An Appalachian story of witches, ancestral wisdom & finding your way home....
I invite you to curl up in your favorite spot with your favorite cup & let me share a story with you. Not the kind that begins with “Once upon a time” and ends neatly before breakfast. This one begins much farther back and is no fairy tale.
It begins in the mountains, where the roads wind through old-growth forests, mist settles into the hollows, sometimes in mid-afternoon, & old stories seem to linger long after the people who first told them are gone.
A little note before we begin: If you would rather not read about the Salem witch trials or the history of witches, you are welcome to skip ahead to your card.
My family roots run deep through the Southern Appalachian Smoky & Blue Ridge Mountains, and now I find myself living not far from where those roots were planted so many generations ago. Coming back to this part of the country has been unexpectedly soothing to my spirit. There is something about these mountains that feels familiar to my soul, almost as though some part of me recognizes them before my mind has the chance to explain why. Since returning, I have felt more grounded, more connected & more receptive. My intuition feels even stronger here. My spiritual abilities feel heightened. I know deep down exactly why, and I can tell you who I think about when I notice it.
My Nana.
Some of the first things I learned about what I now call magick came from her. Not from a spellbook or a formal lesson, but through ordinary things that never seemed quite so ordinary to me. Tea, plants, the moon, stones, stories, paying attention & knowing that the natural world was worth listening to. At the time, I didn't know I was learning witchcraft, folklore & mountain granny magick. I certainly didn't think I was learning anything that needed to be hidden. It was simply what Nana knew.
And that is where this story really begins. With a word.
Witch.
For centuries, that word has carried a story written largely by people who feared what they did not understand, what they could not control & what existed outside the boundaries they had created. When most people hear the word, an image immediately comes to mind: the black cloak, the crooked hat, the cauldron, the spell, the darkness & the evil woman lurking somewhere beyond the edge of respectable society.
But where did that image come from? And an even more interesting question is this: who decided what a witch was?
I would bet another word comes to mind for you now. Salem.
The history of witch-hunting is far larger than Salem. Long before the Salem trials of 1692, accusations of witchcraft had spread throughout parts of Europe, and persecutions continued for generations afterward. Tens of thousands of people were executed during the great European witch-hunting era. Women, men, widows, the elderly, healers & even children.
Salem was one very small chapter in a much larger and much darker story, yet it became the chapter Americans remembered most. It was dramatic, documented, eventually retold, sensationalized & turned into a symbol.
But there is something we often forget when we say, “They burned the witches.” They did not discover a group of people who had been proven to be witches. They accused people of witchcraft, and being accused was not the same thing as being a witch.
The people caught in these persecutions were human beings. People who were vulnerable, people who were different, people caught in disputes, people whose neighbors turned against them & even children. People who defied the expectations placed upon them.
The accusation itself could become the weapon. A label could turn a neighbor into an enemy. Fear could turn suspicion into certainty. Once a community was taught who the dangerous person was, people began looking for evidence that the label was true.
That is what fascinates me about the history, because the story was never simply about whether someone possessed supernatural powers. It was also about power itself. Who had it, who didn't, who was permitted to possess knowledge, who was allowed to speak, who was allowed to heal & who was allowed to live outside the expectations of society. What happened when someone refused to fit neatly into the role that had been given to them?
A woman who knew the plants could be a healer in one story & an evil witch in another. A woman who knew how to help during childbirth could be a valued member of her community until something went wrong through no fault of her own. A woman who understood herbs, the seasons, the moon & the body could possess knowledge that was never written in a book, yet was carried from one generation to the next. And when knowledge exists outside the institutions that control it, it can become threatening.
That is where I think the word witch became so powerful. Not because every person accused of witchcraft was secretly practicing some hidden form of magick, but because the label itself could create fear, separate people from one another & establish who was considered acceptable and who was not.
Salem was not the beginning. It was not the largest, and it was certainly not the whole story. The real history stretches across centuries & continents, through villages, courts, churches, families & communities. It is a history of fear, belief, accusation, power, religion, gender, social conflict & control, all tangled together until it becomes difficult to separate one thread from another.
And then, somehow, the old knowledge survived.
That is where the mountains enter my story.
THE MOUNTAINS REMEMBER
The Southern Appalachians have long been a place where knowledge could be carried quietly. Not necessarily hidden behind locked doors, but carried in the way people have always carried the things that mattered most. In their hands, their gardens, their kitchens, their stories & the memories of their mothers and grandmothers.
Appalachian folklore was never one single spiritual tradition. It grew from many cultural influences, including European folk traditions, Indigenous knowledge & African traditions. Some of what people knew became practical knowledge, some became herbal traditions, some became spiritual practices, some became superstitions & some became stories. And some simply became something your grandmother taught you.
That distinction matters to me because folklore doesn't have to be scientifically proven to be meaningful. History tells us what the surviving records say happened. Folklore tells us what people lived, remembered & passed along. Family tradition tells us what survived from one generation to another, and spirituality tells us what we experience for ourselves. Those things can exist beside one another without needing to become the same thing.
That is why Appalachian folklore feels so mysterious to me. The old knowledge doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it arrives as a cup of tea, the moon hanging over a ridge, a plant growing beside the house or a stone picked up from the ground because something about it caught your eye. Sometimes it is an old saying that your grandmother repeats without remembering where she first heard it, and sometimes it is simply a feeling. That strange little knowing that makes you stop for a moment because something feels familiar.
That is the part of this story I understand, because I am back in the mountains now, closer to where my family roots began, and I feel different here. The mountains are quieter. Being surrounded by these familiar old forests gives my mind room to listen. There is something about returning to a landscape connected to your family's history that reaches deeper than words.
Or, as my Nana said, some places simply have a little more magick in them.
And I think there is something worth paying attention to in that, because the old ways were never about having all the answers. They were about learning how to notice. The moon, the weather, the plants, the stones, the seasons, the dreams, the feelings & the things that other people might overlook.
That is the part of the witch story I want to reclaim. Not the witch society taught us to fear, but the woman who remembers. The woman who listens, who knows the plants, who watches the moon, who trusts her intuition & who carries the stories of the women who came before her. The woman who understands that knowledge is not something to be ashamed of.
She was simply unwilling to forget.
Unwilling to forget the things the mountains had taught her. Unwilling to forget the plants that grew along the paths she walked, the stories that had been told around her kitchen table & the moon that had watched over every generation before her. Unwilling to let the wisdom carried by the women before her disappear simply because the world had decided it was strange, foolish or something to fear.
She carried it quietly, the way women have carried so much through the generations. In her hands, in her home, in the food she prepared, in the remedies she remembered, in the stories she told & in the small things she taught without ever realizing she was teaching them.
Somewhere along the way, those things became part of her. Then they became part of the women who came after her, and then another, and another.
That is how ancestral knowledge survives. Not always in books, names, dates or carefully recorded histories. It survives in the things we do without knowing why, in the words that sound strangely familiar, in the recipes we remember, in the plants we recognize & in the way we look at the moon. It survives in the feeling that comes over us when we stand in a place we have never been before & somehow feel that we have come home.
That feeling matters to me because I am here now, standing among these mountains that held my family long before I ever knew their names. I am walking beneath the same ridgelines, breathing the same mountain air & listening to the same forests that witnessed the lives of the people who came before me.
I cannot tell you exactly what my ancestors believed. I cannot fill in every missing piece of their story, but I can feel the weight of what survived. And I can choose what I carry forward, just as you can.
I can carry the reverence for the natural world, the stories, the curiosity & the strength of the women who lived through hard things & still found a way to make a home, raise their families, tend what needed tending & pass something meaningful into the hands of the next generation.
I can remember my Nana.
And in remembering her, I remember that I did not begin with myself. There were women before me who survived things I will never know. Women who walked roads I will never walk. Women who loved, lost, endured, healed, raised children, buried loved ones, watched seasons come & go & somehow kept going.
Their lives may not have made it into history books, but they are still part of my history. They are in the roots beneath my feet, in the gifts I share with others, in the strength I carry, in the intuition I trust & in the stories I tell. And now, in my own small way, I get to carry something forward too.
That is the part of the word witch that I want to reclaim most. Not the spell, not the darkness & not the frightening story that was created around her, but the remembering, the knowing & the connection.
The woman who understood that the earth was alive with things worth noticing. The woman who trusted herself enough to listen. The woman who carried the wisdom of the women before her without needing permission to call it valuable.
She was never the thing we needed to fear. She was the one who remembered.
And now I understand something I could not have understood when I was younger. Coming home is not always about returning to a place. Sometimes it is about returning to the parts of yourself that were waiting there all along.
Sometimes the roots know the way before we do. And sometimes, when we finally find our way back to the mountains, or wherever that ancestral seed first took root, we discover that we were never lost from them at all.
We were only finding our way home.
