White Lady

October's bright blue skies are a fitting backdrop to a landscape ablaze with gold, russet, and blazing orange foliage.  It is the time to enjoy the juicy crunch of a Macintosh or Delicious apple and feel the still warm earth between your fingers as you cover up spring bulbs with their blankets of soil for their winter slumber.

But as the month grows older and the wind grows sharper, it is also time for pumpkins, broomsticks, scarecrows and witches.  In Irondequoit it marks the time for the reappearance of the White Lady who comes to haunt the town Historian's office.  Every October she seems to drift silently through the archives in her ghostly robes rattling the old maps and rifling through the files and hundreds of photographs.  She silently shakes her head in bewilderment over the e-mails that fly through cyber space demanding to know her name and where she is buried.  She smiles enigmatically when she eavesdrops on the frantic explanations of the harried lady who occupies this office as she vainly tries to persuade callers that the White Lady is only a myth, the product of someone's fertile imagination years ago, a tale passed down by generations of Irondequoiters and perpetuated by prankish high schoolers who garbed in white sheets drifted out of the woods in Durand-Eastman park.

Any elementary student can tell a new comer the White Lady's story with variations.  She lived in what is now Durand-Eastman park at least one hundred years ago.  Her teen age daughter disappeared on a walk to the Lake Ontario beach.  And her mother spent the rest of her life searching for her but never finding any clues as to her Disappearance.  After her death, lovers who parked, first in buggies and then as time passed in cars along the lakeshore saw rising out of the autumn mist a lady in white who drifted in on the fog accompanied by two white German Shepherds, or Doberman Pinschers, or pure white Great Danes (whatever canine breed the storyteller prefers).  The lady and her four footed friends would search vehicles for poor hapless maidens in the clutches of evildoers.  Nowhere in the variations of this tale is it ever implied that she found any.

Her story and many others that feature Irondequoit's own homegrown ghosts and goblins will be told once again by the witches of the Haunted House formerly known as the Pioneer House Museum on October 28 and 29.  Reservations for these performances should be made by calling the Historian's Office at 336-7269.  The spirits pictured in the photograph like all good witches wish to remain anonymous and will cast spells on anyone who reveals their identity.