Bells Against Storms and Spirits

Church bells were blessed and dedicated to a saint before they were hung, and their ringing was believed to scatter storms and drive away evil spirits, which could not bear the sound. Chambers traced the tolling of the passing bell for the dying to the same belief, as a way of scaring off fiends. An old woman told Chambers’s writer how, after a wicked squire died, his spirit came and sat on the bell so that all the ringers together could not toll it. There was also a popular idea that old bells sounded sweeter because the founders had put silver in the metal.