There are so many traditions in America that sound totally made up, but you’ll be surprised to learn that some of the darkest ones are actually entirely real.
A coffin comes flying down Main Street
October is a strange month for the residents in Manitou Springs, Colorado. That’s the month when teams push coffin-shaped carts down Manitou Avenue at full speed, and one of the riders wears a costume. Not just any costume, however. They dress up as a woman named Emma Crawford.
Emma was a real, local woman who died from tuberculosis in 1891. She was buried on Red Mountain. Soil erosion disturbed her grave years later and caused her remains to go racing down the mountainside in 1929. Then, in 1995, people began doing the Emma Crawford race. It doesn’t use her actual coffin, thankfully, but it’s still a pretty dark tradition.
Dirt meant for an enemy
Graveyard dirt seems like something from a bad horror movie. Turns out, it has a real place in Louisiana folk magic, and Hoodoo practitioners will collect the stuff from a genuine grave. They’ll then mix it into powders that they use for harmful spells, including something called goofer dust.
Goofer dust is used for protection as well as cursing. Who was buried matters quite a lot, as Hoodoo practitioners will choose a violent person’s grave for one purpose, and then the grave of someone loved or respected for another. They have a reason for picking that grave.
An owl watches something burn
Anyone who’s been to the woods near Monte Rio, California, might know that there’s a 40-foot-tall owl statue there. It’s the site of a very odd ceremony every year. Yes, at Bohemian Grove, members of the private Bohemian Club stage something called the Cremation of Care.
They do this in the lake beneath the owl shrine, and they carry a human-shaped figure representing ‘Dull Care’ there. They then burn the figure. The whole thing is shrouded in secrecy, but some major historical figures have taken part in it, like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
Deliverance behind church doors
Ignite International Ministries in Seymour, Tennessee, is the site of a very unique kind of church ritual. It’s something called deliverance ministry. You have to book your place to attend, and it involves praying over someone believed to be suffering from demonic oppression.
Participants try to remove that dark spiritual presence from the person. According to the church, people should get deliverance after experiencing things like nightmares and torment, along with voices and generational curses. It’s something the ministry advertises openly now.
An offering to the orishas
You might be surprised to learn that animal sacrifice is still a real part of some SanterÃa ceremonies in South Florida. It’s especially common in communities around the city of Hialeah, although some people in small towns in the area practice it, too. People will offer animals like chickens and goats to the orishas, or divine spirits, during religious rites.Â
They usually kill the animals by cutting major blood vessels in the neck, and in some ceremonies, they’ll also cook the meat. Then they eat it. The city government did try to restrict the practice, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against these ordinances. Interestingly enough, SanterÃa itself is an Afro-Caribbean religion that mixes Yoruba with Roman Catholicism.
Dancing until the piercing releases
The Lakota Sun Dance is quite an interesting sight, as it includes things like prayer and dancing. But there’s a darker side. Some participants undergo piercing, where small cuts are made in their chests, and wooden pegs are inserted. They then have similar fastenings placed through the skin.
Participants use rawhide thongs to connect them to a central pole, and the dancer pulls backward. It gets worse, though. The ceremony continues until the skin eventually releases, often by tearing, and it’s as brutal as it sounds. It’s treated as a personal religious offering in the ceremony.
Hanging from the skin
Don’t try looking for any hidden meaning in the name ‘body suspension.’ The practice is exactly what it sounds like, people hang their entire weight from hooks pushed through their skin. It’s something popular among American suspension groups.
They’ll place the hooks through the back, chest, knees, or legs. It all depends on how they want to hang. Then, they use ropes and rigging to slowly lift them clear of the ground. Some people do it because it’s part of a ritual or endurance test. Others do it just to see what hanging there feels like.
Crosses cut below the shoulders
There used to be only one way new members could join the secret society called Hermanos Penitentes in northern New Mexico. You had to get four or six little crosses carved into your back. Initiates would get these cuts just below their shoulders, and sometimes they were made with pieces of flint.Â
But that’s just the start of the pain, as some accounts claim they prevented their wounds from healing completely. The goal was to open them again around Holy Week. Some sources claim it happened mainly in Questa, although it seems to have occurred in the wider Taos County area, too.
Screaming until the demons leave
There’s a ritual at Word of Faith Fellowship in Spindale, North Carolina, called ‘blasting.’ It’s worse than it sounds. The tradition involves people crowding around someone and literally yelling prayers at them from a close range. It usually lasts a long time.
Participants believed it would help them to force out demons, and some rituals also involved holding down or striking the ‘possessed.’ One former member, Matthew Fenner, said a session lasted nearly two hours for him. It’s a whole lot of screaming.
The rod was supposed to save them
Most parents punish their children by telling them to go to their room. The Twelve Tribes community in Island Pond, Vermont, does something much worse. They have a ritual involving striking a thin, flexible rod on a child’s bottom. Yes, really.
They believe disobedience may have eternal consequences and cause children to be damned, so they perform this ritual to ‘save’ them. It got to the point where the authorities removed 112 children in 1984 from the community after allegations of abuse. They were later returned that same day, however, because there wasn’t enough individual evidence for each case.Â
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
6 lost rituals once used to summon guardian angels
People used to lock themselves away for months and sleep beside sacred symbols hundreds of years ago, all because they believed they’d contact their guardian.
