Dead Woman’s Crossing

The place name is the real story. In July 1905 Katie DeWitt James, a schoolteacher from Custer City in western Oklahoma Territory, filed for divorce and left by train with her fourteen-month-old daughter, Lulu Belle, to visit a cousin in Ripley. When her father, Henry DeWitt, lost touch with her, a detective named Sam Bartell took up the search. On 28 July in Weatherford he learned that she and the baby had stayed at the house of a man named William Moore after being brought there by a woman called Fannie Norton, also known as Mrs. Ham. The next morning, witnesses said, Norton, Katie and the baby set out in a buggy; the buggy was seen entering a field near Deer Creek, and Norton came out alone about forty-five minutes later. A boy was asked to take the baby home, and the child, unharmed, had blood on her clothes.

Katie’s remains were found near Deer Creek on 31 August 1905, and her father confirmed her identity; her husband, Martin James, took custody of the child. Norton was traced to Shawnee, where after questioning she died in what accounts describe as a suicide, taking whatever she knew with her. Sources disagree on the outcome: one summary says Bartell closed the case on 5 September after finding a revolver that matched the wound and suggesting robbery, while the Oklahoma Today editor Nathan Gunter and other writers say the motive was never established and the murder never solved. Katie’s husband was never linked to the killing. The old wooden crossing was later replaced, and a concrete bridge nearby took the name that locals gave the spot.

The ghost story grew up around that bridge and the unincorporated community that bears the name. According to local lore, on certain nights Katie can be heard calling for her lost baby; travellers have said they saw a woman in the woods holding a baby who vanished when approached, and others describe blue orbs of light drifting over and through the trees. Gunter, who grew up about a mile from the crossing and has spent many late nights there, has written that he never saw or heard anything out of the ordinary, and that in 2011 he and friends produced a spectral image by painting a figure with a flashlight in a long-exposure photograph. The tale is a good example of how real tragedy gets turned into a roadside legend.

Katie and her daughter were real people, and her death was a crime against them; the legend should not eclipse that. The crossing is a public road with neighbouring farms, so visitors should keep to the road, avoid trespassing and not linger at night. The story appears in Michael Norman and Beth Scott’s Haunted Heritage, in Wikipedia’s list of reportedly haunted places in the United States and in many Oklahoma travel pieces.

A woman’s cry or call for a child heard at night, a woman holding a baby that vanishes, and blue lights moving in the trees. Reports are anecdotal, and the Oklahoma Today editor who has visited many times says he has seen nothing.

The creek crossing and concrete bridge over Deer Creek northeast of Weatherford, and the adjoining woods; the stories are told for night-time visits.

The crossing appears in Haunted Heritage (2007) by Michael Norman and Beth Scott, in Oklahoma Today’s Halloween features and in many travel blogs, and it is one of Oklahoma’s best-known roadside ghost legends.