The underpass that carried old U.S. Highway 70 (also numbered U.S. 29-70) under the railroad in Jamestown, Guilford County, sits between Greensboro and High Point. It is no longer a through road. The concrete tunnel is now a drainage and walking path. The figure attached to it is a young woman in a white evening dress who flags down cars on rainy or foggy nights. She says her name is Lydia and asks to be taken to an address in High Point. When the car arrives she is gone. The driver knocks on the door and is told by an older woman that her daughter was killed in a wreck at the underpass the year before. There is no death certificate for a woman named Lydia who died there in 1923 or any other year in the 1920s.
The earliest published account is a December 5, 1940, story in the Elkin Tribune that already treated the tale as an old local rumor. A man named Burke Hardison later said he had picked the woman up in 1924 while he was a student at North Carolina State. He drove her toward High Point. She vanished from the car. At the address she had given, her mother said she had been killed the previous year. Versions differ on the details. In one she was put out of a car by a boyfriend after an argument. In another she was thrown from a vehicle that wrecked. Local researchers Amy Greer and Michael Renegar, who wrote Looking for Lydia, found a June 21, 1920, article in the Greensboro Patriot. It reported that Annie L. Jackson, about 30 or 35, was killed on the High Point Road roughly three miles from High Point when the driver lost control and she was thrown from the car. The location is near both the old underpass and the present railroad bridge over Main Street. Greer and Renegar located her death certificate and gravesite. The legend calls her Lydia. The newspaper and the certificate call her Annie. NCpedia notes that no record of a Lydia who died in a 1920s wreck at the site has been found. The story is a classic vanishing-hitchhiker tale that has circulated in the Triad for a century.
What is documented is a 1920 newspaper report of Annie L. Jackson’s death on the High Point Road, a 1940 newspaper treatment of the hitchhiker story as already old, and a modern underpass that no longer carries traffic. The woman in white is the story. The name Lydia is the one the drivers were told. The death certificate belongs to Annie.
The old underpass is now a walking path. No clear public photograph of the abandoned tunnel is readily available in the sources used here.
Relevant links
Elkin Tribune, December 5, 1940 (DigitalNC) — the early printed version of the underpass hitchhiker
NCpedia: Lydia, Ghost of the Jamestown Bridge — the Hardison account, the 1920 Annie Jackson article, and the location
Southern Spirit Guide / Medium: The Vanishing Hitchhiker Legend in North Carolina — the same core story and the Greer/Renegar research
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