Lady in Red Still Mystery

'Lady In Red' Still Mystery
JANE BIGGERS
Staff Writer

"The Lady In Red," is still awaiting a final resting place, and remains the same mystery she was when first discovered two weeks ago in the garden of the J. T. Thomas home at Egypt Plantation. Persons viewing the body of the young woman estimate she has been dead more than 75 years.

The woman, amazingly well preserved in a coffin with alcohol, was found a backhoe machine hit the casket while digging a line for a new septic tank pipe. The body was buried four feet beneath the soil of a vegetable garden adjacent to the Thomas home.

A court order is being awaited from Jackson which will permit the body to be taken to Lexington for a final resting place.

Mrs. Thomas, wife of the owner of Egypt which has been a famous landmark along the banks of the Yazoo River since 1835, hopes that somebody will be able to identify the woman so a name can be added to the grave.

Speculations have been that the woman might have died from yellow fever.

A resident of Leland had thought the body might been that of her sister, Mrs. Rivers King, who as a bride moved to a plantation in the Delta 68 years ago, where her husband was an overseer. According to the report, the woman died of smallpox one month after her marriage. She had requested her husband not to reveal her burial place, but to tell them she was “buried in a garden” near the home.

Others say that Mrs. King, had not been buried at Egypt, but closer to Leland.

Still others have speculated the "Lady in Red," so described by the color of her well preserved clothes, which were covered with a striped silk cover, might have been on a riverboat, became ill, and was brought ashore at Egypt, which was one of the famous landings along the Yazoo River.

Southern Funeral Home at Lexington has agreed to bury the "mystery woman." Before she is, her body will be viewed again, to determine from her clothes "just what era" she might once have been known as other than "The Lady in Red."