We’ve all heard the stories before. There’s an old, spooky bridge just down the road … Or maybe it’s tucked away in the countryside somewhere and is no longer in use—but if you can find it, and you can endure the darkness, you will see the scariest thing ever. It might be a ghost, it might be a mysterious light, or perhaps it’s an odd voice or a cry heard in the night. But it’s there. And it’s waiting for you …
These are the stories that we whisper around the campfire and tell in hushed tones as we huddle in our beds just before sleep. The stories are all at once mesmerizing, unique, and familiar in an odd way. There is, of course, a good reason for this: Great scary narratives are almost always wrapped in shrouds of history and urban legend.
It would be easy to dissect many of these tales, to point out their inaccuracies, or to dismiss them outright for their lack of documentation. But that would be a huge mistake. The tradition of oral history—and, of course, telling ghost stories—has been around for as long as mankind can remember. So we can excuse the medium to an extent when it fails to produce facts to back up a particularly horrifying tale. With or without authentication or validation, the truth is that the story remains. And it does so to remind us that all is not logical in our world. Not everything can be easily explained.
One odd turn along the road of life and we can suddenly be faced with the things we were always told were legend. Chances are, if you are reading this book, you probably know a person or two whom this has happened to. Or maybe it was you.
The truth is that sometimes things do, indeed, go bump in the night, and sometimes those things aren’t necessarily supernatural. Tales such as the ones listed in this book can also remind us of the ugly elements of humankind—the horrors of war, love stories gone awry, and the malicious things that people can do. The world can be a terrifying place, and these incidents are the foundation for a lot of terrifying stories.
There is also a more practical reason for many supernatural occurrences to lack supporting facts. Oftentimes when people encounter the mysterious there is a need for the incident to make sense to the observer. It’s not enough to simply accept the situation—that there’s a spirit appearing on the bridge in the middle of the night for instance or that the sounds of a car crash can clearly be heard with no accident in sight or that mysterious handprints are appearing on the windows of a parked car. The observer wants everything to have a reason, so he/she makes up a story to account for the situation.
Because of this, very real supernatural events are happening all over the country, but the particulars surrounding the incidents are completely false. This is human nature; there is always a need to explain the unknown. For me, the challenge of writing a book about bridges and the supernatural involves the obvious—the familiarity and similarity of the stories.
Why does the story of a crybaby bridge sound so familiar to you and me? There’s an easy answer. There’s a crybaby bridge in almost every state in the country! It’s a common location and they invariably have the same name. So, rather than write a book like my previous tome, The Ghost Hunter’s Field Guide (which lists more than a thousand haunted places state-by-state), I decided to document the best bridges and tales in the country and organize them into recognizable categories.
As a note for would-be explorers, the bridges listed in this book are almost always public locations (and are noted when they are not), but care and caution should always be exercised when trekking to these spots. Especially if it’s a bridge located in the middle of nowhere or down a road that is no longer serviceable. I am, of course, talking about very real dangers here—not the supernatural. Some bridges are decommissioned because they simply are not safe anymore, and never forget that a bridge is almost always made to cross over something and what’s underneath is probably not so safe! And then there are trains and traffic … Yes, yes, you get it.
So always let people know when you venture into the wilds, always do the safe thing, and always get permission if you decide to visit any private locations listed here. And remember, while the stories chronicled in this book can sometimes be debated concerning the validity of the details—or perhaps dismissed by certain intellectuals as being rumor or urban legend—a couple things are quite certain:
The bridges are quite real.
And somewhere a small group of people is gathered together telling stories about that bridge right now …