photos A group of 30 civic and religious leaders founded Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington in 1850, and construction began six years later. The United Methodist Church partially supports it, but its administration is secular. Its…
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When pioneers discovered strange balls in the stomach of their livestock, they reached for an age-old explanation: witchcraft. Although witches were believed to bewitch by a variety of nonphysical means, occasionally they required physical aids to commit their maleficium. These included hardened spheres of animal hair called hoodoo balls or witch balls, as well as wreaths,…
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How historians and journalists used witchcraft to ridicule immigrants, African Americans, and poor rural whites. Nineteenth and early-twentieth century journalists and historians considered the persistence of witch beliefs in Illinois an embarrassing footnote in history, when they acknowledged it at all. Convinced of American progress, historians dismissed witchcraft as a “miserable superstition” and an “imaginary…
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How the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses influenced a generation of occult beliefs in Illinois. Successive waves of European immigration left their imprint on the Prairie State, from the French and their Afro-Caribbean slaves in the 1700s, to the Scotch-Irish and Anglo-American Southerners in the early 1800s, Germans in the 1840s and ‘50s, and the great…
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M.A. Kleen 