Scary & Freaky stories: The Paranormal World

The Troll Bridge

Check the microfilm in the library and the disappearance might come up somewhere around the middle of November, just before Thanksgiving. But the way I heard it, and the way everyone else here on the Kentucky side of the river knows it, it was Halloween night.

It gives me the shivers just to think about it–that one night of the year where ghosts slip past moonlit windows, ghouls creep by in a tumble of rusty leaves, and skeleton bones clack-rattle in the windblown trees.

No, it had to be that sleepless October night. That was about the time Ricky Donaly and Tommy Clarke’s old junker of a pickup truck bit the dust anyway. Remember that heap they’d pooled their money to buy just so they could haul every jack o’ lantern in the neighborhood down to Principal Ford’s and pile them in his front yard the year before? No one would be caught dead walking the bridge if they’d had the wheels to go around it.

Of course the bridge was a short cut, but it wasn’t built to be. The expanse of it was railroad tracks laid for freights passing from city to city, town to town over the hilly Bluegrass countryside. If you were walking across and a train came barreling down on you it was either jump and splatter on the rocks by the creek or wait to get plowed over by tons of speeding steel. Well, as the story goes, those might not have been the only dangers, at least not for Ricky and Tommy. You see, their bodies weren’t found stuck to the tracks or scattered in the woods below. Their bodies weren’t found at all. That’s why everyone calls it the Troll Bridge.

Are you listening?

Folks start turning off their lights at eight. When the two hours of trick-or-treating are up, it lets the few stragglers know you are out of candy and have had enough scares for the night. Of course, if you leave them on longer it keeps the older kids, the ones who don’t need to dress up to become evil lurking demons, from egging your car and TP-ing your trees.

That’s what Ricky and Tommy were up to when the sound of sirens blared through the chill quiet of the night. They jumped the hedges and lit out for the woods once they saw the red and blue lights come flashing down the street.

At the time they felt lucky to be on foot. If they had taken the truck, they’d likely have spent the night trying to explain to their parents why they had to be picked up at the police station yet again.

They were seniors at the time, breezing through the twelfth grade on state football scholarships–not that they had even cracked their textbooks before they got scouted. A friend of a friend’s sister said she was a sophomore when it all happened and that she’d even seen them up at the stop sign on Grace that night, stealing candy-filled pillowcases from little Draculas and Frankensteins and Fairies and Robots and Princesses.

Well, the point is, they weren’t in junior high anymore and hadn’t been through the woods in years. The trails had changed or grown over, and Ricky’s lighter threw its flint in the first five minutes of walking through the black trees. They wound their way blindly ahead, slapping down twigs and bashing through spider webs for nearly an hour before reaching the other side of the woods.

There they heard the buzzing even before they spotted the sickly orange light beyond the last of the trees. Have you ever been down Gravesway Lane? To old man Hickley’s? If you have then you’ll know he leaves the porch lamp on day and night, all year round, gathering bugs with its dim flicker and humming loud enough to give the Devil a headache.

They hiked over the tall grass and finally set foot on concrete. Tommy wrinkled his brow at the sight of the lonely old house. The yard was a mess of weeds fanning over busted old tires and cinder blocks and moldy stacks of four-by-fours. The house itself was just large enough to fit two square windows and a door on the front wall above the porch, and it had a slanting shingle roof that jutted out into an awning caked over with soggy brown leaves. The incessant dull light shone down on the walls where cracked and curling peels of gray paint stuck like cobwebs to the clapboards.