The Bay Bridge is the working bridge. The Golden Gate gets the postcards and the suicide counts. This one carries the commute, about 4.5 miles from San Francisco to Oakland, and it has a thinner ghost file than its famous neighbor. Most of what people call a haunting here is one man in a raincoat, a story that has been told since the 1940s, plus a steel troll that is not a ghost at all.
The bridge opened in 1936, a year before the Golden Gate. It is a double-decker for most of its length, with a suspension span on the San Francisco side, a tunnel through Yerba Buena Island, and a long eastern span to Oakland. On October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake, magnitude 6.9, dropped a section of the upper deck on the eastern span. One driver died. Caltrans later said a few more seconds of shaking might have brought the whole eastern span down. The damaged section was repaired, and the eastern span was eventually replaced. The new eastern span, a single-tower self-anchored suspension bridge, opened in 2013.
The main ghost story is a pedestrian. Around 1948, the telling goes, a man’s car ran out of gas on the bridge. He walked back along the narrow path beside the roadway to find a phone and call the tow truck. A speeding car hit him and killed him. Commuters say he is still there, in a 1940s hat and raincoat, usually looking around as if he is waiting for the truck. He is supposed to be visible only out of the corner of the eye. Look straight at him and he is gone. His posture changes. The spot does not. Occult World, repeating a local account, calls him one of the most-seen ghosts in the Bay Area because so many people drive past the same place every day, and because he looks ordinary enough that drivers do not always realize what they think they saw. No name, no newspaper clipping, and no tow-truck log have been attached to the story in the sources below.
A second, thinner report is a phantom Highway Patrol officer who pulls cars over at night and then vanishes. That one is listed in Bay Area haunt roundups and has even less attached to it than the man in the raincoat.
The troll is the other story people mix in. After the 1989 quake, ironworkers on the repair crew made a small steel figure, webbed feet, a long tongue, a wrench welded into a bolt, and bolted it to the bridge facing outward so it was hard to see. Caltrans spokesman Bart Ney has described it. The crew treated it as a good-luck charm. When the new eastern span opened in 2013, a second troll, slightly taller and solid steel, was placed on a pier. Caltrans’s official line was benign noninterference. The troll is a sculpture. It is not a reported apparition. It is the piece of bridge folklore that has a maker and a date.
What is documented is a 1936 bridge, a 1989 collapse, a 2013 eastern span, and a steel troll the ironworkers put there. The man in the raincoat is the commute story. He has a decade, a hat, and no name.
The western suspension spans, with Yerba Buena and the city behind them. The same bridge lit at dusk. The new eastern span in the fog, the single tower that replaced the section the 1989 quake damaged.
Relevant links
- KQED: the Bay Bridge troll — the 1989 quake, the ironworkers’ figure, the 2013 replacement
- Occult World: San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge — the 1940s raincoat pedestrian
- Curbed SF: Bay Area haunted spots — the phantom Highway Patrol note
- San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, Wikipedia — opening, the eastern span replacement