Back in the early 1800s, Danville Indiana had officially become a town. The first, in fact, in Hendricks county. Young couples were drawn to this up and coming suburban town. In fact, there is a certain couple that lurk the streets of Danville to this day.
The husband, who was a construction worker, and his young bride, were in their early twenties. She was a housewife and cared for their newborn baby at home. The couple was happy and the young mother was frequently seen cheerfully doing chores or running errands about town while carrying her young baby on her hip.
One day the man went to work as usual, building an overpass bridge for trains that crossed above a busy road. His wife was able to complete her chores early that day and decided to surprise her husband by bringing a freshly prepared lunch for them to share at the construction site. Once she arrived, she was met with the most horrible news. She could barely breathe as his coworkers described the accident that had occurred moments before she got to the bridge.
While putting the final bolts into the last of the tracks, a locomotive unexpectedly came barreling toward the bridge. As the warning whistle blew, valuable tools were left behind as crewmen hastily abandoned their posts and ran for safety. The man knew the tools might derail the train causing a major catastrophe so he rushed back and forth and tried to gather what he could. His heroic effort was curtailed when he stumbled and fell in the path of the steam engine. Recovering too late, the young father could barely look up to see the baffled conductor’s face before a thousand pounds of rushing steel crushed him to death.
His loving wife was so upset and broken that she wandered over to the bridge, and with her baby in her arms, she jumped.
Some say that when you drive under the bridge you can hear a baby crying and you may even see a figure of a woman holding something in the shadows. No matter what, you should never walk the tracks on top on May 15th past 12 p.m. If you do, local residents say, you will be overcome with an overwhelming feeling of loss and feel compelled to jump.
Liam S. from Brownsburg IN
More information about Danville Indiana’s Haunted Bridge
The railroad bridge that spans White Lick Creek in Avon was being constructed in 1907 by immigrant Irishmen. Cement was swirled in huge vats to make pylon supports. One day, one of the men slipped and fell into one of the vats from a badly-constructed wooden platform. He kept sinking deeper and deeper, knocking against the walls of the vat. His co-workers tried to help, but they could not rescue him. The company in charge of building the bridge didn’t want to break open the pylon, so they continued the bridge construction, ignoring the trapped soul within.
Since the tragedy there have been sightings of the worker’s ghost stationed in the portals of the trestle waving a lantern back and forth.
A different story tells of a mother who was walking across the bridge to take her infant to a doctor. Unfortunately, she became trapped on the tracks, she stumbled somehow and her foot got stuck. Struggling to free herself as a train hurtled near, she couldn’t escape safely to the other side of the bridge and had to jump off with her infant in her arms. The baby died as she couldn’t safely protect her precious child and keep her arms around it. The mother, sick with grief, survived the fall survived. She died a few weeks later, enable to bear the pain of her child’s death.
Her ghost is rumored to walk along the bridge, on the high edge. Screams are also heard reverberating around the bridge, and along its arched tunnels, the bridge is silent and dark, filled with cold spots and mystic whirlpools of energy that disconcert the visitor. These tunnels are closed off to visitors.