Legend

“Screaming Bridge”

Jessica Lewis is currently a student at the University of Southern California where she studies Psychology and Classics. She was born and raised in the small city of Newnan, Georgia. Her family lives in a rural area of Newnan, where agriculture is the people’s main source of profit and professional life.

Jessica heard the legend first from her older brother at the age of seven. The legend goes that apparently there was a horrific car accident on the Cedar Creek Bridge over Roscoe Road in Newnan, Georgia in the 1930s wherein a mother and her child died. The legend goes that the woman and her child haunt the bridge at night. People are said to have seen ghost images of the car, the mother and the child. In particular, the woman is often heard to be wailing over the death of her child.

Jessica says that as teenagers it was always a big deal to go to this bridge at night. She says that she has visited the haunted site on various occasions but has not personally seen the ghosts nor heard the strange noises. At her high school, there are many people who do believe they have actually encountered apparitions that are inexplicable and heard noises that are unnatural to the area.

There is evidence online given that there truly was a horrific accident on this bridge in the 1930s. However, there is no scientific proof that the haunting truly is real. It seems interesting that these haunted stories do not seem to develop from nothing, but usually develop around horrific scenes of sudden and painful death. Society seems to be preoccupied with the idea of justice. By this, I intend to say that whenever a horrendous crime or death occurs, people want to believe that there is a haunting because that would justify that things cannot end on an uneven score. For example, the ghosts of the woman and her child in the car accident on Screaming Bridge may have been created by locals who simply felt that the tragic death of these two should not be the end of their presence. The haunting legend allows for them to still exist within this world, it is a sort of ever-present reminder that what happens was not natural. The creation of legends about haunting ghosts may be an important way in which people cope with the horror that happens in life.