I am a witch. Well, a well witcher...
The well on our acreage has stopped producing much. It may come back after some rehabilitation but in the mean time I called out a local water expert and well repair tech to look at it.
He said it might be necessary to drill a deeper well. Then he pulled out two rods, bent at a 90 degree angle and held them loosely in his grip, letting the ends point forward and still able to move freely. He started walking, criss crossing our yard til at one point the two rods turned inward to point toward each other. He dug his heel in to mark the spot and moved on to find at least 5 other spots on the yard where there is water underground. This is well witching. And its been used for years to find underground water.
Dont ask me how it works. I have no clue. But he asked if I wanted to try it, so I did. Held the rods loosely and walked and sure enough, over a certain point they swung together. I was looking at them but very consciously not moving my hands or trying to manipulate them in any way. The rods were only about 1/8" thick and I wasnt gripping them tightly so it would have been impossible to make them turn. Did my hands turn in ever so slightly? Not that I could tell. I turned around and walked back over the spot and sure enough, the rods turned in at the same spot.
Its a weird phenomenon. Have no idea why it works but it does work. I've seen witching used at a friends house with a very long pole held in one hand that would dip down when the witcher walked over the water, and it produced a successful high flow well. This guy even said he could find gas lines using the same technique.
Can't wait til the wife gets home and I let her know she married a witch. lol
Double blind dowsing experiment
Yeah, I love a good spooky story or unexplained mystery, but dowsing falls into that category of belief that I think can actually be harmful.
Conspiracies, homeopathy, witchcraft, etc. - they all teach that you can improve your life through superstition. Once you buy into one of these things, you are more likely to buy into the rest of them.
I dont see that experiment as very representative of actual dowsing for a well. A bottle of water is not a substantial amount of water and dowsing finds underground streams or channels that flow, not a pool of water. And it has to be substantial enough to support a well, which in our case is at least 5 gallons of water per minute.
My parents are caretakers of a small old family graveyard. Guy came by to find unmarked graves, ended up being a dowser. Somehow my mom is convinced that not only did he find several, but he could tell the sex and relative age.
Water tables don't really produce streams or channels except in rock, which you're probably not drilling a well into.
When you dig a well you're making a new local low point for water to collect and seep out of the surrounding ground. That's about it. You're not tapping into a secret underground river. You can put a well just about anywhere on your property you want if you're willing to dig deep enough. The part that's going to differ is how the area surrounding the well drains toward the nearest river. A shallow well on top of a hill ain't going to collect much other than rainwater.
Yep, I was about to say just this. If you have a well that's run dry, the solution is to dig a deeper well some distance away from it. You don't need to find some tiny special area that has water. The water table is going to be roughly the same for most of the local area.
Dowsing "works" because picking any random spot in a field that has a working well will also work.
And yet thats exactly what we have - a shallow well on top of a river bank. The well is only 50 ft deep but its a half mile walk at about a 500 ft drop in elevation to the river. The well has produced steadily for years and now its not, but we've yet to discover why. The neighbor 300 ft away from us has no issues with his well.
As for finding grave and knowing the sex and age of the deceased... well... that's right up there with chem trails and faked moon landings.
Divining the location of water using a couple of sticks is honestly far less believable than a lot of conspiracy theories. Not that it needs to be believed because it has been demonstrated to be fake numerous times, including in experiments designed in collaboration with the dowsers themselves.
The dowsers participating did not seem to feel the quantity of water was a factor in their failure. Of course they may have said that off camera or such statements were edited out, but it seems reasonable they'd go for "not enough water" before "God is having a laugh."
With all due respect to the "God is having a laugh" guy, he seems to believe heavily in the mystical side of dowsing. You dont have to believe there's anything 'supernatural' about it to see it work.
I think a big problem with that is there isn't really a non-mystical explanation for how dowsing would work that makes any sense. Every falsifiable scientific theory has been thoroughly disproved.
Of course, the fact that nobody knows how something works is not proof that it doesn't work... But when every properly conducted experiment shows that it works no better than random chance and the only evidence against that is anecdotal accounts of people insisting that they've "seen it work" it becomes very hard to take seriously. If I believed everything that someone told me they've personally seen I'd be wackier than that ancient aliens guy with the hair.
Im not really defending dowsing because I really dont have a vested interest in it just a fun thing that happened yesterday, but there ARE things that exist in this universe that are inexplicable. Science does not and cannot prove or disprove everything. We can have theories, we can run experiments, we can hypothesize but some things are still a mystery - for instance, what happens to us after we die? Science doesnt know nor can it prove anything, only theorize, postulate and wait to find out for ourselves.
Agreed! Science can only really say anything about claims that are falsifiable--the mysteries you allude to aren't really falsifiable. (The claim that dowsing can be used to effectively locate the presence of water is falsifiable though, which is why I trust the science on that one.)
Dowsing is the word you're looking for.
The article itself does mention that it could be called "water witching" in the US
I’ve always known it as “well divining.” Actually, I made a song called “the well diviner” after a character in a Steinbeck novel. I can’t recall if it is called that in the book, but I am from a place close to where Steinbeck lived and that is what we called it.
Yeah, but who wants to be called a dowser? So blase. Im a witcher! :)
If we throw you into the river, will you sink or float?
I find this type of thing difficult to buy, personally. Dowsing always seemed like a weird superstition to me, even as a kid. This was a cool story, though, and I'm glad that you shared it. I was actually looking for a unique quirk for a character I am writing and dowsing rods fit the bill, so thanks for that.
I saw Goody @GoWestYoungMan talking with the witcher!
Does that make his wife the warlock is that not how it works?
... it's only upon reading your comment that I realized OP's username is meant to be read as "go west young man" not "gowest young man". I did wonder what "gow" meant.
I was overdue for my annual viewing of these brilliant men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2xlQaimsGg&ab_channel=Browningate
Glad to be of service in your literary pursuit :)
I have a friend that swears down that automatic doors just ignore her sometimes, and she has been locked into parts of airports before, banging on windows to be let out.
You know, just if you want more weird quirks of the human experience.
How many acres is it and where are you? What are the odds that you don't find water if you dig randomly?
Northern Canada on 2.5 acres. And there's the question - how would you know if you'd find water if you dug randomly. No one knows because at $80 a foot and an average of 450 ft, no one is going to spend $36,000 per hole to punch a bunch of holes in their yard. What you dont want to do is drill to 1000 ft and end up with a dry hole that just cost you $80,000 for nothing.
Isn't the guy doing the dowsing, choosing the location, and doing the drilling all on his own? Wouldn't it be on him if he didn't hit water? Also, wouldn't he benefit from choosing a spot where you have to dig deeper if the cost is based on the depth of the well?
No, he's the well service guy. I'd have to hire the driller so he gets no benefit other than helping to solve my water issues.
He's currently 'shocking' our well, which means dumping 5 gallons of chlorine into it, adding several hundred gallons of water, letting it soak for 24 hours and draining it. All in the hope that it will open up the slits in the bottom of the well casing where the water seeps in. If he was trying to grift me, he'd just tell me to drill another well rather than fix the one we have.
I'm not too familiar so I had to look it up, but shock chlorination seems to be used for a well when there's a bacteria issue at play. I can't find any instances of it being recommended to restore a dry well. Unless you have a biofilm blocking your well somehow I don't see how it would help. Make sure the chlorine filled water doesn't go into your septic system, or onto your plants, and you don't drink it.
Personally, I'd highly recommend you call for a 2nd opinion from another company, unless this guy manages to miraculously fix your well after this.
Anyway, good luck!
It could easily be bio blockage. Also the sudden insertion of a large amount of water from his water truck puts pressure on the slits to open them up.
I live in a small rural subdivision and asked for recommendations for the local well experts in our local fb group. Apparently its this guy or the other guy, so I have a 50% chance of picking the best guy for the job, but he does come recommended :)
Ah, I love that. “There are two people in town who can do that, so you’ve got a 50/50 on either the best or the worst person available”
Thank you for sharing your experience, the quirky and weird stuff tend to be my favorite here on Tildes. I think my introduction to this concept was Wile E. Coyote of all places
In the late '90s I was working at a summer camp, and one summer we were upgrading our 30+ year old electrical infrastructure to accommodate people plugging in computers and TVs instead of just lamps, so we had electricians out to make the improvements. I watched this electrician pull some thick wire off a spool, cut and bend it into two L-shaped pieces, and then walk across the field until they swung inward towards each other. He started digging and sure enough that's where the buried wire was.
I was baffled and asked him about it, and he gave me the two L cables but explained that it worked with bent metal coat hangers or anything that would swing freely in your hands. The rest of the staff and I did a bunch of non-rigorous experiments with walking blindfolded along a path where someone else had buried a cable and it worked more often than chance would explain.
My best explanations are a) that an electrician who already knew where the wire was decided to mess with a spectator and then my amazement skewed the follow-up experiments, b) that it is a way to tap into your subconscious and expose an inner "hunch" about where a cable would be buried, or c) there is some kind of subtle scientific principal that has been overlooked or dismissed because this is an area that is so ripe for scammers and charlatans.
Keep in mind our nervous system is a giant electrical signalling mechanism, and we're very tactile creatures.
My wife can split food into even portions by weight, without even trying. Like to the tune of less that 1% error (<3g deviation on 500g).
I have no doubt that there's some % of the population that is sensitive enough to changes in electromagnetic fields that would occur when doing dowsing (for water or wires) that a large population sample would still do better than random guessing.
I hate to tell you this, but it's possible to develop proprioception through practice to the point where you can make very precise movements and judge weights accurately. When I did lab work, people used to joke about my "calibrated elbow", because I could measure milliliters and milligrams freehand, without a scale or flask. Same thing in the pastry kitchen - exact cups, ounces, grams, etc., to within 1% error or less. And again, perfect 2 ounce pours in the winery tasting room.
Spouse worked as a bartender, and he can still freehand accurate liquid pours within the range of typical cocktail volumes.
The process is similar to a musician learning exactly where to put their fingers to produce specific sounds from a musical instrument. No magic required, just developed human skill. To be fair, proprioception is one of the least understood "senses". It's a complex set of neuromuscular activities that's tantamount to a biological AI module just for synthesizing sensory inputs comprised of forces and vectors, and outputting corresponding movements in space.
Oh yes, this is kind of what I'm referring to, not saying its supernatural or anything.
I've developed a pretty good sense of being able to detect rain about 30 minutes out if I've been outside for > 4 hours. I attribute it to working summer camps in my teen years (in the 90s), where even as a staffer I was in unconditioned space or outdoors 99% of my summer. It's almost certainly no more than being attuned to humidity, temp, and pressure changes around me.
It's pretty well documented that certain people (especially people with disorders like arthritis) can detect air pressure changes. Like anything, those sensory inputs are learned and tuned over time so that the brain automatically interprets them as a signal to the outcome. So there are definitely people that can intuitively feel when it's about to rain, since their joints tell them when the air pressure is low, and rain almost always follows.
EMF sensitivity, however, is psuedoscience. People claim to be able to tell when wifi or 5g or radio waves are on near them, but there's no mechanism or evidence of that being true.
The electromagnetic wave changes by being near water or being above power lines buried 3 feet under ground are far lower, and there's no mechanism or evidence of human beings being able to detect them.
This is a real thing. I can attest that the old broken elbow and the femoral joins of hip replacements ache on low barometric pressure days at all times, and the rheumatic joints are sensitive to the kind of high heat and humidity that presage a warm-weather thunderstorm. [And yes, I was crazy enough to spreadsheet a couple of years of journal data to get to p < 0.01 conclusions. Sample size = 1, unblinded, recall bias, and other issues apply.]
Yes I know, I was reiterating the point that atmospheric pressure changes are detectable by certain people. Sorry if that was a little unclear.
Rain is also specifically one of the things that humans seem to be highly sensitive to, it's pretty neat! Not everyone can sense it, but I think they believe it's related to smell
Petrichor. It's the smell of rain on dry soil, and humans are incredibly sensitive to it.
And its absolutely glorious. Had our first early morning rain of the spring yesterday and I happened to walk outside at 5 am to the most wonderful smell. Its a big part of the joy of living in the country too.
Electromagnetic fields was my first thought as well. Could a significant amount of groundwater affect the Earth's magnetic field enough that it could move a thin piece of metal?
No. The entire planet's magnetic field can't even move a thin piece of metal. Groundwater would have essentially zero effect. Like not even a nanotesla.
That's not true at all.
Otherwise compasses wouldn't work.
By that logic, the wire hangars in your closet should all be aligned north-south.
For a compass to work, the needle has to be magnetized along its length. It also needs to minimize static friction and inertia so the miniscule electromagnetic force acting on it is able to rotate it. This is why compass indicators are either balanced on a pin or floating in low-viscosity fluid. A random length of wire held in a hand meets none of these criteria.
Even if it did, variations in the Earth's magnetic field due to the presence of a void filled with groundwater would be so small that even extremely sophisticated equipment may not detect it, let alone a simple compass.
Finally, while water is not electrically conductive, the minerals in the water typically are. But it's not doing any magnetizing either unless there's an electric current flowing through it. So unless you ran a power line through it, that's not what's going on either. Even then, you'd basically just be detecting the power line and not the water.
I’m on board with everything else you’ve mentioned here, but I think I’ll slightly disagree with your premise here — if dissolved minerals are electrically conductive, then moving water can induce potential, and a moving source of potential is enough to induce a magnetic field.
Of course the actual amounts are infinitesimal, so even if you had a high pressure pipeline of the saltiest water possible, you’d still be basically unable to get any magnetic reading outside the pipe.
True, but I was working from the assumption that the aquifer was just an underground mud hole. As noted somewhere else in the thread, subsurface streams only occur in rock, and nobody's digging a backyard well into that.
Then why use dowsing rods if a compass would just go haywire over the water (and over which part of the water? It's not like all in a vertical column.
(Not serious)
It's magnets. Magnets explaine probably most of our how does it work questions like how do birds migrate or how do rats know to abandon ship and how do ladies get pregnant and where my chips go at night.
But seriously I don't understand how electric fields and magnets work so maybe the rods respond subtly to that....
I'm not a materialist but that doesn't mean that I necessarily believe all that is unexplained has an otherworldly nature.
I sometimes feel that a lot of we do are methods to activate unconscious knowledge, sometimes called "intuition". It is possible that the well witcher is capable of observing patterns which are not conscious or overtly rational, but that are capable of influencing micro movements of his hands and all the parts of his body that affect balance.
Or there's just water pretty much everywhere so they're never wrong. Even in arid areas, an aquifer could be the size of a farm or larger so dowsing will often work 100% of the time or just not at all so you can blame the effect on other environmental variables.
In that case one could just have a program to generate a random point in the map. But I won't defend dowsers, I'm just providing an alternative explanation.
Yes, that's exactly right, you could. Aquifers aren't tiny little pools or streams of water. They're giant underground reservoirs that fill volumes of gravel, sand and permiable rock. Many of them are hundreds or thousands of square miles wide.
Chances are, if your neighbor has a working well, if you dig to the same depth anywhere on your property, you will too.
Shallow wells are even more reliable.
I live in Florida, and basically anywhere in the state, if you dig 25 feet down, you'll hit groundwater. No rods or expertise required.
The guy who spends $80,000 to drill 1000 ft down and ends up with a dry hole would likely disagree with you :) It's not everywhere.
Sure, but do you think the result in that case would be different if they dug a few hundred feet to the left?
I'll admit that the edge of an aquifer has to be somewhere, but - statistically - it isn't on the 2.5 acre you're currently looking at.
Remember that (most) geologic features form from: mountains, beaches, glaciers. Consider the size of your nearest mountain, beach, or glacier. Now consider the size of your plot of land. I doubt the choice of drill site within that plot of land has much impact on the available water.
Edit: I should probably point out this doesn't really address the claims about finding man-made structures - water lines, gas lines, etc. - or shallow well sites. I really only wanted to talk about the geologic features involved in choosing a deep well site.
I also don't know how it works but it does work. I'm a massive skeptic, I don't believe in anything supernatural or anything in the real world (fiction is a different story).
My friends and I tried it and it freaking worked. It was insane. All of us are incredibly skeptical but it worked. One of us knew where a pipe underground was on a plot of land and we took turns and nailed it everytime, even when blindfolded. It is insane.
Best guess is come kind of mild electrical field generated by rushing water or something that moves the rod ever so slightly (you have to hold them very gently so they have the freedom to move).
It's so weird, I don't believe it's supernatural, it has to be something scientific but it's beyond my understanding.
It's been rigorously tested in the past, without any evidence found.
There are a lot of ways that your friends could have unconsciously found the pipe, ranging from your friend unconsciously cluing the testers in, hearing or feeling the turbulent flow of water in the pipe below you, just being generally aware of the general location of where a pipe would be and so forth. It's a really really hard thing to control properly, and being able to find water by any of those means doesn't constitute dowsing.
If you're interested, the Munich dowsing experiment is probably the most well funded, comprehensive study of this, and reading the controls involved are pretty interesting.
Thats my best guess too. I dont think its anything supernatural or mystical. I think the flowing water somehow affects our bodies and creates a change (electrical? chemical? who knows) that causes the wires to move. I dont understand it, but I do believe it works. And Im not a superstitious person either.
What is superstition aside from believing in things that are unprovable or have been disproved? I'm not saying it's a bad thing or a bad trait, but you seem pretty clearly a superstitious person in at least this one regard.
Would you classify flat-earthers as superstitious then? They hold a belief that is disproven, but not necessarily built on supernatural explanations, so I’ve always categorised them differently in my own mind
Edit: now that I’ve thought about it, I can also apply your definition to the discussion around quantum physics interpretations of many-worlds versus Copenhagen interpretation versus pilot-wave theory and others that share this space
I feel like there's a difference between people who are arguing for the physical world being different than it provably is, and the people who are arguing that there's something undefinably more? This isn't well thought out, to be clear. But maybe there is some ineffable something that we can't measure yet. It's super unlikely that such a thing is true on a human scale, but maybe? By comparison, disproving the flatness of the Earth is trivial.
Interesting. Ive never thought of myself as the least bit superstitious. I see it more as a phenomenom that I dont understand but I dont ascribe any mystical or supernatural beliefs to it which Ive always thought of as the basis for a superstition.
Practically, there have been extensive tests on dowsing as a technique for finding water, and no one has found proof of it being something that people can do in a double-blind study. If your theory is that there is some as of yet undefined human capability that makes it possible for people to do so, what is that but faith in an ability that is beyond what is provable using current natural science? A super-natural ability, if you will.
My suspicion is that, if dowsing works in some cases (I've heard a lot of people insist it can be used for finding cables, pipes, and even non-conductive buried objects), double-blinding will ruin the effect because it's not actually the dowsing rods that do it. I think it's something way more interesting and impressive: I think people are subconsciously reading the landscape.
Anecdotally, I have found it surprisingly easy to find buried objects. I found a septic tank by observing a patch of ground with a slightly higher ratio of weeds to grass (indicating ground that was a tad drier than the surroundings). I found a pipe by noticing that the grass above it looked slightly thicker and healthier (the soil was less compacted where the ditch had been dug out, making it easier for the grass to grow and spread its roots). I found a cable by observing the very faintest linear depression over top them (so shallow that I could only see it from certain angles). I have used similar techniques many times to trace deep tree roots and to locate large rocks I want to dig out of my garden.
These are cases where I was deliberately searching for clues but, even so, I startled myself at my accuracy. I expected that I would have a few false starts before I found what I was looking for, but the truth is that I have never dug in the wrong spot. Every time I have tried to find a buried object, my first guess has been right.
Since then, I have watched videos of archaeologists deciding where to situate their digs, and they do a lot of the same things. They walk around a landscape, take note of very subtle patterns, and start mapping out roads and buildings before spade touches soil.
I can imagine that some people learn to pick up on signs like these without being fully conscious of it, and the dowsing rods just serve to reveal their subconscious hunch (e.g., because they slightly change their grip when they expect dowsing rods to find something).
Now that I would totally believe. That people are clever pattern matching machines, and that they'd attribute their own cleverness to the wrong thing is exactly how it would go down. I like this hypothesis.
I think it's time to admit that you're a littlestitious.
Good word. Im gonna admit to Littlestitiousness. Also the name of my garage band.
Aren't you religious? Isn't that essentially the same as being superstitious?
I apologize if that's not a polite comparison, I don't mean to belittle religion by it. I think both things are fine as long as they make a person's life better and aren't used to hurt anyone.
Well, Dowsing is an established craft. I'm hesitant to call it "science" since as you said, we don't (yet) know how it works. And that often gets stamped as "pseudo science" by the science guys!
While working in mundane matters most of the time, we don't pay attention to it but there are still many secrets of the universe still uncovered, many mysteries yet unexplored.
So what makes something pseudoscience if not proof that it's a bunch of hooey that doesn't actually work?
The whole documentary "The Enemies of Reason" is worth a watch, it explains why people might come to the conclusion that drowsing works: https://youtu.be/i4MPz8h9gYY?t=20
This is entirely unrelated but can we please not bring "the wife" thing from reddit over to Tildes. Just say my wife or spouse or something please god.
Edit: I don't care if it's not from reddit it's still really annoying imo
That doesn't strike me as a particularly Reddit-focused turn of phrase. It's a very common way to describe your spouse.
“The wife” has been a common phrase In the Real World for a very long time. Also “the kids”, “the [pet]”, etc and combinations of them.
Not much "the husband" though. Maybe it's the extra syllable. In Norwegian the word for husband is just "the man" whereas there's a whole separate word for wife (though it's also said with definite marking commonly as well).
I say "the wife" and my wife says "the spoose" all the time.
Thank you for this. This is very fun.
We got married in Denmark, where they kindly let you opt for the ceremony to be done in English, and the officiant actually pronounced it that way then. Made the whole thing that much more fun.