The Miserly Woman of Halle

There was a woman in Halle who had amassed such a fortune that she could no longer count it, yet neither could she release it from her grasp. Her husband was a simple labourer, yet through her enterprise and cunning they had slowly climbed until they achieved a modest but comfortable existence. Yet the woman was never satisfied. Every coin she earned was set aside with the rapacious eagerness of a raven.

But this money could not simply be deposited in a bank, for she trusted no bank. She wanted to see and feel her wealth. So she hid everything in water kettles and rain barrels – copper pails filled with silver coins, tin vessels brimming with money, all concealed beneath her bed, upon her loft, in her cellar. Only she knew the location of each secret cache. Her husband, her children – not even they knew where she had hidden the money.

Years passed and the woman grew old. Her body became grey and weak, yet her will to accumulate money never faltered. She laboured until the day of her death, and even upon her deathbed her thoughts were not of her soul, but of all the money she had gathered.

The funeral of the woman was peculiarly impoverished. She had left no money for a proper burial – though she had amassed wealth beyond measure – because no one knew where the money was hidden. Her husband died of shame and want, though he was richer than most folk in Halle and did not know it.

Yet death was not the end for this miserly woman. Only weeks after her burial, the villagers began to notice something unusual. Every night, in the field beyond the church – the field where the cherry tree grew – a light was seen. Those villagers brave enough to look closely witnessed something that froze them with terror: the ghost of the woman, clad in white linen, digging deep in the earth beneath the cherry tree.

Night after night, winter and summer, the phantom dug. It dug with the same fierce determination with which she had gathered money in life. The villagers wished not to understand, yet could not ignore what they witnessed. All who passed that field felt a cold chill, sensed how the very air itself seemed to protest against what transpired there.

On one night, some villagers felt compelled to venture to that field, not from courage but from an inexplicable compulsion. There beneath the cherry tree they beheld something that made them weep and laugh at once. The spirit of the woman had dug and dug until she had uncovered a water kettle – brimming with silver coins. She withdrew it from the ground and placed it upon the grass, most carefully, as though it were the most precious object upon the earth.

The next morning the villagers did indeed find the kettle. They could scarce believe what they witnessed: silver coins, many silver coins, and a note written in an ancient, trembling hand. The note read: ’For my funeral. I could not do it in life, so I do it in death.’

The woman’s husband used the silver coins to give his wife a proper funeral, nay, even an honourable one. Perhaps this was what her spirit desired – not rest, not peace, but merely the certainty that she had finally, in her own way, paid for her own burial. After that night, no more lights came to the field, and the cherry tree grew on in peace.