The House of Horrors - Decades Old Tale Still Haunts Tulsa

By Kristina Dudley | Originally Published in The Tulsa World on Wednesday, October 28, 1998

(Editor's Note: Fifty-four years ago, a crime came to light in the city of Tulsa that had all the twists and turns of a thriller movie. With Halloween just around the corner, the true story about the woman known as the hex mistress whose powers over two young women really spooked Tulsans is as haunting today as it was in 1944. Her mysterious powers have yet to be explained.)

It was the early 1940's when behind ivy-covered brick walls and the well-manicured lawn of a Midtown house, bizarre activities were going on that would rock the city of Tulsa for years to come.

In a cold, concrete basement near Main and 21st streets, two young women spent more than seven years imprisoned by a woman later dubbed the hex mistress.

When details of the incredible story surfaced, Tulsans reeled at the tale of two trusting girls and a motherly guardian with alleged hypnotic, occult powers.

We always called her the hat lady. She always wore a big hat, remembers Winifred Dudley, who lived at 18th Street and Boston Avenue with her family during the war.

She gave candy to my niece when we would walk by with her in a stroller, Dudley said – and wondered later what the hex woman could have slipped into the candy.

Dudley remembers that the girls who lived with the hex mistress always wore dark clothes, but she and her family never suspected anything strange going on.

When the story first broke, Dudley said, "I was scared to go outside and saw them digging up the caskets. I just imagined she could do all kinds of thing to us. But she was probably harmless.

They were saying the girls had been hypnotized, and that they had slept in the basement. I will never forget that. It was the closest I had ever been to big crime.

Through strange hypnotic powers that have never been really explained, 31-year-old Virginia and 30-year-old Willetta worked, turned over their entire paychecks and were beaten and abused by Meredith Fontane with whom they lived at 10 E. 21st St., according to newspaper accounts at the time.

How they met Fontane, is not clear but both were attracted to the matronly woman who took the girls under her wing. Their loyalty to her was obsessive, and ties with their families were severed.

Both girls willingly signed over their paychecks to the older woman who dressed them in tattered dresses while she allegedly had closets full of fine clothes, drawers brimming with jewelry and silver.

She was also said to own enough cosmetics to stock a drugstore. When the young women returned from work, they were locked in an unheated basement where they slept on orange crates all winter in below-freezing temperatures.

They said they were routinely whipped, starved and beaten, yet also devoutly professed their love for Fontane.

The older woman also stirred up animosity between the girls by comparing their paycheck amounts and spreading false stories about the supposed lack of morals of one and the murderous purity of the other, according to a Tulsa World story in 1944.

One girl was represented as sexually abnormal and the other as promiscuous. Neighbors also reported mysterious burials by the three women taking place in the dead of night in the back yard.

Near the last year of the girls' imprisonment, Fontane took in an 11-year-old boy whom she said was her nephew.

In mid-1944, the story came out revealing Fontane's activities. Investigators launched the possibility that Fontane, mistress of the hex house, may have practiced a strange, hybrid religion of her own making. Officers scoured the treasure-laden home from which she allegedly controlled the two young women through hypnotism and mesmerism.

It was soon found that Fontane was not the woman's real name. A picture of her alleged husband was actually a relative of one of the young girls.

Her real name was Fay H. Smith. She had collected money from the girls' parents and from the U.S. government under phony names and false pretenses.

More ominous were the life insurance policies. Both girls had coverage on their lives. Both named Fontane as beneficiary.

A few months before being apprehended by police, Fontane had taken out a policy on the life of the 11-year-old boy. A former maid at the house, had a $25,000 policy drawn up on her life and named Fontane as beneficiary. On Feb. 4, 1934, she was hit by a car and killed.

Fontane's real husband, F.H. Smith, took out a $31,000 annuity policy, naming his wife as beneficiary. On Jan. 21, 1934, less than a month prior to the maid's death, he killed himself on Riverside Drive with a shotgun blast to the head.

Police, acting on the neighbors' stories of nighttime burials, dug up two small coffins in the back yard of the house. Inside were the bodies of two dogs. Fontane-Smith was not ever formally linked to any deaths.

She was brought to district court on a perjury-related charge that she had induced the two girls in her home to falsely testify against a neighbor during an earlier assault case. She was sentenced to one year in the penitentiary.

She later pled guilty to federal indictments of using the mail to defraud and making false statements to obtain a ration book for her dog, Bon Bon. She was placed on three years probation to follow the one-year state stay at McAlester and disappeared from the state after her release.

From newspaper accounts, it was said that the two young women returned to work. "But I still don't hate Mrs. Fontane -- I still can't hate her," Virginia said upon her release from the house." For so many years Willetta and I held her in such high respect. We never called her any pet names, just Mrs. Fontane. I'll never understand the control she had over us."

The hex house, which was later sold, was eventually torn down and the grounds turned into a parking lot for the Akdar Shrine Temple.

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