Ghost Story: The lady in white at Stow Lake

In honor of Halloween, we thought it would be fun? to revisit the 100+ year old legend of the ghost that reportedly haunts Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park.

The gruesome tale has a couple of variations but the premise is that a woman was at Stow Lake with her young child who fell into the water and drowned. The mother went in after the child and also perished.

In the first version, the mother and child are boating on the lake. In another telling, the mother, with her baby carriage, stops to chat with a friend while walking the lake. She is then horrified when she turns around a few moments later and the carriage – with the child inside – has disappeared. The mother then runs into the lake and drowns by distress.

Ever since then, the bereaved mother, wearing a white Victorian dress (and of fair hair) appears to visitors at night at Stow Lake (especially when it’s foggy).

Those who claim to have encountered her say they were approached by the lady ghost, who begged for help with finding her child. (Watch this ABC Localish episode to hear a ghosthunter debate whether the lady in white is a “residual haunting” or an “intelligent haunting”…).

The first documented report of a ghost at the lake appeared in a January 6, 1908 story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

According to the article, a speeding car full of revelers was stopped by the police in Golden Gate Park. All of the passengers were ashen, and the driver, Mr. Arthur Pigeon, told police they’d seen a “thing” directly in front of their vehicle, “clad in a luminous white robe, and holding its arms extended as though to stop the progress of the machine.”

Police asked to be taken to the scene of the “ghosting”, but by the time Mr. Pigeon and his police escorts reached the spot where he’d seen the apparition, it was no more.

“Captain Gleeson of the Park Station was informed of the affair,” the Chronicle wrote, “and gave orders that any ghost answering this description is to be arrested on sight.” [Editor’s note: How does one handcuff a ghost?]

No one has ever located a report about dual drowning(s) at Stow Lake from the turn of the century. But that may be due to the 1906 earthquake, in which fires destroyed all of the city’s coroner and police reports.

Early newspaper reports do paint a grisly tableau of Golden Gate Park, which was a common destination for suicides. So much so that the San Francisco Call, an early city newspaper, ran a Sunday feature in 1900 called “The Park Suicides”.

According to that Call article, 1 in every 12 suicides in San Francisco took place in the park from 1890 to 1900. In the list of suicides printed with the story, four of them were women, including one was was never identified.

The legend has all the makings of a good ghost story – a tragic death, self-sacrifice, and a mother’s neverending grief – against the backdrop of a dark lake that is shrouded in fog almost nightly.

So feel free to take that night walk around Stow Lake. But keep your eyes peeled for the lady in white. If you do see her, you better have a good answer when she asks, “Have you seen my baby?”

Sarah B.