The Legend of Mrs. Bittles

Mrs. Bittles (not her real name) was our neighborhood crazy lady. She lived on the street behind ours.

We didn't really know too much about her except for what we had been told by other people and what we made up because it sounded good.

Here's what we knew to be true about her:

a) she lived alone in a home on the street behind ours
b) she had no car and she walked EVERYWHERE!

Here's what may or may not have been true about her:

a) The purse that she always had with her was chock full of money because she did not believe in banks. It also contained a very large knife.
b) She paid cash for her house.
c) Her late husband had been a professor at Georgia Tech; she went crazy after he died.
d) She had no children.
e) She had children, but they had as little as possible to do with her and were only interested in her money.
f) She had special powers.

Here are a few of the stories I had heard about Mrs. Bittles.

Janet Pendleton's mom came home from work one afternoon. As she walked down the hallway, she heard a noise in the bathroom. It was too early for Janet's dad to be home from work and Janet and her sisters were still at school. Janet's mom peeked in the bathroom and found Mrs. Bittles taking a bubble bath in their tub.

Mike Harris's mom came home from the grocery store one morning. As she got out of her car she noticed the back door was wide open. She knew for a fact that she had closed the door when she left. As she walked towards the house, she smelled bacon. Mrs. Bittles was in her kitchen and cooking herself some breakfast.

My own personal story about Mrs. Bittles:

My dad was sitting in our front yard one evening enjoying his after dinner coke and Mrs. Bittles was walking down the street. She saw my dad and began walking towards him. My brothers and I ran in the house because this was, after all, crazy Mrs. Bittles.

To our utter astonishment, my dad got a lawn chair for her to sit in, and called for us to bring another coke out because we had company. When my brothers and I began arguing over who was going to be the one to bring the coke out, my mom told us to knock it off. She grabbed a coke out of the refrigerator and went outside to sit.

My brothers and I ran to my bedroom because my window was the closest and offered the best view. Plus, we figured if Mrs. Bittles whipped that knife out of her purse, we could easily call the cops since the phone was just down the hall.

Mrs. Bittles introduced herself to my parents. This was the first time all of them had met. She told my parents where she lived and how long she had lived there. As I recall, the conversation ran the gamut. They talked about religion and what was wrong with the world. She told my parents about the depression and how she had lived through it. She talked about how wasteful people were and how they didn't take care of things they had.

To prove her point, she told my parents about the things people threw away and all of the things she found in her roadside travels. She opened her purse and took out a grocery bag. We thought for sure that this was the fabled money we had heard so much about.

She opened the bag and asked my parents to look inside. My mom said there had to have been 100 plastic combs in that bag. Mrs. Bittles said she could not believe the fact that people threw away perfectly good combs. She offered some of them to my parents, but they politely declined.

She also pulled out a couple of coke bottles she had found. She could not believe that someone had thrown them away when they could have returned them to the store and gotten back a dime.

As the sun began to go down, she got up to leave. She thanked my dad for the coke and the conversation and left. That was the only time we were personally visited by Mrs. Bittles.

We were extremely disappointed that none of our questions had been answered. We still did not know if she had all her money and a big knife in her purse. She had not mentioned anything about her husband or her kids if she had any. All in all, we were extremely unhappy that our parents had not taken the opportunity to find out any of this important information so that we could add it to our Mrs. Bittles file.

My dad told us in no uncertain terms that we were to leave that poor woman alone. We were not to bother her in any way, shape, or form and if he caught us or HEARD of us doing anything, we'd have him to answer to. That threat was enough to make us steer clear of Mrs. Bittles' house and give her a wide berth when she walked down the street. We did not talk TO her, but it did not stop us from talking ABOUT her.

Mrs. Bittles served a very useful purpose to all of the kids in the neighborhood. We used her as an instrument of torment against pesky little brother and sisters.

For instance, suppose your little brother was playing with a toy that you wanted to play with. You couldn't just yank it away from him, because he would just go tattle to mama and get you in trouble.

So, what you did was just look at him and say, "Mrs. Bittles touched that." His face would go white and he would immediately toss the toy away. It was a known fact that if you touched anything Mrs. Bittles touched, something bad would happen to you before the day was over.

All you had to do at that point was mumble some sort of jibberish to "break the Bittles spell" and the toy was now yours to play with.

We also told our brothers (or sisters) that Mrs. Bittles like to look in people's windows at night. For added effect, we would go to the window below my (uh, I mean somebody else's) brother's window and stand there in the dirt so that we could leave footprints. Then go get the disbelieving brother and show him the prints.

Oh, it made bedtime so much MORE fun! With each dog bark and leaf rustle, you would whisper "There she is.....listen!" Invariable, this would lead to a mom or dad having to come to the room and sit with him until he went finally went to sleep.....and telling you they'd deal with you the next day.

Here's another good one. Suppose your mom asked you to babysit your little brother while she ran to the store. You didn't want to because it was almost time for "Days of Our Lives" and you knew just as soon as your mom walked out the door, your little brother would immediately pulling out all stops to aggravate the h*ll out of you and ultimately you would wind up missing the episode where Stefano Dimeara came back from the dead for the 15th time.

Not to fear! As soon as said brother began to act up, all you had to do was walk towards the phone and tell him you were going to call Mrs. Bittles and have her "come git 'im". Usually, that was enough to stop him in his tracks. But occasionally, he would push a little more.

At that point, it called for a little something extra. You picked up the phone and actually began to call Mrs. Bittles. (Actually, you were calling the number for the time and temperature, but he never knew that.) That in and of itself granted you the serenity to watch Stefano come back to life in peace.

Ultimately, Mrs. Bittles met a sad fate. She was walking in traffic and was struck by a car. Had she been younger, she probably would have survived, but she fell and broke her hip. She wound up having to go in a nursing home where she died about a month later. But her spirit (figuratively and literally) lived on.