White Lick Creek runs through Hendricks County, between Danville and Avon. The ghost story is not about the water. It is about the railroad bridge that crosses it, about half a mile south of U.S. 36 on County Road 625 East. Locals call it the Haunted Bridge. It is on the Avon town seal. The death at the centre of the legend has never been pinned to a named body.
The bridge that stands there was built in 1906 and 1907 for the Big Four Railroad, the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis. Engineer W.M. Dunne designed it. The Indianapolis News of June 27, 1907, described a span about 305 feet long, with three arches of 75 feet and a row of smaller arches on top, at a cost of about $70,000. It was double-tracked in 1908. It is roughly 70 feet high. It still carries CSX trains. An older abutment from an Indianapolis and St. Louis bridge, about 1870, sits nearby. The concrete bridge replaced that crossing.
On November 13, 1908, a local paper, the Friday Caller, ran a short item that is the closest thing to a contemporary record. It said two or three men had been killed in accidents at the Big Four bridge over the creek, and that the bridge was now alleged to be haunted. Reputable men, it said, reported the sound of a great weight falling into the water underneath, while the water stayed calm. That is a newspaper saying people were already calling it haunted a year after it opened. It does not name the dead.
The main legend fills in the name. He is called Dad Jones, or Henry Johnson, or simply an Irish worker. He was on a wooden platform above a form that was being filled with concrete. The platform broke. He fell in. His coworkers could not reach him. They heard him pounding the sides of the form until he stopped. The company, the story says, decided it was cheaper to leave him in the pier than to break it open. Some versions say an arm was left sticking out and was cut off. After that, people reported screams and knocks from one specific pier. When an earlier trestle was torn down, a man was said to walk the tracks trying to flag trains.
None of that is in a death record under those names. Local historian Susan Truax has said Avon has no newspaper that reaches back far enough, so the stories are oral. DePauw professor James Cooper has pointed out that the bridge is hollow, with chambers in the arches, and that a hollow concrete span can moan when a train crosses or when the wind hits it. In the 1950s, Indianapolis kids came out to see the bridge, and Avon kids set off firecrackers to scare them. The sound and the prank are documented explanations. The entombed worker is not.
A second story is a mother with a sick baby, walking the tracks toward Indianapolis because it was the short way. Her foot caught. The baby fell. In one version the mother jumped after the child. In another she lived and died of grief. People say you can hear her when a train goes over, and that you should honk when you drive under the bridge to cover the sound. A third says four workers fell into the creek during construction, and that visitors hear thuds on the rocks on calm days. The 1908 paper’s “two or three men” is the only count that has a date on it.
What is documented is a 1906 Big Four bridge, still in use, and a 1908 newspaper that already called it haunted and mentioned deaths in accidents. The man in the concrete, the mother, and the baby are the stories the county has told since. The creek is the setting. The bridge is the site.
The arches over the muddy creek. The span from the road, the hollow openings visible above the larger arches.
Relevant links
- WRTV: the legend after 115 years — the 1906 build, the 1908 newspaper, the three stories
- Visit Hendricks County: the legend — Dunne, the double-tracking, the oral versions
- Haunted Places: Avon Bridge — the competing names and the mother-and-baby tale
- White Lick Creek, Wikipedia — the Dad Jones version