Fact Check: Photo Does NOT Show "Lady Ghost" Margaret Lee, The Abilene Teacher Who Purportedly Avenged Her Students Killed By Raiders in 1871

False Photo

Is this a photo of the "Lady Ghost", a schoolteacher named Margaret Lee from Abilene, Kansas who killed five men, raiders, who in 1871 had killed twenty students when they burned the one-room schoolhouse? No, that's not true on two counts: This photo from 1912 shows thirteen-year-old Eva M. Lott, not a school teacher named Margaret Lee. There is no historical evidence of a schoolhouse fire in 1871 in Abilene or Dickinson County, Kansas, nor is there a legend of a "Lady Ghost" matching these social media posts' story about an avenging schoolteacher.

The story of Margaret Lee appears in a post (archived here) published by the Facebook page History Haven on Oct. 3, 2025. It begins:

Her name was Margaret Lee. In 1871, she taught twenty children in a one-room schoolhouse near Abilene -- a woman of books and blackboards, not blood. But one night the prairie burned. Raiders rode through, set fire to the school, slaughtered every child inside, and left Margaret beaten but alive. The sheriff called it "unfortunate." The town moved on. Margaret did not.

This is the photo included in the post:

(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from facebook.com/share/p/1B8jP9sMr3.)

She cut her hair, strapped on boots, and took up a revolver. Within a year, five men lay in prairie graves -- each one a raider, each one marked by her hand. Folks whispered of a figure in the night, pale as bone, pistol steady, who rode without fear or mercy. They called her the Lady Ghost.

She never remarried, never taught again. But every mother in Kansas told her story -- of the schoolteacher who avenged her children when the law would not. In a land where justice was scarce, Margaret Lee carved her own into history.

The story does not ring true because children would not be inside a one room schoolhouse in the middle of the night. Additionally the town marshall of Abilene, Kansas in 1871 was none other than Wild Bill Hickok. Had Hickok gone after these raiders or neglected his duty, surely his famous name would be included in the tale if it were true.

The first schoolhouse (archived here) in Abilene, Kansas was a stone block construction (pictured below) built in 1868 and relocated in 1969. It did not burn in 1871. A book written in 1893 detailed the history of schools in Kansas up to that time, and the chapter on Dickinson County Schools is transcribed on the ksgenweb.org website (archived here). There is no mention of a schoolhouse burning in Abilene or anywhere in the county in 1871, and there is no mention of a schoolteacher named Margaret Lee.

(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from dkcohistory.blogspot.com/2012/01/brief-look-at-abilenes-historic_31.html.)

A reverse image search (archived here) turns up duplicate copies of the baseless Margaret Lee story posted recently, but also turns up older posts with a different name associated with the photo, Eva Marie Lott. One early example is a post on Pinterest (archived here) from at least five years ago (pictured below). There is a detailed caption including the text from the reverse side of the postcard photo (not pictured), the post links to a Flickr account which is no longer active. The caption reads:

Eva Marie Lott, 13 Years Old, July 1912

Photo by

simms54

on flickr

Eva Lott, Maude's sister; July 1912; Eva resided near Wray, Colorado. on the back of this postcard photo: "From your sister, Eva M. Lott, age 13yr 9mo 22 da, to Maude Lott, Belgrade, Mont."; scanned from an original photo