A soaking-wet young woman in a white dress flags cars along the shore road at White Rock Lake in Dallas, asks to be driven home, and leaves nothing in the back seat but a puddle. The story has been in print since 1943. The lake's own historian cannot find her death.
The woman who flags cars down along the shore road at White Rock Lake in Dallas is soaking wet. She wears a white dress, she steps out of the dark when the headlights catch her, and what she wants is a ride home. She takes the back seat, always, and she says why: her clothes will ruin the upholstery. She gives an address a few minutes off the water. When the car pulls up to it, the back seat is empty and there is a puddle where she was sitting.
People have placed her on East Lawther Drive, at Garland Road, and on Winstead Drive, and they have been telling it that way since at least 1943. That is the year the oldest known version went into print, in a piece called "The Ghost of White Rock" by Anne Clark, collected in the Texas Folklore Society volume Backwoods to Border. In Clark's telling, a couple parked on the shore switch on their headlights and find a girl in a sheer, wet white dress who says her boat overturned. She rides in the rumble seat so she will not soak the other young woman. She gives an address in Oak Cliff. The man who answers the door there is her father, and he tells them his daughter drowned three weeks ago, and that they are the third couple to bring her home.
Ten years later, Dallas Morning News columnist Frank X. Tolbert printed a different one inside a book about Neiman Marcus. In that version the driver is Guy Malloy, the store's display man, and the passenger is a blonde in an expensive damp dress that Malloy's wife recognizes as Neiman Marcus merchandise. The address is on Gaston Avenue in Lakewood. The man at the door says his blonde daughter fell from a pier and drowned two years earlier. She had been a devoted customer of the store.
The address keeps moving between tellings, and so does the drowning. Sally Rodriguez, the lake's unofficial historian, has spent years hunting for a death that fits any of them. "I've found lots of stories," she told WFAA, "but no stories that match that." She notes that lakes in Ohio and Michigan tell it about their own girls.
What White Rock does have is a drowning record. Dozens of them sit in the Dallas Morning News archives, some of the bodies never recovered. Ghost Texas and Central Track both name a Louise Ford Davis. In their accounts she drowned herself here on July 5, 1935, after her sister found a note and called the police. The same two accounts date the recovery of Rose Stone, 35, of Mansfield, to November 24, 1942, the year before Clark's ghost went to press.
Both accounts record what Stone had on. A sweater and a skirt.
