Zelda P. Spellman was born in 1346. She grew up during the 14th century in Europe, with at least five other siblings: Vesta, being the oldest; Edward, Della, Hilda and Sophia, the youngest.

Vesta was terribly jealous of all the attention that Hilda and Zelda got when they were little. So, she turned their parents into pigs. The Witches Council decided that people with pigs feet could not raise children and so when Vesta refused to turn them back Hilda and Zelda were adopted out to a family in the country.

While the children were living in the farm house the parents stayed in the barn. Their father was "getting very good at working an instamatic with his snout". When their mother head-butted Vesta about a month later, they were turned back into humans. In order to legally get Hilda and Zelda back, they had to adopt them. Their overbearing mother, Grandma Lydia, spent 200 years of violin lessons on Hilda, while Zelda won trophies.

As Zelda reached adulthood she went off to college. Zelda attended Other Realm University and subsequently went on to pursue three advanced degrees from Harvard University, graduating in 1873. When it became apparent that she would lose her job as associate professor unless she obtained a more recent degree, she completed a doctoral thesis in two weeks and earned a fourth PhD from Adams College.

Zelda, during the Renaissance, lived in Florence and met a man named Benvolio. Though her father disliked Benvolio, Zelda married Benvolio anyways, though their marriage only lasted three days. At some point, Zelda woke her Aunt Dorma up and was turned into a porch swing.

Both sisters bounced from one job to another over the centuries while trying to find what they wanted to do. Zelda worked as a coal miner when she lived in Wales, rating this as her worst job. During the early 19th century, Hilda and Zelda worked together at a saloon. They were run out of town, but fortunately found a way to maintain some financial security: junk. In the early 1990s, before Sabrina came to live with Hilda and Zelda, they had manservants, spent late nights on the town, weekends in Tuscany, took part in Formula One racing, and originally had a disco on the second floor of their house.