In the autumn of 1884, a young man named Joe Bob Duggit was drifting on his raft along the swampy stretch of the Yazoo River near Yazoo City, Mississippi, when he heard an awful scream coming from the home of the mysterious old woman the townsfolk called the witch. Curiosity got the better of him. He tied up his raft, crept to the house, and peered through a window. Inside, he saw two lifeless men lying in the living room and an old woman chanting strange, frightening songs while waving her arms in circles.
Terrified, Joe ran back to town and brought the sheriff. When the sheriff and his deputies burst through the front door, the bodies and the old woman had vanished. But a search of the attic changed everything. There, the men found dozens of malnourished cats huddled among piles of fish bones, and two human skeletons dangling from a support beam.
As the search party recoiled, the old woman gave herself away by rustling in the leaves outside. They spotted her slipping toward the swamp and gave chase. According to Joe’s account, they caught up to her as she was being swallowed by quicksand. Before her head went under, she shouted a curse: she would break out of her grave and burn down the whole town.
Her body was recovered the following morning, and she was buried in the middle of the town cemetery with the heaviest chain the townsfolk could find wrapped around her grave. The sheriff reportedly mocked the threat, saying that if she could break through that chain, she deserved to burn down Yazoo. For years, the witch was forgotten, and Yazoo City grew into a prosperous port town of nearly six thousand people with electric streetlights and hundreds of buildings. On the afternoon of May 25, 1904, a young woman named Pauline Wise was preparing for her wedding when she discovered a small fire in her living room.
The blaze quickly got out of hand, and strong winds carried it from house to house, engulfing street after street. Witnesses reported something strange: the flames seemed to jump through the air as if driven by a supernatural force, and the sudden gust of wind was unlike anything they had seen at that time of day. By the time the fire was spent, it had destroyed three-quarters of the town, reducing more than two thousand homes and nearly every business to ash. Miraculously, no lives were lost.
The only buildings to survive were the new courthouse, a library, an unfinished school, a church, and a few residences. The next morning, older residents walked to the middle of Glenwood Cemetery, where the witch had been buried about twenty years earlier. What they found confirmed their suspicions: the heavy chain around her grave had been broken in two. The fire, they concluded, was her revenge.
This legend of the Witch of Yazoo, first popularized in Willie Morris’s 1971 book Good Old Boy, remains part of the town’s identity today. The witch’s original headstone, engraved only with the letters TWW, went missing shortly after being placed. Some believe the initials stand for “The Witch,” while others say they refer to her apparent name, Tandy Warren. The grave remains wrapped in chains to this day, because local law holds that when the chains are gone, the witch will return and have her revenge on Yazoo City.
The legend of the Witch of Yazoo was one of many terrifying tales that grew out of the belief in witchcraft and the occult. More than two hundred years earlier, that belief had consumed an entire New England town. In 1692, in the Puritan town of Salem, Massachusetts, Reverend Samuel Parris grew alarmed when his nine-year-old daughter Betty and his eleven-year-old niece Abigail began behaving frantically, screaming in pain, claiming to be pinched by unseen forces, and suffering fits. The local doctor, William Griggs, could find no medical condition and pronounced the girls possessed by the devil.
When two friends of the girls began complaining of strange visions, panic swept the colony. At the center of the hysteria stood a woman named Tituba, remembered as the first woman accused of witchcraft during the trials. Her origins remain unclear. Some scholars believe she came from the Arawak tribe of Venezuela, captured and sold into slavery in Barbados; others think she may have been a native of Barbados.
Captain Peter Roth of Kent, England, had sailed from Barbados in July 1674 bound for the northeast coast of South America intending to kidnap American Indians and sell them into slavery. After trading peacefully with canoe-borne groups along the Amakura River, Roth captured eight women and two children who had boarded his vessel to trade. Tituba was eventually bought by Samuel Parris, a sugar plantation owner in Barbados who had studied theology at Harvard. After his father’s death and a string of misfortunes including falling sugar prices and a hurricane, Parris moved with his family to Salem, where he became the local reverend, and Tituba came with them as a domestic slave.
In Salem, Tituba and Betty Parris grew close. Parris and his wife were often away on parish business, and the children spent most of their time with Tituba, who entertained them with stories about traditional Voodoo practices in Barbados. When Betty and Abigail began behaving strangely, Parris pressed the girls to name who was responsible. They quickly accused Tituba.
The Parris’s neighbor, Mary Sibley, allegedly instructed Tituba to bake a so-called witch cake and feed it to a dog in the hopes that it would reveal whoever was bewitching the girls. Tituba was arrested and thrown in jail alongside two other women, the elderly Sarah Osborne and a beggar named Sarah Good. Although she initially denied dabbling in witchcraft, under questioning by Magistrate John Hathorne she made a startling confession. She claimed she had not harmed the girls but had made a pact with the devil.
Hathorne asked if she had ever seen the devil, and Tituba confessed, saying the devil came to her and bid her serve him. She gave vivid descriptions of demonic characters, animal accomplices, and evil spirits that had come to destroy the Puritan community, and accused others of witchcraft in her confession. The townspeople were captivated. Scholars believe Tituba was the perfect scapegoat for the Parris household.
As an enslaved woman, she would have been obliged to obey her master and had no choice but to follow his orders. She was treated harshly by Parris, beaten for allowing the girls to take part in fortune-telling practices. She may also have been appealing to the Puritan belief that if you confessed and repented your sins, you could still be saved. Tituba confessed, repented, and declared her love for Betty Parris.
The public warmed to her, and the jury changed its sentiment. She rescinded her confession after claiming it was made under harsh treatment, and the Puritan community could not justify executing her after her repentance. On May 9, 1693, the grand jury refused to indict her due to a lack of evidence, but she still served a thirteen-month prison sentence in an overcrowded Boston jail because Samuel Parris refused to pay her bail. After her trial, she was sold to an unnamed person for the price of her debt, and then she disappeared from historical records.
The Salem witch trials resulted in almost two hundred people being accused of witchcraft, with nineteen executed and five others dying in custody. Tituba’s confession, forced or not, helped ignite the most infamous witch hunt in American history. Nearly two centuries later, another legend grew around a woman known as the White Witch of Rose Hall in Jamaica. Annie Patterson was born in Britain in 1802 to an English mother and an Irish father.
Her family moved to Haiti, where both parents died of yellow fever, and she was raised by her nanny, a Voodoo priestess. When her nanny died, Annie set off for Jamaica, which had been under English control since the mid-seventeenth century. Rose Hall, a vast plantation manor considered by many the finest ever built on the island, had been constructed in the 1770s by John Palmer, a senior member of the colonial community. According to legend, Annie met John Rose Palmer, a nephew of the original owner, and cast a spell on him to force him to marry her.
She was then believed to have poisoned him to gain sole control of the estate, and to have killed two subsequent husbands by stabbing and strangulation. She was said to have ruled the plantation sadistically, whipping and torturing the enslaved people, and even murdering their children to harvest their bones for black magic spells. Finally, she was killed by a former enslaved man named Takoo after she murdered one of his relatives. The reality was far less dramatic.
Annie Palmer and John Palmer left Rose Hall shortly after they were married around 1820, as the estate had run into massive financial problems when slavery was gradually banned throughout Britain’s colonies. John passed the manor to his creditors, and the estate was abandoned for about 130 years. The myth originated in 1868 with a story about the first owner, Rosa Palmer, who had lived decades before Annie ever arrived. A 1911 book on Jamaican history and a 1929 novel, intended as fiction, added further details and cemented the legend.
Yet despite the truth being well known, many Jamaicans still consider Rose Hall haunted, and stories persist of a figure in green velvet roaming the grounds and screams heard from the basement at night. Britain had its own chapter in the history of witchcraft. Victoria Helen McFarlane, better known as Helen Duncan, was born in Callander, Scotland, on November 25, 1897. From a young age, her spiritual side was clear, and she would behave hysterically and scare other students with her prophecies.
She married Henry Duncan in 1916, had twelve pregnancies of which six children survived, and took on part-time work in a bleach factory while beginning to offer seances to earn extra cash. She became a physical medium who could conjure and materialize the spirits of the recently deceased. During the 1930s and 1940s, she traveled all around Britain, with hundreds attending her seances. She would enter a trance, and ectoplasm would come out of her mouth and take on the form of dead loved ones, bringing great comfort to grieving families.
But some were determined to prove her a fake. In 1928, a photographer named Harvey Metcalfe attended her seances and revealed the spirits were simply dolls made from painted paper-mâché masks with old sheets. Psychic researcher Harry Price paid Duncan fifty pounds to perform test seances, and his report described her refusing to be x-rayed, her husband passing her cheesecloth, and the supposed teleplasm proving to be paper soaked in white of egg. Price published photographs revealing fake ectoplasm made from cheesecloth, rubber gloves, and cutout heads from magazine covers.
Duncan’s former maid confessed to aiding her tricks, and even her own husband admitted the materializations were the result of regurgitation. In 1933, a seance was disrupted when the lights were turned on, revealing a spirit made from a stockinet undervest, and she was convicted of fraudulent mediumship and fined ten pounds. The outbreak of the Second World War saw demand for her services increase. In late November 1941, a few days after the sinking of the HMS Barham, Duncan claimed a dead sailor’s spirit told her what had occurred.
The Navy had censored the sinking to keep British morale high, and only close relatives knew the fate of the ship, so authorities began to take interest. In January 1944, two officers from the Navy attended her seance in Portsmouth and were offended by her fraudulence. One lieutenant recalled how a white cloth figure appeared claiming to be his deceased aunt, but his aunt was alive and well. They reported her to the police, and on January 19, 1944, undercover police raided her workplace.
Duncan was arrested and charged with vagrancy, a minor crime with a maximum fine of five shillings. But authorities refused her bail and moved her to Holloway prison in London, a notorious women’s prison known for holding murderers and traitors. The charge was eventually amended to witchcraft under an ancient act from 1735, and she was accused of pretending to exercise or use human conjuration. The trial drew widespread attention and controversy.
Witnesses were divided, some claiming she was a fraud while others insisted she was authentic. Duncan attempted to demonstrate her abilities in front of the jury, but the judge did not allow it. After thirty minutes of deliberation, the jury found her guilty of contravening the 1735 Witchcraft Act, and she was sentenced to nine months imprisonment. Upon hearing the sentence, she cried out, “I have done nothing.
Is there a god? ”
Helen Duncan was one of the last people convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, and became known as Britain’s last witch. Prime Minister Winston Churchill criticized the proceeding as a waste of time and a misuse of court resources, calling the charge obsolete tomfoolery. Her prison wardens reportedly left her cell door unlocked.
In 1951, the Witchcraft Act was repealed and integrated into the Fraudulent Mediums Act, and Duncan’s trial was a contributing factor. After completing her sentence, she promised to stop conducting seances, but in 1956 another raid occurred while she was in the middle of one. She died on December 6, 1956, at age fifty-nine in her Edinburgh home, due to ill health likely caused by obesity and heart problems, though some spiritualists claimed her death was a direct result of the police raid, which left her with second-degree burns on her stomach.
She died just five weeks after that final raid.