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If you've been with MapleStory for a long time, there's a good chance you've heard this story at least once. It's the old rumor that if you scattered mesos in Perion, a ghost would appear—the eerie tale of the White Lady.

Today, I want to go over the full story behind the White Lady, one of the most famous ghost stories in MapleStory history.

Before Nexon released MapleStory in North America, there was a woman named Muriel. After graduating from high school, she dreamed of marrying her boyfriend Bob, but the two were poor, so they decided they both needed to work. Muriel eventually became a GM at Nexon's North American branch.

Up to that point, it sounds like an ordinary story. But this is where the rumor takes a darker turn. One of the GMs under her made a mistake serious enough to anger Muriel, and unable to contain herself, she set an embarrassing photo of that employee as the Sleepywood background. The image was soon removed, but orders came down from above, and Muriel ended up facing heavy punishment.

The details change a little depending on the version, but in the one that spread most widely, the enraged employee murdered Muriel while she was working late, and her spirit remained behind in the Maple World. That is the heart of the story: Muriel became the White Lady, a ghost left to wander the Perion region.

What made this rumor so frightening wasn't just the story itself. Players even began passing around supposed methods for meeting the White Lady inside the game.

According to the rumor, if you kept going back and forth through the portal to Perion's Warrior Sanctuary, MapleStory would suddenly crash and change into a strange login screen. Then, if you entered the Warrior Sanctuary again in that state, Muriel with the nickname LEAVE would be standing where Dances with Balrog usually was. After that, the White Lady's face would fill the screen, and the game would throw you back to the login screen once again.

Because it wasn't just a story anymore—because detailed methods and conditions for encountering her were being passed around—the rumor felt even more real. And then one more condition was added: if you scattered mesos on the ground in Perion, you could summon the White Lady even faster.

As this ghost story spread, it led to one of the strangest and most amusing scenes of all. Once the rumor caught on, countless players on the official MapleStory—even on the Korean servers—became absorbed in this unverified ritual, scattering mesos across the ground in Perion just to see her.

Some players actually threw down tens of thousands of mesos while waiting for the White Lady to appear. Maybe it was a mix of fear and curiosity—the feeling of knowing it was scary, yet still wanting to see it, and wondering whether she might really appear after all. Even so, that remains the most striking image tied to the White Lady rumor in MapleStory. The fact that a ghost story led players to act on it in-game shows just how powerfully it spread.

So, did the White Lady actually exist in the game? In truth, this ghost was a boss monster that appeared as part of an event on a MapleStory private server run in North America. The backstory was also nothing more than fiction created by that private server. In other words, the White Lady did exist somewhere in the world, but she was never a monster that appeared in the official MapleStory operated by Nexon.

To be more exact, she was event content implemented as a boss monster on a GMS-based private Maple server, and the backstory behind the rumor was simply part of that boss's setting—naturally, it was fictional. Even if you search the relevant terms on Google, you won't find any actual news about it.

Once you know the truth, it can feel a little hollow. But that, in a way, is part of this rumor's appeal. The fact that a single event boss from a private server grew into such a massive ghost story—and even led players on the official servers to scatter mesos in Perion—shows just how far a gaming rumor can spread.

It's been a long time since the White Lady rumor was revealed to be fiction, but even now, stories about the White Lady still surface from time to time in the MapleStory community. In that sense, the White Lady seems to show that game ghost stories are not simply about whether they are true or false. They survive through the shared memories and emotions of the time when people were enjoying that game together.

If you remember hearing the story of the White Lady back when you played MapleStory, or if you actually tried scattering mesos in Perion yourself, share your story in the comments.