In Willaston, a small village in Northern England, people gather from far and wide in a grassy field, wielding pitchforks and various other tools. They begin to poke these instruments into the ground, shaking them back and forth and hitting them to create vibrations, often while wearing elaborate costumes. Believe it or not, this isn’t some extravagant pagan ceremony. It’s known as worm charming, or, in the U.S., worm grunting, a competition to see who can coax the most worms out of the ground.
Due to worm charming’s decentralized nature, the rules and regulations vary from place to place, but they all tend to go along the same lines. Without actively digging up the worms, one must use various tools and techniques to get them to come up to the surface. Contestants usually participate in teams of one to four, and are allotted a specific plot of land and given a time limit, usually half an hour, to charm them up. The person with the most worms wins, but prizes are also given out in other categories, such as largest worm.
One controversy in worm charming is whether contests should allow the use of liquids or not. Liquids are effective for bringing worms to the surface, but certain liquids (such as fecal matter), can be harmful to the field or the contestants. Contests that allow liquids often require participants to take a swig of whatever they are using, just to prove it isn’t too toxic. Besides vibrations and liquids, people often employ other creative strategies, such as dressing up as worms or something that attracts them and playing musical instruments.
Worm charming actually predates its competitive form and has been practiced around the world for generations. In the U.S., families in the Southeast have historically made money with this technique, selling harvested worms as bait for fishing. Worm charming works by creating vibrations in the ground to drive worms to the surface, which can produce hundreds of worms in just a few hours. Many theories have been posed to explain why the vibrations cause worms to exit their burrows, with the most popular being that it resembles those produced by digging moles, which feed on earthworms.
