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Please note that all my writings are created by me & NOT by an AI writing intervention tool, however, I can not speak to my sources’-sources. If you use any information from this site have the curtesy to site.
In this colourful episode I’m talking indigo and as a sidebar – the law, which will circle around the origin of Haint Blue & since I am talking haint or haunt or ghost blue in regards to dwellings, I’m going to include some information about a Law that is referred to as the Ghost Buster Law. So, buyer or seller beware!
The first time that I can recall hearing the name haint blue was from my husband in response to my question ”what colour of paint should we use for this area”? The area I was referring to was an area in our new digs, a home we recently purchased.
“Haint blue”, he said. “What is that”? I replied. Haunt blue, it’s a colour, traditionally used to keep ghosts trapped/confused – was more or less his reply.
Wow, he uttered the word…ghost. Perhaps an episode in and of itself. That reply lingered with me for awhile. Why would anyone want to use a colour that is associated with spirit entrapment and why blue? Hmm.
That conversation was the seed for this podcast AND as I have stated before – what I offer up on topics, is by no means definitive information – obviously.
Today the colour haint blue, or the colloquial term haunt blue, equates to, for the most part, shades of pale blueish-green and typically used in the Southern States to paint porch ceilings.
The haint blue paint colour – a sky blue or robin egg color when mixed with milk paint, originally derived from the colonial cultivated indigo plant’s leaf which produced indigo colour dye that was mainly used for export from the Colony of South Carolina Low-country to England to be used in the textile industry.
The word indigo means “the Indian” or “from India” It is believed that the ancient people of India’s subcontinent may have been the first to domesticate a plant that could produce a blue coloured dye. They may have been the first to domesticate but other countries, such as in China, Japan, Latin America and Africa had access to and utilized the indigo plants.
The word indigo represents colour and as previously mentioned a plant, a plant with over 750 species of indigo – ranging from trees to herbaceous to shrubs which are also identified as, in case you needed to know, genus Indigofera. Their terrain encompassed tropical areas such as parts of India, Africa, Latin America and subtropical areas of China and the coastal areas of southeastern U.S.A.
Indigo seeds arrived with English settlers back in 1670 with an initial strategy to cultivate the plant for it’s dye. That idea never blossomed due to other revenue generators such as tobacco and the sugar cane crops (Butler, Nic,2019).
The 1732 establishment of the Southern Colony was for the primary purpose of creating a mercantile. It was hoped that the system would further fuel England’s prosperity and growth with the exporting of commodities from new lands back to the old, this became a strategic move when England encountered import/trade interruptions in their supply chain due to the war between France and Spain and was thus unable to access indigo and other exotic goods through their usual routes.
The exotic indigo dye only began export from the Colony around the mid 1700’s to the late 1790’s. Latin American indigo seeds were primarily used in South Carolina as it produced a beautiful blue dye. Indigo (indigo dyestuff) became the Colony’s second most valuable export next to rice. Although a profitable crop, it was an expensive endeavor, due to the production cost for the numerous quantity of vats that were required in order to extract the dye from the indigo leaf via a fermentation process.
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Dr. Nic Butler author of Indigo in the Fabric of Early South Carolina, writes “…one set of vats for every six or seven planted acres of the crop…Two hundred acres of indigo…would require the construction of at least thirty sets of production vats…” The cultivating of plants and the labour intensive dye production of the 18th Century was done, for the most part, by enslaved African people and their descendants, later referred to as the Gullah and Geechee people.
According to How Stuff Works “The lore of the haints in the U.S. can be traced back to the low country — a 200-mile (322-kilometer) area of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. The area became home to the ,Gullah Geechee slaves and their descendants brought to America from West and Central Africa.
The Gullah and Geechee people’s of Georgia have retained – since their arrival in the mid 1700’s, many of their African traditions, such as their cuisine, crafts, and of course their spiritual beliefs. The name Gullah/Geechee is now recognized to belong to those whose ancestry were from West and Central Africa. The name may have derived from any one of several African ethnicities or areas such as those that were first transported over to the Southern Colony from Angola and is speculated to inhabit the area of the South Eastern Coastline of Carolina to Florida, – also known as the Gullah coast. Geechee refers to the islanders of Georgia.
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Haint means blue. Using ghost blue paint was just one of the Gullah ‘s tactics that was incorporated into their practice of protection against the not-so-nice spirits that might have been lingering around the in-between.
Gullah’s of the low country, a sub-tropical climate in the Southern States, believed that blue was a commanding and inescapable colour to use as a form of shielding against haints or ghosts. And use they did in the form of milk paint that was mixed with the blue dye from the indigo plant – a.k.a. haunt blue.
More than likely it was the dry dye residue from fermented indigo leaves from inside the wooden or brick vats that was incorporated into a paint mixture made of milk, lime, ash or lye, creating the lighter shade of blue which could then be used as a type of protection-paint against evil spirits for the dwellings of those enslaved. And paint they did.
Haint blue milk paint was applied to porch ceilings, doors and windowsills of lodgings because the blue colour was thought to trick spirits into believing they had stumbled into either water, which according to legend, they cannot cross however, if that did not float the ghost’s boat, the blue could also mimic the sky, causing spirits to fall further away from their indented target.
In addition to repelling spirits, haunt blue paint was thought to ward off insects however, it may be the lye in the milk paint that keeps some insects away.
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A Splash of Blue History
Blue has been used in art and decoration although other colours like red and purple were front runners for use as dye colours. Today commercial indigo is, for the most part, synthetically made but historically indigo was extracted from plants that were native to parts of India, Asia and Africa.
The Egyptian deity Amun was said to be capable of invisible flight after turning his skin blue. In medieval times blue dye was made in England, Germany and France from woad, a flowering plant belonging to the mustard family, that produced a blue dye colour also known as woad. “Julius Caesar reported that the Celts and Germans dyed their faces blue to frighten their enemies…” (Wiki).
Today parts of the Mediterranean like Greece wear blue in the form of symbols to protect against evil, or perhaps more precisely the evil eye. And speaking of superstition let’s circle back to the Southern States to a type of blue used in some of the crepe myrtle trees.
Empty blue glass vessels would also be hang/placed on tree branches to ward off evil spirits. Blue glass bottles were hung on trees for protection to trap spirits. Some believed that spirits would either flee upon seeing the bottles or be entrapped in the bottles by way of greasing the throats of the bottles to assist in the overnight capture and confinement of negative spirits until the morning sun arose, which would ensure their death and kill them…AGAIN!
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By 1775 South Carolina had exported more than 1 million pounds of the dried indigo to England But after the American Revolution the mercantile links between the Americans and the British dismantled due to prohibitions on exportation of most goods imposed by England.
By 1783, South Carolina tried to sell their indigo product elsewhere however without much success due to the popularity for the indigo product produced by French and Spanish colonies.
“By the early 1790s, there was a worldwide oversupply of indigo dye, and South Carolina planters realized that chasing after indigo profits like they had before the war was now a futile endeavor” (Nic Butler).
If you are interested in painting your porch ceiling blue, check out Sherwin Williams, a paint company that used to sell haunt blue paint however, I believe that paint is no longer available at least not with that name. They do have a paint called waterscape which is said to capture the essence of the haunt blue colour. Perhaps they should have called it water can’t escape based on the folklore surrounding the colour.
For an informative read regarding indigo and the south, I encourage you to visit Dr. Butlers very informative paper, Indigo in the Fabric of Early South Carolina a link to that is on my website www.orbicletimes.com
So now I know something I did not know before, I hope that you caught some new information here as well. We never did paint that section, or any other section of our home haunt blue. After reading the history behind the history I took a pass on a colour that’s associated with entrapment.
Please note that my all my writings are created by me & not by AI intervention, however, I can not speak to my sources-sources.
If you are interested in hearing more of this story then please visit my YouTube channel with the handle @orbicletimespodast or hit the link below.https://www.youtube.com/@orbicletimespodcast/about
Image created by Kelly-Jo
I hope you join me in the next episode, on whatever pod catcher you use, for part 2 entitled Ghost Buster Law which will circle around The first house in the United States to legally be declared haunted and a tentative. I’ll leave it at that for now. Thank you for taking your time to visit these, Orbicle Times.
If you liked what you read/heard please give a like and share here or on my Y.T. Channel with the handle @orbicletimespodcast…it is free to do so and much appreciated.
SOURCES:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MILK PAINT – oldfashionedmilkpaint.co.uk
Blue Bottle Trees – South Carolina Lowcountry
Blue in History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_in_culture
Butler, Nic. Indigo in the Fabric of Early South Carolina | Charleston County Public Library (ccpl.org)
The Dark History of Indigo, Slavery’s Other Cash Crop | HowStuffWorks
Learn Religion, Bottle Trees
https://www.learnreligions.com/bottle-trees-
WIKI
Isatis tinctoria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria
ORBICLE TIMES ™ 