Every kid in Callis, Kentucky, grew up with the same small town urban legend. If you parked on the Gilly Creek bridge at midnight and flashed your headlights three times, the Lantern Lady would come walking up the creek bank toward your car. I was forty-four before I found out who made her up, and why. Scary urban legend stories usually start with a dare. This one ends with a confession.
Callis is a county seat of about two thousand people in the hills southeast of Lexington. One stoplight, a courthouse, a dollar store, three Baptist churches, and a weekly newspaper called the Callis Ledger. I’ve been the editor of the Ledger since 2015. Before that I was a reporter there. Before that I delivered it on a bike.
Everybody in Callis has a nickname, and most of them aren’t flattering. My old boss at the paper was Bird Tolliver, because he was skinny and loud. The county librarian was Miss Opal, who was ninety and still worked three days a week. And for most of my childhood, the sheriff was Big Dale Mattox, who was six foot five and never smiled where you could see it.
The Lantern Lady of Gilly Creek
Here’s the legend, the way every kid in Callis tells it.
In the 1920s, a young woman was supposed to marry a man from across Gilly Creek. On the night before the wedding, he drove his wagon across the old wooden bridge in a flood, and the bridge washed out, and he drowned. She went down to the creek every night with a lantern to look for him. One night she didn’t come back.
Now, if you park on the bridge at midnight and flash your headlights three times, she thinks it’s his wagon lamp. She comes up the bank with her lantern to meet him. And when she gets close enough to see that you’re not him, she drags you down to the deep hole under the bridge where he died.
Every teenager in Callis did the headlight thing at least once. I did it in 1992 with my cousin Ricky and two girls from Berea. We flashed three times and screamed and peeled out before anything could happen. That was the point. Nobody actually waited.
And that was the other part of the legend. The part the grown-ups told you. Don’t ever stop on that bridge after dark. Don’t ever go down to the deep hole. Kids who went down there got hurt. Big Dale would personally drive you home and tell your daddy.
It worked. In thirty years I never heard of anybody actually going down to the creek at night.
The First Mention
In the fall of 2019, I decided to do a Halloween feature on the Lantern Lady. Local legends sell papers. I figured I’d dig up the original drowning in the archives, find the bride’s name, maybe get a picture of the old bridge.
The Ledger’s archives go back to 1911. They’re in bound volumes in the basement of the courthouse annex, and some of them are on microfilm at the library. Miss Opal helped me.
I couldn’t find the drowning. There was a flood in 1927 that took out several bridges in the county, but no deaths at Gilly Creek. No wedding. No bride who went missing.
So I started looking for the first time anybody wrote the words “Lantern Lady” in the paper.
It wasn’t in the 1920s. It wasn’t in the 1950s. Miss Opal said she’d lived in Callis her whole life and she’d never heard of any Lantern Lady when she was young. She said, “That’s a newer story than people think, honey.”
The first mention was in October of 1979. It was a column on the front page, signed by Sheriff Dale Mattox. The headline was “Sheriff Warns Teens Away From Gilly Creek Bridge.” In it, Big Dale told the whole story. The bride, the wagon, the lantern, the deep hole. He wrote that “several young people” had reported seeing a woman with a lantern on the creek bank, and that while he didn’t believe in ghosts, the bridge was dangerous and the deep hole had a strong current. He asked parents to keep their children away.
Bird Tolliver had been a young reporter at the paper in 1979. I called him. He was retired and living in Richmond. When I read him the column over the phone, he was quiet for a while.
Then he said, “Dale didn’t write that. Dale couldn’t write a grocery list. He came in and told it to me, and I typed it up, and he told me to put his name on it.”
I asked him if anybody had really reported seeing a woman with a lantern.
He said, “Not that I ever heard of. Before that column, nobody had ever heard of her. After it, everybody had.”
How a Small Town Urban Legend Gets Made
Once you know where to look, you start seeing things.
A month before Big Dale’s column, in September 1979, there was a small story on page six of the Ledger. A young married couple from Lexington, the Prewitts, had been reported missing by their families. They’d left Lexington on a Friday to visit her grandmother in Harlan and never arrived. Their car was a green 1976 Chevy Nova. The story said police in several counties were “on the lookout.”
Route 9 runs from Lexington toward Harlan. It crosses Gilly Creek on that bridge.
There was no follow-up story. Ever. I checked every issue through 1981.
The other thing I found took longer. It was in the county court records, and a clerk who owed me a favor helped me look. In 1983, the Kentucky State Police arrested Big Dale’s younger brother, Royce Mattox, for running a chop shop out of a barn about a mile up Gilly Creek. Stolen cars, cut up for parts. The cars that couldn’t be sold, the records said, were “disposed of.” The state police didn’t say how.
The charges against Royce were dropped two months later. The paperwork doesn’t say why. Big Dale was sheriff for another eleven years.
I sat in my car outside the courthouse with all of it on the passenger seat and I thought about every grown-up who ever told me never, ever to go down to the deep hole.
What the Drought Found
I didn’t publish the Halloween feature. I didn’t have enough. Big Dale died in 2004. Royce was eighty-six and in a nursing home in Winchester with dementia. Everybody else who might have known anything either wouldn’t talk to me or was dead.
The summer of 2022 was dry. The driest in fifty years in that part of Kentucky. By August, Gilly Creek was down to a trickle, and the deep hole under the bridge was a shallow pool you could see the bottom of.
Two boys from the high school went down there to fish for crawdads. They found the roof of a car sticking out of the mud. Green paint.
The state police brought in a crane. It took two days. The Nova still had its Kentucky plates. They found what was left of two people inside. I’m not going to describe that, and neither did the police report.
Under the Nova, there were two more cars. Neither of them was ever identified.
The official finding was that the Prewitts lost control on the bridge in 1979, went into the creek, and sank in the deep hole. An accident. The state police said they couldn’t determine how the other two cars got there, or when. Nobody was charged. Royce died that October.
I ran the story on the front page. I wrote what I knew and nothing I couldn’t prove. I didn’t write the word “chop shop.” I didn’t write that a sheriff invented a ghost to keep kids away from the place where his brother was sinking cars, and maybe sinking worse than cars. I didn’t write that, because I couldn’t prove it.
But everybody in Callis read it, and everybody in Callis knew what I meant.
Some people stopped speaking to me. Big Dale’s daughter still lives on Main Street, and she hasn’t said a word to me since. Other people came up to me at the grocery store and squeezed my arm and didn’t say anything. I’m still not sure which group knew more.
Here’s what keeps me up at night. Big Dale made up the Lantern Lady to keep teenagers off that bridge. It worked for forty years. Nobody ever went down to the deep hole. Nobody ever found the Prewitts.
So was the Lantern Lady a lie that hid a crime? Or was it the only thing that kept a bunch of dumb kids like me from walking down that bank one night and seeing something that would have gotten us killed?
I don’t know. I’ve decided I don’t get to know.
The bridge was replaced last spring with a new concrete one. I drove over it a few weeks ago, late, coming home from a school board meeting. I didn’t flash my headlights. I’m forty-seven years old.
But I looked down at the creek as I crossed, the way you always do.
There was a light down on the bank. Small and yellow, and swinging a little. Like somebody holding a lantern and walking slowly toward the road.
I didn’t stop. Nobody in Callis ever stops on that bridge.
If you want more towns that keep their own secrets, read the small town horror story about fires that only start on Tuesdays, a creepy town story about clocks running eleven minutes slow, or one of our scary hunting stories from a Pennsylvania hollow.
Does your hometown have a small town urban legend?
Most towns have a creepy urban legend that every kid knows and no adult will explain. If your hometown has a small town urban legend, or one of those scary legends that turned out to be covering for something real, tell us about it in the comments below.
How scary was it?
More Small Town Horror Stories
Our HOA Cited Us for Things You Could Only See From Inside Our House
Three Bus Passengers Got Off for Pie at June’s Cafe and Never Got Back On
The Last Family in Fenwick Never Left the Town Under the Lake
Every Porch in Our Town Lights a Pumpkin for a Man Who Never Came Home
The Sexton’s Diary and the Bell That Rang at 3 A.M
Every Fire in Our Town Started on a Tuesday