The Wicked Witch of the West is a fictional character in the classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by the American author L. Frank Baum, is the evil ruler of the Winkie Country, the western region in the Land of Oz. She is inadvertently killed by the child Dorothy Gale with a bucket of water. In Baum's subsequent Oz novels, the Wicked Witch of the West is referred to occasionally.