 About three and a half hours north of New Orleans, Louisiana is Yazoo City, Mississippi. For all intent and purposes, Yazoo City, Mississippi seems to be like any quaint old southern town. It's a town that lies at the mouth of the Mississippi Delta and even has a plaque in it dedicated to Monday Mysteries character Robert Johnson. And some people might recognize Yazoo City, Mississippi from the movie Oh Brother Wear Art Thou, seeing that they used the bank in Yazoo City, Mississippi in the movie Oh Brother or Art Thou. But one of the most interesting things about Yazoo City is a fire that happened in 1904. A fire that from what I can see left about half of the town as a ghost town. Now fires are very common, but the locals in Yazoo City will tell you that this fire was started by a witch. But before we go any further, you know what to do, please hit that subscribe button and give us a like. As always, thank you so so much to all of our producers and patreons on this channel. If you would like to join our Patreon community, there is a link in the description box below. Welcome to Esoteric Atlanta, my name is Bryce and today we're going to be talking about the Witch of Yazoo City. Here in the Deep South, many, many, many small towns have these legends. Legends of witches, of werewolves, vampires, you name it. However, with a lot of these really small towns here in the Deep South, some of these legends never leave the town. The locals know them, but most of the time people outside of the locals might not necessarily know of these particular legends. Well, the same is true, in my opinion, for the Witch of Yazoo City, and it wasn't until a very famous American writer who grew up in Yazoo City wrote a very popular American novel that exposed this interesting legend to the rest of the world. Willie Morris was born in Jackson, Mississippi on November 29th of 1934. Now Jackson, Mississippi is the capital of the state of Mississippi, and it's relatively close to Yazoo City, in fact it's only about 40 miles northwest of Yazoo City. And when Willis was six months old, his parents up and moved to Yazoo City. So Willis Morris spent his entire childhood running around the streets of this small southern town. Now Willie Morris was a very smart kid, in fact he ended up graduating valedictorian of his high school class, and then went on to the University of Texas at Austin. Like many great American novelists, Willie Morris wrote about what he knew best. And that is, of course, the Deep South. Now I have said many times and I will continue to say there is no other place in the world that I would rather be from than the Deep South here in America. Between the states of South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, we have a very, very colorful and eclectic cultural heritage. Where people whose culture is influenced by Christianity, European Christianity, African Voodoo, Voodoo, and of course the tales of Native Americans. As I said in our Creole episode, many of us here in the Southeast do qualify as Creole, since Creole is a combination of multiple cultures coming together in one. And I've said many, many, many times before in the past that most people who are from the Deep South have a bit of a belief in the supernatural. If you've never been here to the Deep South, you might not truly understand what I'm saying when I talk about the land itself being its own character. Down here in the Deep South, we live in a very, very warm climate. And I'm not talking about warm as in the warmth of Arizona, I'm talking about a very different heat, a heat that's packed with humidity. Living down here in the Deep South, you spend most of your year feeling like you are walking through a bowl of hot soup. This humidity gives the area a life of its own. The air is dense and thick. And sometimes it's so hot that things cannot move quickly, hence why a lot of Southern accents are slow accents. Down here in the Deep South, we have a flamboyancy. There's a funny joke down here where we say, we don't hide our crazy. We put it on the front porch and give it iced tea. And so when we talk about writers like William Morris or even one of his predecessors, William Faulkner, we're talking about people that have quite a bit of stories and situations to write about. Now if you think back to a lot of the great Southern stories, these end up being some of the most famous and well read novels globally. I understand that people across the world are very fascinated with the stories that come out of the Deep South or the Southeast. You look again at William Faulkner or even stories like Gone with the Wind, and even more modern stories like the Divine Secrets of the Yahya Sisterhood. And it wasn't too long before many big, big publishing houses and magazines started to notice William Morris' talent, and in 1963 he was hired by Harper's Bazaar. And then in 1967 he became one of the youngest editors for Harper's magazine. Now if anybody knows anything about publishing houses, the editors pretty much are the people that help mold and shape stories for the writers. And so obviously at a very young age, William Morris was off and running in his literary career. In 1980, Willis Morris moved back to Mississippi where he became a writer in residence at the University of Mississippi. And it is said that he greatly influenced another Southern writer, John Grisham. Now before William Morris moved back to Mississippi, he wrote a novel called Good Little Boy, A Delta Boyhood. This book was published in 1971 and it was about Willis' childhood growing up in the 1940s in, again, Yazoo City. Now much later they would go on to make a movie adaptation of this story called The River Pirates. And in this novel, this is where people were introduced to this legend of the witch of Yazoo City. The story goes that in the late 1800s, there was a witch that lived on the Yazoo River right outside of Yazoo City. It is said that this witch would lure in fishermen and then torture them. Well one day the sheriff of Yazoo City was a bit fed up of all these missing fishermen and he decided that he was going to go and apprehend this witch. A chase ensued throughout the swamps in Yazoo City. But it wasn't the sheriff that would eventually catch the witch. It was the land itself. It seems that the witch was stuck in quicksand. And as she started to sink lower and lower and lower into the quicksand, she yelled out a curse upon the city of Yazoo. She said, in 20 years I will return and burn this town to the ground. And then in May of 1904, a fire broke out in Yazoo City. This fire took out almost every single business in the city. It burned down at least 200 residents and took out about 27 blocks. It is said that the fire started in the paulier of a young woman, a young bride, who was getting ready for her wedding day and quickly as if by magic the fire spread. Well the next day as the townsfolk were cleaning up from the fire, they decided to go check out the graveyard where this supposed witch was buried. Now the interesting thing is that 20 years prior to the fire when the witch passed away in the quicksand, the town decided to put chains around her grave so she could not get back out again. Well the day after the fire, the chains around her grave were broken and in fact even to this day some of the locals of Yazoo City call the witch the chain lady. Now here's something super interesting. For over 100 years now, the city of Yazoo has gone back and repaired the chains around her grave. And every time the chains are repaired by the next day, they're broken again. Now many people have looked into this grave plot, this famous grave plot in Yazoo City to find if there's some truth behind this legend of this witch. The records do show that a female did own this plot and the original tombstone had the initials T-W or as many people believe the witch. Now the original tombstone is no longer there. The community did replace the tombstone with a new one but not long after that tombstone was replaced the new one fell over and split in two. It split in two almost perfectly as if by magic. Now Willie Morris, the man who gave fame to the witch of Yazoo City, ended up passing away on August 2nd of 1999. He passed away of a heart attack and Willie Morris himself is buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Yazoo City not far from the witch. How's that for a really interesting display of karma? So if you're near Yazoo City and if you go into Yazoo City today you will see that part of the town is still in ruins from the fire. You'll also see a very famous graveyard with two very famous residents. Alright guys, thank you so much for sitting through this video. Normally on Wednesdays we release our edition of our newest missing book of the Bible but as you know we have not been doing that for the last couple weeks because we have had a couple of guests come on the show on David's show on Tuesday and so it won't be for the next week or so before we start a new book. Please let me know your thoughts and your opinions down in the comment section below. If you are from Yazoo City or if you've traveled through Yazoo City, if you know this story, if you've seen these graves, I would love to hear from you again. Please leave your experiences down in the comment section below. Also regarding a telegram channel I am going to be opening one up eventually again it's been a kind of a crazy couple of weeks with being sick and then I've got all these other projects going on off of the channel with other people in this community like Negative48 and SabrinaGal and all this stuff regarding the Jesus Tram that we're doing on other channels and other platforms. We are going to be opening up other telegram channels together so please be looking out for that. I'm super super super excited about that and of course I will eventually be opening up an esoteric Atlanta telegram channel so that we can all communicate freely with each other which would again be way easier than email seeing that my email gets really flooded sometimes and I can't go through it all in a day so I'm hoping that that's okay with everyone and I'm super looking forward to that when we actually launch that. Again I will keep you guys posted. So this week I've got two more interviews this week. We're going to be speaking to Liz from TikTok again, it's a little girl chat and then we're going to have another girl chat with Tamara. She'll be back on the channel again at the end of the week so I'm super super excited about that and I hope you all are having a really really good week. Please keep your head up, hold the line, the best is yet to come. We're really getting towards the end. There's not much longer we have to go in this W-A-R and so please please please just keep your spirits high and know, please know that God is in control. I personally am not comfortable guessing at dates as to when something will happen because as the Bible even says it will come like a thief in the night. It will come when it comes and I trust God and I do trust the alliance and the white hats but we do know we're getting close guys. So please just keep your spirits up, enjoy every minute of every day and know that you were put here on this earth at this time for a very special reason. Alright guys thank you so much to Josh McKay as always for doing our music. If you would like to purchase the full song not just the clip that we used at the beginning at the end but the actual full song there is a link down in the description box below and thank you again so much to Todd Roderick my awesome awesome boyfriend without him I would not have a channel because he is the savvy tech savvy person of our relationship I most certainly am not. I as most of you all have noticed I have a twitter account but I don't even know how to work twitter so he is the one that really knows how to work all the stuff behind the scenes and so I would definitely not be here with you without him. So anyway so thank you to Todd and thank you to you guys too you guys are very much a part of this and where we go one we go all. I will talk to you soon. Bye!