We call her the Lady of the Lake because we first encountered her by the lake. She was desperate for a ride. She was young — maybe 16 —and was wearing a white formal gown that was soaked to her skin … we stopped and she got in. She thanked us for picking her up and asked us to drop her off at an address on Gaston Avenue … “This it?” I asked the lady. No reply. Thelma looked towards the back and let out a start. The girl had vanished …
This excerpt is from the fictional novel “1854 Garrett Street”, written by Alfred R. Pierotti, Jr. who lived eight of his childhood years at the neighborhood address.
Neighbors of White Rock Lake no doubt know the rest of the story, or some version thereof: A mournful homeowner answers the door and tells the would-be Samaritan to go away — that his tale about the girl in the wet white dress couldn’t possibly be true because that girl, his daughter, drowned years ago.
In his reality-based mystery novel, Pierotti rehashes the story exactly as he remembers it — just as his father’s acquaintance, a display director at Titche-Goettinger Department Store, told it to him and his little sister, Nancy, back in the 1950s.
“We were at dinner at [Guy and Thelma Malloy’s] Forest Hills house when he told us the story,” Pierotti says. “Afterwards, my sister, being a bit cynical, asked to see the watermark on the Malloy’s car upholstery … he showed it to us. She kept very quiet the rest of the night.”
Pierotti isn’t the only writer with ties to the ghostly muse.
Rose-Mary Rumbley recounts a strikingly similar account in her non-fiction book, “Dallas Too.”
“As a Dallas native, we grew up with that story, and who knows who really started it,” Rumbley says. “But my friend — Barbara Rookstool was her name — swears her father was the one who first told it. What I put in the book is what I know.”
Rumbley’s account perfectly aligns with Pierotti’s — Barbara Rookstool’s father was none other than Guy Malloy, a “window dresser at a local department store.”
The late Frank X. Tolbert wrote a book titled “Neiman-Marcus, Texas: The Story of the Proud Dallas Store” in 1953, in which he, too, reports a ghostly encounter among a window dresser, his wife and a woman in white, only Tolbert writes that the couple worked for Neiman Marcus, and — more importantly, he states — the stylish specter was wearing a Neiman Marcus design.
The White Rock Lake that today teems with cyclists, pedestrians and police is a far cry from the park Pierotti, now a teacher at Jesuit College Preparatory School, knew as a child, but a wonder-inducing eeriness has lingered. Lake lore was the launch pad for not only his first mystery novel, but also set the stage for a successful prequel titled, “Toward the Setting Sun.” Pierotti is working on part three of a trilogy, still moved by the spirit of the neighborhood.
“My family’s short history on Garrett Street, like the unknown Lady, has vanished,” he writes in an epilogue, “but it reappears from time to time.”
