Main Piece

CD told me about a haunted bridge in his hometown of Zionsville, ID. The rumors would swirl around at his middle school, and a little bit at his high school:

“Back in the day, the KKK was pretty big in Indiana. Like, a town in southern Indiana is where the 2nd chapter started. There’s this bridge in town that doesn’t exist anymore because it got destroyed by a tractor a few years ago. It was a 30-40 yard long bridge; a backroad nobody really drives on.

Supposedly it’s haunted: If you drive your car there at night, and turn off all the lights, you’ll see things or hear voices. It’s haunted because the KKK would lynch people there. One of my friends said when they’d go there at night, they’d sit in their car, roll down their windows, and hear voices, indistinct whispering in the woods.

Someone who went, they were there long enough that there was fog on the windows, and there were handprints on the windows.”

Informant background

CD is a student at the University of Southern California. He is from Zionsville, ID.

Performance context

This story was told during a folklore collection event that I set up with a diversity of members from the USC men’s Ultimate Frisbee team. We were in a classic folklore collection setting: sharing drinks around a campfire, in a free flowing conversation.

Analysis

The “haunted place” rumors often involve some kind of action that you must do while at the place in order to bring out the haunting: in this case, turning off all your lights or rolling down your windows. This activity seems to legitimize the “legend quest” of going out and trying to see if the rumors are true or not, because it is more complicated than simply going there – you have to actively participate in the ritual once you arrive. CD’s haunted bridge seems like a typical example of a legend quest where the primary participants are teenagers (middle and high-school aged children.)