A Story My Mother Used To Tell Me(Len Daniels) A Story My Mother Used To Tell Me

One of the stories my mother used to tell me many times over while I was still a young child, as a bedtime story, was the one about the witches that roamed the neighborhood where she lived. She was born and raised in Italy until she was 5 years old at which time her father and mother emigrated to the United States to start a new life. Fortunately, or unfortunately, all the old myths and stories came with them from life across the ocean. The one that I remember most vividly is the one about the witches that would attack the young girls while they slept. It seems that when the Italian teenagers in her region would wake up in the morning and appear at the breakfast table with a bruise mark on their necks, the explanation the girls gave their parents was that it was the work of those witches that roam the night and come to suck the blood from their victims while they slept……Today we call these marks “HICKIES.”

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