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Ok, but HOW does witching/dowsing WORK?!?!?

I

in-too-deep

Well-known Member
Didn't want to steal the thread below, so I started a new one.

I've never tried it myself, but my dad has and I've heard lots of testimony...does anyone have a scientific or atleast common sense explanation?

And why are some people unable to make it work?
 
Probably has something to do with body chemistry why it doesn't work for some. I use brazing rods to find any underground line. Works like a champ for me. It's just science, although of a sort we haven't quite figured out yet.
 
I have no idea about the dowsing for underground water; the crossed wires will definitely work, though I don't know how. It's not just water lines, will also find buried wires, field lines, etc. Will "find" overhead power lines also...........
 
I used to think that the more relaxed people were better at that, but of the several successful ones I know personally, they are from relaxed to mildly wild. First one I met, never been on this place, and found the lines, the water veins and directions, and well depth. Our priest plans to come out this Spring to locate some tile lines that I want to add on to- they were put in before GPS records.
 
Not sure, but some people can, some not. Something to do with magnetic fields or similar. I have an old locating device like a meter, you just held it by it's strap just above ground and it would move when over a pipe. My brother can't but I can. Like in the post below, grab a couple flag markers, if to long I'd smack em with whatever was handy against the track to cut. This will probly start some nay sayer's, but when they started useing "safe" flags (plastic staff) I tried it using a lighter to heat and bend. It works fine, metal or plastic "L" rods, metal or plastic pipe or wire doesn"t matter. Me and my buddy were always double checking the marker crew and catch mismarks.
 
The first time I ever saw this done was in a community college class (evening) by a lady that worked in some highlevel government science program...ie...a very educated individual and scientific minded. She was talking/demonstrating "finding" metal objects kinda/sorta like metal detectors do. When she started talking and doing her show & tell I thought "what a waste of our time by such a smart person."

I DID NOT BELIEVE HER AND TRIED TO FIGURE OUT HER MAGIC TRICK.

After class, several people stayed to talk further with her. I then dropped my wad of keys on the floor and tried it...IT WORKED!!

Several days later, I tried it over a incoming water line...marked each spot and marks pretty well lined up.

THIS IS MY THEORY: It detects where there has been some underground disturbance of the soil...ie...water line ditch/trench, etc. As for the "metal" finding...don't have a clue.

I've never tried the apple/peach limb thing and only tried to locate water for a well one time. I was within 10 ft. of where a 200 ft. well was later drilled that produced 10+ gal/minute. A "pro" had gone ahead of me a few days before. I made NO ESTIMATES on depth of water.

I read a book one time about this and "belief in yourself" seemed to be the answer. I still don't "believe", but have seen it in my own hands.

Has anybody done a GOOGLE check on this??

RICK
 
Ha. I guess I posted on the wrong thread. Yeah, magantism makes the most sense, as I posted below, seems a flow of water, electric current, helps, which is how the old times can judge how much water, how deep, by years behind a shovel I suppose. How I or others fine dead lines or empty pipes is the question to me. Funny how rusty welding wires work, but a too dry fruit tree branch doesn't. And, as I mentioned on the Txas water thread, how the heck does the gas company sniffer work? From several feet away with concrete, tarmac or plastic sheet in between. Nowdays with water in the west now hundreds or thousand plus feet down, those old timers still feeling the artesian water viens?
 
i"m an engineer by training and spent 34+ years in engineering. I was skeptical the first time a neighbor showed me with a couplwe of "L" shaped wires. It does work but I have no explanation for it. Just because we don"t understand it doesn"t mean it won"t work. It just means we don"t understand.
 
I had the dowser look for water on my place.
guy found 3 spots he said drill here or here or here,marked the spots and said,all the water you'll ever need about 50'deep.

well, turned out not a friggin drop to be had,they went to 150' on two places.
the last spot had 2 gal/min at 85' deep.

The well driller said,it's all BS,i drilled many wells,there is no way of telling till you find it.
Just poke a hole,it's there or it ain't.

my 2 c
 
There is a big difference between dowsing for underground water lines and dowsing for a water well. I have no idea how someone can find water by dowsing although around here there is water everywhere. But finding water and electric lines works with the brazing rods.
 
Don't know how it works, but I agree with the other poster who said that faith or confidence has a lot to do with it. I personally don't have that confidence in my own abilities.

When I was working on that sign crew that I mentioned below, I came home and fixed a couple of brass rods and had my then-eight year old son walk slowly with them across our back yard. The rods crossed over the water service line that had been installed many years before his birth.

That guy on the sign crew could find stuff as fast as he could walk. At every sign location, he would check from the edge of pavement to the right of way line. If his marks didn't agree with the utility locator's marks - we used his - and like I said, we hit only two water lines out of hundreds of possibilities.

This was in the days before fiber optic phone cuts would bankrupt a contractor. I've never seen this tried on a fiber optic line. That would take some guts. . .

Paul
 
I can dowse water and have positive proof that it works.I will type it out 1 finger if any one is interested..
 
Nothing to back it up, but I wonder if it has something to do with variations in density? Had an electrician on a site trying to tell me exactly where he buried a feed. I keep accurate as-builts and showed him the trench location. He swore it was 10 ft further out and used the two wire method until they crossed (10 ft out). He dug and found the wrong trench (I think it was water or empty conduit - can"t remember). He dug where I marked and found the feed. Electric trench had grits for backfill. Other was I think 1" washed gravel.
No doubt that method found a trench, but one of lower density.
My thoughts only....
 
here is what i know/have experienced...

worked for the town a while ago...one of the guys on the clean up crew was a real firm believer in the whole thing...during lunch break one day, after we had been talking about it...he went into the woods and grabbed a y-shaped stick, showed me how to hold it and told me to walk...after about 12 steps the sticked pointed at the ground...hard!...i couldn't twist it up...seemed like some odd forces working there...

when we were working on the house a friend who was helping us tape was asking about the well and we said he had to drill one and got on the subject of dowsing...he ran into the barn and grabbed 2 welding rods, bent them and as we walked when you hit a certain spot they would turn towards each other...i tried it, my dad tried it, he tried it...it seemed to all cross in teh same spot...a couple of true doubters also tried...sister's ex boyfriend and others...still worked for them...
drilled where it seemed to be strongest...hit a good stream of water...

don't know how it works...don't know why...but it seems to...
 
oh yeah!
i forgot...on the negative end...
a friend of ours was looking at getting a well drilled and he had a couple of dowsers come out...
one showed up with a piece of paper.
he sketched the property
closed his eyes
ran his hands over the paper
and made a dot and said "water will be there"
never left the kitchen

needless to say my friend did not drill where he said...at $15 a foot.
 
After you find a vein with the 2 wires that cross, just take one wire & walk across the vein and the rod will point in the direction the water is flowing. Try it both ways with either wire & it will be the same. There is electricy in flowing water that creates a magnetic field that the wires pick up just like a compass.
 
Just plain luck there is nothing there at all in the process. The farther west you go the less success there is. Less water! Many clearly reasonable tests have been administered to the faithful and they all fail. Sorry, I do science. Jim
 
I have seen it done and have done it myself.. work well on buried lines with either electricity or water.. works best if water is flowing verses no water. I beleive the free electrons line up with the earths magnetic field when its either metal or flowing water line. plastic water lines that have the water cut off are very difficult to find, verses plastic water lines in use. I have not seen the deeper water pockets located and cant verify, but I beleive that they do the same. when the electrons can line up with the field of the earth, that area will show more pull that areas of low permability or none magnetic materials. So while there is some very good proof for shallow, I have not seen deep work done.

ITS VERY DIFFICULT TO HOLD THE DOWSING RODS LOOSELY enough SO THAT THEY CAN WORK and turn and not be turned by wind or gravity!!! IT takes some practice but will and does work.
 
As an Engineer and an Attorney and generally NOT a believer in such things I CAN STILL SAFELY AND WITH EXPERIENCE SAY IT DEFINITELY WORKS FOR ME even though I have no idea how or why, but hey I believe in God n I never saw him in person either

My 85 yr old farmer and neighbor showed me how and even though it was buried water lines we were lookin for (not where to drill any well) I FOUND EVERY ONE and the stick made a pronounced hard pull to the ground everywhere one was buried.

Again I cant explain it n dont really care BUT IT WORKED FOR ME BIG TIME regardless if it works for anyone else and regardless if anyone can explain how IT JUST WORKS SOMEHOW??? Magic I guess lol

John T
 
Witching/dowsing are one of those things that you can't prove one way or the other. You hear all sorts of stories about people who drilled 10 holes and no water, so a dowser comes out and say's drill here and low and behold there a gusher. Its probably true but you never here about the hundreds that where drilled and were dry.

Just like high voltage power lines that cause cancer. Lots of people who live under them get cancer and lots don't. JMHO Dave
 
Well I drill water wells full time so of course dowsing doesn't work for Me have walk round with a forked stick for hrs. never moved, bent, wiggle, shook or nothing! but if I have two brass rods bent L shape and hold them in my hands, slowly walk over a water,gas line or cable the dang things will bounce off My chest, they just bang into my chest so fast and hard they bounce off. Also used to be a water well driller round here that for 25.oo would witch your well, well truth be knowed he would walk round till he found a flat, dry, easy place to get his rig into
 
we had three of them do it for my uncles' well and they all said you have to believe in it for it to work supposedly. My uncle didnt really 'believe' in it and he tried it and it didnt work but my aunt did and she tried it and went where the witcher and found some and got it to work! so i dont really know what to say.

Have a good evening and God Bless everybody,

Cort B. Lamey
 
I happen to be one of those people that it works for. I have witched hundred of wells through out the mid west. I was a real skeptic till a old driller proved I had the touch. I have called the depth down to 350 feet and the amount of water up to 650 GPM. I have had big companies charter plane to get me to sites. Had one old boy drive me all over a section of land. He would go certain spots and asked "how about here" I would say "no good" I found my spot and we marked it. "I will pay you after we drill" About 6 month later run into me on the street and said "I owe you and handed me $300, He said " I run you all over that section and many of the places I had you check I had already had test wells drilled and they were dry. Today 20 yrs later he is running a big circle pivot irrigation on that well. I know most of you are thinking who is this crazy idiot who expectd me to beleive this story. Old legs and arms will no let me do it anymore. It is hard work if done right. It is really a science to read that old stick. I still have my old stick.

Every body laugh together.

gitrib
 
How does it work?? No one will ever know but it does. I have a friend that was a well driller for many years and that is how he found his spot to drill. NEVER had a dry hole,and that is something in Southern AZ. I don't witch for wells but I occasionally look for water lines or buried cables. has never failed me. Strange thing, my dad also has the knack, gift, feel what ever you want to call it. We use copper wire out of Romax bent in an L and held loosely in a closed fist.. His will turn out away from each other, mine will turn in and cross themselves. Go figure.
 
Last spring we had to find a field tile to hook a new tile up to so I went out there where I thought it should be and walked around with the bent wire. Every place the wire turned I put down a flag. I found the buried phone wire in the road but I knew where it was anyway.

When the backhoe started digging, the place where I thought the tile was at was a no-show but a couple of other places I had marked had tile laterals I didn't know were there.

Tried to find tile with the wire in another field and the wire turned every 60 feet or so in an area I know there wasn't tile. Must have been water veines down there. It was a field that tended to be wet anyway.

If I use two wires they turn in towards each other. If I use one wire it turns outward. Go figure!Jim
 
(quoted from post at 14:24:26 03/31/11) Didn't want to steal the thread below, so I started a new one.
Click to expand...

Tell you ain't been around in awhile........... Just ain't proper to start your own thread when you can turn someone else's into your own conversation :roll:

Not sure I would bet the farm on it but have seen people do it. Dad would find water lines, wires and gas lines with decent accuracy. Guy told us where to put the well, but I think he was a quack and just got some bucks..We were on a river bottom about 300ft from the river and folks would punch wells with a ram filter and T post driver. As for some not being able to do it, could be in the body, my brother could never wear a watch until the digital ones came out (could wear one but never knew the right time) because he has so much electricity (??) in his body. I've always been gonna try it, but just never got around to it.

Did your inlaw ever come over here? Or has he been here and gone back already?

Dave
 
I think it may work on electricity, It works for me.
Question... how do you people for whom it works tell how deep the water is??

I practice on places I know where a power cable or water pipe is. Stand where you think the water is after establishing its direction. hold the wire[L shape] and walk off at 90 degrees. the wire turns back towards you. the distance travelled is the depth of the water.
certainly works.
the water pipe is 12'' deep, elect cable is 2'deep. The wire turns back to me at these distances.
Tried it out on a 100' bore..sure enough it turned back at 100'.. Don't ask me why..
 
Here' another one.
Person over the road decided to put a bore in his front yard.Truck turned up. dowser selected the place, started boring. BANG. through his underground electric cable.. took 2 days to pull out 100 feet of cable and replace. he did get a reading but didn't notice there were no wires to the house.
 
Home of the crooked stick people {dowsers} is Danville, Vermont. 10 miles down the road. They have a convention every summer. Very impressive demonstrations. I'm a believer after seeing that.
 
With all these anecdotes about how well dowsing works, why is it that no objective scientific study has been able to confirm even a single dowser's ability?

James Randi has a one million dollar check for the first person who can prove their ability to dowse. Some of you dowsers ought to give him a call.
James Randi on dowsing
 
Dowsing works by angling your hands so the dowsing rods are pulled by gravity. You can make them cross, you can make them aim apart whatever you want. They do not do anything the holder doesn't cause them to do.

The branched stick is just aimed by the holder.

I'll say it a again, a good dowser, is just someone who knows the lay of the land and makes good guesses about where an escavator burried stuff.

Locally, if you drill 100 ft you hit clean water, anywhere. People still get the dowsers to come in before drilling, the well drillers don't care, they know they get their money for the 100 ft and it always goes that deep!
 
Nonsense, they know where the rock came from, how it was taken there, how it was broken/shaped, and who carried them over there. Doesn't take a scientist to prove anything.
 
working on a construction site years ago, where a large metal building was being put up for an equipment maintenance yard. The pad had been poured about a year earlier, and it was surrounded by a large gravel parking lot. We needed to do some digging in the lot, and we knew that a cast iron drain line had been laid from the pad to a nearby creek. Gravel had been spread, and lots of weeds were near the creek, so we could not tell exactly which direction the line went.
Rather than help us look, one guy went and got two brazing rods, bent them into an L, and started walking across the lot. When they crossed, he then followed that to the creek, where he found the outlet. I was pretty skeptical, but he let me try it and it worked for me too. You held the rods loosely in your hands, and whenever you got over the drain line, the rods would move. So I know that there is something to it.
 
Phil, I was not speculating on WHY dowsing works, but rather the idea that it works at all.

I don't need proof that the Pyramid of Khufu exists. I've seen it, I've walked on it and I've been inside it. In fact on clear days I could see it from my apartment in Maadi, where I lived in 1993.

On the other hand, I've seen no evidence that dowsing exists. I'm not going to waste my time speculating why something IS, when in fact it ISN'T. If you can prove otherwise, Randi has a million dollar check with your name on it.
 
I see you have never tryed dowsing, or been round a rig, we don't drill a well we try to make a hole that will supply you with half decent water, some places that at 50' other places its 350' In My Area. also places round here that if I go 100' you won't have any thing but mud or sand.
 
in-too-deep, if you want to try it, get 2 identical metal coat hangars, cut the bottom off one side, then the other side at the bend go up 5 inches and cut the hangar. bend it so you have a 90 degree angle and the short end sticking up about 5 inches. do the same for the other hanger. make a loose fist, set the hanger 5 inch side into the fist and let the end sit on the side of you little finger so it swings freely. hold the other one the same way. hold your hands about 8 to 10 inches apart chest high and walk slowly ahead. the hangars should be parallell to each other. when you cross over something, ie field tile, waterline ect, they will pull together quickly, or spread wide apart. drop a marker at this spot, move over about 10 feet and repeat. this is the way i mark field tiles. supposedly it works because the dug line causes a magnetic field the wires pick up. moving water underground causes the same thing.
 
I know that it works. I can feel something move those rods in my hands that I know isn't me.

I don't know of any way I would prove that to you or Randi, but I'm comfortable enough with my own knowledge, and others can decide for themselves.
 
They've been bull$hitting you.

If you carefully study many of the details of the size and locations of the stones, and the machining of the granite, it's clear the methods they've described with ropes, rollers, and ramps are not physically possible.
 
I've been reading through these, and finally had to add my two cents. My grandmother does it only with a freshly cut willow "Y" branch. She showed me how the branch almost pulls out of her hands when crossing the septic tiles in her back yard. I tried it without success. Then we held hands and both had a hand on the willow. My knuckles went white trying to keep that branch in my hand, and my 85 year old grandmother wasn't muscling me around. I've done it with copper wire, and the biggest reaction from the wires were the same place my grandmother and the well driller marked at our property. The well driller did a well up the road at 48ft, but told us to expect much deeper. Ended up getting poor flows at 71ft and 123ft, but good water at 190ft. Not a clue how it all is explained though.
 
Here is another 2 cents worth. Witching, dowsing, religion, fortune telling, palm reading & maybe others have this in common: No proof is necessary for the believers AND no proof is sufficient for the non-believers.
 
My house in MA was in the way of a new interstate highway along with my dads and uncles.My uncle decided to move his house back away from the new highway.Once the house was moved back he had a well dug with a back hoe.I hauled in some 30 inch tiles with a pick up.Uncle asked me if I would dig deeper by hand.His back was messed up in the house move.The back hoe got down to 15 feet.Uncle had dowsed the well site.He said there was a strong flow coming from the west and two smaller flows from the south.I dug down 3 more feet,still no water.There was a seam of coarse sand that ran around 1/2 the well wall.I was 1 foot below the seam.I dug at the south end of the seam and 2 streams of water came in .The west side had a large stream gush in when I dug at the sand with my shovel.Water was coming fast so I lowered a tile in with the truck and back filled.I had to lower all the tile and back filled by days end.Next morning the well was filled to 1 foot of the top.The back hoe dug a ditch to the foundation for the water line.I tapped my fathers dug well to supply water to my house.2 houses were too much for the well.Friends and I set out to drive a well point.I dowsed a flow of water running from the south.We had to move over about 8 feet to put a pully on a tree limb.A Shaw garden tractor had a flat belt pulley on the engine.We used the pulley as a capstan to haul the driving weight up.Worked fine till 8 feet when we hit something solid.Dug down and found a big rock.Dug a hole in the side wall and rolled it in.4 of us took turns digging,water came in at 14 feet from the side I had dowsed.We lowered the tile.This well supply enough water as long as we were there.Farmer I worked for bought my house and moved it to some land he owned.When it came time to drill a well he asked the driller if he used dowsing.He said some times.The well had to be in the front yard because septic system was in back of the house.Two of us stood behind the house while a 3rd man dowsed the front yard .All came up with the same spot under an apple tree.The well came in strong at 50 feet and was drilled to 75 feet.My father bought a place in a small city and I moved to another state where I could own a large amount of land and not be bothered by zoning.I built my TV shop here that I couldnt have in MA.Any one interested in dowsing should read a book called Henry Gross and His dowsing rod.I dont know how it works but have dowsed several wells here.I use an apple stick.A strong water flow will pull the stick so hard it will hurt your hands.My brother in law is an engineer, he cant do it.I can locate septic tanks with an apple stick.
 
I ask people who laugh at dowsing to explain gravity,magnetism,electrons,where does outer space end?What keeps the planets in place.Why does my Border Collie know so many of our words and even the spelling of some.He watches me when I count money in my wallet or put my check book in my pocket.He knows I am going to use my truck, he loves to ride.The moon affects the ocean tides but how does it do it?
 
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