Our journey to find a good story to make people think I’m interesting (ghost-hunt) began at Wopsononock lookout. We were right en route to the bend where the White Lady’s carriage fell, plunging her into the depths of a ravine, which is obviously the best way to start a hiking trip. After an inspiring photo session (evidence for the police, just in case), we found our way stumbling down the forest on Wopsononock mountain.
As the legend goes, the White Lady was staying at the Wopsononock Hotel for her honeymoon. Now, the Wopsononock Hotel burned down far, far before we ever got there. But there was one thing that could never join it in the flames- the train tracks. These train tracks were exactly what made the hotel so accessible which exponentially increased its popularity. And there was a pretty good chance they hadn’t been removed.
Our thought process was that if we find the train tracks, we find the hotel, and we can find where she fell, and perhaps anything interesting about what happened to the White Lady. Seems solid, right?
Well, in a shocking turn of events, there is in fact no hiking trail on Wopsy Mountain that will bring you to abandoned train tracks, since the only person who would want such a thing would have to be crazy (shoutout to my group mates, and of course, Professor Tuttle). This meant that we got lost almost immediately since paper maps are supremely unhelpful in discovering which is left and which is right when all you have to navigate is a wide variety of the exact same tree.
By the time the sun set, we’d ended up falling from low cliffs, stumbling upon stone chairs, and climbing down the mountain onto the literal highway, and yet, no sign of the White Lady. We decided it was time to bring out the big guns: actually driving down Devil’s Elbow.
A constant in the White Lady’s legend is that while you drive alone along Devil’s Elbow in the dead of night, all alone in your car with only the stars for company, a pretty woman dressed in white will ask for a ride. She will be quiet and kind, and once your car leaves the highway, she will disappear.
In yet another shocking turn of events, (debatable) she didn’t show. Which was actually kind of disappointing because I was actually hoping to see her, just a little. Perhaps we should’ve taken the trip one at a time, each of us driving alone. But since the vast majority of us could not drive (and the ring problem of not having an actual car) it didn’t end up working out like that.
For all that we ended a ghost-hunting trip notably ghost-less, there’s something exciting about running around a mountain and designating every fallen scrap of metal and brick as a relic of the Wopsononock Hotel. We may not have been able to meet the White Lady, but I think we learned a lot about her on our trip. Maybe next time she’ll see fit to say hello and give us a bit of a fright. Where’s the fun without a few near-death experiences?