American Mythology: Soap Sally

From "Soap Sally, a Villain of Appalachia and the American South, Echoes Old World Evil," at Atlas Obscura, a tale of a villain reminiscent of the witch in Hansel and Gretel or the Baba Yaga:

    When Tabatha Saint was a young girl growing up in rural Alabama, her knees often stained green from exploring the weedy garden and wild places of her family’s 80 acres, her grandmother Louise would tell her stories. One stood out: a folktale of murder, lye, and missing children.

    Soap Sally, Grandmama Louise said, lived in the nearby woods, and waited with her basket for misbehaving children to tire of doing chores. “She would look to us like someone we would trust,” Saint says, recalling her grandmother’s warning. “Maybe a child, or an animal that we had been trying to pet, a rabbit, a fox. … She would tell us that we would want to follow Soap Sally because it would seem like a lot of fun.”

    The stranger would lead the children back to her cottage, where they would gorge themselves on candy and fall asleep. From there, Grandmama Louise’s tale darkened.

    “Soap Sally would put us in her stewpot,” Saint says, “and our skin would basically melt away from our bones and she would turn us into wax.” Soap Sally would fashion the melted fat into soap or candles shaped like hands—symbolizing the children’s idle, chore-shunning hands—and then sell them back to her victims’ families, who, in effect, ended up burning or doing the wash using their own children. 

While the author tries to weave a feminist theme into what is basically a tale of a serial killer, the main thrust of the story may have been to keep children from playing in the ash barrels used to collect wood ash to make lye. The article notes that the prevalence of the tails declined after commercial soap became more available.