In Brief
For roughly forty years, a single tree on a curve in Newark's Branch Brook Park had a patch of white painted on its trunk. The kids of Roseville called the woman who waited there Mary Yoo-Hoo, and drove out at midnight to see if she'd step from the dark.
The Full Story
In Newark's Branch Brook Park, the story is about a tree. Not just any tree: one on a sharp curve in the park road, with a patch of white painted on its trunk. For roughly forty years that white mark was the landmark, and the kids of the Roseville section, the neighborhood that borders the park, knew exactly what it meant. You drove out at midnight, slowed at the curve, and waited to see whether the woman in the bloody wedding dress would step out of the dark. They had a name for her. They called her Mary Yoo-Hoo.
The legend says she was a bride. The Newark Public Library tells it as a young woman killed in a carriage accident on her way to her wedding, and the older accounts gave her a wedding gown gone red. But the story has never settled on how she died. Some versions put her in a 1976 limousine crash, the chauffeur driving newlyweds home from the reception and missing the curve. Others have a couple skidding on ice into the tree, or prom-bound teenagers losing the car in heavy rain. Same curve, same tree, different deaths.
She turns up on rainy and foggy nights, the accounts agree on that much. Sometimes she stands by the tree. Sometimes she waves a car closer, or steps into the road in front of it. "I swear one time we saw her," one visitor wrote, "her white flowing gown in the dark wandering looking for her dead husband." Another, recalling a 1970s visit with her mother, said simply: "i saw her. She was very nice and friendly."
The drive out to the curve was its own ritual, and not always a safe one. In the 1980s, a Newark man named Al Clark remembered his cousin Tommy Boutsikaris taking a sports car around that same bend at about 40 miles an hour. They walked away from it. They also got ticketed.
The ground under all this was once a marsh called Old Blue Jay Swamp. L'Aura Hladik, who founded the New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society, has a theory that the White Lady is old swamp gas and fog doing their work on the dark. She found the tree before the road was rerouted, with a dent in the trunk she figured a car had left.
The swamp is buried now under one of the prettiest places in Newark. Caroline Bamberger Fuld donated 2,000 Japanese cherry trees here in 1927; the park holds more than 5,000 today, and every April the blossoms draw some 10,000 people. The bride on the curve is a newer, darker story sitting on top of all of it.
No newspaper, no police report, no death record traces to any crash at that curve. The bride has no name. And the county eventually cut the tree down and moved the road. By most accounts, once the white-marked tree was gone, the sightings dropped off.
