The London Bridge that spans Bridgewater Channel in Lake Havasu City is the exterior of John Rennie’s 1831 stone bridge over the Thames. It is not the medieval London Bridge. Rennie’s design was accepted in 1823 and the bridge opened in London on August 1, 1831. By the 1960s it could not carry modern traffic. The City of London put it up for sale. Robert P. McCulloch, founder of Lake Havasu City, bought it in 1968 for $2.46 million. The exterior granite was numbered, dismantled, shipped through the Port of Long Beach, and reassembled over a new steel-and-concrete frame in Arizona between 1968 and 1971. The bridge opened there in October 1971. The hollow interior carries utilities and houses bats and swallows. The lamp posts are cast from French cannon captured at Waterloo. That is the documented history. The ghosts are the stories that followed the stones.
The Arizona accounts say the bridge brought its dead with it. Drivers and walkers report a British policeman (a bobby) walking the span at night, a woman in a black dress who crosses quickly and sometimes appears to jump and vanish before she hits the water, and figures in 19th-century clothing. One local history account, from Ed Walker of the Lake Havasu Museum of History, counts eleven spirits and ties them to blood from the heads that were once displayed on spikes at the old Drawbridge Gate (Traitor’s Gate) on the medieval bridge. Those heads were on an earlier structure. Some of the stones from that older bridge were reused when Rennie’s bridge was built. Walker’s claim is that the blood soaked into the granite and the spirits came with it. Other tellings add a prostitute, a beggar, and a newsboy, plus the sound of cart wheels, horses’ hooves, and a policeman’s whistle after dark. A 12 News segment and a Ghost Adventures episode (2020) have floated the idea that Jack the Ripper used a service door in the bridge because his 1888 murders were within a mile of it in Whitechapel. There is no contemporary record that places him on or in the bridge. The 1985 television film Terror at London Bridge (also called Bridge Across Time), starring David Hasselhoff, put the Ripper’s ghost in Havasu after the reconstruction. That is fiction.
What is documented is a 1831 granite-clad bridge that stood on the Thames for 137 years, a 1968 sale, a numbered-stone move, and a 1971 opening in the desert. The bobby, the woman in black, and the eleven spirits are the reports. No death certificate or inquest in Arizona names a person who died on the span and is said to remain there. The stones are real. The names attached to them are not.
The London Bridge over Bridgewater Channel at night and by day.
Relevant links
Arizona Republic / Valley 101: Jack the Ripper might be haunting Arizona — the paranormal claims and the Whitechapel proximity argument
Go Lake Havasu: London Bridge fun facts — the 1968–1971 move, the hollow interior, the bobby and the woman in black
AP: 15 things you might not know — the Waterloo cannons, the bats, the rumors
ROUTE Magazine: London Bridge — Ed Walker on the eleven spirits and the Traitor’s Gate heads