Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Storm Hag of Lake Erie: Jenny Greenteeth, Presque Isle, and Appalachian Water Folklore
Lake Erie has never needed much help frightening people.
It is the shallowest of the Great Lakes and the smallest by volume, which means its waters warm quickly, cool quickly, and can turn rough in a hurry. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes that Lake Erie’s average depth is only about sixty two feet, while its western basin averages only about twenty four feet. In a lake like that, wind does not have to fight deep water for long before waves begin to rise.
That physical danger helps explain why so many stories have gathered along Erie’s shore. Sailors, fishermen, children, lighthouse keepers, and lakefront families all learned that calm water could become deadly water. Out of that old fear came shipwreck tales, ghost ships, black dogs, lake monsters, and one of the strangest water spirits connected to the southern shore of the lake.
They called her the Storm Hag of Lake Erie.
The Folklore of the Storm Hag
In modern retellings, the Storm Hag is usually placed near Presque Isle, the long sandy peninsula that curls around Erie Harbor in Erie County, Pennsylvania. She is described as a wicked lake witch or water hag, sometimes identified with Jenny Greenteeth, who calls up storms, sings or waits beneath the water, and drags shipwrecked sailors down into Lake Erie. S. E. Schlosser’s widely circulated version in American Folklore describes her as an evil Jenny Greenteeth who summons storms and pulls sailors beneath the lake after wrecks.
The most important modern scholarly source is Judith S. Neulander’s Folklore of Lake Erie, published by Indiana University Press in 2024. Its table of contents includes a nineteenth century entry titled “Jenny Greenteeth the Storm Hag of Lake Erie,” placing the story inside a larger Lake Erie folklore world that also includes ghost ships, South Bay Bessie, the Black Dog of Lake Erie, and other lake legends.
That matters because the Storm Hag should be handled carefully. There are many internet summaries that make the legend sound ancient and well documented, but the strongest direct sources are modern folklore collections and retellings. The older primary records do not clearly show a colonial or early national source naming “the Storm Hag” at Presque Isle. What they do show is the older world that made such a legend believable: a dangerous lake, a hard shoreline, and a region where shipwrecks were common enough to leave a cultural memory.
Jenny Greenteeth Comes to Lake Erie
The name Jenny Greenteeth did not begin on Lake Erie. It belongs to a wider British water-hag tradition. In English folklore, Jenny Greenteeth was often treated as a pond, river, or marsh figure used to warn children away from dangerous water. Roy Vickery’s 1983 article “Lemna minor and Jenny Greenteeth” in Folklore is one of the useful academic studies of the tradition, while Simon Young’s later work connects Jenny Greenteeth to the broader idea of nursery bogies that frightened children away from ponds, pits, and other hazards.
Lake Erie gave that old water warning a new setting. Instead of a child near a pond, the Lake Erie version places sailors and travelers on open water. Instead of duckweed or a still pool, the danger becomes a storm, a gale, a sandbar, a shoal, or the sudden violence of a shallow Great Lake.
That is how folklore often travels. A figure from one place does not simply remain unchanged. It is reshaped by the fears of a new landscape. On Lake Erie, Jenny Greenteeth became a storm spirit, and the Storm Hag became a way to give a face to the lake’s worst moods.
Presque Isle and the Real Dangers Beneath the Story
Presque Isle is not just a scenic peninsula. It has long been tied to military, shipping, and maritime history. During the War of 1812, Little Bay at Presque Isle sheltered Oliver Hazard Perry’s fleet, and six of his eleven vessels were built in Erie at the mouth of Cascade Creek. Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources notes that the waters and shores of Presque Isle protected the fleet during construction.
A primary-source map from May 13, 1813, drawn by John Widney and held by the University of Michigan’s Clements Library, shows why the place mattered. Presque Isle’s sheltered bay and connection to Pittsburgh made it a useful warship-building site, but the sandbar at the mouth of the bay created a serious obstacle to moving the brigs Lawrence and Niagara into open Lake Erie.
Those details are important for a folklore article because they show the truth beneath the supernatural. The Storm Hag did not need to be real for sailors to fear the place. The shoreline itself was hazardous. The bay protected ships, but the lake beyond it could destroy them. A sandbar, a gale, or a sudden change in water could do what later stories blamed on a witch below the surface.
NOAA’s proposed Lake Erie National Marine Sanctuary materials make the danger even clearer. Historical records suggest that 196 vessels may have sunk within Pennsylvania waters of Lake Erie, and thirty five shipwrecks have been identified. Those wrecks range from the 1838 steamboat Chesapeake to speedboats, tugs, barges, and workboats lost before 1940.
The Federal Register notice for the proposed sanctuary describes Pennsylvania’s Lake Erie waters as part of a “maritime cultural landscape,” shaped by sacred places, cultural practices, lighthouses, shipwrecks, early shipbuilding, major naval yards during the War of 1812, and one of the busiest waterways of the mid nineteenth century.
That is the world where a Storm Hag belongs.
Chautauqua County and the Eastern Lake Road
The Storm Hag is most often tied to Presque Isle, but the larger Lake Erie danger zone stretches east and west along the shore. Chautauqua County, New York, also belongs to this story. The county’s official history notes that French explorers landed on the Chautauqua County shore of Lake Erie in 1739 while looking for a southward passage to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The route connecting Barcelona Harbor on Lake Erie with Chautauqua Lake, later called the Portage Trail, became part of the county’s long connection to inland travel and wider imperial history.
That shore also had its wrecks. A compiled Chautauqua shipwreck list records storm losses near Dunkirk, Barcelona, Silver Creek, Van Buren Point, and other county locations. The list includes the schooner Brandywine, lost in a gale near Barcelona in 1842, the propeller Owego, stranded in a blizzard and gale off Barcelona in 1867, and the propeller Oneida, which capsized in a gale off Barcelona in 1852.
One of the county’s best archaeological examples is the Dunkirk Schooner Site. MaSS, the Maritime Stepping Stones project, describes it as a two-masted shipwreck, with its masts still standing, and notes that the wreck was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.
Such records do not prove a Storm Hag story at every harbor, but they help explain why Lake Erie folklore spread so easily. Every town had its own memory of the water. Every wreck gave another reason to imagine something waiting beneath it.
Ashtabula and the Ohio Shore
To the west, Ashtabula County, Ohio, gives the Storm Hag article another Appalachian edge. The Appalachian Regional Commission lists Ashtabula County, Ohio; Chautauqua County, New York; and Erie County, Pennsylvania, among the counties within the Appalachian Region.
Ashtabula’s Lake Erie waters also hold their own maritime record. The Ohio History Connection’s Ashtabula County Underwater Archaeology Survey project called for background research and survey work to identify and evaluate underwater resources in the county’s portion of Lake Erie.
The broader Ohio record is even larger. Ohio History Connection says more than 2,000 ships are estimated to have been lost in Lake Erie, with nearly 600 believed to be in Ohio waters. The Ohio Shipwreck Inventory was established in 2004 to document abandoned shipwrecks older than fifty years under Ohio jurisdiction.
Institutions such as the National Museum of the Great Lakes and the Great Lakes Historical Society continue that work through the Peachman Great Lakes Shipwreck Research Program and the journal Inland Seas.
For folklore, Ashtabula and the Ohio shore matter because they show the Storm Hag is not just a Presque Isle curiosity. She belongs to a wider Lake Erie imagination, where ports, wrecks, storms, and shoreline communities all share the same dangerous water.
The Weather Behind the Witch
The Storm Hag is frightening because Lake Erie itself can act strangely to anyone who does not understand it. Michigan Sea Grant explains that storm surges and seiches are common on Lake Erie because of the lake’s east-west orientation, prevailing westerly winds, and shallow western end. A seiche can push water toward one end of the lake, then send it rushing back.
The Midwestern Regional Climate Center notes that Lake Erie’s western and eastern shores are especially prone to high storm surge, and that major storm surge events can beach, damage, or even destroy ships while also causing flooding and shoreline damage.
That science gives the Storm Hag a natural foundation. To a sailor in the nineteenth century, a sudden gale, a rising lake, or a violent surge would have felt personal. The wind seemed to have a will. The water seemed to reach. A ship that survived the worst of a storm could still be damaged, stranded, or lost when the danger seemed to have passed.
That is exactly the kind of moment where folklore grows. The Storm Hag waits until people relax. The lake does the same.
Legend Versus Record
The Storm Hag of Lake Erie works best when told honestly. It is not safe to present her as a firmly documented eighteenth century Presque Isle belief unless a stronger primary source is found. The more responsible reading is that she is a Lake Erie folklore figure tied to modern and scholarly retellings, shaped by the older Jenny Greenteeth tradition, and made convincing by real maritime danger.
That does not weaken the story. It strengthens it.
Folklore does not need to be a newspaper report to matter. It tells us what people feared, how communities explained danger, and how landscapes became characters in local memory. Lake Erie was not just water to the people who lived beside it. It was road, workplace, battlefield, graveyard, border, and warning.
The Storm Hag is one way that memory took human shape.
Why the Storm Hag Belongs in Appalachian History
At first glance, a Lake Erie water witch may seem far from the mountains most people picture when they hear Appalachia. But Appalachia is not only coal seams, ridgelines, cabins, and hollers. The Appalachian Regional Commission’s map reaches into northern Pennsylvania, western New York, and eastern Ohio. Erie County, Chautauqua County, and Ashtabula County all sit inside that broader Appalachian region.
That makes the Storm Hag a northern Appalachian borderland story. She stands where mountain history meets Great Lakes history. The same region that sent timber, coal, iron, grain, fish, soldiers, migrants, and manufactured goods across difficult landscapes also looked north to a lake that could open the world or close over a man without warning.
Presque Isle gave shelter. Lake Erie gave passage. Storms gave grief. Folklore gave the danger a name.
So when the old stories say the Storm Hag waits beneath the waves, it is worth hearing more than a monster tale. It is the voice of a shoreline remembering every ship that did not come home.
Sources & Further Reading
Neulander, Judith S. Folklore of Lake Erie. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2024. https://iupress.org/9780253069795/folklore-of-lake-erie/
Evans, Timothy H. Review of Folklore of Lake Erie, by Judith S. Neulander. Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, 2025. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/jfrr/article/view/41123
Schlosser, S. E. “Storm Hag.” American Folklore. Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.americanfolklore.net/storm-hag/
Vickery, Roy. “Lemna minor and Jenny Greenteeth.” Folklore 94, no. 2 (1983): 247–250. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0015587X.1983.9716284
Young, Simon. “In Search of Jenny Greenteeth.” Gramarye 16 (2019): 24–38. https://www.academia.edu/44474795/Young_In_Search_of_Jenny_Greenteeth
Briggs, Katharine M. A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. London: Allen Lane, 1976. https://archive.org/details/dictionaryoffair0000brig
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Proposed Designation of Lake Erie National Marine Sanctuary.” NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. Accessed June 30, 2026. https://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/lake-erie/
Federal Register. “Notice of Intent to Conduct Scoping and to Prepare a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Proposed Designation of a National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Erie.” May 19, 2023. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-05-19/html/2023-10644.htm
Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “History of Presque Isle State Park.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dcnr/recreation/where-to-go/state-parks/find-a-park/presque-isle-state-park/history
Widney, John. “A Map of Presque, Isle or Erie.” May 13, 1813. William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan. https://clements.umich.edu/exhibit/the-war-of-1812/case-8/
Naval History and Heritage Command. “Battle of Lake Erie: Building the Fleet in the Wilderness.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/b/battle-of-lake-erie-building-the-fleet-in-the-wilderness.html
Erie Maritime Museum. “Building the Fleet.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.eriemaritimemuseum.org/research-topics/building-the-fleet
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Lake Erie.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.epa.gov/greatlakes/lake-erie
Michigan Sea Grant. “Surges and Seiches.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.michiganseagrant.org/lessons/lessons/by-broad-concept/earth-science/surges-and-seiches-2/
Midwestern Regional Climate Center. “Great Lakes Weather.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://mrcc.purdue.edu/living_wx/greatLakes
National Weather Service. “Great Lakes Rip Currents.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.weather.gov/cle/great_lakes_rip_currents
National Weather Service. “Great Lakes Beach Hazards.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.weather.gov/greatlakes/beachhazards
Penn State University. “Shipwreck Exhibit to Focus on Lake Erie’s Maritime Heritage.” January 26, 2016. https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/shipwreck-exhibit-focus-lake-eries-maritime-heritage
Regional Science Consortium. “Lake Erie Shipwrecks.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.regsciconsort.com/lake-erie-shipwrecks/
Pennsylvania Historic Preservation. “Shipwrecks? In Pennsylvania? PASST Tells Us All About Them.” October 18, 2017. https://pahistoricpreservation.com/shipwrecks-pennsylvania-passt/
Chautauqua County, New York. “History.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://chautauquacountyny.gov/live-work-play/History
NYGenWeb. “Chautauqua County Shipwrecks.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://chautauqua.nygenweb.net/HISTORY/Shipwrek.html
Maritime Stepping Stones. “Dunkirk Schooner Site.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://mass.cultureelerfgoed.nl/dunkirk-schooner-site
Ohio History Connection. “Ashtabula County Underwater Archaeology Survey Request for Proposals.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.ohiohistory.org/ashtabula-county-underwater-archaeology-survey-request-for-proposals/
Ohio History Connection. “Ohio Shipwreck Inventory.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.ohiohistory.org/preserving-ohio/survey-inventory/ohio-shipwreck-inventory/
Ohio History Connection. “Ohio Shipwreck Inventory and Why It Matters.” March 7, 2016. https://www.ohiohistory.org/ohio-shipwreck-inventory-and-why-it-matters/
OhioShipwrecks.info. “Data Source Listing.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://ohioshipwrecks.info/datasourceinfo.php
National Museum of the Great Lakes. “Research.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://nmgl.org/research/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Accessed June 30, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: This article treats the Storm Hag as folklore rather than as a proven colonial-era account. The legend is strongest when read beside Lake Erie’s real record of storms, shipwrecks, dangerous water, and shoreline memory.