Not all the stories my friend's tell are set in Benton. Some are urban legends from other small towns. The following story is one that was told to us by our friend Taylor Croft. Taylor was not born in Benton, but her mother was and her family is of old Benton stock. Taylor was born in Madison and raised in Yazoo City until a few months ago when her mom suffering from a bad divorce moved her and her daughter back to her hometown. Anyway it's with her permission that I'm posting her story here for others to read and enjoy.
A long time ago, back when Yazoo City was known as Manchester there lived a woman all along in a run down house on a hilltop that overlooked a sharp bend in the Yazoo River some thirteen miles from town. The town has been developed and the swamp has been drained and cleared away and farmers now plant cotton, soybeans, peanuts, and corn in what used to be nothing but marshland. But the till top remains and on top of that hilltop one would find ruined remains of an old house.
Now according to legend the woman was named Ruth and how she came to live in a run down house located on top of a hill that overlooked a bend in the Yazoo River that was surrounded by swamp has remained a mystery for generations. Some say she had once been a belle who had lived in Vicksburg, others say she had come over from England to escape justice. Nobody knows, but what they did know is that she was a strange woman and her house was filled with books, old leather bound books that had strange symbols on the covers and whose pages were filled with strange letters that nobody could read beside Ruth herself.
One stormy, foggy night a young boy of twelve who had been fishing in the nearby swamp for catfish knocked upon Ruth's old wooden door. He was soaked to the bone and the rain was coming down in buckets. He knew somebody was home because through the dirty windowpanes that were choked with cobwebs, dirt and dust he spotted a single candle flicking upon a wooden table.
Finally the boy could not take the coldness and the downpour anymore and so he pushed upon the door and walked inside Ruth's home. The moment he walked in was the moment he felt himself grow pale. Because the scene he had walked into reminded him of the vivid images of hell the local Baptist minister preached on every so often.
The wooden floorboards of the house were covered in blood, crimson red blood that seemed to call out to him. The stench of rotting flesh seemed to fill the room, on the table was a butcher's cleaver that was stained red with blood and beside it was a human hand. Bubbling away on the dying embers of a fire was a black cauldron. The boy cursed his curiosity as he slowly picked his way from the front door over to the simmering kettle. Taking a deep breath he peered over the edge and a moment later he was overcome by horror!
For there, bubbling away in the pot was a blood red broth, a hellish concoction it seemed of severed fingers, human bones, blood, human flesh, dried red peppers, fish bones, and fish heads all bobbing up and down in the bubbling red sea. The boy felt himself about to vomit when there in the doorway stood old Ruth, her brown tattered dress hung down down, her gray hair tangled and matted down, her fingernails long and yellow, with dirt caked under them. In one hand she held a large skinning knife and in the other she was dragging what appeared to be a man. And a man that looked like he had just been pulled from the muddy Yazoo River. His short black hair was dripping wet and he seemed more dead than alive.
The boy blinked and peered at Ruth who it seemed was also wearing a leather apron that was stained with blood. Her eyes quickly narrowed at the boy and then in a crackling tone of voice she called out.
“Dark One! Oh Dark One! You've gone and brought Ruth a tender little meal! He'll be fine as summer wine all chopped up and boiled in one of Ruth's good old fashion soups!” Ruth Joyfully called out as she dropped the fellow she was holding. He landed in the mud with a thud, it was then the truth dawned on the boy, the man was dead.
The boy its said was overcome with fright but retained his wits about him. He dashed toward Ruth and ran past her and dashed toward the swamps. All the stories agree on one thing, he dashed toward the river to his wooden raft and started to paddle toward the tiny hamlet that was Manchester. He reached the town right as the morning sun was starting to peek over the willow, and cypress trees that dotted the banks of the Yazoo River.
He put in at the bottom of what is now the bottom of Main Street but then was called Fisherman's point. Breathing hard he climbed up the muddy banks of the river and started toward the Sheriff. Now at the time Benton was still the county seat of the newly formed Yazoo County and Manchester was nothing more than a collection of salons, alehouses, with a few shops and banks and a collection of small creole cottages located in the steep hilly section north of the main business district. This area is now called Broadway Street.
But Manchester did have a small militia attachment in town called the Manchester Rifles. The militia acted like a make-shift police force and was mostly used to deal with river pirates and highwaymen that roamed the countryside and often preyed on flatboats and lone travelers. The Commander of the Militia was also the Sheriff oddly enough. He was a tall man, a big chested man who had won a reputation of being a skilled tactician and a fearless leader in many of small and often deadly clashes with armed groups of highwaymen and river pirates.
His name was Martin Harden and to his house this boy came knocking.
“Mr. Harden! Mr. Harden!” The boy called out. “I've seen the devil in the making down by River Bend! Old woman Ruth! She is cooking and eating men alive!” He cried out into the early morning. “I've seen her cooking a hellish broth!” He cried out in agony.
Martin Harden was at breakfast when the boy came calling that morning, at first he was annoyed but then he started to think. For years men and boys had gone missing around that bend in the river. And he knew of old woman Ruth, everybody did. Most of the town's folks just regarded the old woman as nothing more than a mild annoyance, she most often showed up on market days standing on the street corner where she would be for alms. Other times she would try to exchange her herbal curses for a few crumpled dollar bills and still others she offered to read somebody palm in exchange for a few pennies.
And though Martin Harden had his doubts. He could tel the boy was sincere. And so he told his maid to look after the boy to fix him some breakfast while he went about town and gathered up some men. Around mid-morning a posse of men had been formed, all of them were mounted and armed. Martin then called for the boy and told him to lead them to the woman, warning him if this was just a hoax then there would be trouble for him.
The boy swore an oath that this was no hoax and so the posse set forth into the jungle-like swampland that surrounded the village.
The trek through the swamp was a perilous one, clouds of mosquitoes swarmed around the men as they hacked their way through canebrakes using only their pocket knives and backs. The sun too was merciless. Dozens of shallow creeks had to cross and with each step the men took, horseflies nipped at their exposed skin. But they pushed on, they pushed on through the heat of the day till at last late in the afternoon they came to the edge of the woods that bordered the witches hut.
It was then they paused and took a collective breath because standing before them was a sight that chilled even the toughest man among them. A man, naked hung from a tree by his ankles. He had been gutted like a deer and his head had been cut clean off his shoulders and a wooden bucket sat under the bloody stump. Drops of crimson red blood dripped down into the bucket. And there in the doorway of her house old Ruth stood, hatched in one hand, musket in the other and a pistol tucked into the waistline of her dress.
One of the younger men raised his musket and fired off a shot, he missed but Ruth slowly turned toward them, raised her own musket and a moment later she fired off a shot and the same young man that fired first fell down to the ground, dead as a hammer. Ruth's musket ball had spit his head half into.
Martin Harden then gave the order to attack and the men charged from the clearing toward the old woman who raised her pistol and shot another dead before taking her hatched into her hand and charging out to meet her attackers. The following melee only lasted a few moments before Ruth had hacked her way through the loose formation of men, killing two more and wounding another. Like a mad dog she ran into the woods, howling like a banshee as she dove headfirst into the thicket of briers, vines and bamboo.
But as luck would have had it, she lost her footing and slipped down a slipper slope and landed in a pool of quicksand. Just before she slipped under the surface however, she yelled out.
“I'm going to put on a curse on this damn town.” She bellowed at the top of her lungs. “Each generation will feel my wrath. My curse will linger till Gabriel blows his trumpet! And God decides to end this world and bring forth his kingdom. Not till the day of judgment will this town be safe!” And with that she slipped under the surface and was no more.
Now according to legend, they fished her body out of the hole and tied it to a horse and carried her back to town. Their they hung her from a sour apple tree to prove to the towns people she was really dead and her rule of terror over the them had come to a end. A search of her house uncovered the remains of around twenty seven bodies.
She was buried in an unmarked grave in the town's cemetery, but then they remembered her parting words and so they had a blacksmith forge a chain, the chain had thirty seven links in it. And covered the whole of her grave. The townspeople did this more out of jest and mockery than anything with the smith who forged the chains having said.
“If she breaks out of that! She can burn the whole damn town down!”
Time marched on and the tiny river hamlet of Manchester grew into a city and the name was changed from Manchester to Yazoo City to honor the river the town was built on. The towns population greatly increased and business thrived. A railroad was built that connected the town to Jackson. The railroad expanded and branched out into the delta.
Electricity soon came to the town and soon electric street lights replaced the need for lanterns and candles. Once dirt streets were replaced with brick, thriving merchants built fine houses in a newer section of town that was soon to be called Grand Avenue; a modern High School was built at the intersection of Grand Avenue and Main Street. The city had telegraph offices that connected the business district to such far away places as Boston, New York, Liverpool and London. The town also built a fine brick railroad station.
The town was thriving, till one hot August evening when a mysterious fire broke out at the top of Broadway Hill. Soon the first had spread to the surrounding houses, the wooden houses went up like matchsticks, burning brightly, hot embers and cinders rained down from heavens and soon the fire spread, it spread down from the steep hill and into the main business district.
The orange and red flames seemed to leap from one building to the other. The town was thrown into a panic and ministers of all the churches in town started to ring the church bells of the town. A call to arms, as men, women, and children rushed down the streets toward the safety of the river as the town burned around him.
It was a hellish sight, the wooden frames of the houses burned brightly, the heat caused the cobblestones to crack, the metal rails of the trolley seemed to almost melt from the heat, and above the loud pealing of the bells the screams of men, women, and tragically children trapped inside the burning building filled the air. The main business district was gutted and soon the fire spread to the surrounding neighborhoods. Grand Avenue, Madison Street, Jackson Street, South Main, Custard Street, Willow Street, Brook Street, Taylor Street, and River Street, burned and the smell of roasting human flesh and horseflesh filled the air.
The fine churches and public building that lined North Main Street went up in flames, the newly built Catholic and rebuild Episcopal Churches, were reduced to a smothering pile of cinders and ashes, the towns post office and hospital burned, not even the schools were spared.. the flames lasted for three days till at last a sudden downpour quenched the fires. The butcher's bill came to three thousand houses burned to the ground, two hundred and fifteen businesses, seventeen churches, and the whole school system gone.. and most heart breaking of all seven hundred and fifty people had perished. The fire had caused around six million dollars in damages.
Once the smoke cleared though, a few of the older townspeople who had been just toddlers when Ruth was hanged remembered her dying threat and so they started toward her grave. It was early afternoon when they arrived at the grave, and much to their horror the long length of chain that had surrounded her grave had been broken in half.
“The witch, she returned.. she broken out of her grave..” Somebody was supposed to have said upon looking down at the broken chain.
The witches curse endures today. Another length of chain was broken when the Mississippi River rose up and claimed the downtown area in the flood of nineteen twenty seven. Again another length of chain was broken when the Tallulah – Yazoo City – Durant, Mississippi tornado ripped through town, causing several million dollars in damages and taking the lives of twenty seven people. And so it seems old Ruth is keeping her word, and still using whatever dark powers she had to keep her curse alive. And so it seems the town of Yazoo City is cursed and will be cursed till the ending of the world.
