When Tabatha Saint was a young girl growing up in rural Alabama, her knees often stained green from exploring the weedy garden and wild places of her family’s 80 acres, her grandmother Louise would tell her stories. One stood out: a folktale of murder, lye, and missing children. Soap Sally, Grandmama Louise said, lived in the nearby woods, and waited with her basket for misbehaving children to tire of doing chores. “She would look to us like someone we would trust,” Saint says, recalling her grandmother’s warning. “Maybe a child,…
