Tag Archives: lady in white

The Lady in White at La Quinta Resort

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 45
Residence: California
Performance Date: 5/1/2019
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Context:

The informant is a 45-year-old man and of Mexican ethnicity. The informant is my uncle on my mother’s side. On a trip to Palm Springs, my parents, uncle and aunt, who is referred to as YV in this piece, stayed at the La Quinta Resort for a weekend. On arrival, my uncle experienced something unusual.

Main Piece:

Okay, so we arrived at La Quinta resort at night. We parked curbside about 30 feet from our cottage. Your mum and dad were already inside. YV and I were unloading our bags from the car and I grabbed my things and was walking slowly towards the cottage looking down to the walkway. When I looked forward, I noticed an image of a woman standing near a tree about 40 ft away. She was wearing all white and she had long, black hair. I looked back to see if YV was looking in the same direction, but she was still getting her things from the car.  I quickly turned to where I had seen this woman, but she had disappeared. A shiver ran down my spine. I didn’t immediately tell YV of what I had just seen because I had a feeling she’d freak out.  Unbeknownst to me, YV later showed me a coffee mug she bought from hotel as a souvenir.  The woman on the mug is the woman I saw that night. Again, I felt that same shiver run down my back.

Background:

This is a personal experience that my uncle witnessed firsthand. Prior to this experience, he had no knowledge of hauntings or stories surrounding the Resort.

Notes:

There are similar stories told by other guests who have stayed at the resort regarding ghosts and hearing ghostly voices. A security guard working one night claimed to have seen a ghostly woman walking across the tennis courts at the hotel. Many stories describe experiences within the hotel rooms and bungalows. My aunt YV, experienced something in her room the same night my uncle saw the ghost woman. YV’s description matches the descriptions that other guests have had as well.

 

For more accounts of ghostly experiences at the La Quinta Resort, check this out:

La Quinta Resort and Club

“Lady in White”

Nationality: Caucasian, Filipino, Puerto-Rican
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Hawaii Kai (O'ahu)
Performance Date: April 12th, 2013
Primary Language: English

So he (my teacher’s friend) was driving on the Pali highway—middle of the day, nothing spooky about it—when he drove by a lady dressed all in white, with long white hair and… a white dog, walking down the Pali highway, hitchhiking. In his head he was thinking, oh my God, what an idiot, hitchhiking on the Pali, that’s so dangerous!

… and so he didn’t stop, just drove right past her…

Then, he was still thinking about it, so he looked in his rear view mirror to try to see behind him and check if they were still waiting there and… there they were, sitting in the back seat of the car.

(inhales deeply) Which is obviously how he ended up crashing the car… So, the lesson of the story is, if you ever see the lady in white, or the white dog—together or separate, you HAVE to pick them up. Otherwise bad things are going to happen to you…

 

How did you come across this folklore: “this is another one told by Hawaiiana teacher, but this time he was talking about an actual friend.”

Other information: “My teacher’s friend was in the hospital… so when he (my teacher) went to go visit his friend in the hospital, having heard that this friend had crashed his car, he asked him what happened. What the friend said in response is the story of the Lady in White…”

There are a lot of legends similar to this one, by no means limited to Hawai’i. This theme of a woman, usually in white, associated with some kind of macabre “aura,” returning dead for some purpose and somehow demanding respect, is found in a lot of places around the world… and these versions also reflect a similar relationship to belief that is contextual. You might not always believe in or expect the Lady in White to show up, but you wouldn’t rule out it happening, especially in a spiritual/”haunted” area like the Pali and much less at night.

For another version of this, see Glen Grant’s Chicken Skin Tales, which was also made into a TV show on a cable channel in Hawaii called “Chicken Skin,” where people tell/reenact various ghost stories from the islands written in the book. This story was featured on an episode, which began by interviewing a man in a hospital…

Grant, Glen. Glen Grant’s Chicken Skin Tales: 49 Favorite Ghost Stories from Hawaii.Honolulu, HI: Mutual Pub., 1998. Print.