Patty Cannon
Patty Cannon was evil.
There’s not much doubt about that.
A description of her crimes against man and child might begin with the escaped slaves she captured and sold back into captivity, to end with the countless anonymous peddlers and unfortunate travelers who made a final, fatal mistake by taking lodging at her infamous public house in western Delaware.
Even in the raucous, rough ‘n’ tumble 1820’s, she stood several ax handles above most other reprobates.
But history might be as recent as today when it comes to Patty Cannon. Her ghost may roam the old paupers’ field where her bones cam to rest – at least for a time.
Patty lived on a property that straddled the Mason-Dixon line at Reliance on the Delaware/Maryland border. There she operated an inn where she’d take in wayfaring travelers, feed and entertain them, and then when they had gotten quite comfortable, murder them.
She’d drag their lifeless bodies to a corner of the basement, rummage through their packs and clothing for whatever she might be able to turn into a profit, and then stack their remains up in the corner until she could safely dispose of them. No sense in calling too much attention to herself, so she’d wait until there was a good load to put in her wagon and then haul them away for a quick burial at some isolated field.
It’s not that the authorities didn’t suspect Patty was up to something nefarious. That’s why she chose her living accommodations with such care. When the Maryland constables came looking for her, she’d hotfoot it across the road into Delaware and stay in her barn until they’d given up and gone home. When the Delaware authorities showed up, she’d cross back over the state line and sit on the porch of her Maryland home.
It’s not clear why the police from the two states didn’t ever figure all this out and show up at the same time.
In any event, Patty’s wickedness didn’t end with straightforward murder. Stories were told of her taking crying slave children (Maryland was a slave state in the 1820s) from her servants and killing them in most horrible ways.
She operated a kind of depraved reverse Underground Railroad. Slaves who had bought their freedom often went into Delaware and Pennsylvania to find work. Patty’s gang of thugs would secretly scout out farm fields in those states, kidnap the black freemen, drag them back to her house, and chain them in the attic or in the cellar, next to the cadavers. Georgia and South Carolina slave traders came up the Nanticoke River near her home and, on an island in the river, they’d attend Patty’s appalling auctions for her human goods. As it happens, Patty Cannon’s undoing was directly connected to one of the slave auctions. Patty killed a slave trader and, for some reason, put his body in a blue trunk she owned and then buried it behind her own house. Some time later, she decided to rent out the land. Years passed. One day a tenant’s plow horse tumbled into a fissure that had suddenly opened in the ground. After he pulled out his horse from the bottom of the hole, he spied Patty’s blue chest. Thinking he’d found Captain Kidd’s or Blackbeard’s treasure, he pulled it out and forced open the lid. Of course, there was no treasure, only the rotting carcass of the old slave trader, still neatly wrapped in one of Patty Cannon’s tablecloths. Even the butcher knife she’d used to kill him with was in the trunk.
Patty had gone to far this time.
There was her trunk. There was the body. There was her tablecloth. And there was the murder weapon.
Perhaps after so many years of cleverly eluding authorities she thought her deeds would forever go unpunished. If so, that was her final, fatal mistake.
Lawmen skillfully lured her into Delaware where members of her gang had already been jailed. They’d turned states’ evidence by providing enough testimony about murders and kidnappings to hang their old boss several times over.
Patty Cannon’s arrest and jailing made news throughout western Delaware. Criminal trials were often the spectator sport of choice in early America—on the days before her trial was to start the lines of eager onlookers, all hoping to get good seats, already stretched around the block.
The she-monster of Delaware had other plans.
On the night before the trial, perhaps after waving to the crowds gathered outside her jail window, she slit open the hem of her dress and took out a vial of arsenic. It was a means of disposal with which she was already familiar—two of her husbands had been dispatched with just this poison. She drank it down, thus no doubt disappointing several hundreds of Delawareans.
They buried Patty in a Georgetown paupers’ field. Everyone thought they’d seen the last of the most notorious female criminal in Delaware history.
Think again.
Her body lay undisturbed for decades until the time came when county officials decided to enlarge the Sussex County courthouse and jail and concluded that the paupers’ field had to give up its graves for the expansion. According to one legend, a young man helping to dig up and move the interred discovered he was working on Patty Cannon’s remains. He picked up her skull, tucked it inside his jacket and took it home as a “gift” for his father, it is said.
Patty Cannon has not gone gently into eternity.
In 1960, a man walked into the Dover, Delaware, Public Library carrying a hatbox and some documents. He wanted to know if they’d like a permanent addition to their collection of artifacts and opened the box.
Inside was the skull of Patty Cannon. Apparently, the documents somehow proved her identity.
She’s still there in the library, in Dover.
The old Patty Cannon house if a private residence, but it still stands. Although an historical marker has been positioned nearby, it is says nothing about the at least forty murders she was said to have committed.
Haunted Heritage, by Michael Norman and Beth Scott, 2002, published: Tom Doherty Assoc. LLC, pg. 26-28 |
