Witch’s Woods, A Baby Boomer’s March Nightmare

By: Lou Macaluso                                                  

Mike, Rick, and I had run out of things to do.  It was the last day of our spring break, late March, 1959.  We decided to walk to the train trestle, cross the Little Calumet River, and go roller skating at Art’s Roller Rink in Harvey.  When we got to the trestle, however, our plans collapsed.  Illinois Central Railroad construction workers were replacing railroad ties and rails atop the trestle.  Crossing the river was impossible.

The Little Calumet River and its alleged raw sewage bordered the southwest corner of Riverdale from Halsted Street on the west to the train trestle on the east.  From the trestle, the river curved southward bordering a thin strip of Dolton on its east side and the “backyard” of Harvey on its west side.

We sat down on a dry pile of stones dumped at the base of the trestle.  The workers would be spreading the stones around the newly laid railroad track.  The temperature was about 38 degrees, and dirty patches of snow still littered the brown grass wherever shadows lingered for most of the day.  On the riverbank, thin ice spread toward the middle of the river until it finally surrendered to the green current of the murky water.

Our grammar school educated us well about the dangers of playing around early spring ice.  The school district showed a safety film about how to build a human chain to rescue someone who had fallen through thin ice into a cold river, lake, or deep pond.  Even daredevil Rick respected the danger of playing on ice during this time of year. 

We sat on the pile of stones for about a half hour playing a game whereby we would see who could toss a stone and get it as close to the edge of the ice without it tumbling into the river. Suddenly, Rick jumped up and just blurted out, “Let’s walk down the river to the witch’s house!” 

“What!” I said in disbelief.

“Are you crazy?” Mike added.  “We’re not even supposed to be by the river.  My dad told me not to wander off this far…especially around that house.”

The area east of the river in Dolton was a thickly wooded area known unofficially as Witch’s Woods.  The name “Witch’s Woods” never appeared on a Dolton, a Chicago area, or an Illinois state map.  The name evolved from its only resident who lived in an old rotting frame house buried deep in the woods.  Very few people ever saw the woman who lived there, so naturally, just as the “Boo Radley” legend in Harper Lee’s

To Kill a Mockingbird grew the legend that the woman living there was a witch grew, also.

Stories about the woman nurtured the legend throughout the years.  Tales spread of unidentified human remains found in the vicinity.  The most notorious tale was that of two missing kids who were last seen snooping around her house and then mysteriously disappeared one summer in the mid 1940s.  The police allegedly searched the area including the witch’s house, but they didn’t find a trace of evidence.  Rumor had it that the old woman cackled mockingly when the police tore apart her house as they searched for leads.   

“C’mon chickenshits,” Rick urged. “Who’s gonna’ know?  Besides, we’ll say we got lost.  We were walkin’ along the riverbank, just tryin’ to find our way, and we ran into her house.  I’ve never seen her house. Have you guys?” 

“No,” I said, “but I’ve heard about it.  I heard there are animals’ and even people’s skeletons buried between the river and her house.”

 “I don’t know,” Mike shook his head cautiously, “Remember that tape recording Paul and his friend Bob made?” 

Paul was an older kid who lived next door to me.  The previous summer he and his buddy, Bob, had sat on Paul’s front porch and listened to a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Paul called to us, “Hey, you guys wanna’ hear somethin’?” 

We walked up the two steps from the lane to his front porch.  Paul and Bob were just smiling, nodding, and listening.  Tinny treble sounds of someone walking inside a room, perhaps a kitchen, and putting dishes away vibrated from the speaker.  During this activity a woman spoke incoherently. Then, after some silence, echoes of high-pitched screaming erupted from the speaker.

“What the hell are we listening to?” I asked.

 “The witch,” Bob said. 

“What?”

“Bob stayed overnight last night,” Paul had continued, “and we snuck out with this battery powered tape recorder. We went into Witch’s Woods and put a microphone in her broken basement window.  Then we turned the machine to ‘record’ and let it run for about a half hour.”

“Wow!” we reacted.

“So what’s that screamin’ about?” Mike asked.

“She just sits in her basement and screams,” Paul replied.

So that was the tape.

“That tape was bullcrap,” Rick lectured to us as we sat on the pile of stones.

“Maybe, and maybe not,” I responded, “but we don’t have anything better to do…Let’s go.”

Mike agreed, and we began our journey starting beneath the trestle on the riverbank.  At that point the river flowed eastward, but gradually it bent southward toward Sibley Boulevard.  The witch’s house was about a half mile from the trestle and a block before the Sibley Boulevard underpass. 

After about twenty minutes of tedious hiking we saw a small clearing at the riverbank ahead.  We slowly approached it.  A narrow path emerged in the middle of the wooded edge of the clearing.  The path curved just enough into the thick woods so that its destination was invisible…but we knew where it led.

We didn’t speak a word.  Rick moved first and approached the path; Mike and I followed.  Some flagstones must have been thrown hastily along the path many years ago because they were barely visible from years of muddy water washing over them. 

After about twenty yards the path ended abruptly at a large clearing. To the right of the clearing some old rotting porch steps came into view.  The steps led to the back porch of a small dilapidated farmhouse.  The wood on the house rotted into a grayish-brown color.  Small-paned windows peered from the wall on each side of the back porch door.  Yellowed newspaper covered the inside window glass.  The back porch door was the kind of door that people used indoors to close off rooms.  It had rotted and splintered from exposure to the outside elements.  A simple brass knob protruded from the right side of the door about halfway up.  A huge round stone and cement fireplace covered about two-thirds of the west wall.  The fireplace tapered upward into a beautiful chimney with red and gray round stones neatly mortared together.  The rest of the house seemed to be desperately clinging to this beautiful structure. 

This was where the witch lived, and the witch was home.  Burning damp cottonwood spit small red sparks and puffs of gray smoke out the chimney.  No broken basement windows lined the base of the house as Paul and Bob had informed us; there was no basement at all.

We just stood in the clearing and stared at the house.  A woman’s voice called out, but not the shrieking old lady voice that talked and screamed on the audio tape; it was just a woman’s voice calling from inside the house, “What do you boys want?”

All three of us gasped at the same time, and our eyes focused on the simple brass knob on the back porch door that slowly turned.  We didn’t want to see what was on the other side, so we let our imaginations see it.  Our imaginations saw an old hag with stringy hair, no teeth, warts and pockmarks on her face.  She was hunched over in a gunnysack-like dress, and she was pointing a shotgun at us.  Then our imaginations said, “Run like hell!”

In my younger days I had the gift of speed, and I used it at that moment to a fault.  I raced ahead of Mike and Rick down the flagstone path.  When I reached the small clearing a shocking reality hit me; the river came next.  I tried desperately to stop at the bank, but my momentum kept me moving.  I instinctively did a baseball “hook” slide onto the thin ice.  I felt the cold water seep from its surface through my pants. 

By this time Mike and Rick had reached the small clearing and stared as if Boris Karloff had met them at the river. I must have looked like the drowning kid in the safety film from school.  I hoped that they would remember the part in the film where the people formed a human chain to save the kid, but all they did was stand on the riverbank and scream, “Ahhhhh!”

When I realized that screaming “Ahhhhh!” wasn’t helping, I formulated a plan.  The sheet of ice had stabilized, but it cracked a little more every time I inched forward toward the riverbank about four yards away.  I knew that somehow I had to get to my feet and leap forward.  Slowly, I pulled my knees to my chest and positioned the toes of my shoes onto the ice.  As I stood up I could see the ice crack like a lightning bolt beneath my left foot and toward the riverbank.  With all the strength in my legs I sprang forward.

My right foot found enough traction, but my left went straight through the ice.  My body shot forward at an angle.  Luckily, Mike and Rick were at the edge of the riverbank, and they grabbed the wrist and forearm of my right arm and pulled me into the small clearing.   

The three of us rested silently in that little clearing for several minutes.  Too much adrenalin had pumped through our systems in too short a time.  After several minutes had passed I sat up and looked at my feet.

“Oh shit,” I moaned.  The shock and excitement had masked the fact that my left shoe was gone, and my foot was freezing.  The shoe must have come off when I leaped forward and my foot went through the ice.  Surely the current had carried it away.

“Now what am I gonna’ do?”

We worked on some stories that I could tell my parents, but even we couldn’t make ourselves believe them.  Then Mike stood up and said, “Maybe we can think of somethin’ on the way home.  Why don’t you take your undershirt off and wrap it around your foot.  At least you’ll be able to walk home on it.”

That seemed like a good idea.  When I stood up to take my coat off something curious appeared. An old black rubber boot, not necessarily a man’s or a woman’s, just an old black rubber boot stood on a muddy sunken flagstone at the beginning of the path.  I walked toward the boot, and Mike and Rick followed. A grayish-looking rag protruded from the top opening of the boot.  I bent down and picked it up.  It was an old but very clean gray woolen sock.

I turned to Mike and Rick. “Do ya’ think….?”

“Who else could’ve left it?” Mike replied.

“Should I thank her?” I asked.

“Hell no!” Rick said. “I’m not even sure you should put ‘em on. There might be a bat in there ready to bite your toe off!”

I didn’t care. My foot was freezing, and I was willing to take the risk. I took my cold, wet, dirty sock off my foot and threw it in the river.  When I pulled the wool sock over my cold foot I immediately felt the warmth returning to it.  Then I slipped my covered foot into the boot, which was a little too big, as if it had been worn by an older kid or a small adult woman. 

Mike and Rick were already making the return trip down the riverbank.  “Come on, let’s go,” Mike turned and coached me.  “We’re already in trouble for bein’ gone so long!”

I looked up the flagstone trail.  Spontaneously I yelled, “Thank you!”

I waited a few seconds, but no answer came, so I joined Mike and Rick for the long trip home.

After about an hour we arrived in front of my house where Mike and Rick departed to their separate houses.  In all that time we hadn’t come up with a believable story for my lost shoe and sock. 

As I stood in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at my front door a unique idea hit me. I decided to attempt a new strategy for situations like this; I would tell the truth.  Sure!  It always worked on Leave It to Beaver.  Whenever the Beave got into trouble the same scenario repeated itself.  Beaver sat on the living room couch or his twin bed while his parents, Ward and June Cleaver, sat by him.  He would tell his parents what had happened as Ward and June listened with raised eyebrows. When Beaver finished, Ward would say something such as, “Well, Beaver, I hope you learned your lesson, and I do commend you for telling the truth.”

Beaver would scrunch up his face and say something innocently funny (canned laughter). Then June would say to him, “Now go upstairs and wash up before dinner, dear.”

When Beaver left, June would say, “W-a-a-a-a-a-rd, do you think Beaver really  learned his lesson?”

Ward would briefly reminisce about a similar experience from his own childhood with a humorous tagline.  More canned laughter, music up, and then the show would cut to a commercial. 

Everything would be perfect.  My parents would just have to know their lines.

I immediately sensed that I was not in the Cleaver household when I walked through the front door. 

“Where in the hell have you been!” Dad yelled.

“And what happened to your shoe?”  Mom added.

I didn’t panic.  I sat down on the living room couch and waited for them to sit, too.  Then I told them the whole story.  I even scrunched my face up a few times, just like the Beave.  When I looked up, it seemed to have worked.  Dad had that concerned Ward Cleaver look on his face, and Mom wore her I’m-trying-to-understand face. 

But after a few beats of silence they reminded me again that this was not the Cleaver household.           

“How many times have we told you to stay away from that river?”

“Where do you get off thinking you can go snoopin’ around a person’s house like that?  Now get your sorry butt upstairs without dinner while your mother and I come up with a good punishment for this bullshit you came home with! 

So much for the truth and the Leave It to Beaver approach. 

Spring finally arrived about three weeks later.  Lawns grew green and ready for mowing.  Mom’s flower garden started to bloom, and she worried that an early spring frost might ruin it. 

We were having dinner one night around this time when Dad threw out his usual school night question, “Well, how was school today?”

This time Beth, my older sister, didn’t offer her stock “It was okay” answer.  Instead, she said “We went to the witch’s house today.”

“What?” Mom asked.

Beth mockingly replied very slowly, “W-e-e w-e-e-n-t t-o the w-i-i-tch-e-e-s…”

 “Don’t get smart, young lady!” Dad interrupted.

 “Miss Dumont, our science teacher,” Beth continued, “said that the woman who lived by the river was some kind of expert on wildflowers and all that nature stuff.  Miss Dumont knows her.  Anyway, it’s only a few blocks from school, so she walked our whole class over there.  Everyone was scared, but she made us go.  We didn’t stay long, but the woman showed us all these flowers and plants around her house and talked about the animals that lived by the river.  She was pretty nice to us.  Her name is Miss Verhoeven or something like that.”

Dad, though more interested in his dinner than her story by now, asked, “Well, what did you learn?”

Beth’s answer, though anti-climactic, never went further than our dinner table.  No one in Riverdale wanted to hear it or to believe it anyway.