In Brief
At Loon Lake Cemetery near Lakefield, Minnesota, the story is that a beheaded 18-year-old witch is buried with the axe that killed her, and that stepping over her grave kills you within days. The records tell a quieter, sadder version.
The Full Story
At Loon Lake Cemetery, an abandoned pioneer graveyard on a knoll above the water near Lakefield, Minnesota, the story everyone tells is about a witch. The legend says an 18-year-old girl named Mary Jane Terwillegar was beheaded in 1880 by the citizens of Petersburg, who buried her here with the axe that took her head. Step over her grave, the lore goes, and you die an unnatural death within days. Two other women are said to have met the same fate, and to haunt the place alongside her. Her surname drifts from telling to telling — Terwilliger, Twiliger, Twilegar — the way names do once a real person becomes a legend.
The records tell a quieter, sadder version. Mary Jane Terwillegar died on March 5, 1880, of diphtheria, while working as a domestic servant in Cherokee, Iowa. She was 17. Her head, as the Utne essay puts it, was fully attached to her neck. Her parents, John and Phoebe, lived to 101 and 92 and are buried in the same ground she's supposed to curse.
The cemetery was founded in the 1870s and serves no one now. One account describes it as swallowed by overgrowth — ivy, prickly wild raspberry, and tall prairie grass holding an unfathomable population of ticks. The director of the Jackson County Historical Society traces the witch story to an 1880s local named James S. Peters, who "had this thing about witches." When Peters' mill jammed, he blamed witchcraft; the cause turned out to be a buffalo fish stuck in the gears. He made witch effigies ringed with flattened silver dollars and shot at them. A later store operator helped the tale along. "They liked the story," he admitted, "so I kinda helped it along a little bit."
The real horror isn't the curse. It's what the curse did to the graveyard. The cemetery once held at least 68 headstones. By 2013, only about 11 remained, nearly all the originals smashed from their foundations by legend-seekers. Someone dug a pit six feet across trying to exhume Mary Jane. Her own marker was stolen in the 1990s, recovered by police, and now sits on a concrete floor at the historical society, beside a display of Megadeth memorabilia — the metal band whose 1988 song "Mary Jane" is said to draw on the same legend.
The lore made her a monster. The lore also tore apart the place where the real girl is buried.
