Tetford Witch

Near Tetford church in the Lincolnshire Wolds, a woman long believed to be a witch was said to have a small hole bored in the wall of her cottage — an opening through which she was seen to pass in the form of a hare, the classic supernatural disguise of a Lincolnshire witch. She had a local reputation for ill-wishing and cursing, and her neighbours held her responsible for bewitching several family members to death.

The tale was collected by James Alpass Penny and published in Folklore Round Horncastle (Morton & Sons, 1915), making it one of the better-documented witch legends of the county. In Penny's version a hunter encountered an unusual hare that stood its ground and held his gaze before he peppered it with shot. The following day the woman was found at home barely alive, her body covered in wounds or boils that corresponded exactly to every pellet he had fired. A later variant collected locally has a hunter wound a hare in the leg, then discover his own mother at home with a matching injury.

The witch-as-hare tradition is ancient and widespread across Britain and Ireland, but the Lincolnshire variants recorded by Penny and later retold by Susanna O'Neill in Folklore of Lincolnshire (1992) give it a vivid local character rooted in specific communities and named individuals. The detail of the cottage hole — a deliberate domestic arrangement for shapeshifting — is particularly memorable, suggesting a woman whose supernatural life was as practically organised as her ordinary one.