What Are Victorian Murder Bottles? How Parents And Teachers Can Respond To This TikTok Trend
Last Wednesday, I was packing up my 5th grade classroom after parent-teacher conferences, when my boot caught on a crumpled backpack leaning by the reading nook. The zipper was half unzipped, and when the bag tipped over, a dozen fuzzy stickers, a half-eaten pack of Sour Patch Kids, and a tiny thumb-sized glass bottle rolled across the carpet. I picked it up: corked tight, full of cloudy dark wax, dotted with tiny straight pins sticking through the glass, and what looked like a splinter of wood and a tiny chip of red ceramic inside. The side had someone’s name scribbled in pencil: Milo R.
I immediately thought of the headline I’d scrolled the week before: Victorian murder bottles are back. I’d rolled my eyes then, another weird TikTok trend, nothing to do with me. Now here one was, in my classroom.
Javi, the backpack’s owner, showed up early the next morning to grab his stuff for a field trip, and I pulled him aside by the art cart. He turned bright red the second I held up the bottle, and immediately started stammering that he didn’t mean anything, it was just a joke. I told him to slow down, I wasn’t calling the office, I just wanted him to tell me what it was.
Turns out he’d watched a 15-second TikTok tutorial that explained Victorian murder bottles were 19th-century folk magic: you fill a bottle with bits of your enemy’s stuff, pins to curse them, and hide it to bring bad luck to people who’ve hurt you. Javi’s enemy was Milo, who’d been pushing him off the blacktop swing every day for three weeks, and had stolen his limited-edition Minecraft eraser twice. Javi had told the recess aide twice, but nothing changed, so he’d spent $2 on the tiny glass bottle at the craft store, made it over the weekend, and brought it to school because “it works better if you keep it close to where he is.”
That’s when it hit me how totally normal this is, even with the weird, alarming name. When I was 11, my friends and I made yarn voodoo dolls of the mean girls who spread rumors about us, stuck them with straight pins, and hid them in our lockers. My grandma told me when she was a kid, everyone had a small “hate notebook” where you wrote down all the annoying things people did to you, to get the mad out. History really does repeat itself—we just gave an old kid trick a new old name, and suddenly everyone’s panicking about it.
I’ve been teaching long enough to know that the first impulse most adults have when they see something called a “murder bottle” is to panic. We call it a threat, we suspend the kid, we search every locker in the grade, and we send a panicked email to parents warning them about the dangerous new trend. But that’s all reaction, not response. The bottle isn’t the problem. The problem is that Javi had been asking for help with a problem for three weeks, and no one did anything, so he found his own way to feel in control of his anger.
That’s the big takeaway for other parents and teachers I’ve talked to about this. If you find a murder bottle in your kid’s backpack or your classroom, here’s what actually works, step by step. First, don’t yell, don’t call it dangerous right off the bat. Ask the kid to tell you about it: just “Can you walk me through why you made this, and who it’s for?” That’s it. Most kids will open up right away, because they’re already half embarrassed they got caught. Second, don’t dismiss their anger. Don’t say “It’s just a stupid bottle, why are you so mad about a swing?” Instead, say “It makes total sense that you’d want to do something to feel better when someone’s bothering you every day. That sucks.” Javi told me later that no one had said that to him yet—everyone just told him to ignore Milo, that it wasn’t that big a deal.
Third, fix the actual problem, not just the symbol. Javi and I walked out to recess that day, talked to the recess aide, and set up a rotating swing schedule so the same kids didn’t hog all the good spots. Then we had a quick chat with Milo, who didn’t even realize Javi was that upset—he just thought they were messing around. He gave Javi a new eraser from his own collection, and that was that. As for the bottle, I didn’t force Javi to throw it away in front of me, which would have made him lose face in front of his friends. I told him this was a way he dealt with being mad, which was understandable, but we don’t keep things meant to wish harm on other people at school. He could throw it away himself, or I could keep it in my desk until the end of the year if he didn’t want anyone to see him get rid of it. He threw it in the trash on his way out, and that was that.
It’s been a month now, and I’ve seen three more murder bottles pop up in my classroom, all for different kids who’ve been picked on or left out. None of them have been actual threats. Last week, I saw two girls tucking theirs in their backpacks after talking about the rumor that was going around about them. They told me they already talked to the counselor about the rumor, this was just “getting the mad out before we did anything else.” I didn’t take them. I just nodded and walked away. Two days later, the bottles were in the classroom trash.
This trend isn’t some new sign that kids are getting more violent. It’s just the same old thing kids have always done: find a creative, slightly spooky outlet for the anger that adults haven’t gotten around to addressing yet. The name sounds scary, but the bottle’s just a bottle. The real work is always the same: listen to the kid behind it. I still check in when I see one, and I still make sure the actual conflict gets sorted out, but I don’t panic anymore. Some things really do just stay the same, even when they get a dramatic new old name.
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