In the cigarette haze of a backstage locker room, the kind that smelled like cheap whiskey, sweat, and the ghosts of matches long gone, Penny Mitchell wasn’t a name people screamed. She wasn’t a main event attraction, never hoisted on anyone’s shoulders while pyrotechnics blasted and title belts sparkled under the spotlight. No, Penny Mitchell was something grittier—an undercard warrior with calloused hands, a stitched mask, and a ledger full of receipts. She was a worker in a world that chewed women up and called them sideshows. And she kept lacing up the boots anyway.
Born in Springfield, Missouri in 1961, Penny didn’t come from glamor. She came from the heartland, where people kept their heads down and worked through the pain. Her road to the ring began under the stern watch of The Fabulous Moolah, who didn’t run a wrestling school so much as a finishing school for survivors. Moolah taught her girls to bump, to bleed, and—some would argue—to break. It was a house of broken dreams masquerading as opportunity, and Penny took to it like a fish to bourbon—awkward at first, but she got the taste for it soon enough.
By 1980, Penny Mitchell was thrown into the unforgiving world of professional wrestling, debuting at a time when women were still considered novelty acts—gimmicks in bikinis, sideshow freaks in glitter. She wasn’t flashy. She didn’t have Cyndi Lauper backstage or a rock song named after her. But what she had was grit, and she had a punch that could knock the eyeliner off your face. She made her bones tagging alongside names like Sherri Martel and Peggy Patterson, taking bumps in towns nobody talks about anymore, performing in half-empty armories to crowds who cared more about the beer than the bruises.
And yet she hung in. Night after night. Town after town. She showed up with the same gear bag, same fire, same quiet chip on her shoulder that said, “You don’t know me, but you will.”
She teamed with Velvet McIntyre in 1983, and that partnership led to a flash of glory—the kind you don’t see coming, like a haymaker in the dark. The duo took down Joyce Grable and Wendi Richter to win the NWA World Women’s Tag Team Championships. For a brief moment, Penny Mitchell was a champion. She walked through the curtain with something around her waist instead of a bruise on her ribs. The belts didn’t stay long—vacated the next year when both wrestlers returned to the WWF—but they existed. Like everything else about Penny, it was fleeting and uncelebrated. But it was real.
From 1983 to 1984, Mitchell tested herself in the crucible of All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling—a world that didn’t just demand toughness, it worshipped it. Japan didn’t care for flash. It wanted fire. And Penny brought it. She wrestled in a land where women took suplexes like they were gunshots and got up anyway, brushing off concussions like they were inconveniences. There was no storyline fluff, no soap opera kisses—just forearms, sweat, and the kind of crowd that didn’t clap politely, but roared like lions when they saw something worth remembering. Mitchell gave them something to remember.
In 1985, back in the WWF, she slipped behind a mask and became something else: The Spider Lady. Wrestling’s history is full of gimmicks that stick like tar, and this one—this one was different. Under that hood, she wasn’t Penny from Springfield anymore. She was mystery and menace. She tangled with Susan Starr. She squared up against Wendi Richter, one of the era’s biggest stars. She played the villain, the shadow, the enigma. And then came the screwjob.
Wrestling fans remember November 1985. Madison Square Garden. Wendi Richter gets double-crossed by a masked Spider Lady, a finish Richter never saw coming. Only—it wasn’t Mitchell that night. It was Moolah under the mask, pulling a fast one for Vince and the boys in the back, rewriting history with a work that felt too close to a shoot. But the character? That identity? Penny wore that mask first. She built that mystique. And in a business obsessed with legacy, her fingerprints got wiped clean from the crime scene.
She wrestled a little more—teamed with Candice Purdue in 1986 against the Glamour Girls. She worked the Kansas City circuit in 1987, grinding through small-town shows where the payoff was sometimes less than the gas money. Then, quietly, she left the business in 1993. No retirement speech. No ceremony. Just a woman who had taken enough bumps and bruises and probably had a few too many nights where the hotel bed felt colder than the crowd’s reaction.
Penny Mitchell was never a Diva. She wasn’t a Superstar. She was what wrestling used to be: hard-nosed, overlooked, and a little bit tragic.
She didn’t sell posters, but she sold pain. She didn’t have catchphrases, but she had stiff shots. She didn’t play to the camera. She played to the truth.
Look at the photos, if you can find them—grainy images, low-res and mostly forgotten, of a woman in lace-up boots, staring through her opponents like she had something to prove. Maybe she did. Maybe she never stopped.
Professional wrestling eats its young. It praises you with one hand and buries you with the other. Penny Mitchell wasn’t part of the golden era, wasn’t part of the revolution. She was something in between. A ghost in fishnets. A bruiser behind a mask. A worker who showed up when the world wasn’t watching and stayed until the lights went out.
In the end, her story reads like one of those Bukowski poems—you know the kind. Something about the bar being empty, the night being long, and the fight never quite ending the way you think it should.
But still, she fought.
And maybe that’s the only legacy you really need.