The Woman on Fire

"Personally, one of my favorites. I mean, with a name like that, how can you go wrong?"

Mademoiselle Chasseur's Cryptid Guidebook - The Woman on Fire
The Woman on Fire, my personal favorite. 1821 in South Carolina, woman's husband disappears one day after leaving their small town on a business trip. She spends days, weeks, months trying to track him down, but never manages to find anything. Turns out that her tiny little village wasn't exactly the best place for a newly single woman to career hunt so she moved to the big city of Charleston. She manages to find work pretty quickly working at a small little boutique hotel in the city center. Jack of all trades, she was. Worked the front desk, cleaned the rooms, helped with the books, worked in the kitchen, probably would've been able to open her own place if the upcoming series of events didn't occur.

So, she works there for a few years and starts getting a bad feeling. Certain rooms she's not allowed in, a lot of bedsheets she has to clean blood out of, a lot of girls coming in and out (But a lot more coming in than out). Eventually, our dear protagonist comes to find out the truth, she's been working at a brothel. Now, this wouldn't be normally be an issue for our dear Lady, prostitution was legal back. The story goes that she was working the front desk when a mother comes rushing in, completely frantic. She's asking about her daughter, hasn't seen her daughter in days but she knows that she works in this hotel. Our Lady brushes her off, thinking she's gotten a bad bottle of bourbon but tells her that she'll keep an eye out for her daughter. Later that day, boss tells her to take a laundry cart to the basement and leave it there for him to deal with. As she's trying to manuever it down the stairs, it tips over. Our Lady had kept her promise to that mother. but she wasn't going to like the answer she was about to be given. Our Lady, sitting in that stairwell, suddenly remembered how many times the laundry loads were heavier than they should be, how many women came into the building and how few left. She broke down, swearing to herself that everyone who had let this go on would be punished.

She spent the next hour ushering working girls out of the building. Once no one was left in the building besides her and management, walked into their office holding an oil lamp in her hand. Some say that she pinned the owner's hands to his desk with knives, but what is certain is that she smashed the lamp on the office floor, starting a fire that would burn the building to the ground. Our Lady died in the building, she was as guilty as the rest of them, in her mind. But when the fire finally subsided, her body was nowhere to be found. It's been reported that a local vagrant claimed he saw a "Woman of Fire" walk out of the building but this has never been credibly substantiated.

The Woman on Fire has been spotted all over the United States, I even have reports of her showing up a few times in Europe. She seems to be some sort of protector over sex workers. Everyone seems to tell a different story: her showing up to stop working girls from leaving with bad Johns, right before police raids, I even spoke to some camgirls who would "pray" to her to get bigger paydays, it seemed to work for them. I found a brothel in Paris with a little shrine dedicated to a little statue of her. To The Woman on Fire, thank you for all you've done.