The crossing over Mill Creek in southeastern Johnston County is a quiet rural bridge, about 14 miles south of Smithfield on U.S. 701, then left on Shaw’s Creek Road. There are two bridges close together. The ghost story is older than either of them. It was already being told as family lore when H.V. Rose wrote it up for the Smithfield Herald in 1956. Rose had no documents. He said the tale had passed from generation to generation pretty much intact.
The man in the story is named only Lynch. In the version Rose recorded, he was a hard taskmaster who held land along the creek at the bridge. His enslaved workers were known, the story says, for the color of their hair, all redheads, because they were underfed. Their fall and winter diet was given as sweet potatoes and cow tallow. One day Lynch set a man called Old Squire, or Squire, to clear a cornfield by the bridge. Nothing Squire did was enough. Lynch used the lash. When Squire had had enough, he raised his grubbing hoe and struck Lynch dead. He buried the body in a shallow grave under the bridge and went back to his quarters. A search of the countryside never found Lynch.
After that, the bridge got a reputation. Torches and lanterns went out the moment a walker stepped on the boards and lit again on the far bank. One man said his walking cane was pulled from his hand on the bridge and returned, with the touch of a hand, once he was safely across. Chains were said to rattle. Lights were seen bobbing along the creek. The older men in the area called them the lights of Lynch’s ghost. A later version of the story says Old Squire’s body was found on the bridge one morning, with no explanation of how it got there, and that the lights are Lynch and Squire still trying to clear the land.
Aaron Lee, who lived on a farm above the creek and told the story at the Johnston County Heritage Center Ghost Walk, is the local witness in the 1956 account. He was known for chemistry and for breeding horses. The old wooden bridge was called Lee’s Bridge for his family. He set out one fall afternoon to test the tales, riding toward Newton Grove so the return would put him on the bridge after dark. When the horse’s hoof touched the boards, he heard a sound under the bridge like a man in pain, in a death struggle, trying to call for help. That is the experience he put on the record. There is no inquest, no named body, and no newspaper account of a murder under the bridge. Rose said so himself.
What is documented is a 1956 retelling of an oral story, a wooden bridge that is gone, and a crossing on Shaw’s Creek Road that still carries the name. The killing, the buried body, and the lights are the story the county has told since. There is no death record attached to a man named Lynch at that creek.
The Mill Creek marker in Johnston County, from the Bentonville campaign of 1865. The haunted crossing is a different bridge, farther south toward Shaw’s Creek Road.
Relevant links
- Spring Hope Enterprise: a ghost on a Johnston County bridge — the 1956 H.V. Rose account
- Carolina’s Unknown: the Ghost at Mill Creek Bridge — the 1820 dating and the directions
- Johnston County Heritage Center Ghost Walk, 2020 — Aaron Lee’s telling of Lynch’s Ghost