Fort Hays State Historic Site

The legend of the "Blue Light Lady" says Elizabeth Polly still walks Sentinel Hill, seen as a woman in blue with a white bonnet, as a misty blue light, or heard as footsteps climbing the hill. The first recorded sighting was in 1917, when a farmer, John Schmidt, saw a woman in blue walking across his farm toward the hill and followed her into a shed where no one was; in another account a policeman on patrol radioed headquarters that he had hit a pedestrian, but found no body and no damage to his car. The hill is a favorite legend-trip destination for students at Halloween. Fort Hays, now a Kansas Historical Society state historic site, was an Army post on the Kansas frontier in the 1860s. In August 1867, during a cholera outbreak, Elizabeth Polly, the wife of hospital steward Ephraim Polly, nursed sick soldiers as the hospital matron and died of the disease herself. She had asked to be buried on top of Sentinel Hill, but soldiers struck limestone just inches below the surface and buried her on the slope instead, in her blue dress and white bonnet. A monument stands on the hill in her memory, the Kansas Historical Society tells her real story at the fort cemetery during its graveside conversations, and the site is open to visitors.