Tetford's local witch legend concerns a woman who lived close to the village church, in a cottage fitted with a small hole deliberately left in its outer wall, through which she was said to pass freely in the shape of a hare, once a widely believed and genuinely feared disguise for witches throughout English folklore of this period. She had a considerable local reputation for cursing those around her who crossed or displeased her in any way.
In the most commonly told version of the story, a hunter came across a hare out in the fields and peppered it with shot from his gun without knowing what he was truly shooting at; the very next day, the woman was found at home, near death and covered in wounds that matched exactly where the shooting had struck the hare.
The tale was collected by the Reverend James Alpass Penny in his 1915 book on the folklore surrounding Horncastle, making it one of the better-documented witch legends from the county thanks to that genuinely early written record, though even Penny's own version carries variants: in some tellings the woman recovers from her wounds, in others, including one collected by Mary Borrows for Lincolnshire Life magazine in April 1986, she dies of the injuries she sustained. Penny's account also records that she was believed locally to have bewitched her own son and daughter to death, and to have made her own sister gravely ill through the same malevolent power.
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