Diana of the Dunes

Along the Indiana Dunes, visitors to the dunes and shoreline have long reported glimpsing the ghostly figure of a nude woman running along the sand or vanishing into the water. Alice Mabel Gray, born in Chicago in 1881, entered the University of Chicago at sixteen and graduated six years later as a Phi Beta Kappa scholar with honors in astronomy, mathematics, Greek, and Latin. In the fall of 1915, after her eyesight began failing and her editorial-secretary career became impossible, she left the city with little more than a jelly jar, a knife, and a spoon and moved into an abandoned fisherman's cabin on the Lake Michigan shore near what's now Indiana Dunes National Park. Chicago newspapers nicknamed the reclusive, cultured woman who lived alone and swam nude in the cold lake "Diana of the Dunes," after the Roman goddess. In 1920 she took up with a drifter named Paul Wilson, who moved in with her and later faced police questioning, though never charges, after a badly beaten body was found on the beach nearby. Wilson fathered two daughters with Gray and was reportedly abusive; she died in the cabin on February 9, 1925, officially of uremic poisoning, though contemporaries suspected the repeated blows Wilson was known to deal her played a part. Wilson later served time in a California prison for auto theft, and the fate of their daughters was never recorded. The National Park Service now recognizes her through Diana's Dare, a hiking challenge along a short trail that follows in her footsteps.