December 25, 2003

Plains Folk: Legends

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

"Up in very north North Dakota," the story goes, "near Walhalla or LeRoy, there is a grassy path known as White Ladies Lane. It is a grassy, weedy, un-kept-up dirt road off a gravel road.

"As you drive down the road you come upon a bridge over a small creek. If you drive there at night, as many teenagers like to test out, you can see a woman hanging from the bridge in a wedding dress."

The students in my American History classes at North Dakota State University, bless their hearts, have been telling stories again. It’s a new harvest of legends of the plains.

The prologue to the White Lady legend is that the young woman had been party to a shotgun wedding, religious parents compelling the couple to marry shortly after the child was born. The day of the wedding, the bride checked the crib and found the baby dead. She then hung herself from the bridge in her wedding dress.

"Many have seen the figure of the woman hanging there," my informant avers. "Some will say that it is the woman haunting, while others will say it is the lights of Walhalla off in the distance."

Quite a few of these stories are linked to legend trips, that is, night-time adventures of teenagers who go to scary places and hope something goes bump. They are place-specific. "I’m from a small town in western North Dakota called Hazen," begins another one of these. "About 10 miles north of town there’s the remnants of a town called Krem."

This legend-tripper recounts the excursion off the highway, up a series of gravel roads, past the old Krem cemetery, filled mainly with infant burials. After that you come to another cemetery, this one filled with iron crosses and a large wooden cross tipped over under a pine tree. And beyond that is the old Krem townsite, now retaining only a small group of brick and rock houses.

The observant excursionist will notice, some 50 yards outside the second cemetery, a lone headstone with inscriptions in German and Latin. The story of that headstone came to my informant by way of a lady in the rest home.

The deceased was a preacher, we are told. "He was newly out of seminary school, and he was in his mid-20s. He carried on a successful church for a few years, but then a little girl turned up missing. . . . The preacher committed suicide rather than face the charges.

"Well, the story goes, if you drive through the circle of the old brick and rock houses three times, the man will appear and speak to you."

That’s a story with powerful elements of history in it. There are new ones emerging, though, just as surely as fieldstone surfaces every spring. North of Maddock, another writer tells us, there is a house along Highway 30. A high school student named Bob lived there, and he noticed some strange things happening. A tall kid, his feet sometimes stuck out from the blankets at night, and they became freezing cold. When he awoke, his breath made steam in the frosty air but when he got up, the room temperature was comfortable. His family eventually moved away, to Texas, and the house stood vacant.

"One night this summer after the 4th of July," the narrator recounts, "a bunch of my friends went out there." Lights were on in the house, but when they entered, through a basement window, the lights cut out. "They went to the kitchen and all the cupboard doors were shut. All of a sudden they started opening and slamming shut."

The gang of adventurers fled to their cars, where they discovered that several of them had gashes on their bodies, although no tears in their clothing. "One of the girls called Bob in Texas and he told her that sort of stuff happened to him a lot. This is a true story; one of my best friends was out there and came back to town hysterical. To this day nine of them still have the exact same story." Which means it must be true.

###

Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2942, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

Click here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern that is suitable for printing. 
(1.5MB b&w photo)

Click here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern wearing a hat that is suitable for printing.
(1.3MB b&w photo)