Nobody believes an American Sicilian woman who thinks she was a water witch

by Joan S. Brooks
(Birmingham,AL Jefferson)

When I was a young girl, I lived with my grandmother in an old hand cut sandstone house with a slate roof. It was then considered out in the country on a high bluff where people went to escape the heat from the valley. It is very large (12,000 sq. ft.)
The house had originally been on about 12 acres. It was built in the 1920's and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The couple who had the house built had "Honeycombed" the grounds with extensive terraced gardens and the water pipes to service them. By the time my grandmother bought the house from a developer in 1957, he had sold off most of the property for building lots, but she still had 4 acres remaining. There is still a hand cut stone pump house in the yard of a downhill neighbor. There was also a tank that looked like a spaceship incorporated into the new house built next door for the developer's daughter.
When we had a huge water bill in the late 60's, my grandmother called the water company. Service had been brought to the street behind us in the 1930's and the leak was somewhere between the meter which was a block away from our house. There were no blueprints or drawings and to further complicate matters, there were 2 carriage houses on our property. We had no idea how the water got to them. The water man, Mr. Billy Murdoch, was very kind. He showed me how to use in each hand a brass piece of pipe inside a straightened clothes hanger and how to walk slowly with the coathangers aimed straight with my eyes closed. I could feel my arms pulling apart whether I walked up or down hill as long as I crossed over the pipe. The funniest thing is that I found the emptying site for downspouts which ran off the house underground about 50' to the street. I could find a piece of clay pipe and I could walk over a piece of rope and find it.

I had read that this was a gift and should be practiced and had found an article about a man near Cullman Alabama who did this. He didn't seem interested in teaching me even though I would have gladly paid him.
Unfortunately, perhaps due to non practice or something else, I have lost my "mojo". Last year, we had to abandon our old septic system and install a newer one uphill where we would have room for the field lines. I was at least 2 feet off trying to find the water pipes we had found through the years going to outside faucets and the important water service pipe to one of the guest houses. (Mr Murdoch had made us a rough map of the water and gas pipes all those years earlier.)
The area we were working in was packed with old galvanized water pipe, terra cotta sewer pipe, big trees and their roots plus the new field lines and septic tank going in. My brother and my husband hand dug until they found an old water pipe and hand dug it to its end. I felt like a fool and was glad I hadn't been working 400 years ago and maybe have been burned at the stake for being a phoney. Can one just lose their ability? My husband and brother never did really believe me because they felt no change in the coat hangers. Could I have just been imagining the pull?