There are things we pass by every day on our commutes — landmarks that help us know exactly where we are. For listener Carol Keck, one of those landmarks is a little unusual: a recurring patch of fog she drives through on her way to Jamestown.
“It can be fine everywhere else. It seems like it must be a low-lying area, but I go up the hill to get to it,” she said. “It’s like you’re going into Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It’s a dark and misty forest, and you don’t know what is gonna pop out at you.”
The fog isn’t there every day, but Keck sees it often enough that she asked Carolina Curious for an explanation.
The science of fog
Jonathan Blaes, with the National Weather Service, says certain spots in the Triad are known to fog up more often than others.
“These known foggy areas tend to be located in spots where moisture collects,” Blaes said. “They can be low spots, or areas where the wind tends to be lighter, which helps promote fog.”
Keck’s foggy patch dips into a wooded hillside. Blaes says it could have something to do with nearby creeks, but overall:
“It doesn't appear that that location has any kind of meteorological or even geographic tendency that would make me think it's any foggier than most other locations in the Triad,” he said.
A paranormal explanation
But in Jamestown, fog has another reputation. Some say it’s connected to a ghost story about a woman named Lydia.
Legend has it that Lydia died in a car crash on a bridge in Jamestown. Her spirit is said to appear on foggy nights, hitching rides from passing drivers. When they reach her house, she disappears.
Dan Sellers, with the folklore group Carolina Haints, says the story is actually one of the most famous ghost tales in North Carolina. The bridge in the legend isn’t exactly where Keck sees her fog, but it’s nearby — just up the road.
“So I have actually heard over the years about a moving mist, or about Lydia perhaps being seen in mist form,” Sellers said.
Sellers says the tale belongs to a long tradition of hitchhiker ghost stories dating back centuries. And while no records of a Lydia exist, researchers did find evidence of a young woman named Annie Jackson who was killed in a car accident there in 1920. And there’s a reason why the name might have changed as the story was retold.
“Lydia is a popular ghost name in folklore,” Sellers explained. “Actually, I can think of three other Lydia ghosts in Guilford County right now, off the top of my head.”
Sellers led an effort to install an official Legends and Lore marker by the bridge — cementing its place in the town’s folk heritage.
“I think just the fact that it's somewhere that you can go visit makes it special. It’s not an intangible idea of a place. It's not an abstraction. It's somewhere you can actually go. You can go stand there and touch the place and see it.”
So what does Carol Keck make of the idea that the fog she drives through might actually be Lydia?
“I think it probably has a more scientific answer,” she says. “But I like the romance of it actually being involved in a ghost story.
You can hear that ghost story in full if you visit the area — there’s a QR code right on the marker titled Lydia’s Bridge, linking to a dramatic retelling.