the.com/witching hour
3 a.m. given a press release by people who feared the dark and named it.
means The late-night hours, especially around midnight or 3 a.m., traditionally believed to be when witches, ghosts, and supernatural forces are most active.
from The phrase pairs 'witching'—from Old English 'wicca/wicce,' the male and female practitioners of magic whose name eventually gave us 'witch'—with the old sense of 'hour' as a charged, fateful slot of time. Midnight had long been folklore's danger zone, the moment between days when the veil thins, but the specific phrase 'witching hour' is comparatively recent, surfacing in English around the late 18th or early 19th century. The rival '3 a.m.' tradition draws on Christian lore—an inversion of the 3 p.m. hour of Christ's death—but that's a later, devotional embroidery on top of the older midnight fear.
- prime hour
- Traditionally 3 a.m., a mockery of Christ's 3 p.m. death
- baby version
- Newborn evening fussiness stole the same ominous name
- market term
- Stock traders dread the last trading hour's chaos
- literary debut
- Shakespeare's Hamlet coined the witching time of night
- liver shift
- Chinese medicine assigns 3 a.m. to liver detox
the witching hour bell — midnight bell at harvard yard that has tolled since 1726
midnight express train — istanbul to paris overnight service, historically departed at midnight during witching hour folklore periods