What Are Victorian Murder Bottles? Teacher Explains Why Kids Love This Trend And How To Respond
Last Tuesday I was kneeling by the back supply bin in my 7th grade art room, picking up crumpled clay scraps and half-dried glue sticks, when my hand hit something small, hard, wrapped in crinkled black notebook paper. I pulled it out and turned it over: a tiny 2-inch glass bottle, neck sealed with lumpy blue candle wax, the handwritten label scrawled in silver gel pen read “MURDER BOTTLE FOR LILA WHO STOLE MY SKZ PHOTOCARD”.
I’d first heard the phrase “murder bottle” a year earlier on a history podcast, talking about 19th century folk magic. Back then, people would fill glass bottles with nails, broken glass, and small poppets of people they hated, then bury them under their homes to curse whoever had wronged them. They called them murder bottles, and they’d been out of common practice for more than a century. Until now, apparently.
By the end of the week, I’d spotted a dozen more around school. Kids passed them in hallways between classes, tucked them into the back of pencil pouches, and the local Walmart’s craft section had even started a small display of bulk mini glass bottles priced at $1 each, marketed specifically for the trend. That same Friday, I got an email from a parent that spelled out the panic a lot of adults are feeling right now. Her 11 year old had brought a murder bottle home in her backpack, she wrote, and she was convinced this meant my art class was encouraging occult activity and violent behavior. She wanted me to ban all glass bottles from the room immediately.
The topic came up again at the PTA meeting the next week. Half a dozen parents gathered around the snack table after the official meeting, voicing the same concerns. Why call it murder if it’s not dangerous? Is this a sign our kids are getting more aggressive? One mom said she’d thrown her son’s bottle in the trash and grounded him for a week, and he still wouldn’t talk to her about why he’d made it.
The next Monday, I pulled Mia, the 12 year old who’d left that first bottle in my supply bin, aside after class. I didn’t yell, I just set it on the table between us and asked her what it was all about. She shrugged, pink-cheeked, and said it wasn’t that big of a deal. “Lila stole my photocard that I waited three months for,” she said. “I was so mad I wanted to scream. But if I yelled at her, everyone would say I’m overreacting. So I wrote all the bad stuff I wanted to say on little pieces of paper, put them in the bottle, and sealed it. It got the mad out. I don’t actually want her to die. We sat together at lunch yesterday.”
That’s the thing no one is talking about when they panic about murder bottles. This isn’t a new dangerous trend. It’s just the latest iteration of something kids have done forever. When I was 12 it was slam books, where we wrote all our mean and petty feelings about the people we didn’t like. Ten years ago it was burn lists. Now it’s murder bottles. The edgy name is half the point—middle schoolers live for that little rush of being forbidden, of talking about something adults think is inappropriate. It’s how they process big, messy feelings that we don’t let them talk about out loud. We tell kids all the time to be kind, to not hold grudges, to not say mean things. But that doesn’t make the anger go away. It just makes it hide.
After a month of watching this trend play out in my classroom and talking to parents about it, I have three small, concrete things I tell people to do when they find a murder bottle in their kid’s stuff. First, don’t panic and throw it away before you ask about it. Instead of opening with “why do you have this violent thing?” try “this looks interesting, tell me what it’s for.” Nine times out of ten, you’ll get a story about a petty grievance or a hurt feeling that your kid hasn’t known how to say out loud. One mom told me last week she found a murder bottle her 13 year old made for the kid who’s been bullying him for a year. Before she found it, he’d just said everything was fine at school. The bottle was the first opening she’d had to actually talk about how miserable he was.
Second, set clear, simple boundaries, instead of an all-out ban. The rule I use in my classroom is: you can make whatever you want for yourself, but you can’t leave a murder bottle somewhere the person it’s about will find it. You can’t show it off to other people to scare or hurt them. That’s it. If it’s crossing into bullying territory, that’s a problem. If it’s just sitting in your kid’s desk or their closet at home, it’s not hurting anyone.
Third, don’t fix it for them. You don’t have to talk them out of being mad, or make them throw the bottle away. The whole point of the thing is that it’s their space to hold the bad feeling. They just need you to know it’s there, if they want to talk more about it.
It’s funny, isn’t it? History really does repeat itself. Victorian working class people made these bottles to bottle up all the anger and hurt they couldn’t say out loud, when they had no power to change the things that were wrong in their lives. Now 12 year olds make them to bottle up the anger and hurt they can’t say out loud, when everyone’s telling them they shouldn’t be that mad about a stolen photocard or a mean rumor. It’s the same human impulse, just a new generation.
I started a small free bad feeling station in the back of my art room a couple weeks ago. I bought a big pack of mini bottles, put out scrap paper and markers, and a locked box to keep them in if kids don’t want to take them home. Any kid can write whatever they want, seal it up, and leave it there, no questions asked. We’ve got 19 bottles in the box right now. Some have edgy murder names, some just say “I hate my math test” or “I miss my grandma.” A couple parents still say it’s inappropriate, that I’m encouraging bad behavior. I don’t argue with them. I just tell them what I’ve seen: kids don’t stop feeling bad when we tell them they can’t have a place to put their bad feelings. They just stop telling us about them. Right now, this is working. We’ll see how it goes next semester.
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