The Bone Lady: Life As a Forensic Anthropologist

24. A Witch's Tale

ISTORIC cemeteries dot the landscape across this country, and I am drawn to them, from the smallest, overgrown plot along the side of the road to the largest, manicured city of the dead. Cemeteries or tales of cemeteries were an integral part of my childhood. Grave cleaning and the subsequent "dinner on the grounds" were included in our pilgrimages to Old State Line Cemetery, where my great-aunts and uncles, Great-grandma Wallis, and other family members are buried. As children, we anxiously made the two-hour ride in the back seat of Aunt Pearl's old green and white Buick. She drove slowly down the dusty dirt roads where wilting palmettos pushed their fingerlike leaves from the earth toward the sky as we traveled deeper and deeper into the backwoods. The periodic trips to Old State Line reestablished our departed family's presence in our lives and reassured the living that they, too, might receive such attention in the future. We spent the long day cleaning and weeding around the shallow fm A WITCH'S TALE H 112 THE BONE LADY soil depressions, rearranging dirt into mounds that served as reminders of people's lives. As Mama moved her hoe deftly back and forth across the graves, she told stories from her childhood to all those who gathered to listen. She talked about an eerie light in the cornfield at night, its source unknown. She described the hanging tree in the bend not far from her house and recalled how her family never drove a wagon that way at dusk because the horse would always bolt as it neared the dying tree. She spoke softly of the moving light seen late at night on an isolated railroad track, a brakeman from the distant past. She comforted ailing family members, assuring cousin Attie and others that she would tend to their plots if they left this world before she did. I have not been to Old State Line since I was a child. Instead, I mind the graves of others. In a small cemetery on the outskirts of Zachary, Louisiana, rests the above-ground burial vault of a young woman named Alice Penny Taylor . Alice died in 1859. Legend has celebrated her relation by marriage to the alleged nephew of Zachary Taylor, Mexican War hero and last U.S. president from the Deep South until Jimmy Carter was inaugurated over a century later. But her local claim to fame revolves around her reputation as the witch of Zachary. In Louisiana, where one is more apt to hear of a voodoo priestess "working a little gris-gris," the accusation of witchery is a little uncommon . How did it come to be leveled at Alice? What were the actual circumstances surrounding her life? Hers was a story I wanted to know more about. It all began in the summer of 1990. Wayne Rogillo, from the cemetery maintenance board in Zachary, called looking for "the Bone Lady" and reached my lab. Hearing of our scientific interest in human skeletal remains, he asked if I would like to examine the bones of a young woman whose grave had been disturbed for the third, and what he hoped would be the final, time. Of course I agreed. By piecing together what Rogillo, one of the guardians of the cemetery, told me, by A WITCH'S TALE 113 Alice PennyTaylor's original crypt showing iron railings and broken marblecover interviewing local citizens, and by examining the physical and historical evidence, I learned a lot about Alice and a little about how the modern myth of her witchcraft has survived. The small cemetery where Alice rested contained traditional below^-ground burials except for one above-ground burial vault near the highway—hers. Contrary to popular belief, above-ground burial vaults in Louisiana began not from necessity due to flooding, but from a cultural tradition brought here by Europeans hundreds of years ago. However, they are also practical in low-lying areas prone to flooding. Alice's reputation as a witch goes back at least two generations— to the children of the 19505 and 19605. Alice was only nineteen years old when she died. Who knows who was the first to whisper that "a witch is buried there"? Somehow the idea began to circulate—and it stuck. The story goes that Alice roamed the cemetery at night, mournfully calling for her loved ones. Her tomb became...