By Hunter Cook
I would pass by it, everyday on my walk to and from school. I would occasionally glance over and admire how pretty the view was. A small creek with a bridge, a nice field with bright blue and red flowers growing all around it. Trees full of silkworms and buzzing bees. It was a nice contrast to the rest of my walk which was filled with dull grey buildings that seemed lifeless.
I asked someone once, a teacher, about the area. It has a unique name that piqued my interest when a friend told me about it. The people in town call it the Wailing Bridge. The story goes that a lady that lived nearby was walking along the bridge with her infant daughter. She was poor, hungry, and it was the Depression. She dropped her baby girl like a stone, head first. She was delirious from lack of sleep and hunger. Her husband had run off to the city to find work and left her with a starving baby. So when she stopped producing milk, she decided it was enough. When she looked at what she had done, she lost her mind. She screamed into the night, and it could be heard for miles around.
Until it was abruptly cut off.
No one knows what happened to her, what her name was, or how she died. The story was lost to the many years that had passed. I didn’t believe the story when I heard it, and neither did my parents. But the story gave me a feeling of unease every time I passed by. It was one of those inexplicable things, you know? When you know something isn’t real, but your brain still plays tricks on you. No matter what I did, a chill went down my spine when I imagined her, staring at me. I did a little researching at the library to ease my worries
I found out the story was completely made up. It was called the Wailing Bridge because of the presence of mountain lions in that part of the woods at night, they would wail out and sound like crying infants. That translated into an urban legend about a crying baby being put to death at the bridge by an exhausted mother, and then an urban legend game of telephone happened and it became the mother who was the one wailing.
I knew the story was fake, made up by some locals to scare their kids. But for some reason, no matter how much I logically understood it was fake, I couldn’t shake the idea of her staring at me as I walked by in the morning and in the evening. As winter drew near and it got darker earlier and earlier I was walking past that bridge near sunset. I could swear I saw a pair of glowing eyes looking out towards me, but it was probably my imagination. I walked past while keeping my chin up trying to be brave. I heard a story a few days later about the bridge, and how people call it the Bunny Bridge. I scoffed at the ridiculous name. Somehow it was even worse than Wailing Bridge. Once again my curiosity got the better of me and I asked about it.
The story goes that a couple was walking down the bridge one night, looking for a place to get some privacy out in the woods. They heard a chainsaw, and from underneath the bridge came a six foot bunny rabbit chasing them away. The girl got away to tell the story, but the man was found hung up from a tree brutally sliced to pieces. When I heard the story I couldn’t help but laugh. A six foot tall bunny with a chainsaw? People get more ridiculous everyday.
Yet still I couldn’t help but feel I was being watched every time. Those phantoms playing tricks on my brain, I kept seeing glowing eyes and hearing footsteps and heavy breathing. That shadow of a wailing mother and the ridiculous bunny man caused me great unease as it got darker and darker every time I walked past that bridge, that creek, that beautiful open field. One afternoon it was pitch black on my walk home, and it was raining. My hood was up and I was edging towards that bridge slowly, my anxiety ramping up as I got closer and closer. My curiosity finally reached its peak. I needed to know what was so special about this bridge that had everyone so worked up. I mean, surely it wasn’t that big a deal, right?
I walked away from the dirt road that led me home, and into the wooded area leading to the bridge, to the creek. I felt my newfound courage waver as I heard footsteps behind me so I began to pick up speed on my way to the bridge. I crossed the raging creek by jumping. When I was finally at the bridge I was underwhelmed by how normal it was. Nothing scary, nothing dark or creepy. I stood in the shadow beneath it and saw no spiders, no ghosts, no bunny man. Just an ordinary bridge casting an ordinary shadow. I jumped back as I saw glowing eyes in the tree line. I tripped and fell on my backside as I jumped, and hit my head on the ground with a hard fall.
I looked up to see what I had tripped over, and quickly panicked. I pulled myself to my feet and took several steps back. He was twisted and broken in several places. His body was mutilated beyond recognition, his bones had shot clean through his knees, and arms were twisted in weird angles. Worse than that, his face had been torn at by something, his sides were ripped to pieces. A trail of innards lay at his side. It was so hard to tell because of the mess of his body, it took me a moment before I realized he was around the same age as me. I caught my breath as I looked at the pile of flesh, as I tried to clean the blood off my shoes, when I heard the wailing.
But I knew the wailing was no apparition or Bunny Man, that the glowing eyes were no ghost or monster, and the footsteps behind me weren’t even human. I knew that the boy in front of me had not been sliced by a chainsaw or possessed by a ghost. He had jumped, he had fallen, and he had been dragged away and fed upon by the same mountain lion that watched me enter the woods. The same mountain lion that now stood above me on the bridge wailing in the night.
I made it home that night no worse for wear, and they found the body in the morning. As I walked to class the field I’d grown to love watching looked sick and bloody to me now as the police pulled what they could of the boy into a bag to be disposed of. I asked around and finally got a straight answer. My curiosity no longer raged inside me, but I felt I needed the closure hearing it provided.
The adults in town call it the Suicide Bridge. The story goes that every few years or so some lost soul heads off into those woods, sad or afraid or just unhappy, and jumps right off. The bridge is high enough and the sharp rocks on the side of the creek are deadly enough that they don’t last very long. Some people say that their spirits wail out at night, forever mourning their mortal souls, but the locals know it’s actually the mountain lions that have come to know the spot is a good place to find easy food at night. Back in the day they used to bury the bodies in the field beside the bridge, no markings or epitaphs to remember them by.
The stories come from the kids in town. The bunny man and the wailing woman were never real, obviously. But what’s real is sometimes too much to admit. Some people have to hide behind those stories because reality is too much for them. Those urban legends were a way to keep people from thinking too hard about that wailing. About those tormented spirits. Sometimes stories aren’t just about making up lies to scare you, or give you the chills when you pass by a bridge on your long walk home. Sometimes those stories are trying to tell you what’s real without you realizing it. They try to keep you from finding all those unmarked graves hiding in plain sight.
