Superstitions

A few traditional Outer Banks superstitions:

• If you wear socks to bed you will wake up with a sore throat (as a teenager I often went to bed with socks on because I'd go out barefooted in the evening and come home late, too tired to wash my feet...but I never remember waking up with a sore throat).
• If you sweep after sundown, you will sweep a member out of your family (seems like a creative justification for not working at night).
• If you go in the front door, and out the back door, you will have bad luck (Blanche often reminds me of this when I visit her).
• If a bird gets in the house, it means bad luck (a house wren once found an opening, and built a nest in my screen porch; when the eggs hatched the baby birds flew all around the porch, pooping on everything. It was definitely bad luck!). 

When I was a teenager I came across this quotation by Francis Bacon (1561-1626): "The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other."

Our latest Ocracoke Newsletter is about the Unionist North Carolina State Government established at Hatteras in 1861. You can read all about it here: http://www.villagecraftsmen.com/news092114.htm.