There is a tale of an event years ago in Ramapo, New York. Two boys wanted to go to a high school dance. So they borrowed a car and drove off toward the high school. Along the road they came across a young girl who was hitch hiking. She told them her name was Lavender. She happened to also be wearing a lavender colored dress. She was on her way to the dance as well so they offered her a ride. They arrived at the dance, and one of the boys in particular was especially taken with Lavender and they danced the night away. His friend however, did not recall his friend being able to dance at all.
It was getting late and it was time to leave. When Lavender got into the car, one of the boys noticed that she was cold to the touch. He put his jacket around her to keep her warm. She told them where she lived and as they approached the bridge to cross into the village where she lived, she suddenly told them to stop and let her out at the bridge. They did so and they drove off. The next day, the boys realized that Lavender still had the boy’s jacket. They decided to drive to her village to find her and get it back. They started through the town stopping at each home asking if they knew Lavender. Each home told them they could not help them. Until finally they knocked on the door of an old lady’s house. She answered and told them that yes, she did know Lavender. She was her daughter. They told her she must have been mistaken because Lavender was much too young to be her daughter. She said “No, that sounds like her”. And she showed them a picture of her and sure enough it was her. However, she said Lavender died years ago when she was struck by a truck on the bridge on her way to the school dance. She told them that she was buried in the Ramapo cemetery. The boys did not believe her as they saw her just the night before.
On the way home they decided to stop by the cemetery and see for themselves if her grave was really there. As they walked into the cemetery, they saw the boy’s jacket hanging over a tombstone. It was the grave of Lavender.
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The first time I read about “Lavender” was in an 1954 or 1956 issue of Readers digest Magazine. The story was a bid different, it began with the explanation as how the girl obtained the dress which was descriped ad an evening gown: She had seen it at a Church rumage sale and grabbed it, so taken was she by the garment. I can’t recall reading that the boy’s car was a borrowed one. But I do recall that they did drop her off at a house to which they returned the following day in order to retrieve the jacket.
I also read this story when I was about 10 years old and think it was a Readers Digest book. I also remember her finding the dress at a rummage sale. I was telling this story to my 8 year old granddaughter…she loves it! Was happy to find this story online as it brought back the story and happy memories.
I believe this story because not only one person saw her but both boys this is a good story!!
It’s a good story. I love stories like this and I know we all do! : ) I don’t know how you feel about it, though, but isn’t it “interesting” that the one boy happened to have worn a jacket that he borrowed, and thus ‘needed back’ which then prompted him to search Lavender out— then to discover she had died many years earlier. It’s (first off) written for T.V. … then, there are so many ‘spin offs’…. with the white lady stories… or the one dressed in white and her sweater was found on the tombstone…. et cetera.
But as one very wise person has said,… there are truths initiating the tales…
And there well may be! I find I love these tales myself, and actually hope that there is some factual basis. It’s almost like finding out that Santa Claus is real.
Corliss (fourcats77@sbcglobal.net) What do you think?
When i heard this story i thought that one of the boys had borrowed the jacket and then they were also borrowing a truck and the girl had been hit by a semi truck and that the boy’s name were Joey and tom I think and that Joey was the one who was dancing with lavender. Any way this is by far the best told story out of the results i got when i searched this story after i saw it on Haunted History.
I live around Ramapo, and I never heard of this Legend.. Im not saying it isnt true, there are alot of Strange happening’s in and around Ramapo… I would like to find out Who is Lavender ?
Brings back memories. I first read the “Lavender” ghost story in a compendium of stories that I bought in a book fair in school, back in the 1960s.
I hadn’t thought about that story since then until I read your post.
there is also a story like this that happened in nc exept the girl’s name was lydia. too many stories about this ghost.
certain rainy nights, where US 70-A twists around a sweeping curve that passes by an old, overgrown underpass, drivers will see a young woman in a white evening dress standing by the side of the road, desperately trying to flag down a passing car. If anyone pulls over to help the young lady, she climbs meekly into the back seat of the car and explains that her name is Lydia, and that she’s just been to a dance and now she’s trying to get home. She gives the driver an address not too far away, and he kindly agrees to take her there. The driver may try to engage Lydia in conversation, but she seems distracted and in a world of her own, so he just leaves her in a respectful silence and concentrates on the road ahead.
When the car pulls in to the address that the young woman gave, the chivalrous driver invariably hops out to open the door for her — only to discover that she has vanished.
Perplexed, the man goes to the door, where an old woman answers. The man explains that he’s picked up a young lady named Lydia by the overpass who asked to be brought to this address, but she’s no longer in the car. He wonders if she may have run out before he could open the door, and he just wants to know if she’s safe and if everything is as it should be.
A faint, pained smile of recognition passes over the old woman’s face, as she reaches for a picture in a silver frame sitting on a table by the door. It’s a photograph of the young woman the man drove to the house.
“Lydia was my daughter,” the old woman says, “She died in a car wreck by that overpass in 1923. You’re not the first one, and I suppose you won’t be the last. Every so often, her spirit flags down a passing driver. I suppose she still doesn’t understand what happened to her. I suppose she’s still trying to get home.”
That’s why the overgrown underpass near Jamestown is called Lydia’s Bridge. Drive past it on a rainy night and you may see Lydia, too.
anishing hitchhikers are a staple of American folklore. Seemingly every state in the Union has some variant on the story of a young woman who died in a car crash on the way home and is still trying to make her way back home. In his book The Vanishing Hitchhiker, Professor Jan Harold Brunvand records multiple variants of the story, including one of eleven recorded in North Carolina in the Sixties. The legend seems to date from even before the invention of the automobile, as there are recorded versions with ghosts hopping on buggies or horses. Sometimes the mysterious passenger is a religious figure — a Catholic saint, a Mormon wandering Nephite, or even Jesus in person — on the road to deliver a helpful warning message for the driver about the impending apocalypse.
But like any oral tradition, these stories have shifted through the years. A few central points of the North Carolina legend remain stable – the girl’s white dress, her sitting in the back seat, and the fact that it’s raining seem to turn up in every version. It’s only relatively recently, when the influence of the internet began to give our oral culture a more static format, that the variant where the girl is named Lydia and specifically identified with the overgrown bridge has become the most often told one.
Versions of the story circulating in the Sixties usually insisted that the girl’s name was “Mary” and that she was trying to return home to Greensboro, having attended a dance in Raleigh, and the point where the driver picks her up is usually given as somewhere along US 70. But the bonus of having a specific, and genuinely creepy, destination associated with the story seems to have fixed our homegrown hitchhiker halfway to High Point and perpetually flagging down passing motorists from Lydia’s Bridge. The fact that Lydia’s Bridge is not actually a bridge, but a culvert to carry the railroad tracks over a now-dry stream bed is accounted for, in the wonderful way that oral tradition compensates for unhelpful reality, by the story’s usually specifying that the road “has been rerouted.” Recently, the tidbit confirming that a ghost hunter found the death certificate for a “Lydia Jane M ” who died on December 23 (or 31st) 1923 from “fatal injuries from a motoring accident” has been circulating with online versions of the story.
o what does the story of the phantom hitchhiker mean? Why do we keep telling it time and time again? Its probably worth noticing that most versions of the story place the accident sometime in the 1920s, a time when the death of a young woman in an automobile accident would have been a relative rarity, and not the unfortunately common occurrence it is on today’s overcrowded roads. There may be similar folk memories of that first, fatal accident which took the life of a young woman from the town kept alive in the phantom hitchhiker stories. There also may be something in the way the story captures the excitement of a teenager’s first few years driving, where making the journey from Raleigh to Greensboro alone at night can seem like an adventure and where anything is possible — even picking up a hitchhiker who died nearly a century ago.
I” Belive, This too” Be true!! Becouse” It” is.
THIS” WAS TOLD, TO ME 1ST HAND.
BY A PERSON, RELATED!! TO”” THE FAMILY
LOOK” IT UP. !!! ROBET.
BY
I heard the same story…except her foot was a hook.