Crazy Kate is the witch of Swineshead in the Lincolnshire fens, a figure of the kind that gathered around any solitary, unliked woman in a superstitious age. She was said to keep three cats as her familiars and, by night, to make her way to the Manwar Rings — an ancient earthwork east of the village, reputed to date from the time of Canute and long held to be a place where witches met to take their instruction from the Devil.
The story
The best-known tale tells how suspicious villagers resolved to watch her. For three nights they hid in her garden, but never once saw her come or go; they concluded that she had sensed them, made herself invisible, and slipped away. When at last they broke into her cottage they found only her cats and her broom — and then Kate herself fell upon them, promising to curse the whole pack of them for their trespass. In some tellings the angry mob later burned her cottage and her cats, and she was never seen again.
The legend is preserved in modern Lincolnshire folklore collections, including Polly Howat's *Ghosts and Legends of Lincolnshire and the Fen Country* and the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project. Crazy Kate is distinct from the older Swineshead legend of Brother Simon, the monk said to have poisoned King John at the nearby abbey.