The legend of Bradley County’s official goblin, Tall Betsy, is based on tales told to children a century ago of a tall woman dressed in black who silently walked the streets of Cleveland filling young and old alike with terror.
But newly discovered newspaper clippings from the late 1800s appear to document Tall Betsy’s origins, going back more than 130 years.
When Cleveland multimillionaire Allan Jones recently opened a relative’s missive about the family’s genealogy that included some 1800s-era newspaper clippings, it wasn’t a predecessor’s name that caught his eye, but the words, “mysterious ‘woman in black.'”
Jones’ September 1894 article was the oldest reference he had seen yet to the woman he’s been bringing to life since Oct. 31, 1980, as Cleveland’s Halloween tradition, “Tall Betsy.“
The modern fictional tale of Tall Betsy propagated by Jones is based on stories told by his mother and grandmother, who’d heard accounts of a wandering woman dressed in black from a century or more ago. Jones’ great-great-grandfather, John R. Taylor, allegedly encountered the figure as he walked home one night near Cleveland’s Confederate monument downtown.