Colville Covered Bridge

Two paranormal teams, three deaths, and an 1877 covered bridge where an Ovilus typed 'Sarah Mitchell' and recorders caught a stray laugh.

When the Bluegrass Ghost Chasers played back their voice recorder inside the Colville Covered Bridge, they heard a laugh that didn't belong to any of them.

This 124-foot wooden tunnel over Hinkston Creek was built in 1877 by Jacob Bower using a multiple king post truss, served Bourbon County for over a century, got dismantled in 1997, and was rebuilt and reopened in 2001. The rebuild used new timbers, but anyone who grew up around here will tell you whatever's in the bridge didn't leave when the old boards did.

Three deaths anchor the stories. An early-1900s hanging in the middle of the span. A 1930s car crash where a young couple coming home from a dance missed the bridge entrance, plunged into the creek, and drowned. And an elderly woman who had a heart attack while walking through the tunnel and never walked out the other side.

The car-crash legend is the one drivers report most. Cross the bridge at night and sometimes headlights appear in your rearview mirror, closing fast, right up until the point where the phantom car should be on top of you. Then the lights disappear. A variation has the headlights shining up through the floorboards, from the creek below, where no car could possibly be.

Ms. Mitchell is the other name that comes up. Paranormal investigator Patti Starr took a team through the bridge on an October night (Chuck, Pete Eclov, Mary Beth) and ran an Ovilus, an EMF meter, and an audio recorder. The Ovilus, which converts environmental readings into words, output two phrases during the session: "Car lights" and "Sarah Mitchell." When Starr asked out loud, "Are you here with us, Ms. Mitchell?" the audio recorder picked up a female voice answering "yes." One of the investigators felt a hand on his shoulder. The EMF meter pegged for about two minutes.

"I do not have proof that ghosts exist," Starr said afterward, "but I've been known to get some pretty convincing evidence."

The Bluegrass Ghost Chasers investigation came later, led by Larry Conley. They brought the voice recorders and EMF meters, plus a teddy bear rigged with a voicebox that triggers when something touches it. Conley's take on the folklore is measured: "With any folklore, there's just always some truth behind them, so you just never know."

The reason the bridge works, practically, is the way it's built. A covered bridge is an enclosed wooden tunnel, and enclosed wooden tunnels do interesting things to sound. Footsteps amplify. Voices echo. A creek running underneath fills the quiet with a low constant noise that the brain will happily turn into sobs or whispering if it wants to. Colville is one of only thirteen covered bridges left in Kentucky, it's on the National Register of Historic Places, and it's open to traffic. Which means the headlights behind you tonight might be real. The ones at two in the morning, closing fast, vanishing ten feet from your bumper, are the ones people go home and think about the next day.