The ghost reported most often at Concordia Cemetery in El Paso is a woman in white walking her own grave, and guides say she nods back at whoever watches her. She was Florida Wolfe, called Lady Flo, and her plot sat unmarked for 58 years.
Concordia Cemetery in El Paso, Texas keeps a woman who walks her own grave. She turns up in a white dress, day and night, over the same stretch of desert headstones, and guides call her an intelligent haunting for one reason. She notices the living. She acknowledges a visitor with a wave or a nod, then goes back to her walk.
They know who she is supposed to be. Florida J. Wolfe, known most of her life as Lady Flo.
The Handbook of Texas, in an entry by historian Cecilia Gutierrez Venable, traces her back to an enslaved family in Estillville, Virginia, born around 1860. She left for Mexico after 1880 and turned up at a neglected ranch near Casas Grandes belonging to an Irish aristocrat, Delaval Beresford, as his housekeeper. The relationship followed. Beresford began introducing her as Lady Flo, a title that gave her standing to run the ranch alone whenever he traveled. They lived there more than twenty years. Venable records what happened when they came into El Paso for supplies: Texas miscegenation law shut them out, a hotel refused Beresford the room he asked for as Mr. and Mrs. Beresford, and the pair took shelter in the Black section of town.
December 1906 took it all inside three weeks. In Venable's account, her ranch manager walked into a dark room, struck a match, and was shot dead by a teamster the two of them had hired to drive them home the next day. The man fled, police arrested Wolfe as an accomplice, and she spent up to two weeks in the Casas Grandes prison. Nothing was ever established about her part in it. She had been out only days, waiting in El Paso, when Beresford's train collided at Enderlin, North Dakota on December 23 and killed him.
A handwritten will surfaced from his bank leaving her $10,000. When she pressed for more as his common-law wife, his brother, a Royal Navy admiral, went to Porfirio Diaz, who backed the family because Mexico recognized no marriage. She settled for $15,000 and cattle, and signed a paper stating she had never been his wife.
Tuberculosis killed her in El Paso on May 19, 1913. The death certificate spelled her Flora, put her age at about forty-two, ten years short, and her occupation as housekeeper.
Concordia is called El Paso's Boot Hill. John Wesley Hardin lies here under a welded iron cage that Texas Highways describes heaped with roses, shot glasses and coins. Wolfe's grave had nothing on it at all, and the Handbook dates her stone to May 1971, when the Phyllis Wheatley Civic Club raised the money for it, 58 years after she went into the ground. The photograph on her Find a Grave memorial shows it alone in pale dirt, cut in three lines: FLORIDA J., WOLFE, 186? to 1913. Nobody knew the last digit of the year she was born, so the carver set a question mark where it belongs. She still stops to nod.
