The bridge once called Fiddler’s Bridge crossed Scott’s Run near St. Georges, a few miles south of Wilmington in New Castle County. The original span is gone. A 1953 article in the Wilmington Sunday Star said it was already gone by then. The road became U.S. 13, the DuPont Parkway, and a small modern bridge still crosses the run at that point. The story attached to the old crossing is older than the present structure. It was already half-forgotten when the 1953 piece appeared. There is no name for the man and no death record that places a fiddler drowning at the site.
The versions differ in detail. One says he was a local enslaved man in the mid-1800s who played the fiddle at dances and fairs across southern New Castle County. After a severe beating he was never the same. He left and lived as a recluse in the woods around St. Georges. Nights he sat on the bridge and played mournful tunes. One night he fell or drowned. Another version, recorded in a 1947 radio program called “Assignment Wilmington,” drops the beating and the enslaved status and says he was a country fiddler who was jilted by a girl no one knew he loved. He stopped going to parties and sat on the little bridge playing strange tunes until he fell into the creek. In both tellings the music continued. Locals later said that if you threw a silver coin, or a dime, into the water from the bridge at midnight, you could hear the fiddle again. The 1947 account specifies a silver coin and exactly midnight. The 1953 newspaper account says a dime. The trees along the run are swamp trees. When the wind is up their branches creak. That is the ordinary explanation the same sources give for the sound.
What is documented is a 1953 newspaper article that treated the story as an old local legend already fading, and a 1947 radio retelling that gave the jilted-fiddler version. The original bridge is gone. The modern one on U.S. 13 is not the one the story was told about. There is no named fiddler, no inquest, and no contemporary notice of a drowning at the crossing. The coin and the midnight are the ritual. The man is the one the story supplies.
No clear public photograph of the present small bridge over Scott’s Run at U.S. 13 is readily available. The larger St. Georges Bridge over the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal is a different structure a short distance away.
Relevant links
Josh Hitchens, Haunted History of Delaware — includes the Fiddler’s Bridge legend among Delaware ghost stories
Haunted Places: Fiddler’s Bridge, Middletown / St. Georges — the 1953 Wilmington Sunday Star account, the enslaved-fiddler version, the dime ritual
YouTube: “Assignment Wilmington,” 1947 episode on Fiddler’s Bridge — the jilted-fiddler version and the silver-coin-at-midnight detail