Branch Brook Park

Newark kids called her Mary Yoo-Hoo. The White Lady of Branch Brook stood beside a painted tree on a dangerous curve in a bloody wedding dress.

Kids from Newark's Roseville section used to call her Mary Yoo-Hoo. You drove through Branch Brook Park at midnight, slowed down at the sharp curve where a single tree had a white patch painted on the trunk, and waited to see if the woman in the bloody wedding dress was out that night.

Three versions of the story survive. In the most-told, from 1976, a bride and groom were leaving their reception in a limousine when the chauffeur missed the curve and slammed into the tree. The bride died on impact. Her groom and driver walked away. In another, the couple was on their way to wedding photos in the park when the car hit ice and skidded into the same trunk. In a third, the victim was a prom-bound teenager whose date lost control of a V8 Mustang in heavy rain. Different couples, different decades, same turn, same tree.

Locals painted a white splash on the trunk to warn drivers. Somebody else painted a white X at the spot where the bride landed. For maybe forty years, that tree was the landmark. Weird NJ magazine documented her in at least seven issues. On foggy or rainy nights, drivers reported a translucent woman in a wedding dress standing beside it, sometimes waving cars closer, sometimes stepping into the road. The gown billowed in a wind nobody else could feel.

One Highland Avenue resident summed up the ritual: 'We would pile in a car at midnight and drive through looking for the lady in white. You had to go really slow near the sharp curve by the tree and it would be pitch black out. I swear one time we saw her, her white flowing gown in the dark wandering looking for her dead husband.'

The ground under Branch Brook Park has been getting people killed for longer than the legend goes back. Before the park opened in 1895, this 360-acre tract was Old Blue Jay Swamp, a marshland surrounded by tenements whose residents drew their drinking water out of it. That's part of why Newark's nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks ran so bad. During the Civil War, the land served as Camp Frelinghuysen, where six New Jersey regiments trained between 1862 and 1864. A lot of the names who mustered out here are on markers at Antietam and Appomattox.

L'Aura Hladik, who founded the New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society in 1998 and wrote Ghosthunting New Jersey, has a physical theory for the White Lady. Swamp-origin ground holds unusual humidity and gas. Fog plus headlights plus a known curve plus the suggestion of a dead bride gets you most of the way to a spectral figure. Whether that fully explains everyone who's seen her is another question.

The county eventually took the tree down and rerouted the curve. Sightings dropped off sharply after that. Branch Brook is now best known for its 5,000 cherry blossoms, donated by Caroline Bamberger Fuld in 1927, and a cherry blossom festival that pulls ten thousand people every April. But on a foggy April night, down near where the old curve used to be, people still occasionally see something white moving through the trees.