I still get shivers about a character my grandmother used to tell us about, one of those "he/she/it comes and gets bad little boys and girls" type monsters. Soap Sally was this evil old woman who would sneak into the house late at night and throw a "tow (burlap) sack" over their heads (for some reason, once she got you into that sack, you couldn't make enough noise to call for help) and drac them off into the woods, where she would put them into her pot and make soap out of them. That really scared all of us kids until we grew out of the age when we believed in such things.
The really frightening thing, the "goose bump" thing, about it came years later. While researching a paper on the Reconstruction years in the South, I ran across an old article about a local serial killer of that time. It was a half insane former slave woman who made her living selling home made soap around the area. It was finally discovered that she was killing passing strangers and making soap from their bodies. There was no way of telling just how many men, women, and children she had killed and disposed of in that manner, but it was described as "at least in the dozens."Her name was Sally, and she was known to everyone locally as locally as "Soap Sally." That was when the goose bumps started, when, at 20 years of age, I discovered that my childhood "boogy man" was a real person.
