The Goose River Bridge carries Pascal Avenue over the Goose River in Rockport, Knox County, just before the river meets Rockport Harbor. Rockport was once called Goose River. The present bridge is a modern replacement. An earlier iron truss bridge stood here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The figure attached to the crossing is called Pitcher Man, or the Pitcher Man. He is said to be William Richardson. There is no contemporary record of a man by that name being killed on the bridge in 1783, or in any other year.
The story says Richardson threw a party, or joined one, when word of the end of the Revolutionary War reached the village in 1783. He carried a pitcher of ale through the streets, filling mugs and urging people to celebrate. On the bridge he met three men who were still loyal to the British crown. He offered them a drink. One struck him on the head with a musket or a club. They left him. He died before help arrived. No one was charged. The versions vary slightly in the number of pitchers and the number of men. One later telling adds that he had earlier guided a privateer up the river to hide supplies from a British ship, which made him a local hero. That detail does not appear in the earliest accounts. The ghost is said to still walk the bridge in Revolutionary-era clothes, pitcher in hand, looking for someone to share a drink. Reports from the 1950s describe couples parked near the bridge who saw a transparent man approach with a pitcher and tap on the window. Later accounts say he has been seen on both the old and the new bridge, sometimes thrusting the pitcher through an open car window. The town has posted no-trespassing signs from sunset to sunrise at the area under the bridge that locals once called the Passion Pit.
What is documented is a bridge that has stood in successive forms on Pascal Avenue, a late-twentieth-century local legend about a 1783 killing that has no supporting vital record or newspaper notice, and a cluster of 1950s sightings of a friendly figure with a pitcher. The man and the murder are the story. The bridge is real. The pitcher is the one the story supplies.
Relevant links
- Haunted Places: Pitcher Man – Goose River Bridge — the 1783 party version and the modern sightings
- New England Legends, Podcast 114: The Pitcher Man of Goose River Bridge — the Tory attack and the long circulation of the story
- Booze + Spirits: The Ghost of Goose River Bridge — the 1950s lovers’-lane reports
- BridgeHunter: Goose River Bridge (Old) — the earlier iron truss
- https://www.thepagegallery.com/blog/rockport-bridge-history