#witch ball

[treehuggingwitchypractice]

This first full moon of 2026 I had a friends witchcrafting party and made witch balls for luck, protection, prosperity (and more).

Each ball turned out so unique. I love them.

Our ingredients:

My final ball:

[carbon-heart]

My personal witch ball, a glass float made during a glassblowing class in Oregon.

[hiccupdragonbornhaddock]

I made this witch ball for our front door, with protection in mind -- I think it turned out pretty. It contains lavender, amethyst, rose buds, cinnamon, rosemary, black pepper, star anise, and a protection sigil.

[soldierofhekate]

Dream Night

[ltwilliammowett]

Blue Bristol witch ball handpainted with a ship and [...] the lass that love’s a sailor and For my Sister on the back, late 18th - early 19th century

A witch ball is a hollow sphere of glass. Historically, witch balls were hung in cottage windows in 17th and 18th century England to ward off evil spirits, witches, evil spells, ill fortune and bad spirits.

Superstitious European seafarers valued the talismanic power of witch's balls to protect their homes and the For my Sister on the back suggests that the ball was made by her seafaring brother.

[sixminutestoriesblog]

witch balls

When I was a child visiting little tiny New England towns was different than it is today. These days when I walk down a carefully curated Main Street in some wind swept, coastal town you can barely smell the salt in the air anymore and every shop you step into is pristine air-conditioned and smells like a department store used to, all faint traces of new plastic and underlying pungent scent of whatever it is they paint large shipments of clothes with to keep them during shipping. Most of them are still set up to look old, in fact many of them are in old buildings, but the weight of all those years isn't really allowed to show through. It's all ocean cottage core now, neat and white painted and artistic sea glass and sandpipers in simplified wooden statues, wire legs frozen instead of blurring with motion. Don't get me wrong. I love ocean cottagecore. I would decorate my whole house in it if I had the money. And the little shops, pristine and pretty, absolutely have a sweet appeal to them, not willing to give up their personality for the sterilization of 'Big City' box stores. I do miss however, what tourist shops in those same little towns used to be. Less plastic magnets for the refrigerator shaped like whales and sweatshirts of labrador retrievers declaring them a specific colored Dog and more -

half forgotten not-quite-antique shop, hidden down some narrow salt smelling alley where the stones that make up the road are uneven and there's a dusty smell to the cracks of the wood floors that never goes away. As a child going to a 'tourist shop' in one of these towns was like walking into a magic shop, a true magic shop, with books of breathtakingly beautiful paper dolls as detailed as any old fairy book illustration, imitation scrimshawed whale teeth, old time candy, books about lady pirates and clever glass marbles full of painted fish. The things those old shops offered felt local, magical, impossible to find in any other town in the entire world. Childhood colors everything more vivid than it probably was but I still think of longing and a child's minor spending money in a world of treasures when I remember those shops.

In one of those shops, as a child, I saw my first glass fishing float.

At the time it was being sold as a Portuguese fishing ball, a better buoyant for nets and lines than cork or wood. I remember, distinctly, the surprising weight of it when I picked it up. I was used to glass being fragile, light, airy. The fishing ball was none of those. It had a weight to it and a solid feel to it that said it was fit to ride the choppy waters of the icy Atlantic and do its duty, tide in and tide out. Storms weren't going to break and drown this glass. It would ride the waves forever and when it finally broke free of its net, it would find the shore, in itself or in pieces as polished sea glass. These balls were sturdy and I fell in love with them. The first time I could finally afford one was a triumph and the rare times I managed to find them in shops, as the years and the advance of more proper 'souvenirs' advances, I snatched them up even if it meant my spending money for the rest of the trip would be lean. Finally, eventually, the balls disappeared from the last shop and I thought my meager hoard was all I'd ever see of them again, an old relic that was already being phased out before I'd even discovered them as a child.

Imagine my surprise when, years and years later, a friend, helping me fix my bathroom from some water damage, saw one of them where I had it hanging in the window and seemed surprised to recognize it. He called it a 'witch ball'. I corrected him but he was adamant. And so, thanks to the internet, I rediscovered my glass fishing floats - with a new name and a new story to go with it.

Witch balls are hollow glass balls. They can range in size, I've seen some as small as rounded shot glasses and the older ones seem to be about as large as my fishing balls, which is about the size of a cantaloupe. Like fishing balls, they're not made for perfection, in fact, the bubbles and imperfections in the glass blowing process are considered part of their selling points. They tend to range in colors, with modern day witch balls being an absolute riot of colors or a beautiful gradual shift from one color to the next. They've been around for quite a long time as well. There are accounts of witch balls hanging in English houses, especially sea-faring ones, as far back as the 17th and 18th century, though they were often known as 'watch balls' back then and not quite as riotously colorful as modern ones, tending to be more often made of green or blue glass. Sometimes they would have salt or herbs put in them before they were sealed but the main thing witch balls needed were stands. In fact, something I just learned, the way to tell a kugel (friendship) ball and a witch ball apart is to look for the glass strands inside the ball. Witch balls need those strands to be effect. Witch balls are, after all, created to be traps.

The idea was that you hung your ball inside your house, often in an eastern window but sometimes from the rafters or set on top of a stand. Than, when evil things tried to enter the house in the night, they would be distracted and then captivated by the way the light of the moon played against the glass of the ball. Sometimes, the evil had to touch the glass, sometimes being ensnared simply happened automatically once their gaze was fixed on it. Either way, the evil would find itself pulled into the glass, trapped in the maze of the strands inside and unable to escape. There it would remain either until the morning sunrise burned it away or until the glass ball was broken, freeing it to continue its harm. Not all witch balls worked that way. In some cases, the glass was made to be more reflective with the idea that evil things, as we've already read, didn't have reflections and couldn't bear the reminder or that the glass would turn aside the evil gaze and reflect it back on its creator.

There is some speculation that glass Christmas ornaments may be tied into something similar as well, although, humans also simply like hanging sparking objects up for no reason but 'pretty' as well.

Bottle Trees serve the same general purpose and can still be found in parts of the Southern US, a tradition brought over from the Congo during slavery times. The belief is that blue bottles hung on tree branches will entrance and capture evil spirits inside their depths and hold them there where they can't cause any harm until the morning sun burns them away with its rising.

As a last note, I should point out that calling my collection 'fishing balls' wasn't necessarily wrong. While some of my later purchases did have strands in them, my early ones from childhood didn't. Apparently there's a very invested set of people who collect Japanese fishing floats on the West Coast of the US and Canada as well.

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

If you like crystal balls as much as I do, gaze at my collection of vintage crystal ball imagery.

[ducissatenebrarum]

Witch balls are globes of glass, with a hole in the top, often suspended in doorways or windows. They were made in most glass factories across Europe as glassblowers’ ‘whimsies’ or showpieces and then later sold as decorative items. 

They appeared in a variety of geographical contexts and had numerous uses, but the name itself refers to the belief that these balls were protective devices that could ward off evil spirits, especially the evil eye and the malevolent influence of the witch. The idea that witch balls could offer magical protection appears to be an innovation of the early nineteenth century – but the ways in which they were used drew upon a much older tradition of apotropaic magic and its attendant fear of witchcraft. The name witch ball is probably a corruption of ‘watch ball’  – an allusion to their use in reflecting an extended panorama beyond the usual line of sight – helping people, in essence, to look around corners. This made them especially useful for shopkeepers to spot thieves, for householders to see who was coming up the garden path, or for parents who reportedly hung them in nurseries or above cradles. These prosaic uses unlocked their potential ritual value – from objects of vigilance and observation, ‘watch balls’ became ‘witch balls’, and developed into objects of magical protection. This custom extends to other types of glass containers – ‘witch bottles', for example, were stuffed full of silk threads, their suspension loops indicating that they were hung up as charms in the home. Interestingly, some withc bottles are glass fire-extinguisher vessels; devices used as safeguards against fire and then requisitioned for protection against witchcraft.

It is believed that after being buried, the bottle captures evil which is impaled on the pins and needles, drowned by the wine, and sent away by the rosemary. 

 An explanation of the threads inside the witch ball is offered by modern folklore: evil spirits, attracted to the shiny surface of the ball, become mesmerized by the reflection and upon touching it are caught and imprisoned by the strands inside. Household in the district would hang ‘golden witch ball[s]’ to repel witches. There are many variations regarding the proper meaning and treatment of witch balls. In some accounts the witch, seeing the reflection of her intended victim in the witch ball – and being naturally attracted to the shiny surface – would curse the reflection rather than the intended victim, and so the ball defused the spell. It was also thought that evil influences accumulated as dust on the ball and therefore regular cleaning was necessary.  Given the belief in their evil-averting properties, it is perhaps unsurprising that witch balls, alongside their spherical cousins crystal balls, were to be found hanging in clairvoyants’ parlours and fortune-tellers’ booths throughout the twentieth century