Aunty Greenleaf is an old woman who appears in a mysterious tale of witchcraft in the farming community of Brookhaven on Long Island, New York. The story “Aunty Greenleaf and the White Deer” first appeared in a collection of ghost stories and tales called Spooky New York by S. E. Schlosser, but the elements of her story are clearly reminiscent of the accusations leveled against the men and women accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s.
Like most old women who are accused of witchcraft, Aunty Greenleaf was not considered attractive. She had a small patch of gray hair atop her head and her nose was crooked. She was thin and weak. She lived alone in a hut outside of the town of Brookhaven, and all the townspeople avoided her except when they became too ill and needed her herbal remedies. According to the tale, her remedies worked too well to be natural.
Schlosser’s story is narrated by Abe, a child in the town of Brookhaven. He shares how he and his sister Judith had been cautioned by their mother never to go near Aunty Greenleaf. But their fear mingles with their fascination with her, and they discuss her with other children. They learn from a boy named Tommy that if one placed a piece of silver in her path she would turn and walk the other way. This would serve as proof that she was a witch, because witches can’t pass over anything made of silver.
The accusations against Aunty Greenleaf are vague but threatening and meant to caution the listener against any interaction with the strange, solitary Aunty. After one local farmer spoke rudely to Aunty Greenleaf, his pigs fell ill and died, one after another. Aunty Greenleaf received the blame for the dead pigs. Another town resident and prominent citizen, Mistress Williams, dreamed of Aunty Greenleaf. Williams’s daughter fell ill the next day and nearly died. Aunty Greenleaf also received the blame for this calamity.
Though she lived outside of Brookhaven, Aunty Greenleaf apparently enjoyed travel. Abe’s friend Tommy tells of how Aunty Greenleaf “magicked” an eggshell and used it travel across the Atlantic, so she could frolic with the witches of England before returning home in the very same eggshell. There is a reference in this portion of the story to her “witch friends,” but these friends are not named.
The real trouble with Aunty Greenleaf began in the autumn. People in Brookhaven noticed a white deer in the woods. Hunting parties attempted to locate and kill the animal, but all failed. People claimed that the animal was either impervious to bullets or some kind of phantom. At this same time, several people in town experienced calamities. Women could not churn their butter, a common event blamed on witchcraft. Cows and pigs sickened and died. Some people blamed the phantom deer. Others pointed out that all of the families experiencing the trouble had treated Aunty Greenleaf badly in recent times.
More men set out to hunt the white deer. After a day and night of hunting, they encountered the deer and described it as the largest deer any of them had ever seen. It was so fast they could not keep up. Then, men in the hunting party began to experience nightmares. Abe and Judith’s father was one of the hunters troubled by the nightmares.
In Schlosser’s story, Abe and Judith remember that witches have an aversion to silver and beg their father, a member of the hunting party, to make silver bullets. Their father is reluctant, but urged on by his wife, he agrees. Abe watches his father melt the metal to make the silver bullets. That night the children and their mother wait up until their father returns.
The father describes finding the deer and swears he hit it with at least one bullet. The deer stumbled but got up and kept running. He tracked the deer almost to Aunty Greenleaf’s hut where he lost it in the dark. This was seen as ominous since a white deer should be very visible. After that night, no one spotted the deer and the hunting stopped. The cows and pigs on the local farms stopped dying. Women could churn their butter again. The hunters stopped having nightmares.
In another version of the tale, there are no children, but an unrelenting hunter does track the white deer relentlessly and rips silver bullets from his coat when regular bullets do no harm to the phantom deer. The relentless hunter does finally hit the deer with the silver bullets, and he tracks the injured animal to the hut of a queer old woman who lives a solitary life amid the pines and catbriers.
For the next three days, everything seemed to be returning to normal. Then Abe’s father went into town and learned some troubling news. Two days earlier, Aunty Greenleaf had taken ill. She died and when the town doctor examined her, he told the minister he discovered three silver bullets in the old woman’s spine. Abe and Judith nod knowingly, convinced that their advice saved their father and the town. Aunty Greenleaf was dead and the white deer was never seen again in Brookhaven.
Elizabeth Pagel-Hogan
See also Bell Witch; Bloody Mary or I Believe in Mary Worth; DeGrow, Moll; Demonic Possession; Old Betty Booker; Old Granny Tucker; Salem Witch Trials
Further Reading
Drake, Samuel Adams. 1975. A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore. North Clarendon, VT: Charles E. Tuttle.
Greenberg, Martin H. 1995. 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Schlosser, S. E. 2005. Spooky New York: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, and Other Local Lore. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press.
Thompson, Harold William, and Thomas F. O’Donnell. 1979. Body, Boots, & Britches: Folktales, Ballads, and Speech from Country New York. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.