Dowsing/Witching for water.... Yeah this is another crazy old man skill

Originally posted by BohemianBrim
my grandmother always just used a Y shaped willow tree stick.
grab the two top ends of the Y, and hold them a certain way(sorta like those rods),
and when the stick bends down to the ground you have water.

Wow, a childhood memory just came rushing back. I remember doing this. I recall it worked, but then I was in a more moisture prone climate.

By what I have read on here it sounds like moisture seeking trees seem to work best. Has anyone tried an Aspen?

reply to post by loves a conspiricy


A bottle of water under a box??? It has to be a larger body of water than that. My dad witched for our well on the farm...Watched him do it and they hit water with the first try.

I learned this skill from a Mr Powell...he was a dowser and when the well drillers and home owners had exhausted all hope.. they would call him... and he found water everytime. Once, he said that he found an underground aquifer that they couldn't cap and it turned into a pond.

His style varied...the basic finding of a water line from the pumphouse to the house was as you had shown.

The way he found water on virgin ground was as follows...

He used a grape vine bowed out like a U and he held it by the ends like handle bars on a bike..

Here in NC...most underground aquifers run from west to east...so he would cross from north to south

Everytime he crossed the underground stream, the grapevine bowed down and he would drive a stob there...after enough stobs were driven, you could trace the underground stream by "connecting the dots" so to speak. Then he would find the point with the strongest pull...and there would be your well.

He taught me to do it, and I still can...twenty years later with a peach tree cutting shaped like a Y

reply to post by benrl


That could have something to do with barometric pressure. I've always known when it was about to storm, or as you noticed, the feeling you have near water.

This doesn't work for me. I was trying to find my water bottle and instead I found my candy. But I was eating candy at the time so maybe it was working right after all?

it works. i use it all the time to find underground sewers and water lines. have been doing this for over 25 years.
it only works on moving water.

reply to post by letscit


Any suggestions on how to stop failing at it? I've always been interested in this since I watched "In search of" reruns with Leonard Nemoy. His guys never found anything, EVER! I guess seeing him was worth it, but what a let down! Should've called it "Just looking around for fun".

I know in France it is commonly accepted and used. Everyone hires a "radiesthesist" before drilling for wells.

One time my husband met a guy that does that at his work. He laughed and said he didn't believe in this stuff. The guy, knowing nothing about my husband pulled a peice of paper and asked him to draw a rough outline of our property. Then he used his pendalum over the paper to tell him where a stream of water ran (he was correct, there was a stream running exactly where he said).

Then he said there was water in another area, running off from a nearby vineyard, cemetary, or crop, which was polluted water (by rotting bodies or by chemical treatments). He said it ran underneath where we slept, especially on my side, and that it was the cause of migraines I suffered. He added that at that moment, I had one.

I WAS at home with the curtains closed, laying down, trying to deal with a terrible migraine right then!
On the side of the property he said the underground run off was coming from, there was a vineyard.

He said if we stayed there, and I continued to sleep in that spot, I would eventually get breast cancer.

This was without my husband telling him anything during all this.

Soon after, my husband changed jobs and we had to move. We sold that house (I haven't had a migraine since). A family bought the house, and one year later the woman was found to have breast cancer and swiftly died.


This does raise questions in my mind and makes me wonder if the dowsing rods simply act as a tool for interpretting things the mind picks up subconsciously- because this was at a distance, and he knew much more than just where water was!

reply to post by Bluesma


That's kind of scary actually.

I just recieved my monthly science magazine and found an article in it about cryptochrome being foudn in the eyes of humans! This is a protein believed to give plants and animals magnetosensitivity!

Here's one article:
www.wired.com...

I am aware that some people have a better sense of orientation than others- I am one of those that can always tell where North, South, East, and West are, no matter if I can see the position of the sun or not.

I wonder- perhaps the information we recieve through things like this just remains on a subconscious level and whether or not one can "use" it depends upon how receptive they are to their intuition of subconscious messages?

In this context (dowsing) I wonder if changes in EM fields around you could be percieved through the eye, and one uses tools to help them interpret the feedback from the subconscious on the input?

Originally posted by Bluesma
I am aware that some people have a better sense of orientation than others- I am one of those that can always tell where North, South, East, and West are, no matter if I can see the position of the sun or not.

I wonder- perhaps the information we recieve through things like this just remains on a subconscious level and whether or not one can "use" it depends upon how receptive they are to their intuition of subconscious messages?

In this context (dowsing) I wonder if changes in EM fields around you could be percieved through the eye, and one uses tools to help them interpret the feedback from the subconscious on the input?

i too have the knack of 'knowing' my position or orientation, but it's not like something in one's head...it's more like a whole body feeling an awareness of its location

time, to me is (i guess) not reliant on the Sun position or any other subliminal messages... and i'm 99% of the time within 10 minutes of what a clock says.
its just a 'knowing' that one experiences with their whole body, and not centered on thinking or from the mind or head area


I'm a firm believer that the electro-magnetic field gets 'disturbed'
and as the EM field circles around the unseen disturbance, there are eddies & vortices created in the 'EM 'field'
and that is what pulls the witching device into that 'X' (crossed rods) position...


In this particular area i get a lot of EM field pollution from all the overhead power lines... so i need to factor that in as i walk my grid work & mark target spots to make a underground 'map' of the terrain & just what we might be looking At or looking For...
lots of trash and field lines, tree roots, even large rocks can be unwanted targets of a dowsing


thanks, Bluesma

Ehh, Despite posting this comic I'm still on the fence about dowsing. I mean I've seen it work, though I've never gotten the darn things to work for me. Maybe I'm just not believing hard enough or something.

Originally posted by Skewed
Any scientific explanation as to why this works?

Just a guess on a whim, but one possibility is static electricity.
I'm thinking of a little experiment I did as a kid with a comb under a faucet.



If a stream of water can bend in such an "impossible" fashion because of a small amout of static, there's no reason why the "bend" can't happen at the other end of the equation.

Some questions I'd have are;
What's generating the static charge, or is it just electricity/energy of the water in general reacting with that of the person, with the "rods" acting as antennae?
Does it absolutely require a human? Could a robot do it? What if it was grounded/charged the same as a person would be?

Stopped typing, youtubed "dousing static electricity," came up with this pretty-hard-to-follow video, but it's not a bad explanation

"...basic facts... ...the divining rod phenomenon is, in my opinion, an electrical phenomenon... it has nothing to do with magic or things like that... It's just mother nature and physics..."

..WATCH also the video "Divining Rods and Electricity INFO"for more information...some theory about the "Divining Rod Phenomenon" There a two types of DRods in use. One RRod is made of two pieces of metal like i shown in my video " Divining Rod and EMField " called L-Rods they got static electrically captures like a capacitor....The other common DRod is called V - Rod...it is a closed electrical loop...it follows the princip of movement and induction...like a coil..The body of the person who use the L-Rods or the V-Rod works like biological electrical amplifier ...the signal from the ground is amplified by the nerves of the body and causes a movement of the muscles of his hand...this is not in all cases the way how it works....in my last video about this phenomenon the (one..) L-Rod moved
only by the power of the EMField...confusing ? yes it is ...!!!
but quit interesting ...the signals where comes out of the ground can be detected cy electronic devices ....but is not simple to build it...it works like a passive radar...maybe you know this kind of detection...tectonic gaps got different electrical captures the the ground beside it....

Originally posted by JohnnyCanuck
Aside from the fact that Randi has come under sever criticism for structuring tests so that they CANNOT work,

That is simply because he stops cheating - and funnily enough all "psychic", dowsing, etc etc powers suddenly stop when cheating is stopped! The severe criticism comes from people who are stopped cheating

this same method has been used in gemfields to find a good spot for digging, when crossed is for vertical shaft,
as you dig down, they uncross and is for horizontal side shaft.

could be the other way around though with the crossing and uncrossing, but no water would want to be found either way while digging.

There is an old guy that was kind of a hippie that was very successful at water witching.. I asked him how he learned to do it and was told that when he built the plywood shack he lived in he decided that he'd just see if he could do it and was successful... At the time there were friends of his that were leaving Dallas and building houses in the woods miles away from piped in water and they relied on him.. Where ever there was a house there was a well near by but in the last 15 years most people were getting on the community water service because during long dry spells their wells were going dry but so far the people whose wells were doused by John have gotten along without needing to do that.

* Did you know that a dowser (P.C.Brown) was paid a substantial retaining fee on contract to Richfield Oil Company and was also employed by Signal Oil and Gas, Standard Oil, and Getty Oil amongst others? (they wouldn't do that if he was no good!)
* US marines in Vietnam were taught to dowse (by L.J.Matacia) so that they could locate booby traps and where the enemy was.
* Dowsing is routinely taught to British Army Engineers and the British Army HQ in Germany is supplied with 750,000 gallons of water a day, found by dowsing.
* The largest oil strike in 20 years in Oklahoma was found by dowser J.W.Young.
* A dowser (J Longton), in his first effort in the UK, found buried Viking silver brooches valued at over $60,000.
* Diamond companies routinely use dowsers to assess possible mining sites.

Yeah... it's not as far out there as some would have you believe...

Originally posted by Bobaganoosh
I have used this method to find water, sewage, and underground electrical lines.

I met one elderly man about 15 years ago who uses a mesquite or willow forked branch, I have no clue how that works, but it is crazy to witness in person.

Good thread.

Yup, me too! Plenty of times, with 100% accuracy. Good to know (from some others in this thread) that it doesn't actually work, and I was actually just getting lucky.

Originally posted by DaddyBare
Yeah... it's not as far out there as some would have you believe...

and your valid souce for those claims are? A proper source, like a press release by the british army.

I was visiting my Mother's rural property not long after she purchased it and she told me she was getting a bore (well) drilled the following weekend. When I asked her where, she told me it was undecided. The conversation eventually got round to "dowsing" and I told Mum I was sceptical. Ha! We made a pair of dowsing sticks (?) out of 2 lengths of fencing wire approx. 50cm long with 90 degree bends about a quarter of the way along them, to use as handles. Still doubting, I wandered around for about 15 minutes without any sort of success when I neared one of the front corners of her block. The rods crossed over! When I stepped back off the mark they uncrossed again. I tried this 5 or 6 times backwards and forwards and each time the rods would cross and uncross as I passed over this one spot about a metre square! Fastforward 1 week and she told me on the phone the bore was in. When I asked her where they drilled it she told me they dropped the drill about 30 metres down on the precise spot I had dowsing success and found beautiful pottable water! This is also surprising to me because the property is a couple of hundred metres above sea level. I would have thought artesian water would be located closer to sea level!

reply to post by 1825114


If you want to test your explanation, maybe rub your feet on carpet, and then go dowsing without discharging it?

Update, I just tried the static theory on my water bottle. I proved two things. One, rubbing my feet on the carpet increased the effectiveness of the rods, and that you can find something as small as a bottle of water under a box.