ST. HELENA, Calif. – With California in the grips of drought, farmers throughout the state are using a mysterious and some say foolhardy tool for locating underground water: dowsers, or water witches.

The practice of using a branched wooden stick (a dowsing rod) to locate underground water or buried minerals is known as dowsing or divining. In some areas of the United States, this practice may be ...

There are numerous studies that show dowsing is no more effective at discovering water or whatever than pure chance or a guess. Sometimes dowsing is referred to as divining. In the US and elsewhere ...

Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John ...

Dowsers do more than find water. Dowsing, also called water witching or divining, is an ancient art used to find the unknown, including the location of water or minerals, or unresolved health ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. In this photo taken Thursday, Feb. 13, 2014, proprietor Marc Mondavi demonstrates dowsing with "diving rods" to locate water at ...

What Mondavi was concentrating on is the ancient practice used for finding groundwater known as water witching, or dowsing. Witching is believed to have been in use for centuries, and involves using ...

Nordis Estrem will teach a water dowsing class on April 5 from 1:00 to 2:00 pm at 1607 Jasmine in Carrizozo. The fee for the class is $10.00 and class size is limited to 10 students. Water dowsing or ...

Updated 7 a.m. Wednesday Most of the major water companies in the United Kingdom use dowsing rods — a folk magic practice discredited by science — to find underwater pipes, according to an Oxford Ph.D ...

There are many different ways to hold a divining rod or dowsing rod. Some people prefer to "witch" for water with a pendulum. The practice relies on the idea that the object will suddenly move when a ...