The Wailing Woman of Lake Tawakoni

The Dark Beneath: Scary Folklore & Whispers About Lake Tawakoni...

CASE FILE #3

A Local Legend Drenched in Grief and Fog

There’s a sound that drifts across Lake Tawakoni just before dawn—thin, mournful, and unmistakably human. Locals call it the wind. Old-timers call it her.

They say she walks the shoreline in a soaked nightgown, her hair tangled with lakeweed, her voice cracked from decades of screaming. She doesn’t speak words. She wails. And if you hear her, you’re already too close.

🕯️ The Tragedy Beneath the Surface

The legend begins in the early 1970s, when a woman named Evelyn Harper lost her daughter in a boating accident near the Iron Bridge. The child, Lila, was just six years old—last seen reaching for a dragonfly before slipping off the edge of the dock. Her body was never recovered.

Evelyn returned to the lake every day for weeks, then months, then years. She stopped speaking. She stopped eating. She was last seen walking into the water during a thunderstorm, clutching a bundle of lilies. Her footprints led to the edge. They never came back.

🕷️ The Sightings

Since then, campers and fishermen have reported chilling encounters:

• A woman sobbing near the reeds, vanishing when approached.

• Children waking in the night, claiming “a wet lady” was standing outside their tent.

• A voice calling “Lila…” from beneath the dock.

One park ranger swears he saw her reflection in the water—though no one was standing behind him.

🌒 The Curse of the Wail

Folklore warns that if you hear the Wailing Woman and respond—if you speak, or worse, call out to her—she marks you. Not with blood. With dreams.

Victims report recurring nightmares of drowning, of tangled limbs beneath the surface, of a child’s hand reaching up from the lakebed. Some wake with water in their lungs. Others claim their mirrors fog over at 3:17 a.m.—the exact time Evelyn disappeared.

Whether she’s a ghost, a grief echo, or something older than the lake itself, one thing’s certain: Lake Tawakoni doesn’t forget. And neither does she.

So if you hear crying on the water, don’t follow it. Don’t comfort it. Just turn away. And whatever you do, don’t say her name.

For more ghost stories from our neck of the woods in East Texas, check out this BOOK by author Mitchel Whitington!

If CASE FILE #3 is the first you're reading, make sure to go back and check out "The Dark Beneath" series of posts! The Dark Beneath: Scary Folklore & Whispers About Lake Tawakoni

Until the next body drops,

-Loretta & David Allseitz

"Unmasking evil, one body at a time"