Haunted Bridge of Avon

Three competing ghost legends all tied to an Avon bridge that's been spooking people since 1908: a mother and baby, a worker, four laborers.

The ghost stories started almost immediately. The Big Four Railroad finished the bridge over White Lick Creek in 1906, and by 1908 Plainfield's Friday Caller was already running accounts of spirits in the area. The bridge was barely two years old.

Nobody can agree on who the ghost is. Three competing legends circulate, all told with the same confidence, and none of them can be cleanly ruled out.

The most popular version: a young mother was walking the tracks to get her sick baby to a doctor. She slipped. She fell. Both of them died in the creek below. Some tellings have the train coming up behind her. Others have her catching her foot on the rail and dropping the baby before she fell herself. Either way, what you're supposed to hear at night is the mother screaming for her child, and local tradition says drivers passing underneath should lay on the horn to drown her out. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty unsettling local custom to just casually keep going.

The second legend says a construction worker fell into wet concrete during the bridge's construction and was buried alive as the cement set around him. Local historian Susan Truax has documented a variant of this that adds a detail: a saw was supposedly left in the drying concrete, and people say you can still hear it on certain nights. When trains cross overhead, they describe a distant buzzing from inside the bridge. In another telling, a worker sawing an oversized wooden beam lost his balance and fell directly into the freshly poured concrete.

The third story skips the detail work and just claims four men fell to their deaths into White Lick Creek during construction. Visitors report thuds and splashes, like bodies still hitting the water.

Professor James Cooper of DePauw University has offered a less supernatural reading. Trains crossing the bridge send reverberations through the hollow arch structure, which is a pretty poetic way of saying big concrete arches sound weird when a CSX freight goes over them. On humid summer days condensation forms on the bridge, which people have called the ghost's tears. Cooper's theory doesn't really compete with the legends so much as explain why the legends stuck: the bridge does, in fact, make unsettling sounds. People heard them in 1908. People still hear them. The stories fill in the reason.

The numbers on the bridge itself: 305 feet long, 70 feet high, three main spandrel arches of 75 feet each, topped with 24 smaller arches, engineered by W.M. Dunne at a cost of about $70,000, double-tracked in 1908 and still in active use by CSX. The town of Avon put it on the official town seal. Indianapolis Monthly put it on a list of 50 things every Hoosier has to do. You can see it for free from Washington Township Park, or drive right underneath it on County Road 625 East and honk your horn if you're inclined to honk for a ghost.

The condensation is the strangest thing to see in person. On a hot day it beads up along the underside of the arches in streaks, catching the light, running down the concrete. Locals call them the ghost's tears. You can reach up and touch them if you stand under the right arch.