In the original comic books, Aunt Hilda dressed like a stereotypical witch, with pointed hat and shapeless dress. She was usually in a bad mood over having to live among mortals, always aware of the dangers should anyone ever find out that their family were witches. It was never explained why Hilda and Zelda chose to live among mortals while the rest of their family and friends all lived in one or more magical realms set off from mortal reality.

Aunt Hilda has tremendous magical powers, but in the first twenty years of stories, she preferred to handle cooking and other domestic needs by hand instead of by magic. Whenever Sabrina would use magic as a short-cut to avoid household chores, Hilda would accuse her of being lazy and failing to realize the satisfaction and superior results of taking her time and doing it herself (often handled as a joke about the generation gap, a popular humor trope from the 1950s into the 1970s). The comic books often implied that magically-prepared food never tasted quite as good as food made from scratch, and as the witches are a nearly immortal race, they have no worries about time-saving measures -- boredom is a greater threat to them, and making things from scratch staves off boredom.

In the original comic books, Aunt Hilda often urged Sabrina to commit occasional pranks against the mortals around her in order to appease the head witch, Della (who considered it a sacred duty for witches to play tricks on mortals but otherwise to avoid and ignore the mortals around them). Hilda also had a tendency to bully her scatterbrained younger sister Zelda. However, she was fiercely protective of both Sabrina and Zelda.