Lady of Stowe Lake
Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is over a thousand acres of beautifully maintained fields and trees. Built in the 1870s the park holds an art museum (among other things) and is home to the National AIDS Memorial Grove. Close to the very center of the park is beautiful man-made Stowe Lake, and Stowe Lakes tragic haunting.
The story goes back to the early 1900s when it was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle in January of 1908, when a young man was stopped by police and told them he reportedly saw ” a thin tall figure” blocking his automobile, “it was wet and it seemed to shine. It was barefoot, I didn’t notice the face. I was frightened and anxious to leave.” The young man then fled the park, only to be stopped by the police a few minutes later. Whether this was the beginning of the Stowe Lake haunting or not is hard to say as the reports on when it began are a little uncertain.
The story is a sad but not unfamiliar tale as many areas around the world have a similar one, it begins possibly only a few years before the Chronicle’s 1908 article on the “thin, tall figure”, when Golden Gate Park was still very new. A young mother is with her three children, two older children and a baby in a stroller, when tired from a full day of roaming the park, she sits on a bench over looking Stowe Lake and it’s center island Strawberry Hill to rest her feet a bit. Her older children are allowed to play close by while the stroller safe next to the bench, the baby asleep. Someone she recognizes stops by her bench and the two begin a lengthy conversation. The Mother keeps an eye on the oldest children but dismisses the baby as it is right next to her and out of harms way. She continues talking to her companion for a good long while.Finally her friend sees it’s time to move on and departs. the young Mother collects her oldest children, but when she reaches for the stroller it is gone. The story is unclear of whether someone took the baby and later dumped it or if the stroller rolled down into the lake with the baby inside, but all accounts agree that the Mother is anxious and fearful as she wonders that area of the park , frantically asking people if they have seen her baby. Horror dawns inside her head as she realizes what may have happened, grief stricken she wades into Stowe Lake to search for her missing child and never comes back up. The baby’s body is found in the lake not far from where it’s Mother sat chatting.
The Mother has been seen for over a hundred years now, pale, wearing a white dress,sometimes soaking wet, and almost always barefoot wondering the Stowe Lake/Strawberry Hill area of the park. Sometimes she is just weeping silently, looking out over one of the bridges that connects Strawberry Hill and the rest of the park and she’ll disappear as you get closer. Other times people have reported witnessing a young woman wading frantically into the water. Another common report is people seeing a tall, pale woman, with dark hair and a distraught demeanor wondering the area, sometimes at night the witnesses will be accosted by her and asked if they’ve seen her baby, when they go leave to seek help they look back to see if she’s following but she has disappeared.
This ghostly legend is also tied in with the history of a certain statue that is not far from Stowe Lake. The Pioneer Woman and Children that resides next to the park’s pioneer cabin has been the park since 1915 and is the only statue of a woman in the entire one thousand plus acres of Golden Gate Park. It’s a simple statue of a Mother with outstretched hands and two tiny children in front of her, but its how people tie into the Stowe Lake ghost story that makes it a bit more interesting. According to some the Ghost of Stowe Lake can inhabit the bronze statue allowing it to move. People have reported seeing it’s head turn as if searching. The original article in the San Francisco Chronicle stated the figure the young man saw had a “shine” to it leaving many others down the years to suggest that the statue walks at night. On certain nights some believe you can see a third, smaller child next to the statues older children as if the mother and child from the original story have been reunited in some way.
The Ghost Cop
Although Golden Gate Park is covered in beautiful mini forests, flowers, and man-made lakes due to its position of being right in the heart of San Francisco it is also riddled with roads for cars to drive on as well as hiking and bike trails, but because of weather or maintenance some of the trails and inlets have “No parking!” or “KEEP OUT!” signs posted. What the park does lack is an abundance of lights.According to spectators the park can be quite dark and ominous at night which makes this next urban legend a bit strange and a bit amusing.
The story reportedly goes something like this:
A couple is driving through the park at night,they are late for a get together and time being tight the driver decides to speed through to get to where they’re going quicker. Suddenly they see what every driver dreads seeing in their rear view mirror, red, white, and blue swirling lights a sure sign that they are being pulled over. Not being the type to disregard a police officer, the driver pulls over. The encounter is normal one as the police officer writes up the ticket and everyone goes on their merry way.
A few days later the man who was driving decides that since he’ll be in town anyway he might as well pay the ticket in person. When he goes to pay his ticket he is informed that there is no record of the ticket ever being written. Happy he doesn’t have to pay the man goes to leave but not before the officer asks him to “hold on” something is very very off about the ticket and not just the fact it was never put in the system.
The police officer asks the guy ” Are you trying to play a game with me son?” understandably confused the guy shakes his head asking the officer what it is that’s bothering him so much and the police officer asks him to describe the police officer that pulled him over to him, as he finishes he notices that Mr. Officer is looking a little pale. After asking what is wrong the other man looks him dead in the eye and replies. “Well, you see that ticket? Looks new to me, but can’t possibly be new. The officer you just described, the one who supposedly wrote that ticket out for you has been dead for more than ten years.”
The above story is usually told the exact way, sometimes the driver is parked in a no parking zone, or has his headlights off at night. No one is exactly sure the origins of the story, but it’s almost always at night, and the dead officer has almost always been dead for “more than ten years.” Although no one reports the officer as being dangerous or violent in any way, it is suggested that if you ever see a police officer trying to pull you over while driving through Golden Gate Park that you do not pull over until you are out of the park as supposedly the ghost cop can not leave the park, makes one believe that maybe he or she is tied to the park in some way. Although trying to explain to the police officer pulling you over about why you didn’t do so immediately was because you thought he was a ghost may garner you some odd looks or a trip to your local psych ward!