“There’s this Seven Bridges story around where I live that Tim and his friends brought me to.  When you walk in you cross seven bridges. It’s like a little trail thing and when you come back out, you only cross six because the last bridge you cross is to the underworld. So like you never come back out of the underworld or whatever once you’re in it, so you never cross the last bridge when you come back. We went pass the first one and I freaked out and we left. But it’s private property and so it gets blocked off at the fourth bridge.”

The first time Amanda heard about the seven bridges was when her friend told her about ghost hunting in her early high school career. She went home and researched online and eventually found the story there. However, she heard it again back in August when she was nineteen years old when her friends brought her to the actual place even though she did not want to go. She thinks the story is pretty old, but that it was created after Hawaii was civilized and built up to what it is like now after seeing the structure of the bridges. If the bridges are still in tact, then it means that they cannot be that old. The story of the seven bridges is often told when a group of teenagers are together and have nothing else to do but to share scary stories. According to Amanda, there are quite a few ghost stories that are native to Hawaii. Since the seven bridges are right by Amanda’s hometown, it is a very popular one amongst the students there.

I am guessing that this story arose from someone who was walking on the trail at night and got spooked by something they heard or saw. Since the seven bridges are surrounded by trees, it is easy to mistaken noises and movements of the trees for something else. The legend could be a result of a memorate which is when someone narrates what happened to them and then the audience interprets it into a legendary form. In this case, it deals with death and ghosts. This could also be an urban legend because it is presented in an eerie manner and deals with a contemporary setting. It deals with psychological views of death and the underworld because people are still unsure about what the afterlife has in store for them. It is one of the major insecurities of the human race; what comes after life.