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.
Lady of the Lake is a story that’s been shared every Halloween among youngsters since at least the 1940s. Some link it to the drowning death of 19-year-old Hallie Gaston in 1927. The earliest written reference comes in 1953 in a story linked to Guy Malloy in the book “Neiman Marcus, Texas.” Malloy, a Neiman’s employee, was famous for telling neighborhood children the story of the girl he once picked up by the lake, who was dripping wet. She’d been to a dance, there’d been a car accident, she needed a ride home. He wrapped her in a raincoat and put her in his car. When he pulled up to her house on Gaston, he looked over and all that remained was a soaking wet raincoat. That was the original telling. Later versions were embellished with the detail that Malloy went to the door and the girl’s parents told him they did have a daughter but she was dead, killed in a car accident or by suicide. But today, many neighbors have their own stories of seeing a ghostly form floating over the water or standing at the banks, always clad in white. (Source: “Neiman Marcus, Texas,” by Frank X. Tolbert)
