Evidence status: WELL SUPPORTED — exact deeper origin complex
Of all the objects humans have decided might improve their fortunes, a dried animal foot is one of the stranger choices.
And the original superstition was considerably darker than the brightly coloured keyrings later sold as novelty charms.
The Short Answer
Rabbit's feet became widely known as lucky charms in the United States around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The specifically American tradition is strongly associated with African American hoodoo and Southern folk magic, where the most powerful charm was not simply any rabbit's foot. Folklore might specify a particular foot, a particular night, a graveyard, moon conditions or other unusual circumstances.
A Smithsonian rabbit's-foot amulet survives from around 1898, and American folklore publications were documenting the belief at approximately the same period.
The deeper origins are more complicated. European animal and amulet traditions may have contributed, but the detailed graveyard rabbit's-foot charm that became famous in America belongs particularly to Southern African American folk belief.
What We Know
Late nineteenth-century American evidence is unusually rich.
An 1883 newspaper story based on Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus material describes a rabbit's foot being carried as protection against frightening supernatural forces.
An 1898 story by African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt gives an even more elaborate version.
Its character Julius insists that an ordinary rabbit's foot will not do.
The charm must come from a particular hind foot of a graveyard rabbit obtained under special circumstances.
Chesnutt's story is fiction, but it relies upon a superstition recognisable enough to contemporary readers to function as cultural material.
In 1899 the Journal of American Folk-Lore described the lucky rabbit's foot as especially prevalent in the Southern United States and connected it with African American tradition. The account specifies the left hind foot and a rabbit killed in a graveyard.
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History also holds an actual rabbit's-foot amulet dated to approximately 1898.
So by the end of the nineteenth century this was not an obscure belief.
It was already entering wider American popular culture.
How It Became a Habit
The original charm could be extremely specific.
Which foot mattered.
Where the rabbit was killed mattered.
When it was killed might matter.
The person obtaining it might matter.
That is typical of folk magic.
Power comes not merely from the object but from the circumstances surrounding the object.
As the rabbit's foot moved into mass popular culture, those complicated requirements gradually disappeared.
The charm became something manufacturers could mount, dye, decorate and eventually turn into a keyring.
The graveyard vanished.
The special night vanished.
The ritual vanished.
All that remained was:
rabbit's foot = luck.
The Story Everyone Tells
A much simpler explanation says rabbits have always represented fertility because they reproduce rapidly.
Fertility means abundance.
Abundance means prosperity.
Therefore rabbits are lucky, and carrying a rabbit's foot gives you some of that luck.
There are certainly long-standing symbolic associations between rabbits, hares, fertility and spring.
But that explanation leaves an obvious question unanswered:
Why the foot?
And why, in documented American traditions, specifically a hind foot taken under elaborate and sometimes unsettling circumstances?
The fertility explanation is too broad to explain the actual charm.
What the Evidence Actually Says
The most historically secure route into the familiar American rabbit's-foot charm runs through Southern African American folk magic.
Folklore scholar Bill Ellis devotes an entire study to the question and explores the rabbit's foot in relation to graveyards, magical reversal and the appropriation of power from uncanny or dangerous places.
Newbell Niles Puckett's twentieth-century research likewise documented traditions in which objects associated with graves or notorious dead people acquired special magical power.
A folklore account published in 1913 explicitly described the rabbit's foot as American, originally Southern, while noting that rabbit-foot charms had by then spread into the northern United States as well.
So:
DOCUMENTED: Rabbit's feet were being carried as lucky and protective charms in the American South during the late nineteenth century.
WELL SUPPORTED: African American hoodoo and conjure traditions played a major role in the specific American form of the belief.
DOCUMENTED: Graveyards, the left hind foot and special circumstances appear in historical versions.
PLAUSIBLE: Older European animal and protective-charm traditions may have contributed additional symbolism.
FOLKLORE: Simply saying “rabbits are fertile, therefore the foot is lucky” does not adequately explain the historical charm.
UNKNOWN: There is no single simple origin from which every rabbit's-foot tradition can be derived.
Different Elsewhere
Rabbit folklore can contradict itself spectacularly.
A Dictionary of English Folklore records the rabbit's foot as a lucky pocket charm in twentieth-century Britain.
The same reference work notes that rabbits themselves could be unlucky for fishermen, with some maritime communities avoiding even saying the word “rabbit” at sea.
So the logic becomes:
rabbit on shore: perhaps lucky.
rabbit's foot: lucky.
say “rabbit” on a fishing boat: definitely not lucky.
Folklore has never been overly troubled by consistency.
Why It Stuck
The rabbit's foot eventually became portable luck.
Small enough for a pocket.
Easy to sell.
Easy to recognise.
And once the complicated folk-magic background had been stripped away, it required no explanation.
Ironically, the modern novelty charm became famous precisely because most people no longer knew the strange ritual world from which some of its most distinctive forms emerged.
There is also an unavoidable joke built into the superstition:
however lucky the foot may be for its owner, it did not turn out particularly well for the rabbit.
Related Curiosities
Why Are Horseshoes Supposed to Be Lucky?
Why Are Black Cats Considered Unlucky?
Why Do We Throw Salt Over Our Shoulder?
Why Do We Cross Our Fingers for Luck?
Sources & Further Reading
Journal of American Folk-Lore — late nineteenth-century documentation of the Southern rabbit's-foot charm and its graveyard conditions.
Smithsonian National Museum of American History — rabbit's-foot amulet dated to approximately 1898.
Bill Ellis, Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture — scholarly examination of lucky rabbit's-foot folklore and graveyard magic.
Charles W. Chesnutt Archive — late nineteenth-century literary evidence describing the detailed Southern rabbit's-foot superstition.
Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore — rabbit-foot charms and the contrasting British taboo surrounding rabbits among fishermen.
Last checked: 19 September 2026