Philadelphia Weirdness

The Season of the Witch

With Halloween fast approaching we must share with you the tale of an alleged witch from Philly's foggy folkloric past. Of course, the term "witch" was once applied to any individual who seemed to harbor dark powers, whether in the form of prediction, healing or the art of voodoo, and many such people were often perceived as evil and usually exorcised in the only way possible—by death.

Tuggy the so-called witch was hardly a high priestess of darkness, but during the 1700s when working as a slave for a Richard Harrison, who owned the Harriton House in Montgomery County, which was built in 1682, she allegedly liked to practice the darker arts. Tuggy was one of many slaves used to farm the crop of tobacco which Harrison dealt in, but their relationship was fiery to say the least, to the extent that Tuggy decided to kill her nasty owner.

She hated life in Philly and was eager to move back to Maryland, so she attempted to poison Harrison, but was disturbed in doing so, and so sought another way. A visit to the local graveyard, whilst equipped with a wooden stake, was her way of attempting to put a curse on Harrison and his ways. A dead body was to be raised as part of the spell, but next morning the only sight which met local folk was the body of Tuggy, staked to a grave. Bizarrely, it seems that she had staked the hem of her own dress, but as a believer in the rising of the undead, she truly thought that the corpse she was conjuring had indeed grasped her from beneath the soil and attempted to drag her beneath the ground.

Tuggy had died of fright in the cemetery, her screams of struggling the previous night had been ignored and the sheer terror of her own ritual had rendered her as one of the dead, her crumpled form a victim of its own curse.

Image Credit: Flickr user lauralemur