Legends 64: No Rest For the Wicked

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It was called the most wicked and sinful city in the world, and now it's gone.

Port Royal, Jamaica, isn't quite a household name today, but in the late 17th century, it was one of the largest European cities in the New World, second only to Boston.

This place was hopping, and that's putting it mildly.

Back in its heyday, Port Royal was the epicenter for trade in the Caribbean.

Under British control, it raked in absurd amounts of wealth for the crown, and the majority of that money came from the slave trade.

In fact, Jamaica was one of the major gateways into the Americas for human traffickers.

But in June of 1692, the levee finally broke.

Port Royal experienced an earthquake and the ensuing tsunami sunk two-thirds of the city beneath the sea.

Out of the 5,000 people who died, an estimated 2,000 of them were lost to the depths of the ocean.

Once word got out about the city's fate, everyone had the same takeaway.

That natural disaster wasn't natural at all.

It was divine punishment, they said, God's retribution against Port Royal.

Everyone had it coming.

And now their corpses were trapped 40 feet underwater, decomposing on the ocean floor.

Today, few people remember Port Royal as a hotbed of vice and slavery.

Instead, it's famous for how it fell apart.

In fact, some archaeologists have even compared it to Pompeii in terms of how many artifacts there are to uncover from those waterlogged buildings.

And it highlights a fascinating dichotomy that we rarely stop to think about.

Some graves are simply known for what they can teach us about the dead, while others provide a deeper glimpse into the lives they lived.

And sometimes, very rarely, a handful of graves manage to do something even more powerful and frightening than that.

They reveal a story that turns out to be more than a little wicked.

I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore Legends.

Mary Jane was a witch.

Well, maybe.

At the very least, the people of Belleville, Ohio were fairly convinced that she was.

According to local legend, Mary Jane Hendrickson was a powerful witch.

She was best known for using her magic to give her neighbors a hard time.

Eventually, when they finally got tired of being cursed six ways to Sunday, the townspeople chased her down and executed her.

The most common version of the story holds that she was hanged from an old pine tree at Belleville's Mount Olive Cemetery.

Then her killers buried her body under that very same tree.

It is said following her interment, sap weeded its way through the bark into the shape of a cross.

Today, Mary Jane's headstone is long gone, having been removed after being vandalized one too many times back in the 1980s.

But if you know what to look for, then you can still tell exactly where her body is buried.

The locals claim that no grass grows over her grave.

If you were to spit or jump on that bald spot, then legend holds that you'd be injured or dead within three days.

Vandalizing her pine tree is believed to result in equally bad luck.

And there are plenty of anecdotes about locals who ended up in hot water after disrespecting Mary Jane's final resting place.

Several visitors have reported their cars going off the road after visiting Mary Jane.

One urban legend claims that a teenager died in a car accident just minutes after urinating on her gravesite.

Another says that two teens died in a car crash after stealing her headstone.

If you're lucky, you just might see Mary Jane's ghostly figure walking through the cemetery.

She's been known to chant as she does so, maybe weaving spells against the people from Belleville from beyond the grave.

Or maybe she's saying something else entirely.

Because here's the thing.

Aside from the rumors, we have no concrete proof that Mary Jane was anything close to a witch.

The real Mary Jane Hendrickson died of natural causes at the age of 72 back in 1898.

According to her obituary, she never married and she was a faithful church attendee.

Basically, she was your standard 19th century spinster, dedicated to her family, devout, and a little boring.

So, how did Plain Jane Mary Jane end up as the local witch?

Well, we can blame that on the kids.

You see, Mount Olive Cemetery is right next to a summer camp, and Mary Jane's grave was at the edge of that graveyard, nice and close to the camp's border.

Apparently, back in 1963, one camp counselor had a creative way of keeping the kids from sneaking out of their cabins.

He figured that they wouldn't want to go anywhere in the dead of night if they were terrified beyond all reason, so he told them that if they didn't pat her headstone, then the evil witch buried there would find them and she would kill them.

Over time, the campfire story spread until it reached beyond the camp and became common knowledge in the town as well.

Some believe that the story became so popular because the witch's name was Mary Jane, if you get my drift, and teenagers always think drugs are hilarious.

So there you go.

The legend of Belleville's witch came about all because kids are predictable.

And because of that, her tale is sadly not unique, because we may not be executing witches anymore, but we're still completely obsessed with them.

So much so that it's actually common practice for people to look at some poor woman's grave and identify her as a witch, whether or not there's any proof to back up that claim.

Because folklore is just as much about entertainment as it is about explaining the inexplicable.

And nothing is more entertaining than a witch, especially since their unholy powers allow them to still wreak havoc long after they're dead.

There's really no other way to put it.

Molly was weird, and she had been since the day she was born, way back in 1685.

Within hours of leaving her mother's womb, it was said that she was able to chew on hard crusts of bread.

Instead of drinking breast milk, she would suckle the udders of her family's cows.

And she was smart, really smart.

They say that as an infant, Molly Lee had the intelligence of an adult.

Tragically though, she was never able to wow her friends with her impressive brain because she didn't have any friends.

Molly Lee was allegedly so ugly that when other children saw her, they went running.

Her life only got harder when her mother passed away.

Molly Lee was forced to raise herself, friendless and alone.

It's no wonder that Molly was a remarkably independent woman by the time she grew into an adult.

As far as we know, she had no interest in marrying, and even if she did, one gets the impression that no one in her little town of Burslem would have her.

So instead, she supported herself by selling milk from the cows that she kept at her cottage.

Now, this was all happening in the 17th and 18th centuries in England, so I'm sure that no one will be surprised to hear that the people of Burslem took one look at this ugly duckling and decided that, yeah, she was definitely a witch.

According to them, the signs were obvious.

She lived alone, she never married, she never attended church, and apparently she kept a giant black bird as a familiar, a manifestation of a dark spirit from hell that she kept as a pet.

You know, normal things like that.

At some point, the local parson, a man named Thomas Spencer, publicly accused her of witchcraft.

Unfortunately for Thomas, it was never a good idea to make a witch angry.

According to local legend, when he and his friends were drinking at the local pub, her blackbird appeared perching on the bar sign.

As soon as it did, all the beer in the pub soured and gave the patrons, including Thomas, rheumatism.

Molly, however, wasn't done with him.

She cast a spell specifically on Thomas Spencer.

In some versions of the story, they claim that for three weeks he was mind-bogglingly drunk.

Others say that he was confined to his bed with stomach pains.

Sadly, Molly couldn't stick around and terrorize Rude Parsons forever, though.

She passed away on April 1st of 1748, and with her last breath, the entire town breathed a sigh of relief.

The local witch was gone, and now they could go through all of her stuff.

The townsmen banded together to take a look around her cottage.

The group was, of course, led by Parson Thomas Spencer, who almost certainly wanted to gloat over the witch's death as he plundered her home.

But when he and the other men stepped through her front door, they froze.

Sitting there in an armchair in front of the fire, with her knitting on her lap and her pet bird on her shoulder, was Molly Lee.

And why wouldn't she be?

After all, she was a powerful witch and she had died on April Fool's Day to boot.

Naturally, the men turned tail and fled, but the bird followed them, and from then on out, it was frequently spotted around Berlum.

And of course, they considered this to be utterly unacceptable.

After all, she was dead and dead women didn't get to go around wandering about after they'd been buried.

The town needed a way to keep Molly from escaping her grave, and so they hatched a plan.

In the dead of night, Thomas Spencer and a group of parsons from other nearby towns led a procession to her gravesite.

With them, they carried the black bird, who had been trapped in a cage.

Together, they disinterred Molly's remains and opening her coffin, they stuffed the bird inside before locking it back up.

Then they lowered the coffin, witch, black bird, and all, back into the tomb.

Normally, a traditional Christian burial involves being buried on an east-west orientation, but that night Thomas and his fellow parsons shifted her tomb so that she was on a north-south orientation.

Today, her above-ground tombstone is easy to spot.

It's the only one in the entire cemetery that's facing a north-south direction.

But if Thomas Spencer had hoped that reorienting Molly's grave would trap her six feet under, then he was sorely mistaken.

To this day, locals are deeply superstitious about the Witch of Berslam's grave.

In 1979, for example, plans were made to rehabilitate the overgrown churchyard at St.

John's.

Molly's tomb was ordered to be left undisturbed, though, and any workmen who were worried about seeing the ghost of Molly were excused from the job.

Local children's folklore maintains that Molly's spirit is still very much alive there.

It's said that if you skip around her grave three times, chanting, Molly Lee, Molly Lee, chase me around the apple tree, then she will appear and haunt you.

But even if her ghost truly is terrorizing the Berslam pre-pubescent crowd, that doesn't mean that Molly was actually a lone, hyper-independent witch.

In fact, her last will and testament tells an entirely different story.

Uncovered in 1984, the will and its discovery blew a huge hole into the legend of the witch of Berslam.

Written as she lay on her deathbed, this will bequeaths a large sum of money, silver plates, utensils, and a tract of land to several living relatives, none of whom, according to the stories, were supposed to exist at all.

One of those unexpected relatives was in fact Molly's mother, who apparently did not die when her daughter was a little girl.

It seems that Molly's will exposed her to be not a witch, but a generous and thoughtful member of the community.

It specifically instructed that money be set aside for the, and I quote, poor inhabitants and widows of Sneed and Berslam.

It also required her family to sell a portion of her land and use the proceeds to build a hospital for the poor.

Any woman with land and money like that most certainly wasn't selling cow's milk just to eke out a living.

Molly Lee was quite well off, and as it turns out, she was probably a self-made woman.

There was no mention of a husband in her will.

It would seem that the stories got at least that one thing right.

Molly Lee was single.

But not in a sad, she must be a witch sort of way.

If her will is anything to go off of, then she was single in a cool, rich aunt kind of way.

Obviously though, over the years, Molly went from being a wealthy benefactor to a nasty old witch.

That shift in public opinion didn't just happen on its own though.

Many historians believe that it can all be traced back to her grave.

It's entirely possible that the unusual tomb gave rise to the legends that a witch had been buried there.

Like a giant game of folklore telephone, Molly's reputation was passed on down the line, growing wilder each time someone retold her story.

We will probably never know for sure how she came to be known as a witch, or for that matter, why her grave is so different from all the others around her.

But we do know that when she died, nobody then believed that she was a witch.

It's good news because hopefully that means that no more innocent birds were ever buried alongside her.

It may be the strangest grave in America.

Amidst all the normal, straight-edged headstones in Myrtle Hill Cemetery, there's one that stands out like a sore thumb.

Crafted out of shiny granite, the grave marker looks less like a proper tombstone and more like a giant bowling ball.

It's an odd design choice, to say the least.

If you didn't know any better, you might even think that it's some kind of modern art piece.

The gleaming ball is completely unblemished by any identifying information.

There are no flowery epitaphs or dates.

Only one name is carved into the stone platform underneath the ball, Stoskoff.

And if you wanted to figure out who exactly was buried there, then that single word doesn't give you much to go off of.

But thankfully, we don't actually have to play detective here because the locals know exactly who Stoskopf was.

She was a witch, and the granite orb was meant to keep her spirit pinned down beneath the earth.

Now there are two versions of the witch's story.

According to one, she was married to an abusive man.

Not caring who she hurt in her quest to escape his clutches, she poisoned the Stoskop family well, killing her husband and her three sons in one fell swoop.

She then threw their bodies into that very same well, and then she was executed once their corpses were discovered.

Another version of the story claims that she murdered her entire family as part of a witchcraft ritual.

Apparently, she also killed quite a few of the neighborhood pets in the process.

When the locals uncovered her crimes, they naturally stoned her to death, but not before she could place a curse on her own grave.

A lot of people actually believe that the giant witchy bowling ball is truly cursed.

Some claim to have seen the image of an eye appear on the ball.

Others say that snow never sticks to it and autumn leaves never land on its smooth surface.

It's cold to the touch by day, but somehow warm at night.

And apparently, if it feels hot, then that means that the ball isn't actually doing its job of keeping Staskopf trapped.

Her spirit is wandering the cemetery, and it's watching you.

Now, some people have claimed to truly see the witch's ghost walking through the graveyard, although it's hard to tell how they knew that it was her, considering that none of the stories include any identifying information about her or her appearance.

In fact, there aren't many specifics at all in the tales about the Stoskop witch, and that makes sense because as far as we can tell, she's just a local urban legend.

But she was inspired by a real murderer, one who was much scarier than any witch could ever be.

Her name was Martha Hazel Wise, and she grew up less than a mile away from Myrtle Hill Cemetery in the small town of Hard Scrabble, Ohio.

Despite spending her entire life in a tight-knit community, community, she had always been the odd one out.

Her neighbors didn't really know what to do with her, and for that matter, neither did her family.

She would sometimes have fits where she barked like a dog, and even more disturbingly, she openly talked about her hallucinations, the most common of which involved angels and doves descending to earth to visit her.

Back in the early 20th century, there were no real resources for poor mental health, so Martha met the same fate as many other struggling young women.

She was married off at the age of 23 to the first man who would take her, and unsurprisingly, the man who volunteered was not interested in helping her.

No, Martha's husband, the much older Albert Wise, was a terribly abusive man who treated her more like a servant and a broodmare than his wife.

During their 16-year-long unhappy marriage, she gave birth to five children, only four of whom survived past infancy.

In 1940, Albert passed away, ostensibly from a blood infection.

Finally free, Martha soon began pursuing new romantic interests at the age of 40.

Sadly, her family mocked her for this, making fun of her delusions and telling her that she would only make a fool of herself.

Her mother was particularly vicious about the entire endeavor and even convinced her to end a relationship with a neighboring farmhand.

And so it probably comes as no surprise that her mother was the first to die.

On Thanksgiving Day of 1924, Martha's entire family fell ill with stomach pains.

Almost everyone eventually recovered to a point, but not her mother.

She only got worse until finally she died on December 13th.

But Martha wasn't done yet.

On New Year's Day, she visited her aunt and uncle, and their entire family fell ill as well.

Her aunt Lily died on January 4th, and her uncle followed on February 8th.

All in all, in the span of just a couple of months, Martha Hazelwise poisoned 16 members of her family, and out of those 16, three of them died but the survivors didn't make it out completely unscathed many of them experienced long-term health problems as a result of the poisonings and some of the children were partially paralyzed for the rest of their lives thankfully it didn't take long for the police to catch on it was suspicious that so many deaths and life-altering debilitations had occurred in quick succession within a single family so they began to investigate and soon they found their smoking gun.

Martha had bought huge amounts of arsenic from the local druggist.

She had been caught red-handed.

She confessed to poisoning her family's well water.

She said that the devil made her do it, and she meant that quite literally.

According to Martha, and I quote, he came to me in my kitchen when I baked my bread and said, do it.

He came to me when I walked the fields in the cold days and nights and said, do it.

Everywhere I turned, I saw him grinning and pointing and talking.

I couldn't eat.

I couldn't sleep.

I could only talk and listen to the devil.

Then I did it.

Of course, the devil couldn't take the blame for all of this.

She specifically called out her mother for baiting her because, and I quote, she laughed at me for loving at my age.

She also confessed to enjoy funerals where she could bask in everyone's attention and pity.

Once Martha's Aunt Lily was exhumed and tested positive for arsenic, it was all downhill from there.

The trial only lasted a week, and it might have gone even faster, but tragically only two days in, her sister-in-law, Edith Hazel, took her own life.

No longer able to bear the grief of losing so many members of her family, she had cut her own throat.

Martha might have only killed three of her family members, but the blood of a fourth was now on her hands.

On May 11th of 1925, Martha received her just desserts.

She was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to prison in life.

Only five years after she committed her crimes, Martha told a reporter, I see ghosts.

Every night they come and sit on the edge of my bed in their graveclothes.

They point their fingers at me.

We will never know if she was truly visited by the ghosts of her family, or if they're the result of a guilty conscience.

But if her family was haunting her, then they must have traveled a very long way to do so.

You see, all of her murder victims, along with several other family members, were buried in the Myrtle Hill Cemetery.

In fact, that's where her aunt was exhumed from for the trial.

But unlike the frightening witch that the legends speak of, Martha would not be joining her family at Myrtle Hill.

Instead, she was interred over 100 miles away in Marysville, Ohio, after she died at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in 1971.

I think it's pretty clear that if there are any spirits wandering around Myrtle Hill Cemetery, then they don't belong to a fictional witch, and they certainly don't belong to Martha either.

If anything, they would probably belong to one of her many victims, looking for someone to point their fingers at.

It sometimes feels as if every community in America has a local witch story.

Not because the people at the center of those stories had any true connection to witchcraft in life, or that they ticked all the boxes for what scholars might consider a witch today.

No, these tales seem to pop up because of one bigger, more common reason.

Fear.

So if Martha wasn't buried under that gigantic ball at Myrtle Hill Cemetery, and there is no evidence that a witch ever existed in Hard Scrabble, then who is under that absurd grave marker?

Well, no one.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not actually a headstone at all.

It simply marks off the general area of the family plot for the Stoskoffs.

No one is buried directly underneath the ball.

Instead, they're all interred nearby in their own graves.

And most importantly, none of those Stoskovs were witches.

The mysterious Stoskoff name might have inspired urban legends about a witch who had been trapped beneath the ball, but that's all they ever were.

Legends.

Stories crafted to inspire a few chills or fill in the gaps that ignorance left unanswered.

Similarly, Martha's wicked deeds had nothing to do with the ball at all.

They simply inspired stories about a mad, poison, crazy witch.

But funny enough, Martha and the Stoskop family are connected.

Do you remember Martha's poisoned aunt, the one whose body was exhumed?

Well, Martha's aunt was George Stoskoff's sister.

It seems, if the stories are true, that she had stolen her aunt from not one, but two families.

As is so often the case, the bigger the pain, the farther people tend to reach for answers.

Through her connection to both families, Martha became something bigger and darker than she had been in real life.

To do something that evil, they say, one would have to be a witch.

I hope today's exploration of spooky witch graves left you feeling a few chills.

I certainly found it enlightening to know how much of the legends ultimately come down to rumors and incorrect rumors at that.

It would seem that what they say is true.

There is no rest for the wicked.

But what if they're not wicked at all?

Well, there is a story for that crowd as well and my team and I have put that together just for you.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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Most witch stories are about evil witches, but sometimes there are good ones.

Back in the 19th century, Sarah was the kind of witchy woman that you'd want to have as your neighbor.

She was the best midwife in Antioch, California, and I'd bet money that she was actually the best in the Bay Area as well.

One newspaper declared that out of the 1,600 births that she attended in her life, she had never lost a single child.

It's doubtful that she was the midwife for 1600 births.

Other newspapers put the number at a more manageable 600.

But either way, they all agreed, if if Sarah was present when you had a baby, then that baby would come out healthy and whole.

If that wasn't magic, then I don't know what is.

And look, she may have had a prickly personality, but who among us doesn't get a little grumpy every now and then?

And she may not have attended church with the rest of her devout Protestant neighbors, but they could overlook a little impiety in exchange for healthy babies.

No matter her quirks, she was still a well-loved pillar of the community.

And so it's no surprise that everyone was devastated when she passed away.

On October 5th of 1879, Sarah had been on her way to a patient in the nearby community of Clayton.

At 68 years old, she wasn't as young as she used to be, so she hired a buggy to take her the short distance.

As the carriage descended a steep hill, something spooked the horse and it bolted.

Completely unmoored, the buggy fell 300 feet down the slope, taking Sarah with it.

She was instantly killed.

Now, while she was alive, Sarah had told the people there that she did not want a religious funeral.

But for the people of Antioch, many of whom were brought into the world by her hands, to not give their beloved midwife a proper Christian send-off, just didn't sit well with them.

So they decided to hold a funeral anyway.

But as they were bringing her body into the church, dark clouds gathered.

Lightning flashed, and suddenly, a terrible storm broke out over the town, forcing them all to run home.

They tried to give Sarah a Christian burial a second time, and again a storm came out of nowhere and forced them to stop the proceedings.

They finally got the message and buried her in Rosehill Cemetery without a funeral.

Local legend claims that to this day, Sarah Norton haunts the cemetery, and she's known as the White Witch.

Witnesses have reported seeing a glowing figure floating over the tombstones and laughing.

Others say they've simply seen a woman clothed in a white dress that seems to be from the 1860s.

Some have heard the sound of bells ringing throughout the cemetery.

There have also been reports of sudden fierce gusts of wind, similar to those that blew during Sarah's aborted funerals.

And most remarkably of all, some even claim to this very day to have seen a horse and buggy on the cemetery trail.

The more cynical locals believe that her soul isn't at rest because she never had a proper Christian burial.

But most believe that she's sticking around for an entirely different reason.

She's keeping watch over all the souls of the children who were buried there.

Personally, I'm inclined to believe the latter.

In life, Sarah dedicated every waking hour to bringing life into the world.

She was responsible for every single healthy baby that had been born in that town for decades.

It simply wouldn't make sense for her to abandon all of her little charges now, not even in death.

This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Cassandra De Alba.

By the way, today's episode topics were listener submitted.

If you have a local legend that you love and want us to possibly include on Allore Legends, send an email to stories at lorepodcast.com.

My team and I can't wait to see what you send our way.

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At Clean Energy Credit Union, your money works for you and the planet.

We use your dollars to fund renewable energy, sustainable communities, and a brighter future.

By pooling deposits with a community of people who care about the planet, we're able to provide loans that help more people afford clean energy.

The future is built by the choices we make today.

Make yours count.

Choose Clean Energy Credit Union.

California, make your home more efficient and eco-friendly.

Upgrade with a variety of home enhancements, such as solar water heaters, heat pumps, high-efficiency windows.

With rates as low as 5.24% APR in California's generous state rebates, you'll save and boost your home's value.

Clean Energy Credit Union, financing the clean energy movement.