Tuesday, June 24, 2008

OKLAHOMA PARANORMAL GUIDEBOOK: Dead Woman's Crossing

Conflicting stories exist that suggest that the germ of a real event, the kidnapping and murder of Mrs. Katie James in 1905, and a later tall tale/urban myth from university students merged to create a jumble of ghostly tales related to this general area. For more information:
Dead Woman’s Crossing:
http://www.ghost-investigators.com/Stories/view_story.php?story_num=15

Dead Woman’s Bridge – Map:
http://wikimapia.org/4525854/Dead_Woman_s_Crossing

Prairie Ghosts has a pretty good account of it, except he misnames the detective who help search. Sam Bartell was a wellknown early US Marshall and local police officer and at the time was with the Oklahoma Detective Agency.
http://wikimapia.org/4525854/Dead_Woman_s_Crossing

For more information on Barter see the entry on him at MYSTORICAL.

If you can find in a library:
Brenner, Susan Woolf. "Dead Woman;s Crossing: The Legacy of a Territorial Murder." Chronicles of Oklahoma: Volume LX (Fall 1982).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm from there, I've been there many times. It's pretty creepy, but there's nothing overtly unusual there, from what I've seen anyway.

MARILYN A. HUDSON, MLIS said...

Yes, others have said the same thing...it may be that this is a label that was created for identification purposes and imaginations have run wild since then. As you will note from the post on place names with bizarre elements (Devil, Dead, etc.) their are a lot of places that no doubt be more interesting...investigation wise.

Kit_Kat said...

Actually, it's said (at least according to my family) that when they found her bones as well as around the time when the bridge was destroyed that the phenomena stopped.