A true story--believe it or not!

Water Witches


I guess you could call us a family of witches. It all started that day many years ago when Dad and his two brothers went to my grandmother’s house to work on her plumbing. Dad took my brother and me along as well. We were drafted into service and spent a good part of the day crawling around under the house running errands and looking for pipes. It was kind of interesting down there—if also a bit dirty and creepy.

At one point they needed to find a water line that ran out into the yard. Nobody could remember exactly where it was supposed to run. Dad’s oldest brother suggested “witching” for it. He went to his pickup truck and brought out a pair of welding rods.

You’ve probably seen pictures of dowsers searching for underground water sources with forked sticks. A variant on this involves using two metal rods, each with a bend near one end to make a kind of handle. The dowser holds one rod in each hand, gripping them very lightly so that they can swing freely. Then he or she walks back and forth across the search area and sees whether the rods move together and cross or move apart.

My uncle soon found a spot in the yard where his welding rods crossed repeatedly. Dad and their younger brother each took turns and found the same thing happening. Finally they dug at the spot—and found the water line they were looking for.

Now, being from a family of devout Christians does not mean that you uncritically accept every paranormal claim that comes along. Quite the contrary, we’ve always tended to be pretty skeptical regarding superstitions and odd claims. We weren’t the sort of people who really “believed” in dowsing. And yet Dad and his brothers had all obtained what looked like a real result with it.

Traditional dowsing for wells is easy enough to explain away. If an area has a viable water table at a reachable depth, you can dig or drill pretty much anywhere and find water. The old well dowsers could hardly have missed! But here was a case of somebody using dowsing rods to find a precise spot.

That set off a bit of a family vogue for water witching. Dad and his younger brother each made pairs of dowsing rods by putting bends in lengths of lightweight metal wire and began fiddling around with them. Dad quickly lost interest, but his brother soon got quite a result in his own back yard.

He walked around the yard trying to see whether his rods could locate the pipes he knew were buried back there. In one spot he kept seeing the rods cross, even though there weren’t supposed to be any pipes in that area. Eventually he became curious enough to dig. He found a drainpipe that he had not known was there.

The oddest result of all occurred not long afterward. Dad and my brother were out for the evening. Mom and I were the only ones at home. She was in the living room; I was in my room upstairs. I had gotten hold of Dad’s dowsing rods and decided to try them out by walking back and forth across the floor of my room. I knew that when Dad had built the house he had clustered all the plumbing in one fairly limited area for efficiency’s sake. There were no pipes of any kind on the side of the house where I was walking.

I was conducting a control experiment. Around 1980 several professional dowsers—people who were supposed to be really good at it—agreed to have their abilities scientifically tested. They took turns walking around with their assorted rods, sticks, pendulums, etc. in a field beneath which had been planted a network of pipes. As each dowser walked the field one or another of the pipes had a flow of water. The subject was supposed to try to mark out the path of the “live” pipe. All failed miserably.

The explanation for why their dowsing instruments seemed to move was that they had been subconsciously making them move. For instance, if you hold a pair of rods like I was using out in front of you it takes only a very slight, imperceptible tip forward or backward to make them cross or uncross. In my little experiment that evening I was trying to see how much tilting it took to make the rods cross. I wasn’t having much luck making them cross. But they kept crossing on their own when I passed back and forth over a certain spot in the floor. I couldn’t figure out what in the world was going on.

After a bit I walked downstairs and into the living room—and saw something there that arrested my attention. Unknown to me, Mom had gotten herself a glass of soda. When she finished it she had left the glass and ice cubes sitting on the coffee table. It sat directly beneath the spot in the floor of my room where the rods had kept crossing. I had, apparently, detected the presence of three or four melting ice cubes through the floor, subflooring, and downstairs ceiling!

In the decades since I’ve wondered what could have happened. I still can’t say that I really believe in dowsing. I suspect that if I’d put my “abilities” to a scientific test I’d have failed as badly as the dowsing pros did in 1980. And yet there’s no getting around the fact that I seemed to have gotten a pretty startling result. Those rods had crossed repeatedly over a spot where I had no idea I would find water, without my trying to make them do so. If it was a coincidence, it was a pretty remarkable one.

I do know this much. I’ve never tried water witching since.

LOL Now if only you could use that talent for oil!

Angela enjoyed hearing your story.