Lydia

Lydia is North Carolina's vanishing hitchhiker — the girl in the white gown drivers pick up on rainy nights near Jamestown, who asks for a ride home and disappears at the bridge or at the gate of the house she names. UNCG folklorists have studied her for decades; she's America's most-documented hitchhiker ghost.

Lydia is the Red Onion's resident ghost — invoked in the operator's own promotional materials as the saloon's upstairs madam from the 1898 brothel days, still making her presence known with footsteps and perfume. The lore is house mythology, but it fits a building preserved intact from Klondike vice-era days.