Welcome to the Nightwalks…

The original rhyme for what number of magpies you see and what “results” from that was published in 1780. The rhyme has its roots in ornithomancy, or bird divination (which was used by the ancient Greeks and Romans).

---

---

Most of you are probably familiar with this poem:

One for sorrow,

Two for joy, 

Three for a girl,

Four for a boy, 

Five for silver, 

Six for gold,

Seven for a secret never to be told

…which is the modern version. However, there are more lines after that going up to thirteen:

Eight for a wish,

Nine for a kiss,

Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss,

Eleven for health,

Twelve for wealth,

Thirteen – beware, it’s the devil himself!

Magpies, like owls, were seen as a bird of either good or bad omen in some cultures and in Britain since at least the 16th century. Other superstitions about magpies included:

• Scottish people believed magpies were evil and had a drop of the Devil’s blood hidden under their tongues
• It was also believed in Scotland that if a magpie’s tongue was scratched with the sharp edge of an unmilled silver sixpence, followed by a drop of human blood being put into the scratch, the magpie would become able to talk in human language!
• The French believed that evil priests reincarnated as magpies or crows. 
• Early Christians saw the magpie as vain for not having fully black feathers to mourn Jesus’s death. The magpie was said to be the one bird who didn’t sing or offer any comfort during the crucifixion.
• In Sheffield, the magpie is said to be the only bird that refused to enter Noah’s Ark, choosing to sit on the roof chattering about the flood instead!
• In the times of cockfights, fowls’ eggs were sometimes placed in a magpie’s nest so that the chicks would absorb the magpies’ aggression
• Dried and powdered magpie flesh was an old remedy for epilepsy and other bits of the magpie were used variously to cure vertigo, bad eyesight, and melancholy.
• People used to believe that eating the leg of a magpie would help you recover from being bewitched.
• Their chattering calls were thought to signify the arrival of guests in the near future, or if they chattered on the roof, the arrival of “evil tidings.”
• One belief was that the magpie was the offspring of a raven and a dove, and as a result hadn’t been baptised during the flood in the Old Testament.
• A Swedish belief states that the magpie is a witch’s bird, and that witches can take the shape of magpies on Walpurgisnacht, when they travel.
• In Germany, the magpie is a “bird of the underworld.”
• In ancient Rome, magpies were associated with fortune-telling and magic.
• In ancient Greece, magpies were sacred to the god of wine, Dionysus
• In China, the magpie was seen as a “bird of joy” in the Manchu dynasty and was seen as representing the yin and yang, fertility and domestic happiness.
• There is a long-held supposition that magpies love to steal shiny objects. In fact, they are more likely to avoid them according to research done by Harrabin in 2014.

These beliefs may come from the aggressive and territorial behaviour magpies can have when nesting. They have been known to swoop at pedestrians and peck or scratch at people’s heads!

The omens of the rhyme are likely to come from medieval times, but the first version of the rhyme to be published was in a 1780 supplement to the 1778 edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens:

One for sorrow,

Two for mirth,

Three for a wedding,

Four for death.

This was in an appendix, contained in a note scribbled by Reverend Henley: “The magpie is called in the west to this hour, a magatipie, and the import of the augury is determined by the number of these birds that are seen together: ‘One for sorrow: Two for mirth: Three for a wedding: Four for death.'”

Another early version appeared in the 1842 edition of John Brand’s Observations On Popular Antiquities. John Brand was a clergyman of the Church of England and spent his time researching and documenting English folklore.

An early version of the poem was extended in Proverbs and Popular Sayings (1846, by Michael Aislabie Denham) with the words “hell” and “Devil” censored out:

One for sorrow,

Two for luck;

Three for a wedding,

Four for death;

Five for silver,

Six for gold;

Seven for a secret never to be told,

Eight for heaven,

Nine for ––––,

And ten for the d–––l’s own sell!

Sometimes “luck” would be changed to “mirth” and “death” would be changed to “birth,” although those last two words are total opposites (or opposing sides of the same coin…)

Another version was in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

One’s sorrow,
Two’s mirth,
Three’s a wedding,
Four’s a birth,
Five’s a christening,
Six a dearth,
Seven’s heaven,
Eight is hell,
And nine’s the devil his old self.

A tradition in England is that if you see a solitary magpie, the way to ward off the “sorrow” or bad luck is to say Good morning, Mr Magpie, how are Mrs Magpie and all the other little magpies? or to salute the magpie and turn around three times.

One 19th century custom in Shropshire was to say Devil, Devil, I defy thee! Magpie, Magpie, I go by thee! then spit on the ground three times.

Another custom in Westmorland and North Lancashire is to draw a cross on the ground when you see a lone magpie, or say this rhyme instead:

Magpie, magpie, chatter and flee,
Turn up thy tail and good luck fall me.

Other variations include taking off your hat to it, bowing, and wishing the bird a good day, or spitting over your left shoulder, turning around three times, crossing your fingers and saying:

I cross the magpie,
The magpie crosses me;
Bad luck to the magpie,
And good luck to me.

Sometimes, birds within the Corvidae family (crows, jackdaws) are involved with this traditional rhyme in places where magpies aren’t often seen, e.g. in America, or in India, where they apply the rhyme to the myna bird.

The “one for sorrow” idea may stem from the knowledge that magpies mate for life, so a widowed magpie is, naturally, a melancholy bird.

Other Strange Iterations

“1 for sorrow, 2 for mirth,
3 for a wedding, 4 for a birth,
5 for silver, 6 for gold,
7 for a secret never to be told,
8 for the tale that the stars have spun,
9 for a gate that can’t be undone,
10 for a river of forgotten lore,
11 for a key to the spectral door,
12 for a mirror reflecting the night,
13 for a beast that lives in spite,
14 for a heaven that none can reach,
15 for a lesson that none can teach,
16 for dreams trapped in stones,
17 for the gods’ hollow moans,
18 for the abyss that gazes back,
19 for the knowledge that which we lack,
20 for a magpies’ final verse, in a realm where shadows converse.”

“1 for sorrow
2 for joy
3 for a girl
4 for a boy
5 for silver
6 for gold
7 for a secret that’s never been told
8 for love,
9 for marriage,
10 for a baby in a golden carriage.”

“I saw eight magpies in a tree,

Two for you and six for me.

One for sorrow, two for mirth,

Three for a wedding, four for a birth.

Five for England, six for France,

Seven for a fiddler, eight for a dance.”

“Ravens perched on a single branch
What do your numbers foretell of chance?
One for sorrow
Two for mirth
Three for a wedding
And for four a birth
Five for rags
Six for gold
Seven for a secret
Never told
Eight for love
Nine for hate
Ten for a new friend at the gate
Eleven for a house
Twelve for sails
Lucky thirteen for secret spells.”

“…Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten for a time of joyous bliss”

“Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten for a letter,
Eleven for worse
And twelve for better”

“…Eight bring wishing
Nine bring kissing
Ten, the love my own heart’s missing!

(from Warwickshire, England)

“…Eight you live
Nine you die
Ten you eat a bogey pie!”

(from Yorkshire)

“One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for rich,
Six for poor,
Seven for a bitch,
Eight for a whore,
Nine for a funeral,
Ten for a dance,
Eleven for England,
Twelve for France”

“One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for rich,
Six for poor,
Seven for a witch.”

“One is sorrow, two mirth,
Three a wedding, four a birth,
Five a sickening, six a christening,
Seven a dance, eight a lady going to France.”

There is also a version by the comedian John Finnemore, which goes up to 1000. You can hear it on “John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme” series 9, episode 6.

---

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_for_Sorrow_(nursery_rhyme)

https://blog.gardenwildlifedirect.co.uk/magpie-rhyme/

https://www.birdspot.co.uk/culture/one-for-sorrow-magpie-nursery-rhyme

https://www.countrylife.co.uk/country-life/how-to-salute-a-magpie-70304

https://www.hypnogoria.com/folklore_magpies.html

https://www.icysedgwick.com/magpie-rhymes/

---

In the middle of Liverpool in the UK, there is a seemingly normal street of shops known as Bold Street. But over the years, people who walked down it noticed time doing peculiar things.

---

Bold Street has the usual sort of thing you’d expect – a line of independent shops, cafes, bars and restaurants with a bohemian style, and a church (St. Luke’s, which was bombed in the Blitz). However, this road is the centre of what has become known as the Liverpool time slips. These are moments where certain people accidentally stepped from the present day into a different time. This is a similar phenomenon to the Versailles Incident.

One off-duty (or perhaps retired) policeman from Melling (Frank) and his wife (Carol) were shopping in Liverpool in 1996. They split up at Liverpool Central Station for a little while, with Frank going into a record shop on Ranelagh Street and his wife into a bookshop on Bold Street to buy “Trainspotting” by Irvine Welsh. When Frank was walking along the incline near the Lyceum heading into Bold Street to meet up with Carol again, he came across a “dead spot of quietness.”

At that moment, a small, 1950s-style boxvan with the name “Caplan’s” on its side almost drove into him, beeping its horn, although he was on a pedestrianised area (or at least, it was for pedestrians in the 1990s!)

Frank crossed the road and noticed the bookshop (Dillons) had changed into “Cripps,” a women’s clothing shop, and the entire street appeared to have gone back in time by decades. The shoppers were wearing 1950s clothing (the men in trilbies and long coats, the women in scarves, berets, pillbox hats and gloves) and the cars were vintage.

There was one modern detail: a twenty-something year-old woman (Emma) in 1990s clothing (a green sleeveless top and black hipsters) carrying a Miss Selfridge bag. Frank followed this woman into Cripps, and the interior of the shop suddenly snapped back into that of Dillons, the bookshop. Frank grabbed the woman’s arm and asked, “Did you see that?” or words to that extent, and the woman replied that she thought a new clothes shop had just opened where the bookshop used to be, chuckled, and walked out shaking her head.

The experience lasted a few minutes but Frank kept talking about it for years, comvinced he had been through a time slip. His wife said she hadn’t noticed anything odd.

It transpired that there had been a firm called Caplan’s in the 50s and 60s, and that Cripps was in the spot where Dillons was (where Waterstones currently is). Cripps was in fact a women’s shawl shop established there in 1848.

Fast forward to 2006. A 19-year-old named Sean was running away from a security guard after stealing something from a shop near Bold Street, and ducked into a narrow passageway called Brooks Alley, which was a dead end.

As he entered the alley, he felt a tightness in his chest and the surroundings seemed to change around him. He turned around to see the guard had disappeared, and found himself in what appeared to be a past version of that area. Roadworks he knew to be there had suddenly gone, people were dressed strangely, and at a newspaper stand he noticed an edition of the Daily Post bearing the date Thursday May the 18th, 1967. When he tried to use his mobile phone, there was no service.

Panicking, he dashed back towards the street, passing shopfronts and signs that later seemed to be from the late 1960s (according to retellings which claim that details lined up with old shop names).

The guard chasing Sean claimed that when he sped into Brooks Alley, Sean had vanished!

As Sean ran, the houses and shopfronts gradually assumed normalcy, but when he stopped and glanced around, the area he had run from still looked antiquated. He boarded a bus and escaped home.

Sean was later interviewed and repeatedly told the same story. The historically factual names of the shops and their locations added to its credibility. The time slip itself lasted seconds or minutes.

Another occurrence from 2006 concerned Jane, a student who was meeting a friend at Liverpool Central station at 3pm. She was a little late for the meeting, so as she went up Bold Street she phoned the friend to let her know.

In the middle of the call and halfway along the street Jane’s phone cut out and she became aware something about the area had changed.

At first, she assumed she’d walked into a period‑drama film set, because there were people close by in Victorian clothes. Later, she claimed to have seen horses and carriages, mud and straw on the road, and oil lamps.

One version of the story stated that Jane spoke to some shopkeepers and passersby who seemed unbothered by her appearance, but other reports said she didn’t talk to anyone.

Jane allegedly said the whole event lasted a minute, then she found herself back in the same spot on Bold Street. She met her friend in the end, but was disorientated and dizzy.

Around May 2011, a woman named Imogen was shopping for baby clothes on or near Bold Street and accidentally entered a shop which technically should not have been there.

Imogen stepped into a branch of “Mothercare” on the corner of Lord Street and Whitechapel to get presents for her new niece or nephew, and was surprised to find that everything was cheap. On trying to pay using her debit card, she was informed the shop didn’t take cards. Irritated but not frightened, she put things back on the shelves and left the shop.

Imogen told her mother what happened, who was confused and said that the shop her daughter was describing had closed years previously and that a bank (a branch where her mother’s account was held) stood in its place now.

In disbelief, Imogen took her mother back to “Mothercare” to check, and there was a bank on that corner instead of the shop.

As recently as the 2020s, weird stuff has been going on. One Friday, December the 13th two girls walked down to Bold Street to do Christmas shopping. They entered a shop they’d never heard of, called “Ritzy Sports.” After looking around, they noticed the clothes cost far less than expected and everyone in the shop was dressed extremely differently to them.

The girls picked up what they thought was a vintage trainer and suddenly found themselves inside the restaurant “AKA Sushi.” They ran out, still clutching the shoe, and when other people became aware of their tale, they found out the style of trainer they picked up was popular circa 1998. CCTV footage of this event hasn’t been found.

[These anecdotes have been passed around by word of mouth so often, it’s more of an urban legend than anything else. There are no original statements or local reports that mark where the stories began, and the people named in them don’t even have surnames.]

People who worked and lived on Bold Street in the 1960s – a decade that many have claimed they slipped back to – may have noticed something peculiar on their road. Chris Gibson, the founder of a community and construction project called “Future Liverpool”, went into the cellar of one of Bold Street’s shops in 2010 and was disturbed to see some messages scrawled on the walls, e.g.:

“God have mercy on all who enter here.” – 5/2/66

“It’s no joke.” – 12/9/69

Gibson also said he heard “noises coming from within the room,” including “a low buzzing sound mixed with a sort of clattering.”

For more time-slip tales from the area, see this PDF: http://www.parascience.org.uk/PDFs/Time%20Slips.pdf

Theories

Various explanations have been put forward for the time slips, the most logical one being that people look at a shopfront or street, misread what their eyes see, then their brain fills in the gaps later.

If you expect to see something historical, your memory can lean towards that. And if you’re sleep-deprived, stressed, daydreaming, or just not paying much attention to where you are, a location can sometimes feel surreal or unfamiliar temporarily. Afterwards, your mind edits the memory, adding details you might have picked up before from stories about time slips from the media.

Other explanations are that Bold Street has “thin spots” where different times sometimes overlap, leading people to believe there’s a time portal in Liverpool.

A popular theory is that the time slips are linked to the underground railway system nearby, especially the city-centre underground loop on Merseyrail’s network, which runs under central Liverpool but not far from Bold Street. Some folks speculate this loop might create energy fields or “vortices” which distort time.

(An interesting side-note: there are old abandoned tunnels under Bold Street, chanced upon by two restaurant workers when they were restocking a cellar. They found a locked door and kicked it down, finding many chambers and workstations joined together by underground passageways. No one knows where the tunnels came from or what they were for, as before Bold Street existed the area was fields and farmland. An old well was excavated in these old foundations in 2001, with archaeologists finding clay pipes and porcelain fragments. You can visit this “Ye Olde Wishing Well” on the premises of Jeff’s.)

Another speculation holds that people have genuinely stepped into an almost-identical parallel world where Bold Street looks like another decade. There’s even claims that the time slips are a “glitch in the matrix,” or “entities are guarding something,” or “someone’s manipulating reality.”

---

Sources:

https://www.discoveryuk.com/mysteries/a-shopfront-to-the-past-the-mystery-of-bold-street-time-slips/

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/bizarre-tale-bold-street-timeslips-20350964

https://thetab.com/2025/02/24/erm-apparently-theres-a-time-slip-on-bold-street-and-every-liverpool-student-knows-about-it

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/i-travelled-time-walking-down-36345785

http://www.paranormalscholar.com/liverpools-time-slips-and-mysterious-events-on-bold-street/

https://www.spookyisles.com/time-slips-bold-street-liverpool/

https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/2141695/i-experienced-time-travel-famous-Uk-street

http://www.parascience.org.uk/PDFs/Time%20Slips.pdf

---

It so happens that “demons” are a nickname gifted to certain thought experiments in physics, philosophy, computer science, and other areas. Here are some of them.

Maxwell’s Demon

The Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell first mentioned this demon in a letter to Peter Guthrie Tait (another physicist and a pioneer in thermodynamics) in December 1867.

The demon was mentioned again in a letter to John William Strutt (a physicist and third Baron Rayleigh) in 1871, before Maxwell included it in his book on thermodynamics Theory of Heat in 1872.

Being a very religious person, he didn’t use the term “demon” but called it a “finite being.”

In Maxwell’s head, this “finite being” would control a portal between two chambers filled with gas. As each gas molecule came near the portal, this “being” would open and close the doorway quickly to allow fast-travelling molecules to pass through one way, and only slow-moving molecules to pass through the other way. This would make one chamber heat up whilst the other cooled down, because the kinetic temperature of gas relies on the speeds of its molecules.

This would decrease the total entropy of the two chambers, which would break the second law of thermodynamics (this law states that a system left to itself evolves into a state of equilibrium, or high entropy / more dispersed and disorganised, not lower / more ordered.

Maxwell’s “demon” or thought experiment was only monikered a demon in the journal Nature in 1874 by William Thompson (Lord Kelvin, a Scottish physicist, mathematician and engineer). He meant the term demon in the same way Greek mythology used the term daemon, i.e. a supernatural entity working in the background and not something evil!

Other scientists used forms of Maxwell’s demon in experiments (though they all differed to his original thought experiment in some way) and none have been found to break the second thermodynamics law. The reasoning behind the demon not being able to break this law are as follows:

• a demon would create more entropy / disorder trying to segregate the molecules than it could ever eliminate
• the demon would need some method of measuring the speed of the particles, and acquiring that information would cause the demon to expend more energy, increasing the entropy within the demon itself even as the entropy of the gas was lowered, so the system’s disorder would still increase.
• even if the demon used a method of measuring the particles’ speed that was thermodynamically reversible, it would need to either discard or store the data it was gathering. Discarding it would still increase entropy / disorder, and eventually it would run out of space to store all that data so would have to start discarding it anyway. Messy creatures, demons.
• the uncertainty principle would prevent the demon from sorting the molecules, because it wouldn’t be able to find their exact locations in the chambers when it measured their momentums.

(Interesting fact: Daemons (or daimons) in computing [certain processes that run on servers to respond to users] were named after Maxwell’s demon. They hide in software and computer systems, waiting for the right moment to emerge and do something either good or bad, before burrowing away out of sight once more. They are created by hackers, software designers, spies, and scientists, and they have come about from the growth of AI. These daimons can learn and even give themselves tasks. Examples of daimons can include chatbots.)

---

Laplace’s Demon

In 1814, the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace looked at how Isaac Newton predicted how an apple would fall according to the law of gravity and wondered if the same way of thinking could be used to predict everything?

Laplace imagined the idea of a demon – or “intellect,” in his words – that was able to know the position and momentum of every single particle in existence and all the laws of nature. Such an intellect would be able to calculate the entire future of the universe and that nothing would be uncertain.

Physicists believe that no such intellect can have all of this knowledge. For example, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, no information can travel faster than light, so although some events can affect the future, we can’t know about them in the present moment. Information about those events just doesn’t have time to reach us.

Even if the intellect could get information from all of the universe, due to the uncertainty principle, that intellect couldn’t possibly know exactly where each particle was and what it was doing. All it would be able to do was guess the probabilities of each particle’s properties, which would involve keeping track of a mind-boggling array of outcomes, and it wouldn’t know which one of those outcomes was going to be the real one. Cue one demon with a migraine.

This demon inspired the British mathematician Charles Babbage’s invention of the early computer, goaded Charles Darwin into thinking about the development of life, and caused Schrödinger to wonder whether something with similar powers could be in charge of cellular order.

Laplace’s demon existed for around 100 years and was “exorcised” at the beginning of the 20th century when quantum mechanics was discovered along with the uncertainty principle.

---

Loschmidt’s Demon

After steam engines had been invented and we were in the throes of the Industrial Age, Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann wondered how to explain entropy (the process by which everything becomes more disorded and messy over time). He reckoned he could explain it by looking at the tiny parts of big systems, e.g. particles of gas filling a room.

His older colleague Josef Loschmidt, however, doubted his methods and posed a challenge in 1876. He said to imagine the universe frozen in time, then reverse the direction that each particle was travelling in. (This original challenge didn’t involve a demon, but later on one was added that could see and freeze particles.)

At the particle level, reversing their movements – and therefore reversing time – would show nothing awry, but if you zoomed out and looked at larger structures, you would see events and objects reversing in time and undoing themselves! This gives rise to the question of why time only seems to run in one direction for us, if time can easily be reversed on a microscale level?

Later experiments would attempt to reverse time, inspired by Loschmidt’s demon. In the 1950s, Erwin Hahn used radio waves to temporarily push electric dipoles (like the hydrogen atoms in water molecules) into rotating in sync, thereby lowering entropy. This made it look like time was going backwards for the molecules. Once he switched off the radio waves, the molecules fell back into disarray.

Nowadays, we understand entropy doesn’t mean that systems always have to descend into chaos. Some systems even change into things that have more order to them, but only temporarily. (Entropy is the ultimate endpoint for everything, though.)

The universe began in a very ordered state, which gave it only one direction to go in… towards a messier state. There are many more ways to wreck an ordered system than to make it even more organised, making disorder much more likely.

So Loschmidt’s demon could reverse the movement of particles, but it would find it a real bugger.

---

Nietzsche’s Demon

This was a being imagined by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his book The Gay Science in 1882. In it, he proposed a being that whispers in your ear one lonely night to tell you that you have to live your life over and over again, “every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you… all in the same succession and sequence.”

This demon would supposedly force you to take full responsibility for your own life.

---

Descartes Demon

In Meditations in First Philosophy, the 17th century French scientist and philosopher Rene Descartes imagined a demon that could put you into a convincing fabrication of reality and make you think that it was real life. Could this demon completely fool you, and could it fool you forever?

According to Descartes, we could defeat the demon, because it wouldn’t be able to force a conscientious thinker to state “I do not exist” and truly believe that statement.

This demon inspired the idea behind the film The Matrix.

---

Bacon’s Demon

Mentioned by the philosopher Francis Bacon, this was the sphinx which haunted the wilderness around the city of Thebes. It had birds’ wings and the claws of a gryphon, and it would ambush travellers before asking them perplexing riddles. Oedipus managed to answer the riddle and kill the sphinx.

Francis Bacon said that Oedipus represented science and the sphinx represented nature, and that though nature could be dangerous, the rational thinking of science could understand it and render it harmless.

---

Miscellaneous

• Einstein “exorcised” the Filon-Pearson demon that could travel faster than light, teleport, act at a distance, and used a force named “gravitation” (not space-time) to push and pull things.
• There are quantum Maxwell’s Demons, nanoscale demons, and nuclear magnetic resonance demons
• Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, “bred” Laplace’s and Maxwell’s demons to imagine a cybernetic demon that can learn from feedback.
• John Wheeler, a cosmologist, proposed demons that live in black holes, feasting on energy and information and appearing to make entropy vanish.
• The philosopher John Searle came up with a demon that lives inside the brain and eats neural synapses.

---

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

https://youtu.be/ONCMMuREO4Y?si=oF2DPeYy-3r9DdB7

https://benjaminfranklininstitute.org/how-3-imaginary-physics-demons-tore-up-the-laws-of-nature/

https://physicsworld.com/a/demons-to-think-with-the-rebels-you-mustnt-ignore/

https://aeon.co/essays/why-physics-today-stands-on-the-wings-of-angels-and-demons