Encounters with the Unknown—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2023
Nashville woman tormented by a Disturbing Spirit she calls “The Lady”
by: Brent Raynes
Drawing by Ann Haywood of her spirit tormenter she called “The Lady,” who had the rat like face, pointed ears and the hands that resembled pigs’ feet.
In the spring of 1975, Ann Haywood, 30, the mother of six, and the wife of Dorris Haywood, a Nashville (TN) building subcontractor, were resting in bed together. It was a warm evening, and the lower panes of the floor-to-ceiling windows were open.
Ann had recently undergone surgery and due to some discomfort, a few hours earlier this day she took some doctor prescribed penicillin to help fight the early stages of an infection. Her husband had drifted off to sleep when she heard dogs barking. She began to worry about possible prowlers, but as he was sleeping so soundly she decided not to disturb him. However, what happened next proved to be something unthinkable. It was definitely not prowlers. Not the usual kind anyway.
“It came through the window – and it was the beginning of hell for me,” Ann was quoted. “It was a woman, and to this day I think of her only as The Lady. She had a cape on, and from under the cape were two hands that were just like pigs’ feet. Her face was almond shaped, her ears were pointed, and she had a mouth like a rat. Her eyes blazed like burning coals.” During this strange episode, Ann said ‘The Lady’ was accompanied by two children. “Her children looked the same,” she added. Ann said she was frightened and praying. “You and your damned God,” she recalled the entity saying. “You don’t need God. You’re with me.” Soon afterwards “The lady” and her two children vanished from sight.
I first became aware of Ann’s disturbing account from the pages of Nashville’s The Tennessean magazine (May 1978), in an article written by the Tennessean’s religious editor Bill Reed, and Gene Wyatt, an associate editor. “Since that first encounter, the two children have disappeared, inexplicably,” they wrote. “The Lady has developed a jealousy about Ann’s husband – and her children – and has led her almost to death on more than one occasion.”
“She has a temper and when she’s mad she sometimes touches me violently,” Ann told them. “It feels like dry ice – you know, burning but at the same time cold. And she always wants to take my breath. She seems to need it…She came down over my mouth and began to take my breath.”
Ann links the appearance of the entity to an event that happened just a few weeks earlier when she was admitted to General Hospital for surgery. She was in a room that she was sharing with an elderly woman. “The woman turned toward me and began to move her lips,” Ann recalled. “No sound came out. I was puzzled. I told her I’d try to call the nurses, and I did. And then the woman said, very distinctly, ‘you’re doomed to Hell.’ Just as she said that, her eyes locked on me and she died.”
“The Lady also breaks things around the house. She throws objects around and turns tables upside down,” she was quoted (National Enquirer, March 20, 1979). The Tennessean article showed a photo of a vase that “The lady” had allegedly broken. On several visitations with this entity, Ann claimed it brought with it a small white casket adorned with nine yellow roses. “I was especially upset because my daughter was pregnant at the time, and I feared this was the child. I was puzzled because the roses had no fragrance,” Ann told the Nashville reporters.
“And then it happened. My niece – only three weeks old at the time – died a crib death, completely unexpected. There was a white casket (the only one available) – and a relative brought nine roses – not a dozen or a half dozen – to place on the casket. When someone told me they were plastic – and without fragrance – that was too much.” Upset, she asked to be taken home. She laid down to rest and again “The Lady” appeared to her. “She put the cape over me and I left with her. I physically died. I know I did, because I could look back on my body lying in bed and my husband and two of my children working on me, trying to revive me.’
Ann’s husband verified that his wife had no pulse, wasn’t breathing, and that he began heart massage and mouth to mouth resuscitation. “One minute she seemed dead, and then there she was back again,” he said, to which Ann added, “The cape was around me and I felt so warm and secure. But I looked back and saw my husband and two children crying. I knew I couldn’t leave them, although I felt so good where I was.” The husband also confirmed that his wife had told him of the white casket prior to the niece’s death.
Another disturbing incident occurred when the husband awakened one night smelling gas. He got up to investigate and discovered that the gas logs in the living room were turned on. Ann would confess that she had followed the instructions of a man’s voice to turn the gas logs on and “then go back to bed and lie down and all your problems will be gone.” “I did just that – and I had no idea at the time that I was about to end my life and the lives of my family,” she told the Tennessean reporters. This happened just the first night after the woman entity’s first appearance, and it was the first time she told her husband about “The Lady.”
According to the National Enquirer, Renae Pickens, a reporter for Nashville’s WSM-TV and a former magazine editor named Dolly Carlisle were looking into the case and planning to do a book about it when they were involved in a traumatic car wreck. Dolly was quoted: “I was driving when I saw this red color right in front of me … Ann had said The Lady was red. Suddenly there was a force turning the steering wheel. I had to fight against it.”
“It was a frightening experience…and because of it, I decided not to have anything more to do with the whole situation.” Renae Pickens added: “The Lady tried to kill us. She appeared to us outside the car – through the windshield – and tried to take possession of the car.”
A Rev. Herbert Lawson of Greenville, Tennessee attempted to exercise the entity, during which a ceramic cross placed on Ann’s body was said to have inexplicably broke. “I’ve dealt with dozens of similar cases, and I’m fully convinced she was possessed,” he was quoted saying. “I think it was the struggle between good and evil that caused the cross to break.” The Tennessean’s Bill Reed was quoted: “I’m convinced we’re dealing with something beyond our normal knowledge.” Gene Wyatt added: “There’s no question the woman is telling the truth. We got a psychiatrist to examine her, and he says she is absolutely normal.”
The Tennesseans had consulted with a prominent Vanderbilt psychiatrist named Dr. Otto Billig, who in 1982, I recently discovered, wrote a book that I am unfamiliar with, entitled Flying Saucers: Magic in the Skies: Psychohistory. I wonder if Ann’s case received any mention in it – something I’m going to try and look into next.
