Since the 1960s and ‘70s, a legend has circulated high schools in the St. Charles area about a witch named Molly Crenshaw. Molly, it is said, was a freed Jamaican or Haitian practitioner of Voodoo who lived in the 1800s. Her charms were occasionally sought after, but after one particularly nasty drought or long winter, the locals turned against her and executed her. In order to prevent her from rising from the grave, they chopped her body into pieces and buried the pieces in the woods around a remote cemetery. It wasn’t enough. Year after year, the pieces crawl closer together. Anyone who successfully locates Molly’s grave will meet a gruesome end. According to a local English teacher at Francis Howell High School, “There was a story about two football players who went looking for the grave in the 1950s. They found it and tried to take the tombstone. They met with an untimely end. The sheriff’s deputies found their bodies impaled on the graveyard fence.” As far as local historians are concerned, there is no basis for the legend. Mollie Crenshaw did exist, but she was neither Jamaican nor Haitian, and she died in 1913 after swallowing carbolic acid. That has not prevented Molly Crenshaw from becoming one of the most popular and enduring legends in St. Charles County. Crenshaw’s surviving relatives removed her gravestone in 1979 to prevent further damage, but every year hundreds of thrill seekers still search for it.
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