Photographer Kathleen Wilke’s Lady of the Lake series captures the ethereal beauty of White Rock’s cherished ghost story. The model is Woodrow Wilson High School alumna Katie Shank.
Joining bodies of water like Devil’s Pool in Australia and Blackwater River in Florida, Reader’s Digest named our neighborhood’s lake to its list of the world’s most haunted bodies of water.
Many residents have heard the story of the Lady of White Rock Lake. Legend has it that a couple in the 1940s picked up a soaking woman wearing white near the lake. After describing a boating accident, she asked to be taken to an address on Gaston Avenue, but when the car arrived at the house, only a wet spot remained in the back seat where the woman had been. The driver went to knock on the door, and the man who answered said that he had a daughter who drowned in the lake two years before.
Other versions of the legend exist, some with the woman committing suicide, others with her knocking on the doors of houses near the lake, all of which provide great fodder for a spooky drive around the lake at night.
Reader’s Digest reported that the legend has been reported since 1964, but the Texas Folk Lore Society first referenced it in 1943. Whatever truth or lack thereof the legend holds, the Lady of the Lake is just one of the many storied that make our neighborhood so unique. Any list that puts White Rock Lake on the same list as Loch Ness (of monster fame) is fine by us.
