The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,273

and knew at any moment what these people were doing. They said Mary Beth made no effort to keep such things a secret.

They also said that Mary Beth was the person to whom the black servants turned when they were in trouble with the local voodooiennes and Mary Beth knew what powder to use or candle to burn in order to counteract a spell, and that she could command spirits; and Mary Beth declared more than once that this was all that voodoo was about. Command the spirits. All the rest is for show.

One Irish cook who worked in the house off and on from 1895 to 1902 told one of our investigators casually that Mary Beth told her there were all kinds of spirits in the world, but the lowly spirits were the easiest to command, and anybody could call them up if such a person had a mind to. Mary Beth had spirits guarding all the rooms of the house and all the things in them. But Mary Beth warned the cook not to try to call spirits on her own. It had its dangers and was best left to people who could see spirits and feel them the way that Mary Beth could.

“You could feel the spirits in that house, all right,” said the cook, “and if you closed your eyes halfway, you could see them. But Miss Mary Beth didn’t have to do that. She could just see them plain as day all the time, and she talked to them and called them by name.”

The cook also said Mary Beth drank brandy straight from the bottle, but that was all right, because Mary Beth was a real lady and a lady could do what she pleased, and Mary Beth was a kind and generous person. Same held true for old Monsieur Julien, but he would not have thought of drinking brandy straight from a bottle, or anything else straight from a bottle, and always liked his sherry in a crystal glass.

A laundress reported that Mary Beth could make doors close behind her without bothering to touch them, as she made her way through the house. The laundress was asked once to take a basket of folded linen to the second floor, but she refused, she was so frightened. Then Mary Beth scolded her in a rather good-natured way for being so foolish, and the laundress wasn’t afraid anymore.

There are at least fifteen different accounts of Mary Beth’s voodoo altar, on which she burned incense and candles of various colors, and to which she added plaster saints from time to time. But no account tells us precisely where this altar was. (It is interesting to note that no black servant ever questioned about this altar would utter one word about it.)

Some of the other stories we have are very fanciful. It was told to us several times, for instance, that Mary Beth didn’t just dress like a man, she turned into a man when she went out in her suit, with her cane and hat. And she was strong enough at such times to beat off any other man who assaulted her.

One morning early when she was riding her horse on St. Charles Avenue alone (Julien was ill at the time, and would very soon die), a man tried to pull her from the horse, at which time she herself turned into a man and beat him half to death with her fist, and then dragged him at the end of a rope behind her horse to the local police station. “Lots of people saw that,” we are told. That story was repeated in the Irish Channel as late as 1935. Indeed police records of the time indicate the assault, and the “citizen’s arrest” did take place in 1914. The man died in his cell several hours later.

There is another story of a foolish maidservant who stole one of Mary Beth’s rings, and awoke that night in her smothering little room on Chippewa Street to discover Mary Beth bending over her, in manly form, and demanding that she give back the ring immediately, which the woman did, only to die by three o’clock the following afternoon from the shock of the experience.

That story was told to us once in 1898, and again in 1910. It has proved impossible to investigate.

By far the most valuable story we have from the earlier period was told to us by a taxi driver in 1910, who said that he once picked