What if the most evil being in the land of Oz was your aunt?

Who wasn't terrified by the Wicked Witch of the West? It wasn't enough that she was going to get you. She'd get your little dog, too.

When it came to evil, she'd go the extra mile.

When the witch first appeared in a cloud of smoke in the bright, candy-hued land of Oz, it sent a cold sluice of dread down your spine.

Even if you knew how it turned out — and we all knew how it turned out because we'd seen the movie before — there was something so twisted and dark about her vicious interruption that you longed for her to go away. When she finally nabbed Dorothy and upended the hourglass to show how long she had to live, she terrified you even more, because you knew she was perfectly capable of killing our heroine.

That hatchet face, that lurid green visage, that sneering voice — they drilled down into a child's mind and lived in the basement where our primal fears lived: Margaret Hamilton, the cackling queen of nightmares!

Unless she was your aunt.

"I think of Aunt Maggie in lovely dresses with high heels," said Astrid King. "And always smelling of roses."

Astrid explained that even though she wasn't related to Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch in "The Wizard of Oz" of the West became her Aunt Maggie.

"I met Maggie when I was probably about 3 or 4," Astrid said. "She was hired by my mother to play an aunt on my mother's TV sitcom, 'Ethel and Albert' on ABC. She and my mother hit it off immediately, and she became a part of my family for the next 30 years. I called her aunt, and she called me Pumpkin Pie, for reasons that have never been clear."

"She was a kindergarten teacher before she became an actress, and had a natural way with children. Well, one year, she asked if she could take over my birthday party, and my mother said sure, so she came up to Stamford, Conn. There must have been about 15 little 4-year-olds in our crinoline and white socks, and she took over with games and singing and storytelling, and we all loved her."

"Needless to say, she wasn't wearing her witch costume."

The kids, it seemed, didn't figure out that this nice lady running the party was the witch, or even Miss Gulch, Toto-snatcher.

"My mother said she didn't think any of the kids paid any attention to it, but the parents were totally terrified when they saw her."

But the witch never scared Astrid. Not even a little.

"To me she was simply an actor, like so many of my mother's hirings, and I understood it was just a role."

Aunt Maggie had a son, Ham, and she never let him watch the movie.

"She said, 'Oh, I never let him see it! I was so afraid that it would scare him to see his mother cackling like that!' "

"Harpo Marx, who lived next door, gave a birthday party for his little boy and invited Ham," Astrid explained. "When Ham came home, he said, 'I saw you in a movie!' He was about 4."

" 'Did you, dear?' Maggie asked. 'Which one was that?' " Maggie had done a lot of films with W.C. Fields and thought it might be one of those.

" 'Oh, the one where you were all dressed up with the funny black hat — the pointed hat —and then you gave that funny laugh you give.' "

" 'What did you think of it?' " she asked her son.

Ham just shrugged. " 'It was just Mama,' he said."