Mary Ellen Pleasant - Scandals and Smears, 1884-1954

Scandals and Smears, 1884-1954

A court battle between Sarah Althea Hill and William Sharon smeared Mary Ellen badly, but the job was finished later when Teresa Bell, Thomas Bell’s widow, sued Mary Ellen over Thomas’ estate. The house Mary Ellen had designed for Thomas Bell and herself became known as the “House of Mystery” and the peculiar arrangements with Thomas’ farce of a “marriage” were exposed and paraded through the courts.

The Hill/Sharon battle and Sharon’s newspaper allies, publicly named Mary Ellen as a "Voodoo priestess" (which she may have been) but went on to say that she was a baby stealer, a baby eater, a multiple murderess, a madam, a lying, conniving, cunning, schemer, and maybe, worst of all, hung the epithet of “Mammy” upon her. All the press from the 1880s and beyond was extremely negative to an aging Mary Ellen. She was quoted on more than one occasion as saying, “DON’T call me Mammy!”.

Pleasant died in San Francisco, California on January 4, 1904 in poverty. She was befriended by Olive Sherwood near the end of her life. She was buried in the Sherwood family plot located at Tulocay Cemetery in Napa, California. Her gravesite is marked with a metal sculpture that was dedicated on June 11, 2011 .

In 1953, Helen Holdredge, who had inherited Teresa Bell’s diaries, wrote a book that devoted 37 pages to Mary Ellen’s achievements up to 1875 and 250 pages to the scandalous newspaper accounts of the 1880s. She did not index the book nor did she do citations in the text. There is a list of sources in the back, though some of these sources are unavailable to other researchers.