The Orange Avenue Bridge in Daytona Beach, Florida

Southeast Haunted Bridges

The bridge that locals still call the Orange Avenue Bridge is officially the Tom Staed Veterans Memorial Bridge. It crosses the Halifax River and the Intracoastal Waterway, carrying Orange Avenue on the mainland to Silver Beach Avenue on the peninsula. The ghost stories are older than the span that stands there now. They belong to the approaches, and to the bridges that came before.

A bridge has stood at this spot since the late 1800s. One account puts the first crossing in 1888. Wikipedia dates the first bridge to 1899, when it linked the then-separate towns of Daytona and Daytona Beach. The span most people remember was a drawbridge that stood for more than sixty years and closed often for repairs. Demolition of that bridge began around June 2016. The replacement was a high-level concrete arch, about 1,885 feet long, with enough clearance for boats and no need to open. It cost roughly $47 million, ran more than eighteen months late, and opened to traffic on August 6, 2020. Barbara Staed, widow of the hotelier and Korean War veteran the bridge is named for, was in the first car across. Staed died in 2013. The bridge carries plaques for American conflicts, and in April 2025 Volusia County opened a Veterans Memorial Plaza on the northwest corner.

The haunting is not in the county file. It is a set of guest and investigator reports, mostly about the northeast approach of the old bridge, and it has been repeated on haunt sites for years. The figure is a young woman with long dark hair, wearing a cloak or robe. No one has produced a death record that matches her.

Three stories compete for her name. One says she was a maid who worked on the peninsula and was killed on the ferry home. Another says she was a runaway who slept under the bridge in the early 1980s and was attacked and killed there. The third, and the one most often repeated, calls her Rose. She was raised by her grandmother, loved a long cloak the grandmother gave her, and was wearing it on the way to a high school homecoming dance when a car struck her at the top of the approach. None of these is tied to a named newspaper account or a cemetery record in the sources below.

The reported behavior is more consistent than the biography. Drivers say she hitchhikes, then is gone when the car reaches the peninsula side. Others say bottles, cans, shoes, and even lawn furniture have been thrown at passing cars. A comment on a haunt listing describes a police officer on midnight patrol who saw a woman in a white nightgown cross the road on the east side, called it in, turned around, and found her gone. The bridge end was about 500 feet away. She could not have reached it in the time the officer took to turn. That is a single unnamed report.

A separate story links the bridge to Lilian Place, the 1884 house on the mainland side that is now a museum. In that telling, a man named Mark DeGraves was pushing a stalled car across the bridge when a drunk driver hit him. He has described seeing his own body and being carried up in a black mist. Lilian Place has its own ghost file, tied to the Thompson family and to children the house is said to have taken in. The bridge woman and the house are sometimes told as one story. They are not the same documented event.

In August 2020, the night before the new bridge opened, local writer Zanne Marie Dryer said she saw a dark figure on one of the high arches. The Daytona Beach Paranormal Research Group has said it investigated the old approach during homecoming week in 2000 and found the location active. Those are investigator and witness claims, not a police finding.

What is documented is a crossing that has existed since the 1890s, a drawbridge that came down in 2016, and a $47 million veterans memorial that opened in 2020. The woman in the cloak is the story attached to the northeast approach. She has three possible names and no confirmed death.

The Halifax River crossing from the air, with the beach high-rises on the peninsula. The same span from above, traffic moving between downtown and the beachside. The new arches at night, lit orange, the view most drivers see after 2020.

Relevant links