If you’ve taken one of the many ghost tours in Charleston, South Carolina, you have surely heard about Lavina Fisher, a woman who lived two hundred years ago. And when you get through reading this, you will thank your lucky stars that she lived back then and not now.
Lavina, along with her husband John, ran an inn known as the Six Mile House, appropriately named because it was six miles north of Charleston. This was back in the day when your main form of transportation consumed oats instead of gasoline. So Lavina and John had a lot of folks stop by for refreshments (think of it as the convenience store of the 1800’s) or to spend the night.
Lavina was a real looker, and she definitely had a way of charming the men folk who visited Six Mile House. This is all very well and good, except for the fact that she had another trait that wasn’t quite as pleasant – she liked to kill the men and steal all their possessions. She did this by serving them poison in their tea. Once the poison began taking effect, John would get into the act by escorting the poor victim to a bedroom, where he begged them to lie down and rest. Once they did, John left the room and pulled a lever which opened a trap door in the floor, spilling the bed and its occupant into a pit below the house. If the poison and fall didn’t finish the victim off, John would do the honors and dispose of the body.
This all worked well for our lovely couple until the evening a man by the name of John Peoples stopped by. Lavina did her normal thing and offered Peoples her ‘special’ tea. But Peoples wasn’t a fan of tea and poured the contents into a potted plant (wonder if the plant shriveled up and died?). Peoples also had enough smarts to realize that something wasn’t quite right with our beautiful but evil Lavina, so he politely excused himself and made his way to the guest bedroom for the evening.
Since he was just faking being tired, Peoples decided to sit in a chair in the room for a while and do whatever people back in those days did without TV, radio, and the internet to entertain them. While he sat there something really weird happened. You guessed right if you thought. “Oh, I bet the bed fell through the trap door!’
Can you imagine the look on People’s face? Bewildered, he threw open the door to his room and demanded that he receive 30,000 bonus points on his frequent visitor card for a less than satisfactory stay. Just kidding, of course. He hollered for someone to please explain to him what had just happened to his bed.
John came running to him and looked just as bewildered. After all, he thought Peoples should have been well on his way to meet his maker by now. And apparently Lavina couldn’t hide her disappointment that he wasn’t dead when she arrived on the scene, so People’s did what any of us would do – he got the hell out of Dodge, FAST! In fact, he was so scared that he ran all the way back to Charleston (wonder if he set a new world record for the fastest six-mile sprint?).
Once in the Holy City, Peoples went straight to the police and reported what had happened. The police went to Six Mile House, began snooping around, and found lots of bodies buried on the grounds, making Lavina Fisher the first female serial killer in U.S. history.
Now for the rest of the story …
Lavina and John were arrested and sentenced to hang. Lavina laughed at the sentence, knowing that married women were protected against execution in the Palmetto State ( a law that was in effect back then). The judge was shrewd though, and laughed right back at her and said, “Well, I’ll just hang your husband first, then you’ll be a widow. And it's perfectly legal to hang a widow in South Carolina."
So John was the first to meet his fate. He went peacefully to the gallows, but not our Lavina. No, she went kicking and screaming. Oh, and she wore a wedding dress, too, in the hopes that some dude in the crowd that had gathered to watch the spectacle would fall madly in love with her and marry her on the spot, thus getting around that pesky widow clause.
Fat chance, Lavina. Men can be dumb sometimes around a beautiful woman, but not that dumb!
Resigned to her fate, Lavina spat and cursed at the crowd. Her last words were: “If you have a message you’d like me to carry to hell, give it to me—I’ll carry it.”
Maybe she did make it to hell. But there sure are a lot of people who say they have seen the ghost of Lavina in the Unitarian Church graveyard in Charleston. And in the jail cell she once occupied.
So if you see poor old Lavina on some spooky moonlit night, be sure to say hello to her and ask her how that trap door thing worked out for her. And next time you check into a hotel, be sure to look underneath your bed. You never know what Lavina’s descendents may be up to these days.
Hope you are enjoying my blog! If so, please re-tweet the link on Twitter and re-post on Facebook!
Hope you are enjoying my blog! If so, please re-tweet the link on Twitter and re-post on Facebook!