Lydia's Bridge

A 1924 driver picked up a girl in a white gown near this Jamestown bridge. At her address, her mother said she'd died in a wreck the year before.

In 1924, an NC State student named Burke Hardison was driving through Jamestown on a wet night when he saw a young woman in a white formal gown standing near an underpass, flagging him down. She asked for a ride to High Point. He took her. When they reached the address she gave, he got out to walk her to the door and turned to find the back seat empty.

A woman answered the door. Hardison described the girl. The woman told him her daughter had been killed in a car accident at a nearby overpass the year before. She was wearing her graduation dress.

The story has been told almost exactly the same way for a hundred years. Folklorist Nancy Roberts wrote it down in her 1959 book An Illustrated Guide to Ghosts and Mysterious Occurrences in the Old North State, which is where most North Carolinians first read it. The ghost has a name now: Lydia. The spot is known as Lydia's Bridge, an abandoned 1920s railroad underpass on the old High Point Road in Jamestown, Guilford County.

Researchers have tried to pin it down. Amy Greer and Michael Renegar dug up a Greensboro Patriot article from June 21, 1920 reporting a fatal wreck on High Point Road near those exact bridges. A young woman named Annie Jackson was killed when her vehicle "turned turtle" on the wet pavement. Annie isn't Lydia, and the date doesn't match Hardison's story either. But a girl really did die on that stretch of road, in roughly the right era, in exactly the conditions the legend describes.

The Lydia story is a classic vanishing hitchhiker tale. Folklorists Rosalie Hankey and Richard Beasley identified it as a distinct type back in 1943, and versions of it show up in pretty much every culture that has cars and cemeteries. That doesn't make it untrue, necessarily. It means the shape of the story travels well.

The specific thing about Lydia is the bridge. You can still go stand under it. The old concrete underpass is graffitied and quiet and has that particular feel of infrastructure nobody maintains anymore. Local kids dare each other to walk through it at night. People have reported seeing a woman in a pale dress on the shoulder of the road in rain, sometimes with her thumb out, sometimes just standing there watching cars go by.

Nobody picks her up and takes her home anymore. The house Hardison drove to is gone. The road he drove is rerouted. Lydia is left under a bridge that doesn't carry trains anymore, waiting on a ride to an address that doesn't exist.