Dowsing, Divining, Water-witching, or Doodlebugging

I learned how to do this back in the 1980s, and to my surprise, there really does seem to be a ‘downward pull’ when passing over certain sections of ground being tested. While admittedly it is entirely possibly to cast a well in some regions and always hit water, it stands as a curious feature that several people testing the same ground can often experience the same results in the same very specific area. That particular ‘tug-tug-tug’ on the pointy-end of the twig is an acquired sense. It is similar to fishing for that coveted lunker of a trophy fish and having little nuisance whitefish (sunfish, bluegill, minnows, etc.) nibbling at the baited hook. You can ‘feel’ this little vibrations in the fishing rod and the adept fisherman knows that it is just pesky mini-fry teasing the hook and not that sought-after lake trout. The sensation in the forked twig is very similar. Once you have felt it, you can scarcely believe that you missed not feeling it before! It is that profound!

Those whom do not believe in divining often cite the diviner’s lack of training in geology and hydrology therefore; they know not how to locate water. It’s the old ‘trust me, -I’m a scientist and you’re not’ mentality.

On the other hand, there are diviners whom claim 100% success rates, claim to predict gallonage, artesian pressure and target depth and are too often proved wrong. They do believers and practitioners more harm than the regular critics and disbelievers of the art. The overly-confidant diviner then retorts that the drilling effort ‘collapsed the rivulet,’ or that ‘the stream diverted’ due to the weight of the drilling platform (having crushed the porous strata,) whatever.

 The most oft claim when finding water has failed is that the water-well driller did not dig deep enough. Who knows? Perhaps the diviner was seeking water and was instead attuned to a natural coal deposit or some other unusual sub-strata mineral? While a 2-inch wide core sample from 400-feet deep would tell a geologist more reliably about the strata ground than a diviner with a quivering wet willow twig, sometimes a water-witching search finds water in places that geologists and well-diggers said that none would found. For me, this is really no more definitive proof in favor of, than a failure for a water-witching to find water is confirmation for the skeptics.

Can Dowsing Find Underground Tunnels?

I have used the bent-wire method myself and have personally not had much success with it. The method is to hold the short ends of a metal rod, preferably made of brass, side by side. By slowly passing these over ground being tested, any ‘underground void’ below your body will cause one or the other rod to swing to the side. As I said, I have not success with this, but my father has and used this method before to locate a misplaced drainpipe in the place where he used to work. The drainpipe had to be extracted from the cement floor, but the blueprints for the build were missing so the engineers were ‘guessing’ at the location. And they missed the pipe entirely.

Upon digging and tearing up the cement floor quite a bit, my dad offered to ‘witch’ the area with two brasing rods. A brasing rod is made of brass, covered with a hard powdered flux. Using a hammer, dad pounded the flux off of the two rods and bent them similar to the image above, and using the side-by-side method, located the pipe. Every time one rod swung sideways over or under the other, it was a ‘hit’ and the position was marked on the floor. Dad traced the direction and length of the pipe with his boot upon the dusty shop floor.

Of course, the engineers laughed at the notion and said that the marked site was way, way off from specs, but they did a test dig on the floor …just to be sure. And you know what? They FOUND the pipe! Exactly where dad indicated it would be, some 12-inches deep and 8 or 10 feet away from where the engineers were mistakenly digging!

While again, not proof-positive, a success like that is better than ‘random chance’ and it really makes one wonder.

Images: Wikimedia commons public domain images