Nana's Knickknacks

A pair of traditional, at- minimum- vintage salt and pepper shakers sat on a shelf in a multi-generational Latino household in the spring of 2015, and the household had begun, slowly at first and then all at once, to come undone around them. Spoons fell from counters with no hand near them. A picture frame turned a quarter inch on the wall in the night. Doors that nobody had touched eased open and eased shut, and the youngest children began waking with scratches on the parts of the back that no eight-year-old can reach with her own arm. By the time the family called the Catholic Church, the activity in the rooms had moved past the explanations the family had been willing to keep using, and an institution that knew how to ask the next set of questions was the one they reached for.

I'm Tillie Treadwell, the How I Met Your Monster columnist for Eerie Expeditions Magazine, and the case I'm telling here came to me about eleven years ago, when I was working alongside the Catholic Church in the United States as a paranormal investigator and a case examiner, with what some of you have heard me call non-religious exorcism on the side. Formal Church capacity for paranormal work in the American dioceses was thin still in those years, and the cases that found their way past a parish priest's first conversation with a worried family often arrived at small lay vetting teams like the one I was on, a practice rarely acknowledgedeven today by the churches. We turned up at the door first. Our job was to figure out what we were actually looking at before any heavier intervention would be granted. The case I'm telling here, was one of mine.

The grandmother of the household, who everyone in the home called Nana, was in her eighties when I met her. Her mind was sharp. Her hands had slowed. She had lived in the house long enough that her family had grown up moving around her, and the small daily habits of her life had set into the floor plan, the chair she preferred and the corner where the radio sat and the part of the kitchen the afternoon light reached at four. One of those habits, going back many years, was a Saturday or a Sunday spent at the small thrift shops along certain streets in her neighborhood, walking through them slowly, picking out one or two things, bringing them home. Knickknacks were her great love. Painted plates, ceramic dogs, glass figurines that caught the light in the window, salt and pepper shakers when she found a set that she liked. Her shelves had filled gradually with the small treasures of other people's discarded lives, and her family had folded the slow tide of objects into the affection they carried for her.

What changed, in my reading of the case, was a single recent set of shakers and the way Nana had brought them home. She had begun, as she put it to me, to feel especially drawn to salt and pepper shakers in a way that sat inside her like an itch. She told me about the shop on a particular afternoon and the pair behind the counter she could not stop thinking about, and the way she had paid for them and walked them out and set them down on a shelf in the living room without quite remembering the walk. The pull she described had a shape I recognized, in the small slow way I had begun to recognize things in those early years of the work. Nana was paying attention to her own life carefully enough to know that the pull was not the ordinary one her hobby had been giving her for sixty years. It was the particular pull. She knew the difference and she said so.

What I noticed when I came through the front door, before I had any read on the case at all, was a pull on the rooms themselves coming from one shelf in particular, distinct from the watchful exhaustion of the family and from the heat of a kitchen that had been working since breakfast. It pulled small. It pulled specific. The word that came up for me, walking through the living room toward Nana's shelves, was "drawn," and when I sat down with Nana ten minutes later and she described how she had felt about the shakers in the shop, the word she reached for first, without any prompting from me, was the same one. It took years of other cases to teach me to read that kind of echo as possible data, rather than as the kind of coincidence a tired or wishful mind generates on its own.

Nana told me where she had bought the shakers. We drove out the next morning to the small thrift shop she had named, a single-counter operation in a strip-mall corner, smelling gently of furniture polish and old paperbacks, run by a family who had certainly been around the block a few times. They were patient with my questions. In showing them photos of the items Nana had bought from them recently, they walked behind the counter, came back with what they could remember, and told me- us- a story I had not been expecting.

The shakers had come in several months earlier as part of a household donation. An entire household, packed up by the surviving family of a woman who had been killed in her own home by her husband. The shopkeeper had not put it that way exactly, but his great niece and wife more than alluded to it. That was what the story amounted to once I had asked the questions- and asking those questions costs something. I do not ask them lightly. The donation, he was very clear about, had come from the wife's family, not the husband's. Everything in those boxes had been hers, her dishes, her linens, the small things that had populated her surfaces for years before the violence that ended her life. Her family had wanted those things out of their grief and gone, and they had brought them to him because he was nearby and decent and asked no more questions than the situation required. The lady members of the family had put the pieces together after a visit from the victim's mother, and after the case made State news.

I held the chain of custody in my mind longer than I usually allow myself in a case. The attractive, expensive shakers Nana had felt drawn to, the ones now standing on a shelf in a multi-generational home full of cousins and aunts and small grandchildren, had spent years on a different table altogether. Old, antique or vintage, of a material I never tested and never asked Nana to hand over for closer inspection scientifically, those shakers had been a fixture of a household where a woman had been hurt repeatedly and at length, and where she had eventually been killed. They had stood on her table for years. They had been in her hands at every meal. They had heard everything the table heard, in whatever way the matter of such hears anything, and the matter had carried that hearing forward with it, wrapped in newspaper, into a strip-mall thrift shop, into a paper bag, into a Saturday afternoon's small ordinary purchase, onto a shelf in a living room three generations deep with people who had no part in any of it.

What I could not let go of in the case, the year I worked it and in the years since, is that nothing about the chain of custody had been concealed. The shopkeeper had no reason to lie and did not, based upon our research findings. The wife's family had emptied her house carefully and grievingly, with the cleanness families muster when they have been holding their breath waiting to begin emptying, and they had handed the boxes to a man who took them in good faith. Nana had walked into the shop on an ordinary afternoon and had picked up the pair that called to her. None of the steps along the chain had carried any malice.

The matter had moved by ordinary means from a violent table to a kind one, and the only thing the chain had needed in order to function as a delivery mechanism was a person at the end of it whose attention to her own pulls was sharp enough to act on them. Nana's was. I think most family lines have a Nana with that kind of attention. I think the modern world has not gotten much better, in the decades I have been watching, at noticing what household objects are bringing in with them when they cross the threshold.

Anthropologists have a phrase for the way an object's history travels with it, and the phrase is older than I am. Igor Kopytoff laid it out in 1986 in an essay called "The Cultural Biography of Things," in a Cambridge volume edited by Arjun Appadurai, and Janet Hoskins extended it in 1998 in Biographical Objects through ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Indonesia. What both of them argued, in their separate registers and through their separate fields, is that an object accumulates the social life it has been a part of, that the accumulation is real and continuous and is part of what an object is when it changes hands, and that any culture that takes its material world seriously has built some version of that understanding into its everyday practice. Folk traditions across continents have always known this. Scholarly anthropology took most of the twentieth century to work out a vocabulary for it. The experiential intuition the wife's family had on the day they emptied her house, when they wanted those things gone and out and away from the people they loved, was an intuition I think most attentive families share without ever having read a page of either book.

What I noted at the time, and what I have come back to since, is that the central inhabited objects in the case were salt and pepper shakers. I had spent the month before the case re-emerged in my mind closing out a series of essays for this magazine with a piece called Three Wards, in which I had argued that salt is one of the three primary protections European folklore has documented against nonhuman peoples, alongside iron and sunlight. The apparent contradiction is real, and the way the contradiction dissolves, in my reading, has to do with what salt actually is in the chemistry sense when it comes home from a grocery store now versus what it was when most of the older folklore I had been working with was being recorded.

What European cottagers were sprinkling at their thresholds and dropping into butter churns and tucking into their newborns' cradles was, at the level of molecules, not the same substance most American kitchens keep next to the stove. Refined American table salt runs about ninety-nine percent sodium chloride or higher after the refining process, with the small remainder being anti-caking compound and, in iodized varieties, added iodine. Natural unrefined salt carries a measurable trace-mineral profile of magnesium and calcium and potassium and iron and dozens of other elements depending on its origin, all of which the refining process strips out. A 2020 paper in Foods, by Fayet-Moore and colleagues, analyzed thirty-one samples of pink salt and reported mean values of roughly 2,700 milligrams per kilogram of calcium, 2,650 of magnesium, and 2,400 of potassium. A 2023 paper in Toxics worked through ten gourmet salts across twelve mineral elements and confirmed that the compositional gulf between refined and unrefined varieties is real, even when the supermarket label treats them as one substance. I think the difference matters at the place where the wards have always operated. I suspect, and I will say plainly that this is a hypothesis I cannot yet test, that some nonhuman beings can ignore or convert or otherwise work around the effects of refined table salt in ways they would not be able to manage against a mineral-rich unrefined salt whose full matrix is intact, and that part of why a salt shaker would be the household object amenable to inhabitation in a violent home, of all the objects on its table, is that what was inside had already been refined into something close to the chemical equivalent of nothing at all.

What I did with the shakers, in the end, was take them. I had the church's blessing and the family's, and I removed the objects from the house and dealt with them through the channels we had for objects that had been carrying things they should not have been carrying. The activity in the household stopped, cleanly, in the way activity sometimes does when a focal object is removed and the conditions that supported it are well-tended elsewhere in the home. The family was emotionally healthy. They were exhausted by what they had been living through, with the escalating attacks. They were close to one another, honest with one another, and the rooms they shared were healthy rooms underneath the activity that had taken hold of them. I think the family at the center of any case is half the case itself, and I have learned to weigh that variable as carefully as I weigh the activity in the rooms. Nana, for her part, was retired from trinket-collecting permanently, with what I gather was some affectionate negotiation from her grandchildren, and the shelves that had filled with other people's discarded lives went into a different kind of use entirely.

What I have, eleven years later, is two possibilities I cannot decide between, and the principled reason I have not tried. It was either, I think, a violent nonhuman being attracted to the shakers or in residence inside them, or it was an imprint of the violence that had been laid down in their material over years of witnessing. An egregore framing came up in the original interview I gave on this case, where the host offered the term and I accepted it in the moment, and it has not held up to my own thinking in the years since, and I have set it aside.

Why I have not tried to tell the two remaining possibilities apart is that the work it would take to do so is work I will not do. To distinguish a violent nonhuman person from a heavy imprint takes sustained observation of the object in question across weeks or months, maybe even longer, watching for changes in the activity around it, for responses to specific stimuli, and for the small consistencies and inconsistencies that, taken together, tell you whether you are dealing with a presence reacting to its environment in real time or with something closer to a recording replaying itself within whatever range the surrounding conditions allow. Honest work of this kind cannot be hurried. It cannot be done from across a room either, because most of what proves useful in this sort of inquiry arrives in the small hours, in the side glance the investigator almost did not give. The call I would have had to make required keeping the shakers in my own house for a long time, and what would be the benefit- especially to me?

I will not bring an item like that home. I have never been willing to, and I will tell you plainly that some of these beings are highly skilled at pretending to be imprints, which makes a long observation period a real risk rather than a procedural inconvenience. An imprint is what it is. A being that has decided you are interesting can do almost anything for as long as it needs to, including holding very still and looking very much like nothing at all. The whole shape of my work has depended, for years now, on knowing which questions cost too much to ask of myself, and this one was on that list before I ever met Nana, and is still on that list now.

There is an answer here that would have been mine to claim perhaps if I had been willing to pay for it, and I was not, and I am not. That is a real position rather than a methodological gap. I think the cases I take, and the questions I leave open, are molded by what I am willing to live with afterward, and the shape of what I am willing to live with has only firmed with time. The cost of every door opened in this work has to be paid in some currency. The doors I refuse to open are part of how I keep my balance sheet.

What I will say is that the case resolved, the family slept again, Nana found a new hobby, and the shakers are no longer in any home that I am responsible for. The provenance of the inhabitation, on the day this entry is published, is still open. I am willing for it to stay that way. In the meantime, Enchanted Objects will be available on Amazon next week, according to my dear publisher.

If this information intrigued you, wait until you see the gold- heavy pages.

Who knows? Maybe the book itself.. is an Enchanted Object.