A state as vast as Texas is home to all sorts of frights: rattlesnakes, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, and many, many ghosts. We interviewed Texas historians and ghost tour guides — and combed the internet — to round up the scariest ghost stories from across the state.
(Editor’s Note: Some of the responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.)
La Llorona
Sue Owen, Texas Ghost Tales
It was two in the morning on a warm, dark night in the summer of 2021.
A man named Martin Godines was driving back home from a friend’s house. He passed near Father McNabo Park on the banks of the Rio Grande, in Laredo. The fields and playground were empty, as expected in the early morning hours while the sun still slept. As his headlights lit up the empty roads, he didn’t know he was about to become part of a series of reports of eerie sightings in this area. But Martin had a camera on his car.
“I was driving around 2 a.m. leaving a friend’s house,” Godines told the Laredo Morning Times. “So as I was driving, I hadn’t noticed what my camera had captured until after I reviewed the video.”
When he got home, he found a video resembling a figure known for centuries and generations across Texas and Central and South America: a glowing woman in white who wails in the night.
La Llorona — the wailing woman — is a story about a woman who roams by waterways, crying out for her children: “Mis hijos, my children.” She’ll never be reunited with them because legend has it she drowned them. The history of La Llorona is very long, with different regional renditions from Texas to Mexico to Guatemala and Venezuela. There are mentions of her as early as the 1800s. In 2019 there were even two major films made, one from Shudder and the other from Warner Bros.
In the version told in California, a beautiful young woman named Maria marries a wealthy rancher, who starts to neglect her after their two sons are born, then lavishes attention on the boys. In a fit of rage, she drowns their sons. Regretting what she’s done, she wanders evermore by the water’s edge, screaming for her children to return.
When she’s spotted, she’s typically seen wearing a white burial gown. But more often, she’s heard. The story of La Llorona is sometimes used to scare children into behaving — or staying away from the water.
But the horror is not just that she’s a wailing wraith in white. One of the 2021 Laredo reports described her as walking calmly — a woman with long, dark hair who seemed sad. The horror is the betrayal. In some versions, a mother whose love turned to murder, then madness.
The Ghosts of Millermore House
Sarah Crain, executive director of Preservation Dallas and former Chief Operating Officer of Old City Park
From 2019 to 2024, I worked for Old City Park, and we have a lot of buildings that are old and historic on that property, in the heart of downtown Dallas off Harwood St. off Interstate 30. There are a lot of stories specifically about the Millermore building. It looks like your pretty standard, architecturally significant plantation-style home, right? But a lot of the Millers lived there up until the 60s, when that home was purchased and then moved to Old City Park, so from 1857 until the 1960s you have over 100 years of Miller family lore.
I have not personally had a scary experience, but a lot of my team has. I have a big familiarity with the fact that a lot of these older buildings have squirrels and raccoons in them. I’m not going to say that ghosts don’t necessarily exist, but I’ve had more experience with a raccoon in a vent than I’ve had with a ghost.
But I will say that my personal first experience realizing that something was interesting at Millermore was a very normal day at the park. I’m doing my rounds in the early evening, and we had this amazing cleaning crew at the time that were a husband and wife team. And I see the husband walking very quickly out of Millermore, and he said, “Hey, who’s in there right now?”
I said, “No one should be in there right now.” And we’d occasionally have issues with break-ins to some of our buildings, so I’m thinking, oh my gosh, is this a giant raccoon, or did someone break in the back?
So I go in and we search the house, and there’s nothing. And he said, “No, when I was cleaning downstairs, there was very clearly someone upstairs. I heard footsteps. It sounded like a heavy footstep. I heard them go up the stairs. I called out to them, and no one was there.” He was like, “I will continue to clean this building. But boy, that gave me the creeps.”
Since then, I’ve had many team members — from educators to janitorial service team members — come to me looking so frightened, hearing noises upstairs and thinking that there is definitely a person in that building …only to find nobody there.
The figure everyone seems to see at Millermore is a lady in a brown dress. A lot of people have attributed that to Minerva, one of the wives of the original owner William Brown Miller. I couldn’t tell you who this lady is. I can tell you that a former executive director of the park thought it was a guest who had stayed too late in this building and watched this lady go up the stairs and went up the stairs after her, only to see that no one was there.
I will say there is something to the history of Millermore, whether it’s the lady in the brown dress or not. In my opinion, what makes it a creepy building is the history of enslavement at Millermore. It’s a plantation building, and maybe the spirits we’re seeing are not spirits of the Miller family, but they could easily be spirits of the enslaved people who lived there during that time. There was also a history of other situations that happened at Millermore, including a family member who killed themselves there.
Since that building moved to Old City Park in the 60s, there have been repeated stories of ghosts. In the1960s there wasn’t a lot of understanding about preservation work, and they took the house apart piece by piece and labeled it like Legos. It sat in storage for a couple years and then it was rebuilt on the site. There’s a creepy element to dismantling a plantation home and then re-building it in a new location. That kind of brings these stories back to life.
Room 1009
Paris Smith, Dallas Terrors guide
The Holiday Inn Express in downtown Dallas opened in 1925 as the Scott Hotel, and almost immediately drew all sorts of unsavory people to its rooms, including Bonnie and Clyde and Benny Binion, the owner of the Horseshoe casino in Las Vegas. At the time, the Scott Hotel was also run as an illegal casino.
Violence spread throughout the hotel. There were reports of a woman who was thrown off the 10th floor of the hotel. It was labeled as a suicide because she was a sex worker, but she was actually murdered by her john on that floor.
Just down the hall on the same floor is room 1009, the most haunted room in the whole hotel, which a lot of people can still rent to this day. There were two murders that occurred in that room.
The first was Jack Smiley, a mobster whose girlfriend was at the bar, chatting it up with a guy. The man started getting aggressive and threatened her. Smiley didn’t like that and when that other man went up to his room, Jack went down to the front desk to get the key — to room 1009. He planned to go in there to kill him. During the attack, the bar guy managed to stab Smiley, killing him in his room.
Another mobster later stayed in that same room. His name is unknown, but the story goes that his throat was slit by another mob member. Ever since then, people that have stayed in that room have felt strange presences.
They report seeing a figure stand over them at night and whisper in their ear with the smell of alcohol on their breath. Guests get locked in or out of that room often. Back in the 1980s, there was an older couple staying in the room, and they ended up locked out of their room for an hour and 45 minutes. A lot of women report feeling the presence of a man standing outside of the shower or sitting in the corner of the room in a chair.
The window in room 1009 is also different from any other window in the hotel. The hotel would get reports of ashtrays being thrown out of the window and windows breaking even when there were no guests in the room. There were also reports of birds flying into the window to try and get into the room. Eventually, the window was reinforced, but the spirits that haunt that room still remained.
‘Something Grabbed My Ear’
Historic Galveston Ghost Tour guides
About three years ago, Galveston ghost tour guide Tyler Jenkins stopped his group at an abandoned boarding house plagued by stories of hauntings and satanic rituals.
“While I was talking, a drunk couple on the tour snuck into the house. I went in and got them out — not a big deal. But I dropped my wallet,” Jenkins told The Barbed Wire.
The tour guide, realizing his wallet was missing later that evening, returned to the abandoned house around midnight to retrieve it.
“After I picked it up, something grabbed my ear and yanked me back, and I fell down. Nothing was there. I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared,” Jenkins said.
Another tour guide, Dave Warner, said giving the haunted walkthroughs in Galveston have convinced him of the town’s supernatural haunts.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that Galveston is haunted,” Warner wrote to The Barbed Wire. “I’ve heard story after story from locals who swear their homes are occupied, and they’re convincing enough to make a skeptic think twice.”
Warner said that on three separate tours, different guests have stopped him and pointed out the same upstairs window at Ashton Villa, a historic mansion.
“They all described a woman standing there, listening to the story I was telling. One of them even brought thermal imaging equipment and picked up a hot spot in that exact window,” Warner said.
Warner believes it was a spirit of Rebecca Ashton “Bettie” Brown, a rich socialite who inherited the family mansion in the late 19th century and died in the Villa at 65 of an illness.
“I haven’t seen her myself, but after that, I’m convinced the ghost of Bettie Brown listens from above,” Warner said.
The Donkey Lady
Nathaniel Scharping, Atlas Obscura
By the Old Applewhite Bridge, a small crossing over the lush river south of San Antonio, an urban legend of a quirky phantom, dubbed the ‘Donkey Lady,’ has grown.
As Nathaniel Scharping reported for Atlas Obscura, the story goes that a woman who lived in the area nearly a century ago spent her time raising donkeys on a farm by herself, until she met her tragic end in a fire. Robert Johnson (also for Atlas Obscura) offers another popular telling of the story: that the woman and one of her donkeys drowned, and their souls became intertwined in the afterlife.
However she met her end, the reports that followed hold a common threads: the sound of hoofbeats and screams echoing through the forest as you cross the bridge and, or visions of a disfigured ghostly woman. Reports range from hoofprints found on cars to the sight of a person with a donkey’s face.
The eerie encounters have made the bridge, nicknamed “Donkey Lady Bridge,” a popular attraction for tourists and locals alike.
“When I moved to San Antonio in 2002, the first stop that my friends brought me to (was) not to the Fiesta, or the Riverwalk, or even the Alamo, it was the Donkey Lady bridge,” Marisela Barrera told Atlas Obscura.
Scharping wrote that the Donkey Lady represents a trend among spiritual folklore of ghosts being predominantly female. Barrera said she resonates with the enduring nature of the Donkey Lady’s spirit.
“The Donkey Lady stands her ground,” she added. “She’s so strong-willed that she could survive despite her circumstances.”
Bouldin
Brian J. Easley, submitted September 2025
My family has never publicly told the story of our home in South Austin.
My grandmother was a widow from far west Texas. After the premature and tragic passing of my grandfather from leukemia, she moved to Austin with their three small children to start a new life.
My grandmother’s mansion, as I suppose it would be called nowadays, was a compound of stone buildings somewhere between I-35 and MoPac, nestled on a forested hillside just south of downtown Austin. The house consisted of an eerie stone cottage connected to a massive and eccentric barn-type main building. There was a rumor that both structures were built with the remains of one of Austin’s original stone homes, structures demolished long ago for unknown reasons.
A few small outbuildings were connected by stone pathways, a winding network dotted by works of art, sculptures and concrete slabs featuring the intense bearded faces and swooped helmets of Spanish conquistadors. I’m 44 years old now, but for a normal kid from Comal County, my grandmother’s home in Austin was a place out of time — a setting from a fantasy novel, or a horror movie.
My mother loved the home for its stature and beauty, but in all the years I knew her, she never stepped foot in or near the south-facing wing of the home: the old stone cottage. The final time had been in the late 1970s, a story she told me just once. One day, she was standing in the hallway in the center of the cottage when the whole world went dark. She felt a frozen hand firmly grasp the back of her neck, paralyzing her with fear. She couldn’t move or speak. It was as if someone held her there, waiting. Suddenly the cold and firm grip gave way to a branding iron-hot sensation, and the next thing my mother knew she was free and running from the home, screaming. She never went into that part of the house again. She wouldn’t even look in the direction of the cottage. When she arrived on the property, she kept her eyes averted down and away as she darted to the main house.
Years later, my sister, then in her teens, thought she would investigate. She was in the cottage kitchen when the house became quiet, and the whole world went white. No birds chirped outside the window. No sounds entered the building. Total silence. A low and booming voice entered her head, not even giving her ears a chance to listen to the unnatural sound saying slow, menacing and clear: “LEAVE.”
A few years and several similar events later, one of two passages to the old stone cottage, from the entry hall to the kitchen, was sealed by construction workers, after multiple sightings of a menacing shadow lurking in the passage. Only the door to the living room remained. The rumor was an Austin priest was brought in to perform a blessing in that sealed passageway, “a cleansing of the old stone cottage,” as my Catholic mother described it. Still other family members, under their breath, say there was an exorcism.
The time came after my grandmother’s death to consider selling the property. My mother wouldn’t go near the house anymore, and as the eldest sibling, had no intention of living there. During the inventory and listing of the home, it was determined that the primary bathroom in the eccentric stone cottage was the final resting place of what we thought were two ornate swinging glass doors. The doors had apparently been sourced from an authentic early-Austin hearse carriage. I thought, “How many bodies, how many souls, had passed through those glass doors?”
The home sold for millions. Rumor had it the house was to be one of the many wings of a wealthy family’s compound. Then, suddenly and without warning, the property was mysteriously razed to the ground. No explanation was given to our family by the new owners. Only the oak trees remained. My grandmother’s home, that she had spent the last 50 years living in, had been wiped clean from this earth, seemingly along with whatever presence was inside living with her all those years.
On a recent trip back to Austin, I drove past the site. I got out of the rented Dodge Ram, and walked to the driveway, the property encircled with construction fence barriers. Up the hill, off to the south side of the property, I could just make out something cropping out of the rubble by the fence line: a conquistador’s bearded face and swooped helmet emerging at a diagonal; the one eye still visible — staring at me.
Marfa Lights
Sue Owen, Texas Ghost Tales
One thing makes this story different from other ghost stories. The Marfa Lights are absolutely real and I’ve seen them myself. So have many West Texans. And you can too. But even after more than a hundred years, no one has succeeded in explaining these glowing orbs that float above the West Texas plain.
Nowadays, they’re often said to be car headlights, even though car headlights don’t dance, swoop upwards, split apart, and join together. Folks who saw them in the 1880s, 1910s, and 1920s assumed they were campfires, even though, ‘It didn’t act anything like a campfire at all,’ legendary rancher Hallie Stillwell said about the lights she saw in 1916 as a teenager. Others have said the lights are related to the ghost of Alsate, the last leader of the Chisos Mescalero Apaches, who was killed in 1882.
You can see the Marfa Lights for yourself. Drive out Highway 90, east of Marfa and park at the little viewing area. Look across Mitchell Flat toward the Chinati Mountains. As it grows dark, you’ll start to see headlights sweeping along the curve of Highway 67 off in the distance. But if you’re lucky, you’ll see something else too.
The Marfa Lights I’ve seen appeared larger and closer than the distant highway lights. They moved above the brush and danced erratically, divided and merged. It’s tough to judge distance and motion in the dark, but I consider myself a pretty skeptical observer and highway headlights don’t cover what I saw. Most observers agree: there’s something out there.
Ghost on the Ranch
Reddit user HellishMarshmallow
“When I was about 8, I encountered a ghost,” wrote HellishMarsmallow last year. “This would have been about 1990. My dad was working on a ranch in deep South Texas. Middle of god’s nowhere. Mesquite trees and cactus as far as the eye could see. We were a mile from the highway down a dirt road and 13 miles from Freer (right in between Laredo and Corpus Christi), a little one-stoplight town. Remote and isolated is putting it very mildly.”
“One summer afternoon, my dad sent me out to the truck to get some papers out of his glovebox,” they wrote. “As I sat in the passenger side of the truck, I saw the silhouette of a man in a cowboy hat walk by the window. Which was odd, because the sun was shining from the other side of the truck. I freaked and ran inside and told my dad what I saw.”
“Dad wasn’t like most cowboys. He’d seen some stuff and he believed in the supernatural,” they continued. “He listened carefully and believed I saw what I saw. He gave me hugs and reassured me ghosts couldn’t hurt me. An avid journal keeper, he wrote everything down.”
“About six weeks later, we were driving in a back part of the ranch. The ranch was huge, 80,000 acres, and we hadn’t been to that part of the ranch in a while,” they wrote. “Suddenly, Dad slams on the brakes and throws it in reverse. There by the side of the dirt road, a hundred miles from anything, is a grave. It was a little cross made of branches tied together and stuck in the ground. There was a little piece of wood with a name, a date and a town scratched into it.”
“(We) called Border Patrol and the county sheriff on the CB radio. Near as they could tell, a group of migrants crossed the border on foot and one of them died,” they continued. “They buried him right there. … They took the remains and shipped them back to the man’s family in Mexico.”
“That night, my dad sat me down and told me the date on the marker was the same date I had seen the ghost,” they wrote. “He showed me the journal entry. Then he pointed out to where he parked his truck. The road that ran right next to the truck, right where the ghost had been walking, was the same one, many miles away, where the man had been buried. Dad said he thought the man had been trying to tell someone, maybe the nearest person, where he was buried.”
The Most Haunted Town in Texas
There’s a small town in East Texas northeast of Longview, not far from the Louisiana border, called Jefferson. Founded in 1841, at its peak it was the sixth largest city in Texas, a trading hub situated on a bayou that connected it to ports like St. Louis and New Orleans. But by the end of the 19th century, the bayou had drained out and so had the town, but its history still lingers — and some believe more than that. Austin Ghosts calls it the most haunted town in Texas, with stories of ghost sightings across the town.
The Jefferson Palace Hotel, initially built as a cotton warehouse in 1851, has so many reported ghost experiences that the front desk keeps a “Book of the Dead” for guests to record their supernatural encounters. There are stories of child laborers dying in the old warehouse and women who were killed when the building was turned into a brothel. Some believe their spirits have stuck around. Modern-day hotel guests have reported moving objects and furniture, disembodied voices, apparitions appearing in mirrors or floating through walls, and messages on bathroom mirrors.
One block behind the Palace hotel is the Excelsior House Hotel. It’s home to ghosts so terrifying that a visit from director Steven Spielberg allegedly gave him the inspiration for the film “Poltergeist.” The story goes that when Spielberg arrived at the hotel, he set down his luggage on a rocking chair in his room and the chair threw the suitcase back in his face. Then, in the late hours of the night, Spielberg was awakened by a little boy in old-fashioned clothing, who asked him if he was ready for breakfast, according to Houstonia Magazine. Spielberg checked out the next day.
The Grove, a historic Victorian home built in 1861, is also said to be home to more than its fair share of ghosts. USA Today even voted it this year as the fourth best haunted destination in the U.S.
Ghost stories there go back over a century, beginning with a man named T.C. Burke, who moved his family into the house in 1882 and moved them out the next day, saying only that, “We couldn’t live in that house.” Miss Louise Young, who lived in the house from the early 1900s until her death in the 1980s, told people often about the ghosts who shared the building with her.
“Common sightings include a lady in a white dress, a man walking through the lily beds in the garden, and a mischievous, possibly flirty entity in the den,” reported USA Today.
But there are stories about Jefferson that concern real terror too, stories that often aren’t included in ghost tours. Asher Elbein reported in the Texas Observer the town’s deep history of white supremacist violence against Black townspeople, particularly in the 19th century.
“(In Jefferson), the television turns on by an invisible hand; the rocking chair rocks in the absence of rocker; an invisible foot sounds upon the stair,” Elbein wrote. “Reality is affected without an apparent cause, and that cause is inferred and uncanny, a hole in things visible purely by its negative shape. Like the question of who precisely grew the cotton that made Jefferson rich, or the names of the many, many who were murdered by its white supremacists and then denied even the dignity of a ghost story, of being allowed to reach back into the world.”
The Walls Unit
Reddit user Ok-Two-5429
The oldest state penitentiary in Texas, nicknamed the “Walls Unit,” is rife with stories of hauntings, especially surrounding its execution chamber, which is the most active chamber in the country. During her time working for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Michelle Lyons witnessed 278 executions, as was reported by Pamela Colloff in her National Magazine Award-nominated Texas Monthly profile.
The unit no longer houses death row prisoners, and executions by electric chair (once called “old sparky”) are no longer carried out in the building, but for decades they were — adding to the sinister nature of the unexplained noises and visions many report experiencing there.
Reddit user Ok-Two-5429 posted on the r/paranormal subreddit last year about the facility, which is located in Huntsville.
“There are stories that the Huntsville (Walls) Unit is haunted. It’s where the execution chamber is, so there’s no shortage of death there,” they wrote. “Apparently you can still hear doors clanging shut in there, and there’s a full body apparition on the top catwalk.”
On a forum for haunted sites in Texas, one user commented last year that he served as a correctional officer in the unit and had several paranormal encounters in the execution chamber.
“I have been in this area by myself around 3 in the morning and have (heard) angry yelling, things slamming with no explanation nor source,” the user wrote. “This is by far ghost-wise the scariest unit the state of Texas has to offer.”
Staff and inmates alike have long been spooked by mysterious activity within the prison’s walls. In 2002, Michael Graczy of The Plainview Herald reported on the experiences of Charles Carter, who served six years as an inmate in the Walls Unit in the 1980s.
“There (were) several times I’d wake up at night and feel like something was staring at me,” Carter told the Herald. “I’d see things go past my cell late at night, down the run. There’d be nobody out there. All of a sudden your hair is just standing up on end. There’s nothing you can do.”
San Antonio’s Ghost Tracks
Sue Owen, Texas Ghost Tales
Generations of San Antonio residents can tell you the story: Go to the railroad crossing where the school bus full of children was killed. If you put your car in neutral, the children’s ghosts will push your car across the tracks and out of harm’s way. The proof? Their handprints on the back of your car.
Over the decades, many have been drawn to the site. It even appears on Google Maps. There is just one problem: the story was transplanted from over a thousand miles away. But there are still grains of truth, and a genuine local phenomenon behind the legend of the ghost tracks.
On a snowy morning in 1938, a school bus was making its way through the winter cold. The driver stopped at a railroad crossing, but his windows were fogged, and he couldn’t see anything. He pulled forward onto the tracks, where the bus was struck by a freight train. Wreckage was strewn over half a mile, and bodies lay scattered in the snow. 23 children and the bus driver were killed.
Oddly enough, it happened not in San Antonio, but Salt Lake City. But the story was reported nationwide the next day, including on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News.
Somehow, according to a city library archivist, the story became attached to the Shane Road crossing in San Antonio.
Perhaps it’s because for years that crossing had its own mystery: a phenomenon called a “gravity hill.” These spots, where an optical illusion creates the appearance of your car rolling uphill when you’re actually moving downward, seem to attract spooky stories around the world.
Until 2018, San Antonio’s ghost tracks were just such a spot. Many who came to test the phenomenon would sprinkle baby powder across the backs of their cars, to record the ghostly handprints. And sure enough, they would appear. But the more likely explanation was that the prints were already there, from the last time people closed the trunks of their cars.
In 2018, the entire dangerous location lost its gravity illusion, when the railroad leveled the crossing. This hasn’t harmed the story, which still wins best urban legend each year in the San Antonio Current, but it has surely preserved the safety of curiosity-seekers.
The Black-Eyed Children
Emma Cieslik, Atlas Obscura
The first reported sighting of the black-eyed children was in Abilene, Emma Cieslik reported in Atlas Obscura. In 1996, after finishing a late shift at the local newspaper, Brian Bethel was sitting in his car outside a strip mall, writing a check to pay his cable bill. “Suddenly, the hair on the back of his neck stood up,” Cieslik wrote. “He noticed a group of teenagers standing close to his car. The teens asked for a ride to their mother’s house to get money for tickets — they wanted to catch a late-night showing at the mall’s movie theater.”
“But something struck Bethel as odd,” Cieslik continued. “The movie they wanted to see had already started—45 minutes ago, in fact—and the teenagers sounded much older than they appeared to be. Then, in the dim light of the parking lot, he saw: Their eyes were completely black. He threw his car into reverse and sped away. When he glanced back, the children were gone.”
Bethel wrote about this encounter in the Abilene News-Reporter, and in the years since, stories about black-eyed children have come from all over the world. “Some details change from one account to the next, but scholars and urban legend enthusiasts alike agree that the figures are an example of death personified as a child,” Cieslik wrote. “Defenses lowered, their victims allow them inside, inviting death and destruction upon themselves.”
Some people have reported seeing teenagers like Bethel while others see younger children, but in all of the stories the children’s eyes are completely and totally black. According to Atlas Obscura, the children speak in a mature, monotone voice, often repeating the same phrase and insisting on being let into someone’s house or car.
“It’s scary because we don’t know what they want,” said author Jason Offutt to Atlas Obscura, who has been researching the black-eyed children for over a decade. “We don’t know what they’re going to do when we let them in.”
There are stories of disasters, like fatal accidents and cancer diagnoses, befalling people who let in the black-eyed children, said Brigid Burke to Atlas Obscura, an adjunct professor of religion at Montclair State University.
“Bethel’s tale of the parking lot encounter nearly 30 years ago was the first known mention of the black-eyed children, but the creepy concept has spread like ghostly wildfire online, even as hard evidence remains elusive,” Cieslik wrote. “Still, when there’s a knock at the door or a pleading figure suddenly at your car window, it’s best to get a good look at their eyes before letting them in.”
The Lady of White Rock Lake
Sue Owen, Texas Ghost Tales
In 1943, or thereabouts, in northeast Dallas a couple was driving at night, along White Rock Lake, when their headlights picked up a figure in white. A young woman with blonde hair. She was dripping wet and her elegant dress was soaked through. She asked the couple for help, to take her to an address on Gaston Avenue. They agreed, and the woman got in the car. But before they reached the address, they found she had disappeared, leaving only lake water on the car seat where she was.
Those are the first written reports of the Lady of White Rock Lake. She is usually described as blonde, always in distress, and asks to be taken to Gaston Avenue and is always gone before the car arrives. Some accounts claim she’s left her wrap behind, and in a particularly Dallas touch, the dress is sometimes said to be a beautiful Neiman Marcus gown in a 1920s style.
She’s one of the more famous Texas ghosts, but she’s also a classic type of urban legend, the vanishing hitchhiker, common across the United States. These stories differ, but the key is always that the traveler doesn’t realize they’re a ghost until they vanish.
Such tales go back to the horse and carriage days, but as automobiles took over American roads, phantom hitchhiker stories grew and spread. But they’re usually surprisingly local, with specific details such as the Gaston Avenue reference. Our Dallas lady wears a white party dress like many of the others, but the description of her as soaking wet and drowned in the lake is unusual.
In the early stories of the lady, the couple is said to have actually gone to the address on Gaston Avenue. A man answers the door, only to tell them that his beautiful blonde daughter drowned some time ago in White Rock Lake.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that The Walls Unit no longer carries out executions via electric chair. The Barbed Wire regrets the error.
