The bridge that carries Alabama Highway 134 over the Choctawhatchee River just north of Newton is an ordinary concrete span. The story attached to it is not. It is the hanging of a Methodist minister in 1864, and a hole in the sand under the old wooden bridge that locals said would not stay filled for more than a century.
William Sketoe Sr. was born on June 8, 1818. He was a circuit rider living in Newton, in Dale County. On the afternoon of December 3, 1864, he was stopped on the wooden bridge over the river. The Newton Home Guard, under Captain Joseph Breare, took him. He was never charged and never tried. The local version, the one on the Newton Historical Society sign, is that he had served three years in the Confederate army and had come home on leave to see a sick wife, and that the Home Guard decided he was a deserter. Other accounts say he was killed for allegedly helping pro-Union renegades in the area. No public evidence of either was produced. He was the third man Breare’s group killed.
He was a tall man. They hanged him from a water oak near the bridge, and his feet touched the ground. One of the men, on crutches from the war, used the crutch to dig under him. The hole was about thirty inches wide and eight inches deep. Sketoe’s last words, in the telling, were a prayer for his killers. He was buried in a cemetery in nearby Echo.
The hole is the part that became the legend. For roughly 125 years, people in Dale County said it kept its shape. Fill it with dirt, trash, or debris, and it was empty again, sometimes within hours. Campers said they pitched a tent over it after filling it and woke to find it swept clean. The story that grew up around it was that Sketoe’s ghost still swung from the tree, and that his dragging feet cleared the hole every night. Kathryn Tucker Windham put the tale in 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, and that is how most people outside the county know it.
A new highway bridge went up over the hanging site in 1979. The hole sat under the span. In 1990 a flood on the Choctawhatchee forced crews to dump rip-rap on the bank to keep the bridge from being undermined. The hole disappeared under tons of rock. The original bronze marker washed downstream in the same flood and is in the Newton museum. A new sign from the Newton Historical Society stands near the site, and a monument was put up in 2006 by Sketoe family members and the town.
There is no modern apparition file the way there is on some bridges. The reported activity was the hole itself, a sense of being watched, and the claim that the six men who hanged him later met his ghost and died violent deaths. That last part is folklore. The lynching is not. The date, the Home Guard, and the absence of a trial are in the record. The hole that would not stay filled is the story the county told for a century and a quarter, until the 1990 flood covered it.
The Highway 134 bridge, with the rip-rap that buried the hole in 1990. The Newton Historical Society sign at the site. The marker and the reconstructed hole in the riverside park.
Relevant links
Beyond Haunted: Sketoe’s Hole — the 2006 monument and the present site under the bridgeA shallow hole near the bank of this bridge is said to be haunted. For decades, whenever someone fills the hole in, it will be empty again within a day. Even highway workers have attempted to fill the hole, but to no avail.
Bill Sketoe, Wikipedia — dates, the Home Guard, the hole dimensions, the 1979 bridge and 1990 flood
Explore Southern History: Ghost of Sketoe’s Hole — the Windham book, the flood, the riverside park
Haunted Places: Bill Sketoe’s Hole — the competing accounts of why he was taken