The Witch in the Mill and other Appalachian Haunts

Alfreda Marion Peel of Salem was among the most intrepid of the roving folklorists who scoured the Appalachians on behalf of the Virginia Folklore Society in the early twentieth century, collecting old ballads from England and Scotland. In 1917, she transcribed “Barbara Allen” as sung by Texas Gladden, who would go on to regional fame as a folk singer.

Peel would “hunt ballads” by boarding at some lonely farmhouse in “mountainous country” and going “on horseback and on foot visit every single person” who was known to make music or sing songs: 

It was a May Day, and the little spring winds were shaking down the Judas bloom and rippling the snowy dogwood below us in many a deep ravine. Where the forest ends and the orchards being stood a little log cabin and in the doorway a woman was sitting. She sang loudly and in a melancholy minor.

As she traveled the mountains of Virginia, her interests expanded beyond music to the folk tales she heard on the porches of shanties or in the cozy kitchens of farm houses down by the creek, tales of witches and hauntings and ill mists that “come a-windin’ ‘round the trees like haunt garments or grey witches’ hair.”

In 1947, she published versions of these tales in Witch in the Mill, seven intertwined stories set in the fictional Sarvis Mountain region, where, she assures us, “All of these things happened long time ago when folks wuz not like they is now an’ trusted more in the advice an’ sayin’s uv older people. Then the people on Sarvis Mountain kinder lived to themselves—not a-seenin’ many strangers, knowin’ all about one another, an’ believin’ a heap o’things that’s well nigh forgot in these times. … One thing they believed in, in them times, that ain’t common now, wuz witches an’ witch doctors that taken off the spells the witches put on you.”

The first tales in Witch in the Mill feature witches up to their usual no good of causing mischief and heartache by hexing animals and a powerful local witch doctor who sets things right—reviving the hog that a widow had counted on for food for the winter and restoring a cow so the beautiful but poor Masie Murdock could buy a fine dress and marry into the well-to-do Corbin family, the kind of family where the gals “had dresses made with store patterns an’ ther poppy brought ‘em hats an’ fancy shoes from town twict a year.” 

In these stories, the balance of nature is restored; the good and charitable prosper and true love finds its way. The suspected witch, Liza Hawkins—of painted face, poor housekeeping, and loose morals where men were concerned—finds herself thwarted and, finally, run out of town by the witch doctor, “a-lookin’ like a right ragged black crow” as she disappeared over the mountain.

But slowly, the world intrudes on Sarvis Mountain. “Doctor medicine” replaces the witch doctor, and there are rumblings of a war between the states. Evil gets the upper hand. “Pore Hallie Cramer wuz destroyed by witchcraft” after falling in the clutches of a powerful witch who had an old book that “come from acrost the big waters, all ’bout castin’ spells.” A coven gathers on Witches’ Knob—the “awfullest lookin’ gang of mean, drunk people”—and boils a black cat down to the bones so an initiate can sell her soul to the Devil. A popular young schoolmaster bringing learning to the area and casting aspersions on old superstitions is murdered and buried under a bridge. Slavery weaves through the narrative; 1861 arrives and the Devil is made real. 

Sarvis Mountain, Peel tells us, “might be anywhere in the lonely regions of our southern mountain country.” And while the stories are “based upon tales of the long ago,” she writes, there are still folks who believe in such yet, “but they’re mighty skerce.”