Best of 2000: Best Ghost

The Lady in White
Vallecito Stage Depot
County Highway S2, south of Scissors Crossing

Some say she comes at night. Others say you first hear the horses snorting outside the door. But the Lady in White has haunted many a visitor to the Vallecito stage depot on the Great Southern Overland Route of 1849. The salt grass sod hut stands as isolated today as the evening the Lady in White staggered in off one of the Butterfield stagecoaches 140 years ago. History books say she looked very frail, sick from bad food and the stress of traveling, all the way from Tipton, Missouri. In the dark little adobe alcove off the kitchen, she lay down and soon expired on the dirt floor. In her white dress they found papers and the name of her betrothed, a gold prospector she was set to marry up in Sacramento.

Aficionados of the Butterfield stagecoach route, including artist Marjorie Reed who illustrated four books about it, say in the silence of the desert night at Vallecito you hear horses' snorts and a lady's sighs.