In the summer of 1879, Martin Woody seemed to have it all: a successful business, a beautiful wife, healthy children, a modern house in a coveted neighborhood and a position as one of the best-known young businessmen and building professionals about town. He was Knoxville’s largest producer of bricks, with his workmen having constructed some of Knoxville’s finest buildings, among them Woodruff’s on Gay Street, the Carpenter, Ross, & Lockett building next door, Albers’ Drugs at 14 Market Square (now part of The Tomato Head) and all city schools built from 1872 to 1881. In Anderson’s Addition, now known as “Happy Holler,” he planned to build houses, offices and stores as part of an upscale development of the Central Avenue Extension in the new suburb of North Knoxville. On his forty-first birthday that year, Woody laid the first bricks on another large project, the Hattie House (later Hotel Imperial, on the current site of Farragut Hotel) at the corner of Gay and Clinch. But by 9:00 the evening of August 25, 1879, Martin Woody would be dead, his reputation destroyed and his name forever attached to haunted lore.
As often happens with burial sites, stories of strange sightings have spun around Old Gray Cemetery since it was established in 1850. Today, YouTubers wander the grounds in search of a ghost they call “Black Aggie.” Long before Black Aggie, however, people were drawn there by a different spirit: The Lady in White. Old Gray’s Black Aggie legend is thought to have originated with high school boys during the mid-twentieth century, just as in the 1880s it was teenage boys who first spread the word about the Lady in White.
Schools have long memories. They are places where stories can linger indefinitely, passed down from one class to another for generations. Since Martin Woody built so many schools, his bloody and scandalous demise would have been a prime candidate for re-telling in the city school buildings of the past.
While students scared younger classes with Martin Woody’s story each year, they also began to speculate he left behind a legacy beyond his buildings in the form of a ghost. If they ever said Martin himself roamed, that version of the tale did not survive. Instead, the phantom said to haunt his gravesite came to be identified as a female spirit, a pale lady dressed in white, silent and seemingly searching for something lost. She was generally identified with two women, Mary Crush and Annie Lowe, one who had died and one who still lived when the stories began. Both were intertwined with Martin Woody.
Mary Crush was born in 1843, into a well-known but somewhat notorious Knoxville family. Her grandmother, still known to everyone as “Polly Crush” despite officially being Mrs. Sam McClanahan for years, was a formidable businesswoman who lived life very much on her own terms. Polly Crush’s tavern had been a town landmark since frontier days.
Mary’s parents’ marriage was a tumultuous one. Her father Johnny was Polly’s eldest son and a well-known town character, but Mary was raised primarily by her Quaker mother Lydia. In 1854, while tending to his mother’s barroom, Johnny stabbed an Irishman who insulted one of the two boys working there, likely Polly’s ward William Polley, a free child of color who later adopted the name William F. Yardley. When Johnny ended his trial abruptly by drowning himself in the Tennessee River during a lunch break, his suicide led Polly to purchase a family lot in then-new Old Gray Cemetery.
Mary may have known of Martin Woody when he was a poor apprentice bricklayer, but it is possible she met him during the Civil War, when he deserted the Confederate Army and returned to a Knoxville recently brought back under Union control. Mary would have liked that Martin was attractive and ambitious. Martin would have appreciated that Mary was beautiful, and that her grandmother knew every well-connected person in town.
They married on Christmas Day 1864 and started their own family within a year. Military contracts to rebuild order from the chaos were lucrative, as were municipal and commercial building contracts during Reconstruction. A decade later, the Woodys were wealthy, and they lived in a large house on Fifth Avenue, the nicest street in the new suburbs. By this time Martin was a city alderman. He took part in almost every civic, professional, and social event, and was an enthusiastic umpire or judge in everything from baseball to horse races to jig dancing.
Annie Lowe’s story is less well documented. Newspapers said she came from Coal Creek, but her origins likely lay closer to Knoxville, in Blount or western Knox County, near Ebenezer. Arriving in town around 1877, she was 10 years younger than Mary, in her early 20s, and soon caught Martin Woody’s eye. There is no record of how the two met, but newspaper accounts of the day recount the story of the bitter end of their tryst.
We do know that Annie suffered a tragedy with the death of her young child in August 1879. Soon after the burial at Cedar Springs, she and Martin argued in her boarding room during the evening of August 25. The Knoxville Chronicle refused to say why. The Knoxville Tribune’s coverage is lost. Annie told Martin she intended to kill him as she produced a pistol from her trunk and pointed it at him. Martin pounced upon her, trying to wrestle the weapon away. During the struggle, she pulled the trigger. The muzzle was pressed directly into Martin’s body, and the bullet ripped through his lower stomach, a sure death shot.
I’m a dead man, were his only words the paper quoted, and they proved true. He lived less than half an hour, most of it unconscious.
Annie shot herself, too, with the same pistol, almost directly through the heart, but not close enough to kill her instantly.
Annie lingered in anguish for over twenty hours, reportedly “suffering thousands of deaths,” from mental and physical pain that even morphine could not quiet.
It was Mary who emerged as the shooting’s longest suffering victim. She would be forced to live with the ramifications of her husband’s actions for the rest of her life. The scandal, “almost the sole topic of conversation in the streets” for days afterward, never wholly died down around her, revived with every additional drama involving her family and bolstered by the juxtaposition of her poverty against her former wealth. Morphine, probably liberally given for her shock at the time of the murder, took hold and became a life-long addiction Mary would struggle against with decreasing levels of success.
The financial stigma was great. Mary fulfilled her husband’s final contracts, but bankers and businessmen gave her no leeway as creditors hounded her. The business went bankrupt within a year. All assets were seized, her fine home sold at public auction. Mary only raised enough capital to buy back one small piece of the tract where Martin once planned to build his show-piece community, no longer viewed as valuable by other bidders: Lots 17 and 18, the corner of Central and Anderson, today the location of the Pirate Tavern in the heart of Happy Holler. Mary tried her hand at running a grocery, then construction. She built four small houses, living in one and renting the others. One by one, she lost them to taxes or debt.
The social stigma was greater, and she remained a pariah in the community. The second anniversary of the dreadful day that changed her life forever was marked by even more violence. Don Lusby and his father Moses were shot to death in the middle of the courthouse, more victims of what came to be called the Mabry-O’Conner Feud. Almost as soon as Don was buried at Knoxville National Cemetery, stories spread that he rose from his grave and walked the grounds on nights when the moon was full. Everyone knew that Don Lusby was a grandson of Polly Crush, therefore Mary’s cousin.
By 1888, Mary lived in severely reduced circumstances on her small portion of the suburb Martin Woody once took an active part in developing. North Knoxville was growing, with its own market square, called Central Market, and a steady increase in homes and businesses, but the newly developed areas were still interspersed with sizable, uncleared stretches that locals called “The Pine Woods.” Dense, dark, and usually lonely, the Pine Woods were regarded as somewhat forbidding, perhaps even dangerous. Some residents still used them as shortcuts, and sometimes for other purposes more private or nefarious.
The slowly declining plantation of Springdale marked the edges of the neighborhood on one side, overseen by the aged, sharp-tongued Sophia Park Churchwell (1817-98), known as the widowed “Aunt Moody.” To the northwest the area was bounded by acres of burial grounds owned by Old Gray and Knoxville National cemeteries, with large, wooded areas separating various parts of the grounds from the others. The community experienced unease about Knoxville National, where a great number of those buried had died violently, then removed from their original resting places to be reinterred in that spot. Amid such growth and such wilderness, the moment was ripe for residents to feel an eeriness in the atmosphere surrounding them, a circumstance which may have made it easier for stories that spread among children to pass to adults.
The full moon of April 1889 appears to have been a watershed for the Lady in White, and perhaps, for one of the women that inspired her. By that time, Don Lusby’s reputation as a ghostly presence in National Cemetery was well established, but new details about the Lady in White were developing. Instead of being confined to the Woody grave or Old Gray, she seemed to have become free to leave the cemetery bounds and roam the neighborhood, most specifically the Pine Woods.
In her little house on Central, stretches of the Pine Woods separated Mary from places and people important to her, the dead at Old Gray and the living, primarily centered around Fifth Avenue and Morgan Street, as well as her church, Third Presbyterian on Fifth at Williams (also built by Martin Woody). It’s likely Mary regularly traveled through the Pine Woods as a shortcut, and if anyone was a target for trouble or harassment there, she would have been a prime candidate. In fact, Mary’s close kinsman threatened to take permanent action against harassment of women and children in the pine woods, if it occurred again during the next full moon:
The fellows who loaf around in the Pine Woods between Central Avenue and Broad Street near Williams Street and scare women and children had better make themselves scarce or they may have to gaze into the mouth of A.L. Munding’s shotgun, the Knoxville Sentinel warned, This thing has gone far enough.
Such agitation and willingness to resort to violence was highly unusual for Anthony Munding. The mild-mannered printer, who published educational and religious texts, was normally a very quiet and unassuming person.
Meanwhile, the legend of the Lady in White had begun to spread among the neighborhood adults, as evidenced by the anonymous citizen who confided in a “North Knoxville News” columnist that he encountered “the ghost” in the Pine Woods near Central Avenue and Williams Street during the April full moon:
I saw a woman in white leaning against one of the trees. She seemed to be looking for something, but as I approached her, she suddenly vanished It was just like, now you see it, now you don’t see it… since then, I have heard of other persons who have been badly frightened by the same spectre while passing the place late at night… Now, don’t put my name in print, because I will be laughed at, but seriously, if there are such things as ghosts, I surely saw one.
The Lady in White’s story lingered prominently for several more decades and may survive in some circles even today. Mary Crush Woody, however, does not. Her body was found on the floor of her bedroom on the morning of March 13, 1899. Even in death, Mary could not evade gossip. The Knoxville Sentinel reported: She was fifty years of age and the widow of Martin Woody, at one time one of the most prominent contractors in the state. He was killed several years ago… it was said that the deceased lady had for a long time been addicted to the morphine habit and the coroner was summoned to hold an inquest. After a private funeral was held at the home of Mrs. S.J. Munding, an orphaned niece she had raised, Mary was buried at Old Gray beside the remains of Martin Woody, whose gravestone had been mysteriously removed from the cemetery.
Researched and written by McClung Reference Librarian Danette Welch