The bridge that carried Steel Bridge Road over the Watauga River in the Siam Valley outside Elizabethton was a one-lane steel truss span built in 1941. It was demolished around 2010 after it was judged structurally deficient and was replaced by a modern concrete bridge. The area had been a lovers’ lane. The figure attached to the old crossing is a hooded or robed man with a skull-like face, or simply a dark presence that opens a car door and sits in the passenger seat. There is no name for him, and no murder record that places a couple dying under the bridge in the 1920s or 1930s.
The story says a young couple, sometimes named Tom Jackson and Wanda Smithson, had parked under or on the bridge. A vagrant or a figure in a robe attacked them with a knife. The woman was killed on the spot. The man flagged a passing car, climbed into the back seat, and was driven to the hospital, where he died. When police returned, the woman’s body and the blood were gone. The assailant was never found. Tennessee folklorist Charles Edwin Price published a version of the story in his 1992 book Haints, Witches, and Boogers. He dated the murder to the 1920s or 1930s, before the 1941 bridge existed. A 2008 HubPages account claims the first documented paranormal report was July 18, 1977, when Beecher Davis, a sheriff’s deputy from Gate City, Virginia, arrived at the Carter County sheriff’s office in a panic. He said the passenger door of his car flew open and slammed shut on the bridge, an indentation appeared in the seat, and he saw a dark hooded figure in his mirror. Later tellings add that the figure has been seen under the bridge and near Stony Creek, and that an invisible presence still opens the rear door of cars that stop on the span. None of these accounts is backed by a contemporary newspaper or police record of the original murder.
What is documented is a 1941 steel truss bridge on Steel Bridge Road that was removed around 2010, a 1992 folklore collection that includes the lovers’-lane murder, and a 1977 account by a Virginia deputy of a door that opened by itself. The couple and the killer are the story. The old bridge is gone. The concrete replacement stands in its place.
The modern bridge that replaced the Siam Steel Bridge over the Watauga River.
Relevant links
BridgeHunter (via Southern Spirit Guide reference) — the 2008 photograph of the steel bridge by Calvin Sneed
Southern Spirit Guide: An Incident at the Siam Steel Bridge — the 1941 construction, the 2010 demolition, Price’s account, and the 1977 Beecher Davis report
The Ghost Doctor: Watauga River Bridge — the Tom Jackson and Wanda Smithson version