She is long lost, hiding deep in the haze of the ’60s, a mystery figure of New Haven cultural history.

She has never been named. She was referred to in the New Haven Register merely as "an 18-year-old Southern Connecticut State College coed," decades before that college became a university.

And yet this young woman set in motion the notorious chemical spraying and arrest of Jim Morrison, lead singer of the rock band the Doors on Dec. 9, 1967, at the old New Haven Arena.

And now I want to find her.

Who is she? Where is she?

My mission is to talk to her, to find out what she remembers of that nutty night, what it was like necking with a rock icon.

This is what I do know about those events, pieced together by reading accounts from the Register, the old Journal-Courier and the Morrison biography, "No One Here Gets Out Alive" by Jerry Hopkins and Daniel Sugerman.

The Doors had come to New Haven to promote their recent hits, including "Light My Fire."

Backstage before the show, Morrison and that unidentified coed were eyeing each other.

"We can’t talk here," Morrison told her. "Let’s find some place quieter."

The young lady followed the singer into a shower room. They started necking.

Then a New Haven police officer, one of many assigned to the Arena that night, discovered them.

"Hey, you kids!" he shouted. "Get outta here! Nobody allowed backstage!"

The girl ran off, but Morrison wasn’t budging. "Eat me," he told the man in blue.

Thereupon Morrison tasted Mace in the face. He stumbled out of the shower, screaming in anger.

During the show, Morrison told the crowd what had happened. He called the officer "this little man in a little blue suit."

Moments later, the police turned on the Arena lights and hauled Morrison off stage.

He was charged with breach of peace, resisting arrest and "performing an indecent and immoral exhibition." As a melee broke out, 12 others were arrested.

But the unidentified coed was not arrested. Nobody ever reported what happened to her after she fled that shower room.

I can’t ask Morrison about it — he’s dead. He perished in a bathtub in Paris in 1971.

But before he died, the Doors recorded "Peace Frog," which carried the line: "Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven."

The remaining Doors toured this past spring and performed at the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford. When the Register’s entertainment editor Fran Fried used the reunion to write about the Arena show, I got very curious about that mystery coed.

I figured somebody affiliated with Southern from those days must remember her name. But three months of tracking down people across the country has resulted only in a lot of head-scratching.

Janice Kornacki, a secretary in SCSU’s Alumni Office, loaned me yearbooks from the classes of 1971 and 1972, one of which should’ve been the coed’s graduating year. I picked out campus newspaper editors, radio station people and class presidents, then Kornacki gave me their current phone numbers.

None of them could dredge up the name.

The closest I came was in a conversation with Richard Farricielli, now SCSU’s dean of student affairs and a member of the class of ’71. He said he remembered the gal in question and that she did graduate with his class. But he couldn’t come up with her name.

State’s Attorney Mary Galvin, from the class of ’71, also tried to help me. But even her investigative skills led to a dead end.

Rick Mahoney, who edited the Southern yearbook in 1970, thought the coed might have an Italian name, so I started reading to him from the yearbooks the dozens of possibilities. Nothing rang a bell.

Mystery coed, who are you? Where are you? Come out, come out and reveal yourself!