The Crazy Ax Woman

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Afterward, every night at exactly midnight, the candle lit up, and one could hear the maniacal laughter of a woman. The old-timers in the closest village Pineville nodded their heads when they heard about the candlelight in the cabin's window. It simply meant the spirit of crazy Anna had returned. 

Many years ago, a woodsman and his wife had lived in the cabin. Each day he went off to do various logging jobs. His wife remained alone in the woods, tending to a vegetable garden. One day he could not return home until after nightfall, and that night his wife heard some terrible screams coming from the surrounding woods. She ran out of the cabin to see what was happening, her heart wildly beating. By the light of the moon, she saw a crazy-looking woman carrying a bloody ax. She looked at the woman who laughed like crazy and then just disappeared. Thinking it was her own active imagination, she didn't say anything to her husband. However, soon she began to change, and there were times her husband came home to find her sitting at the table just staring at a candle and no supper on the potbellied stove. She seemed to come out of a trance and hurried to put supper on while her husband drank some whiskey. Soon she appeared to be walking about as if she didn't know what she was doing, no longer spoke to her husband and seemed to sit at the table and stare into that candlelight more and more. Her husband decided to inquire about a local doctor who could come and take a look at his wife. However, it was much too late. The curse of the crazy ax woman had taken hold of her. He came home from work to find her in the most terrible state and sat at the table reading the newspaper and drinking some whiskey. She seemed to be in a deep trance, and her husband knew tomorrow he would have to find and bring a doctor to see her. Since it was late, he left her sitting there and went to bed. Around midnight, Anna was still sitting there but beside her on the table was an ax. She slowly got up and picked up the ax, then turned toward the bed where her husband slept and chopped off his head. Then she took a hold of his hair, carried the head out of the cabin, and buried it in her vegetable garden. Then she went back in, sat at the table near her bloody and headless husband's corpse, and placed the bloody ax back on the table. The following morning when Tom did not show up at the logging camp, two men came to look for him, and that is what they saw. Anna spent the rest of her life in an asylum for the criminally insane. 

This story was retold at many different summer camps by glowing campfires, and no camper wanted to walk in those woods, whether day or night. The camp counselors thought it was just a made-up campfire story, so they investigated. Two male counselors took a midnight walk into the woods and returned to say that a candle was burning in the cabin, but they had crept to the window and seen no one there. They decided that someone was trying to scare everyone just for fun. So the counselors agreed that the only way they could find out the truth was to set up a campfire in the nearby clearing and sit around to see what happened at midnight. Two guys and two girls volunteered, and once the campers were in their cabins and bed, they set out for the woods. They amused themselves by the campfire in the clearing with "what would you do if" situations. Shortly before midnight, they heard a sound like someone stumbling in the dark, and out in the clearing came the apparition of a man with a bloody stump where his head should be shouting, "Where's my head?" They all jumped up and clutched at each other, but just as quickly, the apparition disappeared. At that moment, the candle's light began flickering in the cabin window, and they heard maniacal laughter. They were about to take flight when one of the counselors, Jane, started screaming. Beside her stood a woman with scraggly white hair, red glowing eyes, a crazed look upon her face, and lifting a bloody ax, she cackled, "Are you, next dearie?" No one ever saw the four counselors again.