The Witches' Tree

Louisville cut down the witches' meeting tree in 1889. Eleven months later a tornado killed 100 people. A knotted osage orange grew from the stump.

The tree at Sixth and Park in Old Louisville is not the one that was there when the curse was placed. The original tree, a maple, was cut down in 1889 to serve as Louisville's maypole. Eleven months later, a tornado killed more than a hundred people in the city, and a new tree grew out of the stump. This one is osage orange and knotted like a fist. Visitors drape it with Mardi Gras beads, skeleton keys, crucifixes, plastic skulls, and handwritten notes. The locals call it the Witches' Tree.

The legend starts with a coven. In the late 1880s, according to Old Louisville folklore, a group of witches and voodoo practitioners used a maple at that corner as their meeting spot. When the city announced plans to cut the maple down for the 1889 May Day celebration, the witches begged the city to leave it alone. The city ignored them. Before fleeing to the forests west of town, the head witch is said to have left a warning: "Beware Louisville, beware the eleventh month."

On March 27, 1890, an F4 tornado tore through downtown. It killed at least 76 people (some contemporary accounts put the toll over 100), injured hundreds more, and flattened entire blocks, including the Falls City Hall train depot, where most of the deaths occurred when the roof collapsed on people waiting out the storm. Some versions of the legend add that members of the original May Day committee were among the dead.

As the storm moved off, a bolt of lightning was said to strike the stump of the old maple. Whatever the mechanism, a new tree grew where the old one had been, and grew wrong. Osage orange trees tend to be scrubby on their own, but this one twisted into itself, full of knots and fused branches, a shape that children draw when asked to draw a scary tree. It's the tree on the corner today.

Over the years it has become one of the most visited spots in Old Louisville, a neighborhood with a reputation for being the most haunted in America. People leave offerings because the tradition says that tossing beads into the branches brings luck, and stealing any of the trinkets brings something considerably worse. The tree has its own Facebook page, maintained by tour guide Susan Shearer, where small good-luck spells are posted for donors and curses are posted against anyone who takes something away. The page is half tongue-in-cheek and half deadly serious, which is the correct ratio for Old Louisville.

The 1890 tornado was real. The body count was real. Whether a group of witches ever met under a maple at Sixth and Park is a question Louisville has never bothered to resolve. What visitors actually photograph is the trunk, which carries Mardi Gras beads, skeleton keys, crucifixes, and plastic skulls from a hundred anonymous donors. Most people reach up to touch one and then pull back before they do, because the curse on taking something is the part of the legend nobody wants to test.