# Short Story 161: The Walking Sticks *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 01 Jun 2018* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Robert Pirkola *01 Jun 2018, 19:38* I was reading *Rosemary's Baby* recently and bumped into a reference to one Thomas Weir, an infamous witch. There was an interesting tale associated with him that I thought relevant to the GW short story "The Walking Sticks". It is said that he "derived his power from his walking stick, topped by a carved human head, giving rise to later accounts that it had often been seen parading down the street in front of him." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Weir. ---