Gold Brook Covered Bridge, also called Stowe Hollow Bridge and, since the early 1970s, Emily’s Bridge, carries Covered Bridge Road over Gold Brook in the Stowe Hollow section of Stowe, Lamoille County. It is a single-lane wooden covered bridge about 50 feet long, built in 1844 by local builder John W. Smith. The lumber is thought to have come from Daniel Dutton’s sawmill just downstream. It is the only 19th-century covered bridge in Vermont that uses wooden Howe trusses and still carries a public road. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. The brook under it was once called Hull Brook. After the California Gold Rush it was renamed Gold Brook when locals panned it. That is the documented history. Emily is not in it.
The story that gave the bridge its popular name is short and inconsistent. A young woman named Emily, poor, was jilted by a richer lover who had agreed to meet her at the bridge to elope. In one version she hanged herself from a rafter. In another she drove a carriage off the side and died on the rocks below. In a third she was in an automobile in the 1920s and missed the turn. In all of them she dies and stays. Visitors report unexplained sounds, a voice inside the short tunnel, lights, and claw-like scratches on cars parked on the span. One account, cited by Joseph Citro, describes a group in the early 1970s who said they were attacked while sitting in a car on the bridge. None of the versions has a name, a date, or a death record attached to it.
The story itself has a paper trail, and it starts late. An earlier history of Stowe discussed the bridge and said nothing about a ghost. Bob Hagerman’s early-1970s book on Lamoille County bridges is the first published account. He drew on a high-school paper by a local student. In a 1978 interview Hagerman said one of the girl’s friends later admitted they had used a Ouija board for part of the research. Joseph Citro, who has written the standard books on Vermont folklore, traced the named “Emily” further: a local woman, Nancy Wolfe Stead, said in the 1970s that she and a friend, Hazel Carlson, invented the tale around 1972 to scare neighborhood kids who swam near the bridge. No Vermont vital record, newspaper, or town history links anyone named Emily to a death at Gold Brook. The Vermont Historical Society has stated the same. The bridge was called Gold Brook Bridge for more than a century before the name Emily’s Bridge appeared on postcards.
What is documented is an 1844 Howe-truss covered bridge, a National Register listing, and a ghost story that two local women and a student paper put into circulation in the early 1970s. The scratches and the voice are the reports. The woman who died there is not in the records.
The Gold Brook Covered Bridge, daytime and at night.
Relevant links
Vermont Public: Mudgett on Emily’s Bridge — Hagerman’s book and the Ouija-board admission
Wikipedia: Gold Brook Covered Bridge — the 1844 date, the Howe truss, the National Register listing, the late origin of the legend
Vermont Historical Society: This Place in History, Emily’s Bridge — the late-1960s/early-1970s start and the lack of a death record
Atlas Obscura: Emily’s Bridge — the versions of the death and the tourist use of the name