Niles Canyon Road and the White Witch

California · United States · Cemetery

California's most persistent woman in white is tied to a fatal carriage accident in Niles Canyon, and to newspaper archives that do not support it.

Niles Canyon Road runs through the hills of Alameda County, California, along what is now the Highway 84 and 680 corridor. The legend attached to it concerns a young woman named Lowery, travelling by horse drawn carriage to a wedding, possibly her own, near the way stop at Scott's Corners.

As the story goes, the horses were spooked by one of the first automobiles ever seen in the canyon, she was thrown from the carriage, and a second car struck her where she lay. That would have made her the first person in the area killed by a motor vehicle. Since then drivers have reported a woman in white near the cemetery and along the road, often together with lights that do not belong to any traffic.

There is also a paper trail, and it complicates things. A researcher working through a journalist's donated clippings, which reach back to the turn of the twentieth century, found that the reporter who first covered the haunting in the 1920s noted no record of any such fatal accident in the canyon, and county records of the period did not support one either.

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Niles Canyon Road and the White Witch is in California, United States.