In December 2008 residents of the Coalisland area began sharing accounts of a mysterious lady in white seen each evening walking past a derelict cottage on an isolated stretch of the Mullaghmoyle Road in Brackaville. By January the story had spread and news outlets had picked it up. Hundreds of people drove out in the middle of winter, and a councillor said at one point there was a line of up to 60 cars on the road with people trying to spot it.
One witness said he had seen her six or seven times and described an old woman wearing a white dress and a long white cape who looked sad or lost, and who stepped out of the hedge at Flush Hill near the second of three telegraph poles. Another, unfazed, described a white cloth-like thing that flies across the road on top of the hill. Around thirty witnesses were said to have seen her over six weeks.
The councillor offered a sceptical view that it was moonlight reflecting on the river. A member of the Northern Ireland Paranormal Research Association said most people can tell moonlight from a human figure, and mentioned an earlier phantom woman hitchhiker on the same road who disappears if a car stops. Local theories included a former resident who had died years before, and the destruction of an ancient fairy tree in a nearby forest. An Irish Central article on fairy trees quotes a Belfast Telegraph report of a Tyrone hawthorn cut down in 2009, with locals seeing a ghost that had been bottled beneath it, though it does not say whether this was the same place.
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