Mistress of the Hex House Leaves Legacy of Bizarre

By Yvonne Litchfield | Originally Published in The Tulsa World on Monday, November 3, 1997

There isn't anything new about Tulsa having socialite-criminals, matrons of dishonor who became women of continual fascination.

One of the most celebrated socialite criminals was Carolann Smith, Mistress of the Hex House, sometimes called the sex house, and who set off a peach of a scandal here in 1944. She was a strange woman who mesmerized a couple of young women and held them in bondage in a fancy Maple Ridge house at 10 East 21st St. For eight years, they gave Carolann their paychecks, lived on sparse meals and slept on orange crates in a cold basement.

Even today, especially around Halloween, Tulsans go looking for the place, but it is no longer there. This is much to the sorrow of Tulsans who could visit one of the town's most famous homes, occupied by a criminal and socialite who practiced a strange hybrid religion.

The house was demolished in 1975 to make room for the parking lot for the Akdar Shrine Temple, which has splendid gold domes, or onions as the neighbors called them. The Shriners carefully covered the place where the house sat with dirt and plenty of cement.

Even so the Shriners are clever enough to entertain young spooks by telling them that every so often their cars in the parking lot were starting up and moving themselves around. They lay the blame of the hexing of the infamous house to Mrs. F.A. Smith or Carolann Smith or Fontaine or Meredith or H.D. Folger or other names she fancied and used over the years.

She was Carolann Smith at the time she applied at Lee Elementary School for sugar and gasoline ration books during World War II. She had the misfortune to apply to Alice M. Allen, a long-time teacher at the school. When Carolann gave names for her children, Mrs. Allen saw hand swaying in the background of the school's library. The neighborhood kids knew that those were the names of her dogs, not children.

The children also knew that Carolann had buried a small casket in her back yard. Mrs. Allen reported the subterfuge to the "feds" along with the information about the burial in the back yard. That sent the press and the police scampering like a plague to her house.

The burial turned out to be one of her dogs. But the police found two young business women wearing skimpy clothing sleeping without blankets in the cold, unheated basement. Reporters had a field day that would shame the modern-day paparazzi. They used words like "mesmerize" and "hypnotism" in connection with the two women and some officers took time off to spend the case.

Carolann was eventually charged with subornation of perjury and obtaining money under false pretenses. She was held in jail under two criminal charges following accusations by the young women who claimed they had been bilked of thousands of dollars while they were mentally befogged with quasi-religious influence exerted by the mysterious woman.

The police department said they had discovered a male accomplice who had perhaps written fake letters for her. The man lived in Tulsa and claimed he was deathly afraid of her. Meanwhile, officers discovered her husband had shot himself after she allegedly talked to him constantly about suicide.

Investigation showed she circulated around Tulsa's social set, she dressed in high style and her house was filled with fancy cosmetics, furs and clothing, plus 46 pairs of new shoes at a time when shoes were rationed.

A short and impassive-faced woman, Carolann was 51 years old and her relationships were "impossible to understand," police reports said. There were fake letters bearing forged signatures of Edward G. Seubert, president of the Standard Oil Co. of Indiana. The letters proposed to protect Mrs. Smith's interest in a proposition that the oil man is supposed to have had some knowledge of. This, purportedly, was a plan to endow the University of Tulsa with a law school.

Dr. C.I. Pontius, president of the university, declared he had never heard of such a plan. The handwriting proved quickly that the signature was a forgery. It looked like the work of the fictitious "Dick," who addressed a loving letter to Mrs. Smith from Randolph Field.

All of the strange actions proved to be nothing that would stand up in court. But in those World War II days filling a false claim for ration books outraged Federal Judge Royce H. Savage. He found her guilty and gave her a year in prison, which she served at McAlester concurrently with a state court conviction for subornation of perjury.

The young women quickly returned to normal and went back to their parents and their jobs without showing much damage for all their beatings and suffering from hunger and flimsy clothing and, worst of all, no make-up while the house was filled with enough cosmetics to stock a drug store.

The good note of this story was the prevention of what might have been. Mrs. Smith had taken out individual $35,000 life insurance policies -- payable to her -- on the girls, on a boy of 13 who she claimed was a nephew but wasn't, and her maid, who was killed in an auto accident shortly afterward. Besides her husband, Carolann and had lost two sons of her own.

Investigators believe that the alert Lee school children, Mrs. Allen and Carolann's pooch named Bon Bon saved those lives, plus heaven knows how many others, from the horrors of that Hex House.

Copyright Tulsa World. World Publishing Co. Rothline Entertainment provides this digital version of copyrighted material based on the copyright regulations for fair use. More information provided atcopyright.gov. This material is provided for the research of the events regarding the Mistress of the Hex House in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Rothline Entertainment also follows the copyright terms provided by the Tulsa World and those terms can be reviewed at Tulsa World Terms and Copyrights.