Local Lore | Lawrence County, Pennsylvania
Somewhere between Mary Black’s death in 1888 and my childhood more than a century later, an Irish immigrant became a witch.
I grew up knowing the rule.
Stand in front of a mirror and say her name three times.
Mary Black. Mary Black. Mary Black.
Exactly what was supposed to happen afterward has faded from my memory. I don’t remember an elaborate story about who Mary was, what she had supposedly done, or why we were supposed to be afraid of her. I just remember knowing the name.
Mary Black was the witch.
That name had an unusual place in my family long before I became interested in the history behind the legend. My mother’s maiden name is Mary Black.
There is no relation. My mother is the genealogist in our family, and she has checked. Our Mary Black and the woman buried at Tindall Cemetery do not share some mysterious family connection.
But try explaining that distinction to children armed with a local ghost story.
My mother was bullied as a child because she shared the name of Lawrence County’s alleged witch.
That detail has always stayed with me. A woman could die in 1888, and generations later her reputation could still carry enough weight that a completely unrelated little girl could be teased simply for having the same name.
But when I began looking past the legend and for Mary Black herself, I encountered a problem.
I couldn’t find the witch.
The Woman Beneath the Legend
The historical Mary Black appears considerably less sinister than the character who eventually inherited her name.
According to local historical and cemetery records, Mary was born in Ireland around 1801. She married Andrew Black, and the couple came to western Pennsylvania during the 1830s. They settled in what is now the Shenango Township area and raised a large family.
Andrew died in 1861.
Mary lived for more than another quarter century, dying on March 20, 1888, in her 87th year. She was buried beside her husband in Tindall Family Cemetery, a small burial ground in Lawrence County.
The surviving documentary record does not establish that Mary practiced witchcraft.
It does not establish that her neighbors accused her of witchcraft.
It does not establish that she was feared as a witch during her lifetime.
In fact, one later family account argues precisely the opposite.
Information provided in 1982 by one of Mary Black’s great-great-granddaughters emphatically rejected the idea that Mary had been a witch or had been regarded as one while she was alive.
That distinction is crucial.
There is a tremendous difference between a historical woman accused of witchcraft and a historical woman who became a witch in folklore after her death.
The evidence currently points much more strongly toward the latter.
The Missing Decades
Mary Black died in 1888.
Yet the familiar stories surrounding the “witch of Tindall Cemetery” appear much later.
That gap may be the most revealing part of the entire story.
If Mary had been a notorious local witch during the nineteenth century, we might reasonably expect some contemporary or near-contemporary trace of that reputation: a newspaper account, family story, church dispute, court proceeding, local history or other documentation.
So far, that evidence has proved elusive.
Instead, versions of the Mary Black legend emerge prominently in the twentieth century.
Local historical accounts place the folklore in circulation by the middle decades of the century. One Lawrence County history identifies a local man named Harry Stein, better remembered as “Harry the Hermit”,as an important figure in spreading stories about Mary around the early 1960s.
Whether Stein actually invented the witch story is much harder to prove.
Folklore rarely provides a clean starting date.
Someone hears something from somebody, changes a detail, tells someone else, and before long everyone remembers hearing the story long before anyone can identify where it began.
But by the 1960s, Mary Black was becoming something the historical record does not demonstrate she had ever been in life:
a local witch.
And Tindall Cemetery became part of the experience.
The Witch in the Cemetery
As the legend grew, so did the stories attached to Mary.
Depending on who told the tale, Mary’s ghost haunted Tindall Cemetery. She could appear to visitors. She could punish those who disturbed her. In another variation, she had supposedly been buried with valuable jewelry.
Then the legend stopped being merely a story.
People began going to the cemetery looking for her.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Tindall Cemetery became a destination for teenagers and curiosity seekers. Local accounts describe vandalism, toppled gravestones and repeated attempts to clean and restore the small cemetery.
Boy Scouts reportedly participated in cleanup efforts beginning in the early 1960s. Eventually, repeated destruction made those efforts difficult to sustain.
Mary Black’s grave itself was disturbed.
Stories that she had been buried with jewelry apparently encouraged grave robbing. Accounts of the cemetery describe graves being dug into and human remains being disturbed or scattered.
The irony is difficult to miss.
For decades, people told stories warning that Mary Black might rise from her grave and disturb the living.
In reality, it was the living who would not leave Mary Black alone.
Even her gravestone eventually required protection.
Today, Mary and Andrew Black’s original stone is no longer standing over their graves at Tindall Cemetery. It is held by the Lawrence County Historical Society for safekeeping.
Accounts differ on exactly how it arrived there. One version says the stone was recovered after being dumped in a swamp near West Pittsburgh. Another says township officials removed it in the 1980s after vandals attempted to carry it away.
Without stronger documentation resolving the discrepancy, both versions remain part of the record.
And that disagreement is appropriate for a story like Mary Black’s.
The farther we move from the woman herself, the harder it becomes to separate what happened from what someone remembers hearing happened.
Mary Black Meets Bloody Mary
By the time Mary Black reached my generation, the legend had changed again.
I remember the mirror.
Stand in front of it.
Say her name three times.
Mary Black. Mary Black. Mary Black.
It is difficult to miss the resemblance to another childhood legend: Bloody Mary.
The Bloody Mary mirror ritual has circulated widely among American children for decades. Its details vary, but the structure is remarkably durable: enter a dark room, look into a mirror, repeat Mary’s name and wait for something frightening to appear.
At some point, Lawrence County’s Mary Black appears to have absorbed that tradition.
Later published accounts of the local legend preserve multiple rituals. In one version, saying Mary Black’s name three times before going to sleep causes her to visit during the night and claw the person’s face. In another, Mary is summoned through a mirror.
There is currently no evidence that the mirror ritual belonged to the earliest Mary Black stories.
It may instead represent something much more interesting.
Children took a national piece of folklore and made it local.
Why summon some vague Bloody Mary when Lawrence County already had a Mary of its own?
The witch buried down the road was much scarier.
A Legend Becomes Local Memory
That may also explain why my mother’s experience matters to this story.
Again, my mother is not related to the Mary Black buried at Tindall Cemetery.
But she grew up here with the exact same name.
And children knew what that name meant.
She was teased and bullied because of it.
That tells us nothing about whether the historical Mary Black practiced witchcraft.
It tells us something arguably more useful about the folklore.
The legend had become embedded in local culture deeply enough that Mary Black was no longer merely the name of a woman buried in an old cemetery.
It meant witch.
By my childhood, I inherited essentially the same association.
But I also inherited a different version of the ritual.
That is folklore happening in real time.
One generation passes down a name. Another adds a mirror. Someone adds three repetitions. Someone else adds scratches across your face. Another person tells you Mary was buried with jewels. Somebody remembers hearing that she was evil. Eventually those details become so familiar that nobody thinks to ask where they came from.
And somewhere underneath all of them lies an actual woman.
So, Was Mary Black a Witch?
There is no credible historical evidence currently establishing that she was.
That doesn't mean we can prove with absolute certainty what every neighbor whispered about Mary Black in nineteenth-century Lawrence County. Historical records are incomplete, particularly when documenting the lives and reputations of ordinary women.
But history cannot be built from what might have happened.
The evidence we have paints a much simpler picture.
Mary Black was an Irish immigrant.
She was a wife.
She was a mother.
She became a widow.
She lived into her eighties.
She died in 1888 and was buried beside her husband.
Decades later, stories began attaching themselves to her name.
Those stories grew.
Children repeated them. Teenagers visited her grave. Vandals damaged the cemetery. Her remains were reportedly disturbed. Her gravestone eventually had to be removed for protection.
And more than a century after Mary died, little girls were still standing in front of mirrors saying her name three times.
Maybe that is the most haunting part of Mary Black’s story.
Not that a witch once lived in Lawrence County.
But that an ordinary woman could become one after she was no longer here to tell us who she really was.
The historical Mary Black disappeared beneath the legend.
Local Lore is where we start digging her back out.
