The fog drifts in like a breath held too long. The trees hush. Near the edge of Lake Ontario, a story lingers.
You’re walking the winding trails of Durand Eastman Park. Maybe alone, maybe not. Maybe you’ve heard the tale before, around a bonfire on the beach or whispered over too many Genesee Cream Ales. Or maybe you just feel it, the way the woods go quiet at dusk.
A woman in white, they say, walks these paths. Still searching. Still mourning.
She’s known as the White Lady of Durand, one of Rochester’s most persistent urban legends. Said to be the ghost of a mother whose daughter vanished near the lakeshore in the 1800s, the White Lady never stopped looking. And when she died, locals began spotting her ghostly silhouette in the fog, gliding through wooded gullies and past the crumbling ruins of what once was an elegant dining hall, often mistaken for the remnants of a castle.
The sightings haven’t stopped. Neither has the story. And now, it’s not just campfire lore. It has a sign.
Thanks to Legends & Lore, a national marker program recognizing oral traditions and community myths, the White Lady has earned her place — literally — in Rochester’s historical landscape. A bold red cast-iron sign was installed near the park entrance, placing her alongside other markers across New York that commemorate Bigfoot, healing springs, alleged witches and folk icons like John Henry and Ichabod Crane.
Launched in 2015 by the Syracuse-based William G. Pomeroy Foundation, Legends & Lore was created to honor stories that rarely make it into textbooks, but never leave the public imagination. More than 2,800 of these markers have appeared nationwide, about 300 per year, on sites where fact and folklore blur and something deeper takes root.
Unlike traditional historical markers, Legends & Lore signs don’t require dusty archives or notarized documents. Applications are reviewed by professional folklorists who draw from oral histories, newspapers, and community storytelling traditions. The only real requirement? The legend must belong to the place, like the White Lady belongs to Durand.
The office of Irondequoit’s town historian Tim Judd looks like a time capsule — shelves of brittle books and stereoscopic cards, drawers of maps curling at the edges and stacks of manila folders spilling ephemera.
For Judd, the beginning (and end) of folklore is hard to define.
“Folklore is almost always rooted in something real,” he said. “But over time, it becomes harder to trace the original event. Imagination, fear, nostalgia — all of it layers on. Eventually, the facts fade and the meaning grows.”
He offered the example of ancient Sumer.
“Was there a great flood? Probably. But that story became the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” then reappeared in Egyptian mythology, and later in the Hebrew Bible,” he said. “Myths show us how people thought, what mattered to them.”
When it comes to the White Lady, Judd is cautious.
“Will we ever know if she was real? Probably not. There’s no name, no family connections. If she existed, she likely lived deep in the woods,” he said. “The story was probably invented both as entertainment and as a warning: children, don’t wander too far.”
That’s the pattern.
“Something happened,” Judd said. “But stories last not because they’re provable. They last because they mean something.”
Musicologist and writer Dr. Anna Reguero sees folklore as a cultural glue.
“The benefits of folklore are in community building and in maintaining connections to the places we identify with,” she said. “But there’s a danger, too, in creating cultural memory that leaves people out.”
She sees the same dynamic in the folklore of music history.
“Think of Wagner, a Nazi sympathizer,” she said. “Maybe what we need is folklore that tells the truer side. People layer their imaginations onto stories to fill cultural needs or teach lessons. Sometimes, you even need someone to oppose.”
And of course, music carries its own folklore.
“A certain melody can transport you back to a place and time,” Reguero said. “As a culture, we have our lullabies, our popular songs, tied to stages of life. The same way a ghost story can.”
In Rochester, a city of migration, industry, collapse, renewal and reinvention, folklore helps capture the emotional residue that history books can’t always hold.
That’s where Legends & Lore comes in, giving official acknowledgment to the unofficial past.
The White Lady is just one of hundreds of legends enshrined in red cast iron. Others include the Leatherman, a 19th-century wanderer who walked a 365-mile loop through the Hudson Valley clad entirely in handmade leather; the notorious Loomis Gang, who terrorized central New York; and healing springs once thought to cure the sick.
“We wanted the signs to spark curiosity,” said Ellen McHale, executive director of the New York Folklore Society. “We wanted people to stop, to wonder, to ask questions.”
Not every marker is about hauntings. Some honor traditions of survival.
Take Pinkster, a spring festival brought to New York by Dutch colonists in the 1600s. Enslaved Africans transformed it into their own celebration: one of music, drumming, oral history and community leadership. Though later suppressed, the festival was revived in the 1970s by folklorists and Black historians. Today it is celebrated again, and efforts are underway to place a Legends & Lore marker on the grounds of the state capitol in Albany.
For McHale, that is where the program moves from quaint to quietly radical.
“These signs don’t just commemorate,” she said. “They correct. They balance the scales. They give voice to the stories that never made it into the official record.”
The Pomeroy Foundation’s founder, Bill Pomeroy, is a leukemia survivor and lifelong history buff who remembers stopping on road trips with his father to read roadside markers. When state programs began to fade, he stepped in to save the stories most at risk of being forgotten.
Alongside Legends & Lore, the foundation supports conventional history projects like Hometown History and the Lafayette Trail. But Legends & Lore hits a different note: it honors oral tradition, superstition, folk knowledge and imagination.
In an era of AI nostalgia and digital deepfakes when even memories feel downloadable, Legends & Lore reminds us that some stories still need to be told aloud, in person, in place, in the presence of someone listening.
Folklore lives between memory and myth. It isn’t static. It shifts with us, reflecting what a community fears, values and refuses to let go. These stories evolve, but they also anchor.
The White Lady of Durand may be just a ghost story. Or she may embody every mother who waited too long, every daughter who didn’t come home, every grief we keep trying to explain.
The markers don’t just preserve stories. They open doors into memory and myth, sparking curiosity and conversations. The markers remind us folklore isn’t buried in the past. It’s alive. It lingers. It haunts.
Because some stories refuse to die — and some ghosts will never let us forget. wgpfoundation.org/history/legends-lore
