Watch for Lavalette's
Own Neighborhood Ghost

As you travel the hill to and from the nursery this fall, keep an eye peeled for our local phantom, especially on those rainy nights. She has been making midnight rounds in our neighborhood for a half dozen decades now.

And don't offer her your coat -- she doesn't need one, even on the coldest of evenings.

The Ghost Girl of Fifth Street Hill has been here at least five years longer than Lavalette has.

It all began at Halloween in 1942, when the first published account of the ghostly sighting appeared in a Huntington newspaper. A Black & White Cab driver told a reporter he had left off a fare at a dance hall on Fifth Street Road at about 4:30 one morning and had started toward Huntington.

"When I got to the top of Fifth Street Hill," the driver said, "a girl hailed me from the roadside. I stopped, opened the door, and she got into the rear seat. It was pretty cold, but she did not have any coat or hat on, just a skirt and thin blouse. I thought that was funny and said, 'It's pretty cold without a coat, isn't it?' and she replied, 'I haven't worn a coat for nine or ten years!'"

The driver asked the mysterious girl where she wanted to go, got an address at the bottom of the hill and took her there. But when they arrived, she had vanished!

It turns out that cab drivers and bus drivers have been seeing The Fifth Street Hill Girl for years.

In 1958, a newspaper story expanded on the legend, saying that quite a few years ago, a Huntington couple took their daughter and her fiance to Wayne to be married. It was the early spring. On the way back, rain started falling, making the road slippery.

"At the foot of the hill," said the paper, "just before coming to the bridge at the corner of 5th Street and the boulevard, the car overturned and the bride was killed." Ever since then, goes the legend, the girl appears, especially on rainy nights, and even in cold weather, always dressed for spring.

As recently as 1977, a Marshall University folklore class quoted a retired cab driver as saying he encountered the ghostly girl on a memorable rainy night. "Where to?" he asked her.She gave him an address in the West End. Of course, when he arrived at the location, the girl had disappeared from the back seat.

The driver knocked on the door at that house and told the old woman who answered the door, "Lady, I've had a terrible experience." He told her what had happened. And the woman said: "That's my daughter. Ever since she died, she comes back every four years."

The driver returned to the cab headquarters and quit his job.