Marsh Road

In 1981, a 14-year-old Milpitas girl named Marcy Renee Conrad was murdered and left at a bridge on Marsh Road by her 16-year-old boyfriend, and local teenagers have been hunting her ghost ever since. The case was so disturbing it inspired the 1986 film River's Edge. The bridge is now closed off to the public.

Marcy Renee Conrad was fourteen. She was a freshman at Milpitas High School. On November 3, 1981, her 16-year-old boyfriend Anthony Jacques Broussard raped and strangled her and left her body beside a road in the hills above town. Then he went back to school and started telling classmates. At least a dozen of them came out to look at the body over the next two days. Nobody called the police.

That's the part that made the national news and eventually the movie. The killing itself was the kind of brutal teenage tragedy that happens and fades. The silence after it, the field trip of kids hiking up to see their dead classmate and then going home to dinner, was something else entirely. Filmmaker Tim Hunter took the story and turned it into River's Edge in 1986, with a 22-year-old Keanu Reeves. Crispin Glover played the friend who won't stop talking about it. Dennis Hopper played the paranoid ex-biker. The film is still studied in college film classes as one of the definitive portraits of American teenage nihilism.

Back on Marsh Road, the legend took on a life of its own. Milpitas kids started driving the back route at night, windows down, listening for screams. Some reported seeing a girl at the bridge, always from the corner of the eye, always gone when they looked directly. Others said they heard a girl crying in the brush. A few said they never went back after what they saw. The trip became a rite of passage for generations of local high schoolers, the way Lovers Lane stories work everywhere else.

What separates Marsh Road from most urban legends is that this one isn't urban and it isn't a legend. Marcy Conrad was real. Her murder was prosecuted. Broussard was convicted in 1983 and sentenced to 25 years to life. He was paroled in April 2023. The case file is public record. The hills above Milpitas haven't forgotten.

Local law enforcement has since closed off the stretch of road where the body was found. Officially it's for safety and for respect. Unofficially, police got tired of picking up broken beer bottles left by teenagers who'd come out to look for Marcy. The bridge is gated. Signs are posted. The thrill-seeking has been pushed further up the road and into the stories kids tell each other in Milpitas High parking lots.

The ghost story on Marsh Road does something most ghost stories don't. It names a real person and keeps her name in circulation, four decades after she was killed, in a town that otherwise had no reason to keep thinking about a quiet freshman who vanished one November afternoon. Whether you think that's haunting in the supernatural sense or haunting in the literal one might depend on how close to Milpitas you grew up.