The Ghost of Kennedy Hill Road

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Every small town seems to have at least one road you're supposed to drive after dark if you want to encounter something you can't explain. Around Byron, Illinois, one of those places was Kennedy Hill Road. The story, as I remember hearing it growing up, concerned a mysterious woman in white who appeared along the road at night. Drivers would catch sight of her moving along the roadside, illuminated for a moment in the headlights before darkness swallowed her again.

Who was the Ghost of Kennedy Hill Road?

It had all the necessary ingredients for a proper northern Illinois ghost story: a lonely country road, darkness, cornfields and woods, a figure dressed in white appearing unexpectedly beside the pavement and, most importantly, generations of young people willing to scare the hell out of one another. Kennedy Hill Road didn't need much assistance. Drive the rural roads around Byron late enough at night and the familiar landscape changes. Farmhouses become isolated points of light. Trees become walls. Your headlights illuminate only a small piece of the world at a time while everything beyond them disappears.

Then somebody tells you that people have seen a woman in white out there, and from that moment on every mailbox becomes a person. Every pale tree trunk becomes a dress. Every movement at the edge of the headlights becomes something running alongside the road. That's how local legends work. Somebody sees something. Somebody else tells the story. Details get added. The story passes through school hallways, cars, parties and bedrooms until eventually nobody remembers exactly where it started. They only know you're supposed to look for the woman in white.

The woman in white is one of the great recurring figures in ghost stories. She's usually somebody who died tragically. Sometimes she's searching for a lost child or lover. Sometimes she was killed on the very road where she continues to appear. Sometimes nobody knows who she is at all. The uncertainty is part of what keeps the story alive. If you explain the woman in white, you don't have much of a ghost story anymore.

Except in the case of the Ghost of Kennedy Hill Road, I happen to know something about the ghost.

I went to grade school in Byron, and my first real crush was a girl there. Eventually I learned something interesting about her mother. She liked to jog. She sometimes went jogging at night. She went jogging on Kennedy Hill Road. And when she did, she wore a white jogging outfit.

So while other people may have spent years wondering about the identity of the spectral woman in white haunting Kennedy Hill Road, I've always had a somewhat less supernatural theory. The Ghost of Kennedy Hill Road was probably the mother of my first grade-school crush.

She wasn't searching eternally for her murdered lover. She hadn't risen from a forgotten pioneer cemetery. She wasn't trying to warn travelers away from some terrible fate waiting around the next curve.

She was exercising.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly the kind of explanation a small-town ghost story deserves. Somewhere along the way, somebody driving Kennedy Hill Road at night saw a pale figure moving through the darkness at the edge of their headlights. They went home with a ghost story.

And somebody's mom went home having gotten her miles in.