According to the early 20th-century folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett, Grover Cleveland was said to have received the foot of a rabbit killed on the grave of Jesse James when Cleveland was running for president in 1884. Like the Hand of Glory, Ellis writes that rabbit’s feet were sometimes considered lucky because of their association with the body of a criminal. In medieval Europe, authorities sometimes left hanged men’s bodies out in public to warn others against committing crimes “but oftentimes, people would go and cut off one of the hands…usually the left one, and pickle it.” “The Hand of Glory was a hand cut from a hanged man,” he says. The Hand of Glory was considered a European good luck charm. Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer, suggests the rabbit’s foot could be connected to a European good luck charm called the Hand of Glory. But it is true that other superstitions about body parts can be found among early European and African Americans, as well as in Europe and Africa. It’s hard to say whether these marketing descriptions reference a real tradition, a joke among African Americans or a cruel joke about African Americans (at least one marketing description for a rabbit’s foot used a racist slur). “While other collected versions disagree about exactly when the rabbit must be killed, all indicate that the rabbit's foot historicizes an especially uncanny or evil time: the dark of the moon a Friday a rainy Friday a Friday the Thirteenth.” “A 1908 British account reports rabbits’ feet imported from America being advertised as ‘the left hind foot of a rabbit killed in a country churchyard at midnight, during the dark of the moon, on Friday the 13th of the month, by a cross-eyed, left-handed, red-headed bow-legged Negro riding a white horse,’” he writes.

companies that sold rabbits’ feet vouched for their authenticity by claiming that a black person had cut them off under specific, unlucky-seeming conditions. He explains that in the early 20th century, U.S. One theory is that European Americans appropriated rabbits’ feet from African American customs or jokes they didn’t fully understand, writes Bill Ellis, a professor emeritus of English and American studies at Penn State, in Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture. A rabbit's foot is often carried for good luck.

Why are rabbits feet lucky