Image courtesy of Madisyn Cummins, of Visit Yazoo.
The grave of the "Witch of Yazoo."
At the heart of the historic section of Yazoo City’s Glenwood Cemetery is one of the town’s most visited attractions. The graveyard is a beautiful place to wander, filled by intricately designed mausoleums with stained glass windows and ornate carvings—the final resting place for Yazoo City’s most prominent families—as well as a simple marker placed where bodies of Civil War soldiers were laid to rest. But for most, the enduring intrigue of Glenwood convenes at the mysterious grave of the Witch of Yazoo.
For more than a century, the witch’s grave has been the subject of countless ghost stories, the centerpiece of many a teenage dare. To this day, pilgrims make their way to the cemetery to pay their respects, or perhaps to ponder the tale that has captured the imaginations of an entire town and beyond.
The story of the Witch of Yazoo is short, but not-so-sweet. There are no records, but the legend has been passed down for over a century. The story changes, depending on who you ask, but the most prevalent version seems to be traced back to Willie Morris’s 1971 autobiographical novel, Good Old Boy.
In Morris’s telling, the witch was rumored to lure fishermen into her home on stormy nights and poison them, burying their bodies on a densely wooded hill. On May 25, 1884, a local boy named Joe Bob Duggett passed the witch’s house on a raft. He heard a loud moan coming from the house, so he tied up the raft and ran toward it. Peeking in a window, he saw the witch, caked in cockleburs and dirt, standing over two dead bodies, reciting indecipherable spells. Joe Bob frantically returned to town and told the sheriff what he had seen. When the sheriff and his men arrived at the witch’s house, neither the dead men nor the witch was found. Instead, they found several half-starved cats, a pile of fish bones, and two skeletons hanging from the ceiling.
“As she was sinking, her pockmarked face was strained toward the sky. She swore her revenge on the townspeople and screamed that in twenty years, she would return and burn Yazoo City to the ground.” —Charlie Carlisle, a Yazoo City resident who tells the story to visitors at the witch’s grave.
Footsteps were heard rustling in the fallen pecan leaves in the backyard, and they saw an old woman, “half ghost and half scarecrow, but all witch,” sneaking away into the swamps along the river. The sheriff chased her into deep quicksand, where her last words before sinking below the surface were, “I shall return. Everybody always hated me here. I will break out of my grave and burn down the town on May 25, 1904.”
“As she was sinking, her pockmarked face was strained toward the sky,” says Charlie Carlisle, a Yazoo City resident who tells the story to visitors at the witch’s grave. “She swore her revenge on the townspeople and screamed that in twenty years, she would return and burn Yazoo City to the ground.”
Image courtesy of Madisyn Cummins, of Visit Yazoo.
Glenwood Cemetery
After retrieving her body from the sand, using pitchforks and cypress limbs, the authorities buried the witch in the center of the town cemetery, covering her grave in the heaviest chains they could find. No one knew her name. It is said that the original tombstone was marked simply with the letters “T.W.,” which many speculate stood for “The Witch.” Eventually, people forgot all about the witch and her curse. That is, until May 25, 1904—twenty years after the witch’s death.
It was a day without forecasts of high winds, yet a breeze picked up, blowing from the southwest. A spark led to a fire that spread down Main Street, then onto Mound Street. “The destruction was massive,” said Carlisle. “The library was spared, but the beautiful Episcopal church across the street burned.”
When all the flames subsided and the damages were assessed, it was determined that over 200 residences and nearly every business in Yazoo City had been destroyed. In all, 325 buildings burned to the ground. No one knew the source of the fire. One theory suggests that it began in the parlor of a young Yazoo City woman who was getting ready for her wedding that afternoon.
The next day, a group of citizens recalled the witch’s curse and made their way into Glenwood, where they found the large chains around her grave broken in two.
“The grave is hands down our biggest tourist attraction,” said Madisyn Cummins, communications coordinator for Visit Yazoo. “People come from all over the country to see it.” She said she has heard that during the fire, people witnessed the witch jumping from building to building, spreading the flames as she went. Others reported that the flames seemed to jump through the air. “That’s the eeriest part of the story. They said it was as if the flames were driven by a supernatural force, because the winds were so unusually high.”
Visitors to Yazoo City often call Cummings to arrange for a tour of the cemetery. Dressed in a period frock coat (weather permitting), Carlisle—a history teacher of more than forty years—will take groups or individuals out to Glenwood, always stopping a bit longer at the witch’s grave. “It’s a fun story to tell,” he said.
Image courtesy of Madisyn Cummins, of Visit Yazoo.
Carlisle laments that there is so little concrete knowledge of the witch. “We don’t really know any other details about the witch outside of what Willie wrote in that book,” said Carlisle. The book, a work of fiction, is a coming-of-age story that chronicles a boy’s life in post-WWII Yazoo City, Mississippi. Biographical in nature, the book is a close retelling of Morris’s own childhood. Morris’s grave can be found in Glenwood Cemetery, too, just thirteen paces from the witch’s.
So the story goes, one of the citizens who discovered the broken grave on that dreadful day in 1904 shared the story with Morris’s character and his friends. “As boys, we would go see it for ourselves,” Morris wrote. “No repairs were made, a reminder to future generations. As if by some supernatural strength, the chain around the grave had been broken in two.”
According to Cummins, locals claim that to this day, the chains are broken each time they are replaced. A stone monument was installed in 1995, detailing the story of the witch and her curse, before mysteriously splitting in two itself. Following a more recent vandalization, in September the city installed an almost $4,000 replacement. We'll see how long this one lasts.
