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“Up in very north North Dakota,” the story
goes, “near Walhalla or LeRoy, there is a grassy path known as White
Lady’s Lane. It is a grassy, weedy, un-kept-up dirt road off a gravel
road.
“As you drive down the road you come upon a bridge over a small creek.
If you drive there at night, as many teenagers like to test out, you can
see a woman hanging from the bridge in a wedding dress.”
The students in my American History classes at North Dakota State University,
bless their hearts, tell me stories. Every year it’s a new harvest
of legends of the plains.
The prologue to the White Lady legend is that the young woman had been
party to a shotgun wedding, religious parents compelling the couple to
marry shortly after a child was born. The day of the wedding, the bride
checked the crib and found the baby dead. She then hung herself from the
bridge in her wedding dress.
“Many have seen the figure of the woman hanging there,” my informant
says. “Some will say that it is the woman haunting, while others
will say it is the lights of Walhalla off in the distance.”
Quite a few of these stories are linked to legend trips, that is, night-time
adventures of teenagers who go to scary places and hope something goes
bump in the night. These legends are place-specific. “I’m from
a small town in western North Dakota called Hazen,” begins another
one of them. “About 10 miles north of town there’s the remnants
of a town called Krem.”
This legend-tripper recounts the excursion off the highway, up a series
of gravel roads, past the old Krem cemetery, filled mainly with infant
burials. After that you come to another cemetery, this one filled with
iron crosses, and a large wooden cross tipped over under a pine tree.
And beyond that is the old Krem townsite, now retaining only a small group
of brick and rock houses.
The observant excursionist will notice, some 50 yards outside the second
cemetery, a lone headstone with inscription in German and Latin. The story
of that headstone came to my informant by way of a lady in the rest home.
The deceased was a preacher, we are told. “He was newly out of seminary
school, and he was in his mid-20s. He carried on a successful church for
a few years, but then a little girl turned up missing. . . . The preacher
committed suicide rather than face the charges.
“Well, the story goes, if you drive through the circle of the old
brick and rock houses three times, the man will appear and speak to you.”
That’s a story with powerful elements of history in it. There are
new ones emerging, though, just as surely as fieldstone surfaces every
spring. North of Maddock, we are told by another writer, there is a house
along Highway 30. A high school student named Bob lived there, and he
noticed some strange things happening. A tall kid, his feet sometimes
stuck out from the blankets at night, and they became freezing cold. When
he awoke, his breath made steam in the frosty air—but when he got
up, the room temperature was comfortable. His family eventually moved
away, to Texas, and the house stood vacant.
“One night this summer after the 4th of July,” my narrator recounts,
“a bunch of my friends went out there.” Lights were on in the
house, but when they entered, through a basement window, the lights cut
out. “They went to the kitchen and all the cupboard doors were shut.
All of a sudden they started opening and slamming shut.”
The gang of adventurers fled to their cars, where they discovered that
several of them had gashes on their bodies, although no tears in their
clothing. “One of the girls called Bob in Texas and he told her that
sort of stuff happened to him a lot. This is a true story, one of my best
friends was out there and came back to town hysterical. To this day nine
of them still have the exact same story.” Which means it must be
true.
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