I thought about campfire tales, but its too broad. Instead, I want to go into a specific ghostly tradition.

Ladies. Typically of a color, most often white, gray, or blue. They feature in movies and novels (I even wrote a ghost story, "Mistress," that was published in Shades of Blue and Gray and had a civil war era ghost).

People dress up as them for Halloween. People claim to have photographs of them. But why do white people (mostly) tell these stories? What's the origin of the Ladies?