{"id":1619,"slug":"old-city-cemetery-roanoke-roanoke-virginia","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Roanoke's City Cemetery opened in 1876 on Tazewell Avenue, a roughly three-acre ground that took the young railroad city's early dead — early mayors, a granddaughter of Patrick Henry, the Fishburn family, park benefactor Peyton Terry, iron founder Ferdinand Rorer. It is the kind of cemetery that fades into the street grid until somebody points at a ledger stone.","Somebody did, on the record. In the Roanoke Times on October 27, 1994, Nancy Connelly — director of the Roanoke Valley History Museum — described the cemetery's Lady in White: a \"real Southern beauty\" who died of influenza in 1918, leaving small children motherless. In white dress and pompadour, she was said to come out at night and weep on a ledge near the Greenwood plot."]},{"heading":"A legend with a byline","paragraphs":["The 1918 date matters more than the apparition. Roanoke's influenza wave that autumn was real and savage, and a young mother dead of the flu leaving small children is a story the newspaper archive could fill a page with — which is exactly what a legend like this is usually built from.","The file's rarity is its provenance: not an anonymous telling but a named museum director, speaking to a reporter, filing the cemetery's ghost as part of the city's heritage. The weeping remains reported; the woman-shaped grief over 1918 is documented."]}],"name":"Old City Cemetery, Roanoke","aliases":[],"type":"CEMETERY","type_label":"Cemetery","cats":["HAUNTING"],"groups":["cemeteries","hauntings"],"desc":"Cemetery with a Lady in White story recorded in1994.","full_desc":"A cemetery in Roanoke, Virginia, Old City Cemetery, Roanoke is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Cemetery with a Lady in White story recorded in1994. HauntHunt files it with haunting reports. Ask the file who haunts it and it answers: Lady in White. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.","address":"Tazewell Avenue","city":"Roanoke","county":null,"state":"Virginia","postal":null,"region":"South","lat":37.278458,"lon":-79.958174,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Discovery or enrichment; earliest report and independent corroboration remain under research. Confidence measures source provenance, not supernatural reality.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":43.1,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0,"source_quality":0.6,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":836,"type":"APPARITION","description":"A museum director described a weeping white-clad apparition near the Greenwood plot to the Roanoke Times. Witnesses name it Lady in White; the name travels further than the proof. Cemeteries keep their stories in the stones; Old City Cemetery, Roanoke in Roanoke, Virginia has its version filed among them. Media accounts carried the story further than the evidence ever did. The account appears in 'These Places Really Are Haunted'. The apparition is the file's anchor — every other report orbits it.","evidence":"MEDIA_REPORTED","evidence_label":"Media reported","entity":"Lady in White","where":"Near Greenwood plot","first_report":null,"approx_date":"Published1994-10-27","confidence":0.75,"conflict_notes":"Influenza-related identity narrative remains unverified; historic cemetery name/location require municipal cross-check.","source":{"name":"These Places Really Are Haunted","url":"https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9410/941027/10270040.htm","publisher":"Roanoke Times / Virginia Tech Digital Library","type":"NEWSPAPER","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[],"entities":[{"name":"Lady in White","claimed_identity":"Lady in White","verified":null,"summary":"A museum director described a weeping white-clad apparition near the Greenwood plot to the Roanoke Times. The file calls it Lady in White. Near Greenwood plot is where the sightings cluster. A cemetery in Roanoke, Virginia accumulating ghost reports is almost tautological — but this is the one the record kept. Sources including 'These Places Really Are Haunted' keep the claim in circulation. The lore has a face now: Lady in White.","behavior":"A museum director described a weeping white-clad apparition near the Greenwood plot to the Roanoke Times.","area":"Near Greenwood plot","first_ref":null,"source":{"name":"These Places Really Are Haunted","url":"https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9410/941027/10270040.htm","publisher":"Roanoke Times / Virginia Tech Digital Library","type":"NEWSPAPER","authority":3}}],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"These Places Really Are Haunted","url":"https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9410/941027/10270040.htm","publisher":"Roanoke Times / Virginia Tech Digital Library","type":"NEWSPAPER","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":0,"entities":1,"sources":1}}