In honor of spooky season, Outside editors are sharing their backcountry encounters while hiking, camping, or otherwise enjoying the outdoors. In the summer of 2026, whitewater rafters on Idaho’s Main Salmon River kept reporting sightings of an unexplained “ghost woman dressed in white.” Associate editor Madison Dapcevich has spent weeks rowing the so-called River of No Return. She sat down with a fellow river-runner and local historian to find out if this modern mystery is, indeed, a haunting spirit of one of the river’s pioneer women.
On a cold, drizzly day in July 2026, Nate Lewand and his fleet of whitewater rafters passed by Black Canyon, an obsidian-colored gorge on the Main Salmon River in Idaho. As they rounded the bend, they spotted a woman standing on a narrow sandy beach far too small to hold a tent. She wore clean linen clothing, military-style boots, and carried a burled walking stick.
Despite being right at the water’s edge in the rain, the woman was bone dry. She had no gear—no ropes, no backpacks, and no raft. She didn’t respond, so we yelled some more.
She just stuck her hand up as if to wave, but she didn’t.” No trail runs along this stretch of the canyon, and the surrounding walls are sheer granite cliffs. I know these areas well, having rowed the Salmon River myself. The canyon is a special place with deeply rooted history that you can feel with every passing oar stroke.
This was his fourth trip down the Main Salmon, an iconic 80-mile whitewater corridor cutting through Idaho’s Salmon-Challis National Forest. His group wasn’t the only one to encounter the mystery figure. Between mid-July and early August, multiple river runners took to social media and local forums claiming they saw a “ghost woman dressed in white.” One group reported hearing haunting wails echoing off the canyon walls at night; others said they saw a figure standing silently, high on a ridge above the rapids.
Lewand noted that at least five other groups told him they also saw the woman at several remote locations along the river, including areas called Black Canyon, Lower Corey Bar, and Yellow Pine. Tales of ghostly women along waterways are as old as wilderness travel itself. In Mexico and the American Southwest, stories persist of La Llorona, the weeping woman doomed to wander riverbanks searching for her lost children.
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