Ghost Legends of Indiana - Haunted Bridge

Haunted Bridge

In the town of Avon, Indiana there is a Bridge that is haunted. The railroad bridge was constructed across the White Lick Creek in the 1850s by immigrant Irish workers. Cement was mixed in large narrow vats and hardened into the form of a pylon. One afternoon while working on the bridge, a platform collapsed and a worker fell into the cement vat. As he slowly sank down into the vat, his fellow workers could not reach him in time and they had no way to save him. They could hear him knocking from the inside of the vat. The company decided to continue building rather than tear down the pylon to extract his body.

While the men finished the work on the bridge, and for years afterward, many claimed to hear knocks and screams from inside the pylon. Decades later, when the bridge was torn down, there were a number of sightings of a man wandering along the tracks trying to flag down trains. The haunted bridge is on the official seal to Avon Indiana. The Big Four Railroad, lifeblood of the connecting arteries in Central Indiana and beyond, required a bridge spanning Country Road 625 and White Lick Creek, so the bridge was built in 1906-1907 and double-tracked in 1908. It is about 300 feet long and 70 feet high, an imposing structure whose image graces the Avon town seal today.

The legend of Avon’s Haunted Bridge has been around for generations. Different rumors abound, but in general, the people of Avon have agreed that if you go near the old bridge at night, you will hear a moaning, discontented ghost, or maybe two or three of them. And if you cross the bridge on a hot summer day, you may see the ghost’s tears on it.

There are various explanations for the hauntings. No one, of course, knows whether they are being carried out by a single ghost or many. Over the years, some theories have come to be popular regarding who the ghosts might be. A few of the most widely accepted versions are summarized below.

Henry Johnson, an alcoholic construction worker, slipped one night during the building of the bridge and fell into some wet cement, dying there in the lonely night. The following morning he was found, face frozen in the cement that killed him.

There is a similar report that an Irish or black construction worker fell to his death during the making of the bridge. He landed inside the framework of one of the bridge’s supports. The railroad decided that, since the unfortunate laborer was already dead, they would simply inter his body in the bridge when they sealed the support with cement. Some say that the poor man’s arm hung out, and they cut it off.

Perhaps, as some Avon residents aver, the ghosts on the Haunted Bridge belong to a young woman and her baby. The story goes that she was walking to the doctor’s house late one night with her sick baby when she had the bad luck to get her foot caught among the railroad ties on the bridge. Then, disaster struck in the form of a huge locomotive barreling down on them. She struggled mightily, finally getting free of the railroad ties, but had no time to run across the bridge to escape the train. So, clutching her sick child, she jumped off the bridge. She survived, but the baby, falling from her arms, did not. Within a few weeks, the mother died of grief and a broken heart. The story concludes that if you drive under the bridge at night, you might very well hear her screaming for her baby.

The haunted bridge in Avon is still a functional railroad crossing, servicing the CSX Railroad, and regularly visited by residents and guests to get spine-tingling adrenaline rush.

Avon Haunted Bridge White Lick Creek and CR 625E Avon, IN