Superstitions & Folk Beliefs About Teeth

Here are some fun superstitions and folk beliefs about teeth your dentist hasn’t told you about.

A baby born with visible teeth is bad luck, and signs of a future murderer.
Dreaming about teeth indicates an upcoming death in the family.
The first molar lost should be covered in salt and thrown into the fire. This will chase away any evil spirits in the child’s body. If not, the tooth may be eaten by a dog (does that happen a lot? ha.) and the child will produce dog’s teeth. Or, you will be doomed to search for the tooth in a bucket of blood in Hell after you die. Well, that was a roller coaster.
Another good reason to burn lost teeth is so witches won’t get a hold of them and acquire power over the owner.
If you want your replacement teeth to be sharp and strong, leave your baby teeth outside a mouse or rat hole.
The number of teeth a child has at one year represents the number of siblings yet to be born.
Good teething amulets include coral, cowrie shells, orris root, and wolf teeth.
Gap between your teeth? You are lucky and will enjoy riches and travels.
The Scottish, on the other hand, believe the gap signifies lechery.
It is believed in some cultures that one should save all their lost teeth and be buried with them, so they have them for their next journey.

Toothaches

Carrying a few teeth from a horse is a good way to avoid toothaches.
Or, you can carry a tooth from a corpse in a bag around your neck.
You can transfer toothache pain by rubbing your gums with a nail and then hammering that nail into an oak tree.
Make a juice out of crushed lady bugs and rub it on your gums to cure a toothache.
If all else fails, you can inhale the fumes of burning henbane, a poisonous plant.
Nibbling on the first fern of spring will bring relief to a toothache (Cornish folklore).
Chewing on a piece of wood from a tree struck by lightning will also do the trick.
If you need to extract the tooth, apply a powder made of dried worms (using worms during mating season works best) onto the infected tooth.

Hirst, C.R., et al. “Superstitions about Teeth.” Folklore, vol. 6, no. 3, 1895, p. 301.

Pickering, David. Cassell Dictionary of Superstitions. Cassell, 1995.

Webster, Richard. The Encyclopedia of Superstitions. Llewellyn Worldwide, Limited, 2012.