In the autumn of 1884, a boy named Joe Bob Duggat was drifting on his raft along the swampy stretch of the Yazoo River when he heard an awful scream from the house of the town witch. Everyone in Yazoo City knew about her, though no one knew her name. She was an old, ugly woman of supposedly evil nature, and the townsfolk feared and hated her enough that they stayed as far from her secluded home as they could. Curiosity got the better of Joe Bob that evening.
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, while an old woman stood nearby, singing strange chants and waving her arms in circles. Terrified, he ran back to town and told the sheriff everything. The sheriff and his men rushed to the witch’s home with Joe Bob leading the way.
When they burst through the front door, the bodies and the woman were gone. The sheriff began to doubt the boy, but a search of the attic changed his mind. There they found a horrifying sight: dozens of malnourished cats huddled together among fish bones scattered across the floor, and two human skeletons dangling from a support beam. The men shut the door, shaken.
As they did, about ten cats escaped from the attic. The group believed the woman had fled, but a deputy heard rustling in the leaves outside the house. From an upstairs window, they spotted her sneaking into the swamp. Joe Bob later described her appearance as half ghost and half scarecrow.
The men chased her and caught up to her trapped in quicksand. According to Joe Bob’s account, just before her head went under, she shouted at the sheriff and his deputies: “I shall return. Everybody always hated me here. I will break out of my grave and burn down the whole town.
” The men tried to save her, but by the time they pulled her body from the mire, she had drowned. The next day she was buried in the middle of the town cemetery. The townsfolk, well aware of her curse, wrapped the heaviest chain they could find around her grave. The sheriff reportedly mocked her threat, saying that if she could break through that chain, she deserved to burn down Yazoo.
The witch was soon forgotten as the decades passed. Yazoo City continued to grow into a thriving Mississippi community. By the 1840s, it had hundreds of homes, businesses, a bank, two hotels, and more than a thousand residents, shipping twenty-five thousand bales of cotton every year. The town had begun in the 1820s when a Choctaw chief named Greenwood LaFlore sold swampy land along the river to five proprietors who planned to build a port settlement named Manchester.
They surveyed the land, named the streets, and divided the town into numbered lots before a single resident moved in. Advertisements ran in local newspapers announcing that the lots would go on sale on February 22, 1830. Many buyers arrived on chartered steamboats, and within two days the best downtown real estate was gone. Four years later, construction was underway, and by 1840 the town was booming.
The following year, its name was changed to Yazoo City, in tribute to the river that sustained it. It later became the county seat and got a beautiful new courthouse. It may have been around that time the mysterious old woman moved near the town. Before that, there was little infrastructure, and surviving in the swampy area would have been extremely difficult.
Mosquitoes were a constant plague, and many townsfolk died of yellow fever. By the 1880s, cotton remained the main export, with hundreds of men working in the fields, and a railway was introduced to better connect the town to the rest of the state and country. Yet a considerable number of people made their living fishing on the nearby river, and during the 1880s, many fishermen who went out never returned. Local rumor held that the witch lured these men into her home, offering shelter during stormy nights.
But she was no good Samaritan. While pretending to help them, she poisoned them with arsenic, then waited for them to die and buried the bodies in the dense woods nearby, believing no one would ever discover her ways. The townsfolk suspected her, but without evidence, nothing could be proved. Then came the morning of May 25, 1904, which seemed like any other normal day in Yazoo City but would go down in history as one of the greatest catastrophes to hit the town.
A young woman named Pauline Wise was making preparations for her wedding when she discovered a small fire in her living room. It got out of hand quickly, spreading to neighboring houses, and as winds picked up, the blaze expanded to intersecting streets and residential areas. This was one popular theory for the cause, though there was no conclusive evidence. Others believed a little boy playing with matches had started the fire in another house.
Either way, the whole town was soon engulfed in flames, and locals fell into disarray. The fire department responded swiftly, helping residents retreat to safety, but despite their best efforts, they could not stop the inferno. The result was mass devastation. Witnesses noticed something strange, however: the flames appeared to jump through the air, as if a supernatural force were at work.
A sudden gust of wind came out of nowhere, unusual for that time of day. The fire destroyed over three-fourths of the town, reducing more than two hundred homes and almost every business to ash and rubble. Only the new courthouse, a library, an unfinished school, a church, and a few residences survived. Remarkably, not a single life was lost.
On the morning of May 26, many of the older residents made their way to the middle of Glenwood Cemetery, where the witch had been buried around twenty years before. What they saw confirmed their worst suspicions: the chain around her grave had somehow broken in two. For them, this had to mean the fire was the work of the evil old woman who had cursed the town years ago. No ordinary force could have snapped such a heavy chain, and the supernatural behavior of the flames seemed to prove it.
Following the fire, locals began to rebuild, and it took around two years for Yazoo City to recover. The legend of the Witch of Yazoo had been well known in town for generations, but it first became famous to a wider audience in Willie Morris’s 1971 book, Good Old Boy. Today, tour guides tell the witch’s story and show visitors around Glenwood Cemetery. The witch’s original headstone went missing shortly after being placed and was engraved only with the letters “T.
W. ” Some think it was short for “The Witch,” while others believe it referred to her apparent name, Tandy Warren. Present-day legend holds that when all the chains are gone from her grave, she will return and take her revenge on Yazoo City.
To prevent that, the heavy chains around her grave are always being repaired.