Her name was Annie Christmas, and according to legend she was the queen of the Lower Mississippi River. This was back when cotton was king, when steamboats plied the muddy waters and when most women considered the river a man's realm.

But Annie Christmas wasn't like most women. New Orleans' answer to Paul Bunyan, she is said to have stood 6-foot-7 and weighed some 250 pounds. She was the equal of any man on the river, and she wasn't shy about proving it with her fists.

She was so tough, Annie was rumored to keep a necklace to which she would add one bead for every nose or ear she chewed off, and two beads for every eye gouged out. By the time she died, it was said to have been 30 feet long.

"The strength of Annie Christmas was prodigious," Herbert Asbury wrote in his book "The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld," first published in 1935. "She thought nothing of walking off a flatboat with a barrel of flour under each arm and a third balanced on her head. Single-handed, she towed a loaded keelboat from New Orleans to Natchez. Moreover, she made the trip on a dead run, and the boat skipped over the water like a swallow. From St. Louis to New Orleans, a man who performed an unusual feat of strength was said to be 'as strong as Annie Christmas.'"

But here's the question: Where did Annie Christmas come from? And does her legend have any basis in fact?

Those are the central questions we explore in our newest episode of “Voodoo City,” a podcast project of NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune in which we take a walk through myths and legends that make New Orleans the city that it is.



"Who is Annie Christmas?"

It is as good a question as any to start with, and it's one CBS Radio Workshop tried to answer in an episode that aired in October 1956, with William Conrad serving as narrator.

Admittedly, it does a better job of embellishing the legend than anything else, adding more questions than it actually answers, but it’s a pretty cool listen, especially for those who appreciate old-time radio.

You can find a YouTube version of it embedded below. Also, you can find a downloadable version at OldTimeRadioDownloads.com.

The birth of a tall tale

Given that they're so often based on oral traditions, it's not always easy to zero in on the origins of a tall tale. In some cases, it's near impossible.

Where Annie Christmas is concerned, however, Times-Picayune writer Meigs O. Frost did the seemingly impossible in a 1948 article he wrote for The Times-Picayune/States-Item Magazine. That article serves as the foundation of this episode. You can find an image of it below.

A caveat to keep in mind: A subsequent correction that was published some two months later noted that author Carl Carmer, who is characterized as something of a literary dupe in Frost's story, disputed the timeline given and downplayed his unwitting role in popularizing the Annie Christmas tale.

Picturing Annie Christmas

Like any good tall tale, the Annie Christmas legend changes depending on who’s doing the storytelling, but one thing is universal: her size. Annie was, according to every account, a vast woman.

According to Frost's story, as well as a description published by in Asbury's book, she also wore a "neatly trimmed mustache." In other words: She was quite a formidable sight.

Here's an illustration published along with Frost's story, and which we discuss in this episode:

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