The veiled woman of Viitna lake

Viitna lies on the old Tallinn–Narva post road, where a coaching inn has stood beside the pine-fringed Pikkjärv lake since the eighteenth century. A guide once had to keep fifty restless children in their rooms at the Viitna motel, so she invented a ghost: a woman in black, veiled, who walks along the lake shore at night and takes anyone she finds outside. It worked. Years later, working as a Lahemaa guide, she began to see the veiled woman herself, standing by the water at dusk, and others told her they had seen the same figure. A story made up to frighten children seems to have taken on a life of its own. The lake is a popular swimming and hiking spot.