“Mama had ways of making us go to bed and (the more difficult problem) stay in bed. She told us scary stories about ol’ Scratch Eyes and Raw Head Bloody Bones. In all my life I have never seen or heard of anything more horrifying than the image I used to have of Raw Head Bloody Bones. If we were ever slow in getting to bed, all Mama had to do was sneak outside and scratch on the window screen one time, and we would all hit the covers like ground squirrels diving into their burrows. It is no wonder so many of us peed in the bed.”
“Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business,” by Dolly Parton, HarperCollins 1995
It’s not hard to see why kids of any era would be terrified by bloody bones, but where did that term ‘rawhead’ come from? And why did it haunt children of centuries past?
Raw-head, says the Oxford English Dictionary, first makes an appearance in c. 1564, along with his friend Bloody-bones. However, as this quotation dated 1566 shows, he was already a familiar figure:
There is not that Discretion or Consideration, by which they may..put a difference betwene their Grandmother’s tale of Bloudy bone, Raw head, Bloudelesse and Ware woulf, and the Churche’s Doctrine of Hell and the Deuill.
‘A Treatise intitled, Beware of M. Jewell,’ by Jesuit priest John Rastell, Antwerp, 1566
The OED goes on to define rawhead as ‘A bugbear or bogeyman, typically imagined as having a head in the form of a skull, or one whose flesh has been stripped of its skin, invoked to frighten children.’ The term is cross-referenced to the phrase ‘raw-flesh’ as a synonym.
That synonym, combined with Dolly Parton’s use of the folk expression ol’ Scratch Eyes, gives us a hint about where rawhead came from, and why it came into use in the mid-1500s.
Smallpox was widespread in Europe by the 15th century, and it would still be hundreds of years till Edward Jenner developed a vaccination for the dreaded illness in 1796. To get it wasn’t a certain death sentence, but pretty close. The disease often caused pustules on the eyelids, which of course would induce the sufferer to scratch them. And with those same types of itchy pustules quickly encasing the entire head, it’s not hard to see how someone in the advanced stages of smallpox would have a head scratched open to raw flesh.
While the idea of a child being mildly scared of a skull is easy to understand, that in itself doesn’t seem like something that would strike true terror in a child. But seeing one’s parents deathly afraid of being in the contagious presence of a smallpox victim, and helpless to protect either themselves or their family, must have shaken European children to the core.
No doubt the term emerged in the larger cities such as London, where conditions of the late 15th century included poor nutrition, poor sanitation, cramped living conditions, and zero understanding of smallpox’ causes.
So did Rawhead always look like a smallpox victim? Not at all. Over time the term evolved into a shorthand for any frightening creature. With the help of adults who needed to rein in children!
MP Mack, a biographer of the great English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), says of him “Because he was not allowed to play with other children, he tagged after the servants. When he became too great a nuisance they frightened him away with visions of Bloody Bones and Rawhead. The horrible spectres that rose before him became so real that he never routed them, absurd as he confessed his fears were.”
Thomas Jefferson’s circle was aware of this little incident, and several decades later, Jefferson’s friend James Lovell wrote in a July 4, 1805 letter:
“Such is the lasting, too potent effect of an Infant’s exposure to the House-Maid’s System of ‘Raw-head & Bloody-bones’!”
In Yorkshire, England Rawhead was a water creature; nothing at all to do with smallpox. “In some parts of the country,” says Elizabeth Mary Wright in her 1913 book Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore, “the boggart of the ponds is a masculine water-demon called Rawhead, Tommy Rawhead, Bloody-bones, or Rawhead and Bloody-bones. Keep away from the marl-pit or rawhead and bloody-bones will have you.” Marlstone was excavated in large chunks by farmers as a soil conditioner, and the quarry-sized pits left behind filled with rainwater. How attractive they must’ve been to kids as potential swimming holes! But the muddy bottoms could hold feet fast, causing drowning, and the walls of the pits could collapse unexpectedly, causing suffocation by landslide. So parents had good reason to scare their kids away from the marl pits.
Smallpox was still a scourge to society by the time Scots-Irish settlers were first working their way into the Appalachian mountains. And so the Rawhead Bloody Bones image remained potent.
The American colonial experience added yet another horrific layer to the visuals of Rawhead: the scalped settler.
Fanny Trollope (1779-1863), an English novelist living in frontier Cincinnati, makes the connection between scalping and Rawhead. While in that town, she gets malaria, and during her convalescence reads “the whole of Mr. [Fennimore] Cooper’s novels.”
“By the time these American studies were completed, I never closed my eyes without seeing myriads of bloody scalps floating round me; long slender figures of Red Indians crept through my dream with noiseless tread; and which ever way I fled, a light foot, a keen eye, and a long rifle were sure to be on my trail. An additional ounce of calomel [ed.-used to treat malaria] hardly sufficed to neutralize the effect of these raw-head and bloody-bones adventures.”
Scalping was a pre-1900 issue, but smallpox wasn’t fully eliminated from mankind till 1980, so Rawhead & Bloody Bones stayed in the world of childhood fears on into most of the 20th century.
Today, Rawhead & Bloody Bones has become camp; kids books, kitschy horror movies, and tongue in cheek YouTubes have taken the sting out of the character and made it fodder for campfire stories. A world away from its truly dark beginnings.
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