Since we are still recovering from Halloween, I have one more scary story for you adapted from Frederick Stonehouse’s book of the Haunted Great Lakes. This one is taken from his second book, Haunted Lakes II, and it was printed in 2000. It is about a ghostly woman in white (sometimes called a white lady in old folk tales), who appears to a sailor on a ship. This blog will be divided into two separate postings. In the first posting, I will talk about the long tradition of stories that feature this particular motif. In the second part, I will post the actual story itself.
There are a lot of instances in the folkloric tradition where the ghost of a lady dressed in white appears to either one person or a group of people who are driving or traveling to a specific destination. The destination she shows up in is usually related to a place where she used to live, or where tragedy struck her. She usually wants to convey a message to the person she approaches, although the person does not have to necessarily be related to her or what happened to her.
Since the woman ghost wears white, it is often thought to symbolize either her wedding dress or her purity, faithfulness and innocence. Although white can also represent being peaceful, the lady in white is usually almost always in some type of turmoil. She has either been betrayed by her husband in some way, which caused her to perish unnaturally, or she has been killed in some other tragic accident that took her away from her family or home. She is often depicted as wandering the roads aimlessly searching for something, until she encounters a passerby. For example, in one account there is a story of a vanishing hitchhiker who shows up as a ghostly lady in white. She is seen standing by the side of a road asking for a ride home, or to the home of her beloved. Once she arrives there, she vanishes into thin air according to spectators.
With the lady in white, there always seems to be an air of tragedy that follows her and almost always some sense of unfinished business. If you ever encounter her on a lonely country road or other isolated place, you may just be the one asked to help her finish it.
A Winter's Dream 