What Are Victorian Murder Bottles? Why Your Kid Might Be Making One At Home
Last Saturday, I was sorting through the mountain of laundry and backpack clutter that accumulates in our mudroom by the end of the week, when my hand hit something hard, lumpy, and wrapped entirely in gray duct tape. It was a 16-ounce plastic water bottle, with half a dozen tiny pinpricks poked through the cap, and it shifted like there was all kinds of small stuff inside. My 11-year-old son Jax rounded the corner just as I was turning it over to read the label, and his face went that specific shade of pre-teen embarrassed pink. “Don’t throw that away,” he mumbled. “That’s my murder bottle.”
Murder what? I’d heard of fidget toys, slime, even the trend where kids glue all their old toys together to make a giant stress ball, but I’d never heard of murder bottles. He pulled out his phone, showed me his For You Page, and sure enough, there are hundreds of thousands of videos tagged murderbottle, kids all over the country peeling back duct tape to show off their contents, walking through the steps of the tradition. It’s exactly the Victorian murder bottle (also called a witch bottle) that I’d read about in a folk history elective in college. The core idea is simple: you put items connected to the person who wronged you inside, seal it up, hide or bury it, and that’s your curse.
My first instinct was to roll my eyes and tell him it was ridiculous, toss it in the trash. I even opened my mouth to say “we don’t do that kind of stuff here.” But then I stopped, because he was shifting from foot to foot, like he was waiting for me to tell him his feelings were stupid – which I’ve done before when I’m in a hurry to get chores done. So I asked him who it was for. He admitted it was for his travel soccer coach, who benched him for the entire regional playoff game three weeks earlier, then told him in front of the whole team he “wasn’t game ready fast enough” to play. Jax had practiced twice a week all summer, missed three family barbecues to make training, so that stung. Bad.
He said half the kids in his homeroom have one. There’s a girl who made one for the cheerleading captain who spread a rumor she cheated on a test. A boy made one for his dad who forgot to show up to his birthday dinner. No one’s actually planning to hurt anyone, he said. It’s just… something you do.
That’s when I remembered what I’d learned about the original Victorian murder bottles. They weren’t just for evil curses, most of the time. They were made by working people, by women, by anyone who didn’t have the power to stand up to someone who hurt them. A maid who was abused by her master couldn’t report him in 1880, not without losing her job and her home. So she made a murder bottle. A farmer who got cheated out of his land by a wealthy landowner couldn’t take him to court, so he made a bottle. It was never about actually killing someone. It was about taking back a little bit of power when you had none.
That clicked. This trend isn’t some new sign that kids are getting more violent. It’s exactly the same outlet it was 150 years ago. Kids these days have so little control over their lives, and so many unspoken rules about how they’re supposed to act. They’re supposed to be respectful to coaches and teachers, even when those adults are unfair. They’re supposed to be nice to other kids, even when those kids are bullies. They’re supposed to get over hurt feelings fast, not hold onto anger, because anger makes everyone uncomfortable. So what do they do? They make a murder bottle. It’s safe, it’s secret, it doesn’t hurt anyone, and it lets them hold that anger instead of shoving it down where it festers.
I asked Jax if I could see what he put inside. He peeled back a corner of the duct tape and dumped it on the mudroom bench: a broken acrylic nail he’d ripped off when he tripped on the field before that game, a crumpled scrap of the sticker the coach put on every kid’s water bottle, the printed slip of paper that listed Jax as “alternate” for every single playoff game, and a tiny folded note that just said “you were wrong”. No poison, no razor blades, nothing dangerous. Just stuff that held the hurt he’d been carrying around.
We sat on the bench for 20 minutes after that, and he talked about how he wanted to yell at the coach after the game, but he knew that would get him kicked off the team. How all the other kids felt bad for him but no one wanted to say anything because the coach is the one who picks the starting lineups. He even cried a little, which he hasn’t done in front of me since he was 8. When he was done talking, he said he wanted to bury it in the back corner of the yard, by the old fence where no one walks. I grabbed a trowel and helped him dig the hole.
I mentioned this to a fellow middle school teacher friend of mine a few days later, and she said she’s confiscated four murder bottles from kids’ lockers this semester. She used to just throw them away and call parents to warn them about “aggressive behavior”. After we talked, she changed that. Now, if she finds one, she sits with the kid during homeroom, asks them who it’s for and what’s inside, and if it’s not dangerous, she lets them keep it in a locked bin in her closet. At the end of every month, the whole group buries whatever is in the bin out behind the school’s garden. She told me last week that more kids have opened up to her about being bullied or treated unfairly by adults in the past month than she had all of last year.
The thing is, I get why parents panic when they hear about murder bottles. The name is creepy, it sounds violent, it’s easy to jump to the worst conclusion. But I’ve learned that most of the time, when kids do weird, seemingly scary stuff like this, it’s not a sign of something broken. It’s a sign they’re trying to fix something on their own, when they don’t have the words or the power to fix it any other way.
Concrete steps I’ve started following, that any parent or teacher can too: First, pause before you throw anything away. Don’t react to the name. Second, ask if you can see what’s inside, and ask what each thing means. You don’t have to fix the problem right away, just listen. Third, if there’s nothing dangerous inside, let them finish their ritual. Let them bury it, or keep it in their closet, whatever they need to do. The point isn’t the curse, it’s the release.
Last weekend, Jax got 10 minutes of play time in a scrimmage, and he came home bouncing off the walls, talking about how he assisted on two goals. He didn’t mention the murder bottle once. It’s still buried back by the fence, and I don’t think it did anything to the coach. But it did what it was supposed to do for Jax. It gave him a place to put his anger until he didn’t need to hold it anymore. I still check weird wrapped things in backpacks, but I don’t throw them away first anymore. Some of the weirdest old traditions end up being exactly what kids need right now.
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