When I was a little girl, back in the '50's, the story was told to children who misbehaved that "'Soap Sally' was going to get you"! Nobody, including my mother, knew where that came from...she said she had heard it all her life. When I googled it, I found that she was supposedly an ancient black lady who was a soap maker and it was said that she walked the streets of the mill villages kidnapping children who were unattended by an adult, then murdering them and using the fat in their bodies to make her soap.
After she died, it was said that when a small child misbehaved, Soap Sally would visit them in their dreams that night, and if they didn't wake up before she grabbed them in their dream, they would die before the morning, another victim of many. There were even reports of people having seen her many times for years, knowing full well that she was dead. Every time a child would go missing, two or three days later, Soap Sally could be seen, carrying her knapsack full of soap, scoping out the villages for another victim.
In those days, children seldom misbehaved more than once, for they were scared to death that 'Soap Sally' would get them if they didn't behave...also, the 'booger-man' was another one...we were sure scared of him, too! we were never told the scary story about an old woman who murdered children! It was enough the way the women in our family said the name! We terrified ourselves on hot summer nights, giggling and hiding and catching lightning bugs...
