The Witch of Yazoo City
As told by
Willie Morris
Many years ago, there was a mean
and ugly woman who lived alone in carefully guarded seclusion near the
banks of the Yazoo River. Nobody knew anything about her, but they loathed
her nonetheless. They hated her so much they didn't even give her a name.
It was rumored that on stormy nights she would lure fisherman into her
house, poison them with arsenic, and bury them on a densely wooded hill
nearby...this was her hobby, but although many people suspected her of
these evil diversions, no one was able to prove anything.
Then one late afternoon in the
autumn of 1884, a boy named Joe Bob Duggett was passing by her house on
a raft when he heard a terrible, ungodly moan from one of the rooms. He
tied his raft to a cypress branch, ran to the house, and looked through
a window. What he saw chilled his blood and bones. Two dead men were stretched
out on the floor of the parlor, and the old woman, wearing a black dress
caked with filth and cockleburs, had turned her face up to the ceiling
and was singing some dreadful incantations, waving her arms in demented
circles all the while.
Joe Bob Duggett raced to his raft,
floated into town, and told the sheriff and his men what he had seen. They
got a horse and buggy and sped to the old woman's house...They smashed
down the front door, but were unable to find either the dead men (who have
never been found to this day) or
the demented old woman.
They climbed the stairs to the attic, opened the door an inch or two, and
caught sight of several dozen half-starved cats, all bunched together and
gyrating in their wild insanity. Two skeletons, which were never identified
by the sheriff's office, dangled from a dusty rafter. Fish
bones littered the floor, and
the smell was unusually pungent. The sheriff, his deputies, and Joe Bob
stood there transfixed, finally banging the door shut when eight or ten
of the cats tried to get out.
Then from the backyard they heard
the sound of footsteps in the fallen pecan leaves, and from an upstairs
window they saw the old woman sneaking away into the swamps which abounded
along the River. "Stop in the name of the law!" the sheriff shouted, but
the old woman, who as Joe Bob Duggett would later tell his grandchildren,
looked "half ghost and half scarecrow, but all witch," took off into the
swamps at a maniacal gallop. They followed in hot pursuit, and a few minutes
later they came upon a sight that Joe Bob remembered so well he would describe
it again, for the thousandth time, on his deathbed in the King's Daughter
Hospital in 1942. The old woman had been trapped in a patch of quicksand,
and they caught up with her just seconds before her ghastly, pockmarked
head was about to go under. But she had time to shout these words at her
pursuers: I shall return! Everybody always hated me here. I will break
out of my grave and burn down the whole town on the morning of May 25,
1904! Then, as Joe Bob also described it later, with a gurgle and a retch
the woman sank from sight to her just desserts.
With the aid of pitchforks and
long cypress limbs the authorities were able to retrieve her body. The
next day, with the wind and rain sweeping down from the hills, they buried
her in the center of the town cemetery, in a cluster of trees and bushes,
and around her grave they put the heaviest chain they
could find---some thirty strong
and solid links. "If she can break through that and burn down Yazoo," the
sheriff said, more in fun than seriously, "she deserves to burn it down".
The years went by, the long Mississippi
seasons came and went, and the town forgot the old woman.
On the morning of May 25, 1904,
some twenty years later, Miss Pauline Wise was planning her wedding. As
she entered her parlor to show her visitor some gifts, she discovered a
small blaze. Suddenly a strong wind, unusual for that time of year, spread
the fire to adjoining house. From Main Street the fire spread to all intersecting
streets and soon reached the residential section. The roar of the
ever-increasing flames, the confusion of terrorized thousands, the hoarse
shouts of the firefighters, and the sound of crashing walls made a scene
of awesome horror that remained a fixed picture in the memory of eyewitnesses
as long as their lives lasted. Many fine homes were destroyed, and every
bank, every physician's, lawyer's and dentist's office, every hotel and
boardinghouse, every meat market and bakery, the newspaper and printing
office, every church, clubroom, and lodge room, every telephone, telegraph
and express office, the depot, the post office, every furniture store,
every hardware store, all but one livery stable, all but one drugstore,
every barbershop, every tailor shop, every undertaking establishment, and,
in fact, nearly every business necessity.
The next day, after the murderous
flames had consumed themselves, several elder citizens of the town made
a journey to the grave in the middle of the cemetery. What they discovered
would be passed along to my friends and to me many years later, and as
boys we would go see it for
ourselves, for no repairs were
made, as a reminder to future generations. As if by some supernatural strength,
the chain around the grave had been broken in two.
This immense and grievous tale
alone would have been enough to make us woefully mortal Yazoo boys susceptible
to the ghostly presence in our midst as we grew up in the 1940s. But on
still, cold nights in the fall, as the mists whirled and eddied out of
the delta, and the wind whistling and moaning
from the woods made our
hearts pound in fear and excitement, we had other things to remind us that
this was unusual country to have been born in."
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