Ghost Tree (17-Mile Drive)

Ghost Tree on 17-Mile Drive is both a cluster of bone-white dead cypress trunks at Pescadero Point and a lethal big-wave surf break offshore. A woman in white lace walks the road in fog, widely identified as Doña María del Carmen Barreto, a Mexican-era landowner who lost the land in the 1840s.

There are two Ghost Trees at Pescadero Point, and both earned the name. One is a cluster of bleached, dead Monterey cypress trunks twisted by a century of salt wind into shapes that read a lot like figures once the fog moves in. The other is a big-wave break that lives directly offshore, in water cold and deep enough to have killed people who came to ride it. Both are reached from the same turnout on 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach, and both carry the same ghost.

She's called the Lady in Lace. Drivers see her in the middle of the road on foggy nights, barefoot, in a long white lace gown, walking with no hurry. She's there when the headlights catch her and gone by the time anyone gets out of the car. S.E. Schlosser's Spooky California retells one of the older versions: a courting couple sitting on the rocks at Pescadero Point under a full moon watched her walk right past them, glowing, her face "set and sad," down to the beach, where she vanished into thin air.

Folklore pins her to Doña María del Carmen Barreto Garcia Madariaga, who held the 4,426-acre Rancho Pescadero through the 1830s and 40s. She was widowed in 1841, remarried Juan Madariaga in 1844, and sold the rancho to John Romie in the mid-1840s. Wikipedia is blunt about why: "Maria most likely could not pay the taxes on the land, and was forced to sell it." The folklore fixes her death at 1856, and says that's when the sightings started. It's a folklore date, not an archival one, but it's the one the stories use.

The second layer of the haunting is the surf break. Carmel surfer Don Curry named the wave Ghost Trees after the bleached trunks on the point, and it was first seriously surfed in the late 1990s. The Carmel Canyon focuses swell onto a shallow reef and stacks 60-foot faces at the takeoff. On December 4, 2007, Monterey waterman Peter Davi paddled out without a board leash, broke off from his group, and never made it back in. Santa Cruz surfers Anthony Ruffo and Osh Bartlett found him floating in a kelp patch. The coroner pronounced him dead at 1:28 p.m. He was 45. Some surfers will tell you the place has felt different since.

The cypress themselves deserve a minute. Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) is a relict endangered species that only grows natively in two small groves on this stretch of coast. The protected status is why the dead ones are still upright: nobody's allowed to cut them down, so they weather in place. Local photographers have been shooting the same trunks since the 1950s, and the same twisted shapes appear in pictures from the 60s, the 80s, and last week.

Guidebooks number the turnout differently depending on the edition, so skip the stop number and just look for the Pescadero Point pullout between the Lone Cypress and the gate at Carmel. Most tourists don't make it this far. Come at dusk, when the fog rolls in off the Pacific and the dead trees stop being dramatic and start being figural. That's when the road has its reputation, and that's when a woman in lace steps out in front of cars above a surf break that killed Peter Davi.