Everett Covered Bridge

The Everett Road Covered Bridge spans Furnace Run in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the last remaining covered bridge in Summit County, Ohio. The original structure was built around 1877 using a truss pattern patented by Robert W. Smith of Tipp City, Ohio, in 1867 and 1869, during an era when Ohio led the nation in covered bridge construction with over two thousand such structures statewide. The bridge is located at 2370 Everett Road in Peninsula, half a mile west of Riverview Road.

The haunting is most commonly linked to the drowning of John Gilson, a local farmer. According to the legend, on a winter night in 1877, Gilson and his wife were returning home from visiting friends when they found their usual crossing blocked by rising water and ice from a winter storm. Attempting an alternate route, their sled wagon overturned into the icy waters of Furnace Run. Mrs. Gilson was pulled to safety, but her husband was dragged into deeper water by his horse. His body was not recovered for four days. Some accounts hold that the covered bridge was built as a direct result of that tragedy to provide safe passage over the dangerous crossing, though historians have noted that the timeline is uncertain and the bridge may have already existed in some form when Gilson died.

A second layer of legend involves a Native American burial site. During construction of Everett Road in 1856, workers reportedly discovered a hexagonal limestone-block-lined tomb containing skeletal remains and artifacts belonging to the Hopewell Culture, an ancient civilization dating back fifteen hundred to twenty-one hundred years. The road and eventually the bridge were built over or near this burial ground, and some believe the restless spirits associated with the disturbed burial contribute to the area's paranormal atmosphere.

Visitors to the bridge report an overwhelming sense of unease, particularly at dusk. The sound of wooden wheels on planks has been heard when no vehicles are present, as though a horse-drawn carriage is crossing the bridge. Some claim to see a lantern light approaching from inside the darkened bridge, swinging as though carried by an unseen hand. A ghostly hitchhiker has been reported along the stretch of road between the burial site and the bridge, described as a figure wandering in search of a ride who vanishes when approached. Disembodied voices have been heard pleading for help, as though someone is in mortal danger in the water below.

Photographers have captured what they describe as ghostly vapors and partial apparitions in images taken at the bridge, and local paranormal investigators have documented orbs and unexplained fog in their photographs. Electronic voice phenomena recordings made near the bridge have allegedly captured phrases that sound like "help me." The PANICd paranormal database lists the bridge as an active location and investigators visited the site in September 2019.

The original bridge endured the Great Flood of 1913 and a truck impact in 1970, but in 1975, rushing water from a spring storm lifted the entire structure from its sandstone abutments and deposited the wreckage into the streambed. Local residents and the Cuyahoga Valley Association raised funds for reconstruction, and by 1986 the National Park Service completed a historically accurate rebuild using Oregon timber. The paranormal activity, according to those who experience it, continued unchanged in the new structure. Today the bridge hosts contra dances several times a year, connecting visitors to nineteenth-century community traditions, while after dark it remains one of the most frequently reported haunted locations in northeast Ohio.