The Witches' Tree

The Witches' Tree stands at the northwest corner of South 6th Street and Park Avenue in Old Louisville's St. James-Belgravia Historic District. Coverage by WDRB, WAVE3, and Spectrum News, along with Atlas Obscura, Louisville Historic Tours, and LEO Weekly, recounts a consistent legend: in the spring of 1889 a Louisville city committee selected a tall maple at this corner to be felled for a May pole to anchor the city's annual May Day celebration. Local lore holds that a coven of witches who met under the maple warned the committee against cutting it down.

The tree was cut anyway. Eleven months to the day later, on March 27, 1890, the Louisville Tornado — one of the most destructive in Kentucky's recorded history — cut a path across downtown Louisville. National Weather Service and historical reconstructions describe widespread destruction across more than half of downtown, including mansions, schools, bourbon and tobacco warehouses, churches, and Union Station; the National Weather Service records 76 deaths.

According to the legend reported by WDRB and Atlas Obscura, a bolt of lightning struck the surviving stump as the storm passed the corner. In place of the felled maple, a smaller, gnarled tree eventually grew from the stump. That tree — or its successor on the same root system — is the present-day Witches' Tree.

The tree sits within the St. James-Belgravia neighborhood, one of the largest preserved Victorian-era residential districts in the United States and the home of the annual St. James Court Art Show.