I found this message board thanks to a google search. My mom recently told me more about my mysterious grandpa. She’s a devout baptist yet she told me this about her dad without question or hesitation, “he knew the words to whisper at a wart to make it go away. We had people over at our house all the time when I was little. I remember having to be very still and quiet. The warts would go away shortly after their visit. He said an old wizard lady taught him what to say. She told him if he ever shared it with somebody, he wouldn’t be able to do it anymore.”
So I googled wart whispering and saw that somebody here w the handle iknewit posted in 2007 that his mom once took him to a man’s house to have his warts whispered at and I was wondering if it might’ve been my grandpa. I’m banking on the fact that iknewit still has an active account here or maybe changed username? Or somebody knows how to get in touch with them? I know it’s a long shot but I’m excited about this new bit of family history and want to know more about it. I always thought my mom’s parents were strange/quirky but now we’re talking about a possiblilty of magic and it’s just interesting no matter how skeptical we are about it.
I’ll check back here often but if you know how to find somebody who posted here once in 2007, you can email me at camerm1@gmail.com
Or if you’re an admin and you know this is the type of message board that eats newbies alive, go ahead and delete all this.
Wart charming is pretty well-studied (if you search using the word “charm” you’ll get more results), and used to be practiced pretty much everywhere. It’s common for transmission to be cross-gendered (a man has to learn from a woman and vice versa). It’s pretty unlikely that iknewit’s experience was with your grandfather, but it sounds like he was an interesting guy.
“The Wart Whisperer” - a novel reality show in which Grandpa comes to your home to eliminate unsightly excrescences by the power of suggestion.
I’ve seen loonier things on TruTV.
The great thing about warts (from the perspective of alternative healers) is that they come and go unpredictably. Therefore, one can correlate various sorts of treatments with their disappearance without having to demonstrate that the treatment caused the wart to disappear.
Google wart treatment and you will find a dizzying (if not nauseating) array of therapies.
No we are actually talking about pure, ignorant superstition which is what belief in supernatural magic is. I suppose that can be interesting from a psychological or a sociological point of view in terms of how humans approach and invest their beliefs.
