Patty Cannon’s Skull

Patty Cannon is the nearest thing Delaware has to a folk villain, and unlike many such figures she was a real and documented criminal. Living near the Delaware–Maryland line at the settlement now called Reliance, she and her son-in-law Joe Johnson led the Cannon–Johnson gang, which from the early 1820s seized free Black people and fugitives on the Delmarva Peninsula and sold them into slavery in the Deep South. The Delaware Public Archives marker on the state line says the network reached as far south as Alabama and Mississippi and is believed to have taken hundreds of people. The victims, not Cannon, are the people the marker asks visitors to remember.

The gang finally fell apart in 1829, after a tenant farmer found human remains on land she owned. She was indicted that April, and she died in the Sussex County jail at Georgetown on 11 May 1829 while waiting for trial. The cause of her death is disputed, and sources disagree on how many people she killed and kidnapped; Wikipedia credits her with a confession to nearly two dozen murders, while some popular accounts give far higher figures. Her reputation as a devil in a bonnet grew in the nineteenth century, helped by a 1841 pamphlet that invented the first name “Lucretia” for her and by George Alfred Townsend’s 1884 novel The Entailed Hat.

The ghost-like part of her legend centres on her remains. On 1 August 1902 the Wilmington Evening Journal reported that prisoners digging in the old jail lot in Georgetown had found a skull and bones said to be hers, based on older residents’ memory that she was the only person buried there. Three days later the same paper doubted it, pointing out that other bodies lay in the spot and that the skull looked male. The skull was nevertheless hung in a barn, kept in an attic box, given to the Dover Public Library in 1961 and sent to the Smithsonian Institution in 2010. Sussex County children were reported to call her name at the old jail yard and wait for an answer, and parents used her to frighten them into obeying.

No named witness has left a firsthand account of seeing Cannon’s ghost, so this is best treated as folklore built on a true crime. Some storytellers describe the skull and the jail yard as places where her presence lingers, but those claims are modern retellings.

Folklore only: a call-and-response game at the old jail yard, tales of a skull passed from hand to hand, and modern tour stories of her presence. No documented eyewitness sightings were found.

The old Sussex County jail lot in Georgetown, Delaware, and the Delaware–Maryland border near Reliance and Seaford, where the gang operated.

Cannon appears in Delmarva folklore, in Townsend’s novel The Entailed Hat, in James McBride’s Song Yet Sung, in the TV series Underground and in local ghost-tour storytelling.