Laura Wright 
In the early twentieth century, newspapers told a strange story from Oak Level, Virginia, then known as Stebbins.
An old cabin stood there known locally as “Aunt Tabby Anderson’s Place.”
Its former occupant, Tabitha Anderson, had been a poor widow who raised four children there during the Civil War era. According to contemporary accounts, the little house eventually became the scene of an extraordinary haunting.
Rocks fell from nowhere.
Doors lifted from their hinges.
Furniture and clothing moved by themselves.
A plow supposedly traveled through the house without anyone touching it.
And one mysterious letter appeared already written before anyone had put pen to paper.
The disturbances were said to continue for 43 years.
But the strangest thing about the Oak Level Witch may be what happened to the story afterward.
Within a century, Aunt Tabby’s life had been transformed almost beyond recognition.
Aunt Tabby Anderson
In 1861, Aunt Tabby was a poor widow with four children.
She didn’t own a plantation or live in a grand house.
Landowner A. A. Forner allowed the struggling family to occupy the cabin without paying rent. In exchange, the Andersons maintained the property and were permitted to treat it essentially as their own.
Then the Civil War arrived.
And Aunt Tabby’s oldest son was called away.
Joe Anderson Goes to War
Joe was only 16 years old when he told his mother he had to join Lee’s army.
Before leaving, however, Joe made a disturbing prediction.
He told Aunt Tabby that he had experienced a vision of his own death in battle.
Despite the premonition, Joe believed he had to go.
He made one request of his mother.
If he died, Joe wanted his remains returned home and buried at the end of the cabin in the family cemetery.
Aunt Tabby agreed.
She still had three younger children at home, including her 15-year-old son, Meredith.
Then Joe left for war.
Weeks passed without news.
And something strange happened to Meredith.
Meredith’s Mysterious Vision
Approximately a month after Joe’s departure, Meredith came running home in terror.
He reached the front doorstep screaming.
Then he collapsed into convulsions.
Aunt Tabby managed to nurse her son back to consciousness, but Meredith was never quite the same afterward.
When he awakened, he said he had seen something.
What?
He couldn’t remember.
The family tried for days to help him recall whatever had frightened him badly enough to produce the seizure.
Nothing worked.
Whatever Meredith had experienced remained with him in some form for the next 35 years.
And soon afterward, even stranger things began happening inside the Anderson cabin.
The Letter That Wrote Itself
Aunt Tabby became increasingly worried about Meredith.
She wanted to tell Joe what had happened.
There was a problem.
Aunt Tabby couldn’t write.
She decided to visit local merchant Chelsea Anderson and ask him to compose the letter for her.
She knew what she wanted to say.
She simply needed someone else to put the words onto paper.
Before Aunt Tabby could even rise from her chair to visit the merchant, something appeared at her feet.
The letter.
It was already written.
Even more remarkably, the mysterious message supposedly contained exactly what Aunt Tabby had intended to say.
The strange events had begun.
Then terrible news arrived from the war.
Joe Had Been Killed
Aunt Tabby’s premonition came true.
Word reached the Anderson family that Joe had been killed in battle.
His mother remembered the promise she had made before he left.
Joe wanted to come home.
Aunt Tabby struggled to have her son’s remains returned to Virginia.
Approximately two months later, a box arrived that was supposed to contain Joe’s body.
Aunt Tabby buried the remains exactly where her son had requested.
By then, however, something was already happening around the cabin.
The Oak Level Witch
The disturbances became increasingly physical.
Rocks began falling upon the cabin.
Sometimes they appeared inside the house.
Witnesses couldn’t determine where they came from. The roof remained intact, and there were no obvious openings through which someone outside could have thrown the stones.
Yet the rocks continued falling.
Then other objects began moving.
Doors supposedly lifted themselves from their hinges.
Furniture moved without assistance.
Clothing disappeared from the house and was later discovered hanging in trees and bushes outside.
The haunting attracted spectators.
Nobody could explain what they witnessed.
The Plow That Moved by Itself
Some of the reported activity was remarkably dramatic.
A plow supposedly moved on its own, sometimes traveling through the house.
Water buckets moved without anyone carrying them.
Objects changed position.
Stones continued appearing.
The disturbances weren’t described as lasting several nights or even several months.
According to the early accounts, the strange activity surrounding Aunt Tabby’s cabin continued for 43 years.
Aunt Tabby remained in the house until her death.
The End of the Anderson Family
Tabitha Anderson died in 1896.
By then, Meredith had been blind for approximately 20 years.
The strange illness that began with his terrifying experience as a teenager had never completely released him.
Meredith died in 1901.
The family line ended tragically.
Among Aunt Tabby’s four children, there was only one granddaughter.
She died as an infant after being burned to death.
Eventually, the entire family was gone.
But the cabin remained.
And so, apparently, did the disturbances.
Another Family Moves In
By 1904, the old Anderson house had new occupants.
Willie Dunn and his family moved into the property and encountered the strange reputation surrounding it.
Mr. Dunn apparently found the phenomena fascinating.
His wife was considerably less enthusiastic.
She reportedly wanted nothing to do with what she called the “ghost work.”
By then, Aunt Tabby’s strange cabin had received attention far beyond the immediate community.
But as the decades passed, the story began changing.
Eventually, an almost entirely different Aunt Tabby emerged.
The Other Aunt Tabby
The modern version of the legend bears remarkably little resemblance to the story appearing in the early accounts.
In the newer version, Aunt Tabby was supposedly born on a plantation in 1810 and remained there throughout her life.
She wasn’t a poor widow with four children.
Instead, she supposedly lived with her husband until sometime during the 1880s.
The couple had only one son.
His name was Joe.
Then the Civil War began.
Joe the Draft Dodger
In this version of the story, Joe didn’t willingly join Lee’s army after predicting his own death.
He did precisely the opposite.
Joe supposedly refused to fight for the Confederacy.
He hid from the draft inside the family’s basement.
When Confederate authorities arrived searching for him, Aunt Tabby revealed her son’s hiding place.
Joe was captured.
And before leaving, according to the modern legend, he cursed his mother.
That curse supposedly caused the haunting.
It is a dramatic story.
It also doesn’t resemble the version reported shortly after Aunt Tabby’s lifetime.
The Murdered Enslaved Girl
Another element was eventually added to the legend.
Aunt Tabby supposedly owned an enslaved girl who was murdered.
Her ghost was then said to haunt the field where she died.
Again, this detail doesn’t appear in the early account presented in the original article.
The poor widow living rent-free in a small cabin had somehow become the mistress of a plantation.
Four children became one.
A son who willingly went to war became a draft dodger.
And a haunting that apparently began around Meredith’s mysterious illness became the result of Joe placing a curse upon his mother.
The story had undergone a remarkable transformation.
What the Early Accounts Actually Said
The newspaper material produced near Aunt Tabby’s lifetime presented a very different woman.
She had already been widowed before the Civil War.
She was poor.
She had four children.
She lived in the cabin because the property owner allowed her family to stay there without rent.
Photographs of the house were even reproduced in newspapers.
It was plainly not a plantation mansion.
And perhaps most importantly, the earliest version doesn’t place the beginning of the supernatural activity with Joe’s death.
It points somewhere else.
Did the Haunting Begin With Meredith?
The chronology of the original story suggests the disturbances began with Meredith’s mysterious attack.
He screamed.
He collapsed into convulsions.
He claimed to have seen something he could no longer remember.
He never fully recovered.
Then came the impossible letter.
Later came the falling stones, moving furniture, wandering clothing, doors lifting from their hinges, and the traveling plow.
That sequence is particularly interesting because it resembles another famous American haunting.
An Echo of the Bell Witch
The original article notes a similarity between the Oak Level Witch and the Bell Witch disturbances in Tennessee.
In both stories, unusual physical or psychological symptoms appear before the haunting reaches its more famous stage.
With the Bells, the strange activity became associated with John Bell.
At Oak Level, the early accounts point toward Meredith Anderson.
Whether that similarity means anything is impossible to determine from the surviving story alone.
But removing Meredith from the modern version eliminates one of the most peculiar aspects of the original case.
How Folklore Changes History
The transformation of Aunt Tabby demonstrates one of the great problems with oral history.
Stories change.
Details disappear.
New details appear.
Motives are invented.
People who actually existed are gradually reshaped into characters better suited to the story later generations want to tell.
A poor widow becomes a plantation owner.
A willing Confederate soldier becomes a draft dodger.
A mysterious illness disappears.
A curse appears.
Eventually, the newer version becomes so familiar that it begins replacing the older one.
That may be the most fascinating mystery surrounding Aunt Tabby Anderson.
Not simply what haunted her cabin, but what happened to her story after everyone who knew the truth was gone.
Aunt Tabby and the Oak Level Witch
Something unusual was reportedly happening around Aunt Tabby Anderson’s Virginia cabin during the nineteenth century.
Early twentieth-century newspapers preserved stories of falling stones, moving objects, unexplained letters, and disturbances that supposedly continued for decades.
Whether those events had supernatural causes is another question entirely.
But the woman at the center of the original story appears to have been very different from the Aunt Tabby remembered by later folklore.
Perhaps that is appropriate.
Ghost stories have a peculiar way of changing with every generation.
The dead cannot correct us.
Aunt Tabby could no longer explain who she was.
Meredith couldn’t tell later storytellers what he saw that terrible day in 1861.
Joe couldn’t explain what happened before he left for war.
And gradually, the story changed around them.
The Oak Level Witch survived.
But somewhere along the way, the real Aunt Tabby nearly disappeared.
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