James McHenry told the Glens of Antrim oral history project about folk charms. For ringworm and warts, human spittle and the sign of the cross, calling on God, were said to cure both. Wart patients sometimes returned and ringworm patients never did. Patients came from County Down, Toome, elsewhere in Antrim and England, and doctors and vets had limited success. His father received the ringworm cure from a parish priest in the mid nineteenth century and McHenry used it only after his father died in 1945.
For stopping blood, an old woman at Torr Head taught him at age seven to say: in the name of Jesus Christ who shed his last drop of blood on the hill at Calvary, I bid you cease to flow. He said that about forty years before, a man with a severed leg on Waterfoot Bridge was saved when Paddy McCafferty, who was an alcoholic, was fetched from a pub to recite the charm. He also described a shingles treatment near Lough Neagh, with the patient in a dark room with blessed candles.
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