Everett Covered Bridge

Drivers on Everett Road near Peninsula, Ohio report picking up a ghostly hitchhiker between a Hopewell burial mound and the last covered bridge in Summit County. The leading candidate is farmer John Gilson, who drowned crossing Furnace Run in 1877 while his wife survived.

Road construction workers in 1856 cracked open a hexagonal limestone tomb lined with Hopewell burial artifacts. They noted the find, then built their bridge right over it.

The Everett Covered Bridge sits in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, crossing Furnace Run near Peninsula, Ohio. It is the last covered bridge in Summit County. The current structure is a 1986 reconstruction by the National Park Service, built to match the original Smith Truss design patented by Robert W. Smith of Tipp City in 1867. But the ghost story predates the rebuild by more than a century.

On a winter night in 1877, farmer John Gilson and his wife were returning from a holiday party by sled wagon. The creek was swollen with snowmelt. As they attempted to cross, one of the horses stumbled, sending both riders into the icy water. Mrs. Gilson survived. Her husband did not. His body was recovered four days later downstream.

The bridge may have been built as a direct response to the Gilson drowning, though the timeline is debated. Some historians believe it predated the tragedy by a few years. Either way, the two stories are permanently linked in local memory.

Drivers on Everett Road report picking up a hitchhiker near the bridge at night. He appears solid enough to pull over for, standing at the roadside between the bridge and the old Hopewell burial site about a quarter mile away. He gets in. Then he is gone. Multiple accounts describe the same route, the same stretch of road, and the same disappearance. The common theory is that it is John Gilson, trying to find his way home from the creek that killed him.

Paranormal investigators who have visited the site report audio recordings capturing voices pleading for help, as if someone were in immediate danger. The bridge area also produces thick, localized fog on clear nights that dissipates within minutes. Photographers have documented this repeatedly, and it has become one of the more reliable phenomena at the site.

The Hopewell connection adds a second layer to the location. The burial mound that road workers disturbed in the 1850s contained skeletal remains and cultural artifacts from a civilization that thrived 1,500 to 2,100 years ago. Some visitors attribute the hitchhiker not to Gilson but to a Hopewell spirit displaced when the road cut through sacred ground. There is no way to confirm either theory, which is probably the point.

The bridge was damaged by floods in 1913 and hit by a truck in 1970. A spring flood in 1975 lifted the entire structure off its sandstone abutments and deposited the wreckage in the creek bed below. The community raised funds for a historically accurate reconstruction, completed by the NPS in 1986. Today the bridge hosts contra dances several times a year, a New England tradition brought by the valley's early settlers.

The hitchhiker reports continued through the destruction and reconstruction. Whatever is out there does not seem to care whether the bridge is standing or not. Visitors heading out after dark should know that the road is narrow, unlit, and sits inside a national park with limited cell service. The nearest town, Peninsula, is about two miles north.