The Witch of Yazoo

A real 1904 fire wrapped in a curse the town still tells

In the middle of the historic section of Glenwood Cemetery, Yazoo City's public cemetery in the Mississippi Delta, lies a grave ringed with heavy chain links. It is known in town as the Witch's Grave, and the cemetery's sextons work hard to keep the chains in place, because they keep breaking.

There are no records behind the story, but it has been told for more than a century, and its best-known version comes from Willie Morris's autobiographical novel Good Old Boy of 1971. An old woman lived on the Yazoo River and lured fishermen into her house on stormy nights, poisoned them and buried them on a wooded hill. On 25 May 1884 a boy named Joe Bob Duggett, passing on a raft, looked through her window and saw her standing over two dead men, chanting spells. When the sheriff came he found half-starved cats, a pile of fish bones and two skeletons hanging from the ceiling, and glimpsed her slipping off into the swamp, half ghost and half scarecrow, but all witch. He chased her into quicksand, and as she sank she swore that in twenty years she would come back and burn the town to the ground. They pulled her out, buried her in the centre of the cemetery under the heaviest chains they could find, and forgot her.

On 25 May 1904, twenty years to the day, fire swept through Yazoo City. It destroyed three-fourths of the town, more than 200 homes and nearly every business, some 324 buildings in all, and was stopped only by a canal that saved the new courthouse and ten antebellum houses. One account blames a boy playing with matches, another the parlour of a young Miss Wise dressing for her wedding that day. Witnesses spoke of fierce winds and flames that seemed to leap through the air, though the weather reports for the day mention no high winds. The next day, the legend says, townspeople went up to Glenwood and found the chains around the witch's grave broken in two. Yazoo City took almost two years to recover.

The grave was there, people point out, long before Morris was born. Its original stone, now gone, is said to have carried only the letters T. W., and the only record known for the plot shows a woman owned it. Local lore holds that when the last of the chains is gone she will return, and when links were stolen in 2016 it made the news.

Visit Yazoo runs costumed storytelling tours of Glenwood, and the witch, the Chain Lady to many in town, is its biggest attraction.