In Brief
The railroad bridge at Avon, Indiana has been called haunted since 1908, two years after it was built. Three legends explain who died there. None of them check out in the record, and yet the bridge still screams when the trains roll across.
The Full Story
The railroad bridge at Avon, Indiana screams. Locals have called it the Screaming Bridge for more than a century, and they'll tell you who's doing the screaming. The trouble is they can't agree on who.
One version: during construction, a worker slipped into a pylon as the wet concrete was being poured and was buried alive inside it. When a train crosses, people say they still hear him pounding the inside of the forms over the trickle of White Lick Creek below. Another version: a young mother carrying her sick baby fell from the bridge into the creek, and both died. At night she's still heard screaming for the child, though accounts of how she died vary by who's telling it. A third holds that four workers fell to their deaths during the build, and people report thuds and splashes in water that looks dead calm.
Three stories, all told with equal confidence. Then a local historian named Susan Truax went through the records.
She found nothing. No newspaper account, no official report, no documented death of any kind during the build. "I could find no accident that said that a worker was killed," she said, "so I don't think so, however, there are some people who insist that it was true and not everything was reported in the newspaper." The bridge went up in 1906 for the Big Four Railroad, a triple-arch concrete trestle 305 feet long, engineered by W.M. Dunne and built for roughly $70,000. Three main arches span 75 feet each. It was double-tracked in 1908 — and that same year, a Plainfield newspaper, the Friday Caller, was already calling it haunted: "Two or three men have been killed in accidents at the Big Four bridge over Big Creek and now the bridge is alleged to be haunted." The lore is nearly as old as the bridge, and just as undocumented.
There is one explanation that holds up. The arches are hollow. A DePauw professor who studied Indiana's concrete bridges described how a train passing overhead "sends reverberations careening eerily through the structure's caverns." Truax heard it herself: "When the trains go over it, it does make a sound that sounds like somebody's screaming or somebody's moaning, so that lends to it a lot."
The bridge ended up on the town's official seal — the haunted landmark is literally Avon's emblem. Driving under it made Indianapolis Monthly's list of 50 things every Hoosier must do, and drivers who pass beneath honk the horn, said to drown out the grieving mother's wails. CSX freight still rolls across it. The screaming has never stopped.
