Blue porch ceilings scare off haints

Lore has it color fools evil spirits into thinking it’s water

Throughout the South, many front porch ceilings like this one in downtown Little Rock, are painted “haint blue.” It’s an African tradition to ward off evil spirits, says Brian Rodgers, a historian with the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center in Little Rock.
(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe)
Throughout the South, many front porch ceilings like this one in downtown Little Rock, are painted “haint blue.” It’s an African tradition to ward off evil spirits, says Brian Rodgers, a historian with the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center in Little Rock. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe)

Jesse Ellis Sr. knew how to elude haints.

He would head for the swamp.

"He always said when they were running from the haints if they could get across the water they'd be safe," said Brian Rodgers, Ellis' great-grandson.

Unable to fly over water, the haints were stranded on the other side.

Haint is a Southern version of the word haunt. Rodgers said haints are evil spirits, the kind people like his grandfather, who was from Humnoke, wanted to avoid.

The hydrophobia of haints is one reason porch ceilings across the South are painted "haint blue," said Rodgers, who is community relations liaison for the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center in Little Rock.

Painting a porch ceiling a light color of blue would fool the haints into thinking it was water, said Rodgers. Another theory is that the haints would confuse the blue ceiling with the sky and fly off in that direction, away from the house.

"It's interesting because what I found out is it's not one color, it's a spectrum of light blue-green hues," Rodgers said.

He said haints were part of his family lore.

"My great-grandparents used to talk about haints when I was really young, 6 or 7," Rodgers said. "I didn't know what a haint was. I just knew it was something I was supposed to be afraid of."

When he got older, Rodgers realized other people also had heard of haints.

Intrigued by haints and several haint-blue front porch ceilings on houses in Little Rock, Rodgers decided to write an article about haints for the center's newsletter, which will be out in early November.

Rodgers said the African tradition of painting porch ceilings (and sometimes doors, windowsills and awnings) was preserved by the Gullah Geechee people of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. He said they initially made a blue dye from indigo plants.

"They were kind of left on their own, and they were able to retain a lot of their African traditions that a lot of enslaved Africans lost by being on the mainland," he said.

From there, haint blue porch ceilings spread across the South.

"One of the interesting things is how the belief made a transition from being kind of African-American folklore to being a widespread Southern belief," Rodgers said. "Even if people didn't know why they were painting their houses that color, they were doing it."

Whether light blue paint works as a haint repellent is open to debate.

Over time, other less-exotic theories emerged to explain why many Southern homes have blue porch ceilings. Some people say the light blue color keeps birds from nesting on the porch.

Robyn Bailey, project leader for NestWatch at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said she's never heard that theory, and there's no scientific evidence to back it up.

"I'm not a bird psychologist but I've looked at many thousands of pictures of bird nests, and I haven't noticed a theme of birds avoiding blue," she said.

But speaking of birds ...

"Fuzzy chickens in the yard keeps away the haints," according to ozarkhealing.com/ghosts.html.

Brandon Weston, an Ozark Mountain folklorist who maintains that website, said he got the quote from "Folk beliefs from Arkansas," a collection gathered by students at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville under the direction of Mary Celestia Parler, who taught there from 1948-75.

Weston said he surveyed Ozarkers a few years ago regarding haint blue porch ceilings.

"Most people hadn't heard about haint blue on the porch, but there were a few that still knew the lore," he said. "I was told by one informant that the belief is connected to the fact that spirits and witches can't cross over running water and the blue color reminds them of that so it can be used as a way of warding off evil influences."

Other Ozarkers told him about bottle trees, which apparently work in a similar way, with light reflecting off blue bottles and reminding spirits of water.

There are a lot of rules in the Ozarks regarding spirits and how to prevent riling them up.

In "Ozark Magic and Folklore," published in 1947, Vance Randolph wrote that people believed sweeping could stir up the spirits.

"An old-time Ozark housewife seldom sweeps her cabin after dark, and she never sweeps anything out at the front door," Randolph wrote. "A woman in Madison County, Arkansas, told me that ghosts and spirits are accustomed to stand about near cabins at night, and it is dangerous to offend these supernatural beings by throwing dirt in their faces."

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