Legends & Tales Of Mount St. Helens

The Woman In White

--The News Tribune, 2008

For nearly five months after Mount St. Helens blew its top on the morning of May 18, 1980, stories of a spooky female hitchhiker started to make the rounds.

So many people said they saw the woman that the stories were retold in mainstream media reports. Police in Southwestern Washington towns were even notified that drivers might report seeing the woman, Smith said.

Driving at night on Interstate 5 and local highways, many drivers were stunned as their headlights revealed a woman in a white dress walking on the shoulder and signaling, she needed a ride.

When the cars stopped, she crawled into the back seat and sat quietly as they continued on their way. But eventually, the woman would talk about Mount St. Helens.

The volcano's dynamic display that spring was a common conversational icebreaker at the time, so drivers certainly weren't surprised by the woman's choice of topics.

But what happened next certainly sent chills down their spines.

The woman in white would lean forward and say something like, "You know it's going to erupt again."

When the driver glanced at the woman in the rear-view mirror, she was gone.

Similar stories circulated in the area, getting more and more specific each time until, in some of her final appearances, she told drivers, "The volcano is going to erupt again between Oct. 12 and 14."

As the date approached, the sightings became rarer until they stopped altogether. When Oct. 12, 1980, came and went, people started kicking themselves and laughing at each other for giving validity to such a tale.

Some people, Smith said, wrote off the ghostly prediction as a morality tale, a reminder to always respect the power of Mother Nature.

"It would have been natural to assume she meant Oct. 12, 1980," Smith said. "But years don't matter to ghosts."

When Mount St. Helens awoke in late September 2004, the story of the woman in white had almost entirely vanished from local lore. As St. Helens spewed ash and steam; scientists theorized that the main event would be molten lava punching through to the surface.

They were right. After weeks of anticipation, scientists recorded lava finally pushing through the crater floor...on Oct. 12.