Also called hidden shoe, concealed footwear
A worn shoe hidden in a chimney, wall or roof during building work, to guard the household and carry the luck and shape of its owner into the house.
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Take care: Do not open chimneys, walls or floors without proper building advice, and keep concealment spaces away from wiring and flues. Never disturb historic buildings you do not own.
June Swann, keeper of the boot and shoe collection at Northampton, began recording finds in the late 1950s after noticing how many shoes came in from walls and chimneys. The index now holds thousands of entries, with more arriving each month. Most date from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
Shoes are often found beside other hidden objects: dried cats, bottles, pots, spoons and horse skulls under floors. Hoggard groups these as a single tradition of concealment at a house's weak points, though some animals may simply have been trapped by accident.
When the Charles Rennie Mackintosh house at 78 Derngate in Northampton was extended, shoes from the town's shoemaker Crockett and Jones were deliberately hidden in the new building, carrying the custom into the present.
Shoes are the most common hidden object found in old British buildings. They usually turn up singly, heavily worn and patched, which suggests they were chosen because they held the shape and spirit of their wearer. A popular story links the custom to John Schorn, a fourteenth-century Buckinghamshire rector said to have trapped the devil in a boot, though the link is a legend rather than evidence. Finds cluster around chimneys, doors and windows.
June Swann, who died in 2025, built the Northampton index over decades and wrote the first serious study of the custom. By 1986 she had logged around seven hundred finds, and the University of Hertfordshire later helped digitise the record. Because no one wrote down why they hid the shoes, researchers such as Swann and Brian Hoggard read the practice from the pattern of finds, which points strongly to protection of the home.
A sealed bottle of pins, nails and personal traces hidden in a house to trap or turn back harmful magic aimed at the people living there.
Compass-drawn flowers, interlaced lines and Marian VV marks scratched near doors, windows and hearths to block evil from entering a building.
A used iron horseshoe nailed above a doorway to bring luck into the house and keep the Devil, witches and fairies out.
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