Lost Lydia

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Lonely stretches of road all over the country are said to be haunted by the spirit of lost hitchhiker ladies, always trying to reach their final destination.

---

Believed to be a picture of Annie Lydia Jackson (1885-1920) (Source - FindaGrave)

Like the opening of any gothic novel, it was a dark, stormy and foggy night on High Point Road (present day Main Street). A motorist carefully approached an underpass in Jamestown, North Carolina. The headlights illuminated a distant figure on the roadside. He thought perhaps it was a stranded driver, but he soon saw a woman wearing a long dress.  Her dark hair blew around her expressionless face, and like an automaton she waved her arm to signal for him to stop. He pulled over to let her enter the vehicle despite a strange ripple that consumed his body that all was not right.

The unsmiling woman gave him an address to a house in High Point, and stared out the windshield. He tried to make small talk, but got no answer. He finally gave up and they drove in silence. His attention was drawn away to reading the numbers of the houses, until he reached the right one. When he turned to her, she was gone. He didn't believe what his eyes were telling him, so he walked up to the house she indicated. ​

---

Accident that claimed the life of Annie Jackson c.June 1920

A sad woman answered the door, and since it seemed she had this conversation before, she brought a photograph of a woman, and told the Good Samaritan her daughter Lydia died in a car accident years ago. The place of the wreck was the underpass. He recognized the woman as the one that rode next to him.

Throughout the years there were varied reports of this sad ghost.

​Fast forward to present day, and it's believed the identity of the phantom hitchhiker has been discovered. 

On June 20, 1920, at about 10 p.m. Annie Lydia Jackson traveled with J.C. Hutchinson, Charlie Cross and Nettie Lethco along High Point Greensboro Road. Hutchinson was driving the auto, and took a sharp curve too fast. The vehicle rolled, and Annie was thrown and killed when her head struck the pavement; Cross and Lethco were treated for their injuries, and Hutchinson fled from the scene. They all survived except Annie.

---

Charlie Cross who escaped with his life in 1920, was killed in auto crash in 1937

Annie Jackson was 35 years old, unmarried with no children and worked at a chemical company. She had been living at a local hotel for several months. She was buried at Holt's Chapel Cemetery on the grounds of the Bessemer United Methodist Church that was demolished in 1932. She joined her parents, a sister Mary Jackson Dunston and a 9-year-old nephew Byron who were buried there.

Four days after the accident J.C. Hutchinson, who ironically was an auto mechanic, was arrested on a charge of reckless driving. He told police he had left the scene because he was trying to find a phone in order to call for help. He was released on a $500 bond, and the outcome of the charge against him is unknown.

Nettie Bell one of the passengers, married and died in 1970.

Charles "Charlie" Cross however was a different story. Seventeen years later, he died in almost the same way as Annie Jackson. The vehicle he was traveling in skidded and crashed into a tree near Sophia. Three other people involved in the accident survived. He was 33 years old.

---

Lydia's Bridge c.2013

If Annie Jackson does turns out to be the phantom Lydia, the scene of her mother showing her picture to the motorist who gave her a lift is not entirely accurate. When Annie Jackson lost her life, both of her parents were dead​. She was not a young woman, leaving a prom or a dance and wearing a long, white dress; in other words she's not the romanticized version usually given of ghostly hitchhikers, but that doesn't take way that she encountered sudden death. Her family lived about 17 miles away from where the accident took place, so perhaps the place she's trying to reach is the apartment house where she lived.

The road beneath the bridge where the accident occurred, eventually was rerouted and Lydia's Bridge fell into disuse and was taken over by vegetation.

Nancy Roberts wrote in her book An Illustrated Guide to Ghosts & Mysterious Occurrences in the Old North State (1959), where in 1923, Lydia was killed in an accident on her way home from a dance in Raleigh, and that she was the origin of the ghostly sightings dating back to 1924.

The source of Roberts' story was Burke Hardison, who described an encounter with a young woman as he traveled to High Point on a foggy night. He was a young man attending NC State University in 1924, and he drove the forlorn lady to an address where she promptly disappeared, and her elderly mother tells him the story of her deceased daughter.

The only Lydia who died in 1923 was Lydia McCarthy, a 76-year-old widow who died from heart disease.

There is a reference to a death in 1923  for Harvey Yow who died on December 29, 1923 after attending a dance in Carthage. Two of his companions were injured, but only he died.

Another candidate who doesn't exactly fit the bill is Lydia Moize, a 17-year-old who died in 1925 from tuberculosis, and is buried in Gibsonville City Cemetery.

On the trail of the elusive ghost there is Lydia Fields who died on December 12, 1921. She was 60 years old, and died later the same day after being struck down by a truck, and dragged 30 feet beneath its wheels.

Perhaps Lydia is strictly an urban myth, or the circumstances of her death and her name are entirely wrong, and what she's hoping for every time she hitches a ride is to tell her story, and what her real name is.

---