Dead Women’s Crossing was a haunted spot investigated by historian and investigator Susan Woolf Brenner. Brenner was first interested in the place when she heard its name and thought it strange. But what she uncovered when she began investigating the strange location with the help of local records was a story and a mystery that left many questions unanswered even to this day. And there are those who even say the place is haunted.
It all started in the summer of 1905. Katie DeWitt James was ready to start a new life. She had just filed for a divorce from her then husband and had only 14 months earlier given birth to a new child. As the day wore on she knew it was going to be an important time for her. But as the day turned to night, tragedy struck. When her daughter was taken to the police covered in blood, officers were horrified. Luckily, they found that the baby was unharmed. But where had the blood come from? What started as a murder mystery ended with a ghost story in Custer City, Oklahoma.
The baby was cared for by Katie’s family when it was finally reunited with them. But it had been several weeks since the family had heard from her. Her father, Henry called the sheriff fearing something had happened to his daughter. Days later Katie’s body was discovered in Deer Creek When her husband James was visited by police, he answered their questions, but later poisoned himself and died. It seemed the mystery had been solved.
But that wasn’t the final mystery in this case. A pair of travelers passing through town would later happen upon the area and spot the ghost of a woman standing in the woods holding a baby. As the travelers looked at the woman they at first took for a stranded motorist, she eventually vanished and removed any doubt from their minds that what they had just witnessed was something paranormal. Reporting their incident, several locals in the area knowingly informed them that they had become the latest witnesses to the ghost of Katherine DeWitt James’ ghost.
But there were other witnesses as well. Witnesses passing through the area would report that strange eerie orbs of blue light would pass overhead and dance about in the trees, sometimes accompanied by a field of what the witnesses could only describe as “energy.”
But perhaps the strangest part of the murder mystery is the fact that the witnesses would so commonly spot the ghost of a woman holding a baby. Was there another baby involved in the area that could have also died? Or was this simply a projection of Katherine’s thoughts onto the area? Is it possible there was more than meets the eye here? If ghosts are actual embodiments of spirits that pass on, then the woman should have appeared by herself without the baby. Perhaps this is instead simply a photograph burned into the space she was occupying that could show witnesses what happened just prior to her death.
